Reflecting on the Gold Democrats

The official platforms of American political parties are often short on substance and long on platitudes. Sometimes they are a mishmash of contradictions and promises that won’t be kept. Almost nobody reads them even in the year of their adoption, let alone a century later.

Except for me. I’m a history buff.

A Party That Stood on Principle, Not Promises

Among the many platforms I’ve read over the years, I do have some favorites. One was that of a faction of the Democratic Party known as the Locofocos (see “Additional Reading” below). The Locofocos emerged in the early years of the Democratic Party as an anti-Tammany, pro-worker group. They stood for Jeffersonian principles—small and honest government, no subsidies and special favors, sound money, private property, and the rights of the individual. Many Locofoco beliefs became canon in the Democratic Party for decades, right through the presidencies of Grover Cleveland in the 1880s and 1890s.

By 1896, however, the Democrats were drifting from these principles. At their convention that year in Chicago, the young William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska delivered his famous “Cross of Gold” oration that mesmerized the delegates, prompting them to reject much of what Democrats had stood for since Thomas Jefferson’s days. Instead, they fell for easy money and a bevy of dubious interventionist schemes.

Disgusted at the party’s embrace of Bryanism, traditional Democrats broke off, formed the new National Democratic Party, and nominated their own candidates for President and Vice President.

The 1896 Platform: A Last Stand for Sound Money and Limited Government

The NDP platform of 1896 opened with stirring words of time-honored principles and a well-deserved assault on the main Democratic Party that had just deserted them:

The [National] Democratic Party is pledged to equal and exact justice to all men of every creed and condition; to the largest freedom of the individual consistent with good government; to the preservation of the Federal Government in its constitutional vigor and the support of the States in all their just rights; to economy in the public expenditures; to the maintenance of the public faith and sound money; and it is opposed to paternalism and all class legislation.

The Declarations of the Chicago Convention [the one that nominated Bryan] attack individual freedom, the right of private contract, the independence of the judiciary, and the authority of the President to enforce Federal laws. They advocate a reckless attempt to increase the price of silver by legislation to the debasement of our monetary standard, and threaten unlimited issues of paper money by the Government. They abandon for Republican allies the Democratic cause of tariff reform to court the favor of protectionists to their fiscal heresies.

The platform attacked the Republicans for “extravagant appropriations beyond the needs of good government.” It condemned tariffs for anything but “revenue only” and rejected tariffs designed to “protect” domestic producers and political allies.

It praised gold as “the best money known to man” and opposed congressional attempts to compel the federal government to subsidize silver or print fiat paper money. It reaffirmed the decades-old policy of the Democratic Party that “entirely divorced the Government from banking and currency issues.” (The Gold Democrats of 1896 were the “End the Fed” party years before the Federal Reserve’s creation.)

The platform endorsed civil service reform so that government employment would emphasize merit rather than cronyism. It demanded “strict economy in the appropriations and in the administration of the Government.”

It spoke glowingly of Grover Cleveland, the outgoing President who had restrained government spending and defended the gold standard. The platform lauded

the fidelity, patriotism, and courage with which President Cleveland has fulfilled his great public trust, the high character of his administration, his wisdom and energy in the maintenance of civil order and the enforcement of its laws, its equal regard for the rights of every class and every section, its firm and dignified conduct of foreign affairs, and its sturdy persistence in upholding the credit and honor of the nation…

Why the National Democratic Party Faded—But Shouldn’t Be Forgotten

In Indianapolis in September, the NDP nominated former Illinois Governor John M. Palmer as their presidential candidate for the 1896 election. In the end, Republican William McKinley won easily. Rather than support a quixotic, last-minute third-party effort, rank-and-file Gold Democrats deserted Bryan but went for McKinley instead of Palmer.

McKinley, at least, was a gold man. In 1900, he signed the Gold Standard Act into law. It formally defined the American dollar  by gold weight and required the Treasury to redeem, upon demand and in gold coin only, any paper dollars presented to it. The dollar was effectively “as good as gold,” at $20.67 per ounce.

Though Bryan never won the presidency (he was the Democrats’ candidate in 1896, 1900, and 1908), he certainly transformed the party. They were out of the White House for sixteen years. When they finally returned, with the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912, the party and its principles were almost unrecognizable from when Grover Cleveland left office in 1897. Wilson helped undermine the gold standard by cursing the country with a central bank (not by coincidence, today’s unbacked paper dollar is worth less than a nickel of its value then). The next Democratic president, Franklin Roosevelt, would make gold-holding Americans into common criminals.

In the vain hope that Bryanism would be a temporary aberration, the National Democrats (NDP) of 1896 had stood athwart history, yelling, “Stop!” Sadly, Bryan had changed the party forever, and the NDP proved to be a flash in the pan. The Democratic Party continued its leftward march.

The Gold Democrats of the 1896 NDP held firm for good policy but quickly evaporated. Nonetheless, as David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito note, the party they briefly led deserves to be remembered:

It stands out as the last classical liberal political movement of the nineteenth century, and it did not have a successor for many decades to come. Within a few years of its disappearance, the limited-government ideas defended by the NDP were all but forgotten. In 1912, for example, all three major candidates, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Theodore Roosevelt, put forward interventionist agendas. Not until the 1970s would classical liberal ideas finally reoccupy a significant position in political and policy debates.

Please don’t blame me for the dollar’s century-long decline in purchasing power. I would have voted Locofoco in 1836 and Gold Democrat in 1896.

Courtesy of FEE.org

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