Passions and preferences: William Jennings Bryan and the 1896 democratic national convention.

Gould, Lewis L.

By Richard Franklin Bensel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 318 pp.

Richard Franklin Bensel's close-up narrative of the Democratic National Convention of 1896 is an impressive example of intensive newspaper research into a key political event. Using the facts and insights derived from a day-to-day study of the way in which five major newspapers covered the meeting of the Democrats in Chicago in July 1896, Bensel takes the reader into the deliberations that resulted in the nomination of William Jennings Bryan for president as the candidate of free silver. No scholar will need to do again the painstaking work that Bensel has accomplished in tracking the public record of how the Democrats selected their nominee for "the battle of the standards" in 1896.

Bensel effectively captures the devotion with which the champions of gold and silver debated that pressing issue on the floor of the convention and in the hallways and conferences of the local hotels. Because the convention was, in Bensel's estimation, "one of the great turning points in American political development" (p. 305), he sees Bryan's triumph among the Democratic delegates as an example of political passion at its most fervent and enduring. He leaves his story as Bryan moves out from the convention, and thus does not have to deal with the inconvenient ending to the story in Bryan's defeat at the hands of William McKinley. Passion, preference, and charisma took Bryan a long way, but not to the White House. Like other partisans of the Great Commoner, Bensel sees Bryan's frequent defeats as further testament to his historical importance. On the national scene after 1896, Bryan mixed dominance of the Democrats with a high degree of electoral ineptitude.

In telling his story, Bensel's overt renunciation of manuscript sources as relevant for understanding what happened at Chicago seems odd. The letters, speech drafts, and retrospective comments in the papers of such actors as Bryan himself, President Grover Cleveland, William C. Whitney, and countless other Democrats at Chicago would have helped Bensel develop the context in which the events of July 6-10 unfolded at Chicago. Contemporary newspapers in 1896 were filled with facts and opinion, but their partisan insights, too, have to be weighed against other sources that historians traditionally use.

The debate between silver and gold stands at the heart of Bensel's tale, but he often assumes knowledge on the part of his readers about that controversy. He calls the Panic of 1893 and the subsequent hard times "one of the most severe recessions in American history" (p. 25), which is a little like calling Hurricane Katrina a bad storm. The grinding depression of the 1890s shook the country to its foundations and, as historians of Progressivism have pointed out for a generation, produced popular rethinking of the role and purpose of government. The movement for silver addressed the agonizing deflation that tormented the agrarian South and West during these years. With a stubborn and insensitive Grover Cleveland in the White House, Democrats turned to monetary inflation as the 1890s equivalent of a stimulus package. Bensel does not capture these passions outside the Chicago convention, nor does he explain what "16 to 1" meant in economic terms relative to the market price of silver. In a narrative in which the impact of the Pullman Strike and the bimetallic influence of "Coin" Harvey are not analyzed, the historical background of the events in Chicago often seems truncated and abrupt.

Bensel is to be commended for his commitment to his subject. Unraveling the story of what happened at Chicago with Bryan required innumerable hours with dense newspaper coverage of a welter of events. Out of that hard work, Bensel has achieved one of the best treatments in print of a crucial political convention. His narrative flags toward the end, and he misses the significance of Bryan's first strategic mistake as a presidential candidate--the selection of Arthur Sewall of Maine as his running mate. The choice of a Northeastern business figure did nothing to help the Democrats in an electoral sense, and led to endless difficulties in fusing with the People's Party. Nonetheless, at a time when these quadrennial events have become little more than extended political infomercials, it is good to have such a gifted scholar as Bensel recall a vanished age when partisan conclaves debated important questions and actually chose national candidates.

Lewis L. Gould

University of Texas