William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” Speech
socratic-form-microscopy.com
socratic-form-microscopy.com
This gets the causality backwards. What Bryan decided was that he wanted to be President, and that in order to become President he would need to associate himself with an issue hot and controversial enough to attract voters to him for having taken their side on it. Bimetallism was a live-wire issue among the rural constituency he wanted to set himself up as the champion of, and it had few other champions due to the oppressive orthodoxy the gold standard held over the thinking of the time, so he chose that as the issue to wrap his arms around.
It worked -- Bryan stood out to rural voters as the one politician who really understood their needs, and his career as "The Great Commoner" was born. But Bryan's adoption of bimetallism came because he recognized its political potency, not because he held strong opinions about the economics of the matter. He cared so little about those that, when questioned about the details by an Omaha newspaper, he replied that "I don't know anything about free silver. The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later."
It's very strange that losing a Presidential general election is seen as the end of a political career when in years past, candidates like Bryan, Stevenson, or Dewey were still seen as viable.
Also, your explanation of Dewey choosing a political stance that was widely held among voters but somewhat taboo among the political class and riding that stance to prominence shows that there's really nothing new or innovative in the wave of populism sweeping Western democracies in recent years.
Candidates like Clinton falter because they suck. Kicking off your campaign Roosevelt Island and driving to Pennsylvania or wherever in a hotel shuttle van was the kickoff to a weak campaign.
It's true, but it's worth noting that while in modern times losing is generally a career-ender for candidates it is much less so for the operatives behind the scenes, some of whom spend their whole careers cycling from one losing campaign to another. The most striking example of this is Democratic consultant Bob Shrum, who was behind the curtain for a remarkable eight losing presidential campaigns. (See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9895-2004Sep9... for a good profile of Shrum, written as he was on his way to his eighth defeat in 2004.)
To be fair, though, between the years of 1972 and 2004, the only two winning Democratic candidates were Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
You could tell a similar story for any Democratic strategist with an overlapping career. Tad Devine worked for the failed campaigns of Mondale 84, Dukakis 88, Kerrey 92, Gore 00, Kerry 04, and Sanders 16. (He also worked in Ukraine on Viktor Yanukovych's winning 2010 Presidential campaign, alongside Paul Manafort. Small world.)
Also, if you work for a successful Presidential election campaign, you end up working in the White House, e.g. George Stephenapolous, Karl Rove, David Plouffe, David Axelrod, and Steve Bannon.
How do you propose I judge which of you is right?
A great short biographical sketch can be found in Richard Hofstadter's classic The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/773961.The_American_Poli...), which is an excellent, compulsively readable book, though Hofstadter had a low opinion of Bryan so this is not the source to turn to if you want to argue with me. The "I will look up the arguments later" quote can be found in Robert Cherney's A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1704339.A_Righteous_Caus...), which I haven't read myself but looks to be a good general-interest book-length biography. A contrarian view on Bryan can be found in Michael Kazin's A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/79196.A_Godly_Hero), but the rehabilitation of populism has been a project of Kazin's for decades now, so it will come as no surprise that Kazin has more respect for Bryan than most historians.
Bimetallism can never work, because the amount of silver relative to gold is never fixed. It has all the fundamental faults of "pegging" one currency to another.
Setting aside the technical detail (gold vs. silver), the debate was really over hard vs. soft money. The issue is as relevant today as it was in the 1800s.
Hard (scarce, gold) money policies favor lenders, who care very much about getting the full real value of their loans back. Inflation eats into their returns by decreasing the future value of money.
Soft money policies favor borrowers, who pay back loans in ever cheaper currency through inflation. Buy a farm today with a 10-year loan, and every year the real value of the money you pay back (factoring inflation) decreases.
What we see with a lot of the interest in Bitcoin is a direct reaction to decades of soft-money policies by the world's governments.
Here's the money quote:
... There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them. ...
This is what the Cross of Gold speech was about, in a nutshell.
> a lot of the interest in Bitcoin is a direct reaction to decades of soft-money policies by the world's governments
Bitcoin came from and was nurtured by monetary cranks but they are a small fraction of why people are interested in it lately. Today it's an investment asset or a means to do something illicit like dodge currency controls or launder money.
Constant inflation is easily factored in. But inflation varies greatly depending on prevailing conditions. The ruling party has an incentive to push for inflationary policies to stimulate short-term economic activity, leading to bouts of inflation that can wreck lenders over the long term.
What inflation penalizes is keeping your money under your mattress.
Inflation also punishes prudent investors - the kind who save for retirement.
Rising inflation leads to asset bubbles as pre-retirees seek to avoid being destroyed by inflation. Stocks without earnings and real estate, for example. They all get pushed up to ridiculous levels in the name of chasing return to avoid getting clobbered by inflation.
Not to mention the harmful ecological consequences of inflationary policies that encourage consumption over saving.
For example, we are arguably approaching an asset bubble right now because of a decade of low inflation and low interest rates. In a zero inflation, zero interest rate environment nobody is incentivized to hold cash(since it returns zero) or CDs thus risk assets (ie. stocks) become inflated.
I can think of three recent examples where inflation/soft money policies triggered asset bubbles:
- gold from late 1970s to early 1980s (CPI inflation)
- US real estate late 1990s to 2008 (excessive loan origination)
- US stocks from mid 1990s to 2001 (lax margin requirement)
For example, we are arguably approaching an asset bubble right now because of a decade of low inflation and low interest rates. In a zero inflation, zero interest rate environment nobody is incentivized to hold cash(since it returns zero) or CDs thus risk assets (ie. stocks) become inflated.
An inflation rate of zero would incentivize many people and groups to increase cash holdings. With no inflation to keep at bay, cash becomes a real no-risk bet.
Those doing so would no doubt the interested in real rates of return. For years, investors in CDs endured a negative real rate of return due to inflation. This forced people out of cash and into ever-risker assets.
Throw in mild deflation, and the average Joe could make a real return of a percent or two just by holding cash. It could trigger a stampede of sorts into cash and out of stocks, which explains why central banks are so keen to avoid even mild deflation.
The free silver movement was a political attempt to redistribute money from one group (lenders) to another group (borrowers, but specifically farmers) by deliberately causing a one-off burst of inflation. The original goldbugs opposed it (correctly, as the author points out) for that reason. Bryan supported it because he knew it would win him the votes of those who would benefit.
The same is not true of modern fiat currencies, which are for the most part managed quasi-independently with the goal of a relatively constant low, but non-zero, rate of inflation. This is better than either the gold standard or the free silver situation (both of which involved large bursts of inflation at unpredictable times), since the inflation rate can be priced in to interest rates.
It is possible to maintain a principled objection to this on the grounds that the political consensus could break down and we could start manipulating inflation for political reasons again. I'm glad we have people who worry about that, but I don't feel the need to join them.
I have a feeling that the ratio of 'principled objection' to 'economically illiterate' is, uh, not that high though.
(The recording is from a later 1925 performance of the speech by Bryan, not from his original performance that famously turned the tide of the 1896 Democratic National Convention. But it's still a fairly unique opportunity to hear a speech from that era in the voice of the man who gave it.)
We are told that inflation is good because it encourages spending but i would argue that such an effect is being dimished because many deflationary assets are traded on liquid markets.
The Wizard of Oz as an extended allegory for bimetallism was a theory proposed by Littlefield in the 60s, and it's been pretty much thoroughly debunked by literary scholars who point out that the characters are essentially common character tropes from 1890s literature, and biographers who pointed out that it's completely contrary to the views that Baum himself held.