6 ms·

William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” Speech

71 points by zjacobi 8y ago

smacktoward 8y ago
Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech was made when audio recording technology was being born, so in a little miracle of technology, we can actually hear the man himself give it today: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5354/ http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5354/ (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.)
macintux 8y ago
Very interesting piece, and a fascinating blog in general. Seeing someone document their ongoing struggle to understand the world reminds me how little I've done about that myself.
MrZongle2 8y ago
According to Wikipedia and it's citations, William J. Bryan was satirized as the Cowardly Lion by L. Frank Baum in "The Wizard of Oz".
- DubiousPusher 8y ago
  The guy cut quite a swath across American culture in the early 20th century. He was the attorney for the prosecution in the Scopes Monkey Trial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_Trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_Trial
- jcranmer 8y ago
  No. 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.
  - MrZongle2 8y ago
    Well then I suggest you take a trip to Wikipedia and start editing. For that current bit of trivia there are no less than 4 citations, three of which are from this century.
DubiousPusher 8y ago
I find the "Free Silver" movement fascinating because it sheds a light on how much we take our current economy for granted. Before I started to read about economics on my own I heard many times about the evils of easy credit and inflation but never had I heard about the problems of deflation and scarce money.
- anonymous5133 8y ago
  Yup and thankfully now we have so many different money systems that one can decide where to keep their value. People need not keep cash under the mattress if they dont want to. You can hold scarce assets that appreciate over time and only hold inflationary fiat when you need to purchase something. Thus you will never be pressured to spend all your money because most of your "money" isnt being held in inflationary assets. 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.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    That's kind of the point, right? Inflation encourages spending, but it also encourages investment, and your saved money can be invested in stocks and bonds, which also stimulate economic growth more than being stuffed in a mattress.
- walshemj 8y ago
  The crash of property prices in Japan recently is an example of deflation in action and its long lasting negative effects.
smacktoward 8y ago
> Bryan decided that he wanted America to have a bimetallic currency. Unfortunately, there was a political class united in its opposition to this policy. That meant he needed a president that favoured it. 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."
- philwelch 8y ago
  He also ran for President for three out of four elections between 1896 and 1908 without winning. That's unheard of these days. The last major party losing candidate to run again was Richard Nixon in 1968. Ross Perot also ran, and lost, in 92 and 96. 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.
  - gowld 8y ago
    This is likely because the number of viable candidates today is much larger due to population growth and access to media. In 1904, getting famous was much harder than now, so someone already known to the voters, even as a loser, could have a better chance than a yet-unknown.
apo 8y ago
The dispute over bimetallic currency is now more than a hundred years old and has been made entirely moot by the floating US dollar and the post-Bretton Woods international monetary order. 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.
- tptacek 8y ago
  Isn't this really reductive? Interest rates and inflation are intimately linked.
  - wutbrodo 8y ago
    The dynamic he's describing is about inflation relative to its expected value at the time of the deal. If you expect inflation to avg X% over the course of the loan and it ends up being so, then it's factored into the nominal rate of the loan and neither of the situations he describes come to pass. It's also mainly applicable for fixed rate loans only. So yea, it's pretty reductive.
    - notahacker 8y ago
      And today's monetary policy is focused targeting predictable inflation rates over a period of time, which actually makes estimating it for credit purposes much more predictable than in the gold standard era, when it was zero with massive variance
Symmetry 8y ago
If you haven't done coursework in economics reading at least the Wikipedia page on inflation is a really good way to understand more about the issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
hyperpallium 8y ago
His reasons for opposing evolution in the 1925 Scopes trial are interesting https://wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jennings_Bryan https://wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jennings_Bryan
ericnyamu1234 8y ago
wow.check out this cool forum http://mawazo.byethost7.com/index.php http://mawazo.byethost7.com/index.php

71 points by zjacobi 8y ago

Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech was made when audio recording technology was being born, so in a little miracle of technology, we can actually hear the man himself give it today: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5354/ http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5354/ (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.)

macintux 8y ago

Very interesting piece, and a fascinating blog in general. Seeing someone document their ongoing struggle to understand the world reminds me how little I've done about that myself.

MrZongle2 8y ago

According to Wikipedia and it's citations, William J. Bryan was satirized as the Cowardly Lion by L. Frank Baum in "The Wizard of Oz".

DubiousPusher 8y ago
The guy cut quite a swath across American culture in the early 20th century. He was the attorney for the prosecution in the Scopes Monkey Trial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_Trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_Trial
jcranmer 8y ago
No. 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.
- MrZongle2 8y ago
  Well then I suggest you take a trip to Wikipedia and start editing. For that current bit of trivia there are no less than 4 citations, three of which are from this century.

DubiousPusher 8y ago

I find the "Free Silver" movement fascinating because it sheds a light on how much we take our current economy for granted. Before I started to read about economics on my own I heard many times about the evils of easy credit and inflation but never had I heard about the problems of deflation and scarce money.

anonymous5133 8y ago
Yup and thankfully now we have so many different money systems that one can decide where to keep their value. People need not keep cash under the mattress if they dont want to. You can hold scarce assets that appreciate over time and only hold inflationary fiat when you need to purchase something. Thus you will never be pressured to spend all your money because most of your "money" isnt being held in inflationary assets. 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.
- philwelch 8y ago
  That's kind of the point, right? Inflation encourages spending, but it also encourages investment, and your saved money can be invested in stocks and bonds, which also stimulate economic growth more than being stuffed in a mattress.
walshemj 8y ago
The crash of property prices in Japan recently is an example of deflation in action and its long lasting negative effects.

smacktoward 8y ago

> Bryan decided that he wanted America to have a bimetallic currency. Unfortunately, there was a political class united in its opposition to this policy. That meant he needed a president that favoured it. 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."

philwelch 8y ago
He also ran for President for three out of four elections between 1896 and 1908 without winning. That's unheard of these days. The last major party losing candidate to run again was Richard Nixon in 1968. Ross Perot also ran, and lost, in 92 and 96. 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.
- gowld 8y ago
  This is likely because the number of viable candidates today is much larger due to population growth and access to media. In 1904, getting famous was much harder than now, so someone already known to the voters, even as a loser, could have a better chance than a yet-unknown.

apo 8y ago

The dispute over bimetallic currency is now more than a hundred years old and has been made entirely moot by the floating US dollar and the post-Bretton Woods international monetary order. 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.

tptacek 8y ago
Isn't this really reductive? Interest rates and inflation are intimately linked.
- wutbrodo 8y ago
  The dynamic he's describing is about inflation relative to its expected value at the time of the deal. If you expect inflation to avg X% over the course of the loan and it ends up being so, then it's factored into the nominal rate of the loan and neither of the situations he describes come to pass. It's also mainly applicable for fixed rate loans only. So yea, it's pretty reductive.
  - notahacker 8y ago
    And today's monetary policy is focused targeting predictable inflation rates over a period of time, which actually makes estimating it for credit purposes much more predictable than in the gold standard era, when it was zero with massive variance

Symmetry 8y ago

If you haven't done coursework in economics reading at least the Wikipedia page on inflation is a really good way to understand more about the issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

hyperpallium 8y ago

His reasons for opposing evolution in the 1925 Scopes trial are interesting https://wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jennings_Bryan https://wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jennings_Bryan

ericnyamu1234 8y ago

wow.check out this cool forum http://mawazo.byethost7.com/index.php http://mawazo.byethost7.com/index.php