"He must be kept out!" - anti-free silver cartoon from 1896.
>>18420303William Jennings Bryan was the guy who first turned Democrats into the grievance/wealth redistributionist party.
>>18420338>the grievance/wealth redistributionist party.Nah they were already the ethnic patronage party by then with the Italians and Irish.
>>18420303Going from Grover Cleveland to W*lliam J*nnings B*yan was one of the most despicable things any organisation has ever done, and should have meant the end of the Democratic Party
The worst thing Bryan has done was hand the nomination to Wilson in 1912. Utterly calamitous decision.
>>18420351the guy wasn't in his right mind going to run for president 4x
>>18420366>>184203511912 was going to be a Democrat year no matter what; it was inevitable after 16 years of Republican rule. That was the longest time the same party held the White House since the second party system without the Civil War/Reconstruction providing a cheat code or the same guy running 4x.
>>18420371Ok, but it did not have to be W****n
>>18420371And that's exactly why Bryan royally fucked up. It was guaranteed that the Democrat nominee would win and he handed it to fucking Wilson.
>>18420399meds, Dumpist
>>18420303>be farmers>spend yourselves into debt because you're retarded>hey man, why don't we enact 20% inflation or have free silver? that'll help pay my debts off never mind that it will crash the economy with no survivors
>>18420427If you told them that by the 70's the dollar would be backed by nothing at all they'd probably be over the moon
>>18420427goes back to Jefferson and Jackson who hated banks because they were retards and spent themselves into debt. like i mean Jefferson was constantly squandering money on imported French wine and books.
>>18420475t. LBJfag
>>18420342Italians were mostly post-1900 things. 1890s Northern Democratic power lied in Irish and German Catholics
>>18420704the New Orleans lynching occurred in 1891
>Finance magnate J.P. Morgan famously only considered monopolies bad when they were in dirty hands, and he did not consider his own hands dirty. Aside from his controversial bailout of the US government in 1894, he took advantage of the economic depression during the decade to take bankrupted businesses into his hands, often placing his own firm's management on their board of directors, in what became known as interlocking corporate directorships.[3]
>Bryan netted 176 electoral votes and 22 states in the 1896 election, more acreage than McKinley but fewer people--"Only the South and the desert", critics scoffed. There is no doubt that indebted farmers deserved relief, but the free silver obsession was self-defeating--what might have helped was a gradual inflation of the currency as the 1890s was an era of deflation and a tight money supply.
>>18420427rural unrest was finally resolved when FDR created farmer gibesmedat and made them into wards of the state
>>18420303>16 kbyte jpg>bottom text in microscopic lettersharm yourself today.
>>18420338>The Southern/Ethnic Catholic party>Not already based entirely on grievance and pork barrelling.
>>18421057nonetheless Grover Cleveland was a Northern Bourbon Democrat and basically exactly like Republicans outside supporting lower tariffs
>>18421289The southern democrats were too toxic nationwide after the civil war, while the western democrats were deemed radical rabble-rousers so only the northern Democrats were electorally viable
>>18421289Grover Cleveland was a hero and even Hamilton himself would have voted for him
