Garret Hobart, McKinley's 1st Vice President, had died in office in 1899, so he needed a new one. He chose Governor Theodore Roosevelt of New York, because his svengali, Ohio Republican boss Mark Hanna, though TR was making too much noise as Governor, thinking he'd be silenced as Vice President. He told McKinley he had to live, to keep "that damned cowboy" out of the White House.
Adlai Stevenson, who had been Vice President under Grover Cleveland's 2nd term from 1893 to 1897, had been nominated as Bryan's Vice President. Stevenson's grandson, Adlai Ewing Stevenson II, would be elected Governor of Illinois in 1948, and nominated for President by the Democrats in 1952 and 1956.
McKinley's 1896 promise of "the full dinner pail" to end the depression that began with the Panic of 1893 had worked, and Bryan's 1896 call for "free silver" no longer had the same resonance. Bryan tried to make an issue of the Philippine Campaign, but, as with the Union cause in the Civil War during the election of 1864, the tide turned as the year went on, and people angry at McKinley for the war not going well calmed down. "Imperialism" lost its effectiveness as an argument, and McKinley's popular-vote win over Bryan, and his Electoral Vote win, were each a little bigger than they were in 1896.
In America, the Republican Party's hatred of Communism long predated Senator Joe McCarthy in the early 1950s. In both the 1896 and the 1900 campaign, Roosevelt gave campaign speeches for McKinley, suggesting that Bryan and his populist ideas were comparable to the Paris Commune -- which briefly held power in France in 1871, while TR was 12 years old.
On September 6, 1901, at a World's Fair in Buffalo, McKinley was shot. He died 8 days later, and Theodore Roosevelt was President of the United States. In 1904, Hanna died, and TR won a term of his own.
*
November 6, 1900 was a Tuesday. Baseball season was over. College football was in midweek. Basketball and hockey were still all-amateur. So, no scores on this historic day.
No comments:
Post a Comment