Week 29
The USA General Election campaign proceeded along a number of tracks—issues, campaign strategies and techniques, the roles of the two candidates, Electoral College math, and candidate personalities. The New York Times, forged into a major journalistic voice after Adolph Ochs’s 1896 purchase, captured the candidates’ personalities in a penetrating editorial in 1899. Neither politician, stated the paper, possessed “that broad and philosophic sweep of mind that marks the creative statesman.” But both were “able” and displayed “gifts and capacities” for effective leadership. Bryan was “somewhat more alert” than his stolid rival but fostered mistrust among some by his call for “swift and sweeping changes in . . . substantially all of our institutions and customs,” including currency, the banks, bonds, taxes, trusts, wages, and labor laws. Bryan’s constituency was “the army of the discontented.” McKinley, by contrast, spoke to the sober-minded, conservative, property-owning Americans who “are afraid of overtopping talent and brilliancy.” Not trusting “a man who leaps into fame by a single speech,” insisted the paper with a bit of slyness, these voters shun the Clays, Websters, and Blaines in favor of “far less shining but safer men” who understand them and their concerns.
Merry, Robert W.. President McKinley: Architect of the American Century (pp. 444-445).
