1896 - McKinley vs. Bryan
Mark Hanna, Courtesy of the Library of Congress
The first true big-money presidential campaign in U.S. history pits Republican William McKinley of Ohio against Democrat William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska. Bryan is a stirring orator with a populist bent that resonates in Main Street America, but the pro-business McKinley has more appeal to Wall Street. Mark Hanna, the Ohio businessman who chairs the Republican National Committee and runs McKinley’s campaign, systematically hits up businesses for contributions. Hanna instructs officers of banks to cough up a quarter of a percent of their total capital and assesses other companies according to their “stake in the general prosperity of the country.” In the case of Standard Oil, for example, that stake amounts to $250,000. In this fashion, Hanna raises, by various historians’ estimates, somewhere between $3.4 million and $7 million for McKinley. (In today’s dollars, that translates to between $79 million and $164 million.)
With the ability to outspend Bryan by as much as a 12-1, Hanna stages the most elaborate political advertising effort ever seen — peddling his candidate, in the words of future President Theodore Roosevelt, “as if he were a patent medicine.” Hanna buys boxcars full of campaign posters and lapel buttons and prints 275 different pieces of campaign literature in nine languages. Because McKinley is reluctant to travel because of his wife’s illness, crowds are brought in — with the help of free tickets provided by railroad companies — to hear speeches from the front porch of his home. To counter Bryan’s eloquence and grass-roots appeal, some of Hanna’s 1,400 paid campaign workers shadow the Democrat’s whistle-stop tour, saturating the places where Bryan appears with McKinley posters and literature.
Hanna’s work pays off. In November, McKinley narrowly bests Bryan in the popular vote, 51 to 47 percent, but crushes him 271-176 in the Electoral College. Democratic activist Harold L. Ickes will later lament: “I have never doubted that if the Democrats had been able to raise enough money, even for legitimate purposes, Bryan would have been elected.”
SOURCES: David Herbert Croly, Marcus Alonzo Hanna: His Life and Work (New York: Macmillan), 1912; Anthony Corrado, “Money and Politics: A History of Federal Campaign Finance Law,” The New Campaign Finance Sourcebook (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution), 2005; Mark Green, Selling Out: How Big Corporate Money Buys Elections, Rams Through Legislation, and Betrays Our Democracy (New York: William Morrow), 2002; D. Aaron Chandler, “A Short Note on the Expenditures of the McKinley Campaign of 1896,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 1, 1998; Gil Troy, “Money and Politics: The Oldest Connection,” The Wilson Quarterly, Summer 1997; The Inflation Calculator; Russell L. Mahan, “William Jennings Bryan and the Presidential Campaign of 1896,” White House Studies, March 22, 2003; Jackson Lears, “When Jesus Was a Democrat,” The New Republic, April 10, 2006; “1896 Presidential Election Results,” David Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections; Alexander Heard, The Costs of Democracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 1960.
