The 1896 presidential campaign, which pitted William McKinley against William Jennings Bryan, was a crucial turning point in U.S. history. Many contemporaries considered it the most important political event since Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860. Fusion with the Democrats, in support of Bryan, spelled doom for the People’s Party, which had been the most promising reform party of the early 1890s. McKinley’s victory established Republican dominance in Washington for over a decade. Bryan’s defeat was a loss for the West and South, but the realignment of 1896 nonetheless helped create favorable conditions for Jim Crow segregation and the disfranchisement of black voters in the South.

Despite its high stakes, the campaign was fought on the rather obscure question of currency standards: should the U.S. adhere to the gold standard, seek an international agreement for bimetallism (coinage of both gold and silver), or permit “free and unlimited coinage of silver” (without fees or a production ceiling imposed by the U.S. mint) at a sixteen-to-one ratio with gold? This issue largely vanished after McKinley’s inauguration, as the nation entered a war with Spain and asserted its place on the world stage. The challenge for teachers is to show the 1896 campaign’s broad significance to many groups of Americans at the time, and to use it as a window into turn-of-the-century society and culture.

The campaign generated an enormous outpouring of political cartoons. About ninety of these are posted, along with party platforms, candidate biographies, and other background materials, on the 1896 web site at Vassar College, <http://iberia.vassar.edu/1896>. This lesson plan offers suggestions for using the 1896 web site in the classroom, offering various approaches to the political, economic, and social issues raised by the cartoons and commentary. Additional ideas are posted at the site’s teaching page <http://iberia.vassar.edu/1896/teaching.html>.

Guiding Students Through 1896

The World Wide Web offers both the attractions and disadvantages of an open-ended treasure hunt. Students can easily get distracted or browse aimlessly without absorbing the lessons you want to convey. One solution is to ask students to return from an online session with answers to specific questions: What policies did Populists advocate? What did the Republican party mean by “honest money,” and how did they represent it in their platform? Who was John Altgeld? Who won the election and how close was the final vote?

In class, these questions can evolve into more analytic ones: What was “Altgeldism” and why was it a campaign issue? Why did the Republicans win? If your school has a computer lab where the class can work as a group, you may want to answer such questions together. Or you can introduce the election in a brief lecture and textbook reading before sending students to the web site. Below are five more approaches that move beyond the basic facts of the campaign, developing students’ analytical skills and inviting them to engage the material, make choices, and express political opinions.

Lessons

I. How did cartoonists make their appeals?
One of the first things students may notice is the bitter, personal nature of many cartoonists’ attacks. Various candidates and parties are accused of being anarchists and communists, seducers, criminals, and thieves; antisemitic and racial slurs are frequent. What does this tell us about changes and continuities in American politics? You could ask students to look through current newspapers and bring in examples to compare or contrast with the cartoons of 1896. Another approach is to ask students to print out a cartoon, show the image to the class, and identify its intended audience. This may have been an economic constituency—sheep ranchers, railroad workers, or recipients of Union pensions—or the cartoonist may have appealed to regional loyalties, or to all Americans, through references to patriotism and the flag. This assignment can lead to a discussion of literary and popular themes in the cartoons, some of which incorporate Greek myths, Shakespearian quotes, Bible stories, and recent inventions and discoveries such as the X-ray. What common knowledge did cartoonists expect on the part of their readers, as a basis for understanding these references?

II. Whose opinions are represented in the cartoons, and whose are not?
Ask students to point out a cartoon based on racial, ethnic, religious, or gender prejudices, or choose a cartoon or set of cartoons yourself. Compare these to other images on the site, for example, advertisements. Ask students to write a letter to the editor in which they react to the image. They may choose to write as themselves or as a historical character (such as Ida B. Wells, or one of the hypothetical characters in Lesson III, below).

You might want to discuss the cartoons’ varied images of women. As far as we know, all the cartoonists were men; how did they use images of virtuous and evil women to make their points? You may also want to explore positive and negative images of working-class men. How did middle-class Americans define a “good” workingman? What purposes were served in attacking opponents as “bad women” and “bad men”?

III. How would you vote?
Ask each student to create a character from October 1896 (twenty suggestions are below). They should describe the character’s age, history, family, employment, neighborhood, and favorite newspaper or magazine. In class or in a written assignment, they should introduce themselves and explain how they plan to vote on election day, and why. (In some cases they will have to explain how they would vote, since they cannot legally do so.) In addition, you could ask students to point out cartoons that their characters found persuasive. A few suggested characters:

1. Freedman who owns a farm in Kansas
2. Employee of J. P. Morgan and Company, Wall Street, New York City
3. Hungarian immigrant who works in the Comstock mine, Nevada
4. Leader of the Ohio Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
5. German-American rabbi in St. Louis
6. Recent Cuban immigrant working in a Florida orange grove
7. Italian-American parish priest in Brooklyn, New York
8. California sheep rancher who is a Union Army veteran
9. Chinese immigrant who runs a restaurant in Seattle
10. Mormon woman in Utah who has just returned from medical school in Boston
11. Chicago brakeman and member of the American Railway Union
12. White woman who works in a South Carolina textile mill, and whose father and brother died as Confederate soldiers
13. African-American Union veteran who is employed as a sailor out of the port of Boston
14. White tenant farmer who grows cotton in Texas
15. Irish-American mother of three who takes in boarders, and whose husband works at Homestead Steel, Pennsylvania
16. Presbyterian minister and temperance advocate in Vermont
17. African-American woman who owns a laundry business in the Leadville mining camp, Colorado
18. Retired businessman in Baltimore, with investments in railroad bonds
19. Jewish grocery store owner in Philadelphia
20. Junior at Vassar College, from Vermont

IV. Plessy vs. free silver.
Ask students to find and read their textbook’s treatment of Plessy v. Ferguson, and to read excerpts from the Plessy decision and Booker T. Washington’s speech on the 1896 site. Note that there are no cartoons about Plessy on the site (apparently none were drawn) and none of the parties mentioned the case in their platforms. Why might this be? What does it tell us about Americans’ changing measure of the relative importance of issues and events?

As part of its Progress of a People web site, the Library of Congress offers an excellent electronic classroom in which students can “attend” a conference of the National Afro-American Council in 1898 by visiting <http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/aap/aapmtg.html>. Students can debate the most important problems facing black Americans at the time, and the remedies they considered pursuing. They can then contrast this conference with the election of 1896. In what sense was each event political? Did issues overlap? Did any of the party platforms offer solutions to the problems facing African Americans? If so, which ones and how? If not, what strategies should African-American reformers have pursued for reform?

V. Exploring the library.
Guide students to the local newspaper archives at your school or public library. Which party or parties did these papers support? What local constituencies or interests did they represent? Did the town host campaign speakers or parades? Do these newspapers exist under the same names today? If so, how have their editorial policies changed?

If you have access to a good library, students may be able to locate more cartoons in Harper’s Weekly and other contemporary journals. Based on class readings and discussions, ask them to locate and analyze a cartoon that does not appear on 1896.

Additional Resources

A list of works on the 1896 election, party leaders, and broader themes in Gilded-Age history appears at <http://iberia.vassar.edu/1896/bibliography.html>, as part of the 1896 site.

Rebecca Edwards is an assistant professor of history at Vassar College. She is the author of Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (1997).