Maria Haymandou’s newest blog post!
A political cartoon from the 1896 election, showing McKinley and his advisor Mark Hanna
When it comes to presidential elections, they tend to be forgotten for the most part. Chances are that most Americans don’t dwell on presidential elections, particularly any that happened before their lifetimes. But Republican consultant Karl Rove isn’t like most Americans. Because when he isn’t advising the super political action committee he helped to found or commenting on politics, he’s been researching one presidential election that’s fascinated him for a long time, which occurred nearly 120 years ago. In November, he has a book coming out about the 1896 race between Democrat William Jennings Bryan and Republican William McKinley. Today, publisher Simon & Schuster announced that the book is called “The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters”.
In a recent telephone interview, Rove said that he’d been working on the book for a couple of years, accumulating many bins of archival material. He describes it as having violence, betrayal, ambition, integrity and “really cool nicknames”. Rove seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the race, and can spout out detailed stories about the parties’ platforms, strategies and power brokers. Since 2000, Rove has spoken about this election as a turning point that ended years of deadlock in Washington, leading to a generation of Republican prevalence, to which he had aspired while working with Bush.
In the book, Rove credits McKinley with running the first modern primary campaign, as well as the first modern campaign during a general election. Rove has cited parallels to this election to the 2016 election, as debates on such issues as immigration and economic inequality emerged.
While William McKinley ultimately won the election, his Presidential career was cut short after he was assassinated in 1901. He was going up against William Jennings Bryan, one of the great populist candidates in American history. Bryan was a peace advocate, devout Christian and advocate of popular democracy. He was a vocal opponent of the gold standard, opting instead for silver, which he felt would bring the country prosperity. While initially not expected to earn the presidential nomination for the 1896 election, his legendary “Cross of Gold” changed all of that, and he went on to represent the Democratic Party in the race against McKinley. While Bryan lost the election, he ended up running for President two more times.
Maria Haymandou 