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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...