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Part Ninety-One: The Fall of William Jennings Bryan
Give Me That New World Religion:
As the 19th century drew to a close, the United States began to undergo a third Great Awakening. During the third Great Awakening in the United States, religious revival in both Protestant and Catholic churches shifted church issues from a focus on the salvation of the individual to a focus on the salvation of society at large. Problems such as poverty and the plight of the worker were no longer a sign of individual sin, but of societal sin that could be rectified by the state. The third Great Awakening marked a rise in the popularity of Christian socialism in the United States during the early 20th century.
The general rise in popularity of progressive and socialist movements led to the beginning of Christian socialist movements in the United States. Some organizations such as the Salvation Army operated charities to the urban poor. Begun in London in 1865, the Salvation Army grew in Great Britain and North America during the latter half of the 19th century as they provided the urban poor with "soup, soap, and salvation". Around the turn of the 20th century, more political organizations arose in the United States such as the Christian Workers' League founded by Francis Bellamy and the Nesbitine Society[1]. The Nesbitine Society is notable for advocating women's suffrage and for being actively founded by a woman, Edith Nesbit.
Meanwhile, the Catholic Church in the Americas continued to be divided by the Modern Papal Schism. During the papacy of Anti-Pope Gregory XVII[2], the Temporalist Catholic Church attempted to gain support in the United States. The Temporalist Church gained a following in small parts of the former Confederacy among African and Ibero-Americans, but its following remained small. The Roman Catholic Church also placed a minor focus on the United states during this period with the promotion of Archbishop of Baltimore James Gibbons to a cardinal, the first American to be appointed such. Afro-Cuban migration to the mainland South after the Civil War as well as African-American religious figures like Patrick Francis Healy[3], Archbishop of Mobile, the Roman Catholic following among African-Americans in the former Confederacy grew in the decades between the National War and the Great War.
Election of 1900:
At the Republican National convention in Chicago, Bryan was renominated for President without much opposition. The Republicans wanted to capitalize on the support that Bryan had drawn from the Populist Party in the South in the 1896 election and use it to maintain their hold on the White House. For Vice President, the Republicans nominated governor William O. Bradley of Kentucky, who had advocated for the protection of rights for African-Americans in Kentucky after the influx of former slaves into his state.
By 1900, the National Democratic Party had folded as a political party and the members had rejoined the mainstream Democratic Party. The old guard of the Bourbon Democrats had lost their sway over the party and the Eagle Democrats had become the new dominant wing of the party. At the 1900 Democratic National Convention in Buffalo, William McKinley was the obvious choice for the presidential nomination after he had gained national notoriety in the past decade. However, many Bourbon Democrats were still opposed to McKinley's nomination and put up a few other candidates to stop McKinley from gaining a full majority. In order to push support for McKinley to a majority, it was agreed that a Bourbon Democrat would be nominated for Vice President. The Vice Presidential nomination went to William Vilas of Marquette.
With the divide in the Populist Party, 1900 the National Convention was very tumultuous. Founding member James Weaver did not stand for the presidential nomination. The Populists had split into three visible wings; those with support in the West who wanted to maintain the party's focus on economic issues that appealed to rural Western voters like free silver, and those in the South and Northeast who wanted to advocate more progressive social legislation including the creation of an income tax and the public ownership of key industries. While New York governor Theodore Roosevelt made a speech supporting the progressive legislation, there was still much opposition from the key delegates from Western states. A compromise was finally reached after the ninth ballot, and Congressman Caldwell Edwards of Kearney was nominated for president with Thomas E. Watson of Georgia as his running mate[4].
As the 1900 general campaign got started, Bryan and the Republican Party took a different approach to the usual campaign strategies of the other parties at the time. Bryan toured the country much as he had in the previous year when he was drumming up support for his various agendas. The Democrats and Populists, meanwhile, continued the strategy of working mostly with local party organizations and not getting the candidate too directly involved in the campaign. The media and other parties capitalized on Bryan's vigorous campaigning to show how inexperienced and stubborn the president really was, and many cartoons of the time portrayed Bryan as a child pushed into the White House by an overeager Republican Party. Also hurting the Republicans were that their vote was now almost equally split with that of the Populists in many states. These factors allowed the Democrats to win the 1900 election by a landslide and launched William McKinley into the presidency.
McKinley/Vilas: 219
Bryan/Bradley: 132
Edwards/Watson: 41
[1] Founded by OTL author Edith Nesbit.
[2] Anti-Pope Gregory XVII is Joseph-Hippolyte Guibert, OTL Archbishop of Tours.
[3] OTL Healy became president of Georgetown.
[4] The first Southern candidate for executive office nominated by a major party since the National War.
