Cross of Gold Speech - Legacy

Legacy

Bryan's speech is considered one of the most powerful political addresses in American history. Stanley Jones, however, suggested that even if Bryan had never made it, he would still have been nominated. Jones deemed the Democrats likely to nominate a candidate who would appeal to the far-left Populist Party, and Bryan had been elected to Congress with Populist support. According to political scientist William Harpine in his study of the rhetoric of the 1896 campaign, "Bryan's speech cast a net for the true believers, but only for the true believers." Harpine suggested that, "by appealing in such an uncompromising way to the agrarian elements and to the West, Bryan neglected the national audience who would vote in the November election". Bryan's emphasis on agrarian issues, both in his speech and in his candidacy, may have helped cement voting patterns which kept the Democrats largely out of power until the 1930s.

Writer Edgar Lee Masters called the speech, "the beginning of a changed America". Bryan's words gave rise to later economic and political philosophies, including Huey Long's 1930s Share Our Wealth program, with its trigger phrase, "Every Man a King" inspired by Bryan's speech. Author and political commentator William Safire, in his political dictionary, traced the term "trickle-down economics" (common in the Reagan era) to Bryan's statement that some believe that government should legislate for the wealthy, and allow prosperity to "leak through" on those below. Historian R. Hal Williams suggested that the opposite philosophy, of legislation for the masses leading to prosperity for all, advocated by Bryan in his speech, informed the domestic policies of later Democratic presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt with his New Deal.

Bensel ties the delegates' response to Bryan's address to their uncertainty in their own beliefs:

In a very real sense, adoption of the silver plank in the platform was akin to a millennial expectation that the "laws of economics" would henceforth be suspended and that the silver men could simply "will" that silver and gold would, in fact, trade on financial markets at a ratio of sixteen to one. The silver men were thus in the hunt for a charismatic leader who would underpin what they already desperately wanted to believe. They manufactured that leader in the convention, a fabrication in which Bryan was only too happy to assist.