William Jennings Bryan’s Cross of Gold
14 min readJun 14, 2020
In 1896, William Jennings Bryan gave a speech that changed the US forever.
Democrats had always claimed to be the party of America’s poor majority, the common (white) man: farmers, urban workers, and immigrants. Its founders — Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson — assumed the wealthy would always dominate politics, abusing government power to exploit the impoverished majority. Thus, they believed…
