Hello. Quite having behind us the commercial interests and the labouring interests and all the toiling masses,
we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the Bureau of Labour this crown of thorns.
You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold, unquote.
The year is 1896, and at the Democratic National Convention,
William Jennings Bryan has just concluded what is now considered to be one of the most powerful political addresses in American history.
His subject now seems almost comically dry, a championing of by Methodism,
an underpinning of currency based on both gold and silver over the gold standard policy of a sitting Democratic president, Grover Cleveland.
Yet from this single issue stemmed a wider social message, a message of support for the rural poor.
Quote, I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies,
burn down your cities and leave our farms and your cities will spring up again as if by magic.
But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.
I'm afraid I was only 36 years of age.
Almost on the force of his fervent rhetoric alone, Bryan became the Democratic Party's presidential nominee and in the election campaign,
which followed against Republican William McKinley,
will make glimpsed the state of the American nation and its great social and economic divisions as it turns to enter the 20th century.
With me to discuss the American election of 1896 are Noni Kubi, a third year history student of Uncrossed College and the Rothermere Institute,
and Dan Dundrum, a fourth year history student at Lincoln College and also the Rockefeller Institute.
Thank you very much for joining me. N'goni, perhaps we could start by getting a picture of what America is like around the end of the 19th century.
What's the population like on people in towns or cities? What are the main issues facing the country?
So America this time it's undergoing some big changes.
It's industrialising urbanising and there's a lot of immigration, mainly from Europe.
There are a lot of people moving from the from the rural areas into the cities, into not so nice neighbourhoods.
And in 1896, the country is just three years after a big recession panic crash, a big financial panic, I think financial panic in 1893.
What's the cause of this panic? I say this was there was a rush on gold held by the US government,
by many by European investors who were wanting to cash in their dollars and following some crisis in Argentina.
This creates panic within the within the markets and it creates a real problem for lots of America's big companies,
something like a quarter of America's railroad companies go bust in the following year.
It's really we call the figures themselves over bankruptcies and things and unemployment in the industries that you mentioned really swell.
So it's a lot of economic turbulence at a time and during an era when, as we've said, relatively speaking, America's prospered.
In the years since the American Civil War, it's growing at a rapid rate.
I don't think we can overemphasise how rapidly it's grown by our modernised places like Chicago doubles in population.
In the 18th set in the 70s, Nebraska, which is William Jennings Bryan, state her doubles in population during the 80s.
I think so. It's a hugely momentous by if we think if we thought about that in modern context, that would be astonishing.
And it creates all kinds of problems. And it's also a time when America has just finished closing the frontier,
which means they have they've finished expanding across the country, joined up east and west.
They have. Yeah. Yeah. So we're getting the picture in my head and for our listeners that we have this period of great social change,
but shorter periods since 1893 of economic turmoil.
You mentioned to me earlier that certain groups recovered from the economic turmoil much quicker than others.
Yeah. So in particularly, it was farmers who were particularly hard hit, especially out in the West, a lot of.
Farms are abandoned where farmers couldn't pay their mortgages when there was significant
deflation in the currency following the Russian on gold and farmers faced with lowering prices.
They didn't have as much money. Their mortgages were lowering in value. So they often had to leave their homes.
And it's a bit of a bit of a double whammy in lots of ways. There is the the weather is poor, which means that the harvest yields are poor as well.
And in 1896,
and it also comes on the back of a long period of environmental problems in the agricultural region of America that there has been before.
Things have gone poorly for big industries and corporations.
With the panic of 1893, there has been a period in the 90s of poor harvests.
So so in some ways the economic turbulence or turmoil or whatever we want to call it has been going
on for much longer for farmers and for agricultural workers than it does for the rest of the nation.
So the panic perhaps comes in the middle of this economic downturn for the farmers rather than at the start, as it does for everyone else.
A lot seems to come down to this issue of the gold standard versus a free silver standard or by mettlesome thing, could, you know,
perhaps in the first instance, explain this to economic positions that have been in confrontation with each other for a lot of the 19th century.
It's really difficult to understand how big of a deal this was because it's just so foreign to us.
So the American currency? Well, a lot of currencies and the American currency was based on gold.
Lincoln during the Civil War had issued paper currency in greenbacks.
But during Reconstruction, Republicans had been really keen to get this back to 100 percent, backed by gold.
But this man, that period in the whole world where there was like contracting supply of gold and so there was a real shortage of money in America.
And this meant deflation is rapidly expanding period of growing wealth and growing concentration of wealth in certain classes.
And that means there's a real demand for money, but at the same time is contracting supply.
So there's there's deflation. This is like I said, it's really bad in the West, is really bad for farmers and for for some other people.
What they want to happen is to increase monetary supply by using silver to back up some of the currency by metals and silver and gold.
So the way I draw it to me now, it sounds like a completely sensible thing to do to to move towards a dual gold and silver currency.
But what were the arguments on the proponents of gold that kept gold as the standard for so long?
Gold proponents of gold essentially argued that silver will be highly inflationary, that, yes, there are problems with monetary supply,
but the problem with the monetary supply are born out of the somewhat global economic turbulence,
it should be said, of the of the period rather than shortage, necessarily a shortage of gold,
that this is a temporary phenomenon and it will dissipate if we issue silver, will create an inflationary spiral and destabilise our currency.
And that's what we want to do, trade. Yeah, that's exactly the U.K. That's that's a key thing that Europe,
the big financiers in the U.K., which is a financial powerhouse, do not want silver.
They want globally. Gold standard is the accepted consensus for sound economic management amongst the economic elite.
Well, that's really excellent. I feel we've got a good sense of where the country is in 1896, which is, of course, an election year,
the sitting Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, has already served two terms at the convention, is not up for re-election.
The Republicans choose William McKinley. Dan, what sort of man was McKinley?
What did he stand for? Well, William McKinley has been a congressman from Ohio for a number of a number of years.
And he's at the time he wins the Republican nomination. He's the sitting governor of Ohio.
Now, he's not generated much publicity as governor of Ohio, at least on a national stage.
But as congressman from Ohio,
the most significant measure he's backed is a massive increase in tariffs in 1890 as a measure essentially to reduce reduce unemployment.
It's ramping up the tariffs on imported goods to raise the price of foreign produced goods in the hope that Americans turn to domestic goods.
In the meantime, so that his reputation is he's got a murky reputation on gold and silver.
He's never come out strongly in favour of gold up until this point in time.
But one of his favourite means of solving economic problems that it has a reputation for is high tariffs.
So McKinley is chosen for the Republicans by, as I gather, a relatively straightforward process.
There's not a huge amount of confrontation in a convention is the natural candidate.
I do not think everyone just doesn't remember what happened in the Republican
convention because of what happened in the Democratic convention while he was here,
because indeed, the Democratic Convention is much more exciting to begin to describe the issues that Democrats face in picking their candidate.
So the Democrats were a lot more divided over this issue of gold and silver.
They had been losing votes to the populist party, which is particularly Purcellville of the populist party that a third party out of.
Yes. So this is a period where there were a lot of alternative parties and populist party was a big one.
Cleveland had been a strong proponent of gold and it was kind of assumed that the Democrats would just
continue to be gold until the the Free Silver Movement found its spokesman in a William Jennings Bryan,
36 year old. He wasn't currently holding office.
He'd previously be a congressman. He'd been a congressman from Nebraska during the 90s.
And he'd tried to run and become senator for Nebraska, but he lost his bid to become senator,
which was you didn't have one direct election of senators in the 90s to become a senator for your state.
You had to essentially get the backing of the power players within the state.
And when you were standing, O'Brien did not appeal to the power brokers within Nebraska and instead they chose Republican senator.
But yes, William Jennings Bryan had been a congressman and he'd managed to get a lot of attention speaking on the silver issue.
He is one of the prominent advocates for free silver, and he has a reputation as such.
What his background, they come from a wealthy family or a poor family.
How did he get into politics? No, not particularly a wealthy family, a kind of middling family.
He's actually initially raised in Illinois.
He makes a lot of his in later life after the 1896 election.
And and even during this period, he makes a lot of pegging his master to Nebraska.
But he's raised and brought up in Illinois. He actually attends law school in Chicago, but he finds he finds his home in Nebraska.
He starts practising law in in a fairly prosperous town in Nebraska.
And so that's his background is he's he's from a family of Democrats.
His both his mother and father are committed Democrats. And Brian's always throughout college, university, as we call it, and then law school.
Brian's been a very passionate orator. He's put a lot of work into studying the classic orators.
And that's really something he's excelled at, is intellectually he's middling during this period.
But he has excelled at performing as an orator. And he the one thing that we've got to remember about Brian is that he's a really devout
Christian revivalist and he gives America a lot of really great oratory and problems.
But he's a really keen Christian. And so he speaks at political conventions as if from the pulpit, that same style at the convention,
he gives the speech that is known as the Cross of Gold speech, which I read a few quotes from an introduction.
Dan, how did he come to be giving such a big speech?
Was the closing speech of the convention? Well, Bryan has engineered to be at the close of the convention.
He wants to he wants to have the last word, as it were.
But there have been speeches from advocates of silver throughout the convention.
There's a significant member of the Democratic Party who makes a very uninspiring speech in favour of silver at the start of the convention.
So the Democratic Party has endorsed as its plank celebrates the power balance as such within the Democratic Party,
that it's known beforehand that the party will commit to an agenda of free silver.
And so there's a whole bunch of speeches by prominent silver advocates.
But as I said, Bryan, consciously engineers to be speaking last at the convention.
Yes, there are uninspiring speeches for free silver, the kind that ruin people's political careers.
But Brian's inspiring speech in favour of silver really makes an outsider into a viable candidate for the Democratic Party nomination.
It was a very physical performance. The final line about crucified on a cross of gold.
Yes, well, it's a it's one of the we know from reports just how moved and inspiring people in the audience find this speech.
And the great shame is in 1896, we don't have even an audio recording of the speech,
but we know from reports the just the theatricality with which he goes about it.
He concludes the speech. He read the the cross of gold line,
and he literally sticks his hands in the air and makes a crucifix and holds holds the crucifix for four or five seconds, turning around on the spot.
I believe so. Oh yeah. It's very complex.
Somehow I think about image in your head. There's no coincidence that it's a crucifix.
It's explicitly anti Semitic movement.
It's an Freeserve. Advocates believe that it is the big Jewish bankers who were holding the country
to ransom and literally reliving the crucifixion with America as Christ and.
And is this the time actually quite popular?
Oh, yeah, so it's you see a lot in my cartoons from this period, like political cartoons characterise them.
Jewish bankers pinning Brian to across the end of the 19th century turn of the 20th century.
This anti-Semitism is fairly rife not just in America, but in in Europe as well.
It's a conspiracy mentality fuelling this this anti-Semitism in lots of ways.
You made the comparison to Trump earlier on.
Perhaps we should talk about what comparisons can and maybe cannot be drawn with the current election cycle a bit later,
perhaps we should say that, unlike Trump, his poetic mastery is more astonishing, just as from the beginning of the speech.
I will be presumptuous indeed to present myself against the distinguished gentleman to whom you have listened to this word.
But a measure of ability but is not a contest amongst persons the humblest is that in all the land when planting
in the arms of a righteous cause is stronger than all the whole hosts of everything that they can bring.
I come to speak to you in defence of a cause. This wholly is the cause of liberty, the cause of humanity.
I mean, this isn't Christian preaching. You're talking about Florida.
Yeah, definitely. He's a he's got a way with words. You can't see it working on a click bait sort of audience, can you?
He can. I mean, not one use of tremendous or beautiful. No, no.
And it's very it's also very difficult to that we can get across.
We can get a cross of gold. We can give it in speeches, title. But soundbites require several sentences.
And I think this is something you find frequently in political speeches, even up to in some ways that middle of the 20th century, the soundbites.
And it's very difficult to get to a speech, his message just through one sentence.
And it's the same with Brian, but it it flows in it.
It definitely works with the audiences that he's speaking to. His people come to hear, Brian, people come to Brian's rallies.
Brilliant. So Brian is the nominee. How is he viewed at the start of his campaign in the country at large?
People haven't heard of him before. He's yeah.
He's not got that much of of a national reputation beyond the cross of gold and the advocating for silver.
Of course, as you can imagine,
he gets a lot of a lot of publicity in the newspapers there as a result of what goes on at the Democratic convention and the cross of gold speech.
The major new American newspapers are fairly uniformly against Bryan.
The New York World, for example, which is America's largest paper at this time, I believe is very anti Brian.
But of course, by the same token, because they hate Brian, because Brian provides very good copy,
they to actually spend a lot of time covering Brian, but they're not covering Brian in a in a very flattering light.
But yes, this is Brian's fame moment.
This is Brian getting all the attention.
And this very much fuels Brian's political career. For the next 30 years.
Brian will be a national figure until he dies in 1925. Nobody you mentioned to me before that Brian wasn't like so much in the cities.
Yes. So I think it originally starts with the whole deflationary inflationary message of buy metals.
And so if you if you're for silver, you're for inflation.
And that's just really not a good thing. If you are a labouring man in the city, you don't want prices to go up.
And so the cities have a fear right from the beginning. They have a negative view of Bryan.
But then McKinley and his campaign manager, they really get to work on fuelling this fear of Bryan.
And what sort of things do they do? So they tie him to religious fundamentalism.
They say he's an extremist and they tie him to radical radicalism.
So they really tie him to the governor of Illinois who pardon the Haymarket bombers who are notorious anarchists.
He didn't actually do the bombing, but that didn't matter. They were they were anarchists.
And and Brian was tied to this.
So he was seen as a a candidate of chaos and he would disrupt things, which is good if you're not happy with the status quo,
but not so good if you want things to carry on, because there are certain groups who are very much in favour of inflation.
Yeah, yeah, sure. Say the farmers in particular. Really?
Well, not all farmers, it should be said Eastern farmers, not so much Western farmers,
Western Midwestern farmers, Southern farmers, all very keen on inflation because they get more for the project.
And I think, yes, I. I think they're not necessarily keyed on inflation per say, if they could explain to us what inflation was,
but if somebody tells them that by pegging currency to both gold and silver,
they can get higher prices for their produce, and that's definitely something that they can support.
That doesn't necessarily mean that they would support high prices for everything.
Yes, it means that you're basically you pay less money for your land because your mortgage effectively decreases,
which is a big deal for Western farmers.
Not such a big deal if you're a prosperous farmer who has been sat on your land for centuries and don't need to pay off a mortgage.
But if you're a new perspective out in the new lands out west, yeah, I guess it makes a difference.
You mentioned briefly McKinley's campaign manager, Hannah.
Yeah. He seems to be quite an important figure in all this. He finds a new way to to make money for his candidates.
Yeah. So Hannah is kind of credited with creating this modern campaign, which is based on really big money.
Hannah approaches a lot of big businesses who are very concerned about how they trade internationally and they want a stable currency.
And he he tells them that Brian is going to destroy the economy.
Brian laughs Anarchist's Brian is completely crazy, basically, and says, you must fund us because we must stop Brian.
And he raises enormous amounts of money for MacKinley. I think it's the equivalent today of about 85 million dollars,
which is just unheard of then it's a staggering amount that Mark Hannah manages to raise by appealing to industrialists and wealthy people.
Hannah himself is a multimillionaire. Hannah made his money in Cleveland as an industrialist and retires to politics at the age of 40.
And then very much he becomes McKinley's powerbroker for want of a better word throughout.
He is happy and direct in the campaign.
No fundraising is extraordinarily successful, which I think gets back to something not only touched on earlier,
the just the rampant fear amongst the pro gold faction of America,
of the dangers of silver and the dangers of Brian and the effectiveness of this message.
Hannah also commissions commissions. He puts together a speakers bureau that tours the country, making stump speeches effectively in favour of McCain.
McKinney stays in his Ohio home and receives delegations and make speeches.
So it's great to talk about at the same time. Extraordinary that lots of this money went on busing people in.
But it wasn't extraordinary at the time that that's a thing, right, that you bus people.
Rather, it's more it's Brian that does the extraordinary thing of travelling the country for us.
Now, that's normal. Of course, you can go and see of prospective voters.
But he it is Brian who has to do this because he doesn't have the funds and he doesn't have the ability to get people to come to him.
And he does. Amazing whistle stop tour of the nation.
And he gives like five speeches in one day in Detroit and he travels something like during the course of the campaign,
he travels something like 16000 miles on the standard course of trains and things.
He makes speeches from the back of trains. He makes a huge amount of speeches.
He's something like six meals a day to keep him going.
Despite being a teetotaller, he rubs himself down with alcohol to to wake him up, which means he arrives and gives his speeches reeking of gin.
But he's a devout teetotallers, by all accounts, is an extremely magnetic man.
Yeah. Yeah, certainly. Yes. He's he's got the charisma and the force of personality.
He gets where he is because of this public persona and this huge this huge amount of charisma that he's got while speaking.
He becomes a celebrity, basically. Where does he focus his campaign?
Does he go all over or does he focus on swing states? I guess they both focus on the Midwest.
That's so America this time is still recovering from the civil war and it's very sectional.
So the north and Northeast still votes very Republican in the South.
Still, it's very, very Democrat, although this election does slightly change that.
And so the Midwest in the West, that's where the that's where it's going to be up for grabs.
Now, Brian feels like he's got the West pretty, pretty covid.
And so they both focus on that. Yeah, they focus heavily on the on the states bordering the Great Lakes, as nobody said, the region that we think of.
The Midwest, those are the places that they spend a lot of time and effort trying to win the votes of those constituencies.
OK, so we've cunningly kept the listener in suspense until now about who actually won the election of 1896.
But we shall do so no longer knowing what was a result.
They pull Brian after his miles and miles of travelling.
He fails to get the presidency. McKinley It's a landslide in terms of the electoral vote, electoral college.
But in terms of the popular vote, it's pretty close. We should just do a quick recap about the Electoral College votes versus the popular vote.
So Electoral College votes are assigned to every state. Yeah.
So the states have the same number of votes in the Electoral College as they have their representatives in Congress.
And so so each state initially has two two Electoral College votes, plus however many representatives they have in the in the House.
And so voters are voting for an Electoral College representative who is pledged to vote for either McEnany,
O'Brien or one of the other candidates, of which there are a few they know front of them.
So this is a way in which the popular vote be quite close. But the the overall Electoral College vote yes.
And it's not easy. It's not unheard of in America to lose the popular vote, but win the election.
George W. Bush in 2000, these third parties that we talk about only the populist party say so.
We said that in 1835 there were other big deal. So how they got away.
So they've kind of been absorbed by the Democrats because of Brian.
They really, really powerful as a third party coming up to this election.
They had in the previous election, they'd got, I think, four or five states, a number of states anyway.
And they decide that they they've really become a single issue party, which not many,
not all populists are happy about what they've really come behind this very sober idea.
That's their main idea now. And so when Brian becomes a free silver Democrat, they do a very strange manoeuvre of they also nominate Brian.
Brian becomes their nominee, but they select they nominate a different vice presidential candidate.
And it's never quite clear who who Brian will pick,
whether [INAUDIBLE] pick a Democrat candidate or his populist candidate if he does become president.
And so this strange manoeuvre results and the populist party being wiped out, is this well absorbed, absorbed?
Yeah, yeah. I think this is in some ways the the swan song of the the People's Party, which we call the Populist Party.
It grew out of various farmer's parties that existed before it.
And it endorses Bryan. And it loses some of its independent power, let's say, as a third party force because of its endorsement of Bryan.
And as Noni says, in some ways, that's not just because of this manoeuvre.
It's because the Democrats very much begin to absorb its agenda.
And also, silver becomes less of an issue after this. And the world finds more gold.
American economics gets more back on track.
Following his victory, McKinley does quite a good job of stabilising the country.
Would you? Yeah, or at least perceived to be. Yes. You see, as much as any.
Yes, we can debate how much president can actually influence the course of economic development.
And we can also talk about which sections of society McKinley compromises are less good for.
But definitely by 1898 basic the things that we describe as basic economic indicators are doing rather nicely.
There is not the same rampant unemployment. There is not the same panic amongst agrarian populations and these kind of things.
The recovery happens between 1896 and 1898, this long awaited recovery from the panic of 1893.
And what's happened to the gold loving Democrats? Would it be they'd go after Brown took over?
So the Democrats, the split much,
much like people of prophecies or tried to prophecies that the Republicans might win this election if if Donald Trump won the nomination,
that didn't turn out true. But the Democrats do splinter go.
Democrats form their own temporary party and run the Democrat Party.
Yes. Yes. They form their own national Democratic Party and they rally around this issue because, as I said before,
people go advocates feel so strongly about the issue that they are unwilling to support a nominee who is so staunchly pro Silvo.
It's time to ask what should probably tell me is incredibly naive question.
No human me. Why did McKinley win?
And I think in general, McKinley won because of gold, because we were discussing this earlier.
Silver was incredibly popular amongst certain sectors of society, but gold was incredibly popular amongst the rest of society.
And it was so polarising that when Brian stood up for four silver, he was incredibly popular amongst populists, amongst silver Democrats.
But gold Democrats and Republicans are never going to swing his way.
And so McKinley championing gold and saying how pushing this rhetoric that Brian was dangerous and all of these things that pro gold Americans feared.
Yeah, he was always going to win.
Yeah, I mean, in some ways, one could argue not that it's a landslide defeat, but it is actually remarkable how well Brian did,
given the issues that he's supporting and the narrow the narrow constituencies which support his his issues.
He's also part of the party that is associated with the economic panic of 1893.
It's the Democratic Party that has been in office during the panic.
And so all of these things, Brian, as I said,
he does in some ways remarkably well at winning constituencies that in some ways you shouldn't be voting for him.
Then I guess this MacKinley, as well as he manages to turn some southern counties red,
he manages to turn solidly Confederate's counties to vote Republican, which is incredible.
And he does this mainly by showing that Brian is a radical conservative.
Southern whites are really scared of that.
But McKinney also does this by compromising with Southern whites.
And this is a real turning point in this era in in reconciliation between the north and the south.
So McKinney is the last civil war veteran. He was a union veteran, but he doesn't do what's called waving the bloody shirt.
He doesn't say you must vote for me as a unionist, but in the north, because of look what the Democrats did to us.
Instead, when he goes to speak in Georgia, he has a grey a Confederate pin.
And he and he never speaks out against lynching and he doesn't speak out at all against an African-American voter disenfranchisement.
He compromises with the South. Yes, it doesn't.
The race is clearly a huge issue at this time, but actually races very conspicuously absent from the campaigns themselves.
There's just been a major Supreme Court decision in 1896 which has effectively legalised segregation.
And it's it's an issue that the the two candidates avoid engaging with because as n'goni said,
I think that analysis is spot on the political calculations on McKinney's part, cause him not to make race an issue in the election.
And so under his premiership going forward, do some of the social problems in some cities and beyond.
That is, do they continue to fester? Does the general economic improvement also improve the situation?
This is the start of what's known as the nadir of African-American and white relations.
It's it's a period where there is complete in some areas, voter disenfranchisement.
In North Carolina at this point,
there is zero African-Americans registered to vote in the next eight years after McKinley is elected and when he's elected again,
even though he doesn't serve that term, there are at least 800 lynchings.
This is the worst period for race relations, really. So, no, I think party is partly to do with decisions that people like McKinley made.
But they they chose to they chose to compromise and to heal sectional divisions over race relations.
But also the rural urban dynamic and the tensions between the two really don't go away, they intensify quite dramatically.
Brian, even more becomes associated with the agrarian population and with Christianity in the years going forward.
He very much becomes the spokesperson for these constituencies. And in nineteen twenty five, he ends up speaking in short of creationism trial.
And there is kind of caricature. Does this backwards, poor mannered American that's a representative of past America,
this kind of agrarian vision, and that actually he's trying to try to stop the march of modernity.
So that's along with the racial divisions widening the the kind of rural urban divisions continue to widen.
We have three minutes left and it's the thorniest issue of all, but I should ask the question, at least n'goni, are there any comparisons,
useful or otherwise, that perhaps can be made between MacKinley Brid election and the current American election?
We find ourselves serving as a historian. I find myself.
Very difficult to say, oh, yeah, this is how they're similar, but there are a lot of similarities,
so many at that he was saying earlier about the divide between the causes in the Democrat Party.
I think that's one of the big ones in the Republican in the Republican Party now.
We thought that the Republican Party is going to splinter and it still might.
It still might, although there's also the massive difference between the machine for Clinton or the
machine for McKinley compared to the lack of organisation comparatively that Trump had.
So Brian didn't have the campaign strategy. They didn't have the staff behind him.
McKinley had and Trump is doing all of his own talks, whereas Clinton has Obama, she has Michelle Obama, she has Joe Biden, Al Gore.
It's such an incredible list of people who speak for her,
whereas Trump is doing it all himself and even Mike Pence, who started dropping out of speaking for him.
Yeah, yeah. I think I think those are the most significant comparisons.
The the political I mean, what's going on within the parties and the way that the political campaigns are operating.
I think it's it's tempting to look at some of the rhetoric, the rhetoric of the populists,
the Bryars rhetoric and these attacks against the economic elite,
unless this conspiracy mentality in a way, because that's what it is in lots of ways,
that's what's causing this resentment of the of the gold standard.
Is this this idea that Americans and farmers are being played by this Eastern economically?
It's tempting. It's tempting to see some of that in both Trump and Bernie Sanders campaign.
But I think as we pulled out, the problem with that comparison is often what's behind this.
The thinly veiled xenophobia and racism is very different from what we see.
In the 21st century, we might say that that to a certain extent, that underlying Trump's campaign,
but it's definitely Bernie Sanders is not waging anti-Semitic attacks.
There is no question of that.
So, as I said, we should maintain caution with comparisons and similar, but but different in lots of ways.
Well, thank you very much, both of you. It's been an education for me. Join us next time on in our spare time.