newspapers were opposed to Bryan, but his tours and meetings and
speeches had so much news value that they received the widest publicity.
As the campaign drew to a close, it tended more and more to become
a class contest. That it was so conceived by the Populist executive
committee is apparent from one of its manifestoes:

"There are but two sides in the conflict that is being waged in this
country today. On the one side are the allied hosts of monopolies,
the money power, great trusts and railroad corporations, who seek the
enactment of laws to benefit them and impoverish the people. On the
other side are the farmers, laborers, merchants, and all others who
produce wealth and bear the burdens of taxation. The one represents the
wealthy and powerful classes who want the control of the Government
to plunder the people. The other represents the people, contending for
equality before the law, and the rights of man. Between these two there
is no middle ground."

When the smoke of battle cleared away the election returns of 1896
showed that McKinley had received 600,000 more popular votes than Bryan
and would have 271 electoral votes to 176 for the Democrat-Populist
candidate. West of the Mississippi River the cohorts of Bryan captured
the electoral vote in every State except California, Minnesota, North
Dakota, Iowa, and Oregon. The South continued its Democratic solidity,
except that West Virginia and Kentucky went to McKinley. All the
electoral votes of the region east of the Mississippi and north of
Mason's and Dixon's line were Republican. The old Northwest, together
with Iowa, Minnesota, and North Dakota, a region which had been the
principal theater of the Granger movement a generation before, now
joined forces with the conservative and industrial East to defeat a
combination of the South with the newer agrarian and mining frontiers of
the West.

The People's Party had staked all on a throw of the dice and had
lost. It had given its life as a political organization to further the
election of Bryan, and he had not been elected. Its hope for independent
existence was now gone; its strength was considerably less in 1896 than
it had been in 1892 and 1894.* The explanation would seem to be, in
part at least, that the People's Party was "bivertebrate as well
as bimetallic." It was composed of men who not long since had other
political affiliations, who had left one party for the sake of the
cause, and who consequently d