Egad! He Moved His Feet When He Ran

In the West, where miners strongly supported the Populists' commitment to expand use of silver in the money supply, the People's Party campaign generated enormous excitement. Appearing with Populist firebrand Mary E. Lease, and accompanied by his wife, Clarissa, Weaver drew wildly enthusiastic crowds in Denver and Pueblo. He spoke to a large and friendly audience in Los Angeles. Bands and celebratory cannon fire greeted the Populists as they toured the small towns of Nevada.

In an unusual and quite possibly painful fundraising stunt, Lease invited the crowd in Denver to hurl coins at her. The invitation prompted laughter, applause and "a rain of silver dollars," according to a Washington Post account.

Weaver's campaign was less successful as it headed south. Democrats, recognizing the Populists as a threat to their dominance, demonized him as a Dixie-hating Yankee who abused citizens under his jurisdiction when he was a Union Army colonel stationed in Tennessee during the war. Moreover, Democrats warned white voters that support for the Populists could take enough votes away from Cleveland to put Harrison back in the White House and strengthen federal efforts to protect the voting rights of black men.

"Do you think that self-respecting Southern men can now vote for such a man?" Democratic Rep. Charles Triplett O'Ferrall of Virginia asked reporters. As the campaign continued, Southern Democrats worked hard to ensure that the answer was "no."

After winning warm receptions in Arkansas and Texas, Weaver headed into Georgia. At Waycross, Weaver and Lease addressed a crowd of farmers, both whites and blacks, without incident but elsewhere in the state, hazing by Democrats grew more threatening. Finally, at Macon, Weaver was hooted off a hotel balcony just after he began to speak, and Clarissa Weaver was struck by rotten eggs hurled by local rowdies. Weaver subsequently canceled the rest of his campaign swing through Georgia.

Back in friendlier territory, Weaver and Lease campaigned in Lincoln, Neb., where Rep. William Jennings Bryan was running for reelection and had endorsed Weaver instead of Cleveland. Nebraska voters returned their young congressman to Washington, but by a narrow margin of 140 votes. In the end, Cleveland returned to the White House, but his second term -- marred by the Panic of 1893, the violence of the Pullman strike and the legions of unemployed who marched on Washington under the banner of Coxey's Army -- was hardly triumphant.

As for Weaver, his Populist campaign proved stunningly successful; for the first time since 1860, a third party won electoral votes. He carried Kansas, Colorado, Nevada and Idaho and won additional electoral votes in Oregon and North Dakota. Despite the intensely negative campaign against him by Southern Democrats, he received 36 percent of the vote in Alabama and 23 percent in Texas. Overall, it was a vast improvement over the dismal third-party showings of the 1880s.

"His stumping exposed him to a vituperative barrage in person and in the press that went beyond a mere attack on his ideas," Kazin writes of Weaver's two presidential campaigns. "But he surely would have won fewer votes if he'd stayed at home."

After 1892, the major parties began to adopt the general's campaign tactics. Four years later, William Jennings Bryan emulated Weaver with a whistle-stop campaign in which he traveled 18,000 miles, and the Democrat hit the campaign trail when he ran again in 1900 and 1908. In 1900, Republicans selected a hero of the Spanish-American War as President William McKinley's running mate. Theodore Roosevelt proved to be as indefatigable a campaigner as Bryan.

Before long, the aversion of presidential candidates to the unseemly business of canvassing for votes was a thing of the past. Today, the notion that a presidential candidate should avoid the campaign trail seems as archaic as the Whig Party, torchlight parades and the multi-ballot convention.

This article is adapted from "Skirmisher: The Life, Times, and Political Career of James B. Weaver," to be published this fall by Edinborough Press.