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The 1896 Democratic National Convention, held at the Chicago Coliseum from July 7 to July 11, was the scene of William Jennings Bryan's nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate for the 1896 U.S. presidential election. At age 36, Bryan was the youngest Presidential nominee in American history, only one year older than the constitutional minimum. Bryan's keynote "Cross of Gold" address, delivered prior to his nomination, lambasted Eastern monied classes for supporting the gold standard at the expense of the average worker. This was a repudiation of Cleveland-administration policy, but proved popular with the delegates to the convention. Bryan secured the nomination on the fifth ballot over Richard P. Bland. As the nominee, Bryan declined to choose a specific Democratic vice presidential nominee and left the decision to his fellow delegates. Arthur Sewall of Maine was nominated on the fifth ballot. The ticket ultimately lost to the Republican candidates, William McKinley and Garret Hobart. ==Silver in control == For three years the nation had been mired in a deep economic depression, marked by low prices, low profits, high unemployment, and violent strikes. Economic issues, especially silver or gold for the money supply, and tariffs, were central. President Grover Cleveland, a Bourbon Democrat was pro-business and a staunch supporter of conservative measures such as the gold standard; he was strongest in the Northeast. Opposed to him were the agrarian and silver factions based in the South and West, which had been empowered after the Panic of 1893. A two-thirds vote was required for the Democratic Party nomination and at the convention the silverites just barely had it despite the extreme regional polarization of the delegates. In a test vote on an anti-silver measure, the Eastern states (from Maryland to Maine), with 28% of the delegates voted 96% for gold. The delegates from the rest of the country voted 91% against gold, so the silverites controlled 67% of the delegates.〔Walter Dean Burnham, "The System of 1896: An Analysis," in Paul Kleppner et al., ''The Evolution of American Electoral Systems'' (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 147—202 at pp 158-60〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「1896 Democratic National Convention」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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