ed. Only the gold standard, they said, offered stability. The financial panic of 1893 heightened the tension of this debate. Bank failures abounded in the South and Midwest; unemployment soared and crop prices fell badly. The crisis, and President Grover Cleveland's inability to solve it, nearly broke the Democratic Party. Democrats who were silver supporters went over to the Populists as the presidential elections of 1896 neared. The Democratic convention that year was witness to one of the most famous speeches in U.S. political history. Pleading with the convention not to "crucify mankind on a cross of gold," William Jennings Bryan, the young Nebraskan champion of silver, won the Democrats' presidential nomination. The Populists also endorsed Bryan. The moment was to prove their high-water mark. Despite carrying the South and the entire West except California and Oregon, Bryan lost the more populated, industrial North and East -- and the election -- to the Republican's William McKinley. The following year the country's finances began to improve, in part due to the discovery of gold in Alaska and the Yukon. In 1898 the Spanish-American War drew the nation's attention further from Populist issues. If the movement was dead, however, its ideas were not. Many of them passed into law within the next two decades The migration of settlers to the West introduced a national agricultural development distinguished with the regionalization and specialization of crops. Farming was therefore integrated into the industries of the day. Because of the fact that farming was a family operation dominated by large corporate enterprises. The hardest hit were the cotton farmers of the South and the wheat farmers of the plains....
