he issue itself -- "free silver" -- did not survive long into the 20th Century. Rather, it appears, the "style" is what ended up mattering most: the political establishments of the time, Republican and Democratic Parties both, adopted the speaker's rhetorical identification with the electorate's emotionalistic dissatisfaction, co-opting the message in the process. "Free" silver instead of a gold standard? Even Bryan himself, by his 1900 campaign for President, considered the free silver issue secondary to flailing against incumbent McKinley's more attention-grabbing imperialism re: the just-ended Spanish-American War.
Any discussion of the Progressive movement must -- for the purpose of intellectual honesty, at least -- identify its observer's point-of-view if one is to judge with any sense of balance the relative merit, objectivity and subjectivity of the arguments employed. This paper is using as its points of reference three commentators on the Progressive movement and/or its era, each of whom derives his respective opinion(s) from a different starting point: Progressive-era social critic Thorstein Veblen as expressed in his 1899 book, the classic The Theory of the Leisure Class; Richard Hofstadter, who describes Progressivism in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1955 book, The Age of Reform; and Gabriel Kolko, whose self-described "reinterpretation of American history, 1900-1916," is entitled The Triumph of Conservatism, published in 1963. This writer believes that the publication date of each respective work is important, for none of these important commentators on Progressivism does so from the perspective of today -- and none had any inkling of the changes that would take place in the world and U.S. body politic and economies in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. Veblen, indeed, had no idea when he wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class that Marxism would become a major influence in the 20th Century "wheel of history" -- but his sele...