John M. Palmer and the Gold Democrats

On this day in 1817, John M. Palmer was born. He was a key figure in the"last stand" of classical liberalism as a political movement in the nineteenth century. When the Democratic Party, repudiated Grover Cleveland, a defender of the gold standard, freer trade, and anti-imperialism, many of his followers formed a new third party, the National (Gold) Democrats . The party nominated Palmer as its standardbearer. Since he began his political career in the 1840s, Palmer had been a Jacksonian Democrat, Free Soil Democrat, antislavery Republican, Union general and governor of Illinois. His vice presidential nominee was another Civil War general (this time for the Confederacy), former Governor Simon Bolivar Buckner of Kentucky.

The choice of the new party’s name was more than coincidental. The NDP (more widely known as the Gold Democrats) had been founded by disenchanted Democrats as a means to preserve the ideals of Thomas Jefferson and Grover Cleveland. In its first official statement, the executive committee of the NDP accused the Democratic Party of forsaking this tradition by nominating William Jennings Bryan for president.

For more than a century, it declared, the Democrats had believed “in the ability of every individual, unassisted, if unfettered by law, to achieve his own happiness” and had upheld his “right and opportunity peaceably to pursue whatever course of conduct he would, provided such conduct deprived no other individual of the equal enjoyment of the same right and opportunity. [They] stood for freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of trade, and freedom of contract, all of which are implied by the century-old battle-cry of the Democratic party, ‘Individual Liberty’” The party criticized both the inflationist policies of the Democrats and the protectionism of the Republicans.