From the Front Porch to the Front Page: McKinley and Bryan in the 1896 Presidential Campaign

Harpine, William D. From the Front Porch to the Front Page: McKinley and Bryan in the 1896 Presidential Campaign. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005. 240 pp. $21.95.

This book focuses on the political rhetoric of the 1896 presidential election, detailing and analyzing the speeches of the two key candidates, William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan. Drawing on extensive newspaper accounts of the campaign, author William D. Harpine, a professor of communications at the University of South Carolina-Aiken, demonstrates that the rhetoric of a campaign-what candidates focus on, thus attempting to "frame" the issues of the day-plays a major role in public perceptions of candidates and in an election's outcome.

That may, of course, seem obvious, but Harpine uses that basic framework to provide a richly detailed revisionist account of the 1896 election. He contends that McKinleys rhetorical skill was much greater, and much more successful, than most historians have recognized. In contrast, he argues that Bryan's oratory in 1896, long characterized as energetic and masterful, really was so divisive that it doomed the "great commoner's" cause.

Harpine's study of McKinley depicts a...