The new party's founders were disenchanted Democrats who saw its organization as a means to preserve the ideals of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Grover Cleveland.

They included President Cleveland; E. L. Godkin, the editor and publisher of The Nation; Edward Atkinson, a Boston fire insurance executive, textile manufacturer and publicist for free market causes; Spencer Trask, a New York financier and philanthropist; Horace White, the editor of the Chicago Tribune and later the New York Evening Post; and Charles Francis Adams Jr., a leading political reformer and the grandson of President John Quincy Adams.

Two other supporters of Palmer and Buckner became better known in the decades after 1896: Moorfield Storey, the first president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the journalist Oswald Garrison Villard, an anti-imperialist and civil libertarian.

The declarations of the Chicago Convention attack individual freedom, the right of private contract, the independence of the judiciary, and the authority of the President to enforce Federal laws.

They advocate a reckless attempt to increase the price of silver by legislation to the debasement of our monetary standard, and threaten unlimited issues of paper money by Government.

It still proclaims, as it has for many years, the power and duty of the Government to raise and maintain prices by law; and it proposes no remedy for existing evils except oppressive and unjust taxation.