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1896 · THE WHEEL AS A POLITICAL MACHINE
The club: In the presidential campaign of 1896 — the free-silver election, fought over the money question — Fort Wayne fielded a bicycle club for a monetary policy. The Sound Money Bicycle Club counted four hundred members, in Michael Taylor's study of the bicycle bloc in the Indiana Magazine of History: it took part in parades, held public races, and escorted Republican speakers from Fort Wayne out to the smaller towns, Cedarville and New Haven among them. When Richard Guenther came to the city in September 1896 to address the German vote, sound-money cyclists escorted him to the Princess Rink, and gubernatorial candidate James Mount received a warm reception from the club on his Fort Wayne visit. The club belonged to a civic world that had organized around the wheel a dozen years earlier — the Fort Wayne Bicycle Club, founded 9 April 1884, whose officers rode to Hicksville, Ohio, and back in club uniform — but its purpose was new: the bicycle as campaign machinery, four hundred strong, for the gold standard. The club era faded with the bicycle boom itself around 1900.
Sources: the Bike Trails section of this history — Michael Taylor, "The Bicycle Boom and the Bicycle Bloc: Cycling and Politics in the 1890s," Indiana Magazine of History 104 (September 2008) (the Sound Money Bicycle Club, its four hundred members, the escorts and the Mount reception); Cleo Goff Wilkens, Ordinaries, Safeties and Fun (the 1884 club and the Hicksville ride).