The free silver movement reached its height with the 1896 campaign of former Nebraska representative William Jennings Bryan, who won the Democratic nomination for president after his Cross of Gold speech, which decried the gold standard, electrified the 1896 Democratic National Convention. Bryan was defeated in the election by former Ohio governor William McKinley, and in 1900, Congress passed the Gold Standard Act, placing that standard into law. The gold standard was departed from for many purposes by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal administration, and completely ended by President Richard Nixon in 1971.