On this day in 1896 William Jennings Bryan declared from the platform of the Democratic Convention at Chicago, “you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Whereupon he flung out his hands and dropped his head in the manner of many a crucifixion, to greet the thunderous response of the crowd—“like one great burst of artillery.” Bryan was thirty-six, and he would shortly become the Democratic nominee for the presidency, to stand—and fall—against the much quieter and much better financed William McKinley.

Bryan’s stand for the coinage of silver at a ratio of 16:1 with gold was, economic historians now believe, based on a fine general idea—the currency did indeed need reflation—but a poor particular—at market, silver wasn’t worth nearly a sixteenth of gold.

This of course misses the point: Bryan’s irruption demolished the Democratic Party of Grover Cleveland who, Richard Hofstadter beautifully observed, “with his stern ideas of purity, efficiency, and service, was a taxpayer’s dream, the ideal bourgeois statesman for his time: out of heartfelt conviction he gave to the interests what many a lesser politician would have sold for a price.”¹

With Bryan, the Democratic Party began to become the party determined to press the concerns of the downtrodden against the powerful.

Yet, of course, it took more than Bryan to do this: the imagery in the famous phrase attests to his evangelical bent, which is supposed to have turned off Catholic voters, particularly immigrants, on which the Democrats relied to challenge Republicans in industrial states. And Bryan was not good on the Civil Rights question. Nor indeed was he a good politician, much, at all, having won only one office (Congressman), and losing the presidency three times. I’ll stick below the fold my review of Michael Kazin’s biography of Bryan, but will excerpt here my favorite story about Bryan:

Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma gave a speech nominating Bryan for the presidency in 1908. He liked in later years to tell how, as the two of them rode away from the convention hall, “[a]n exuberant Bryan said, ‘You know, Senator, I ascribe my political success to just three things.’ [Gore] would pause dramatically at this point in the telling. Then: ‘I’m afraid I don’t remember a word he said, but I do remember wondering why he thought he was a political success.’”

Review originally appeared here.

Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. xxii+376 pp., illustrations, notes, and index. USD 30.00, cloth.

Reviewed by Eric Rauchway.

If you want to read everything worth knowing about William Jennings Bryan, Michael Kazin has set it down in a lively style that moves briskly through the Great Commoner’s five-act life, each episode of which contains a different epic defeat — three times beaten for the presidency, one time shackled as a pacifist Secretary of State to an administration bound for war, and finally humiliated at the hands of Clarence Darrow and H. L. Mencken in the court of public opinion. Among the minor successes he scored we can count the sale of Florida swampland, which he shilled on the same bill as a “shimmy dancer”, and the Democratic Party’s adoption of Jim Crow, which he cheered on behalf of the “advanced race”. But Kazin hasn’t much interest in counting Bryan’s wins or losses: he wants us to hear the voice of a populist Protestant preaching against the entrenched rich, because “Bryan’s sincerity, warmth and passion for a better world won the hearts of people who cared for no other public figure”. (306) That Bryan did not also win office doesn’t detain Kazin: he wants rather to draw our attention to the phenomenon of a Christian left, irrespective of its success.

1. About a boy orator

I first heard of Bryan when I was maybe six, and my mother played a record of “Blue Water Line,” a folk song urging the cooperative takeover of a failing railroad:

If you can’t afford a quarter then you ought to give a dime
If everybody gave then we could save the Blue Water Line
Just twenty thousand quarters and forty thousand dimes
And we’ll ride again to glory on that old Blue Water Line
We’ll have William Jennings Bryan stokin’ coal on number nine
So dig inside your pockets for the old Blue Water Line

Which about sums the man up: there he is, energetically stoking the fires for a doomed effort to rally the power of ordinary people, whose collective might ought to be enough to thwart the business interests — but somehow, it never is.

The details corroborate this caricature. Born and brought up in Illinois, Bryan there married wisely a woman who “always cared far less about her husband’s many causes than about whether he could win.” (291-2) In this, Mary was bound for disappointment, like all Bryan partisans, but she kept an eye on worldly matters. They moved to Nebraska for the opportunities Bryan saw in the new state.

Setting aside his own commitment to prohibition, he had his campaign buy booze for the largely immigrant, Catholic, wet constituencies of the Nebraska Democratic Party, and won election twice as a Congressman, in 1890 and 1892. He declined to run again in 1894 so he could seek the Senate seat, which he did not get. He never won a general election again, but his best years lay ahead of him.

When Bryan entered national politics, both parties were working to reshape the electorate. Democrats in Southern states were writing laws to take the vote away from black citizens, while Republicans in Congress were working to admit as states those Western territories with reliable Republican majorities. In 1889-90, Republicans backed the admission of six new states, who signally failed to show gratitude. In the grips of a great depression, those Western states full of farmers and debtors were looking mutinous.

Here Bryan came in — just barely old enough to run for President in 1896, he went as a delegate to the Democratic convention in Chicago. He had been to Chicago before, but saw little good in it; as Kazin notes, he learned nothing from its labor politics, which “could have taught the pious young man from downstate that big-city workers were not merely victims of the new corporate order. To win their hearts, one had to spend less time preaching about ‘character’ and more time appreciating their deep awareness of class and their need to organize for economic self-defense.” (16) On his triumphant return to the Illinois metropolis, he had still less time for city folk, workers or otherwise; his people were not city people: “Bryan lavished his words of praise entirely on rural and small-town Americans.” (60)

He knew how to set a stage, how to make an entrance, speak a piece, and exit triumphant, amid flourishes. These were his great, and maybe only, talents. At the Chicago convention he engineered the order of speakers for the free silver plank so he would come last, after the racist Ben Tillman and other specifically sectional spokesmen. By talking of the virtuous oppressed, irrespective of location, he would sound, not regional, but patriotic and even moral.

So he gave his greatest speech, concluding “we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” And he stuck his arms straight out, holding the posture of his own crucifixion for “perhaps five seconds.” (61)

Egomaniacal and blasphemous, the pose thrilled the crowd. The next day, on the fifth ballot, the boy orator from the Platte overtook the seasoned favorite, “Silver Dick” Bland of Missouri, to attain the Democratic nomination for president.

There were at least two problems with Bryan as a nominee. First, though his rhetoric was good — the best, even — its effect faded quickly. John Peter Altgeld, the Illinois governor, heard the “cross of gold” speech in the convention hall, and said he’d rather give a speech like that than be president. But a little later, he wrote a friend, “Applause lasts but a little while. I have been thinking over Bryan’s speech. What did he say, anyhow?” (63)

Second, Bryan was appealing generically to virtue, and the virtue specifically of the oppressed. It was a fine appeal, that — as his adherents noted — transcended sectional divisions within the Republic. Kazin, looking over what little remains of Bryan’s heaping drifts of fan-mail, makes a case that the appeal transcended even class — that Bryan’s call to virtue chimed in the souls of small-time entrepreneurs and professionals, who heard in his moral language the higher purpose for which they yearned. (195)

But the Democratic Party between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Era was — first, last, and always — a sectional party. After the state constitutional conventions and Jim Crow legislation of the 1890s, the Democrats had the Solid (white) South in their corner. The only way for them to win nationally was to reach out beyond the white supremacist South to another constituency. Winning the mountain West wasn’t enough — there weren’t enough electoral college votes there to overwhelm the populous Republican strongholds. The Democrats needed to hang onto the South while gaining the immigrant and ethnic populations of the cities.

Which was precisely what Bryan could not do. When he spoke the language of the evangelical Protestant, he was preaching words of comfort to the converted, and saying nothing that city constituencies wanted to hear. In the election of 1896, Bryan carried outright more states than McKinley,¹ but nobody much lived in them: he lost by 95 votes in the electoral college. It would be his best showing.

2. A voice crying out

After the Spanish-American War, which even Bryan couldn’t resist — he signed up with the Nebraska National Guard, though his unit never left Florida for Cuba — McKinley looked like an untouchably popular war president. Principled objections to taking the Philippines as colonies, and to fighting an interminable dirty war to keep them, were ignored. Bryan made this losing cause the hallmark of his 1900 candidacy. As Kazin writes, “The stark truth is that Bryan’s long campaign had done nothing to alter the verdict of 1896″ — except, perhaps, for the worse; Bryan lost by a much larger margin this time. (108)

For eight years afterward he spoke and wrote for a living, selling only himself. As Willa Cather noted, “[h]is constituents are controlled not by a commercial syndicate or a political trust, but by one man’s personality.” (101) The same might have been true of some others in the era — Robert LaFollette, perhaps — but few sold as well as Bryan, whose Chautauqua speeches paid for a handsome living in all his various houses.

Having lost twice with a tribune of the people from the Western plains, the Democrats nominated a conservative New Yorker, Alton B. Parker, in 1904, and lost even worse. They returned to Bryan in 1908, and lost again.

Then something changed. In 1910, the Democrats carried the House of Representatives for the first time since 1892. The country had evidently begun to tire of the Republicans. Sensing finally their opportunity, the Democrats picked not a Westerner or an Easterner, but a Southerner who lived in the North: Woodrow Wilson. In 1912 they won the Presidency and the Senate, too. Wilson honored Bryan with the Secretaryship of State, giving him a position at the heart of the administration.

As the country’s principal diplomatic officer, Bryan had no authority over domestic matters. But, Kazin said, “his immediate task was to flesh out the assault on corporate wealth, to turn the Democrats’ new power into a boon for the majority of American voters who either earned wages or owned a farm or other small business. What ensued was the greatest rush of reform legislation in U.S. history until the New Deal, one inspired by Bryan’s speeches and the party platforms he’d been drafting since 1896.” (223)

Yet Wilson’s reforms, whatever their inspiration, were not in fact especially Bryanite. As Kazin notes, on the most Bryanite issue of all — government control of credit and currency — Bryan sold the pass. He started off strong, telling Wilson, “The government alone should issue money,” and threatened to resign if Wilson didn’t keep the Wall Street bankers out. (225) But before many months had passed, Bryan swallowed his pride, “decided to act like a statesman,” and stumped for the compromise Federal Reserve Act, which kept private bankers in the system. Within a year afterward, Wilson had put the most eminent Wall Street banker and critic of Bryanism, Paul Warburg, on the Federal Reserve Board. (226) It was the first of a series of compromises for Bryan, including those on the Clayton Act and the Federal Trade Commission. He had little input into the Wilson inner circle. Nor did he say anything about Wilson’s segregating federal employees along racial lines, though he privately wrote a poem in the voice of a black man who “does not applaud segregation, but … seems to accept it as divine will.” (227)

As Secretary of State, Bryan annoyed the lushes among the diplomatic corps and the press by refusing to serve alcohol at dinners and receptions. He tried to stick up for his favorite leaders in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, but Wilson eventually sent in troops to invade and run them both. In Mexico, undergoing a wrenching revolution and without a proper government since 1910, Bryan suggested backing Pancho Villa, a fellow “teetotaler” whose family were regular churchgoers. (231)

Finally he had to quit. He objected to any strong stand against Germany’s submarine warfare, even when it killed Americans. After a U-boat sank the British liner Lusitania, killing over a hundred Americans, Bryan asked Wilson not to protest too harshly. After Wilson’s telegram demanding that the Reich respect the persons and property of neutral nations, Bryan spoke privately to the Austro-Hungarian ambassador, who claimed the Secretary of State had told him not to worry too much over the Lusitania note. Bryan denied saying it, and shortly afterward resigned from an administration with which he had never been in tune.

3. Moral victories

Into the 1920s, Bryan kept stumping for his vision of the working man’s needs, and his brother Charles stayed in politics, becoming Nebraska governor and Vice Presidential candidate. But after his resignation in 1915, Bryan had finished with electoral politics: Mary moved the household to Miami, and although Bryan stayed a Nebraskan for voting purposes till 1921, he followed. He liked Florida, whose palmetto frontier he helped settle by selling real estate in Coral Gables.

After the Democrats’ defeat in 1920, when James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt lost to Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, Bryan declared “The day is past when the liquor machines and the Wall Street interests of the large cities can successfully dictate to the great moral majority of the nation.” He had launched himself on his last crusade for that moral majority. As Kazin writes, his “effort to reverse the erosion of religious faith eclipsed every other cause.” (271)

First of all, Kazin notes, the crusade was “irrational.” There was, on the face of it, no erosion of religious faith; churchgoing rose through the 1920s. It was also ecumenical, on behalf of faith per se, not any particular faith: “religious diversity had never bothered Bryan, and he didn’t protest it now….” What he didn’t like was science taking faith’s place as the way of explaining the world; “he recoiled at any research in biology or geology that denied the supernatural.” (272-3)

As a Southerner now, and a crusader against Darwin, Bryan found himself comfortable with certain longtime allies. He grew easy with segregation, which he explicitly endorsed. His “passion for democracy had always cooled at the color line,” Kazin notes. (278) And Bryan found himself increasingly able to express his worries about immigrants, too, who — he wrote his brother — “may not be only against prohibition, but other moral issues which are coming.” The new Klan, revived in the 1910s, found itself at home with the new Bryan, and when the Democratic convention of 1924 tore itself apart over whether to dissociate itself from the hooded night-riding white supremacists, Bryan argued that his party ought to let the Klan alone.

In the spring of the following year, the prosecutors in the Scopes trial invited him to join them in Dayton, Tennessee to enforce the state’s law against teaching evolution. When Bryan accepted, Clarence Darrow agreed to join the other side. As Kazin notes, Bryan’s speech against the evolution textbook emphasized his indignation at the implications of natural selection, which dissolved the barriers between man and beast: “How dared these scientists possibly think of shutting man up in a little circle like that with all these animals, that have an odor….” (289) Darrow put Bryan on the stand and made him look a fool. The jury found for the state against Scopes and the judge levied the minimum possible fine, which H. L. Mencken’s newspaper offered to pay (it was the least they could do after publishing every barb and libel the Baltimore wit could think to lob at Bryan and his Tennessee supporters). That Sunday, Bryan went to church in Dayton, had lunch, and lay down for a nap from which he never awoke.

4. The moral of the story

Kazin points out that Mencken was an anti-Semite who hated Franklin D. Roosevelt, and thus that it is “an irony” that “progressive intellectuals continue to repeat Mencken’s great slur” on Bryan. (299) Mencken was a nasty piece of work, and a great hater — which is partly why he was so funny — but this doesn’t necessarily make him wrong about Bryan.

Bryan had little time for any ideas, and less for those that upset his pieties. He had an instinctive rapport with hundreds of thousands of Americans, and could win the votes of millions, based mainly on his ability to take a moral stance when properly situated onstage. But he hadn’t any administrative ability to speak of, nor crossover appeal to key, swing demographics.

Kazin takes Bryan’s career partly as a parable on “[t]he obvious problem for liberals,” which he says “is that most Americans don’t share their mistrust of public piety. Time and again, secular reformers defeat themselves by assuming that this difference doesn’t matter, that they can appeal solely to the economic self-interest of working-class Americans and ignore moral issues grounded in religious conviction.” (303) Yet as Kazin himself shows, Bryan appealed both to economic self-interest and to religious conviction — and lost, time and again, himself.

Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma gave a speech nominating Bryan for the presidency in 1908. He liked in later years to tell how, as the two of them rode away from the convention hall, “[a]n exuberant Bryan said, ‘You know, Senator, I ascribe my political success to just three things.’ [Gore] would pause dramatically at this point in the telling. Then: ‘I’m afraid I don’t remember a word he said, but I do remember wondering why he thought he was a political success.’”² Bryan may well, as Kazin says, have created a rhetoric and a “new style of politics” that endure today. (305) But whatever his lesson for our own time, it isn’t how to win elections.

You can buy the book here.

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¹Bryan won 22 states to McKinley’s 21; they split California and Kentucky. Bryan won 176 electoral votes in 1896, 155 in 1900, and 162 in 1908.

²Gore Vidal, Palimpsest: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1995), 49.

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¹Seriously, if you read no other book of American history—well, I mean, aside from my books—you should read Hofstadter’s American Political Tradition.