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48 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
And the whole multitude sought to touch him, March 5, 2006
for there went virtue out of him, and healed them all. Luke 6:19
There is a tendency in the U.S. today that when we think of William Jennings Bryan, if we think about him at all, we think of the aging demagogue defending Creationism at the "Scopes Monkey Trial". Bryan's image seems coextensive with the actor Frederic March's characterization of a preening, self-righteous zealot in the movie "Inherit the Wind". Michael Kazin's "A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan" does a wonderful job of capturing the political life of a man who captured the ears and hearts of millions of Americans from 1896 until his death in 1925 at the age of 65. Millions of American farmers and laborers saw virtue in Bryan and sought to touch him. Kazin goes a long way towards explaining the social and political phenomenon that was William Jennings Bryan.
Kazin's "A Godly Hero" is both well-written and meticulously researched. Bryan, known to friends and foes alike as the "Great Commoner" was the Democratic Party's candidate for President in 1896, 1900, and 1908. Kazin does an excellent job of presenting Bryan as more than a cartoon-like caricature. Although always a devout, fervent Christian Bryan rose to national acclaim not on the basis of his religious world view but on a populist platform that was more than a bit radical for his time. Kazin points out, of course, that Bryan's political views were informed by his Christian beliefs, but notes that those beliefs led him to fight as a populist for social justice. Bryan's three presidential campaigns called for support for the rights of small farmers and factory workers as they did battle against the big railroads and factory owners. He sought to nationalize the railroads, legalize the right to strike, and to be among the earliest campaigners for women's suffrage. Those beliefs led him to strike out against the incipient imperialism of the United States as it launched its first overseas military adventures in Cuba and the Philippines. Bryan's religious beliefs may also be linked to the antiwar stance he took as Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State in 1913-1914. He opposed the government's perceived movement towards war even as it stressed its ongoing neutrality.
Kazin takes pains to point out that Bryan's stern religious beliefs placed him on the side of social progress and not on the side of reaction. This is an important consideration in any historical examination undertaken in an era when strong religious convictions are often invariably linked (and often unfairly) to social and political conservatism. Kazin does an excellent job of putting Bryan's religious beliefs into the context of an era in which the progressive and populist movements grew throughout the country's urban areas and farm lands.
Bryan's meteoric rise to fame was facilitated in no small part by his oratorical skills. Both supporters and foes marveled at Bryan's ability to keep a crowd transfixed during his speeches. Kazin's description of Bryan's stunning Cross of Gold speech at the 1896 Democratic Convention brings that convention to life.
This is not a warts-free biography. Kazin notes the inherent conflict between Bryan's egalitarian instincts and his kow-towing to his southern Democratic supporters who spent most of the years from 1896-1908 disenfranchising (and lynching when necessary) black American voters in the south. This "Great Commoner" chafed at U.S. policies denying the Philippines the right of self determination while condoning the segregationist policies of the Wilson administration that resulted in eliminating blacks from all but menial federal jobs. It is here, on the great American altar of race relations that Kazin's resurrection of Bryan becomes a bit problematic. It is clear that Bryan's populist beliefs were sincere and from the heart. However, it is far from clear whether Bryan's acquiescence to the forces of racism in his party was based on a fundamental belief in the inferiority of another race or a necessary political accommodation to a powerful element of his popular base. If the former is the case one must question Bryan's judgment. If the latter is the case one must question whether this accommodation with the evil that was Jim Crow ruins his reputation for integrity.
"A Godly Hero" closes with Bryan's last moments in the public eye, at the trial of John Scopes. Called to the witness stand by famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow (who once called Bryan the "idol of morondom"), Bryan was eviscerated by a series of questions about a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis. It is interesting to note that Bryan managed to avoid answering Darrow's questions directly. It seems (to me at least) that Bryan was not prepared to testify under oath than Jonah was swallowed by a while and other similar questions. This does tend to support Kazin's thesis that Bryan was not as much concerned with the teaching of evolution as with the growing line of thought by `social Darwinists' who used Darwin's teachings to espouse wars of conquest and the physical elimination of the weak by the strong.
Taken as a whole, Bryan's life is a study in contradictions. He fought for social justice while accommodating segregation. He fought for women's suffrage at the same time he led the fight for prohibition. He campaigned unsuccessfully on platforms (workers' rights and federal insurance for bank deposits for example) that helped elect liberal Democrats from FDR through LBJ but will go down in history for his assault on the teaching of evolution. Michael Kazin's "A Godly Hero" does an excellent job of sorting through these contradictions and giving us a picture of Bryan as a "man-in-full". "A Godly Hero" is a worthy addition to the history of the populist era.
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37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
History Blown Open, February 15, 2006
I enjoyed the book without really planning on it. Kazin makes a long ago period come alive, and it is amusing looking at the years of Theodore Roosevelt from a deliberately oblique angle, as it were. As Kazin points out, Bryan and Roosevelt were nearly contemporaries, born a mere two years apart, and their lives intertwined on many levels, though they were miles apart in their views on--well, on just about everything. Everything, that is, except the power of manifest destiny and the call of the American Empire.
Kazin brings it all up close, and the gallery of American politicians, many of them long forgotten, jump into life. You can almost feel you were at one of those long-drawn-out political conventions of the turn of the century, and his cast of characters are vivid and fleshy. Do you know how in the YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON author Robert Caro manages to animate all manner of pols, give them flesh and blood? Kazin's style will remind you of Caro's way with a tale, only his task might be more difficult for the era was a good 60 years before LBJ's and in some ways more difficult to access. Some of the platforms men stood on seem almost to have a schizophrenic edge to them, and Jennings Bryan, as Kazin admits, has an opaque quality to his thinking that mirrors the perplexities of the common man of his day (I use the words "man" and "men" in shorthand to denote a day before universal suffrage, not that Kazin's biography doesn't include some powerful female figures, such as Bryan's acerbic, "choleric" widow Mary, who spared no one the foul side of her tongue and when she had something to say she let you have it!)
Thus Bryan shamefully stood by when Josephus Daniels urged Democrats in the Carolinas to prevent black voters from going to the polls by any means necessary. The time was ripe for a revival of lynching and, disgracefully, Bryan's policies did nothing to prevent that. And yet to all intents and purposes he was a progressive on many other fronts, a John the Baptist figure to FDR's Christ, a voice crying out in the wilderness. It was an era when ordinary people spoke in the cadences of the King Jamws version of the Bible, for approximately 80 per cent of US citizens were all intimately familiar with the contents of that one book, even those who had never cracked another book. The language of the Bible was a lingua franca, understood by all, and it might be said that Jennings Bryan exploited this situation and fairly revelled in it. He was the leading orator in an age of great ones. Unfortunately few of his speeches have been preserved on celluloid!
I was especially impressed by Kazin's coverage of Bryan's years in Miami, a period often overlooked by previous biographers. One of these days we will wake up and realize that everything bad or good to come out of the 20th century originated in Miami, a city I long one day to visit.
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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Great Commoner, February 23, 2006
Professor Kazin has previously written a couple of well-regarded books on the Populist movement of the late 1800s. His very latest work demonstrates his skills again; this is a well-paced narrative with good character sketches of some of the major political figures of the time, including of course William Jennings Bryan. Most people, if they think of the Populist movement at all, think of romantic revolutionaries, people unhappy with economic instability brought by early industrialization and eager to return the US to a democratic nation of small producers and farmers. Kazin never really calls Bryan a Populist, preferring instead the term Progressive, and uses Bryan's life as a means to argue that the insurgency of the time was more complex than some believe. The result is a very passionate biography of Bryan.
Bryan never was a Populist. The Great Commoner was an agrarian Democrat who convinced the Populist Party to support him in the 1896 Presidential election, despite the fact that the Populists ran surprisingly well in 1892 on a platform that really took it to the corporate interests then running roughshod over the American landscape. Bryan's 1896 Democratic Presidential nomination also represented the Party's rejection of the conservative stand-patism of President Grover Cleveland -- really a Republican who differed from the GOP only on the issue of a protective tariff -- in favor of a platform of economic reform based primarily on the call for inflation to ease the plight of debt-ridden farmers. Bryan lost the 1896 election, one of the four or five most important in American history, to William McKinley.
1896, though, was only the start of Bryan's career. He won his Party's nomination for President twice more -- in 1900 and 1908 -- and later served as President Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State from 1913 to 1915. Bryan resigned that latter commission when it became clear to him that President Wilson's neutrality policy toward World War I bellgerants was a ruse to hide the inevitable -- the entry of the United States into hostilities in support of the United Kingdom and her allies.
Throughout, Kazin argues, Bryan served as the conscience of the Democratic Party and the poltician who served as the bridge between the conservative Cleveland, and to a lesser extent the segregationist South, and the progressive Wilson and, eventually, the more inclusive, nationalist Democratic Party. Bryan triggered this when he built upon his 1896 platform of economic justice, continually expanding the subjects that he believed needed the corrective of federal governmental intervention. Most to his credit was Bryan's very early support of women's suffrage and equality; very much to his debit was his insistent racism against African-Americans.
Kazin does not hesitate calling Bryan a racist even as he emphasizes Bryan's overall positive legacy. This is to the author's credit. Still, I'm not as convinced as Kazin that Bryan is a useful figure for finding the roots of the modern Democratic Party. First, Kazin argues that Bryan as Secretary of State was not a simple isolationist and had an approach to foreign policy based on moralism symbolized by binding arbitration of international disputes by member nations. But Kazin devotes only about 15 pages to this important area and doesn't convince me that Bryan was anything but an unrealistic, unsystematic analyzer of foreign affairs. This was in marked contrast to other Democrats of the time and later, who recognzied the need for a cohesive strategy for dealing with the inevitable -- America's growing economic, and thus political, involvement in the world. Second, domestically, he was essentially a cultural and economic anti-modernist who never systematically integrated a feasible conception of the individual's place in the modernizing world. This is not an unfair criticism of Bryan, for other politicians in his time were grappling with these issues much more productively. FDR, to me, borrowed much more heavily from his cousin TR (and Wilson) than Bryan in formulating the New Deal, and his marriage of government to industry between 1933 and 1935, and after 1939 represented a far more realistic appraisal of the economic facts of life than Bryan was ever able to muster. FDR fashioned a modern Democratic Party in that image more so than any conception borrowed from Bryan.
I'll give Kazin credit though .. he sticks by his guns. He places Bryan's famous defense of anti-evolutionary laws (in the last month of his life) in the famous Scopes Trial within Bryan's life-long commitment to religious belief. Bryan's Christianity, in turn, formed the core of his political beliefs, at root a desire to build a nation of Christian small producers, an explicitly religious, sectarian version of Jeffersonian Democracy. By linking Bryan's absurd defense of Tennessee's "anti-monkey" law to his overall matrix of Christian belief Kazin seeks to understand (justify?) Bryan's late-in-life actions. Kazin wants modern Democrats to learn from Bryan and understand the cultural roots of economic protest. This, he seems to believe, is the only way for the Democrats to win elections. This may be true, but as Kazin notes, the substance of religious belief has changed quite a bit in the meantime. The focus is now on individual salvation, not the Sermon on the Mount. Democrats still can't forsake the secular, hip, ironic, modernists living in the Blue States if they want to win and they'll lose that base if they play too much to the individualized, and quite serious, piety of the suburban and rural red states. Its hard to see Democrats and early 21-st century descendants of Tennessee's original anti-secularists coming to some sort of mutual understanding. Professor Kazin seems to think its possible; I'll defer to his optimism and hold my tongue.
Overall, I recommend this book for an understanding of the multiple influences on the 20th - and 21st - century Democratic Party. Plus its a good read.
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