I agree with the gentleman from Missouri that no writer yet has fully evoked Bryan. This particular book covers his life well but without digging heavily into psychology and I'm fine with that. The film "Inherit the Wind" made far too much of the fictionalized Bryan's endless talking and eating in some ham-headed attempt to conjure up an oral fixation or something. In the late Fifties to mid-Sixties every socially conscious filmmaker was a psychologist. Today, the same can be said about biographers.
The problem with Bryan, at least in terms of making him into something sensational, was that he was a paragon of virtues from an earlier time, a time when when, well, humility, modesty, temperance, focus, honesty, forgiveness, and a lot of other now-unfamilar and boring concepts were considered virtues. Oh, Bryan was ambitious, and he enjoyed being adored by crowds but it wasn't the ambition of Cheney or the craving for adoration of Clinton, at least not in any dreary sense we'd understand. Bryan made his impact by being Bryan, by speaking to people, by articulating their dreams, by often being an effective politician. He did that so well that up till fairly recently he still had mythic status, a great orator who was still spoken of with some reverance as late as the 1960's (I doubt nowadays 1 in 10,000 would even know the name).
I think ultimately historians have the same problem with Bryan as music biographers have with Franz Joseph Haydn--one of the greatest of all composers but a fairly normal and healthy man whose life lacked wild stories and titilating anecdotes. Personally, I find biographies of people like Haydn and Bryan enjoyable (this book at hand was very refreshing and I've found over the years that virtually everything from the University of Oklahoma Press usually is). It's nice reading about accomplished folks who are fairly normal. It's interesting that Bryan and Roosevelt, two of the giants of that era, both had steady and rewarding marriages with highly intelligent and accomplished women, both had families, both had lives and interests outside of politics. There's a rough definition of "healthy" lurking in there somewhere.
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