A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan Hardcover – February 7, 2006

Every February or March, all across America, local Democratic Party organizations hold their annual Jefferson-Jackson Day fundraising dinner in honor of the third and seventh presidents of the United States, respectively, widely regarded as the founding fathers of the party. In 1997, President Bill Clinton helped dedicate the new, sprawling memorial to President Franklin Roosevelt on the Mall in Washington DC, the first president since Lincoln to be so honored, putting the thirty-second president on equal footing, more or less, with the signer of the Declaration of Independence, whose monument, approved by FDR in 1937, is clearly visible across the Tidal Basin. In these chosen three – Jefferson, Jackson and FDR – the modern Democratic Party have claimed their holy political trinity. However, after reading Michael Kazin’s critically acclaimed “A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan,” it is clear that the famed Nebraska orator deserves a place in that pantheon as the trailblazer of the modern Democratic Party, the man who bridged the small government, anti-federal Jefferson-Jackson party of the nineteenth century to the progressive New Deal era of the twentieth.

If William Jennings Bryan is remembered at all today, it is likely for all the wrong reasons. Either because he was three-times nominated for president (1896, 1900, 1908) by the Democratic Party and thrice defeated and/or that he led the 1925 prosecution against a Tennessee high school biology teacher for teaching the theory of evolution. As “A Godly Hero” makes abundantly clear, to summarize Bryan’s half-century career by these selective events is misleading, myopic, and supremely unfair.

Born into a relatively privileged family in southern Illinois at the start of the Civil War, William Jennings Bryan embodied the ideal politician of the age: a devout Christian, academically trained in the law, and truly brilliant in oratory. For the rest of his life the “Social Gospel” would be his political lodestar, Jesus and Jefferson his role models. “I have more than a usual power as a speaker,” Bryan recognized about himself in an early diary entry, and “God grant that I may use it wisely.” In the opinion of many contemporary Americans, particularly rural evangelical Christians in the South and West, he did.

His voice was at once mellifluous and stentorian (important in an age of open air meetings without microphones); his prose simple and direct; his arguments sincere, if not especially sophisticated. His perspective was a “… strict, populist morality based on a close reading of Scripture.” Even adversaries confessed that they had been temporarily won over after listening to him. Within months of arriving in Washington in 1891 as a freshman Congressman of no real reputation, Bryan quickly established himself as “one of his party’s most popular orators,” according to Kazin. His inimitable voice and political passion would carry him quickly to the top of his party – and eventually earn him a small fortune speaking every summer on the Chautauqua circuits. It is estimated that Bryan appeared at over six thousand scheduled speaking appearances between 1895 and 1925 (an average of two-a-day for 30 years), often to packed houses of humble citizens, many of whom traveled hours just to hear him.

Bryan’s rise to national political prominence was meteoric. During the course of just half-a-decade he went from an unknown, thirty-year-old Congressman from a remote Great Plains district in southeastern Nebraska to the presidential nominee of the oldest political party in America. And he did so on the strength of a grassroots movement built by his eloquence, sincerity, and indefatigability, not patronage or backroom wheeling-and-dealing. It was a populist playbook that served him well for decades, the only changes being the focus of his political crusade. In 1896 it was against the gold standard and in support of free silver; in 1900 it was against imperialism (although he initially supported the war against Spain and even served as a Colonel of Nebraska volunteers that never left their Florida training base); in 1908 it was against the trusts; in the late 1910s it was against alcohol; in 1925 it was against social Darwinism.

Bryan emerged as perhaps the most polarizing political figure in the country. Many critics “considered his public speaking an exercise in bathos and demagoguery.” He was loathed and feared by the urban elite, including those with long ties to the Democratic Party, and widely mistrusted by the middle class across the mid-west. “What is remarkable,” Kazin writes, “is not that Bryan lost but that he came so close to winning.”

Yet, along the way Bryan fundamentally altered the art of presidential electoral campaigning, converted his Democratic Party into the liberal wing of America’s two-party system, and according to former Wilson administration Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo, “had more to do with the shaping of the public policies [between 1895-1935] than any other American citizen,” other than those who had served as presidents.

Bryan would almost single-handedly end the long American tradition, begun by Washington, of the aloof presidential candidate who let others campaign on their behalf. Kazin argues that one of the reasons that Mark Hanna – the Karl Rove of the McKinley presidency – chose Teddy Roosevelt as a running mate in 1900 was because the young war hero and progressive reformer could somewhat match “Bryan’s combination of stump thunder and backroom sweetness…”. Meanwhile, his manager and younger brother, Charles, maintained from his offices in Lincoln one of the earliest and most extensive political marketing databases ever assembled.

It was Bryan’s extensive, vocal, and loyal grassroots following all around the country that eventually broke the grip of East Coast conservative’s control over the Democratic Party. More than anyone else, Bryan established the party as the leading liberal political organization in America. Prior to 1896, the conservative, so-called Bourbon wing of the Democratic Party was in control. Committed to laissez faire economics, small government and social conservatism, they represented their party’s classic Jefferson-Jackson heritage. These supporters of Grover Cleveland’s two non-consecutive terms as president and who had forced the uninspiring Alton Parker to the top of the 1904 Democratic ticket were buried under the combined weight of crushing electoral defeats and Bryan’s stranglehold on Southern and Western voters. He had become more than a political leader; he had become a political symbol, “a tribune of the exploited producers” of the country during a time of radical reform. Many of the political issues that he championed on the stump for years, many of which may have appeared quixotic at the turn of the century, would ultimately become law, such as a federal income tax (16th amendment), the popular election of senators (17th amendment), prohibition (18th amendment) and a women’s right to vote (19th amendment). Bryan’s extensive political influence over progressive Congressmen also played a crucial role in ensuring government control over the newly establish Federal Reserve System in 1913, another example of Bryan’s willingness to depart from the blinkered biases of his nineteenth Democratic Party forbearers. And he accomplished nearly all of this as a private citizen (Bryan’s public service was limited to only two terms in Congress [1891-1895] and 27 months as secretary of state).

So why has Bryan’s legacy been dismissed by the modern Democratic Party? First, and most likely foremost, he was an evangelical Christian who put Jesus Christ and the Social Gospel at the foundation of his political action. That alone, I believe, is enough to get many liberal academics to dilute his influence. Recent comments by sociologist George Yancey, an African-American professor and devout Christian, are illustrative: he claimed that the discrimination he's faced in the academy for being Christian has been far worse than any racial discrimination he's experienced, "and it hasn't even been close." Second, and perhaps more understandable, is Bryan’s undeniably conservative views on race. As Kazin concludes, “Bryan’s passion for democracy had always cooled at the color line.” Evidently Jefferson and Jackson’s early nineteenth century slave ownership is somehow forgivable whereas Bryan’s early twentieth century silence on Jim Crow is not.

In summary, Kazin delivers a penetrating and balanced portrait on one of the most influential politicians in American history and clearly the father of the modern Democratic Party.

William Jennings Bryan poses a problem for contemporary political observers: where does one place the man? This lion of the Democratic party stood up to the power of Wall Street on behalf of impoverished farmers and tradesmen, but he also turned a blind eye to violence against African-Americans, whose second-class status he justified through scripture. One of the most vocal anti-imperialists of his day, he deplored the United States' colonization of the Philippine Islands only to later practice gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean as Secretary of State. He was as deplored by conservatives for siding with the disenfranchised as he was reviled by liberals for denouncing the teaching of evolution in public schools. His populism would reshape American politics forever, but in ways he could never have imagined.

Bryan rose to prominence during the Panic of 1893. Financial speculation in the expanding railroad industry was one of its chief causes. The subsequent bank runs, credit crunch, and trade paralysis it caused disproportionately punished those at the lower end of the economic ladder-- farmers and tradesmen. Resentment had been brewing on the part of workers against Wall Street speculators, and Bryan possessed a unique ability to give voice to the dispossessed.

The voice. It is perhaps difficult to relate in an era of 24-hour news cycles and 7.1 surround sound the power which a strong voice used to command. In an era predating radio, electronic amplification, or audio recording, Bryan practiced the art of oration until he had honed his voice to perfection. Many of his contemporaries rated him the orator of the century, and even his political adversaries would find themselves moved to tears at his speeches, only to later disagree with every word when reading the transcript in the newspaper.

His famous Cross of Gold speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention catapulted him to instant fame. He praised the working classes over those who merely moved money from one column to another-- an obvious dig at Wall Street, whose speculation was widely seen as the primary cause of the financial crash. Bryan drew a straight line from the Jeffersonian vision of agrarian government to the plight of the modern farmer, claiming that this conception of America was threatened by the rise of Eastern financiers trading on the wealth which they had no hand in producing.

"You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country."

His address electrified the convention, and instantly propelled Bryan to the top of the 1896 ticket. Although he narrowly lost to William McKinley, Bryan swept every state in the West and the South. He also became a hero to millions of Americans who saw him as their political savior. Their devotion knew no bounds. Bryan received thousands of letters from admirers claiming that the election had been stolen by Republican operatives, and that a bloody revolution might be required to put the country back on proper footing. While he never encouraged such extremism, neither did he go out of his way to uproot it.

In representing the interests of the powerless, Bryan overcame his party's historic mistrust of federal power. Yes, federal power was still seen as the evil behind the War of Northern Aggression, but Bryan felt it might yet be turned to good if it could be harnessed to support the working man. A federal income tax, for instance, could require those at the top of the economic ladder to help support those on lower rungs. A federal agency to regulate the trading of securities could help prevent rampant speculation and illicit dealing by Wall Street. Bryan would later argue for federal oversight of food manufacturers to ensure the correct listing of ingredients on their products, and public financing for political campaigns to negate the influence of big business in the electoral process.

Bryan also lambasted the notion that the United States should join the rest of Europe in becoming an imperial power. Most Republicans favored colonizing the Philippine Islands after Spain was forced to relinquish them. To those who argued that the U.S. had a moral obligation to "Christianize" and "civilize" Filipinos, Bryan asked how such an argument differed from that made by the British in 1776, and asked: "Is our National character so weak that we cannot withstand the temptation to appropriate the first piece of land that comes within our reach?" He argued that the burden of creating and maintaining an empire would "turn the thoughts of our young men from the arts of peace to the science of war."

If Bryan's first run at the presidency had been waged on a platform extolling the rights of working class Americans over those of the privileged few, his second in 1900 was based on anti-imperialism. Where his earlier loss had been close, his second was decisive: this time, he was crushed by McKinley. Bryan's populist message had millions of converts, but it played better in rural districts than in big cities whose occupants feared the firebrand. Up until he was tapped to serve as Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State, Bryan functioned as the party's moral conscience-- a perpetual campaigner who continued to push Democrats to reject the plutocratic vision of the Republican party.

When Woodrow Wilson was sworn-in as President in 1913, he tapped Bryan as his Secretary of State. For the first time in his life, Bryan had to subjugate his personal politics to another's vision, with dubious results. In his new role, Bryan's pacifist and anti-imperialist ideals were severely undermined by his ordering of gunboat diplomacy against Haiti and the Dominican Republic.The nation's leading pacifist thus set in motion an arrogant, militant treatment of Central and South America which was reflected 70 years later in Ronald Reagan's characterization of events in Nicaragua as taking place "in our own backyard." One can, without too much imagination, attribute the anti-American stance of recent Central and South American leaders like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez as a direct result of the imperialist legacy Bryan helped to establish.

William Jennings Bryan's legacy is difficult to place. Here is a man whose strident defense of the weak and impoverished against the strong and well-financed informs much of the language still used by the left today. But this is also the man who employed facile arguments from scripture to justify the second-class treatment of African-Americans. An ardent opponent of Wall Street, Bryan argued for many of the regulatory agencies we take for granted today (and whose founding would wait until FDR's New Deal). But he also took no pains to mask the ecclesiastical underpinnings of his politics in a manner the Christian Coalition would find familiar today. His elevation of rural farmers and laborers as "real" Americans as opposed to their big-city brethren has been wholly co-opted by the right wing. One hears this sentiment echoed today by the likes of Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, and Michele Bachmann, although their classification system hearkens more to demographics than economics by playing up on white suburban fears of the racial diversification of America. Attendees at the raucous 1964 Republican National Convention would hound "Eastern elites" in the media for supporting more moderate leaders than the far right's chosen nominee, Barry Goldwater. This regional division comes directly from Bryan-- but in a manner he would have found utterly repugnant, shorn as it was of the heart of his argument: the exploitation of working class Americans by big business.

Without Bryan, there would not have been a Huey P. Long, whose refrain of "Every man a king" was a clear echo of the Nebraskan. There would have been no Father Coughlin, whose fiery oratory pushed FDR to the left-- and who would set a precedent for inflammatory rhetoric of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh many years later. Theodore Roosevelt would likely have not split with the GOP and formed the Progressive Party had he not come under mounting pressure from the populists that Bryan helped define.

And without this lion of the left, the conservative movement would not have the bulk of its ideological vocabulary. Therein lies the contradiction, the great punchline which only history can devise: one of the nation's most ardent defenders of the poor and dispossessed posthumously provides the party of corporate America with its most potent lexical weapons.