The Preachings of Brother Bryan

If he had no formal title, then it was best to know him by the work that he did. And while he was a member of the bar, people didn’t think “lawyer” when they heard his name. He was, rather, an “orator.” It was a respectable profession in those times before the advent of motion pictures, television, and the Internet. And there has never been an American for whom the title “orator” was more fitting. It has been estimated that when he was at the height of his powers, half the population of the United States had heard him speak. He had a very long run on the Chautauqua circuit, which traveled the country, providing enlightened speeches to the masses—a sort of late-19th- and early-20th-century version of TED talks. William Jennings Bryan delivered a speech called “The Prince of Peace” over 3,000 times to Chautauqua audiences. The man could work a crowd.

So .  .  . on a hot Chicago day in July 1896, he rose to address the Democratic party’s national convention in the Chicago Coliseum. Though it held the White House in the ample form of Grover Cleveland, the party had seen tough times since the Civil War and was looking at more of the same. Cleveland had been the Democrats’ only successful presidential candidate since Appomattox, winning twice, though not in succession. He was, at the time of the convention, out of favor with just about everyone. During the convention, he passed the time by fishing off Cape Cod.

Meanwhile, the Republicans had vastly more money; they were the party of Wall Street and the great fortunes of the Gilded Age. They had the East, where the banks were, and the Midwest, where, increasingly, the factories were.

The Democrats had the South and what was left of the frontier, the prairie states. They had the farmers and the small businessmen who were struggling as the prices paid for crops seemed to move in only one direction—down—while the railroads raised the fees they charged for shipping those crops and money grew increasingly scarce.

So there was plenty of discontent among the party’s constituents when Bryan rose to give it voice and to mobilize it.

His cause was “free silver.” The nontechnical definition would be easy money. Inflation. The Republicans were for gold—”hard money”—which worked to make the elites of the East rich and keep the farmers on the frontier poor.

When he took the podium that day, Bryan did not soft-pedal it. While it had been slightly more than 30 years since the end of a civil war that had cost more than 700,000 lives, in describing the fight over free silver, Bryan declared,

One expects a certain amount of hyperbole in a political speech but this was a bit much. There had been a tough fight between two wings of the party that led to the defeat of Cleveland’s more centrist faction, which was actually in favor of the gold standard. Bryan represented the insurgents. The fight had split the party, which, in his speech, Bryan made into something close to fratricide as he went from excess to excess, declaring at one point that

One reads those words, today, with a kind of amused disbelief, thinking, Oh, come on. But, to be charitable, Bryan and those in his camp had begun the fight not merely as underdogs but as inferiors. They were the rubes, and all the best and right-thinking people were on the other side. As Henry Adams put it, “All one’s friends, all one’s best citizens, reformers, churches, colleges, educated classes, had joined the banks to force submission to capitalism.” So Bryan may have been entitled to a little exaggeration.

The whole thing seems impossibly arcane today, when not one American in a thousand could explain the fight over the gold standard as opposed to “free silver.” But it can be understood, crudely, as the most elemental sort of political conflict. Namely, Us vs. Them. And Bryan painted it in the kind of language that, stripped of some 19th-century rhetorical excess, would fit just fine in today’s political battles.

Political candidates, from then until today—and probably henceforth until the crack of doom—could touch up the wording and comfortably give that speech. And the people who seek to understand American politics would spot it as 100-proof populism. The speech sets up the enduring conflict between the little man in an unfair struggle against the rich, the fat cats, the “malefactors of great wealth,” and so on. Bernie Sanders could give that speech. He does, in fact, though in much flatter language. Patrick Buchanan gave that speech when he ran for president, though in more belligerent language. The list goes on and on: Huey Long, Eugene Debs. And the list is not comprised only of losers. Franklin Roosevelt could have given that speech. It is the summing-up of the populist grievance and the call to arms for the common man. After the speech, Bryan became known, almost inevitably, as “the Great Commoner.”

The speech had even anticipated the argument for what became known as “trickle-down economics” and gone on to rebuke it:

Bryan had put his hand on the beating heart of a great and abiding resentment that has endured, rising and falling in intensity, right down to our own times, when the “1 percent” are, says Bernie Sanders, not paying their fair share. The distinction is that Sanders doesn’t feel obliged to reach for rhetorical effects or the kind of biblical metaphors and cadences that came naturally to Bryan. As, for instance, in the last and immortal paragraph of his Chicago speech, when he thundered,

At this point, Bryan extended his arms like Christ crucified, and the hall went silent. That silence seemed to last for a very long time and then, there was cheering. Loud and continuous and sincere. Some of the delegates raised Bryan on their shoulders and carried him around the hall as the cheering went on and on. The New York World described a scene where “everybody seemed to go mad at once .  .  . the whole face of the convention was broken by the tumult—hills and valleys of shrieking men and women.”

The cheering and celebrating went on longer than the speech, which had lasted about 20 minutes, not long by the standards of the day. But it had changed everything, not least Bryan’s prospects. The convention had yet to nominate a candidate for president and there were some 13 candidates in the running.

The next day, the balloting began. Bryan was in second place after the first ballot. But the momentum of the speech was with him, and on the fifth ballot, he was nominated as the party’s candidate for president.

Bryan went into the race as the champion of the common man, but what passed for the mainstream media in those days opposed him on grounds of both substance and style. In a subhed to its convention story, the New York Times described a scene where “The Silver Fanatics Are Invincible: Wild, Raging, Irresistible Mob Which Nothing Can Turn from Its Abominable Foolishness.”

Other than that .  .  .

Still, the reaction to the speech had won Bryan important allies. Among them were Eugene Debs, labor leader and future presidential candidate (and hero to Bernie Sanders), who wrote to Bryan that he was “at this hour the hope of the Republic—the central figure of the civilized world.” The speech had done this for him. Now, he needed to capitalize on it.

Bryan’s opponent in the general election was William McKinley, whom none would describe as charismatic. But then, until the advent of Bryan, nobody thought he needed to be. He had the backing of the Republican party and all that this meant in terms of organization and money. He had Mark Hanna, the Cleveland industrialist and moneyman—and later senator—who created an organization and fundraising operation that anticipated much of what is commonplace now. Hanna helped raise what were, for the times, prodigious amounts of money, including a contribution of $250,000 from John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. He built campaign organizations in every state. His strategy was, simply, to overwhelm the Democrats and Bryan.

Which appeared easy enough. Bryan, however, was accustomed to being outspent and out-organized. But he believed, with justification, that he had never been

out-orated. So he took his splendid speaking ability on the road. In this case, the railroad.

The whistle-stop campaign was still in its infancy and had been employed, till then, by candidates who were desperate and willing to try just about anything. Bryan went into his with confidence and abundant energy.

It began in early August and went on, with only the occasional pause to rest and recharge, until Election Day in November. Bryan had enormous reservoirs of energy and never seemed to weary of hearing himself talk. So the train carried him almost 20,000 miles across 26 states with the candidate orating all the way. Some five million people heard him speak.

McKinley, meanwhile, stayed at home. But a concerned Hanna went to work raising both money and fears of what a Democrat in the White House might mean for the men who worked the factory jobs and on the railroads. Those, in other words, who would soon become the dependably Democratic union vote. But in 1896, these people were concerned that they would lose their jobs if Bryan were elected. They believed this, in part, because their bosses told them so.

The newspapers wrote about Bryan because, in the style of Donald Trump, he gave them something to write about. Always another speech before another audience. In addition to being an orator, Bryan had done time as a newspaper editor, and while most of the words that appeared beneath his byline had been written by someone else, he had a feel for the business, and he knew what counted as news and what reporters and editors wanted. So he gave it to them. Meanwhile, McKinley stuck to his front-porch campaign.

One can only imagine how things might have gone if there had been radio in those days. Or television. Or, heaven forfend, social media.

But in the end, the energy and the oratory were not enough. Money and organization and, perhaps, a better and more serious grasp of the issues and the role of government allowed the Republicans and McKinley to win the election. Turnout was almost 80 percent of eligible voters (all male, of course), and Bryan lost 271 to 176 in the Electoral College. With a swing of merely 20,000 votes in key states, he would have won.

Bryan, his followers, and those who wrote about him may not have realized it, but his time had passed. He did not vanish from the stage, though, and remained an intensely public man. He was a big draw as an orator and was nominated again by the Democrats in 1900. He lost, again, to McKinley. After sitting out the 1904 race, he was nominated, again, by the Democrats in 1908. And lost again, this time to William Howard Taft. In 1912, he did his best for Woodrow Wilson who repaid the favor by making Bryan his secretary of state, a job for which he was particularly ill suited. He was no interventionist and opposed those actions of Wilson’s that he believed brought the nation closer to joining the war in Europe. Finally he resigned. Then came the last sad act. He became, at best, a sort of historical footnote; at worst, a buffoon—especially to populists of the left

and progressives.

One wonders why. He was, at the beginning of his public life, in the vanguard on the issues that were critical to the progressive cause: a graduated income tax, the regulation of child labour, and the vote for women, among others. He was against what he saw as American imperialism and said, when running against McKinley, in 1900,

Bryan was, again, out of step. The nation was in an expansionist mood. He lost again, and the numbers were worse this time: 292 electoral votes to 155. Still, he had taken the sort of stand that would, one thinks, have made him a permanent hero on the left.

Personality certainly accounts for some of his loss of standing. Bryan wasn’t especially interesting. He was good with words, especially the speaking of them. But he gave the same speeches over and over, and the emphasis was more on delivery than on content. Shortly after he’d given the Cross of Gold speech in Chicago, one of his political rivals said to Clarence Darrow, Bryan’s opponent in the last, sad act of his life, “I have been thinking over Bryan’s speech. What did he say, anyhow?”

That speech, like the other Bryan set pieces, was more starch than protein. This was the point, after all. He was an orator, not a university lecturer. But the kind of people who preferred university lectures and who crafted the intellectual and cultural agendas saw him as shallow and, at bottom, a philistine. To Bryan, the Bible was more than a book. And so books were not that important to him. He was, therefore, not much interested in the new ideas of the new century.

He was insufficiently cosmopolitan and sophisticated and seemed to have just about no interior life. He was happily married and a hard worker and a Midwesterner to the center of his soul. His name might have been Reagan. If, that is, Reagan had been the man his detractors thought he was.

At any rate, Bryan was not one of them. It was a matter of style as much as anything else. Among his conspicuous faux pas, he had taken up the cause of Prohibition after his third defeat as a candidate for president. And he would not serve alcohol at State Department functions when he was secretary. He campaigned for the 18th Amendment, which was another strike against him in the minds of the sophisticates and urbanites, though at the time Prohibition was something of a feminist and progressive cause, designed to save the working man from himself and from exploitation at the hands of the big distillers and saloon owners.

It was no help to Bryan that he also campaigned for the 19th Amendment. He had been passionate about the cause of women’s suffrage his entire career. But .  .  . apostasy on just about any issue is punishable by the progressive inquisitors. Bryan’s support of Prohibition was one more piece of evidence that he was a rube.

And then, there were two issues upon which no deviation is tolerated. He was an old-fashioned Democrat. That is to say, the kind of Democrat who made peace with the states of the old Confederacy and their racial attitudes. The Democrats needed the electoral votes of those states and, anyway, Bryan’s constituents in Nebraska were white and Protestant. At the Democratic party convention of 1924, the last of Bryan’s life, a resolution was introduced condemning the KKK. Bryan spoke against the resolution, and it was voted down. The great orator had employed his gift in support of the insupportable.

Heywood Broun savaged Bryan, writing that he was

That last piece—the bit about evolution—anticipated the last, melancholy act of Bryan’s life.

It was called the Scopes Monkey trial. The short version is that the state of Tennessee chose to prosecute a school teacher for exposing his students to the ideas of Charles Darwin. In the rural, fundamentalist regions of the country, evolution was considered heresy.

So Bryan went to Dayton, Tennessee, to assist in the prosecution of one John Scopes who had been put up to his act of civil disobedience by the ACLU. When the state filed charges, Clarence Darrow, the nation’s most celebrated criminal lawyer, volunteered his services to the defense at no fee.

The trial was a national spectacle (and was designed to be). Over 100 newspapers sent reporters, including H. L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun. There were even live radio broadcasts over a Chicago station. This was a first.

The judge would not allow expert testimony as to the validity of Darwin’s theories of evolution. The question before the court, in his opinion, was simply did Scopes do it—teach evolution—or didn’t he?

So Darrow engaged in a little legalistic jujitsu and got Bryan on the stand as an expert witness on the Bible. He then proceeded to attack. Bryan was asked questions about the literal interpretation of such biblical matters as the swallowing of Jonah by the whale, Joshua’s causing the sun to stand still, the great flood and Noah’s ark, and so on. Bryan finally had to give in and concede that, well, maybe the Bible was not always to be taken literally. He even went so far as to say it was possible that the creation required more time than six days. That those might better be described as “periods.”

By the end of the questioning, Bryan looked like a weary old fool, and everyone, save he, saw it.

Mencken was not there to see it. He had, however, covered the first days of the trial and had written of Bryan,

Five days after the trial ended with a guilty verdict and a $100 fine for Scopes (never paid), Bryan lay down to sleep after eating a more than ample meal. He never woke.

Mencken was happy to violate the old stricture De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. Bryan, he wrote, was

Bryan’s humiliation became material for a Broadway play, Inherit the Wind. The play became a movie with Fredric March in the Bryan role. Spencer Tracy was Darrow and, improbably, Gene Kelly was Mencken. The film was widely praised, of course, and said to be, somehow, an allegory about McCarthyism.

It was not the first time that Bryan had been treated badly in the movies. There had long been speculation that the character of the Cowardly Lion in L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz was modeled on him.

It was a long fall from the heights of the Cross of Gold speech to the Mencken obituary and the Hollywood treatment. Eugene Debs, who had written to Bryan after the Cross of Gold speech that he was “the hope of the Republic—the central figure of the civilized world,” remarked, on his death, that over his life Bryan “grew more and more conservative until finally he stood before the country as a champion of everything reactionary in our political and social life.”

A sad end for a man who, as much as anyone, formulated the political designation “populist” that is attached, in this season, to both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. If this is the season of populism, it seems strange and sad that Bryan is never more than a footnote or an aside in op-eds attempting to explain the mood of the electorate.

He was a force that, like a prairie thunderstorm, brewed up out of nowhere, created a spectacular show, and then vanished. Still .  .  . even after all these years, it was one hell of a speech.

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.