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William Jennings Bryan (March 19, 1860 –
July 26, 1925) was an American lawyer, statesman, and politician. He was
a three-time Democratic Party nominee for President of the United
States. Bryan was a devout Presbyterian, a strong proponent of popular
democracy, an outspoken critic of banks and railroads, a leader of the
silverite movement in the 1890s, a dominant figure in the Democratic
Party, a peace advocate, a prohibitionist, an opponent of Darwinism, and
one of the most prominent leaders of the Progressive Movement. He was
called "The Great Commoner" because of his total faith in the goodness
and rightness of the common people.
He was one of the most energetic
campaigners in American history, inventing the national stumping tour.
In his presidential bids, he promoted Free Silver in 1896,
anti-imperialism in 1900, and antitrust in 1908, calling on all
Democrats to renounce conservatism, fight the trusts and big banks, and
embrace progressive ideas. President Woodrow Wilson appointed him
Secretary of State in 1913, but Bryan resigned in protest against
Wilson's policies in 1915. In the 1920s he was a strong supporter of
Prohibition, but is probably best known today for his negative criticism
of Darwinism, which culminated in the Scopes Trial in 1925.
****
Early life
Bryan was born in Salem in the Little Egypt
region of southern Illinois, where his father was a lawyer and farmer
and prominent Democratic politician. His parents were Methodist and
Baptist, but he joined the Presbyterian church as a teenager. He was
homeschooled until age 10, finding in the Bible and McGuffey Readers the
truths he adhered to all his life, such as that gambling and liquor were
evil and sinful. He attended the academy attached to Illinois College,
then studied classics there, graduating as valedictorian in 1881; he
graduated from Union Law School in Chicago.
He married Mary Baird in 1884; she became a
lawyer and collaborated with him on all his speeches and writings. He
practiced law in Jacksonville (1883–87), then moved to the boom city of
Lincoln, Nebraska. He was elected to Congress in the Democratic
landslide of 1890 and reelected by 140 votes in 1892. In 1894 he ran for
the Senate but was overwhelmed in the Republican landslide.
Rise to fame: 1896
At the 1896 Democratic National Convention,
Bryan galvanized the silver forces to defeat Bourbon Democrats tied to
incumbent Democratic President Grover Cleveland. Thanks in large part to
his Cross of Gold speech, Bryan won the nomination for President.
His famous "Cross of Gold" speech,
delivered prior to his nomination, lambasted Eastern monied classes for
supporting the gold standard at the expense of the average worker.
Bryan's stance, directly opposing the conservative Cleveland and the
Bourbon Democrats, united the agrarian and silver factions and won the
"Boy Orator of the Platte" the nomination. Bryan was said to have
enjoyed this colorful nickname until opponents ridiculed it by saying it
was appropriate thing to call Bryan, since the Platte River was narrow,
shallow and widest at the mouth. Just 36, the youngest presidential
nominee ever, Bryan managed to attract the support of most mainstream
Democrats as well as disaffected Populists and Republican supporters of
Free Silver in the West. Bryan formally received the Populist Party
nomination and the Silver Republican in addition to the Democratic
nomination. Thus voters from any party could vote for him without
crossing party lines, an important advantage in an era of intense party
loyalty. Republicans called Bryan a Populist. However, "Bryan's reform
program was so similar to that of the Populists that he has often been
mistaken for a Populist, but he remained a stanch Democrat throughout
the Populist period." The Populists nominated him in 1896 only--they
refused to do so in previous and later elections.
Bryan crusaded against the gold standard
and the money interests, demanding Bimetallism and "free silver" at a
ratio of 16:1. Most leading Democratic newspapers rejected his
candidacy, so he took his cause directly to the people, making over 500
speeches in 27 states. Republicans discovered that by August Bryan was
solidly ahead in the South and West, and far behind in the Northeast.
But he appeared to be ahead in the Midwest, so the Republicans
concentrated their efforts there. They counter-crusaded against Bryan,
warning that he was a madman who would wreck the economy. By late
September the Republicans felt they were ahead in the decisive Midwest,
and began emphasizing that McKinley would bring prosperity to every
group of Americans. McKinley scored solid gains among the middle
classes, factory and railroad workers, prosperous farmers, and among the
German Americans who rejected free silver. William McKinley won by a
margin of 271 to 176 in the electoral college. Bryan, however,
maintained a powerful grip on the Democratic party (broken only in
1904). Bryan ran again in 1900 on issues of free silver and opposition
to imperialism, but McKinley scored an even bigger victory. Bryan lost a
third time to William Howard Taft in the 1908 elections.
Progressive Leader
Although Bryan never won an election after
1892, he continued to dominate the Democratic party. He strongly
supported going to war with Spain in 1898, and volunteered for combat,
arguing that "Universal peace cannot come until justice is enthroned
throughout the world. Until the right has triumphed in every land and
love reigns in every heart, government must, as a last resort, appeal to
force." Bryan volunteered and became a colonel of a Nebraska militia
regiment; he spent the war in Florida and never saw combat. After the
war Bryan came to denounce the imperialism that resulted from it. He
strongly opposed the annexation of the Philippines (though he did
support the Treaty of Paris which ended the war). He ran as an
anti-imperialist in 1900, finding himself in an awkward alliance with
Andrew Carnegie and other millionaire anti-imperialists. Republicans
mocked Bryan as indecisive, or even a coward, a theme echoed in the
portrayal of the Cowardly Lion in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). In
1900 he combined anti-imperialism with free silver, saying:
The nation is of age and it can do what it
pleases; it can spurn the traditions of the past; it can repudiate the
principles upon which the nation rests; it can employ force instead of
reason; it can substitute might for right; it can conquer weaker people;
it can exploit their lands, appropriate their property and kill their
people; but it cannot repeal the moral law or escape the punishment
decreed for the violation of human rights.
He held his base in the South, but lost
part of the West as McKinley retained the Northeast and Midwest and
rolled up a landslide. Out of office Bryan gave many speeches and
published a weekly magazine, The Commoner, calling on Democrats to
dissolve the trusts, regulate the railroads more tightly and support the
Progressive Movement. He regarded prohibition as a "local" issue and did
not endorse it until 1910. In London in 1906, he presented a plan to the
Inter-Parliamentary Peace Conference for arbitration of disputes that he
hoped would avert warfare. He tentatively called for nationalization of
the railroads, then backtracked and called only for more regulation. His
party nominated gold bug Alton B. Parker in 1904, but Bryan was back in
1908, losing this time to William Howard Taft.
Bryan was extremely disappointed after the
1908 election, and he and his wife moved to Sharyland in deep south
Texas where he intended to live a quieter life devoted to farming and
writing; however, he was unable to get politics out of his blood. After
supporting Wilson in 1912, he was rewarded with the top job as Secretary
of State. Wilson made all the major foreign policy decisions himself,
only nominally consulting Bryan. Dedicated to peace (though not a
pacifist), he negotiated 28 treaties that promised arbitration of
disputes before war broke out between that country and the United
States; Germany never signed on. He supported American military
intervention in the civil war in Mexico in 1914. Bryan resigned in June
1915 over Wilson's strong notes demanding "strict accountability for any
infringement of [American] rights, intentional or incidental." He
campaigned energetically for Wilson's reelection in 1916. When war
finally was declared in April 1917, Bryan wrote Wilson, "Believing it to
be the duty of the citizen to bear his part of the burden of war and his
share of the peril, I hereby tender my services to the Government.
Please enroll me as a private whenever I am needed and assign me to any
work that I can do." Wilson, however, did not allow Bryan to rejoin the
military and did not offer him any wartime role, so he threw his
energies into successful campaigns for Constitutional amendments on
prohibition and women's suffrage.
Alan Wolfe has concluded that Bryan's
"legacy remains complicated. Form and content mix uneasily in Bryan's
politics. The content of his speeches . . . leads in a direct line to
the progressive reforms adopted by 20th-century Democrats. But the form
his actions took—a romantic invocation of the American past, a populist
insistence on the wisdom of ordinary folk, a faith-based insistence on
sincerity and character—lead just as directly to the Republican Party of
Karl Rove and George W. Bush."
Prohibition, the antievolution movement and
Scopes trial
Bryan moved to Florida in part to avoid the
wet ethnics who were so numerous in Nebraska (Coletta 3:116). He
remained as busy as ever, often filling lucrative speaking engagements.
Always pious, during the final years of his life, he was extremely
active in religious organizations and devoted himself to the defense of
fundamentalist Christianity. (His father, a judge, was a Baptist, and
his mother converted to this faith from Methodism when Bryan was 12. He
and his sister later became Presbyterians.) After leaving the State
Department, he shifted focus to social and moral issues, and to world
disarmament. He refused to support the party nominee in 1920 because he
was not dry enough. As one biographer explains,
Bryan epitomized the prohibitionist
viewpoint: Protestant and nativist, hostile to the corporation and the
evils of urban civilization, devoted to personal regeneration and the
social gospel, he sincerely believed that prohibition would contribute
to the physical health and moral improvement of the individual,
stimulate civic progress, and end the notorious abuses connected with
the liquor traffic. Hence he became interested when its devotees in
Nebraska viewed direct legislation as a means of obtaining antisaloon
laws. (Coletta 2:8)
He was thus primarily interested in
destroying the liquor interest, which controlled politics in many
inner-city wards and seemed to be on the other side of every issue. His
national campaigning helped Congress pass the 18th Amendment in 1918,
which shut down all saloons starting in 1920. While prohibition was in
effect, however, he did not work to secure better enforcement. He
ignored the Ku Klux Klan, expecting it would soon fold. He strongly
opposed wet Al Smith for the nomination in 1924; his brother Charles
Bryan was put on the ticket as candidate for vice president to keep the
Bryanites in line.
By the 1920s, Bryan was among America's
most outspoken critics of Darwinism and the theory of evolution. His
biographer explains the evolution of Bryan's thinking and the breadth of
his defense of God:
"He leaned very heavily on James Henry
Leuba's book, The Belief in God and Immortality, a Psychological,
Anthropological and Statistical Study . . . , which showed that college
students decidedly lost faith during their four years, and on Vernon
Kellogg's book, Headquarters Nights . . . , which deduced from talks
with German military leaders that Darwinism stimulated them to war. He
also rode the wave of anticommunism that swept the United States
following the war, for communism rejected God, ridiculed the Scriptures,
and glorified materialistic power. Gravely concerned with the
skepticism, infidelity, agnosticism, and even atheism taught in various
colleges and universities—he named Bryn Mawr, the University of
Michigan, Wellesley, Vassar, Barnard, and the University of Wisconsin,
among others—he suggested that no teacher paid from taxation be hired or
retained unless he believed in God. By early 1919 his mind was made up.
Men must be for him or against him, for or against God."
Bryan actively supported state laws banning
public schools from teaching evolution; several southern states did pass
such laws after Bryan addressed them. His participation in the highly
publicized 1925 Scopes Trial served as a capstone to his career. Bryan
was asked by William Bell Riley to represent as counsel the World
Christian Fundamentals Association at the trial. During the trial Bryan
took the stand and was questioned by defense lawyer Clarence Darrow
about his views on the Bible. Political author Thomas Frank speculates
that Bryan's antievolution views were a result of his Populist idealism
and suggests that Bryan's fight was really against Social Darwinism, a
theory that fundamentalists perceived as going hand in hand with
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.
Bryan died on July 26, 1925, only five days
after the trial ended. Whilst the trial was still in progress, local
School Superintendent Walter White proposed that Dayton should create a
Christian University as a lasting memorial to Bryan. The first classes
of Bryan College took place in 1930 in the Rhea County High School
building, the site of Scopes' infraction of the antievolution law, until
facilities were available on the campus at its current location.
****
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