For three decades, William Jennings Bryan streaked across the sky of American politics, his brightness never fading despite countless failures.  Renowned for his zealous Christian faith, he appropriately expired immediately after his final and most glorious defeat, at the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925.

In A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan, author and Georgetown history professor Michael Kazin argues that Bryan, despite his three failed presidential campaigns, successfully and permanently transformed the Democratic Party into a progressive one.  Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt may have won elections that Bryan had spectacularly lost.  But their electoral success, and their liberal policies, would have been impossible, according to Kazin, absent Bryan’s exertions.

Kazin laments that liberals and good Democrats never credit Bryan for his achievements, much less claim him as their ideological icon.  The first 30 years of Bryan’s political career are rarely remembered, except for his masterful “Cross of Gold” speech to the 1896 Democratic Convention.  (The oratorical debut of The Great Commoner drove delegates to tears and spasmodic dancing in the aisles.)  Instead, Bryan is largely recalled as a buffoonish fundamentalist who bumbled his way through the Scopes Trial, unsuccessfully defending the Bible against evolutionism and pitting his supposedly bigoted, Southern yahoo allies against educated urban elites.  The Democratic Party used to be full of Southern yahoos.  But now Democrats, or at least their leaders, are drawn almost exclusively from educated urban elites, who see Bryan as more a Red State caricature than an ideological father.

Biographies of Bryan have been few: Most Americans know him through Inherit the Wind, the fictionalized account of the Scopes Trial that first appeared on Broadway in 1955.  Fredric March portrayed the Bryan character in the 1960 movie version, with Spencer Tracy as Bryan’s courtroom nemesis, based on Clarence Darrow, and Gene Kelly as a fictionalized H.L. Mencken, whose mocking reportage about Bryan condemned the once-revered orator to 80 years of disrepute.  But Bryan deserved far better than his treatment in Inherit the Wind.  Of the three personalities who were central to the courtroom drama and the media coverage of it, Bryan was the most noble and likeable character, whatever his politics and theology.  By contrast, Darrow and Mencken, for all their brilliance, were cynical and often nasty.  Unlike Bryan, both were often contemptuous of democracy and regular people.

Though he held political views that were harshly polemical and often outlandish, Bryan seems to have lived without acrimony.  More impressively, despite his repeated electoral disasters, he never succumbed to bitterness: His faith insisted that defeat and suffering were central to the Christian life.  Bryan was reared by a Baptist father and a Methodist mother in Salem, Illinois.  With his father’s permission, he joined the Cumberland Presbyterian Church as an adolescent after attending a tent meeting.  Although later generations would deride him as a fundamentalist, he was, in fact, broadly ecumenical, urging full social inclusion for Catholics and Jews.  His Christianity, although remaining theologically orthodox, was strongly guided by the rising Social Gospel of the late 19th century.

As a young lawyer, Bryan worked for and was mentored by Lyman Trumbull, the former Illinois senator who had run against Abraham Lincoln in 1854.  Although Lincoln had more votes in the state legislature, he feared a pro-slavery candidate would ultimately win unless he stepped aside in favor of Trumbull.  Impressed and grateful, Trumbull enthusiastically supported Lincoln’s subsequent campaigns.  In his own political trajectory, Trumbull went from Democrat to Republican to Democrat again.

Bryan was from a solidly Democratic family and never wavered in his political affiliation.  He moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, to practice law and raise his family.  Then, at age 28, when he campaigned for Grover Cleveland and other Democrats (1888), Bryan discovered his magnetic appeal to audiences.  Besides having a voice that had both sonority and volume, Bryan rejected the baroque phrase-making of 19th-century speeches in favor of simple talk.  “I have more than usual power as a speaker . . . God grant that I may use it wisely,” he told his wife.  In 1890, Bryan won election to Congress from a very Republican state.

Grover Cleveland was reelected to the presidency in 1892, but his second term was overshadowed by a national depression.  A staunch conservative, Cleveland refused to expand government powers, liberalize the money supply, or tolerate railroad strikers, whom he suppressed with federal troops.  Bryan unveiled his oratorical magic before his congressional colleagues by rhapsodizing about the glories of silver currency against the more restrictive gold standard.  He ended his two terms in Congress to run unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1894.  Although he won the popular ballot, he lost in the Nebraska legislature and never served in elective office again.

Bryan became editor of the Omaha World-Herald and put himself on the agenda of the 1896 Democratic Convention, which was divided between pro-Cleveland conservatives and pro-silver progressives.  “The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error,” Bryan declared.  “I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty—the cause of humanity.”  Claiming support from the “producing masses of this nation,” Bryan melodramatically concluded: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”  He then stepped back from the podium and stretched out his arms.  The crowd was at first silent, then exploded with frenzied excitement.  Bryan was nominated as his party’s candidate for the presidency at the age of 36.

Shunning the tradition that presidential candidates not openly campaign, Bryan relentlessly crisscrossed the nation by train, in this first of three national presidential campaigns.  Meanwhile, the avuncular Republican candidate, William McKinley, more quietly received visitors on his front porch.  McKinley won election with 51 percent of the vote and 271 electoral votes to Bryan’s 176.  The Democrat swept the South and the West, but the Republican took the Northeast, where urban laborers could not identify with the Great Commoner from the Midwest.  Interestingly, most churchgoers and clergy in the North, including the famed evangelist Dwight L. Moody, opposed Bryan; to many of them, his rhetoric was blasphemous.

For the next 30 years, Bryan would remain a political gadfly, running for but never holding elected office.  He served briefly in the Spanish-American War but vigorously opposed a U.S. empire comprising liberated Cuba and the Philippines.  Later, Bryan became a functional pacifist.  His rhetoric moved to the left, at one point alarming even his allies when he urged nationalization of the railroads, an idea he later shelved.  Still, Democrats could not resist Bryan’s hypnotic appeal, and he was their candidate against McKinley again in the 1900 election.  This time, he lost by a wide margin.

The Democrats reverted to an obscure conservative candidate in 1904 but listened to their heart once more in 1908 by pitting Bryan against William Howard Taft, who won easily.  Bryan remained steadfast.  Unable to resist the adoration of the crowds, he spoke to any respectable group willing to pay $500.  He was the first American politician routinely to receive hundreds of thousands of letters.  He published a regular newsletter for his supporters, while maintaining his journalistic post at the Omaha World-Herald.

Though Woodrow Wilson viewed Bryan condescendingly, he could not ignore his party’s elder statesman, and so Bryan became Wilson’s secretary of state in 1913.  The Great Commoner did not succumb to any pretensions in his new role, appearing regularly at the State Department unshaven and in old suits.  To the horror of the more refined, he also maintained his vigorous speech-making on the Chautauqua circuit, sometimes sharing the stage with jugglers, acrobats, and magicians.

Despite his repeated political defeats, Bryan remained an enormously popular orator and storyteller, dispensing folksy wisdom and a populist Christianity.  He did not compromise his core convictions, however.  While Wilson worked behind the scenes to thrust the United States into World War I, Bryan worked publicly and privately to honor the President’s promise to keep us out of it.  Finally, to Wilson’s relief, Bryan resigned from the Cabinet.  

Bryan was uncomfortable with power, with all its responsibilities and compromises.  He preferred the high rhetoric, idealism, and acclaim of speech-making and campaigns.  He also enjoyed the prosperity that his speakers’ fees brought him and his family.  The Great Commoner lived well, but not ostentatiously.  He devoted himself to charities and church work, fighting the increasing theological liberalism that plagued his Presbyterian denomination.

Despite his lofty populist aspirations, Bryan was never very interested in the plight of segregated black Americans.  His private conversation and letters avoided racial epithets, and he seems to have been free of any personal racial animosity.  Yet he unquestioningly accepted the racial mores of his time.  Bryan also knew that the Democratic Party could not win a national election without the segregated South.  He raised no objection when the Wilson administration resegregated the federal workforce.  And, at the 1924 Democratic Convention, Bryan opposed a platform resolution that would have condemned the Ku Klux Klan.  Why should “the Catholic Church, with its legacy of martyr’s blood and . . . its long line of missionaries,” or the Jews, who “have Moses . . . and Elijah . . . , need a great party to protect [them] from a million Klansmen?” Bryan asked the delegates.  “It requires more courage to fight the Republican Party than to fight the KKK—more courage to save a nation than to throw a brick.”  Bryan carried the day in what was his last address before a Democratic Convention, but it was an unfortunate note on which to end his political career.

Bryan’s final performance occurred in Dayton, Tennessee, in a drama that was almost wholly contrived.  The city fathers wanted the publicity, and the American Civil Liberties Union wanted a test case for Tennessee’s prohibition against teaching evolution in the public schools.  Bryan saw the defense of the Tennessee law as an act on behalf of populist democracy.  He also regarded the philosophical and ethical implications of Darwinism as insidious and especially threatening to the weakest members of society.  Naturally, he offered his services to the prosecution, even as the agnostic celebrity lawyer Clarence Darrow offered himself for the defense of the young football coach, John Scopes, who had volunteered for the part of the fall guy in the show trial.

Darrow lost the trial but won in the court of public opinion by summoning Bryan as an expert witness to defend biblical literalism.  Bryan was unprepared and surprisingly inarticulate.  He had prepared a masterful summation argument.  But the clever Darrow, well aware of Bryan’s oratorical power, outwitted his rival by declining to give his own summation, therefore denying Bryan his chance at gaining a courtroom pulpit.  H.L. Mencken ridiculed Bryan at the trial as the “idol of all Morondom,” with “peculiar imbecilities” and full of “theological bilge.”  Bryan died in his sleep before he could leave Dayton, thus giving Mencken the last word.

Kazin has attempted to redeem Bryan’s reputation.  The author, a nonreligious liberal, admits that he does not share Bryan’s brand of evangelical Christianity.  And he laments Bryan’s failures on racial issues.  But he hails his unflagging populism, which decisively made the Democrats the liberal party, in opposition to the conservative Republican one.  Kazin does not really explain why the socially conservative states that once voted for Bryan now vote Republican, and vice versa.  He describes Bryan, accurately, as a big-government, Social Gospel evangelical and suggests that he might be a role model for today’s religionists of the left, such as Jim Wallis.  But Kazin does not understand that such leftists today, however religious, have more in common with Clarence Darrow than with Bryan.

He does, however, recognize in Bryan an American original, lofty in character, enormous in personality, tireless in pursuit of his causes.  Bryan can quite rightly be admired even by those who remain grateful that he lost every bid he made for the presidency.

 

[A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan, by Michael Kazin (New York: Anchor) 432 pp., $16.95]