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The Great Commoner

"There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests up on them."

William Jennings Bryan (March 19, 1860 – July 26, 1925) was an American politician, lawyer, and orator. He was the face and voice of populist politics for his era, putting his enormous rhetorical gifts in the service of the common man, as well as a staunch defense of religious fundamentalism.

Bryan is best known for being the Democratic Party's nominee for president of the United States three times.note  His first and most successful run was in 1896 against Republican William McKinley.note  The primary issue in the race was a severe economic recession that started in 1893. Bryan and his supporters argued that "free silver" would solve the problem: by allowing coins to be minted in cheaper, more abundant silver, more money would be circulated, debtors could more easily pay off their creditors, and the higher prices of goods would favor farmers and ranchers. The Republican Party and the Gold Democrats, the latter of whom included then-President Grover Cleveland, staunchly opposed this policy, believing the inflation invoked by the silver standard was one of the primary causes of the recession, and favored a less inflationary gold standard. Though it sounds mundane, at the time it was a highly controversial issue, splintering the Democratic and Republican parties into factions and creating several minor parties whose sole or primary objective was promoting one standard over the other. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Bryan delivered his now-famous "Cross of Gold" speech, an impassioned plea to support free silver and a scathing denunciation of the gold advocates as favoring urban elites at the expense of poor and rural people. Bryan's speech had a tremendous effect, both securing him the Democratic nomination and changing the trajectory of the party's politics towards populism.

Although Bryan carried all the southern and most of the western states, he lost the popular vote by a slim margin — and the electoral vote by a somewhat wider margin — to McKinley due to the Democratic Party's splintering and the Republican Party's estimated thirty-to-one spending advantage. He was a Graceful Loser, sending McKinley a congratulatory message by telegraph. Additionally, Bryan was determined not to get out of just because he lost in 1896, and he made clear his resolve to run again.

Bryan did challenge McKinley again in 1900. With the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Bryan once again found himself a Democratic outsider, opposing the war and American imperialism in general. This turned out to be an unpopular opinion; most Americans believed the war was a short-term military operation meant to liberate Cuba and the Philippines from Spanish tyranny. Bryan, initially supportive of the idea of exporting democracy abroad, had come to believe that the war was being waged for material reasons to create an American empire. (This perhaps would be one of the few things he advocated for that are still remembered positively/justified by historians—both in America and the countries affected.) His opposition to the war got him branded a coward and a phony in the press, as did the support he received from many of the economic interests that he had opposed in his previous campaign. Furthering his troubles was his persistence in calling for free silver, a position that had lost much of its appeal thanks to an economic boom during the McKinley administration. In addition, McKinley's running mate, a young Theodore Roosevelt, matched and even surpassed Bryan's fiery oratory and vigorous campaigning. As a result, he lost to McKinley a second time, this time by a larger margin.

After his second defeat, Bryan began to believe that his zeal in political pursuits was interfering with his moral mission. He shelved electoral politics and spent the next eight years shifting his attention to social and religious activism, traveling across the country giving speeches in favor of Progressive issues, campaigning for Progressive politicians, and founding the populist political magazine The Commoner, which was dedicated to educating the public about political issues. It was also during this time that Bryan became known for his public advocacy for Christian Fundamentalism. A devout Presbyterian from a young age, Bryan believed that alcohol and materialism were the greatest evils facing American society. As such, Bryan became known as a staunch proponent of Prohibition and critic of Darwin's theory of evolution.

Bryan ran for president again in 1908, this time against William Howard Taft. Taft had the advantage of the star power won by Teddy Roosevelt, who had assumed office after McKinley's assassination. Bryan stubbornly attempted to maintain his populist image, accusing the government of being a pawn of corporate interests all throughout his campaign. However, a combination of a booming economy and Roosevelt's trust-busting activities neutralized this strategy, and Bryan suffered his worst defeat yet at the hands of Taft.

After his third defeat, Bryan retired from electoral politics completely, instead supporting Woodrow Wilson's successful 1912 presidential campaign and briefly serving as his Secretary of State. He instead devoted his time to various social issues such as women's suffrage, prohibition, and his continued opposition to evolution. The latter consumed most of his later life, culminating in the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. On March 25 of that year, Tennessee had passed a law forbidding the teaching the theory of evolution in public schools. Few took the law seriously — the University of Tennessee even openly refused to comply with it — but several business leaders and politicians in the town of Dayton saw the law as an opportunity to win their town some free publicity. High school teacher John T. Scopes volunteered to be arrested for teaching the theory, and his trial had exactly the intended effect, very quickly becoming national news. The buzz attracted Bryan's attention, who saw the opportunity to win a platform for his anti-evolution crusade and to put Darwin's theory on trial before the entire country, and he was selected to serve as the prosecutor. Opposing him was famed criminal attorney Clarence Darrow, an old rival who despised religious fundamentalism and the idea of censoring scientific education. The trial made a public spectacle of creation-evolution debate in a manner never seen before. In the end, Bryan's grandstanding proved to be his downfall. He assented to being cross-examined by Darrow, despite being the prosecutor, and Darrow humiliated him on the stand. This was the last act of Bryan's career, as he died less than a week after the trial ended.

In retrospect, popular perception of Bryan's political career is defined overwhelmingly by his repeated failures to become President. This unfortunately overshadows his (admittedly short) prior tenure as a congressman, his popularity as a political activist, his enormous influence in the Democratic Party,note  and his extraordinary work as Secretary of State, which may have helped keep America out of World War I. Several theories have been advanced as to why he never got the big job: some say Bryan shot himself in the foot by putting all his eggs in the "free silver" basket; some say that his attempts to pursue a middle path between economic conservatism and Progressivism backfired, making both sides dislike him; and some just chalk it up to the bad luck of, first, having to follow Cleveland's unpopular second term, and second, having to go up against the Republican Party when it was led by a figure as iconic as Teddy Roosevelt, something that would perhaps have been futile for any Democratic politician of the era. Today, you'll almost always hear him being praised as a folk hero or denounced as a demagogue, with very little middle ground.

His legacy probably suffers most with regards to his religion: thanks to his participation in the farcical Scopes Trial being literally the last thing he ever did, he has an unshakable reputation as The Fundamentalist.note  In fact, Bryan's attitude towards Darwinism was not entirely motivated by Anti-Intellectualism. Bryan was bothered by "Neo-Darwinism", contemporaneous trends in social and political philosophy that led him to believe that Darwinism as applied to human beings promoted elitism, materialism, militarism, and oppression of the weak and downtrodden. Considering the dominance of social Darwinism as a school of thought during that time, it was a relatively reasonable position to take. Also, while Bryan was technically a "Fundamentalist," the word meant something different then than it does today. Bryan promoted Biblical literalism not because he was a Bible-thumping conservative, but because he believed a just God would make The Bible as accessible to poor farmers as to trained theologians. He opposed Modernist approaches to Biblical criticism because he believed they promoted idle philosophical speculation over simple morality and piety and would subvert the ethical foundations of Christianity in favor of the "Might Makes Right" philosophy he hated. He did, however, encourage the metaphorical interpretation of some parts of the Bible, such as interpreting the days in the Genesis creation story as thousand-year "ages", not 24-hour periods, and permitting for a belief in the evolution of non-human species.

His reputation as "The Great Commoner" is also somewhat complicated. While he spoke and politicked on behalf of the poor, he himself had made a fortune in real estate. Also, despite disdaining racism, he never supported contemporary efforts towards racial equality and had a very conciliatory attitude toward racial segregation. His anti-elitism was also somewhat hypocritical; he often seemed more interested in romanticizing and moralizing at the common man than genuinely advocating for him. His concept of "The Common Man" also categorically excluded the urban poor, who were greatly disadvantaged by Bryan's key policy (a two-metal standard meant higher rents and inflated prices of goods) and whom he decried in many of his speeches as morally degenerate. In his campaigns, he comes off as a Slave to PR, whose positions tended to be calculated to appeal to his supporters rather than any higher principle, though he was known to take risks, such as his support of women's suffrage and military non-intervention. We will never know whether he would have made an effective president, or if he would have persisted as a populist, if he had ever won the office.

Bryan in fiction:

  • Inherit the Wind is a fictionalized account of the Scopes Trial, with Bryan represented by the Populist lawyer Matthew Brady.
  • A popular interpretation of The Wizard of Oz is that the Cowardly Lion is a caricature of Bryan, having a "roaring" rhetorical presence despite being perceived as cowardly for his positions.
  • Planet of the Apes (1968) has a courtroom scene that plays out like an inverted parody of the Scopes Trial, with the orangutan Dr. Honorius in Bryan's role, arguing that the idea of a talking human is blasphemous and heretical, because God made apes in His own image.

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