by Scott Farris
The crowd roared its approval again and again as Bryan built up to his peroration and the most electrifying moment in the history of American presidential conventions.
“You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns,” Bryan thundered in conclusion, first bringing his hands to his temples, “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!” He then extended his arms wide in the near sacrilegious pose of a man crucified upon a cross—a pose he held for a full five seconds—while the convention sat in stunned silence before erupting into pandemonium with delegates deliriously shouting, crying, and stomping their feet for a full forty minutes, twice as long as Bryan had spoken.
The reaction was akin to religious ecstasy. “Everyone seemed to go mad at once,” the New York World reported. A delegate who had come into the convention an avowed opponent of Bryan and the free silver movement pulled a still unconvinced companion out of his seat and screamed, “Yell, for God’s sake, yell!” The next day, on the fifth ballot, the convention nominated Bryan as its presidential candidate, the youngest person, at age thirty-six, ever nominated by a major party. Later, the People’s Party decided to make Bryan their nominee as well. Adopting the Democratic nominee as their own ended the Populists as a serious third party challenge to the established order, but they had found a worthy champion in Bryan.
Thus began one of the most class-conscious and overtly religious campaigns in American history. “The poor man is called a socialist if he believes that the wealth of the rich should be divided among the poor,” Bryan said, “but the rich man is called a financier if he devises a plan by which the pittance of the poor can be converted to his use.” The journalist William Allen White, writing from the heartland of Kansas, said, “It was the first time in my life and in the life of a generation in which any man large enough to lead a national party had boldly and unashamedly made his cause that of the poor and the oppressed.”
Religious imagery abounded. Bryan supporters proclaimed his campaign led the nation to witness “a new Pentecost” and a “new baptism of fire.” Others were scandalized. Bryan was accused of sacrilege, with one cartoon proclaiming, “No man who drags into the dust the most sacred symbols of the Christian world is fit to be president of the United States.” Others stood amazed, either appalled or inspired, that anyone would try to apply the Golden Rule to practical politics. Even the influential twentieth-century historian Richard Hofstadter, who was no fan of Bryan or the Populist movement, acknowledged that Bryan “swept away much of the cynicism and apathy that had been characteristic of American politics” for the previous thirty years.
There was no apathy on Wall Street. Big business interests were terrified of the possibility of a Bryan victory. The Republican National Committee alone raised and spent the equivalent of fifty million in today’s dollars campaigning against Bryan. Other sources spent one and a half times as much. Republicans mailed out 120 million pieces of campaign literature printed in ten languages to a nation of fourteen million voters, and hired fourteen hundred professional speakers to stump for the Republican McKinley, who stayed in Ohio and campaigned from his front porch. There were allegations of employers threatening employees with dismissal if Bryan won and other charges that workers who supported Bryan were transferred to new plants in the days before the election so they would be disqualified from voting by residency requirements.
Against this array of Republican political might, the Democrats countered with Bryan—“one man, but such a man!” as described by Anna Lodge, the wife of Republican stalwart Henry Cabot Lodge. Writing to an English friend, Mrs. Lodge noted that Bryan had been able to raise but a half-million dollars, perhaps no more than 5 percent of what the Republicans had gathered. Bryan was unable to tap the resources of the Democratic establishment as many conservative Democrats, including Grover Cleveland, aghast at being swept aside by the populist Bryan, not only refused to campaign for Bryan, they announced they intended to vote for McKinley. And most urban newspapers, even those that had been reliably Democratic in the past, abandoned him and endorsed the Republican.
So Bryan did what had not been done since Stephen Douglas; he campaigned for himself at a pace that would be difficult to match even with today’s means of travel. He traveled eighteen thousand miles through twenty-six states and spoke an average of eighty thousand words a day. He drew crowds as large as seventy thousand. In West Virginia, it was estimated fully half the voters in the state attended a Bryan speech at least once, and his total audience during the campaign was estimated at five million people. Further, his speeches “spoke to the heart and intelligence of the people, with a capital ‘P,’” Mrs. Lodge said. After Bryan, the tradition of the “front porch” campaign, in which the voters went to the candidate instead of the other way around, was dead. Given all Bryan’s disadvantages, he ought to have been buried in a landslide; instead, he carried twenty-two Western and Southern states and won more than 47 percent of the popular vote.
As shrewd as he was pious, Bryan had a simple explanation for his defeat. “I have borne the sins of Grover Cleveland,” he said, noting that he ran as a Democrat when a Democratic president was presiding over an economic depression. Tellingly, in regard to his future plans, Bryan titled his campaign memoirs The First Battle. Nominated unanimously at the next Democratic convention, he lost in his rematch against McKinley in 1900. With the economy having improved modestly (in part due to the discovery of gold in Alaska and the Yukon Territory, which loosened the money supply), Bryan focused the new campaign on criticizing McKinley’s “imperialist” designs in the Philippines following the Spanish-American War. The United States, having freed the archipelago from Spanish rule, declined to grant its independence, which led to an ugly and now largely forgotten four-year guerilla war with Filipino insurgents. More than four thousand American soldiers were killed, as well as twenty thousand Filipino combatants; another two hundred thousand Filipino civilians succumbed to famine and disease caused by the war. The American public in 1900 cared more that the economy was improving and followed the cry of McKinley’s campaign to “let well enough alone.”
In 1904, Bryan stepped aside to let conservative Democrats try their luck once more. They nominated New York appellate court judge Alton B. Parker, who lost in a landslide to Theodore Roosevelt, the White House resident since McKinley’s assassination in 1901. In the past, Roosevelt had accused Bryan of “communistic and socialistic” ideas; Bryan in turn now tweaked TR for earning the title of a progressive by passing watered-down versions of Democratic reform measures.
In 1908, the Democrats turned once more to Bryan to run against Roosevelt’s handpicked successor, his secretary of war William Howard Taft. It was a lackluster campaign that Bryan had thought he could win. In the end, he actually received fewer votes than he had in 1896. His lasting accomplishment that year was winning the endorsement of the previously nonpartisan American Federation of Labor, and organized labor has remained a bedrock constituency of the Democratic Party ever since.
Now a three-time loser, Bryan, only forty-eight years old, was already a has-been as a presidential candidate. He was still idolized by millions, but it was the magic of the 1896 campaign that had bonded his followers to him in a way almost unprecedented in American history. His image hung like an icon in a million American homes next to portraits of Jesus. Overseas, the only image that hung in Leo Tolstoy’s bedroom was a picture of Bryan, who had become friends with the great Russian novelist and pacifist during one of Bryan’s world tours. Unlike later critics who disparaged Bryan’s intellect and his politics, Tolstoy declared he found Bryan “remarkably intelligent and progressive.”
Bryan corresponded widely with the famous and the unknown. Hundreds of thousands of admirers wrote to him, to ask a favor, to tell him their troubles and ask for his prayers, and to talk about how his words and example had profoundly changed their lives. A young Presbyterian cleric wrote, “I want you to know tha
t I am one of the thousands of young men in this country that you have helped into lofty conceptions of life and its meaning.” Still a politician, Bryan used the correspondence to his political advantage by creating a database of a half-million names that aided him in his campaigns.
Bryan radiated goodwill. His essential kindness and decency, which some mocked as yet another sign that he was a simpleton, caused admirers to open up and reveal their most intimate secrets. A woman named Amy Howley, who had attended one of Bryan’s massive outdoor Bible classes when he lived in Miami, confided to Bryan in a letter that she had a husband who committed suicide and had recently watched a daughter die during childbirth. “God only knows why I am telling you all this. But somehow I thought you’d pray for me,” Mrs. Howley wrote, adding that while she never expected to see Bryan again, she hoped that they might meet in Heaven.
Such maudlin sentiments drove cynics to distraction. Historian Richard Hofstadter accused Bryan of possessing “a childish conception of religion.” The radical journalist John Reed joined Bryan on a tour of rural Florida and wrote a condescending profile of Bryan floating down the Ocklawaha River “on a gasoline yacht, in black statesmanlike cutaway, white clerical tie, light grey fedora hat, his hands clasped across his stomach, benevolently bringing love and order into his simple world.” The acerbic journalist H. L. Mencken, who had once thought Bryan’s speeches as sublime as a Beethoven symphony, forgot that he had been a youthful admirer of Bryan and later wrote one of the most hateful obituaries ever published about a beloved public figure, calling Bryan “a vulgar and common man . . . a peasant come home to the dung pile.”
“What his enemies could not understand,” said University of Chicago political scientist Charles Edward Merriam, a strong supporter of Bryan’s progressive policies, “was that the people are as much interested in knowing about their leader’s heart as in knowing about his head, and that sympathy no less than intelligence plays its part in the great process of popular control.”
Bryan was especially sympathetic toward women, though there was never a hint of sexual scandal surrounding him. He adored his wife, Mary, who was his full partner in politics. One of his daughters, Ruth, became a congresswoman from Florida and the U.S. minister to Denmark, the highest rank a woman had achieved in the U.S. Foreign Service at that time. He paid his female employees at his magazine, the Commoner, the same union wages received by men. Bryan not only advocated women’s suffrage years earlier than most Democratic leaders, he argued for other measures of sexual equality. He said that the age of sexual consent should be the same for women as for men and that men who solicited prostitutes deserved punishment just as much as the prostitutes themselves.
Bryan was not particularly sympathetic, however, to African Americans. While he never used racial epithets and took no steps to make the lot of African Americans worse, he held the racial prejudices common to his day, and his reform agenda never included anything to correct racial injustices. He accepted the “Jim Crow” segregation laws of the South as a fact of life, no doubt in part because the South was a large portion of his political base. This moral blind spot is a shame because Bryan did, from time to time, exhibit some cognizance of the plight of African Americans. He occasionally entertained blacks in his home, and he criticized the Republican Party for rewarding the loyalty of African-American voters with nothing more than a few “janitorships.” He also chastised Southern Democrats for failing to support expanded government power over railroads because he knew what they really feared was federal interference in segregation. “As if your personal objections to riding with negroes should interfere with a great national reform!” he said. A few black leaders, including W. E. B. Du Bois, endorsed Bryan in the 1908 election, but Bryan knew 1908 was his last chance to be president and that could not happen if he alienated the South. So he stepped back from even the very modest outreach he had made to African-American voters in past campaigns and never really applied his Christian ethics to addressing their unique problems. The same could be said of virtually all the major progressive leaders of the day and indeed most Americans.
In 1912, the Republican Party split in two, and Bryan might finally have won the presidency. He worked for an unprecedented fourth nomination but was rebuffed. Eventually persuaded of Woodrow Wilson’s progressive credentials, Bryan then used his still considerable influence to make Wilson president. He led a switch of delegates at the Democratic National Convention that eventually gave Wilson the nomination on the forty-sixth ballot.2 More as a reward for his party service than out of gratitude or friendship, Wilson named Bryan his secretary of state.
When World War I broke out, Bryan and Wilson agreed to a policy of strict neutrality, but Bryan was soon alarmed by Wilson’s growing support for the Allied cause and his increasing inclination to have the United States enter the war. Bryan was not a true pacifist, but he did abhor violence and was appalled by the slaughter going on in the European trenches. Wilson was angered by Germany’s use of submarines; Bryan thought the U-boat attacks were no less despicable than Britain’s blockade of Germany, which was causing widespread hunger and the threat of starvation. When Wilson declined to couple condemnation of Britain’s blockade with his protest of the German sinking of the Lusitania, which killed more than one hundred Americans, Bryan resigned.
During his short tenure as secretary of state, Bryan had proposed treaties that promoted arbitration over war in international disputes. “The killing of human beings,” Bryan said, “shall not be commenced by any nation until the world knows what crime has been committed that requires so high a penalty.” He had negotiated twenty-nine “cooling off” treaties, as they were known, and Bryan had sincerely thought, given all the advancements in science, travel, and understanding, that humanity might be on the verge of making war a thing of the past. Now, with military and civilian deaths estimated at sixteen million in the most catastrophic event in modern history, he tried to grasp how the world had gone so wrong.
Despite his earlier avowal of neutrality in the conflict, Bryan came to believe that a German culture increasingly hostile to traditional religion was the cause of the war. Before the war, Germany had been the center of the new “higher criticism” of the Bible, which was scholarship that challenged traditional beliefs about the authorship of the books of the Bible and which challenged the literal truths of its accounts. Germany had also produced the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who provocatively referred to himself as “the Antichrist,” and whose work disparaged Christianity as a religion for the weak and unhealthy. His book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, with its concept of “will to power,” was distributed as inspirational reading to thousands of German troops during World War I. Particularly influential on Bryan was a book by Vernon Kellogg, an American biologist who spent part of the war years with members of the German high command. Kellogg reported that the Germans had applied to international relations the theories of Charles Darwin, which Herbert Spencer had boiled down to “survival of the fittest,” thereby provoking the bloodiest war in human history.
This “Social Darwinism,” as it is known, had been used by some in America, including E. L. Youmans, founder of Popular Science Monthly, to discredit the type of reforms advocated by Bryan. Social Darwinists argued, essentially, that biology was destiny; therefore, the government had no power to redress social inequalities. The theory clashed with everything Bryan believed about the duty and the power of a Christian to change the world. Still, the Social Darwinism movement before the war was so small that it did not particularly disturb Bryan. In 1909, he said that while he was not convinced of the truth of evolutionary theory, “I do not mean to find fault” with those who accept evolution as fact.
But the war and his perception of its root causes changed Bryan’s attitude. Bryan, as we have seen, linked the impulse for progressive reform to religious faith. If the teaching of evolutionary theory was undermining the faith of students, then it was undermining progressi
ve reform as well. To prove his point about the impact of evolutionary instruction upon religious belief, he cited a survey conducted by a Bryn Mawr College psychologist, which found that while only 15 percent of college freshmen said they did not believe in God, more than 40 percent of graduating seniors said they did not. Coming to grips with the first wave of the American youth culture in the Jazz Age of the 1920s, Bryan was also appalled by surveys that found only 10 percent of college students were seriously interested in religion, while 50 percent gambled and 62 percent drank alcohol (then illegal under Prohibition).
Bryan believed Darwin’s theories were being improperly applied to a host of human endeavors—even though, as far as he was concerned, it had not been proven as fact, even as it applied to biological evolution. In commentary printed in the New York Times in 1922, Bryan addressed the question, “Did God use evolution as His Plan? If it could be shown that man, instead of being made in the image of God, is a development of beasts we would have to accept it, regardless of its effect, for truth is truth and will prevail. But when there is no proof we have a right to consider the effect of the acceptance of an unsupported hypothesis.”
Bryan said he had no issue with the teaching of evolution as theory but insisted it should not be taught as fact. He further argued that while private schools could teach whatever they wished, public schools had an obligation to respect the wishes of those who paid the taxes to support the schools. As Walter Lippmann later observed, Bryan had flipped Jefferson’s dictum regarding the “separation of church and state” on its head. If, Bryan argued, the state could not compel someone to practice a certain religion, then the state also could not compel someone to challenge his or her religious faith, either. He therefore went on a national campaign to persuade state legislatures to pass laws that would prohibit the teaching of evolution as fact in the public schools (although Bryan insisted that such laws should not carry a fine or any other form of punishment). Five states passed such laws. One was Tennessee.
