The Great Commoner

A Godly Hero

The Life of William Jennings Bryan

Michael Kazin

Alfred A. Knopf: 376 pp., $30

*

WILLIAM Jennings Bryan, the prairie lawyer who roared out of the Gilded Age and thrust the Democratic Party on a populist path to the New Deal, is an exile from the pantheon of modern liberalism. Today’s liberals mostly remember Bryan as a Christian fundamentalist yokel who opposed Darwinism, not as the fiery tribune who championed economic justice and denounced the barons of Wall Street. Bryan spent a lifetime as an advocate of common men and women, but his appearance in the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial,” where he fulminated against academic freedom and godless intellectuals, did untold damage to his legacy. Social critic H.L. Mencken wrote about the proceedings with all the acid skepticism he could muster, ridiculing Bryan for his “peculiar imbecilities” and “theologic bilge.” Two decades later, in the 1948 classic “The American Political Tradition,” liberal historian Richard Hofstadter delivered what was perhaps the coup de grace, dismissing the thrice-nominated presidential candidate as a “provincial politician following a provincial population in provincial prejudices.”

Michael Kazin’s “A Godly Hero” is a fair-minded attempt to rescue Bryan from such condescension. The man known as the Great Commoner will remain a tough sell to many progressives, but Kazin has written a superb biography and a challenging reconsideration of Bryan’s place in U.S. political history.

Kazin, an avowed secular liberal and author of “The Populist Persuasion,” tells us at the outset of this book that he feels ambivalent about his subject. To be sure, Bryan’s flaws loom large. He championed equality but not for blacks in the Deep South. One of the greatest orators of his day, he was also a borderline demagogue with a weakness for sweeping simplicities. And though his following was vast, he could never lead the Democrats over the top -- Republican William McKinley bested him in the presidential races of 1896 and 1900, and William Howard Taft defeated him in 1908. Bryan, who won only two elections to Congress, was slow to abandon bad ideas and sometimes made a fetish of principle. A Republican rival once jibed that Bryan would “rather be wrong than be President.”

But Bryan’s importance transcends the win-loss column, and Kazin’s portrait is as much a biography of a movement as it is of a man. Bryan was a political crusader deeply in the American grain, a Christian liberal and lay preacher who inspired millions of voters with a message grounded equally in Jefferson and Jesus. The modern left in America may be antagonistic to faith-based politics, but Bryan belongs to an older American progressivism that took its cues from the Bible, not the teachings of Marx or the prescriptions of soulless technocrats. Against the growing power of corporations and monopoly capitalism, Bryan “proposed an alternative regime of Christian decency” and “moved people by describing how those who believed in Scripture could transform humanity into a just and peaceful race,” Kazin writes. This creed was known as the Social Gospel. Yet there was much more to Bryan than airy nostrums about doing right by your fellow man. Long before President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he pushed for legalized strikes, taxing the rich, regulating banks and subsidizing farmers. Indeed, Bryan was so identified with these policies that Herbert Hoover snorted that Roosevelt’s New Deal was merely “Bryanism under new words and methods.”

Bryan’s rise was as meteoric as that of any politician’s in U.S. history. In 1890, at 30, he was elected the second Democratic congressman in Nebraska history. Once a solidly Republican state, Nebraska was roiling in populist ferment. Debt, a severe drought and collapsing prices had pushed farmers to the edge of financial ruin; many bolted the GOP for radical agrarian splinter movements such as the People’s Party. Bryan harnessed this anger and took on the conservative Democratic leaders to force the party in a more radical direction. Denounced as a Popocrat and a “calamity howler,” Bryan thundered, “The Democratic party cannot serve God and Mammon; it cannot serve plutocracy and at the same time defend the rights of the masses.” He took up the great agrarian cause of his day -- the cry for a return to silver coinage -- and galvanized his constituency, farmers of the West and South.

Today, the passions aroused by bimetallism can seem downright arcane, but the “free silver” movement exerted an almost mystical hold over its partisans, who believed that bankers, creditors, industrialists -- all supporters of the gold standard enacted in 1873 -- were out to crush rural America by restricting credit and driving down prices. Bryan’s moment had arrived. At the 1896 Democratic Convention in Chicago, he electrified the delegates with one of the most dramatic speeches in U.S. history. Lashing the “few financial magnates, who, in a back room, corner the money of the world,” Bryan closed with an unforgettable peroration, “We will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

It was a brilliant bit of political theater. And to the horror of Democratic Party elders, who clung firmly to the gold standard and laissez-faire economics, Bryan secured the nomination, running as a “Populist in Democratic clothing.” He garnered 6.5 million votes in the general election, one of the most fiercely contested in U.S. history, but lost by nearly 600,000 votes to McKinley and his well-oiled GOP machine, kept humming by Mark Hannah, the Karl Rove of the Gilded Age. Kazin oddly marvels that Bryan came so close even as he explains that urban workers in the industrial Midwest and Northeast, who might naturally have leaned toward a populist candidate, had nothing to gain from the inflationary pressures of free silver. (The only big city he carried was Denver, in the heart of silver mining country.) But there was no turning back for Democrats, who shed their traditional suspicion of big government. With Bryan, we begin to see the outlines of the Democratic Party, FDR style.

Bryan was the Democratic nominee four years later, after America’s taking of the Philippines in the Spanish-American War made the election, in part, a referendum on U.S. foreign policy. He campaigned as an anti-imperialist, but he would not relent on free silver. As in 1896, he lost in the cities, and McKinley, benefiting from a strong economy, coasted to victory again. Yet Bryan’s second defeat had the paradoxical effect of enhancing his stature. To his followers, Bryan was a “prophet-statesman” who glowed with a righteous luster (even Taft called him “the least of a liar I know in public life”). Unbowed, he pressed on as a footloose political agitator, traveling the globe, meeting with Russian novelist and social reformer Leo Tolstoy, and giving thousands of speeches and sermons. The Democrats were just as hapless without Bryan on the ticket: In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt, who reinvented himself as a trust-busting progressive Republican, annihilated Alton Parker, a dreary appeals court judge. Bryan lost a third time in 1908, but one of his greatest achievements came four years later when he helped secure Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s nomination. (Bryan would serve as Wilson’s secretary of state, only to resign after bitterly opposing America’s entry into World War I.)

The three-time loser received more mail than any politician of his time, and though Bryan destroyed much of this correspondence, Kazin uses what remains to give us a glimpse of the contours of Bryanism, circa 1900. Bryan’s supporters were not just agrarian rebels but a broad spectrum of middle-class white Protestants -- doctors, lawyers, merchants. They hungered for reformist politics grounded in Christian morality. In Kazin’s acute phrasing, Bryan’s people were “egalitarian modernizers with little use for the culture of modernism.” This goes a long way toward explaining why Bryan joined the prosecution of John T. Scopes for teaching evolution in Tennessee. (It was his last hurrah in public life; Bryan died days after the trial’s end.) Though defense attorney Clarence Darrow ran circles around Bryan, Kazin sets the record straight about Bryan’s motives: He feared the political implications of Darwinism and the specter of eugenics, in “which a few supposedly superior intellects, self-appointed, would direct the mating and the movements of the mass of mankind.” This is an honorable concern, and Kazin’s welcome book shows that there is no contradiction between Bryan the man of God and Bryan the inflamed liberal. Howard Dean Democrats, take note.