The Prototypical Unelectable Liberal

...The Prototypical Unelectable l iberal I F YOU WANT TO BE TREATED KINDLY by history, it's helpful to choose the right friends but crucial to choose the right enemies...

...Even during the Gilded Age, tycoons didn't outnumber farmers and factory workers...

...But the speaker's addiction to the podium left him little time for introspection, if he were so inclined...

...His opposition to the war in the Philippines clashed with the imperial spirit of the age...

...George Washington's modern biographers are almost uniform in dismissing or minimizing his religious faith...

...Even Douglas Southall Freeman's magisterial seven-volume biography dared not assert that its subject was overly devout...

...Before long, he was turning his religion against Darwin, with irreparable consequences for his reputation...

...He campaigned so frenetically that in 1896, Kazin suggests, most of the 6.5 million people who voted for him may have heard him speak during the campaign...

...Large corporations still dominate our economy, bankroll our politicians and frame our mass culture...

...Thanks to his views on laissez-faire capitalism, activist government, and the use of military force, William Jennings Bryan was the darling of the liberals of his age, which might be expected to inspire affection among the liberals of our age...

...Not until his political career was over did he come out for Prohibition...

...WI SHINGTON'S GOD by Michael and Jana Novak attempts to clarify the record about the reat man's religion...

...His inflexible neutrality even after the sinking of the Lusitania soon alienated the president and forced Bryan's resignation, freeing him to indulge in unrestrained moralizing-such as his pronouncement that "We Americans should make the Sermon on the Mount the real law of nations...

...Reserved and emotionally reticent, he left no extant theological treatises on his personal religious beliefs...

...only confirms the common perception of Bryan as a religious crank whose oratory was as antiquated as his view of science...

...Bryan sponsored the nation's first income tax and was a key backer of two major constitutional amendmentsone providing for direct election of senators (previously chosen by state legislatures) and one extending the vote to women...

...Most of these were actually just two speeches that he recycled endlessly...

...Willard Randall's more recent George Washington: A Life similarly asserts, "He was not a deeply religious man...

...A serious Baptist and conservative Richmond newspaper editor, Freeman presumably did not share the secular biases of more recent biographers but nonetheless was cryptic Washington's God: Religion, Liberty, and cautious about and the Father of Our Country Washington's religion, by Michael and Jana Novak Henry Cabot Lodge, (BAsic BooKs, 256 PAGES, $26) well over a century ago, was probably the last Reviewed by Mark D. Tooley major biographer to i insist that Washington was unequivocallya Christian, I based on a single reference to Jesus Christ as "the I Divine Author of our religion...

...Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin hopes to reclaim Bryan from this caricature and elevate him to his rightful place in the pantheon of liberal heroes...

...This insistence on a religiously ambivalent Washington stretches back over many decades...

...All these causes, with the exception of Prohibition, are consistent with modern liberalism...

...Urged to abandon his free-silver fixation, he replied, "I can say to bimetallism at sixteen to one as Ruth said to Naomi: Entreat me not to leave thee or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go...

...Only a few days later, he was dead, peacefully expiring during an afternoon nap...

...James Flexner, in his famous three-volume work of the 1970s, wrote: "Washington subscribed to the religious faith of the Enlightenment...

...The Founding Believer A T A CANDLELIGHT DINNER o n the portico of Mount Vernon, Roman Catholic ethicist Michael Novak was reluctantlypersuaded bythe Mount Vernon Ladies Association to write a book about George Washington's religious beliefs...

...His call for an activist government that would shield everyone from want didn't really translate into electoral success until the Great Depression, only to go out offashion before the 1960s were over...

...and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God, my God...

...What Kazin notes of his Prohibition campaign applies to the rest of his public life: "Everyone conceded that Bryan was a moral man...

...Bryan's time is not unlike our own," he asserts...

...He occasionally veered into outright hypocrisy, as when he employed biblical imagery to praise the notoriously corrupt New York City political machine run by boss Richard Croker: "Great is Tammany, and Croker is its prophet...

...Biographies usually serve to capture the complexity of figures previously seen in caricature, but after a couple hundred pages, it becomes apparent that seeking complexity in Bryan is like looking for geckos in Alaska...

...The intertwining of his political and religious convictions was such that Bryan could hardly tell (or care) where one ended and the other began...

...What the author doesn't consider is that if Bryan deserves credit for making the Democratic Party what it is today, he may also bear some responsibility for its decline...

...His spirit, however, made itself known as his party came more and more to embrace his brand of public policy-a form of liberalism that was an electoral liability in 1908 and remains one in 2006...

...Bryan was undoubtedly a man of faith who sincerely believed in the political causes he pressed...

...He is also too scrupulous a historian to conceal or excuse Bryan's conspicuous shortcomings...

...The Novaks (who are father and daughter) remind us that for a century after Washington's death, historians, starting with his first biographer John Marshall, described the first president as a devout Christian...

...Most Americans know him, if they know him at all, only as the Bible-thumping windbag Matthew Brady Harrison of Stanley Kramer's 1960 film Inherit the Wind...

...He confidently assured his listeners that Jesus' name "can be invoked for the correction of every abuse and the eradication of every evil, in private and public life...

...Kazin nonetheless thinks his subject has substantial relevance to the 21st century...

...What really gets in the way of Kazin's game effort to capture Bryan is that the man seems to have had no inner life...

...Either Washington actually believed this or he was a "liar," Lodge wrote...

...But by standing against A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan by Michael Kazin (ALFRED A. KNOPF, 374 PAGES, $30) Reviewed by Steve Chapman evolutionary theory in the Scopes trial, he provoked the glorious derision of H.L...

...Among the over one million visitors each year to Washington's exquisitely preserved estate, the request for such a book is common but largely unrequited, Novak was told...

...Joe Ellis's highly acclaimed His Excellency of last year echoed this theme: "Never a deeply religious man, at least in the traditional Christian sense of the term, Washington thought of God as a distant impersonal force...

...His gift for rhetoric was such that even a young Mencken described Bryan's 1904 convention address as possibly the best speech he had ever heard...

...Kazin suggests that a little more Bryanism is just what modern Democrats need...

...His presidential campaigns, in Kazin's view, rescued the Democratic Party from the laissez-faire individualism of Grover Cleveland (who once said, "Though the people support the government, the government should not support the people") and prepared the way for Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson...

...Kazin attributes Bryan's infallible unelectability in part to factors beyond his control, such as unhelpful economic conditions, but admits that Bryan himself was a big part of the problem...

...Running for Congress in Nebraska in 1890, the lifelong teetotaler told temperance audiences he was on their side, but bought rounds of beers at a saloon in Omaha...

...And his less appealing traits were eventually resurrected as well, in presidential nominees as varied as Lyndon Johnson, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, and Al Gore...

...Such clarification is long overdue...

...But he was also a self-righteous one, convinced yet again that only he was capable of guiding the nation along the path of private and public virtue...

...The clues must be extracted from Washington's ecclesial habits, his family life, his character, and the numerous references to the Almighty in his public writings and personal letters...

...That melding of church and state may have less appeal now than it did then, particularly on the left...

...But maybe they've got too much already...

...When teacher John Thomas Scopes was tried for violating the state's ban on teaching evolution, Bryan was called by the defense, whereupon Clarence Darrow mercilessly exposed not only his ignorance of science but his superficial acquaintance with Scripture...

...Mark D. Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C...

...At his last cabinet meeting on April 5,1955, his final words were: "Man is spirit" and "Never be separated from the Americans...

...Not since the Civil War has anyone else had the honor of losing more than twice as the nominee of a major party...

...His indictment of "plutocrats" did not charm middle-class voters who aspired to upward mobility...

...Churchill concluded that both causes "are, I believe, identical...

...Yet his faith in this country only deepened...

...Mencken and other progressive thinkers, thus dooming himself to be remembered mostly as a risible hayseed who stood in the way of science and got flattened...

...On the eve of World War I, he placed unbounded faith in the promulgation of MAY 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65 BOOKS IN REVIEW treaties to maintain peace, and responded to the outbreak of hostilities with ineffectual pleas for the belligerents to lay down their arms and submit their disputes to arbitration...

...Two days before he had written President Eisenhower, whose presidency no longer alarmed him, asseverating his belief that both had worked for two great causes, "AngloAmerican brotherhood" and "the arrest of the Communist menace...

...66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2006...

...He had no chance to rehabilitate his damaged public image...

...The assumption of the last century's scholarship that Washington was irreligious is partly his fault...

...But the portrayal of Bryan as spokesman for ordinary people raises the question why so many of them voted against him...

...His delivery of one of the most famous speeches in American history, his 1896 "cross of gold" address, Steve Chapman is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune...

...Scopes was convicted, but Bryan was the butt of endless ridicule both here and abroad...

...It doesn't help that Bryan is perhaps the most prodigious failure in American political historynominated three times for president by the Democratic Party and getting beat each time...

...T HE AUTHOR, WHATEVER HIS POLITICAL sympathies, is a highly capable biographer with a sure feel for the spirit of the times...

...Once he left his Bible thumping mother's household he may never have taken any Anglican communion again, yet he went to church frequently...

...His fervor for bimetallism over the gold standard alarmed workers who feared it would lead to inflation, and, as Kazin says, he "had taken a side in a class conflict most Americans were not fighting...

...By teaching evolution in public schools, he said, his enemies were trying to destroy "every moral standard that the Bible gives us...

...He was blind to the plight of black Americans, which was convenient in a party dependent on Southern segregationists...

...But we lack politicians, filled with conviction and blessed with charisma, who are willing to lead a charge against secular forces whose power is both mightier and more subtly deployed than a century ago...

...His tenure as Woodrow Wilson's secretary of state suggested that maybe the Gospels are no substitute for Clausewitz...

...like Franklin and Jefferson he was a deist.., not believing in the doctrines of the churches...

...This great friend of America slowed down...

...Hence the title of this book...

...He also inspired almost scary reverence among many followers-whom Kazin quotes frequently to convey the ardor he inspired...

...His religion, meanwhile, consisted of a simple and often sentimental piety that often brings to mind his future wife's initial reaction to him: "She wondered if, over time, she'd be able to bear his unceasing goodness...

...It's hard to see why themes that proved unfruitful for Democrats a century ago would be more potent today...

...Writes Kazin, "Bryan was the first leader of a major party to argue for permanently expanding the power of the federal government to serve the welfare of ordinary Americans from the working and middle classes," arguing tirelessly for "legalizing strikes, subsidizing farmers, taxing the rich, banning private campaign spending, and outlawing the 'liquor trust.'" A Godly Hero reminds us how much bigger a role he played than just presidential candidate...

...Yet in 1908, running against the charismafree William Howard Taft, Bryan got only 43 percent of the popular vote...

...Over 30 years, he writes, "Bryan delivered over six thousand scheduled addresses and a myriad of spontaneous ones...

...The obvious difference is that Bryan's views were an outgrowth of his faith, a philosophy that Kazin says "married democracy and pietism in a romantic gospel that borrowed equally from Jefferson and Jesus...

...Though Kazin thinks the modern party could profit from emulating Bryan, it may be that the flaws that kept Bryan out of the White House are all too present among Democratic lead64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW ers today, with similar consequences...