Exit the Commoner
34 THE COMMONWEAL May 15, 1929 EXIT THE COMMONER IT MAY well be that the historian of the future will point to the present session of Congress as to a turning-point in the American story....
...Knowledge of the political game is invaluable, but it may safely be averred that the Nebraskan never learned this game thoroughly...
...But in the fall of 1896, New York banks had eagerly inflicted upon themselves a capital levy of 1 percent, Standard Oil had written its cheque for $250,000, and almost equally magnanimous contributions from other sources helped along the publication of 120,000,000 Republican pamphlets—all in order to avert the menace of Bryanism...
...It was a simple, literal, poorly buttressed faith...
...An oratorical voice, for instance, is a great thing, but Beveridge and Spooner had as much of this as Bryan...
...But it is only a question of time until the second wave follows the first into oblivion...
...Both retained a faith in America as the best and most favored of all countries, and a faith in the average man who could not be fooled all the time...
...And yet there were big impressive facts: that less than J4 of 1 percent owned half the nation's wealth...
...Indeed those fathers have become well-nigh incredible...
...They also have not been settled...
...When the farmer allowed himself to be drafted for a struggle in which he had nothing at stake (regardless of the chunks of his pet philosophy which were inserted into the official declarations) and from the outcome of which he had nothing to gain, he paid tribute to industrial power in the purest coin of patriotism...
...Wilson's crusade may have been instinctive rather than reasonable, but it was bred of shrewd perception none the less...
...And so when one sees, for almost the first time in history, a Congress chosen by parties which unite in approving the tariff, the monopoly, the organization of big business and the repudiation of all social action as "paternalism," one knows that the defeat of ten years ago has become a rout...
...What new version of them our children shall see, God only knows...
...Never without the conviction that he had been entrusted with a mission of which he must prove worthy, Bryan transformed scriptural phrases into moral maxims and moral maxims into political slogans...
...He was, indeed, a George Whitefield turned politician...
...and though our economics are far wiser than were the theories which eddied in the wake of Henry George, our practical application of them is still frighteningly shoddy...
...Up to this time no political party had openly enlisted the aid of corporate finance...
...His party came alive in him just as the martial instincts of Frenchmen leaped to being in Napoleon...
...There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the wellto-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below...
...Destroy our farms and grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country...
...The people who tossed their Bibles out of the window at the behest of young prophets of ape origins would not immediately apprehend the subtly intellectualized faith of more highly advanced civilizations...
...But after one has seen how neatly writers like Mr...
...The real explanation is that he succeeded in dividing the American nation into clear-cut halves which actually faced each other in grim, relentless battle...
...But when you ask the May 15, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 35 only question that really matters—how did this brownskinned young country lawyer fasten his grip upon a countless throng?—the writer stares back at you vapidly, as if the query were like a demand for an exposition of Houdini's bag of tricks...
...Such biographies of the man as we possess—Mr...
...When Bryan spoke, he was simply a kind of sponge absorbing what he wanted from the world to which he intimately belonged...
...Curiously enough the political maturity of the revival coincided almost precisely with the stroke of political paralysis which fell upon Populism...
...But the fate of Bryan is the most obvious because the most immediate...
...Werner can pepper their books with little dashes of religious satire, one is profoundly certain that they have no substitute to offer America for the simple religion of Bryan's mob...
...M. R. Werner's is the most recent— are couched in terms of good-natured derision and condescension...
...At any rate those problems were-never the fundamental concern of Bryanism...
...And they did still more...
...That reposed upon convictions which are still very much alive, and upon which the cultural development of the United States was in a great measure dependent...
...From the very beginning he placed his finger unerringly upon the right recruiting slogans...
...Bryan knew from his own experience that when this "rock of ages" had once been dynamited, there would be for many no support and no terrain upon which to fight against darkness...
...Unquestionably bimetallism was wrong, and the sweeping attack on the tariff was wrong...
...and that imperialism was in the offing...
...In all this he was not eccentric, as some people seem to feel, but simply expressive of the code which millions of his folk accepted as their ideal...
...Maybe he had been wrong all the time...
...An America headed directly away from everything inculcated by the spiritual teachers of the frontier will soon enough repudiate their politico-moral conclusions...
...These were enough to put meat on the bones of a popular movement...
...There are still a few scattered voices of protest from the Middle-West, but no outcry to stir the soul of the crowd or to send all scurrying back to the spiritual Lares of their fathers...
...For whatever advantages the agrarian population may wrest from the raffle, it has been decisively and almost pathetically beaten...
...The Commoner belonged, as Lincoln before him had belonged, to the vast "pioneer population" which sprang from the push westward through the middle states...
...that the National Guard had become an institution for enforcing injunctions against workers...
...America has not yet settled the problems round which the great political conflicts of those years raged...
...Jefferson is buried in oblivion...
...One thing nevertheless must be said for it—it had given a vast populace everything of moral strength and beauty it possessed...
...And the irate, old-fashioned Bryan who lectured to Chatauquas and finally made a stand at Dayton happened, in this respect, to be profoundly right...
...But whereas Lincoln represents a historical moment when the struggle between deism and the Presbyterian-Methodist-Baptist revival was still unsettled, Bryan was the hour of the revivalist triumph...
...This part of the "people's movement" is not yet over, but it is slowly fading out...
...but the Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class that rests upon them"—these phrases, uttered during and before the Chicago convention, rallied to Bryan's support six and a half million citizens, nearly enough to elect him President...
...Possibly the "America of the people" which had been set before so many million eyes as an ideal beyond compare was really only a silly, rural notion—an interesting species of child's play...
...Harding was preparing for victory...
...The "people's" champions, Bryan and LaFollette, sniffed it in the air...
...We may deceive ourselves with the appearances of prosperity, but no sincere man will talk without anxiety of bounty that depends absolutely upon a favorable speculative balance...
...They sing no hymns—primarily for the reason that they own nothing, look to nothing, that is worthy of a hymn...
...Their opposition to Mr...
...While the Methodists were welcoming the advent of Volsteadism, in the name of a century-old temperance effort, Mr...
...If taxation is a badge of freedom, let me assure my friend that the poor people of this country are covered all over with the insignia of freedom...
...Underneath the fundamental problems of the country's faith and moral virility abide...
...Possibly he was saving something that could not be saved, fighting against implacably triumphant ridicule...
...But the change was significant for all that...
...The conception of life and government by which it had sworn for more than a century began to wane during the war...
...You get your fill of references to the Nebraskan's hearty appetite, and of resumes of what happened at Dayton, Tenessee...
...With Beveridge we have looked at the social reality out of which Lincoln came, and most of us have liked it not at all...
Vol. 10 • May 1929 • No. 2
