The Commoner

...Wrong as he was in his attitude toward intervention in Cuba and the Spanish-American war, Bryan never subscribed to any such program of conquest as Roosevelt had been planning for six months before war was declared...

...Those of us who were old enough to be interested in such questions in 1893 have a vivid remembrance of the promptness with which the panic arrived and the enormous and widespread misery it produced...

...His religious and moral convictions were derived from selected portions of the Bible, privately interpreted...

...Indeed, most of his offenses, his blunders and his limitations were due to this vital defect in his formation-he had never learned the importance of intellectual processes in contradistinction to moral intuitions and emotional reactions...

...Enormously more harmful were his efforts on behalf of the treaty which gave Porto Rico and the Philippines to the United States...

...This statement is true even of his position on the free coinage of silver up to the campaign of 1900...

...Several Catholic scientists have so interpreted the "story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible...

...I also found that, while his personality was charming, whatever ability nature may have endowed him with had been badly dwarfed and crippled by a narrow education, and that he was not big enough to overcome his training by continuing his investigation of men and affairs after he entered public life...

...In his later years Bryan's money-making activities gave unholy joy to his enemies and scandal to his more judicious friends, but they are not fairly liable to any more definite ethical criticism than that which is indicated by the canons of good taste...

...At the St...

...To him prohibition appeared, not as an issue between two great groups of persons possessing equal rights, but as a crusade of all the righteous against a diabolical institution which he called the "liquor power...

...In an era of falling prices the country needed more of the circulating medium...

...Whether or not Bryan was the greatest orator that America has produced, he was certainly the most effective and influential...

...In his first campaign for Congress he repudiated the A. P. A., although membership in that organization "would have meant votes for Bryan in Nebraska...

...Had Bryan been equipped with the requisite knowledge and the requisite mental habits, he could have vindicated not only the constitutional right of the state of Tennessee to prohibit anti-religious sectarianism in the public schools, but the character of the law as neither anti-scientific nor unduly restrictive of academic freedom...

...But his religion and his morality were essentially the religion and morality of Puritanism...

...Paxton Hibben intimates that Bryan advocated the acquisition of this territory because he needed imperialism as an issue in the presidential campaign of 1900...

...The reader is impelled to the conclusion that Bryan the man was never able to overcome the constricting influences of his boyhood environment...

...But it presents a relatively simple aspect to him who is content to solve it in the light only of moral intuitions and emotions...

...Only the first twenty-one chapters of The Peerless Leader were written by Paxton Hibben...

...As Justice Chambliss observed in a supplementary opinion to the decision of the Tennessee supreme court holding the law constitutional, the statute did not prohibit every kind of evolutionary teaching...

...Possibly the fact that the Klan delegates in the 1924 convention paid lip-service to prohibition, while the New York delegation to the 1912 convention included several men who had invariably opposed his political ambitions, explains the mutually contradictory courses which he followed in New York City and Baltimore...

...Toward the end of his last term in Congress, when "practically penniless," he became the editor-in-chief of the Omaha World Herald at the incredible salary of $30 a week, after having refused an offer of $10,000 a year "to be general counsel for a railroad associated with the Standard Oil Company...

...Political power wielded by alleged friends of reactionary political policies appeared to him as a greater menace to human welfare than political power wielded by men who would deny their fellow-citizens the most fundamental civic rights, and who had kindled the fires of religious hatred on ten thousand hillsides...

...His emotional faith sufficed for his personal needs, but not for the equipment of a public apologist...

...His Secretary of the Treasury consented to the issuance of a circular by the most to the more powerful banks, directing them to take certain steps which would inevitably lead straight to a financial panic...

...Most of the other politico-economic measures advocated by Bryan soon became so respectable that they were taken up by Roosevelt and thus found their way into the constitution or the statute books...

...Roosevelt was taking the road along which Bryan had, for twelve years, been trying to guide the Democratic party...

...His disinclination to hard intellectual labor and his facile reliance upon moral intuitions and emotions were responsible for most of Bryan's major mistakes...

...One more instance...

...As Secretary of State, he committed or condoned grave blunders in relation to Mexico and Nicaragua, but he steadfastly maintained that American rights should be upheld against England as well as Germany, and resigned his office in something near to disgrace rather than participate in an unneutral policy against which he found his protests unavailing...

...Had his critical faculty been adequately trained it would have prevented him from being swept off his feet by a jingo press following the destruction of the battleship Maine...

...The name of Mark Hanna is identified with the most brazenly materialistic, not to say venal, period of American politics that existed since the days of President Grant...

...In 1912 he violated the instructions by which the Nebraska delegation was bound to support Champ Clark because the latter was receiving the votes of the New York delegation...

...Captain Hibben's well-documented pages show that Bryan was never a student nor a thinker...

...In the evolution trial at Dayton, Tennessee, his intellectual limitations and his excess baggage of emotionalism and pietism were a source of discredit to the cause which he sincerely desired to promote...

...Almost one-fourth of its 446 pages is occupied with Bryan's antecedents and youthful formation...

...Great as were his achievements, the balance of good over evil in his record would have been greater had he died before the Baltimore convention...

...His speech on this occasion was probably the shallowest and most tortuous that he ever delivered...

...At any rate he sadly "misjudged his fellow-citizens," for they neither compelled McKinley to set the Filipinos free from American rule nor did they hand the responsibility over to William Jennings Bryan...

...They were, chiefly, income and inheritance taxes, publicity of campaign contributions, direct election of senators, rate fixing by the Interstate Commerce Commission and control of monopolies...

...The evangelistic urge impelled him to "defend the Christian faith against agnostics," and to submit himself to a damaging cross-examination at the hands of Clarence Darrow...

...On the eve of his entrance into President Wilson's Cabinet, Bryan emphasized to Colonel House "the wisdom of including a Catholic and perhaps a Jew in the official family...

...But he was intellectually inadequate...

...He could have put upon the defense the burden of proving that science denies the existence of a spiritual and immortal soul, or asserts that the entity which man calls his soul differs in no essential from the animating principle of the monkey, the snake or the pig, or requires these monstrous doctrines to be presented to public school pupils as equally true with the axioms of geometry...

...While Bryan's knowledge of the money question was never profound, and while some of his arguments for free silver were naive and shallow, both his knowledge and his arguments will compare favorably with those of his most articulate opponents in the campaign of 1896...

...Professor E. A. Ross found that his book-shelves abounded in crank books, presented by the authors themselves, while the great contemporary authorities on economics were conspicuous by their absence...

...Essentially characteristic of America, this confidence that a mere sonorous recital of axioms is the equivalent of thought, was what William Jennings took with him from Illinois College as the furniture of an adult mind...

...Such an argument, driven home with all of Bryan's oratorical power, would have been devastating...

...Had he not "cajoled and dragooned seventeen Democrats and Populists in the Senate into approving the Spanish treaty," our profitless career of colonialism and imperialism would probably never have been begun...

...The liquor question is complex, baffling and discouraging to anyone who tries to grasp its essential facts and relations...

...for example, Chautauqua lecturing while in the Cabinet although he did not really need the money...

...He was reared according to a strict moral code...

...Although Bryan had perceived this before the court action began, he failed to govern his course accordingly...

...The latter seems to have deliberately attempted, and with considerable success, to reproduce Captain Hib-ben's style...

...In his political methods and expedients Bryan was not more disingenuous than many of our political figures who have enjoyed a larger measure of respectability...

...Not all readers will accept all the interpretations offered by either author, but few will be disposed to doubt that both authors have assiduously sought and noted all the important facts that go to make up the life and deeds of William Jennings Bryan...

...After his death nine chapters were added by C. Hartley Grattan...

...In the latter hypothesis his choice is sufficiently explained by the anti-Catholic tradition which then dominated, as it still dominates, many of our rural communities and educational institutions...

...In 1924 he found it possible to support McAdoo despite the fact that the latter was receiving the votes of the Ku Klux Klan...

...One who had been a faithful follower, Senator R. F. Pettigrew, wrote thus after a week spent in Bryan's home: I found that he was fairly well versed in the law . . . but that he was utterly ignorant of everything else except the Bible and the evils of intemperance...

...In 1928 membership in the Catholic Church meant votes against a presidential candidate in the same state...

...Even in college he was not compelled, perhaps not encouraged, to train himself in these laborious processes...

...It did not forbid a teacher to expound to or even to urge upon his pupils the theory that the body of the first man was evolved from "a lower order of animals," but that his soul was specially created when God "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life...

...As he was unaware of this fact, he does not share the everlasting infamy which should attach to the name of William McKinley for recommending to Congress a declaration of war against Spain after General Woodford's peaceful message had come into his hands...

...Louis Convention he proclaimed that he had "kept the faith," no doubt fully persuaded that he was emulating the Apostle of the Gentiles, although the specific object of his "faith" was not a moral principle but a political measure that had already become antiquated...

...Possessing a superficial quickness of perception, an exceptional facility of expression and an unequaled power of arousing the emotions, including his own, he never saw the necessity of a more fundamental equipment...

...A continuation of the traditional policy of bimetalism would have met that need without substantial injury to any class in the community...

...Two charges which are occasionally made against Bryan's character receive little or no support in Captain Hibben's volume...

...If he sometimes made compromises which seemed inconsistent with sincerity and fine moral principle, the explanation will be found in his Puritanism, his emotionalism, his inability to subject complex moral situations to rational analysis...

...Despite the handicaps of his environment and education and the limitations of his mental habits, Bryan was substantially right in almost all the political causes which he espoused in the years when he was an active candidate for office...

...habituated to rely upon moral emotions rather than rational analysis for the solution of all problems...

...Perhaps the most damaging record that he made in this respect was in connection with the row over the Ku Klux Klan in the Democratic National Convention...

...This was the constitutional issue and the only issue upon which the case of the defense was based...

...In Salem, Marion County, Illinois, it was the custom to equip a young man with a set of formulas drawn from the Book of Proverbs and MacGuffey's Readers and turn him loose in the world to do or die...

...Had he been a student and a thinker he would not have permitted Clarence Darrow to exploit an assumed conflict between the Bible and science...

...Though McKinley had been "a far more forthright prophet of free silver than Bryan," he completely abjured the doctrine as the price of his nomination for the Presidency...

...A textbook or a teacher that "denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible and teaches instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals," is undoubtedly sectarian and as violative of the religious neutrality which is required by law in the public schools as would be the teaching of Methodism or Catholicism...

...Actually, Bryan was all his life sincerely devoted to the cause of peace...

...He would have put this aside as irrelevant, and compelled Darrow to address himself to the question whether the state of Tennessee had the right to prohibit anti-religious teaching in the public schools...

...He was not anti-Catholic nor did he ever barter his principles for money...

...His parents and grandparents, his boyhood home and associates, his training, tutelage and formal education, the society and the institutions that conditioned his development-are all minutely described in the first ninety-six pages and frequently recalled in subsequent pages...

...In his beliefs and aims he was sincere, and as unselfish as the majority of public men...

...In his later years he persuaded himself that prohibition was inexorably demanded by the principles of righteousness...

...In later years his consciousness of and reliance upon his immense oratorical powers, together with his activity in politics and on Chautauqua platforms, made him neglect anything like systematic study of even the problems which he discussed, to say nothing of the elements of general culture...

...Although a prophet of majority rule, he opposed a popular referendum on the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in Maryland from fear that the vote of wet Baltimore would outweigh the purer suffrages of the rural areas...

...that his library contained almost no works whatever of value to a man fitting himself to be President of the United States, or even a member of a state legislature...

...surrounded by men who counted success-socially and morally approved success-the highest secular aim, and possessed of a deep and simple faith in God and His Providence...

...At any rate he never touched the abysmal depths of irresponsible ignorance and malice sounded by John Hay in his letters written at that time to Henry Adams...

...Not only did Bryan condone the support which the Klan gave to McAdoo, with all its ugly implications, but he opposed the resolution which would have brought down upon that detestable organization a well-deserved and most effective measure of public discredit and opprobrium...

...Although he had for many years opposed national prohibition of the liquor traffic, he espoused it finally and inevitably because of his Puritan temper and training...

...Cleveland entered into a conspiracy with the banking interests to put the country on a gold basis, although he had been elected on a platform which pledged him to "attend to the tariff and let the money of the country severely alone...

...He advocated armed intervention in Cuba only two days before the American minister at Madrid had secured from the Spanish government full compliance with the demands of the United States...

...In one of the debates at Whipple Academy he upheld the affirmative of the proposition, "Catholicism is more dangerous to the United States than Communism...

...He also advocated the nomination of John Burke for the Vice-Presidency at the Baltimore convention...

...At any rate, Bryan never afterward indicated adherence to the view which he defended in that debate...

...In his view, all political questions were also moral questions, a vicious half-truth which misled him more than once...

...they were not based upon a comprehensive knowledge of Christian teaching nor upon moral fundamentals...

...All the chapters of the book make easy reading and in none of them does any important source of information seem to have been overlooked...

...under the constant and dominating guidance of positive-minded women...

...Whether this side of the question was assigned to him through some rule of the Sigma Pi Society or whether it was his own preference, we are not informed...

...In that part of American society where he was reared, Sentimentality took the place of knowledge and evangelism was the motive force of action...

...In the contest over free silver, Bryan's conduct was the essence of rectitude in comparison with that of the principal figures in the opposite camp...

...They were badly balanced, now excessive, now defective, seeing sin where sin there was none and at the same time "neglecting the weightier things of the law...