BRYAN-20 YEARS AFTERWARD
Hesseltine, William B.
Bryan—20 Years Afterward By WILLIAM B. HESSELTINE IT is now 20 years since William Jennings Bryan died in Dayton, Tenn. And its high time some competent biographer undertook to study the career of...
...Born in Illinois, reared and educated among pious, devout people, Bryan brought an evangelical fervor to politics...
...This faith, in the beginning of his career, led the Great Commoner to refuse to crucify mankind upon a cross of gold, and, at the end, to refuse to degrade mankind to the status of apes...
...The man who had never been a bigot associated himself with the most narrow-minded religious fanatics...
...The Big Business magnates, the manipulators of trusts, the railroad tycoons, the corrupt bosses of municipal politics, the bankers, and all the licensed plunderbund who had governmental protection in their stealing hated Bryan...
...He felt rather than reasoned...
...Bryan advocated Government ownership of railroads, fought for giving the monetary system back to the people, and led the popular demand for tariff reform...
...One nation, which based its political system on a pseudo-Darwinian concept of society, lays prostrate, its cities rubble and its citizens enslaved...
...It took money, a hysterical smear-campaign, and corruption to win the election for the insipid William McKinley...
...Bryan may have been ill advised in attacking the scientific application of the theory, but he knew that its social application had been distorted to "fallacious and dangerous purposes...
...He knew that these same forces had taken the scientific theory of the "survival of the fittest" and applied it to nations to justify imperialistic conquest...
...He had spiritual insight rather than intellectual grasp...
...The difference, of course, was that Bryan really believed in and wanted peace, and, when he became convinced that Wilson was deliberately heading for war, Bryan refused to remain longer in the cabinet...
...And its high time some competent biographer undertook to study the career of one of the greatest souls of his generation...
...The man who had been the apostle of democratic freedom and of public education had become an advocate of governmental restrictions on the freedom of learning...
...His railroad regulation was superficial, his trust-busting mere oratory, and he carefully refrained from tampering with the tariffs which fostered monopoly...
...He was guilty of bad judgment in 1916 when he accepted Wilson's Protestations of peaceful intent and campaigned for Wilson because "He kept us out of war...
...The Democrats nominated Bryan—to the disgust of the party's eastern, bond-holding, "Gold Democrats" and to the terror of the reactionary Republicans...
...It was against this basic philosophy which Bryan fought—and fought with a belief that mankind was one, and that democracy rested upon a moral foundation...
...He was guilty of bad judgment in 1899 and 1900 when he advised Democratic leaders to accept the treaty with Spain and to carry to the electorate the question whether America should launch itself on an imperialistic career...
...They had not been able to rid themselves of Bryan and Bryanism in 1900, or 1908, or 1912, or 1916...
...The new leader of American liberalism was a product of the Populist movement...
...Sometimes Bryan's analyses of economic problems were superficial, and he sometimes accepted panaceas without probing their implications...
...But Bryan had thrown himself into another battle...
...Roosevelt imitated Bryan, and yielded to public pressure —which Bryan and his kind aroused—by demanding railroad regulation, by making dire threats of trust-busting, and by vocal excoriation of "malefactors of great wealth...
...This faith, rather than an urge to play the dangerous game of power politics, inspired the Bryan peace treaties...
...And even after 1918, Bryan was still a force to be reckoned with in the political arena...
...YTET Roosevelt made no effort to break the hold of Wall Street on the banking system of the country...
...On the witness stand, Darrow tricked Bryan into proclaiming a literal belief in the Deluge, Jonah's whale, and Daniel's fiery furnace...
...Yet he understood the common man as well as Old Bob, and far better than Roosevelt or Wilson...
...They used their controlled press and their kept journalists and their hireling speakers to smear Bryan as a buffoon, and writers of history have accepted their propaganda as truth and perpetuated it in the text-books...
...Bryan converted people, he saved souls for democracy, and he baptised his followers in the name of economic and political reform...
...SUCH an intellectual approach did, on occasion, lead the Great Commoner into error...
...The nations whose industrial might and whose prodigal use of cannon-fodder have proved their fitness to survive are suspiciously watching each other...
...The current picture of Bryan is the product of the propaganda activities of the men who fought him and his principles for long years...
...His heartfelt instinct for democracy penetrated deeper than the rationalizing of the political theorists...
...They had been making that hopeful declaration since 1896...
...It is an ironic commentary on historians that they have accepted the swashbuckling imperialist, Theodore Roosevelt, as a great liberal, and have ignored or played down the Great Commoner who was a man of peace...
...Mencken and the sophisticates were in high glee, and when Bryan suddenly died, just as the trial ended, the Mencken-Darrow-Republi-cah caricature was firmly fixed in the American mind and ready for the history books...
...Bryan entered a new crusade to prohibit teaching the theory of evolution in the public schools...
...He had become a leading figure in a fight which seemed to prove all the charges of superficiality, of charlatanism, of narrow bigotry that his opponents had made for a quarter of a century...
...At the trial, Clarence Darrow, Chicago's most noted criminal lawyer, tried Bryan instead of young Scopes...
...And it's high time some serious study was given to the social applications of Bryanism rather than of Darwinism...
...The aging Commoner went on the witness stand and was mercilessly pilloried by the clever lawyer...
...The glib, caustic Henry L. Mencken, voice of a newer sophistication, reported the trial for the nation's press, ridiculing Bryan, making him into the combination of fool and charlatan that the reactionaries had always claimed...
...Bryan's approach to political problems was emotional rather than rational...
...He knew that for many years the reactionary forces of the land had been using the Darwinian theory to support their exploitation of workers, and farmers, and the common man everywhere...
...He understood the need for a reform in the currency system better than the economic pundits...
...and in each successive Democratic convention and Presidential campaign the Tory forces had had to reckon with the man who embodied the moral fibre of democracy...
...But, on the other hand, Bryan's moral and emotional processes frequently provided a surer guide than Wilson's coldly rational methods...
...But it is the imperialist Roosevelt, mouthing Progressive doctrines and blocking progressive change, who has the accolade of the historians while the truly liberal leader is dismissed as a windbag...
...His platform manner was the manner of the frontier preacher, and his political principles, like his private life, came straight from Holy Writ...
...Bryan put himself at the forefront of the movement, addressed' Fundamentalist church groups, lobbied in legislatures for "anti-monkey" laws, and finally, when Tennessee brought a high school teacher into court for violating the law, Bryan appeared as counsel for the prosecution...
...And it's time that men ceased to regard Bryan's part in the anti-evolution controversy as the aberration of a fossilized fanatic...
...It is high time, 20 years after the Dayton trial, to replace this caricature with a more adequate portrait of a man whose belief in the dignity of man and whose faith in democracy had inspired him in many battles...
...His "Cross of Gold" speech, ringing the changes upon the refrain that the small merchant, the farmer, and the miner were as much business men as the magnates on the New York Stock Exchange, and ending with the defiant peroration, "You shall not press this crown of thorns upon the brow of the laboring man: You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold," swept the convention off its feet and captured the imagination of the plain people of the country...
...William Jennings Bryan first burst upon the national consciousness at the Democratic nominating convention of 1896...
...Upon his retirement from Wilson's Administration, the imperialists and the reactionaries, both Democrats and Republicans, breathed relieved sighs and declared again that Bryan was through...
...IT was strange company in which the Great Commoner found himself...
...He knew, too, the deep desire of the people of the world for peace, and his much ridiculed treaties providing for arbitration and a "cooling off" period before a declaration of war—made while he was Secretary of State—were sounder in concept and in method than the League of Nations or the power politics devices of San Francisco's United Nations Charter...
...Today, 20 years after the fiasco of the Scopes trial, we are witnessing some of the results that Bryan foresaw...
...He lacked the intellect of Old Bob La Follette, he was less learned than Woodrow Wilson, and he made no pretense to scholarship as did Theodore Roosevelt...
...Bryan's wisdom was greater than his knowledge, but he understood, as he told E. A. Ross, that the doctrines of Darwin would "weaken the cause of democracy, and strengthen class pride and the power of wealth...
...Despite the sophisticates, Bryan was no fool...
...It's high time, too, that the history books ceased treating Bryan as a glib-tongued clown, a boy orator who never grew up, a Chatauqua spell-binder who roused the yokelry without being able to lead them, and a fool in politics...
Vol. 9 • December 1945 • No. 48
