by Scott Farris
Even though the sum of his experience in elected office was two terms as a junior congressman from Nebraska in the early 1890s, Bryan was the Democratic Party nominee for president three times. He lost each election by an increasingly larger margin. But it was that first campaign in 1896, when he came so close to winning despite having the entire power structure of the country against him, which still has the ability to thrill. His campaign was “an excitement that was almost too intense for life,” said a reporter who covered it. It was so vital a contest that it inspired poetry, such as this verse by Vachel Lindsay:
I brag and chant of Bryan, Bryan, Bryan
Candidate for president who sketched a silver Zion,
The only American Poet who could sing outdoors,
He brought in tides of wonder, of unprecedented splendor,
Wild roses from the plains, that made hearts tender . . .
“You are a prophet sent by God,” one admirer from Kentucky wrote Bryan during the campaign.
The great issue that inspired such idolatry was the otherwise stolid campaign topic of currency reform, yet the 1896 Bryan presidential run so took on the character of a revival that it seemed impossible to discuss it in anything other than religious language and imagery. Josephus Daniels, the North Carolina editor who would later serve with Bryan in Woodrow Wilson’s Cabinet, said Bryan had “rolled away the stone from the golden sepulcher in which democracy was buried.” Bryan was described as a new Moses, a St. Paul, or a young David out to battle the Goliaths of big business, Wall Street, and the Republican Party.
This time, Goliath won. So committed were these powerful interests to Bryan’s defeat that they expended campaign funds in amounts that would not be equaled for a century—well in excess of one hundred million in today’s dollars.
Before Bryan, the Democrats had been the party of small government conservatism, which the party’s patron saints, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, argued was necessary to protect the people. For Jefferson and Jackson, a powerful government would only serve the interests of the well connected. Better to limit what government can do then risk having government side with the powerful. This was the philosophy embraced by the only Democrat to serve as president between 1860 and 1912, Grover Cleveland, who while in the White House in 1896, was still presiding over the lingering effects of the “Panic of 1893,” with one in six workers still unemployed. “Though the people support the government, the government should not support the people,” said Cleveland.
Rejecting the policies of his party’s sitting president, Bryan had a much different creed: “The power of the government to protect the people is as complete in a time of peace as in time of war.” Government was not a weapon, but a tool. More than eighty years before Ronald Reagan would be accused of advocating “trickle down economics,” Bryan criticized “those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”
During his more than thirty years in public life, Bryan was instrumental in the passage of a host of progressive reforms. The breadth of the list is extraordinary. Four major reforms—a progressive federal income tax, women’s suffrage, Prohibition, and the direct election of senators—required constitutional amendment. Bryan’s support and advocacy was critical to the adoption of each, causing one biographer to suggest that Bryan is personally responsible for more constitutional amendments than any person but James Madison. Bryan’s influence is particularly extraordinary given that, except for his four years in Congress, the only other public office he held in his life was two years as Wilson’s secretary of state. His influence came not from any office but from the roughly fifteen years he spent as titular head of the Democratic Party and the large popular following he enjoyed until his death in 1925.
Despite this lack of official portfolio, other reforms advocated by Bryan—utility and financial regulation, pure food and drug laws, the eight-hour workday, disclosure of campaign contributions, and the citizens’ initiative and referendum process—became law during his lifetime. Even more, such as bank deposit insurance, subsidized crop prices, federal protection for the right of labor to organize and strike, and old age pensions would be implemented later under the New Deal, which Herbert Hoover called, “Bryanism under new words and methods.” A few Bryan initiatives are still on the progressive agenda, including publicly financed elections and a guaranteed living wage.
Bryan did not justify the need for these reforms based on social science, but on a religious imperative. For Bryan, all “great political questions are in their final analyses great moral questions.” The law, Bryan said, “is but the crystallization of conscience; moral sentiment must be created before it can express itself in the form of a statute.” Religion was the basis of moral sentiment, Bryan believed, therefore religion is “not only the most practical thing in the world, but the first essential.”
Because religion had practical value in restructuring society, Bryan deplored ministers who thought the only function of the church was personal salvation. In his Bible classes, Chautauqua sermons, and religious articles, Bryan liked to point out that only one-fifth of the Gospel is devoted to the discussion of salvation and the afterlife; the other four-fifths provide instruction in how human beings are to interact with and treat one another. “Christ went about doing good,” said Bryan, and he believed it was the duty of every Christian to do the same.
Individual charity was not enough. A Christian’s duty, Bryan believed, was also to work politically for a more just and compassionate society with the goal of creating, as near as practicable, a heaven on earth. “I have no patience with those who feel they are too good to take part in politics,” Bryan said. “When I find a person who thinks he is too good to take part in politics, I find one who is not quite good enough to deserve the blessings of a free government.”
Bryan did not concern himself with the morality of citizens in their private lives. There is no record of him criticizing anyone’s personal foibles or infidelities, even those of his political enemies. He cared about public morality. The wealthy individuals who believed a few charitable contributions could make up for the unjust methods they used to earn their fortunes disgusted him. A special target of his ire was the founder of Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller, who had become the richest man in America through ruthless business practices. Rockefeller was a great philanthropist, and he, too, liked to teach Bible school, which only caused Bryan to snort, “Many people will wonder how Rockefeller summons the courage to preach so much religion while he practices so much sin.”
Such sentiments made Bryan as much preacher as politician, although despite his many speeches and writings on religion, he was never ordained. And while he was a Presbyterian, he transcended denominations. He was a broad ecumenical spiritual leader for Protestant Middle America in his time, much as the Reverend Billy Graham would be a half-century later. Bryan admitted that even though he enjoyed making political speeches, “I would rather speak on religion than on politics.” With Bryan, however, the line between the two was indistinguishable. “When you hear a good democratic speech it is so much like a sermon that you can hardly tell the difference between them,” he said.
Despite the caricature he became in popular culture following his death, Bryan was not, in the strictest sense, a Fundamentalist, the conservative vein of Protestantism that arose in the late nineteenth century in response to historical criticism of the Bible. Bryan shared some of the Fundamentalists’ concerns, toward evolution and how other forms of modernity seemed to challenge and undermine the Christian faith, but he did not share their belief in the Bible as a literal historical record. During the Scopes Trial, for example, he acknowledged that the creation story in Genesis could refer to six eon
s of time, not six twenty-four-hour days. He also did not believe, as many of the Fundamentalists of the time did, that Christians should separate themselves from society; rather, he wanted to bring more of society under “the Christian spirit.” Also unlike the Fundamentalists, Bryan was not pessimistic about humanity’s ability to change society. Many leading Fundamentalists were pessimistic about Bryan, admitting to never voting for him.
Though he might have blanched at the adjective, Bryan was a liberal Christian. He would have preferred being tied to the Social Gospel movement, which he called “applied Christianity” and which sought to apply Christian ethics and values to the worst problems of society. The literal truth of the Bible concerned him less than his belief in the fundamental truth that “‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,’ if fully lived up to, would solve every problem; economic, social, political and religious.” His enemies could rightly accuse him of self-righteousness, but all acknowledged his sincerity. Even President William Howard Taft, who foiled Bryan’s third try for the presidency in 1908, acknowledged that he was “the least of a liar I know in public life.”
Bryan’s total devotion to the truth (as he understood it) would sorely damage his progressive legacy. His final crusade would be a widely misunderstood (and mischaracterized) campaign against the teaching of evolution as fact in the public schools. His performance during the Scopes Trial led critics to portray him as naïve, simple-minded, and, most cruelly of all, bigoted. In truth, he was broadly ecumenical, speaking before all denominations (although the Unitarians’ denial of Christ’s divinity bothered him a great deal). Neither anti-Catholic nor anti-Semitic, Bryan actively courted Catholics and regularly spoke in synagogues. He studied the other religions of the world outside Christianity but found Islam appalling in its treatment of women and concluded during a world tour he made in 1905 and 1906 that Hinduism was guilty of idolatry. Bryan, as will be discussed shortly, saw his crusade against evolution as not only fully compatible with, but crucial to the cause of progressive reform.
Bryan had first demonstrated an independence of thought on religion and a willingness to buck convention when he was a youth. Born in Salem, Illinois, on March 19, 1860, to a Baptist father who had been a Democratic judge and state senator and a Methodist mother, Bryan the boy became a Presbyterian after having a personal “born again” experience at a revival at age thirteen. He later attended little Illinois College, where courses in biology and geology led him to question whether certain stories in the Bible, such as the creation story, should be taken literally or allegorically. He wrote the famed agnostic lecturer Robert Ingersoll for advice but only got a form letter in return. This seems to have been his only serious crisis of faith.
Bryan was a straight arrow even then, but not suffering from sanctimony. “For some reason Bryan’s goodness was not the kind that rubbed against you and turned the fur the wrong way,” a classmate recalled. Bryan studied at the Union Law College in Chicago, but he did not like the big city and so missed some opportunities to better acquaint himself with the problems of urban workers and families. Worried that rural Illinois was too Republican to elect many Democrats, Bryan concluded that the opportunity for a political career was in Nebraska, and so he moved there in 1887, immediately diving into local Democratic politics.
He served two terms representing Nebraska in Congress and lost a bid for the U.S. Senate. This was the sum of his political experience, and although he was only thirty-six years old in 1896, he was as certain that he would be nominated for president at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as he was of the divinity of Christ. Despite his short tenure in Congress, he had become known in much of the country as an exceptional orator. He was also a brilliant tactician and blessed with keen political instincts. But more than anything, he had empathy. He could feel the pain and the near frantic desire for relief that existed in the many parts of the nation that had been in economic crisis for most of the previous twenty years.
Beginning in 1873, the year the United States officially went on the gold standard, farmers in the South and Midwest suffered from a seemingly never-ending period of deflation. Year after year, American farmers saw prices continue to go down. Corn that had sold for 83 cents a bushel in 1881 sold for 28 cents a bushel in 1890. A farmer who could have paid a debt with one thousand bushels of wheat in 1865 needed three thousand bushels to repay the same sized debt thirty years later. Tens of thousands of farmers went broke and lost their farms.
Credit that might have helped some farmers weather the hard times was almost impossible to find, and when it was available, the interest rates were exorbitant. Rates of 18 to 24 percent were typical, and in the South interest rates in excess of 40 percent were not uncommon. There was simply no money available that could circulate and stimulate the economy. All the currency in circulation in the state of Arkansas, for example, came out to just thirteen cents per resident! By 1893, the nation was facing the greatest economic depression in its 117-year history.
Out of this anguish, the People’s Party, better known as the “Populists,” was born. While some Populist leaders were colorful characters, urging farmers to raise more hell than corn, they were not unsophisticated rubes. They understood that there were causes for their problems beyond whatever constraints the gold standard placed on the money supply, and they proposed a wide range of reforms to deal with the crisis, including state regulation of railroads, utilities, and grain elevators. Farmers even engaged in collective action, similar to their urban brethren who formed labor unions, by creating the Grange movement, which allowed them to try to coordinate and control production, storage, transportation, and ultimately prices.
But central to the Populist platform was expanding the money supply. The Populists proposed that silver be coined as well as gold at a ratio of sixteen-to-one. The coinage of silver would increase the supply of money, but by coining it rather than using it to back the issuance of more paper money, the Populists hoped to avoid creating the inflation experienced during the Civil War. Scholars then and since have derided the free coinage of silver issue as a simplistic response to a complicated financial crisis, but the renowned economist John Maynard Keynes later wrote that the Populists were not wrong to believe currency reform was part of the answer to the nation’s problems and that the United States’ stubbornness in remaining on the gold standard until 1933 severely limited the government’s ability to deal with the Great Depression.
Bryan, then and now, was also ridiculed for adopting the free silver issue as his own. When first asked about free silver as a young congressman in 1891, he famously admitted that he was not entirely certain why the minting of silver made sense. All he really needed to know, Bryan said, was that his Nebraska constituents favored free silver: “I will look up the arguments later.” He did and two years later gave a three-hour speech, without notes, before the House in which he offered a sophisticated explanation of monetary policy, full of facts and details, and which included, in addition to free silver, such ideas as the creation of a federal reserve system for banking, a managed currency, and federal insurance for bank deposits. Despite this and other displays of intellect, Bryan was repeatedly tagged as someone who just gave pretty speeches, and histories of the election of 1896 almost always focus solely on the silver issue.
Seldom explained is that Bryan’s strategy was to use the silver issue to advance a broader agenda. Silver was the issue that resonated with the crowds who came to hear him speak and Bryan was a politician who needed votes; if advocating silver monetization provided an audience to educate on other reforms, so be it. Bryan had toured the country throughout 1895 and early 1896, speaking before groups large and small, and meeting party leaders and potential national convention delegates. By the time the Democrats gathered for their national convention in Chicago in July 1896, Bryan reckoned he had personally met with more convention delegates than any other potential candidate, which enhanced his confidence that, if
given the right opportunity, he would win over the convention and his party’s nomination.
The opportunity came when Bryan cleverly arranged to be the final speaker in the debate over a free silver plank at the convention. A supporter scribbled a note of encouragement to Bryan, saying, “This is a great opportunity.” Bryan, fully aware of his gifts as an orator, wrote a short note back. “You will not be disappointed.”
The young Bryan, slender but broad-shouldered, moved with the grace of an athlete, bounding up the stairs, two at a time, to reach the rostrum. His physical energy further galvanized the crowd’s attention. He began quietly but was still easy to hear even in the farthest reaches of the massive Chicago Coliseum. Bryan had a mesmerizing baritone voice that could be heard clearly without amplification from a distance of three city blocks. In the days before microphones and loudspeakers, it gave him an extraordinary advantage over other speakers.
Bryan had another advantage; he was a talented writer who wrote all of his own speeches, every word. He had tried and refined large portions of the speech in other places, and he knew the reaction each line would generate. Knowing that the audience was with him from his opening words, Bryan would later write that he could actually see the crowd react “like a trained choir,” responding “instantaneously and in unison . . . to each point made.”
The address featured many memorable points. Scoffing at those who insisted protecting business meant protecting the rich, Bryan said, “The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer,” and deserved the same considerations. He ridiculed those who seemed to believe the problems of the farmer were less important than those of the industrialist. You could burn down the cities, but as long as people had something to eat, the cities would rise again “as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”