| William Jennings Bryant and the Social Darwinists
Gary Bennett
December 27, 2009
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.
Reading
BRYAN, BRYAN, BRYAN, BRYAN – Vachel Lindsay
In a nation of one hundred fine, mob-hearted, lynching, relenting, repenting, millions, There are plenty of sweeping, swinging, stinging, gorgeous things to shout about, And knock your old blue devils out.
I brag and chant of Bryan, Bryan, Bryan
Candidate for president who sketched a silver Zion,
The one American Poet who could sing outdoors,
He brought in tides of wonder, of unprecedented splendor,
Wild roses from the plains, that made hearts tender,
All the funny circus silks
Of politics unfurled,
Bartlett pears of romance that were honey at the cores,
And torchlights down the street, to the end of the world.
There were truths eternal in the gab and tittle-tattle.
There were real heads broken in the fustian and the rattle.
There were real lines drawn:
Not the silver and the gold,
But Nebraska’s cry went eastward against the dour and old,
The mean and cold.
It was eighteen ninety-six, and I was just sixteen
And Altgeld ruled in Springfield, Illinois,
When there came from the sunset Nebraska’s shout of joy:
In a coat like a deacon, in a black Stetson hat
He scourged the elephant plutocrats
With barbed wire from the Platte.
The scales dropped from their mighty eyes.
They saw that summer’s noon
A tribe of wonders coming
To a marching tune.
Oh, the longhorns from Texas,
The jay hawks from Kansas,
The plop-eyed bungaroo and giant giassicus,
The varmint, chipmunk, bugaboo,
The horned-toad, prairie-dog and ballyhoo,
From all the newborn states arow,
Bidding the eagles of the west fly on,
Bidding the eagles of the west fly on.
The fawn, prodactyl and thing-a-ma-jig,
The rakaboor, the hellangone,
The whangadoodle, batfowl and pig,
The coyote, wild-cat and grizzly in a glow,
In a miracle of health and speed, the whole breed abreast,
The leaped the Mississippi, blue border of the West,
From the Gulf to Canada, two thousand miles long:-
Against the towns of Tubal Cain, too cunning for the young,
The longhorn calf, the buffalo and wampus gave tongue,.
These creatures were defending things Mark Hanna never dreamed:
The moods of airy childhood that in desert dews gleamed,
The gossamers and whimsies,
The monkeyshines and didoes
Rank and strange
Of the canyons and the range,
The ultimate fantastics
Of the far western slope,
And of prairie schooner children
Born beneath the stars,
Beneath falling snows,
Of the babies born at midnight
In the sod huts of lost hope,
With no physician there,
Except a Kansas prayer,
With the Indian raid a howling through the air.
And all these in their helpless days
By the dour East oppressed,
Mean paternalism
Making their mistakes for them,
Crucifying half the West,
Till the whole Atlantic coast
Seemed a giant spiders’ nest.
And these children and their sons
At last rode through the cactus,
A cliff of mighty cowboys
On the lope,
With gun and rope.
And all the way to frightened Maine the old East heard them call,
And saw our Bryan by a mile lead the wall
Of men and whirling flowers and beasts,
The bard and the prophet of them all.
Prairie avenger, mountain lion,
Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun,
Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West,
And just a hundred miles behind, tornadoes piled across the sky,
Blotting out sun and moon,
A sign on high.
Headlong, dazed and blinking in the weird green light,
The scalawags made to moan,
Afraid to fight.
II
When Bryan came to Springfield, and Altgeld gave him greeting,
Rochester was deserted, Divernon was deserted,
Mechanicsburg, Riverton, Chickenbristle, Cotton Hill,
Empty: for all Sangamon drove to the meeting-
In silver-decked racing cart,
Buggy, buckboard, carryall,
Carriage, phaeton, whatever would haul,
And silver-decked farm-wagons gritted, banged and rolled,
With the new tale of Bryan by the iron tires told.
The State House loomed afar,
A speck, a hive, a football,
A captive balloon!
And the town was all one spreading wing of bunting, plumes, and sunshine,
Every rag and flag, and Bryan picture sold,
When the rigs in many a dusty line
Jammed our streets at noon,
And joined the wild parade against the power of gold.
We roamed, we boys from High School,
With mankind,
While Springfield gleamed,
Silk-lined.
Oh, Tom Dines, and Art Fitzgerald,
And the gangs that they could get!
I can hear them yelling yet.
Helping the incantation,
Defying aristocracy,
With every bridle gone,
Ridding the world of the low down mean,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
We were bully, wild and wooly,
Never yet curried below the knees.
We saw flowers in the air,
Fair as the Pleiades, bright as Orion,
-Hopes of all mankind,
Made rare, resistless, thrice refined.
Oh, we bucks from every Springfield ward!
Colts of democracy-
Yet time-winds out of Chaos from the star-fields of the Lord.
The long parade rolled on. I stood by my best girl.
She was a cool young citizen, with wise and laughing eyes.
With my necktie by my ear, I was stepping on my dear,
But she kept like a pattern, without a shaken curl.
She wore in her hair a brave prairie rose.
Her gold chums cut her, for that was not the pose.
No Gibson Girl would wear it in that fresh way.
But we were fairy Democrats, and this was our day.
The earth rocked like the ocean, the sidewalk was a deck.
The houses for the moment were lost in the wide wreck.
And the bands played strange and stranger music as they trailed along.
Against the ways of Tubal Cain,
Ah, sharp was their song!
The demons in the bricks, the demons in the grass,
The demons in the bank-vaults peered out to see us pass,
And the angels in the trees, the angels in the grass,
The angels in the flags, peered out to see us pass.
And the sidewalk was our chariot, and the flowers bloomed higher,
And the street turned to silver and the grass turned to fire,
And then it was but grass, and the town was there again,
A place for women and men.
III
Then we stood where we could see
Every band,
And the speaker’s stand.
And Bryan took the platform.
And he was introduced.
And he lifted his hand
And cast a new spell.
Progressive silence fell
In Springfield,
In Illinois,
Around the world.
Then we heard these glacial boulders across the prairie rolled:
“The people have the right to make their own mistakes….
You shall not crucify mankind
Upon a cross of gold.”
And everybody heard him-
In the streets and State House yard.
And everybody heard him
In Springfield,
In Illinois,
Around and around and around the world,
That danced upon its axis
And like a darling broncho whirled.
IV
July, August, suspense.
Wall Street lost to sense.
August, September, October,
More suspense,
And the whole East down like a wind-smashed fence.
Then Hanna to the rescue,
Hanna of Ohio,
Rallying the roller-tops,
Rallying the bucket-shops.
Threatening drouth and death,
Promising manna,
Rallying the trusts against the bawling flannelmouth;
Invading misers’ cellars,
Tin-cans, socks,
Melting down the rocks,
Pouring out the long green to a million workers,
Spondulix by the mountain-load, to stop each tornado
And beat the cheapskate, blatherskite,
Populistic, anarchistic,
Deacon- desperado.
V
Election night at midnight:
Boy Bryan’s defeat.
Defeat of western silver.
Defeat of the wheat.
Victory of letterfiles
And plutocrats in miles
With dollar signs upon their coats,
Diamond watchchains on their vests
And spats on their feet.
Victory of custodians,
Plymouth Rock,
And all that inbred landlord stock.
Victory of the neat.
Defeat of the aspen groves of Colorado valleys,
The blue bells of the Rockies,
And blue bonnets of old Texas,
By the Pittsburgh alleys.
Defeat of the alfalfa and the Mariposa lily.
Defeat of the Pacific and the long Mississippi.
Defeat of the young by the old and silly.
Defeat of tornadoes by the poison vats supreme.
Defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream.
VI
Where is McKinley, that respectable McKinley,
The man without an angle or a tangle,
Who soothed down the city man and soothed down the farmer,
The German, the Irish, the Southerner, the Northerner,
Who climbed every greasy pole, and slipped through every crack;
Who soothed down the gambling hall, the bar-room, the church,
The devil vote, the angel vote, the neutral vote,
The desperately wicked, and their victims on the rack,
The gold vote, the silver vote, the brass vote, the lead vote,
Every vote?…
Where is McKinley, Mark Hanna’s McKinley,
His slave, his echo, his suit of clothes?
Gone to join the shadows, with the pomps of that time,
And the flame of that summer’s prairie rose.
Where is Cleveland whom the Democratic platform
Read from the party in a glorious hour,
Gone to join the shadows with pitchfork Tillman,
And sledge-hammer Altgeld who wrecked his power.
Where is Hanna, bulldog Hanna.
Low-browed Hanna, who said: “Stand pat”?
Gone to his place with old Pierpont Morgan.
Gone somewhere… with lean rat Platte.
Where is Roosevelt, the young dude cowboy,
Who hated Bryan, then aped his way?
Gone to join the shadows with mighty Cromwell
And tall King Saul, till the Judgment day.
Where is Altgeld, brave as the truth,
Whose name the few still say with tears?
Gone to join the ironies with Old John Brown,
Whose fame rings loud for a thousand years.
Where is that boy, that Heaven-born Bryan,
That Homer Bryan, who sang for the West?
Gone to join the shadows with Altgeld the Eagle,
Where the kings and the slaves and the troubadours rest.
Sermon
The scene is frozen in our consciousness, one of the defining moments of Modern America: Clarence Darrow heroically defending Science and Intellectual Freedom by placing the champion of the forces of darkness and ignorance on the stand, forcing William Jennings Bryan to show to all the world that he believes absurdities, defends the indefensible, and uses his power to force others to do the same. You’ve seen the play: this yokel believes Adam and Eve were the first human pair, doesn’t know or care where Cain got a wife; believes some sort of whale or fish swallowed Jonah; in short the whole enchilada, whatever the Bible says, however absurd, however much in contradiction of science or even of itself; coming soon to your local school district to punish teachers for teaching biology, geology, physics or history. The Dragon, having been metaphorically slain by St. Clarence, obliges by dying on the Spot, presumably from shame at having been publicly exposed as a charlatan.
I’m afraid I’m going to make several demands on you today, and the first is to suggest that things are not always what they seem, that we have in fact merely caught a man of great and noble character at a bad moment. One of the rarities of Bryan’s career was that, before the Scopes Trial, he had in thirty years lost many political races and crusades, but had steadily gained in esteem through them all. More than almost any other American politician, Bryan had the knack of losing the battles, but winning the war. His causes were adopted, one by one, by people who had originally seen him as a dangerous radical. But in Dayton, Tennessee, he as prosecutor technically won the case, while in the great court of public opinion, in the major newspapers of his day and in the play Inherit the Wind a generation later, he lost the reputation he had gained over a lifetime.
A biographer suggests mitigating factors in Bryan’s behavior after 1920. The diabetes that claimed his life shortly after the Monkey Trial may have been diminishing his mental faculties and clouding his judgment. And we know that he disapproved of laws of the Tennessee model which included punishment for disobedience; he believed strongly in the power of moral persuasion and disapproved of the use of force in most cases. Bryan was not after publicity; rather, as the most revered Christian statesman in America, he was steadily pushed by others, first into a position of national leadership in the fundamentalist movement, and then into helping prosecute a violator of a law to which he had objected. In the end Bryan saw his faith on trial, and he could not back down.
But this is not all there was to William Jennings Bryan. He was one of the greatest men of his time, and it is doubtful that any other American has ever made such a great positive impact upon our public life and then been so thoroughly forgotten.
For the rest of the story, we go back to the year 1896, a turning point in American political history. After the Civil War, American cities and industries and railroads had blossomed, but the wealth created was concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Prices were jacked up by high protective tariffs and the spread of monopolies; labor conditions were abominable, with extremely long work weeks, widespread child labor, unsanitary and dehumanizing sweatshops; company towns that sucked workers’ wages away faster than they could earn them; wages depressed by seemingly endless stream of immigrants fleeing even worse conditions abroad. Attempts by workers to better themselves were bludgeoned to death by management-hired private thugs as well as regiments of public thugs called up by governors beholden to the rich. One of the grandest of these grand larcenies was the adoption of the Gold Standard in 1873. By removing silver as currency while withdrawing paper money from circulation, the plutocrats who ran the government systematically shrank money supply over the course of two decades, even as the population and real wealth of the country exploded. The result was one of the greatest deflations in world history. Debts incurred in the 1860s and ’70s became far larger and harder to repay as time went on. The massive deflation in the US housing market over the last two years, where houses are in many cases worth far less than what is still owed on their mortgages, may give us a sense of what it was like to live in that time, especially for Western farmers. Since prices of monopoly-controlled goods did not share in the price reductions, farm prices fell all the faster.
Both major political parties were owned body and soul by the rich. We think of Democrats as the Party of the Left, more or less, but for half a century before 1896 that had not been the case. The Democrat Grover Cleveland cleaned up some governmental corruption by creating the Civil Service, but had nothing to say about the growing economic inequities, and fittingly lost control of his own party after doing nothing about the suffering engendered by the Depression of 1893.
With the deepening poverty and despair, radical movements began to flourish, particularly in the West and South. The Populist Party grew in the 1880s, but like all American third parties, it was ultimately doomed to irrelevance and extinction. By the way, regardless of what the media might proclaim, there are not now nor were there ever “conservative populists” any more than there are “conservative progressives” or “conservative liberals.” The Populists were angry, but they were also as intelligent, well-read and principled as were the radicals who had made the American Revolution; they even managed to bring Southern blacks and whites together in a party of common interest, something demagogues have not tried to do in any era. In the Democratic Convention of ’96, radicals of this stripe were in control; they nailed together a platform calling for a progressive income tax, control of monopolies, and a return to silver coinage as a way of halting deflation. Then they waited for a candidate.
Bryan, the final speaker on platform issues, became man of the hour by delivering a speech for the ages. Once this was a treasured statement of progressive American principles in much the same way as the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg Address; perhaps it should be again. These are his concluding remarks:
I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty – the cause of humanity ….
Mr. Carlisle said in 1878 that this was a struggle between “the idle holders of idle capital” and “the struggling masses, who produce the wealth and pay the taxes of the country”; and my friends, the question we are to decide is: Upon which side are we, “the idle holders of idle capital”or upon the side of “the struggling masses”? This is the question which the party must answer first, and then it must be answered by each individual hereafter. The sympathies of the Democratic party, as shown by the platform, are on the side of the struggling masses, who have ever been the foundation of the Democratic party. There are two ideas of government. There are 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 that rests upon them.
You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country …. Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor the crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.
The campaign was far and away the most scandalous in American history. Republicans owned most of the newspapers then as now, and they painted Bryan in the most pejorative terms imaginable. A Jacobin, an Anarchist, a Socialist (there were no Communists yet, or he would have been one of those too), a demagogue. Mark Hanna extorted from frightened businessmen a war chest which in real terms was in the range of $200-$500 million, in a nation far smaller and poorer than our own; Standard Oil’s contribution alone almost matched the entire Democratic campaign fund. Teddy Roosevelt made plans for a last military stand if the “Reds” won, and John Hay made plans to rendezvous with other emigrŽs in Paris. A number of bosses told their employees not to bother to show up the next day, should Bryan win.
That all this should be the reaction to a candidate who brought back the words and ideas of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, illustrates better than anything else the death grip which wealth had gained on America in 1896. In the end the popular vote was close, the electoral vote less so, but Bryan lost.
A pattern had been formed for Bryan’s career. In 1900, new and massive gold strikes in the Klondike and South Africa temporarily eased the vice grip of deflation. But in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, we had become an imperial power in a world mad with colonialism; Bryan dared to campaign against imperialism, saying it was unworthy of America’s ideals and suggesting that we should begin preparing our new colonies for self-government. He lost again, but in 1901 accidental president Teddy Roosevelt became the first of Bryan’s former political enemies to begin adopting his policies, now rechristened the “Square Deal.”
A third principled defeat followed in 1908, but after Woodrow Wilson won in 1912 in a close three-way election, Bryan was appointed Secretary of State. Wilson was another former enemy, but he now called for a New Freedom, also straight from Bryan’s platforms. Aside from his foreign policy responsibilities, Bryan was instrumental in shaping several of the key domestic reforms, most importantly the creation of a new way of banking called the Federal Reserve System.
On most foreign policy issues, the President and Secretary of State thought alike. Their guiding principles were distaste for imperialism, respect for the autonomy of other countries, a desire to spread American values of democracy and human rights, and the attempt to create an international structure of law to curb war and other primitive national atavisms. As is the case today, some of these principles came into conflict with one another; as a result, the level of intervention in the Caribbean and Central America was almost as great as in the “We stole it fair and square” days of Teddy Roosevelt. Still they laid a foundation for a future Good Neighbor Policy to the south and for supra-national organizations to mediate disputes elsewhere.
Only in one area did Bryan and Wilson disagree, and that finally led to the Secretary’s resignation: he was a pacifist who rightly believed that Wilson’s policies toward Germany would lead us into war. Who was right? Without American intervention, Germany would have won, and the result would have been an unpleasantly authoritarian Europe. But given the way events actually played out, the imposition of a draconian peace treaty on Germany, which enraged its people while keeping their economy weak and its democratic government unpopular and the withdrawal from European affairs of the only state capable of controlling it or resolving its grievances peacefully, all of which pretty much guaranteed some variant of Hitler and World War II, it would probably have been better for America to stay out of World War I. Finally, at the end of the war, Bryan’s last failed political crusade was attempting to persuade Americans to join the League of Nations.
While he despaired of his failures, meanwhile, items from Bryan’s agenda continued to be adopted: direct election of senators; progressive income tax; women’s suffrage; prohibition; moving colonies to self-government. And a number of states were adopting Populist reforms such as initiative, referendum and recall. Franklin Roosevelt, coming to power after the Nebraskan’s death, abolished the gold standard, established a principled foreign policy in Latin America, and helped create the United Nations as what Bryan hoped the League of Nations would be. In short, much of the decent middle-class, internationally respected America he campaigned for had come into being by the time some of us were coming of age in the mid-twentieth century.
But we are back to that strange period of his life, starting in 1921, when Bryan abandoned the world of politics and began to champion the teaching of bad science in the schools. It mystified his contemporaries among liberal reformers and has continued to baffle those who know enough about him not to be satisfied with Elmer Gantry / Pat Robertson-type caricatures. We mentioned his illness and pressure from followers as possible reasons. But we also know that he had come to believe that the evils he had been fighting his whole political life had been caused or exacerbated by the influence of one man. For the malefactors of great wealth, the monopoly-seeking capitalists, the gold standard purists, the imperial expansionists continued to expound a world view in which what they were doing was natural and right and inevitable, as they invoked the name of Charles Darwin.
Darwin was a scientist and his theory of evolution through natural selection, first explained in Origin of Species 150 years ago last month, is one of the great documents in the history of science; but his achievement did not exist in a vacuum. The 19th century, particularly in England, America and a few other countries, was a time of rapid change without parallel in world history. The development of industrial capitalism, huge corporations and what seemed a widening distance between wealth and poverty, resonated with the notion that progress in the world came through savage competition; the very phrase “survival of the fittest,” though appropriated by Darwin, was actually coined by the English political philosopher Herbert Spencer and meant to apply to human culture. His basic premise was that government should stay out of the way and let human beings compete for survival as the only path to evolutionary improvement of the species; if the strong survived and the weak failed, then that was what nature intended. It was a very popular idea among the new industrial barons, and both Darwin’s and Spencer’s ideas were pushed and funded by them. Spencer’s ideas did not survive him long in England or Europe, but lived on in the United States and were later pushed by intellectuals like Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman.
In Europe, Darwin’s name was invoked to push other ideas, such as that of German Premier Otto von Bismarck, that affairs among nations are ultimately settled by “blood and iron;” Marxists saw competition as between economic classes. And everywhere Darwin was used to push racism. The economic and military supremacy of the West was seen as proof that its peoples were more highly evolved and were natural masters of the world; all other races were natural selection’s losers, destined to be slaves. We can group these assorted ideologies under the banner of “Social Darwinism.” Though some were ideological support for actions that would have taken place in any case, others were the direct result of popular beliefs about evolutionary biology. There was the pseudo-science of eugenics: legislators, judges and juries were persuaded to disregard their natural sentiments and authorize sterilization of the unfit. Many of the frightened Republicans who were terrified of Bryan considered his followers to be subhuman; the Darwinist H. L. Mencken was only a particularly skillful writer among the many who habitually used images of apes and subhumans to describe Bryan’s followers and most other liberal politicians and political groups.
Thus it was that Bryan, who as a young man had been open-minded about the origins of humanity, came to be convinced that Darwin’s theory was responsible for much that was wrong with the modern world. “The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate,” Bryan said, “Evolution is the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.” He believed that the Bible countered this merciless law with “the law of love.” It was not any principle of Biblical inerrancy that motivated him, but a desire to cut off a poisonous political philosophy at its root, to promote a national myth that would motivate the young to high ideals. He prepared himself as a prosecutor not to defend the stories of Genesis, but to present to the court and world the image of Jesus as “Prince of Peace.”
He completely misunderstood his political adversaries, of course. In a Monkey’s Paw sense, his wish for the defeat of Darwin in the political arena came true, in that challengers to the teaching of evolution are strong in much of the United States. But I’m not sure he would appreciate the victory. We might say Social Darwinism has simply evolved, adopted protective camouflage, or mutated. Much of modern fundamentalism shares the same policies at home and abroad as did the Social Darwinists, but uses the language of evangelical Christianity, though there are usually very few teachings of Jesus himself in their dogma. Those Christian groups which preached social justice and were open to the findings of modern science, on the other hand, have declined in numbers and influence. Secular culture in the West has also changed. The horror of Social Darwinist moralities finally climaxed in the 1930s and ’40s when perhaps 100 million human beings were murdered in Nazi and Communist atrocities and in the battles of World War II. There has been a massive reaction in the West since then; for much of the second half of the last century, it was impolite in intellectual circles to imply that any human characteristics beyond eye, hair and skin color might be due to genetics. In general, secular culture in both Europe and America has promoted policies far more progressive than have today’s fundamentalist Christians.
At the same time, the popular understanding of evolutionary biology is better grounded. Natural selection never involved “survival of the fittest” within hunter/gatherer tribes, but pushed trust and cooperation to form cohesive groups that could protect and educate children. Since individuals never had to survive on their own, they were able to carry a much wider variety of genetic traits, and this in turn has given the human species much more flexibility in adapting to different environments; genetic variation has been one of the greatest strengths of humanity, not as eugenicists asserted a weakness. And until recent times, there was very little or no competition for survival between tribes, which were scattered too thinly to interact at all; nationalism and racism could never have been factors in human selection. Thus the major tenets of Social Darwinism have no basis in actual human evolution; it was an ideology that emerged from a particular culture and economic system, not from any insight into the reality of human nature. Bryan too was a product of his time, but one worthy of our highest respect. I would like to end with these words of historian Henry Steele Commager:
. . defeated candidates are usually forgotten and lost causes relegated to historical oblivion, but Bryan was not forgotten and the causes which seemed lost triumphed in the end. He refused to acknowledge defeat, not out of vanity or ambition, but because he was sure the causes which he championed were right, and sure that right would triumph in the end. And, right or not, most of them did. Few statesmen have ever been more fully vindicated by history. ltem by item the program which Bryan had consistently espoused, from the early nineties on into the new century, was written onto the statute books – written into law by those who had denounced and ridiculed it. Call the list of the reforms: government control of currency and banking, government regulation of railroads, telegraph and telephone, trust regulation, the eight-hour day, labor reforms, the_ prohibition of injunctions in labor disputes, the income tax, tariff reform, anti-imperialism, the initiative, the referendum, woman suffrage, temperance, international arbitration. These were not all original with Bryan, but it was Bryan who championed them in season and out, who kept them steadily in the political forefront, who held his party firmly ‘to their advocacy ….
For Bryan was the last great spokesman of the America of the nineteenth century – of the America of the Middle West and the South, the America of the farm and the country town, the America that read the Bible and went to Chautauqua, distrusted the big city and Wall Street, believed in God and the Declaration of Independence. He was himself one of these people. He thought their thoughts, and he spoke the words that they were too inarticulate to speak. Above all, he fought their battles. He never failed to raise his voice against injustice, he never failed to believe that in the end justice would be done. Others of his generation served special interests or special groups – the bankers, the railroads, the manufacturers, the officeholders; he looked upon the whole population as his constituency. Others were concerned with the getting of office or of gain; he was zealous to advance human welfare. And when the [rest] . . . are relegated to deserved oblivion, the memory of Bryan will be cherished by the people in whom he had unfaltering faith. |
