The Crusading Commoner a Close Up of William Jennings Bryan and His Times Review
The historical reputation of William Jennings Bryan has non been a distinguished one. He is ridiculed for losing three presidential elections. He is ofttimes presented as a reactionary spokesman for a dying rural culture that resisted yielding to the progress of urbanization. His opposition to American imperialism and the Kickoff World War mark him equally an neutralist. Finally, and most notoriously, his prosecution of John Scopes for education the theory of evolution in 1925 marks him as anti-intellectual.
A Godly Hero, Michael Kazin's revisionist biography, challenges all these points, usually assuredly and e'er gracefully. He stresses the damage that the journalism of intellectual elitists like John Reed and H. Fifty. Mencken did to Bryan'southward reputation while he was yet alive. Unable to have his orthodox Christianity, temperance and rural values, they disregarded many points of public policy on which they agreed with Bryan. Instead they focused on the motif of his leading an ignorant country mob. Their critique endured after Bryan's death, culminating in the 1950'due south in the unflattering caricature of him as the character Matthew Harrison Brady in the play "Inherit the Wind."
Kazin, a professor of history at Georgetown University, clearly regrets the contemporary chasm between the intellectual left and organized religion. An underlying current in this book is a conviction that the left must accommodate American piety in order to return to ability. Whether Bryan is the right politician to invoke on this point is debatable, for he never held elective part higher than two terms in the House of Representatives. Nonetheless, Catholic readers volition identify with Bryan's combination of orthodox belief and Christian social action. He was remarkably close to recent popes in this combination of traits. Bryan opposed evolution considering he correctly associated many of its advocates with genetic manipulation, and he believed that religious skepticism led to inhumane wielding of political ability. Social Darwinism was the true target of his crusade against development.
Bryan cherished people of very different backgrounds. He ofttimes received international boarders into his home, including an Irish Cosmic named Dan Helpmate, who participated in ecumenical prayer sessions with the Bryan family. A Japanese gentleman, Yamashita Yashichiro, lived with the Bryans for five years. Bryan toured Europe extensively in the early on 1900's, forging a strong friendship with Leo Tolstoy and studying the embryonic welfare state that the British Liberal Party was assembling during those years. Such signs of openness brand information technology tragic that Bryan never extended the same empathy to African-Americans, remaining quite indifferent to their growing sufferings in the segregated Due south. Besides unfortunate was the fact that Bryan's anti-imperialism was partly motivated by his fear of wider American clan with people of color around the earth.
This evidence modifies assumptions that the Democratic Party's minority status during the first third of the 20th century was caused by the divisions between its rural and urban wings. In fact, Bryan understood the importance of the urban vote to Democratic chances and worked closely with the relatively few Catholic advocates of prohibition. He also sought to restrain the anti-Catholicism of his less aware followers, rebutting those who blamed his defeat in 1908 on the papacy'southward support for William Howard Taft's friendliness to the church when governor of the Philippines. When Bryan praised the party'southward founder, Thomas Jefferson, he never emphasized Jefferson's agrarianism, focusing instead on the third president'southward advocacy of popular commonwealth and his rejection of privilege of all kinds. Bryan was also amidst the first Democrats to enquire whether these Jeffersonian goals might be best met by an activist government rather than by limited authorities, Jefferson's personal preference. Bryan, like Barry Goldwater, became an instance of a defeated presidential candidate whose essential models for political coalitions and domestic legislation were later fulfilled by bodily presidents from his party.
Why, then, was Bryan himself perennially unsuccessful? He conspicuously frightened powerful financial interests, who greatly outspent him. Notwithstanding, a deeper explanation reflects an enduring gimmicky criticism: that he was an impressive orator whose rhetoric contained little substance. Bryan valued sentiment over logic in his discourses. This led commentators like Gov. John Peter Altgeld of Illinois to review Bryan's memorable "Cross of Gold" spoken communication at his political party'southward 1896 convention as follows: "I accept been thinking over Bryan'south speech. What did he say, anyhow?" Kazin does not connect the two themes explicitly, but his evidence suggests that Bryan'south tragedy was that he did not frequently let his deeply reflective graphic symbol to influence his speeches, thus creating the imitation impression that he was no more than a demagogic rube.
Occasionally, Kazin's analysis is marred by overreaching for parallels to present-mean solar day events. In 1915, for case, Bryan resigned equally Secretary of Country because he thought Woodrow Wilson was as well inclined toward intervention in Globe War I. Kazin believes that Bryan would have better served his cause by remaining in the administration and so that at that place would have been more advocacy against American entry into that disharmonize. Bryan, he feels, was prophetic about the war's futility and long-term evil effects in bringing totalitarianism to Europe. The unspoken subtext here is the Iraq invasion of 2003. It would accept been amend if Kazin had been more explicit nearly this supposed parallel, so that an otherwise excellent book would not be guilty of the same flaw he sees in "Inherit the Wind"—using an effect of i era every bit a metaphor for a dissimilar event in another.
This article also appeared in print, under the headline "The Bang-up Commoner," in the May 29, 2006, result.
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Source: https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2006/05/29/great-commoner
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