A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan - Hardcover

Kazin, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375411356 ISBN 13: 9780375411359

Publisher: Knopf, 2006

Synopsis

An illuminating and dramatic biography of William Jennings Bryan that restores him to his place of importance in American history – as a hero and leader of the Christian left.

Bryan is remembered today mostly as the fundamentalist voice in the 1925 Scopes trial. But as Michael Kazin makes clear, he was a man of exceptional accomplishment. The most popular speaker of his time, he gained a vast and passionate following among both rural and urban Americans, to whom he embodied the righteousness of a pastor and the practical vision of a reform politician. As leader of a major political party, he was able to put the fight to improve the welfare of ordinary Americans in a moral and religious frame. He preached that the nation should expand the power of the federal government and counter the overweening power of banks and industrial corporations by legalizing strikes and supporting labor unions, banning private campaign spending, giving the vote to women, instituting a progressive income tax, and prohibiting the sale of alcohol.

At the 1896 Democratic convention, he delivered the famous Cross of Gold speech and made the fight against the gold standard, believing it was the cause of the nation’s economic travails, his own Christian mission. Thereafter, the size of his following mushroomed: for the first time, millions outside the industrial north felt they had a champion with a chance to take power in Washington. Bryan became their “godly hero,” in honor of whom they named their sons and to whom they wrote fervent letters of admiration. In 1896, 1900, and 1908, the Democratic Party nominated him to be its presidential candidate, relying on the discontent of the heartland to tip the balance in his favor. But despite his immense popularity, the Republican opposition was able to defeat him each time.

Yet Bryan’s legacy in American political history is enormous. He did more than any other man to transform the Democratic Party from a bulwark of laissez-faire into the citadel of liberalism we identify with Franklin D. Roosevelt. As secretary of state, Bryan helped craft the idealistic foreign policies of Woodrow Wilson before resigning in protest against the administration’s drift toward entering World War I.

This is the first major biography of Bryan in almost forty years—and the first to draw on the countless letters Bryan received from his followers as well as on his speeches and the lively journalism of his time. The result is a clarifying portrait both of a seminal figure in the history of our national politics and religion and of the richly diverse and volatile political landscape in America during the early twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Kazin is professor of history at Georgetown University. He is the author of three previous books about American history, America Divided, The Populist Persuasion, and Barons of Labor. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, and The American Prospect, among other publications. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and twice from the Fulbright Scholar Program, he lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Education of a Hero, 1860–1890

He borrows from the philosopher his principles, from the poet his language, from the warrior his courage, and mingling with these his own enthusiasms, leads his hearers according to his will.

—William Jennings Bryan on oratory, 1877

Salem may never be more than a pleasant stop along the interstate highway that slices through the verdant prairie of south-central Illinois. Stretched out beyond the sign listing a population of eight thousand is the usual array of chain hotels and restaurants, gaudy gas stations and car washes, and tiny convenience stores. An imposing new Caterpillar rental and repair place suggests that the local economy is thriving, while twenty-six local churches compete to fill a set of loftier needs. Yet one can stroll down the main street of Salem in the middle of a weekday in summer without encountering more than a handful of residents. The nearest movie theater is down in Centralia, sixteen miles away.

A different fate seemed possible in the 1850s, when Silas Bryan moved to town. The Ohio and Mississippi Railroad had just run tracks down Main Street, which made it possible to reach St. Louis in only ninety minutes—the same time it takes to drive the distance today. A Methodist women’s college with two faculty members had recently opened its doors, and freshly built churches dotted the dirt streets of the newly incorporated town, the seat of Marion County. A few miles outside town, there lay ample deposits of bituminous coal, and three flour mills were unable to keep up with the demand of a growing population. “Salem is rapidly improving,” boasted the local weekly in 1854, “and its elements of wealth and prosperity are now being rapidly developed.” Soon it would be “a commanding point . . . where industry, sobriety, and honesty will surely thrive; where good health may be found, where long life may be enjoyed and where all the concomitants of competence and oppulence [sic] are inevitable.”

Silas Bryan’s own ambitions dovetailed with those of his town. He was born in 1822, the eighth child of a farm family from Point Pleasant, a village that then lay inside Virginia’s western border with Ohio. At the age of eighteen, he left a crowded log cabin to move westward in search of an education and, perhaps, a fortune. Harvesting crops and chopping wood, he slowly amassed enough credits to graduate, at the age of twenty-seven, from

McKendree College, a Baptist institution in southern Illinois. He then followed a career path common to educated men in rural America during the middle of the nineteenth century: a few years of teaching school followed by reading law books and passing a bar examination. In 1851, Silas moved to Salem and opened a legal practice. A year later, he married Mariah Jennings—a reverent, resourceful, lovely young woman who was one of his

former pupils. They built a small two-story frame house on Broadway Street—a five-minute walk from the county courthouse, which still marks the epicenter of Salem.

Silas matured into a man of substance and an indispensable father of his town. He was a pioneering member of the provincial legal elite that did much to establish genteel society in the hinterland of midcentury America. Townspeople admired his legal skills and compensated him well—so well that in 1866 he was able to buy a 520-acre farm a mile outside of town with a deer park alongside it. Area voters, most of whom were Democrats, also elected him to a series of public offices. Over a twenty-year span, Silas served in the state senate, as a circuit court judge, and as a leading member of the committee that drafted a new Illinois constitution.

And he never wavered from the gospel of the Democratic Party. It was a potent mixture of egalitarian principle and racist fear. Democrats in the nineteenth century often spoke as class warriors, American style. They preached that every small farmer and wage earner was equal to the rich and the well-born, and that the “producers” who fed, built, and clothed the nation deserved access to every opportunity society could offer. Yet Democrats also vowed to defend the livelihood, moral values, and families of the white majority against black Americans who refused to accept their servile destiny. As late as the 1870s, the party filled its campaign broadsides with images of “popeyed, electric-haired and slack-jawed” black men straight from the minstrel shows that were the most popular form of theater in nineteenth-century America.

These ugly stereotypes served a populist purpose. Updating and hardening Jefferson’s anti-elitist suspicions, Democrats accused their political enemies of shedding tears for unworthy blacks but sneering at the language and manners of the productive white majority. In the party’s demonology, New England divines and schoolmarms mocked the Irish-born men and women who built and cleaned their houses, while speculators made quick fortunes manipulating markets instead of gaining a just reward after “years of patient industry.” Good Democrats believed their task was to uphold the libertarian principles of the early Republic. The Democracy—as the party was commonly known—stood tall, a pillar of resistance to well-born zealots who wanted to shut off immigration, prohibit drinking and other private amusements, and increase the powers of the federal government to enrich their friends.

Silas Bryan dated his own loyalty to the Democracy to boyhood memories of the 1828 election of Andrew Jackson, a stalwart defender of slavery. Later, as a Democratic partisan in Illinois, Silas Bryan endorsed the views of Stephen Douglas, who in his famous debate with Lincoln declared, “Our people are white people, our state is a white state, and we mean to preserve the race pure without any mixture with the negro.”

In the spirit of Old Hickory, Silas mingled a plebeian ethic with a fealty to racist assumptions. In 1856, he ran for the Illinois Senate against a opponent friendly to abolition. At one rally, Salem’s “hardy yeomanry” filled the county courthouse to hear Bryan blast “the Black Republican press” for saying that he was friendly to Mormonism. In 1872, Silas ran for Congress on a platform that advocated inflating the money supply to rescue farmers and wage earners from the burden of debt. But a former general in the Union army narrowly defeated him and ended Silas Bryan’s office-chasing career. The judge remained a prominent Democrat in southern Illinois and one of the richest men in town.

However, Silas was never content with the trappings of material success. By all accounts, he embodied the virtues that nineteenth-century Americans summed up as “character.” He was loyal and honest, industrious and pious—qualities prized by moral philosophers from the Hebrew prophets to Cotton Mather. And Silas attempted to apply these virtues to the life of his local community and state. When he died of a diabetic stroke in 1880, thousands filed by his casket as it lay in the county courthouse, and every business and school in Salem closed down for the afternoon. Obituary writers praised him for never wavering from his beliefs, for routinely feeding hobos who came to his door, and for kneeling in prayer three times a day, wherever he happened to be. Silas had specified the hymns to be sung and the Bible passages to be read at his funeral. Among the most memorable were verses from Paul’s Second Epistle to Timothy: “For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”

A year after his father’s death, Will Bryan paid a florid tribute to character in the valedictory he gave at his college graduation: “If each day we . . . plant ourselves more firmly upon principles which are eternal, guard every thought and action, that it may be pure, and conform our lives more nearly to that Perfect Model, we shall form a character that . . . will bring success in this life and form the best preparation for that which is beyond.” Others may have mouthed such nostrums without taking them too seriously; one biographer comments that the talk “was more suitable for an eighth-grade exercise than a college commencement.” Yet like most Americans in the Gilded Age, both father and son were convinced that character underlay good governance as well as sound religion.

Will Bryan spent his childhood in social tranquility, if not utter innocence. He was born on March 19, 1860, a year before the onset of the Civil War. More than fifteen hundred residents of Marion County served in the Union army; one out of every six succumbed from either wounds or disease. But no battles took place in the area, and the bloodshed left only a mild impression on local history—perhaps because many residents, like Silas Bryan, had migrated from the South and didn’t favor the end of slavery and the rule of the Republican Party, which were prime consequences of the war. Neither Will’s memoirs nor the little early correspondence of his that survives mentions the conflict that ruptured the nation.

As a child, he was also unfamiliar with the afflictions and joys of an increasingly polyglot and industrial society. In Salem, Will probably met few people of a religion or ethnic group different from his. In 1860, a large majority of the thirteen thousand inhabitants of Marion County were native-born white Protestants of British or Irish heritage who farmed modest plots of corn and raised pigs and cattle. A few sma...

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0375411356
• ISBN 13: 9780375411359
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 374