This Day in Populist History (Death of William Jennings Bryan, ‘The Great Commoner’)

July 26, 1925—Less than a week after the conclusion of the trial that damaged his reputation as an advocate of liberal causes, William Jennings Bryan—whose silver tongue led him to stints in Congress and heading the State Department, not to mention a three-time Democratic nominee for President—died in his sleep at age 65 in Dayton, Tenn.

Bryan had come to this small community as the lead prosecutor in the case against John T. Scopes for teaching evolution in the public schools—a notorious trial I discussed in this post from 15 years ago. Already battling diabetes, he had suffered in the recent oppressive heat in an age lacking air conditioning, particularly during his grueling and highly unusual cross-examination by defense attorney Clarence Darrow.

The final resting place for this politician, among war veterans in Arlington National Cemetery, might surprise many. But Bryan was entitled, as a colonel of volunteers in the Third Nebraska Regiment in the Spanish-American War—though his widow kept in mind his profound aversion to war (evidenced in his opposition to imperialism) by eschewing a full military funeral.

In his lifetime, because of his tireless dedication to the ordinary citizen, Bryan earned the nickname “The Great Commoner,” and even politicians who disagreed strongly with him, such as the Republican incumbent in the White House, Calvin Coolidge, paid tribute to him at his death.

But since then, the meaning and value of his career have been called into question primarily because of three men: iconoclastic journalist H.L. Mencken, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Hofstadter, and Donald Trump.

Throughout the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” Mencken had poured scorn on Dayton as a symbol of backward, anti-scientific ignorance and Bryan as its unworthy champion. Bryan’s death provoked the Baltimore Sun columnist and American Mercury editor into writing an obituary that has become legendary for its vitriol. This sample will give a sense of its tone:

“If the fellow was sincere, then so was P. T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses.”

With a blizzard of canceled subscriptions and pulled advertisements over the incendiary post mortem, Mencken was forced to revise it after the first edition hit the streets of Baltimore, according to Glenn Branch’s July 2014 account on the Website of the National Center for Science Education. Nevertheless, the journalist left those passages intact when the article was reprinted in The American Mercury, a publication influential in the kind of urban intellectual circles already unsympathetic to Bryan’s embrace of creationism and Prohibition.

Mencken’s brief was given scholarly heft by way of Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter in The Age of Reform, an examination of the Populist and Progressive movements, and especially his chapter on Bryan as “The Democrat as Revivalist” in the even more widely read The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It.

More coolly ironic than Mencken, Hofstadter ended up just as dismissive towards Bryan, and for many of the same reasons: “He closed his career in much the same role as he had begun it in 1896: a provincial politician following a provincial populace in provincial prejudices.”

The growing intellectual disaffection expressed by Mencken and Hofstadter took more widely seen creative form in the Jerome Lawrence-Robert E. Lee play Inherit the Wind.

Written at the height of the McCarthy Era, it highlighted the Scopes trial as a distant mirror of the threats to freedom of inquiry posed by anti-Communist hysteria. Its heavy use of the transcript of the Bryan-Darrow courtroom clash, however, blinded many viewers to its deviations from fact concerning other aspects of the trial and its participants.

Lastly, I would argue, Donald Trump’s domination of the political arena has led to countless facile interpretations of the meaning of “populism.” Characteristics of the term, springing from the writings of Mencken and Hofstadter, include anti-elitism, anti-intellectualism, suspicion of large institutional forces, nativism, anti-Semitism, and conspiratorialism.

The link between Trump and Bryan was surely cinched when Steve Bannon told a CPAC audience in 2017 that the former reality TV star was “probably the greatest public speaker in those large arenas since William Jennings Bryan.”

But Trump’s dark whisperer has even less reason to link the New York plutocrat to the heartland populist than he does to associate him with Andrew Jackson. More balanced—and, I would argue, more accurate—assessments of Bryan can be found in this 2017 Politico article by Michael Kazin and especially in Garry Wills’ scintillating 1990 study, Under God: Religion and American Politics.

Following Bryan’s electrifying “Cross of Gold” address at the 1896 Democratic National Convention, he had become over the next 30 years “the most important figure in the reform politics of America,” Wills observes, with his three Presidential campaigns “the most leftist mounted by a major party’s candidate in our entire history.”

The list of causes that Bryan championed early on are especially telling: “women’s suffrage, the federal income tax, railroad regulation, currency reform, state initiative and referendum, a Department of Labor, campaign fund disclosure, and opposition to capital punishment.”

In trying to curb the excesses of the Gilded Age—and in disdaining the lure of easy money, even when it might have bolstered his bank account and Presidential prospects—Bryan contrasts as dramatically with Trump as any other politician in Hofstadter’s “American Political Tradition.” We do a disservice to him and to the desperate people looking for a similar champion in likening him to Trump.

Flashback, July 1925: Darrow Cross-Examines Bryan at Scopes Trial

In a confrontation as heated as the Tennessee weather that week, William Jennings Bryan, the most radical major-party Presidential candidate until Jesse Jackson, endured hours of cross-examination on the literal interpretation of the Bible by Clarence Darrow, the longtime “attorney for the damned.”

When it was over, Darrow had not managed to avert a sentence of guilty for client John Scopes for teaching evolution, but he had left Bryan’s reputation as a populist in tatters and spawned some of the most simplistic assumptions in America’s long history of culture wars.

Appropriately, a trial that began as a stunt climaxed as one. The defense team at the Scopes “Monkey” Trial had no more intention of getting anything useful out of Bryan’s testimony than the prosecution had of putting the defendant’s livelihood and human rights at risk.

For a trial that was not just massively but maniacally covered (it was the first time a legal proceeding was filmed or broadcast live over the radio), innumerable myths have spring up about the eight-day case in Dayton, Tenn. Most of these derive from Inherit the Wind, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, especially in the 1960 film adaptation starring Fredric March and Spencer Tracy in the principal roles.

Lawrence and Lee could probably claim some form of dramatic license just by naming the two adversaries “Matthew Harrison Brady” and “Henry Drummond.” But so much of the centerpiece of the movie—Bryan’s cross-examination—was taken from the Scopes trial transcript that viewers could be forgiven for thinking just about everything in the film was true. 

Hollywood’s distortion of history, ranging from elementary facts to larger issues regarding the major figures’ motivations, fits in perfectly with what historian Garry Wills wrote about the trial in Under God: Religion and American Politics (1990): “Almost everything about the Scopes trial has been misinterpreted, and it is the ‘educated’ part of America that has accepted the distortions.”

In the popular imagination, for instance, the notion has taken hold that Bryan believed literally in every single word of the Bible. But a careful examination of the following small portion of the trial transcript—part of Darrow’s cross-examination of Bryan--reveals that the great orator and three-time Democratic nominee for President was not what would nowadays be termed a fundamentalist:

CLARENCE DARROW: Do you claim that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?

WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN: I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there. Some of the Bible is given illustratively; for instance, "Ye are the salt of the earth." I would not insist that man was actually salt, or that he had flesh of salt, but it is used in the sense of salt as saving God's people.

DARROW: But when you read that Jonah swallowed the whale -- or that the whale swallowed Jonah, excuse me, please -- how do you literally interpret that?

BRYAN: When I read that a big fish swallowed Jonah -- it does not say whale.

DARROW: Doesn't it? Are you sure?

BRYAN: That is my recollection of it, a big fish. And I believe it, and I believe in a God who can make a whale and can make a man, and can make both do what He pleases.

DARROW: Mr. Bryan, doesn't the New Testament say whale [Matthew 12:40]?

BRYAN: I am not sure. My impression is that it says fish, but it does not make so much difference. I merely called your attention to where it says fish, it does not say whale.

DARROW: But in the New Testament it says whale, doesn't it?

BRYAN: That may be true. I cannot remember in my own mind what I read about it.

DARROW: Now, you say the big fish swallowed Jonah, and he remained how long -- three days -- and then he spewed him up on the land. You believe that the big fish was made to swallow Jonah?

BRYAN: I am not prepared to say that; the Bible merely says it was done.

That hardly ended the distortions associated with the Stanley Kramer film. Among the other misimpressions:

* That Bryan’s testimony took place inside the courtroom. Temperatures were so high and the courtroom was so packed that the cross-examination was moved outside.

* That Scopes was targeted right in his classroom while teaching Darwin. Though Scopes had previously taught from the textbook George William Hunter's A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (1914), he had not done so on the day specified in the indictment. In fact, Darrow did not want to place his client on the witness stand lest the fact emerge at cross-examination—and the case be thrown out before it could be appealed.

* That Scopes was locked up at the start of the trial. This was an invention of the film, but there was no chance of it happening. For starters, the town fathers were not out to stamp out evolution (though they surely wouldn’t have minded it) so much as to increase tourism. (It was in the midst of a recession that had resulted in the town's population declining by half.) They believed—correctly, as it turned out—that the media would be out in full force if they could mount a challenge to Tennessee’s recently passed legislation banning the teaching of evolution in schools. Moreover, the whole thing was a put-up job: not only did the schools superintendent and owner of a local coal mine ask Scopes if he were willing to, in effect, act as a “test case” against the new Tennessee law, but a couple of members of the prosecution team were also friends of the schoolteacher.

* That Bryan bullied Scopes’ girlfriend. Never happened. In fact, not only did the “Great Commoner” offer to pay Scopes’ fine for teaching the class, but the defendant wrote in his memoir (published decades later) on his continuing admiration for Bryan.

* That Bryan’s testimony represented the turning point of the trial. Judge John Raulston, it was certainly true, was not in any way, shape or form impartial, but he was surely correct that Bryan’s testimony was highly irregular. His ruling should have carried the day, except that Bryan, eager to air his views, said he had no objection to the defense motion. (That horrible mistake was compounded by the fact that Bryan had not argued a case in nearly three decades.) In any event, Raulston ruled, the day after the testimony, that the jurors were to disregard every bit of it.

* That Bryan suffered a fatal heart attack toward the conclusion of the trial. The heat—not to mention Darrow’s cross-examination—was rough on Bryan, who suffered from diabetes. But he did not die immediately after his day on the stand, but five days after the end of the trial, in his sleep.

* That, despite their clash, Darrow retained deep respect for Bryan. The closing scene of the film shows Drummond reproving cynical reporter E.K. Hornbeck for his cruel summary of Brady’s life. In fact, Darrow was just as scathing. When he was told by reporters that Bryan had died—perhaps from a broken heart over the trial, it was suggested—Darrow muttered bluntly that it had to do more with "a busted belly," then offered something more palatable for public consumption.

*That H.L. Mencken, though displaying contempt for Bryan, kept an ironic distance from Darrow. The Hornbeck character was based, of course, on columnist-editor-lexicographer H.L. Mencken. Unlike his character in the film, Mencken acted as a virtual consultant to the Scopes defense team. In the modern media environment, that connection would itself be the subject of controversy because of the writer’s extreme lack of objectivity.

* That the case represented the Waterloo for teaching evolution in the schools. Not really. Scopes lost the case before Judge Raulston, but a higher Tennessee court overturned the verdict on a technicality (the jury, not Raulston, was supposed to figure out the size of the fine)—exactly what Darrow was hoping to avoid. He wanted the law to be overturned on its merits, rather than the denouement in this case.

*That Bryan objected to evolution largely because he couldn’t accept the notion of man’s descent from apes. This might be the greatest distortion of all in the movie. The crux of Bryan's opposition came down to what he believed to be a natural consequence of Darwinian evolutionary theory—the notion of “social Darwinism.” Several robber barons had argued that, since evolution favored the strong, they had no obligation to help the poor to survive. Bryan disagreed vehemently, and counterposed the Christian “gospel of love” against it.