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.

This Day in Convention History (Bryan Electrifies Dems With ‘Cross of Gold’ Speech)

July 8, 1896—With a barn-burner of an address to Democratic delegates gathered in Chicago for their Presidential convention, William Jennings Bryan did more than just switch the direction of his party in a more liberal direction, toward an acceptance of silver that incumbent Grover Cleveland would not support.

The former two-term, 36-year-old Congressman from Nebraska and advocate for the Populist movement also served notice that he would launch a campaign in which personal intensity would only be matched by physical mobility, as he became the most important Democratic figure for the next generation—its Presidential nominee three times, and a political force to be reckoned with in two others.

You can listen to Bryan’s recording of his “Cross of Gold” speech on the American Rhetoric Web site, but I’m afraid it would be like hearing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony played on a single note. He read the speech in a recording studio, on equipment far more primitive than today’s, requiring careful pronunciation above all else. It lacked an audience that “The Boy Orator of the Plains” could cajole, convince, exhort, and—at one memorable point, to one lukewarm group—defy.

Most of all, it lacked the suspense—and unexpected drama—of the real-time event. “When I finished my speech," Bryan recalled, “I went to my seat in a silence that was really painful. When I neared my seat, somebody near me raised a shout, and the next thing I was picked up—-and bedlam broke loose.”

At least since the Republican Convention of 1976, when Gerald Ford narrowly beat down the insurgent candidacy of Ronald Reagan, nothing of consequence remains to be decided at the two parties’ quadrennial gatherings. If, as historian Michael Beschloss noted in this past Sunday’s New York Times, modern conventions resemble heavily scripted “infomercials,” the style of their predecessors was political theater. It may have been best exemplified in 1896, when, upon the conclusion of Bryan’s speech, the transported delegates marched around the hall for an hour.

The next day, the delegates nominated Bryan for the Presidency. No prior candidate had been present for his own nomination.  Moreover, although well-received convention speeches have thrust other up-and-rising politicians to national prominence (e.g., Hubert H. Humphrey, Barack Obama), no other has become his party’s nominee the week of his speech.

The fiery finale of the speech (“You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold”) ensured its permanent place in political annals. It also manifested the religious intensity that Bryan would display on public occasions throughout the rest of his life.

As Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, for instance, he and the President placed in State Department posts a high number of former missionaries and their children—part of their plan to ensure that post-imperial China would not only be a democratic nation, but also a Christian one. The concluding, perhaps most controversial, chapter of his life—his participation in the Scopes “monkey trial”—resulted from his fear that the theory of evolution was becoming increasingly accepted by churches.

This unfortunate end to Bryan’s life ensured that he would not be remembered as he should have been—as the most radical contender for the Presidency until another religious-minded candidate, Jesse Jackson, came along in the 1980s. Furthermore, it undoubtedly encouraged historians such as Richard Hofstadter to view perhaps more darkly than they should have the roots of the Populist movement he came to spearhead.

Populism took shape in the Gilded Age, as farmers found themselves increasingly marginalized in an America turning away from agriculture and toward industry. Farmers especially felt themselves at the mercy of railroad magnates and East Coast financiers.

In certain ways, farmers’ sense of loss and rhetoric that blamed Wall Street and foreigners for their plight (Britain had withdrawn money from American banks in the Panic of 1893) has led some media observers (notably, Forbes and U.S. World Report) to liken Bryan and the Populist wing that took over the Democratic Party in 1896 to Donald Trump’s and his supporters that upended the GOP establishment this year.

Historian H.W. Brands anticipated these critics in a 1996 appearance on C-Span’s Booknotes to promote his history of the 1890s, The Reckless Decade:

“A populist is someone who appeals to the masses, who generally employs a rhetoric of distrust of groups that they identify as elite. And in a democracy like the United States, to be branded ‘elitist’ is a serious charge. Populists portray themselves as the defenders of received values, of traditional virtues. They often tend toward demagoguery. In . . . the I890s, they were quite taken by conspiracy theories. This was in line with their thinking that elites controlled the American political systems, the American economy. And there was a notion that if somehow the United States could simply get back to its populist roots, if the common people could once again take control of the political and economic system, then we would return to some golden era of American history.”

 

Certainly, a powerful sense of grievance and a feeling that too many remained stranded in hard times (the Panic of 1893, the Great Recession of 2007-09) are common threads running through these different points in time. Bryan gave voice to this when he directly addressed gold-standard adherents who followed the lead of the incumbent President, Grover Cleveland:

"When you [turning to the gold delegates] come before us and tell us that we are about to disturb your business interests, we reply that you have disturbed our business interests by your course." He went on to redefine "business man" in a broader sense than the proprietor of a large urban concern, as it was already becoming known.

But Bryan, unlike Trump, was a party loyalist, ready to differ sharply with opponents on issues but without resort to name-calling; he was not a billionaire, but a man who had to recoup his finances after the 1900 Presidential race; and, far from espousing vague, often contradictory positions, he proposed specific reforms way in advance of their eventual enactment (e.g., the federal income tax, railroad regulation, women's suffrage, a Department of Labor, state initiative and referendum, and two issues with sharp resonance today: the abolition of capital punishment and campaign fund disclosure). 

The youngest major party Presidential nominee in American history, with little opportunity to make a name for himself during his four years in Congress, Bryan made a virtue of necessity by launching something unprecedented in national politics: a barnstorming campaign by train, in which he made at least 250 speeches, seen by at least 5 million people. This drew an implicit generational contrast with the 54-year-old Republican nominee, William McKinley, who conducted a “front-porch campaign” from his Ohio home.

But McKinley’s campaign manager, Mark Hanna, countered with an all-media promotional blitz based unapologetically on funds derived from the commercial interests that Bryan castigated. 

In his fine new book The Fight to Vote, Michael Waldman not only itemized the multiple ways that the GOP got its message out (e.g., 120 million pieces of literature, brochures in nine languages, and a short film of McKinley that was, in effect, the first campaign commercial), but also its systematic, even shameless form of fundraising (for instance, “Banks were dunned to donate one quarter of 1 percent of their capital to McKinley’s campaign”).

 

Predictably, Bryan was swamped in November 1896. He would go on to be nominated again by the Democrats in 1900 and, after skipping the 1904 race against overwhelmingly popular Theodore Roosevelt, for a third time against William Howard Taft in 1908. He lost each election. But, as leader of the party’s liberals, he lent critical support to Wilson at the 1912 Democratic Convention.  That alliance proved ill-fated for Bryan. Wilson appointed him Secretary of State but sought his advice little, and Bryan resigned in protest over the President’s handling of the Lusitania controversy.

Flashback, May 1915: ‘Lusitania’ Sinks U.S.-German Relations

When the Lusitania sank off the coast of southern Ireland, far more than 1,200 passengers and crew members became casualties of the German submarine attack on the British liner. So did the political career of America’s Secretary of State, any notions of inviolable neutrals in wartime, truth in the face of propaganda—and, ultimately, any chance that the U.S. could stay out of the conflict raging in Europe.

Unlike another ocean liner that had experienced a comparable loss of life three years before, the Lusitania has not formed the backdrop of any blockbuster films, let alone British TV costume dramas or Broadway musicals. Nor, contrary to misimpressions conveyed over the years, did it immediately lead the United States (which protested vehemently over the loss of 128 of its citizens aboaed) to declare war.

But, again unlike the Titanic, the Lusitania sinking did lead to outcries over human-rights violations, and did form part of a campaign that convinced Americans that Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany represented an outlaw state that was threatening international order and peace.

When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, American public opinion still overwhelmingly favored staying out of the conflict—a not entirely surprising result, considering that one in seven Americans traced their ancestry to one of the countries involved. But more than the reluctance of certain immigrant groups tilted toward neutrality: Americans still heeded George Washington’s warning in his Farewell Address to avoid “permanent alliances.” Feeling ran strongly in the United States against involvement in Europe’s ancient quarrels.

In his new bestselling history of the attack, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, Erik Larson stresses the notion of contingency in this fateful event. If only Captain William Turner had received submarine warnings that had been sent to him; if only he had followed the recommended protocol then in place for British vessels that found themselves in harm’s way; if only a thick fog off the Irish Coast hadn’t lifted that day…

But I've come to the conclusion that all of this was immaterial given the supercharged atmosphere prevalent at the time, one that not only assured that the belligerents would test non-combatants in a way they never had been before. The technology and conditions of war had become 20th century, but public expectations that civilians could stay unharmed--especially when the British Navy was maintaining a blockade that could starve Germany--might have been back from the Crimean War. The Literary Digest neatly summarized the prevailing wisdom after the attack: “Condemnation of the act seems to be limited only by the restrictions of the English language.”

To me writing this post in a 21^st century dominated by a 24/7 news cycle, the most astonishing aspect of the crisis was how long it took for the U.S. government to react. When Woodrow Wilson heard the news about the sinking, he was so upset that he slipped away from the Secret Service and walked the streets of the capital by himself—where, amazingly, he was left alone.

It would be another three days (during which the President did not consult with his Cabinet) before Wilson could sort out his thoughts enough to speak, and even then he might have wished he could have walked back what he said. In an address to naturalized citizens at Philadelphia’s Convention Hall, Wilson only alluded to the crisis in the most high-flown terms:

“The example of America must be the example not merely of peace because it will not fight, but of peace because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the world and strife is not. There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.”

One person who was having none of that was Theodore Roosevelt. The leader of the charge up San Juan Hill, having suffered a bitter loss to Wilson in the Presidential race three years before, still hankered for glory—if not on the battlefield, then in the Oval Office. No longer in the White House, he felt no compunction in criticizing its current occupant.

The sinking, TR said in a statement the day after, was “piracy on a vaster scale of murder than any old-time pirate ever practiced….It seems inconceivable that we can refrain from taking action in this matter, for we owe it not only to humanity but to our own national self-respect.”

As John Milton Cooper, a historian of the Progressive Era, has noted, the war—and especially the Lusitania—provided Roosevelt a “chance to cast off restraints.” He would argue ceaselessly for American intervention, and when that didn’t materialize immediately, beat the drums for a monthlong “preparedness” camp to train civilians for military duty.

Privately, to his son Archie, Roosevelt derided Wilson and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan as “abject creatures” who “won’t go to war unless they are kicked into it.” In fact, though, significant differences between the two were developing that would, in the end, be unbridgeable.

In recognition of Bryan’s role as kingmaker at the 1912 Democratic convention, Wilson had named him to lead the State Department. Two years into the administration, it was clear that the two were little suited to each other, with the two men's basic agreement on a moralistic foreign policy being more than outweighed by Wilson's contempt for Bryan as an intellectual lightweight.

But it was the Lusitania crisis that exposed a policy difference which finally drove them apart. Wilson may have told Americans, immediately after the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914, that they needed to be "neutral in fact as well as in name," but in practice Bryan was far more likely to back this principle.

Wilson sent a note affirming the right of neutrals to sail on the high seas and protesting to the German government about their violation of this in the case of the Lusitania. He would not, however, agree to Bryan’s suggestions that the President send a similar message to Great Britain and urge the American people not to travel on Allied ships. The Secretary of State, who could not get the President to see that modern technology had eroded the ability to protect neutrals, signed the note for the President, but with the gravest of reservations, believing it would unnecessarily provoke Germany.

A second, more strongly worded note from Wilson, demanding an end to German submarine warfare, led Bryan to resign on June 9, 1915--who, though lamenting the loss of life on the liner, could not see that it was worse than the British blockage starving hundreds of thousands of Germans to death in a blockade. 

It was an extraordinary moment in American diplomatic history—only one of two times in the 20^th century when a Secretary of State resigned in protest over a specific act or policy. (The second time did not occur until 65 years later, when Jimmy Carter’s dispatch of a hostage rescue mission into Iran prompted Cyrus Vance to act similarly.) Wilson ignored Bryan’s offer of assistance in any capacity when war broke out two years later, and the politician who had been the Democratic nominee for President three times would never again run for, let alone hold, public office again.

Before he left, however, Bryan put his finger on the matter that has been the focus of debate on the Lusitania in the years since: what about the presence of munitions aboard the Cunard liner? He bemoaned the loss of life, but thought that Germany was within its rights to sink the liner to prevent contraband from reaching the Allies. Moreover, he did not see how, as the President stated baldly, “England’s violation of neutral rights is different from Germany’s violation of the rights of humanity.”

The Lusitania had been carrying small-arms munitions for the British Army in Flanders. Almost immediately, however, speculation ran rampant that even more arms, surreptitiously placed, had been aboard the ship. What fed the suspicion was 1) a second explosion heard by many survivors, and 2) the enormously rapid (18 minutes) time it took for the ship to sink. (By comparison, the Titanic went down in almost three hours.) These additional arms, the theory ran, were high explosives, and if their presence could be proven, they would indict the British government for concealing the fact from civilians.

Famed maritime explorer and diver Robert Ballard, while acknowledging that the area surrounding the wreck had been tempered with over the years, concluded that it was most likely clouds of coal dust mixed with oxygen that created the second explosion.

But the controversy is unlikely to rest there. The possibility exists, for instance, that it was the Germans, not the British, who were responsible for the second explosion, in the form of a second torpedo launched by the U-boat commander, Walther von Schwieger. A denial of an ordered second torpedo  in his diary long served to dismiss the notion out of hand. However, that was not the original version of the diary but a retyped one, and the German government would certainly find it within its interest to discredit any notion of their own callousness by falsifying the evidence.

But the chance that it was Britain’s responsibility for the catastrophe, at least in some measure, cannot be ruled out. There was, for instance, the message sent three months before by Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, that it was “most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hope especially of embroiling the United States with Germany….For our part, we want the traffic—the more the better, and if some of it gets into trouble, better still.” There is also the curious decision of the Admiralty not to provide Lusitania with an escort when it came closest to the war zone.

Last year, the British newspaper The Guardian reported on consternation within  the Foreign Office in 1982 at the thought that a salvage mission could expose divers to unexploded munitions and explosives still present in the murky waters around the Lusitania. Moreover, the head of its North American office worried that, 70 years after the event, descendants of the North American victims could still sue the British government by showing that German fears about extensive munitions were well-founded.

Much, but by no means all, of the outrage expressed over the Lusitania’s sinking would have been mitigated by any such discovery. The following passage from an editorial in Scientific American about the sinking would not have had to be changed by a single word, even if the persistent conspiracy theories about The Lusitania could be proved:

“This is the first instance in the history of mankind where a regular transatlantic liner, filled with civilians of many nationalities, has been deliberately sunk on the high seas, and this act was committed, not after allowing innocent women and children to escape in lifeboats, but wantonly and wickedly without allowing the victims of the weapon of destruction any chance for their lives.”

For the change in relations with America, the German government had, in the end, nobody but themselves to blame. Diana Preston, author of Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy and A Higher Form of Killing, notes that the attack was just one event over the course of six weeks in which Germany violated the conventions of warfare and international law. Two months before, it had unleashed poison gas at French and Canadian positions near Ypres. Then, at the end of May, it chose to rain destruction not from the ground or the depth of the sea, but from the air, in the form of a zeppelin that dropped explosives and aerial bombs on London.

While initially disposed to be conciliatory toward the United States, Kaiser Wilhelm was soon heeding the advice of his military advisers that sterner measures were called for. Thus ensued months of espionage, sabotage, and even planned assassinations on American soil. By the time British intelligence had intercepted and translated the Zimmermann telegram guaranteeing Mexico Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico if it joined Germany and Japan in an invasion against the U.S., the American public had had enough.

 
A war declaration by Congress after all of that was a mere formality.