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.