William Jennings Bryan - Background and early career, First Battle: 1896, War and Peace: 1898-1900

Political leader and orator, born in Salem, Illinois, USA. After practising law, he was elected to the US House of Representatives (Democrat, 1891–5) and began to develop his reputation as the Great Commoner, using his oratorical skills on behalf of the causes of ordinary folk. He opposed high tariffs, and he called for an income tax, direct popular election of senators, a Department of Labour, prohibition, and women's suffrage. Out of office, he turned to journalism and lecturing, and when he attended the Democratic national convention (1896) and delivered his famous ‘Cross of Gold’ speech on behalf of free silver, the agrarian West prevailed over the urban East and he received the presidential nomination. He lost on this occasion and twice more (1900, 1908). After helping Woodrow Wilson gain the Democratic nomination in 1912, he became Wilson's secretary of state (1913). Devoted to establishing arbitration as the solution to international disputes, he resigned in 1915 rather than go along with Wilson's belligerent warnings to Germany, but when America entered World War 1 he supported Wilson. In 1920 he moved to Florida where, participating in the real-estate boom, he made a fortune. He continued his career as a lecturer, known especially for his support of prohibition and of a literal interpretation of the Bible. It was in this last capacity that he made his final public appearance, speaking for the prosecution at the Scopes anti-evolution ‘monkey trial’ in 1925.

William Jennings Bryan

41st United States Secretary of State
In office
March 5, 1913 – June 9, 1915
Preceded by	Philander C. Knox
Succeeded by	Robert Lansing
Born	March 19, 1860 Salem, Illinois, USA
Died	July 26, 1925 Dayton, Tennessee, USA
Political party	Democratic
Spouse	Mary Baird
Profession	Lawyer, Politician

William Jennings Bryan (March 19, 1860 – July 26, 1925) was an American lawyer, statesman, and politician. Bryan was a devout Presbyterian, a strong proponent of popular democracy, an outspoken critic of banks and railroads, a leader of the silverite movement in the 1890s, a dominant figure in the Democratic Party, a peace advocate, a prohibitionist, an opponent of Darwinism, and one of the most prominent leaders of the Progressive Movement.

Bryan was one of the most energetic campaigners in American history, inventing the national stumping tour for presidential candidates. President Woodrow Wilson appointed him Secretary of State in 1913, but Bryan resigned in protest against what he viewed as Wilson's provocative language in dealing with the Lusitania crisis.

Background and early career

Bryan was born in Salem, Illinois, in the Little Egypt region of southern Illinois, on March 19, 1860, the son of Silas and Mariah Bryan.

Silas Bryan was born in 1822. Silas Bryan, a Jacksonian Democrat, won election to the Illinois State Senate, where he knew Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. Silas lost his seat to a Republican in 1860, the year of William Jennings Bryan's birth, but quickly rebounded by winning election as a state circuit judge.

In 1866, the family moved to a 520-acre farm north of Salem, living in a ten-room house that was the envy of Marion County. Silas served as a sort of "gentleman farmer" and William Jennings Bryan grew up in this agricultural setting.

Both of Bryan's parents were devout Christians. Since his father was a Baptist and his mother was a Methodist, Bryan grew up attending Methodist services on Sunday mornings and Baptist services in the afternoon. In 1872, Mariah Bryan joined the Salem Baptists and the family now worshiped with the Baptists in the morning - at this point, William began spending his Sunday afternoons at the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. In 1874, at age 14, Bryan attended a revival and was baptized and joined the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. In later life, Bryan would refer to the day of his baptism as the most important day in his life, but, being raised in a devout family, at the time it caused little change in his daily routine. As an adult, Bryan left the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in favor of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America.

Bryan was homeschooled until age 10, finding in the Bible and McGuffey Readers the truths he adhered to all his life, such as that gambling and liquor were evil and sinful. In 1874, 14-year-old Bryan was sent to Jacksonville to attend Whipple Academy, the academy attached to Illinois College. During his time at Illinois College, Bryan was a proud member of the Sigma Pi Literary Society.

First Battle: 1896

At the 1896 Democratic National Convention, Bryan galvanized the silver forces to defeat the Bourbon Democrats who supported incumbent President Grover Cleveland, and who had long controlled the party. Bryan's stance, directly opposing the conservative Cleveland and the Bourbon Democrats, united the agrarian and silver factions and won the nomination. Just 36, the youngest presidential nominee ever, Bryan formally received the nominations of Populist Party nomination and the Silver Republican Party in addition to the Democratic nomination. Republicans ridiculed Bryan as a Populist. However, "Bryan's reform program was so similar to that of the Populists that he has often been mistaken for a Populist, but he remained a stanch Democrat throughout the Populist period."

Bryan crusaded against the gold standard and the money interests, demanding Bimetallism and "Free Silver" at a ratio of 16:1.

The Republicans nominated William McKinley on a program of prosperity through industrial growth, high tariffs, and sound money (that is, gold.) Republicans discovered that, by August, Bryan was solidly ahead in the South and West, and far behind in the Northeast. They counter-crusaded against Bryan, warning that he was a madman--a religious fanatic surrounded by anarchists--who would wreck the economy.

War and Peace: 1898-1900

Although Bryan never won an election after 1892, he continued to dominate the Democratic party. Bryan volunteered and became a colonel of a Nebraska militia regiment;

After the war, Bryan came to denounce the imperialism that resulted from it. Republicans mocked Bryan as indecisive, or even a coward, a theme echoed in the portrayal of the Cowardly Lion in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). In 1900, he combined anti-imperialism with free silver, saying:

The nation is of age and it can do what it pleases;

1900-1912: on the Chautauqua circuit

Following his failed presidential bid in 1900, the 40-year-old Bryan re-examined his life and concluded that he had let his passion for politics obscure his calling as a Christian. For the next 25+ years, Bryan would be the most popular Chautauqua speaker, delivering thousands of speeches, even while serving as secretary of state. His most popular lecture (and his personal favorite) was a lecture entitled "The Prince of Peace": in it, Bryan stressed that religion was the only solid foundation of morality, and that individual and group morality was the only foundation for peace and equality.

As early as 1905, Bryan was warning Chautauquans of the dangers of Darwinism: "The Darwinian theory represents man reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate - the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.

Bryan also now threw himself into the work of the Social Gospel. Bryan served on organizations containing a large number of theological liberals: he sat on the temperance committee of the Federal Council of Churches and on the general committee of the short-lived Interchurch World Movement.

In the years following his 1900 presidential loss, Bryan founded a weekly magazine , The Commoner, calling on Democrats to dissolve the trusts, regulate the railroads more tightly and support the Progressive Movement. Parker in 1904, but Bryan was back in 1908, losing this time to William Howard Taft.

Secretary of State: 1913-1915

After supporting Wilson in 1912, he was rewarded with the top job as Secretary of State. Wilson made all the major foreign policy decisions himself, only nominally consulting Bryan. Dedicated to peace (though not a pacifist), Bryan negotiated 28 treaties that promised arbitration of disputes before war broke out between that country and the United States; Bryan resigned in June 1915 over Wilson's strong notes demanding "strict accountability for any infringement of [American] rights, intentional or incidental." When war finally was declared in April 1917, Bryan wrote Wilson, "Believing it to be the duty of the citizen to bear his part of the burden of war and his share of the peril, I hereby tender my services to the Government. Wilson, however, did not allow Bryan to rejoin the military and did not offer him any wartime role, so he threw his energies into successful campaigns for Constitutional amendments on prohibition and women's suffrage.

Prohibition Battles 1916-1925

Bryan moved to Florida in part to avoid the Nebraska ethnics (especially the German Americans) who were "wet" and opposed to prohibition.

Bryan epitomized the prohibitionist viewpoint: Protestant and nativist, hostile to the corporation and the evils of urban civilization, devoted to personal regeneration and the social gospel, he sincerely believed that prohibition would contribute to the physical health and moral improvement of the individual, stimulate civic progress, and end the notorious abuses connected with the liquor traffic. his brother Charles Bryan was put on the ticket as candidate for vice president to keep the Bryanites in line. Fighting Darwinism: 1918-1924 In his famous Chautauqua lecture, "The Prince of Peace," Bryan had warned of the possibility that the theory of evolution could undermine the foundations of morality. This attitude changed when the horrors of the First World War convinced Bryan that Darwinism was not only a potential threat, but had in fact undermined morality. Before World War I, Bryan had been an optimist who believed that moral progress could achieve equality at home and, in the international field, peace between all the nations of the world. In concluding that Darwinism was responsible for the immorality of the present age, Bryan was heavily influenced by two books: the first was Headquarters Nights: A Record of Conversations and Experiences at the Headquarters of the German Army in Belgium and France by Vernon Kellogg (1917), which confirmed that most German military leaders were committed Darwinists who were sceptical of Christianity. In 1920, Bryan told the World Brotherhood Congress that Darwinism was "the most paralyzing influence with which civilization has had to deal in the last century" and that Nietzsche, in carrying Darwinism to its logical conclusion, had "promulgated a philosophy that condemned democracy. However, it was not until 1921 that Bryan saw the threat to morality posed by Darwinism as a major internal threat to the US. The major study which seemed to convince Bryan of this was James Henry Leuba's The Belief in God and Immortality, a Psychological, Anthropological and Statistical Study (1916). Bryan was horrified that the next generation of American leaders might have the degraded sense of morality which had prevailed in Germany and caused the Great War. Bryan decided it was time to act and launched his massive anti-evolution campaign. The campaign kicked off when Union Theological Seminary in Virginia invited Bryan to deliver the James Sprunt Lectures in October 1921. The heart of the lectures was a lecture entitled "The Origin of Man", in which Bryan addressed what he saw as the question foundational to all other moral and political questions: what is the role of man in the universe and what is the purpose of man? For Bryan, religion was absolutely central to answering this question, and moral responsibility and the spirit of brotherhood could only rest on belief in God. The Sprunt lectures were published as In His Image, and sold over 100,000 copies, while "The Origin of Man" was published separately as The Menace of Darwinism and also sold very well. Bryan was worried that Darwinism was making grounds not only in the universities, but also within the church itself. Determined to put an end to this, Bryan, who had long served as a Presbyterian elder, decided to run for the position of Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the USA. (Under presbyterian church governance, clergy and laymen are equally represented in the General Assembly, and the post of Moderator is open to any member of General Assembly.) Bryan's main competition in the race was the Rev. Bryan lost to Wishart by a vote of 451-427. However, Bryan continued his fight from the floor of the General Assembly. Scopes Trial 1925 Bryan actively supported state laws banning public schools from teaching evolution, and several southern states passed such laws after Bryan addressed them. Bryan was asked by William Bell Riley to represent as counsel the World Christian Fundamentals Association at the trial. During the trial Bryan took the stand and was questioned by defense lawyer Clarence Darrow about his views on the Bible. Gould has speculated that Bryan's antievolution views were a result of his Populist idealism and suggests that Bryan's fight was really against Social Darwinism. Others, such as biographer Michael Kazin, reject that conclusion based on Bryan's failure during the trial to attack the eugenics in the textbook, Civic Biology. Mencken using Bryan as a foil for Southern ignorance and anti-intellectualism. Bryan died on July 26, 1925, only five days after the trial ended. School Superintendent Walter White proposed that Dayton should create a Christian college as a lasting memorial to Bryan; fund raising was successful and Bryan College opened in 1930. Popular Image The 1950s play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, Inherit the Wind, is very heavily based on the Scopes Trial. Though the names are changed, Matthew Harrison Brady (played by Frederic March) represents that of William Jennings Bryan: a populist thrice-defeated Presidential candidate from Nebraska named Matthew Harrison Brady comes to a small town in the deep south to help prosecute a young teacher for teaching Darwin to his schoolchildren. In the famous MGM film version, directed by Stanley Kramer and released in 1960, the Brady character (who dies at the end of the trial) is played by the actor Frederic March, who received great critical acclaim for what is a very dramatic - and clearly affectionate - portrayal of William Jennings Bryan. Legacy Kazin (2006) considers him the first of the 20th century "celebrity politicians" better known for their personalities and communications skills than their political views. Alan Wolfe has concluded that Bryan's "legacy remains complicated. Form and content mix uneasily in Bryan's politics. The Trumpet Soundeth: William Jennings Bryan and His Democracy 1896-1912 (1966). "Myths of the Bryan Campaign," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 34 (Dec. 1947) on 1896 campaign; "William Jennings Bryan and the Historians." Issn: 0884-5379 Argues that fundamentalists thought they had won Scopes trial but death of Bryan shook their confdence. McKinley, Bryan and the People (1991), on 1896. "William Jennings Bryan and the Income Tax: Economic Statism and Judicial Usurpation in the Election of 1896" Journal of Law & "William Jennings Bryan and the Presidential Campaign of 1896" White House Studies 2003 3(2): 215-227. "William Jennings Bryan: Boy Orator, Broken Man, and the 'Evolution' of America's Public Philosophy." "William Jennings Bryan and the Social Gospel," The Journal of American History, Vol. Where Did the Party Go?: William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersonian Legacy (2006), on Bryan's place in Democratic Party history and ideology. Bryan, William Jennings. William Jennings Bryan; William Jennings Bryan and the Campaign of 1896 (1953), primary and secondary sources.