Shortly biography of the majors party youngest US Presidential Candidate. Well wrote, history of most important events & proposal of first 20th century in US political debate. "The Commoner" was a progressive, fought battles for bimetallic standard, directly election of US senators & woman suffrage. It an easy description, but had many sources on final, some pictures. This edition is 1985. ( )

William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) is one of the most misunderstood and underappreciated of USAmerican political leaders. Like most people of my generation, I knew him best as the fictional character named Matthew Harrison Brady in the 1955 play Inherit the Wind, based loosely on the Scopes Trial in Tennessee in 1925. That play, in part, was influenced by the sarcastic diatribes of H. L. Mencken, who covered the trial for the American Mercury and is credited with dubbing it “the Monkey Trail.” His last scathing remark on Bryan was to say, “It is tragedy indeed, to begin life as a hero and to end it as a buffoon.” Mencken appears in the play as E. K. Hornbeck, in part for comic relief. However, the play was not originally intended as an accurate docudrama at all, but in fact was an indirect attack on McCarthyism for its effect on the popular thinking in the 1950s. Even so, it is this Bryan of the Broadway stage (and eventually a Hollywood movie) that most of my generation had known.

I was vaguely aware that he had been a hero of my father’s youth, and that he was a “silver-tongued orator” whose “Cross of Gold” speech electrified the 1896 Democratic Convention. I knew, too, that my father somehow thought of him as having been a forerunner of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal of the 1930s, but why I wasn’t at all sure. Granted, Bryan did spend his last few years, a die-hard Christian conservative, fighting for prohibition and against the teaching of evolution in the schools. But prior to that he had had twenty-five years as an active political leader, beginning as a Congressman from Nebraska in the 1890s, nominated three times for the Presidency, and serving as Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State for more than two years. So how did this political hero become Mencken’s buffoon?

A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan by Robert W. Cherny, a little book in the Library of American Biography (Little, Brown, c1985), helped me answer that question. After ten chapters of straight-forward biography, Cherny concludes with “Evaluating a Crusader.” Bryan himself in 1896 had envisioned “the humblest citizen,” like himself, the Great Commoner, as a crusader “clad in the armor of a righteous cause.” Cherny begins this assessment with details of his glorious funeral and the honor bestowed upon him. On the side, he does quote Mencken upon his death: “Bryan lived too long, and descended too deeply into the mud, to be taken seriously hereafter by fully literate men, even of the kind who write schoolbooks.” Cherny proceeds to show how Bryan, not an intellectual himself, came to influence social, political, and economic reform in the United States. Reforms he saw enacted in his lifetime, especially in the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson included anti-trust legislation prohibiting monopolistic control, the direct election of senators, and women’s right to vote. Even more important, with the ascendancy of the New Deal, other reforms that Bryan had fought for came about; for example, the graduated income tax, the repeal of the gold standard, the enactment of welfare benefits and Social Security, and independence for the Philippines. He did, indeed, lead in the complete reshaping of the Democratic Party, rejecting the conservatism of Grover Cleveland in his youth and establishing the party's commitment to participatory democracy, government by the majority, fairness to the working classes, and assistance to the down-trodden. He established and edited a newspaper, The Commoner, and spent twenty-nine years (from his first presidential campaign in 1896 to his death in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925) speaking all across the country, largely on behalf of reshaping the party and reforming the US government.

He was also an out-spoken anti-imperialist, opposing USAmerican efforts to exert control over other parts of the world—though, when the Spanish-American War was declared, he volunteered and served his time in the military. Bryan helped Woodrow Wilson win the presidency even though the two men were in many ways polar opposites, and, as Wilson's Secretary of State, was active internationally in his own personal devotion to “conciliation” between nations, effecting thirty treaties. Unfortunately his efforts failed to prevent international conflict and ultimate war. When Wilson decided to enter the Great War in Europe against Germany, which Bryan opposed, he respectfully resigned his position, and returned to private life though not to privacy. Through it all, Bryan’s followers supported him “with unshakable devotion” until his untimely death. Even his staunchest opponents praised him as a man of principle. Under his influence, the Democratic Party initiated and maintained a “commitment to a positive concept of government, its commitment to restraining great concentrations of economic power, and its commitment to increasing the role of the citizen in the political process.”

Unfortunately, in recent years the reform policies envisioned by Bryan and implemented in the administrations of Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR have gradually been reversed. But that’s another story.

A Godly Hero by Michael Kazin is a newer and more comprehensive biography of Bryan, but Cherny's account is succinct and unbiasesd. At last maybe he will be seen by history as someone other than the heavy in a play about the “monkey trial.” Perhaps, waiting in the wings somewhere, is another Great Commoner, ready to lead in the reenactment of the reforms Bryan was so eloquent in supporting. We can hope.