William Jennings Bryan

For other persons of the same name, see William Bryan and William Jennings.
William Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan
41st United States Secretary of State
In office
March 5, 1913 – June 9, 1915
President Woodrow Wilson
Deputy Huntington Wilson (1913)
John E. Osborne (1913-1915)
Preceded by Philander C. Knox
Succeeded by Robert Lansing
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives
from Nebraska's 1st district
In office
March 4, 1891 – March 3, 1895
Preceded by William James Connell Cookie
Succeeded by Jesse Burr Strode
Born March 19, 1860(1860-03-19)
Salem, Illinois, U.S.
Died July 26, 1925 (aged 65)
Dayton, Tennessee, U.S.
Political party Democratic
Spouse Mary Baird Bryan
Children Ruth Bryan Owen
Alma mater Illinois College, Union College of Law
Profession Politician, Lawyer, Milita Colonel
Religion Presbyterian

William Jennings Bryan (March 19, 1860 – July 26, 1925) was the Democratic Party nominee for President of the United States in 1896, 1900 and 1908, a lawyer, and the 41st United States Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson. One of the most popular speakers in American history, he was noted for a deep, commanding voice. Bryan was a devout Presbyterian, a supporter of popular democracy, a critic of banks and railroads, a leader of the silverite movement in the 1890s, a leading figure in the Democratic Party, a peace advocate, a prohibitionist, an opponent of Darwinism, and one of the most prominent leaders of Populism in the late 19th- and early 20th century. Because of his faith in the goodness and rightness of the common people, he was called "The Great Commoner."

In the intensely fought 1896 election and 1900 election, he was defeated by William McKinley but retained control of the Democratic Party. For presidential candidates, Bryan invented the national stumping tour. In his three presidential bids, he promoted Free Silver in 1896, anti-imperialism in 1900, and trust-busting in 1908, calling on Democrats, in cases where corporations are protected, to renounce states rights to fight the trusts and big banks, and embrace populist ideas. President Woodrow Wilson appointed him Secretary of State in 1913, but Wilson's handling of the Lusitania crisis in 1915 caused Bryan to resign in protest.

He was a strong supporter of Prohibition in the 1920s, and energetically attacked Darwinism and evolution, most famously at the Scopes Trial in 1925. Five days after winning the case but getting bad press, he died in his sleep.[1]

Contents

Background and early career: 1860–1896

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

Bryan's mother was born of English heritage.[2] Mary Bryan joined the Salem Baptists in 1872, so Bryan attended Methodist services on Sunday morning, and in the afternoon, Baptist services. At this point, William began spending his Sunday afternoons at the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. At age fourteen in 1874, Bryan attended a revival, was baptized, and joined the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. In later life, Bryan said the day of his baptism was the most important day in his life, but, at the time it caused little change in his daily routine. Bryan left the Cumberland Presbyterian Church and joined the larger Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. His father Silas was born of Scots-Irish and English stock in st .croix.[3] As a Jacksonian Democrat, Silas won election as a Democrat to the Illinois State Senate, where he worked among Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. The year of his birth, Bryan's father lost his seat, but shortly won election as a state circuit judge.

The family moved to a 520-acre (210.4 ha) farm north of Salem in 1866, living in a ten-room house that was the envy of Marion County.

A young Bryan.

Until age ten, Bryan was home-schooled, finding in the Bible and McGuffey Readers support for his views that gambling and liquor were evil and sinful. To attend Whipple Academy, which was attached to Illinois College, 14-year-old Bryan was sent to Jacksonville in 1874.

Following high school, he entered Illinois College and studied classics, graduating as valedictorian in 1881. During his time at Illinois College, Bryan was a member of the Sigma Pi literary society, and later initiated the Nebraska Chapter of the Acacia Fraternity.[4] To study law at Union Law College, he moved to Chicago. While preparing for the bar exam, he taught high school. While teaching, he eventually married pupil Mary Elizabeth Baird in 1884. They settled in Salem, Illinois, a town with a population of two thousand.

Mary became a lawyer and collaborated with him on all his speeches and writings. He practiced law in Jacksonville (1883–87), then moved to the boom city of Lincoln, Nebraska.

In the Democratic landslide of 1890, Bryan was elected to Congress and reelected by 140 votes in 1892. He ran for the Senate in 1894, but was overwhelmed in the Republican landslide.

In Bryan's first years in Lincoln, he traveled to Valentine, Nebraska on business where he met an aspiring young cattleman named James Dahlman. Over the next forty years they remained friends, with Dahlman carrying Nebraska for Bryan twice while he was state Democratic Party chairman. Even when Dahlman became closely associated with Omaha's vice elements, including the breweries, as the city's eight-term mayor, he and Bryan maintained a collegial relationship.[5]

First campaign for the White House: 1896

A Republican satire on Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech.

Bryan stumped the country for free silver in 1894-96, building a grass roots reputation as a powerful champion of the cause.

At the 1896 Democratic National Convention, Bryan lambasted Eastern monied classes for supporting the gold standard at the expense of the average worker. His "Cross of Gold" speech made him a sensational new face in the Democratic party.

The Bourbon Democrats who supported incumbent conservative President Grover Cleveland were defeated and the party's agrarian and silver factions voted for Bryan, giving him the nomination of the Democratic Party. At the age of 36, Bryan remains the youngest presidential nominee of a major party in American history.

In addition, Bryan formally received the nominations of the Populist Party and the Silver Republican Party. Without crossing party lines, voters from any party could vote for him.[6] In 1896 the Populaists rejected Bryan's Democratic running mate Maine banker Arthur Sewall and named as his running mate Georgia Representative Thomas E. Watson. People could vote for Bryan and Sewell or for Bryan and Watson.

1896 Election

Bryan/Sewall campaign poster.

The Republicans nominated William McKinley on a platform calling for prosperity for everyone through industrial growth, high tariffs and sound money (that is, gold.) 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 staunch Democrat throughout the Populist period."[7]

Bryan demanded Bimetallism and "Free Silver" at a ratio of 16:1. Most leading Democratic newspapers rejected his candidacy.

Bryan as Populist swallowing the Democratic Party; 1896 cartoon from the Republican magazine Judge.

Republicans discovered in August that Bryan was solidly ahead in the South and West, but far behind in the Northeast. He appeared to be ahead in the Midwest, so the Republicans concentrated their efforts there. They said Bryan was a madman—a religious fanatic surrounded by anarchists—who would wreck the economy.[8] By late September, the Republicans felt they were ahead in the decisive Midwest and began emphasizing that McKinley would bring prosperity to all Americans. McKinley scored solid gains among the middle classes, factory and railroad workers, prosperous farmers and among the German Americans who rejected free silver. Bryan gave five hundred speeches in twenty seven states. William McKinley won by a margin of 271 to 176 in the electoral college.

War and peace: 1898–1900

Conservatives in 1900 ridiculed Bryan's eclectic platform.

Bryan volunteered for combat in the Spanish-American War in 1898, arguing, "Universal peace cannot come until justice is enthroned throughout the world. Until the right has triumphed in every land and love reigns in every heart, government must, as a last resort, appeal to force." Bryan became colonel of a Nebraska militia regiment; he spent the war in Florida and never saw combat. After the war, Bryan opposed the annexation of the Philippines (though he did support the Treaty of Paris that ended the war).

Presidential Election of 1900

He ran as an anti-imperialist, finding himself in alliance with Andrew Carnegie and other millionaires. Republicans mocked Bryan as indecisive, or a coward; the portrayal of the Cowardly Lion in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, may pick up the image of Bryan as the Cowardly Lion.

Bryan combined anti-imperialism with free silver, saying:

The nation is of age and it can do what it pleases; it can spurn the traditions of the past; it can repudiate the principles upon which the nation rests; it can employ force instead of reason; it can substitute might for right; it can conquer weaker people; it can exploit their lands, appropriate their property and kill their people; but it cannot repeal the moral law or escape the punishment decreed for the violation of human rights.[9]

In a typical day he gave four hour-long speeches and shorter talks that added up to six hours of speaking. At an average rate of 175 words a minute, he turned out 63,000 words, enough to fill 52 columns of a newspaper. (No paper printed more than a column or two.) In Wisconsin, he once made 12 speeches in 15 hours.[10] He held his base in the South, but lost part of the West as McKinley retained the Northeast and Midwest and rolled up a landslide.

On the Chautauqua circuit: 1900–1912

Bryan giving a speech during his 1908 run for the presidency.

For the next twenty-five years, Bryan was the most popular Chautauqua speaker, delivering thousands of speeches, even while serving as secretary of state. He mostly spoke about religion but covered a wide variety of topics.[11] His most popular lecture (and his personal favorite) was a lecture entitled "The Prince of Peace": in it, Bryan stressed religion was the solid foundation of morality, and individual and group morality was the foundation for peace and equality. Another famous lecture from this period, "The Value of an Ideal", was a stirring call to public service.

In 1905 speech, Bryan warned: "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. If this is the law of our development then, if there is any logic that can bind the human mind, we shall turn backward to the beast in proportion as we substitute the law of love. I choose to believe that love rather than hatred is the law of development."

William Jennings Bryan addresses a crowd from a train in Utica, New York, October 21, 1908.

Bryan 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.

Bryan founded a weekly magazine, The Commoner, calling on Democrats to dissolve the trusts, regulate the railroads more tightly and support the Progressive Movement. He regarded prohibition as a "local" issue and did not endorse it until 1910. In London in 1906, he presented a plan to the Inter-Parliamentary Peace Conference for arbitration of disputes that he hoped would avert warfare. He tentatively called for nationalization of the railroads, then backtracked and called only for more regulation. His party nominated gold bug Alton B. Parker in 1904, but Bryan was back in 1908, losing this time to William Howard Taft.

Bryan's speech to the students of Washington and Lee University began the Washington & Lee Mock Convention.

Secretary of State: 1913–1915

Cartoon depicting Secretary of State Bryan reading news from the war fronts in 1914.

For supporting Woodrow Wilson for the presidency in 1912, he was appointed as Secretary of State. However, Wilson only nominally consulted Bryan and made all the major foreign policy decisions. Bryan negotiated twenty eight treaties that promised arbitration of disputes before war broke out between countries and the United States; onto which Germany never signed. In the civil war in Mexico in 1914, he supported American military intervention.

Bryan resigned in June 1915 over Wilson's strong notes demanding "strict accountability for any infringement of [American] rights, intentional or incidental." He campaigned for Wilson's reelection in 1916. When war 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. Please enroll me as a private whenever I am needed and assign me to any work that I can do."[12] Wilson, however, did not allow Bryan to rejoin the military and did not offer him any wartime role since he was now fifty-seven, so Bryan campaigned for the later adopted Constitutional amendments on prohibition and women's suffrage.

Prohibition battles: 1916–1925

Partly to avoid Nebraska ethnics such as the German-Americans who were "wet" and opposed to prohibition, [13] Bryan moved to Miami, Florida. Bryan filled lucrative speaking engagements and was extremely active in Christian organizations. Deeming him not dry enough, he refused to support the party's presidential nominee James M. Cox in 1920. As one biographer explains,

“ 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. Hence he became interested when its devotees in Nebraska viewed direct legislation as a means of obtaining antisaloon laws.[14] ”
William Jennings Bryan and wife, Mary, in New York City, June 19, 1915.

Bryan's national campaigning helped Congress pass the 18th Amendment in 1918, which shut down all saloons as of 1920. While prohibition was in effect, however, Bryan did not work to secure better enforcement. He opposed a highly controversial resolution at the 1924 convention condemning the Ku Klux Klan, expecting it would soon fold.[15] For the nomination in 1924, he opposed the wet Al Smith; Bryan's brother, Nebraska Governor Charles W. Bryan, was put on the ticket with John W. Davis as candidate for vice president to keep the Bryanites in line. Bryan was very close to his younger brother Charles and endorsed him for the vice presidency.

Bryan was the chief proponent of the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, the precursor to our modern War on Drugs. However, he argued for the act's passage more as an international obligation than on moral grounds.[16]

Fighting the theory of evolution: 1918–1925

Before World War I, Bryan believed moral progress could achieve equality at home and, in the international field, peace between all the world's nations.

Bryan opposed Darwinism for two reasons. First its materialistic account of the descent of man thorough evolution undermined the Bible. Second, he saw neo-Darwinism or Social Darwinism as a great evil force in the world promoting hatreds and conflicts, especially the World War.[17]

In his famous Chautauqua lecture, "The Prince of Peace," Bryan warned the theory of evolution could undermine the foundations of morality. However, he concluded, "While I do not accept the Darwinian theory I shall not quarrel with you about it."

Charles W. and William J. Bryan.

One book Bryan read at this time convinced him that neo-Darwinism (emphasizing the struggle of the races) had undermined morality in Germany.[18]Bryan was heavily influenced by Vernon Kellogg's 1917 book, Headquarters Nights: A Record of Conversations and Experiences at the Headquarters of the German Army in Belgium and France, which asserted (on the basis of a conversation with a reserve officer named Professor von Flussen) that German intellectuals were committed social Darwinists totally committed to might-makes-right.[19]

Bryan also read The Science of Power by Benjamin Kidd (1918), which attributed the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche to German nationalism, materialism, and militarism which in turn was the outworking of the social Darwinian hypothesis.[20]

In 1920, Bryan told the World Brotherhood Congress the theory of evolution was "the most paralyzing influence with which civilization has had to deal in the last century" and that Nietzsche, in carrying the theory of evolution to its logical conclusion, "promulgated a philosophy that condemned democracy... denounced Christianity... denied the existence of God, overturned all concepts of morality... and endeavored to substitute the worship of the superhuman for the worship of Jehovah."[21]

By 1921 Bryan saw Darwinism as a major internal threat to the US. The major study which seemed to convince Bryan of this was James H. Leuba's The Belief in God and Immortality, a Psychological, Anthropological and Statistical Study (1916). In this study, Leuba shows during four years of college a considerable number of college students lost their faith. Bryan was horrified that the next generation of American leaders might have the degraded sense of morality which he believed had prevailed in Germany and caused the Great War. Bryan then launched an anti-evolution campaign.[22]

Ever Hopeful
A November 1924 cartoon depicts Bryan with his brother, Charles, sitting on a log marked "Almost the Solid South" looking at the sun marked "1928" where more hope might come for them. Charles unsuccessfully ran for the vice presidency in the 1924 election having lost a number of southern states.

When Union Theological Seminary in Virginia invited Bryan to deliver the James Sprunt Lectures, the campaign kicked off in October 1921. The heart of the lectures was a lecture entitled "The Origin of Man", in which Bryan asked, "what is the role of man in the universe and what is the purpose of man?" For Bryan, the Bible 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 the theory of evolution and also sold very well.[23]

Bryan was worried that the theory of evolution was making grounds not only in the universities, but also within the church itself. Many colleges were still church-affiliated at this point. The developments of 19th century liberal theology, and higher criticism in particular, had left the door open to the point where many clergymen were willing to embrace the theory of evolution and claimed that it was not contradictory with their being Christians. 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, which was at the time embroiled in the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy. (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. Charles F. Wishart, president of the College of Wooster, who had loudly endorsed the teaching of the theory of evolution in the college. Bryan lost to Wishart by a vote of 451-427. Bryan then failed in a proposal to cut off funds to schools where the theory of evolution was taught. Instead the General Assembly announced disapproval of materialistic (as opposed to theistic) evolution.

According to author Ronald L. Numbers, Bryan was not nearly as much of a fundamentalist as many modern day creationists and is more accurately described as a "day-age creationist":

William Jennings Bryan, the much misunderstood leader of the post–World War I antievolution crusade, not only read the Mosaic “days” as geological “ages” but allowed for the possibility of organic evolution— so long as it did not impinge on the supernatural origin of Adam and Eve.[24]

Scopes Trial: 1925

Congresswoman Ruth Bryan Owen.

In addition to his unsuccessful advocacy of banning the teaching of evolution in church-run universities, Bryan also actively lobbied in favor of state laws banning public schools from teaching evolution. The legislatures of several southern states proved more receptive to his anti-evolution message than the Presbyterian Church had, and consequently passed laws banning the teaching of evolution in public schools after Bryan addressed them. A prominent example was the Butler Act of 1925, making it unlawful in Tennessee to teach that mankind evolved from lower life forms.[25]

Bryan's participation in the highly publicized 1925 Scopes Trial served as a capstone to his career. He was asked by William Bell Riley to represent the World Christian Fundamentals Association as counsel at the trial. During the trial Bryan took the stand and was questioned by defense lawyer Clarence Darrow about his views on the Bible. He was asked questions with no known answers, such as the population of China 5000 years ago. The questions were designed to force him to admit he did not know, or to guess wildly, or to add questionable explanations to things of the Bible. By clever casuistic reply, Bryan outmaneuvered Darrow in about seventy percent of the cross examination. But the media played up the five percent were he was made to look ignorant and the ten percent where he and Darrow came out even. Biologist Stephen Jay Gould has speculated that Bryan's anti-evolution views were a result of his Populist idealism and suggests that Bryan's fight was really against Eugenics. However the biographers, especially Michael Kazin, reject that conclusion based on Bryan's failure during the trial or at any other time to attack eugenics; Kazin notes there is a section on eugenics in Civic Biology, which was the biology textbook Scopes was in trouble for using.[26] The national media reported the trial in great detail, with H. L. Mencken using Bryan as a symbol of Southern ignorance and anti-intellectualism. In a more humorous vein, satirist Richard Armour stated in It All Started With Columbus that Darrow had "made a monkey out of" Bryan.

The trial concluded with a directed verdict of guilty, which the defense encouraged, as their aim was to take the law itself to a higher court in order to challenge its constitutionality. However, the state supreme court reversed the verdict on a technicality and Scopes went free.

Immediately after the trial, Bryan continued to edit and deliver speeches, traveling hundreds of miles that week. On Sunday, July 26, 1925, he drove from Chattanooga to Dayton to attend a church service, ate a meal and died in his sleep that afternoon--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. Bryan is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. His tombstone reads "He kept the Faith." He was survived by among others, a daughter, Congresswoman Ruth Bryan Owen.

Popular image

Main article: Inherit the Wind

The 1950s play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, Inherit the Wind, is a fictionalized account of the Scopes Trial written in response to McCarthyism. A populist thrice-defeated Presidential candidate from Nebraska named Matthew Harrison Brady comes to a small town named Hillsboro in the Deep South to help prosecute a young teacher for teaching Darwin to his schoolchildren. He is opposed by a famous liberal lawyer, Henry Drummond, and chastised by a cynical newspaperman as the trial assumes a national profile. Critics of the play charge that it mischaracterizes Bryan and the trial.

Bryan also appears as a character in Douglas Moore's 1956 opera, The Ballad of Baby Doe and is briefly mentioned in John Steinbeck's East of Eden. His death is referred to in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Bryan was also mentioned on the May 23, 2007 episode of The Daily Show when fictional comedian Geoffrey Foxworthington (an early 20th century parody of Jeff Foxworthy) quotes, "If your dream Vice President is William Jennings Bryan, you might be a puzzlewit." In Robert A. Heinlein's Job: A Comedy of Justice, Bryan's unsuccessful or successful runs for the presidency are seen as the 'splitting off' events of the alternate histories through which the protagonists travel.

Legacy

Statue of Bryan on the lawn of the Rhea County, Tennessee courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee.

Kazin (2006) considers him the first of the 20th century "celebrity politicians" better known for their personalities and communications skills than their political views. Shannon Jones (2006) writes that one of the few topics touched on by historians is Bryan's apparent support of American racism, pointing that Bryan never took a principled stand against white supremacy in the Southern United States. Jones explains that "the ruling elite in the South, the remnants of the old southern slaveholding oligarchy, formed a critical base of the Democratic Party. This Party had defended slavery and secession and had led the struggle against post-Civil War Reconstruction. It had opposed granting suffrage to freed slaves and generally opposed all progressive reforms aimed at alleviating the oppression of blacks and poor whites. No politician could hope for national leadership in the Democratic Party, let alone expect to win the presidency, by attacking the system of racial oppression in the South."

Alan Wolfe has concluded that Bryan's "legacy remains complicated." Form and content mix uneasily in Bryan's politics. The content of his speeches leads in a direct line to the progressive reforms adopted by 20th century Democrats. But the form his actions took was a romantic invocation of the American past, a populist insistence on the wisdom of ordinary folk, and a faith-based insistence on sincerity and character.

In "They Also Ran", Irving Stone criticized Bryan as a person who was egocentric and never admitted wrong. Stone mentioned how Bryan lived a sheltered life and therefore could not feel the suffering of the common man. He speculated that Bryan merely acted as a champion of the common man in order to get their votes. Irving Stone mentioned that none of his ideas were original and that he did not have the brains to be an effective president. Stone personally believed Bryan to be one of the nation's worst Secretaries of State. He also feared that Bryan would have supported many radical religious blue laws. Stone felt that Bryan had one of the most undisciplined minds of the 19th century and that McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft all made better presidents.

However, a number of prominent personalities have also defended Bryan and his legacy. In 1962 the journalist Merle Miller interviewed former President Harry Truman. When asked about Bryan, Truman replied that he [Bryan] "was a great one — one of the greatest". Truman also claimed that, in his opinion, "if it wasn't for old Bill Bryan there wouldn't be any liberalism at all in the country now. Bryan kept liberalism alive, he kept it going." In 1900 Truman, then just sixteen, had served as a page to the Democratic National Convention in Kansas City, there he had heard Bryan give his acceptance speech. In his biography of Truman, the historian David McCullough wrote that in 1900 Truman and his father "declared themselves thorough 'Bryan men'...Bryan remained an idol for Harry, as the voice of the common man." Tom L. Johnson, the famed progressive mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, referred to Bryan's campaign in 1896 as "the first great struggle of the masses in our country against the privileged classes." In a 1934 speech dedicating a memorial to Bryan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said "I think that we would choose the word 'sincerity' as fitting him [Bryan] most of all...it was that sincerity that served him so well in his life-long fight against sham and privilege and wrong. It was that sincerity which made him a force for good in his own generation and kept alive many of the ancient faiths on which we are building today. We...can well agree that he fought the good fight; that he finished the course; and that he kept the faith."

Bryan truley was one of the greatest speakers of his time, and he became a fixture of the democratic party and a hero to the common man. He is normally not credited enough for bringing the Democratic party together to make it into the strongest it could be. Even though he only advocated for the rights of white men, he still couldn’t stop his message from reaching all common people of the nation. Starting with his Cross of Gold speech Bryan brought the populist party into the Democratic, and with his common man message he would inevitably draw the African-American and feminist vote into the party. Bryan became the bridge that brought different factions into the Democratic party, and paved for liberal democrats like Franklin D. Roosevelt with his New Deal legislation. He changed the tide of the Democratic party, and arguably the Democratic party would might be a party of the common people without him.

Bryan County, Oklahoma was named after him.[27] Bryan Memorial Hospital (now BryanLGH Medical Center) of Lincoln, Nebraska, and Bryan College located in Dayton, Tennessee, are also named for William Jennings Bryan. The William Jennings Bryan House in Nebraska was named a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1963.

The full name of Baseball Hall of Famer Billy Herman was William Jennings Bryan Herman.

In 1986, the United States Postal Service issued a $2 postage stamp in his honor, as part of the Great Americans series.[28]

Nicknames

Bryan had an unusually high number of nicknames given to him in his lifetime; most of these were given by his loyal admirers in the Democratic Party. In addition to his best-known nickname, "The Great Commoner", he was also called "The Silver Knight of the West" (due to his support of the free silver issue) and the "Boy Orator of the Platte" (a reference to his oratorical skills and his home near the Platte River in Nebraska). A derisive nickname given by journalist H.L. Mencken, a prominent Bryan critic, was "The Protestant Pope", a reference to Bryan's devout religious views.

Publications

Secondary sources

Biographies

Specialized studies

See also

References

  1. ↑ Jeffrey P. Moran, The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents (2002)
  2. ↑ Bryan, Williams Jennings; Mary j Baidje (2003) "Memoirs of William Jennings Bryan" Kessinger p. 22-26.
  3. ↑ Asked when his family "dropped the 'O'" from his surname, he responded there never had been one. Bryan Memoirs of William Jennings Bryan; Kessinger p. 22-26.
  4. ↑ Acacia Fraternity. "Acacia Fraternity: Notable Acacians". Retrieved on 2008-10-30.
  5. ↑ Folsom, B.W. No More Free Markets Or Free Beer: The Progressive Era in Nebraska, 1900-1924 (Lexington Books, 1999), pp.57-59.
  6. ↑ The Populists and Silver republicans were virtually defunct in 1900 and 1908 and he ran only on the Democratic ticket those years.
  7. ↑ Coletta, (1964), vol.1, pg.40
  8. ↑ Glad (1964)
  9. ↑ Hibben, Peerless Leader, 220
  10. ↑ Coletta 1:272
  11. ↑ Coletta, William Jennings Bryan vol 2 p. 2
  12. ↑ Hibben, Peerless Leader, p. 356
  13. ↑ (Coletta 3:116)
  14. ↑ Coletta William Jennings Bryan vol 2 p. 8
  15. ↑ Bryan disliked the KKK but never publicly attacked the Klan. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan 3:162, 177, 184; Kazin
  16. ↑ Historical documents
  17. ↑ Coletta, William Jennings Bryan vol 3 ch 8
  18. ↑ Coletta, William Jennings Bryan vol 3 p. 200
  19. ↑ Bryan was especially influenced by pp 22-31 of Kellogg's book, which is online
  20. ↑ Bryan, Memoirs 552-53
  21. ↑ Bradley J. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates (1991) p 68
  22. ↑ Coletta 3:200
  23. ↑ Bryan, In His Image (1922) full text online
  24. ↑ The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, expanded edition, Ronald L. Numbers, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 2006, p. 13 ISBN-10: 0-674-02339-0
  25. ↑ "It shall be unlawful..." to teach "...any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." Section 1 of House Bill No. 185
  26. ↑ Kazin p.289. In a speech that Bryan was working on when he died there is one sentence that says "scientific breeding" is impossible. The speech did not use the word "eugenics" and the term does not appear in his writings. Bryan, Memoirs p. 548.
  27. ↑ Oklahoma Historical Society. "Origin of County Names in Oklahoma", Chronicles of Oklahoma 2:1 (March 1924) 75-82 (retrieved August 18, 2006).
  28. ↑ Scott catalog # 2195.

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NAME Bryan, William
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION United States Secretary of State
DATE OF BIRTH March 19, 1860
PLACE OF BIRTH Salem, Illinois, U.S.
DATE OF DEATH July 26, 1925
PLACE OF DEATH Dayton, Tennessee, U.S.