The Life of Bryan
A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan
by Michael Kazin
Knopf, 2006
(374 pages, $30.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Eric Miller
The rehabilitation of has-beens is a fact of political life as old as democracy itself. Curiously, this has proven to be as true for the dead as it is for the living, with figures ranging from John Adams to Dwight Eisenhower arising recently from history’s proverbial ash heap.
Such resurrections should no longer surprise anyone. But when in the first decade of the twenty-first century William Jennings Bryan, that paragon of yesteryear’s simplistic piety and colossal ignorance, comes in for a makeover, it cannot but force the reader (or at least this reader) to sit up, clean his glasses, and check out the facts once more.
The Common Bryan
Michael Kazin, the author of A Godly Hero, is a professor of history at Georgetown University and a genuine admirer of Bryan. The title is not ironic—perhaps as strong an indicator as any that the spell of the so-self-consciously ironic “postmodern” is finally broken. Kazin offers an honest but kind, affectionate but discerning look at a man once known to millions as simply “the Great Commoner,” a three-time Democratic presidential nominee, immensely popular orator, and defender of Christian civilization in the face of the swelling modernist currents of his day.
The remarkable public life of he whom the poet Vachel Lindsay once deemed “the fundamental man” certainly has a lot to teach, and Kazin teaches it well—but not by sorting through layers and layers of psychological debris for “analytic” or “deconstructive” ends. Rather, he simply accepts Bryan for what he (at least to Kazin) was: a clever, gifted, often wise man with an enormous populist and evangelical heart.
Kazin constantly keeps these twin chambers of Bryan’s heart in view, for they are the source of what he finds so appealing in Bryan: his “worldly faith,” shared by multitudes of nineteenth-century Americans, that “married democracy and pietism in a romantic gospel that borrowed equally from Jefferson and Jesus.” The yield of this faith was, for Kazin, a people “who believed that politics should be a moral enterprise and that religion should purify the political world.”
The glimpses Kazin gives us of this people and their “worldly faith” are fascinating, and poignantly serve notice of the vast difference a century can make. After Bryan’s historic “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic convention, for instance, a “joyful riot” ensued. “The floor of the convention seemed to heave up,” one awed and overwhelmed newspaperman recorded, and “everybody seemed to go mad at once . . . the whole face of the convention was broken by the tumult—hills and valleys of shrieking men and women,” who kept at it for some forty minutes.
Another telling example: When in 1898 Bryan enlisted as a colonel in the Spanish-American War, thousands of men from Nebraska joined his regiment explicitly to serve under him; Colonel Bryan had to pick and choose carefully. And one more: Nominating a candidate at the 1904 convention, Bryan delivered a 45-minute speech that didn’t begin until 4:30 A.M.—and the reporters (including a youthful and deeply impressed H. L. Mencken) were still there.
Bryan’s Love Affair
Eric Miller is an Associate Professor of History at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania (www.geneva.edu). He is writing a biography of Christopher Lasch.
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