William Jennings Bryan: The Great Commoner
George Woodcock describes the thrice nominated Democratic candidate for the Presidency, William Jennings Bryan, who eloquently expressed the feelings of the Western farmers at a time when the United States were first becoming a great international Power.
In 1896 William Jennings Bryan, a young man with a golden voice and the air of a Victorian tragic actor, rose into prominence as the champion of the distressed American farmer. Candidate of the Democrats and the Populists, he polled only 14,001 votes too few to win the Presidency of the United States, and he did this by campaigning as a progressive and a reformer against the vested interests of Eastern financiers.
In 1925 Bryan stood again in the eye of the world; but on this occasion the stand he was taking seemed, at least to people outside the United States, a very different one; now, as counsel for the prosecution in the celebrated Scopes case, he was defending the right of the State of Tennessee to forbid the teaching of Evolution.
The difference was only apparent; Bryan’s agrarian radicalism sprang from the same roots as his religious fundamentalism; and the dirt-farmers who crowded into Dayton to applaud his fight against modern scientific teachings belonged to that great phalanx of six million voters who, in election after election, had supported his struggle against the banks and the railroads.
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