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University Daily Kansan Thursday, March 17, 1960
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The Silver-Tongued Orator
By Calder M. Pickett
Associate Professor of Journalism
On a summer day in 1896, a young man from Nebraska arose at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and with a speech marked by glittering oratory and meaningless metaphor transfixed his audience. He held farmer delegates and city delegates in the palm of his hand, and when he had finished he had knocked out "Silver Dick" Bland and was the candidate of his party for the presidency.
That man was William Jennings Bryan, and the 100th anniversary of his birth will be celebrated Saturday. Especially proud of Bryan will be residents of Salem, Ill., where the "Boy Orator of the Platte" was born March 19, 1860. Even more proud, probably, will be Nebraskans, for Bryan was a Nebraskan when the Democrats honored him in 1896, 1900, and again in 1908.
He ran for the presidency three times. His harsher critics maintain that the republic was three times saved. But the image of Bryan is not only that of Fundamentalist charlatan who prosecuted John T. Scopes but also Populist crusader and champion of the little man. Many an old-timer still reveres the memory of Bryan, and who can say that they are wrong?
Those who were around in '96, '00, and '08 think of Bryan chiefly as the standard-bearer of democratic Populism. They remember that day when the Democratic party went almost mad over that great conclusion of a great address:
"Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."
Such imagery is representative of the pious family background of
this politician who could have qualified easily as a Protestant minister in his time. He was the son of a state senator and circuit judge. When he was 2 years old the family moved to a new home. Bryan was graduated from Illinois College at Jacksonville and the Union College of Law in Chicago. He practiced law at Jacksonville and then moved to Lincoln, Neb.
Bryan meanwhile was closely following the national debate over coinage of gold and silver. In Nebraska he helped to found a round table which discussed the tariff, monopoly, railroad legislation and farm problems. When he was 30 he was elected to Congress, and he gained notoriety by a debate on the tariff which revealed him as a sound and adroit thinker.
The Nebraskan stayed in Congress, being re-elected in 1892. He made a bid for the Senate in 1894, and lost. He then became editor of the Omaha World-Herald. Already he had national ambitions, and it was no accident that he made such a speech at the Chicago convention.
But hard facts more and more began to escape Bryan, and Fundamentalist religion and emotionalism more and more triumphed. The stern religious atmosphere of his early life began to dominate him.
In the campaign of 1896 he faced William McKinley, the "front porch" candidate of the Republican party. McKinley promised the voters a "full dinner pail," and the press of the East, even the usually liberal New York World and the ordinarily responsible New York Times, vindictively opposed Bryan. Reid's Tribune and Ochs' Times revised him. The Times called his party the "Popocats" and contrasted Bryan's followers with responsible Republican businessman. McKinley received a little more than seven million votes, Bryan a little less than six and a half million.
Bryan faced McKinley again in 1900, after lining up in 1898 against the international policies of the Republicans and the Spanish-American War, which McKinley
supported only reluctantly, and after long meditation and prayer. Bryan again lost. The Democrats deserted "The Great Commoner" in 1904, preferring the colorless trust-buster, Alton B. Parker. Parker lost to theodore Roosevelt, and Bryan ran again in 1908. Again he lost, this time to William Howard Taft.
His last days were inglorious ones, Wrapped up more and more in his Fundamentalist creed, defying the scientific and social concepts of Darwinism, eating gluttonously, and stereotyped with fan in one hand and Bible in the other, he found himself involved in the Scopes trial of 1925.
The details of that trial are too well known to need repeating. Bryan represented the state of Tennessee, which had passed a law forbidding the teaching of the doctrine of evolution. Clarence Darrow, the free-thinking criminal lawyer who was the antithesis of Bryan, defended Scopes.
"You believe the story of the flood to be a literal interpretation?" Darrow asked Bryan, who was on the stand testifying as an expert on the Bible.
"Yes sir," Bryan said. "I
"I would not attempt to fix the day."
"When was that flood?"
"But what do you think that the Bible itself says? Don't you know how it was arrived at?"
"I never made a calculation." What do you think?"
"I do not think about things I don't think about."
"Do you think about things you do think about?"
"'What's wrong?'."
"Well, sometimes."
Bryan won the case, but the jury was stacked. Darrow had humiliated him, and shortly after the trial, Bryan ate a Bryan-sized meal, and died in his sleep. The two images of Bryan remain—the golden-voiced orator who used the "Cross of Gold" metaphor; the view of such fierce foes as H. L. Mencken, who said democracy had been "on the downward curve since the campaign of 1896."
SELDEN, Kan. —(UPI)— Mrs.
Matilda Rogers, a Kansas Pioneer
who came to the Sunflower State in
a covered wagon, observes her 180th
birthday today.
Mrs. Rogers, a widow, was born in Iowa.
She said the birthday party will be quiet with "a few friends attending."
Pioneer Woman Celebrates 108th Birthday
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