SOURCE: “The Christian Statesman,” in Odell Shepard: Essays of 1925, Edwin Valentine Mitchell, 1926, pp. 77-104.

[In the following essay, originally published in the American Mercury magazine in 1924, Masters discusses the political climate in the United States during Bryan's career and Bryan's development of his Christian platform in response.]

With a triumphant centralization, and with the robber tariff and banks of issue, arose the Grangers, the Greenbackers and other sharked-up resolutes, bent on restoring justice in the land. These rebels against the established order were idealists, dreamers, cranks; but they were also brave and good men, men of ideas and insight. Some of them were fanatics; a preoccupying idea which never becomes an act turns some minds to the fantastic or evil behavior of the knight errant. The Civil War had laid the Democratic party flat, but the two administrations of Grant, both within a decade of its close, were so corrupt that the old party of Jefferson began to feel muscular again as early as 1872. Briefly to say it, Cleveland swam into the ken of national life in 1884, though his first election was largely a fluke. Benjamin Harrison defeated him in 1888 with the old chatter of the bloody shirt, and with the old sophistry of the tariff. But in 1892 Cleveland came back with impressive strength. He had gathered around him not only the radical elements, the discontented and the disinherited, but also the intellectuals, the able men who had turned to the Republican party in the war, and now turned back to the Democratic party in order to save the cook-stove in the White House from the thieves. The issue was the tariff, and not only did Cleveland sweep the country for himself; he also carried it for a Senate and a House. At the same time an unknown man, a new type of man, was elected Governor of Illinois. He was John P. Altgeld, who had been a student of penology, of social conditions, of the administration of the law. His political note was novel, and a forecast of a new order. How happy were the Democrats!

One day in the Fall of 1892, amid the prolonged rejoicings of the Democrats over the election, I was walking with my father down Michigan Avenue in Chicago. I have never known a faithfuler, cleaner-minded Democrat than he, using that word to mean a man who loved liberty wholly, and had some idea how to have it and to keep it. “There will never be another Republican President,” he said. He was then a young man, and happy beyond measure over the complete rout of the Republicans. As the election was a referendum on the tariff, and the Republicans had no other issue and none in sight, there was reason to believe that a future dominated by a McKinley, and later by a Harding, could never come to pass. Who could foresee that the Cleveland strength would evaporate, and that Cleveland himself would allow it to ooze from his hands? But it happened so, because he neglected the mandate on the tariff to step aside and tinker with the currency. This divided his Congress badly, and threw fury into the Grangers, Greenbackers and Populists, with the result that when the tariff question was reached, everyone was by the ears; and a tariff bill passed which was so fraudulent that Cleveland allowed it to become a law by the contemptuous neglect of ten days' failure to sign it.

Other things happened: there was a panic, and a great railroad strike, and Cleveland sent troops into Illinois against the protest of Altgeld, Debs was jailed for violating a labor injunction. The Supreme Court invalidated the income tax, and exacerbated an already bad feeling by doing it by a divided court. So again there was a swarming of the hive. The Populists had polled a large vote under Weaver in 1892. Now, with all the old groups, and with the disappointed Democrats, followers of Altgeld and others, they started to make a real end of plutocracy. All the while Altgeld was writing letters and making speeches and giving out interviews. “The tariff has slain its thousands, but the gold standard its tens of thousands!” That was the cry as well as the whisper. Jevons, Ricardo, Mill, Walker and Adam Smith were taken from their dusty shelves and studied. They were mostly bimetallists. Also, the gold standard was a British contrivance to rob the world and rule it!

There was a man then in Missouri named Richard P. Bland, whose sobriquet was Silver Dick. His shriveled reputation began to pulse with new life. He had fathered and fought for the Bland-Allison Act of 1878, which partly restored silver to use; and now he began to be hailed as the man to run for President in the approaching campaign of 1896. He was the candidate most talked of by the radicals, as the silver issue mounted and the country seethed with interest. But this country is sectional, economically, politically, spiritually, and even poetically. It always has been a sectional country, and it is likely to remain so. Hill of New York, enemy as he was of Cleveland, nevertheless aligned himself with Cleveland on the money question; and in the West, Vilas of Wisconsin, a Cleveland henchman, prepared for the fight against the anarchists. For the most part it was a fight between the East and the West, between the country and the city; and all the while Altgeld was vilified and caricatured as no other man in America has ever been. A cartoon was published of him in an eastern journal (I believe it was called A Journal of Civilization) in which he was pictured as a huge viper, the deadly snake of anarchy; and magazines of lofty spirit lent themselves to articles in which his reasons for pardoning the deluded playboys of the western world, who had escaped hanging in 1887, were analyzed in order to extract from them all satanic poisons.

II

But one-half of the world laughs and goes on and ignores such disturbing quarrels; perhaps it is the wiser half. In the midst of the rising political storm America had a glorious interlude: it was the World's Fair in Chicago, where most of the country feasted and was happy in a Summer of unexampled beauty. Here Buffalo Bill brought his Wild West Show, to the Coliseum, a huge structure near Jackson Park, in which the Indians and the cow-boys frolicked all that wonderful Summer, and the Cossacks rode, and the dervishes whirled for an indefatigable hour to the strains of the cow-boy band. There was most excellent beer, too, at Old Vienna on the Midway; and I, who believed still in the notes to “Queen Mab,” and listened at times to the rumblings of the silver movement, found happy oblivion at the Coliseum and at Old Vienna. Soon another show was to be staged at the Coliseum; and I was to see it thoroughly, too, with the notes to “Queen Mab” as the dominant overtone in my mind.

The second show was the Democratic National Convention of 1896. My father, still hopeful of democracy, was a delegate from Illinois, and he gave me the ticket which admitted me to its sessions. I didn't miss any of them. Daily I saw the Coliseum, with its thousand of delegates and spectators, seething with wrath against the banks, the tariff, government by injunction, the Supreme Court, plutocracy, and Cleveland; and etched out against the scowling mass was the pale face of Altgeld, whose hour had come. He couldn't be nominated for President, for he had been born in Prussia, but he could help to make a platform, and engineer the nomination. Silver Dick was the man.

There was first the fight as to whether the Cleveland men or the silver men should run the show. The silver men won, and that meant an Altgeld platform, and an Altgeld nomination. But before the Altgeld platform was adopted, Hill, Vilas, and Williams of Massachusetts fought desperately against making that pronouncement of repudiation and anarchy the program of the party. I can see Hill yet, bald and short, with his dipping, pointed nose and his badgerlike ferocity, gesturing with short strokes, as if with a broad sword, as he predicted the disgrace and the overthrow of the party of Jefferson and Tilden if this dreadful attack upon the prosperity of the country, this assault upon the Supreme Court, were adopted. There were many to applaud him, too; but it was nothing compared to the bellowing cyclone soon to break loose!

I was sitting just above and outside the delegates' space, watching the fight. Suddenly I saw a man spring up from his seat among the delegates, and with the agility and swiftness of an eager boxer hurry to the speaker's rostrum. He was slim, tall, pale, raven-haired, beaked of nose. They caught at his hands, his coat, as he made his way, as if to bid him God-speed, for he was going to reply to the great Hill of New York. But for that matter, Hill's voice had not carried sufficiently; neither had that of Vilas, nor that of Altgeld, who was known to be ill, and who showed it. But as this young man opened his great mouth all the twenty thousand persons present heard its thunder. “I would be presumptuous, indeed,” he began, “to present myself against the distinguished Senator from New York, if this were a measuring of abilities.”

With this forensic artifice, the audience yielded itself to him. Then he was smiling, a sweet reasonableness shone in his handsome face; and then he rose to the thrilling drama of telling epigram, of parry and thrust, of prophetical wrath. Through forty-five minutes he played upon the colossal strings of that responsive audience and when he finished the convention went mad. The delegates arose and marched for an hour, shouting, weeping, rejoicing. They lifted this orator on their shoulders and carried him as if he were a god. And I—was not this the man to carry out the notes to “Queen Mab”? William Jennings Bryan, from Nebraska—that was the word that went round to inform us who didn't know. William Jennings Bryan, only thirty-six years old! William Jennings Bryan, who at thirty-four had beaten and cowed the great Tom Reed of Maine in a debate on the tariff in Congress! At last a man! Silver Dick must step aside as John the Baptist did of old!

I must use a cut-in here: I saw Bryan at Madison Square Garden in 1924, not applauded, but hissed; not carried on shoulders, but in danger of being booted; not smiling, young, trim, inspiring and inspired, but hard, set of mouth, dogmatic, shriveled, old and malicious. The defeat of 1896, and his later defeats, had sculptured him to this figure. It had been better if he had died, or been assassinated in 1896. He would then have become a sort of political Keats, a treasure of the imagination to his country! He saved his life and lost it!

But six million five hundred thousand of us voted for William Jennings Bryan in 1896; and how our hearts were hurt by the terrible assaults made upon him! Why did Joseph Medill call him a “popocrat”? Why did Henry Watterson write him down as a “dishonest dodger,” and sneer at him as a “boy orator”? Why did the clergy of New York characterize him as a “slobbering demagogue,” and a “political fakir,” and the whole East see him as “an addle-pated boy”? We, the young eagles of that day, could not understand the depth of this malice. Suppose he were not a good lawyer, as his enemies said, as an old associate of his, an able lawyer of Chicago, declared. What of it? Suppose he had not succeeded as a lawyer, suppose he was poor. What of it? So was Lincoln poor; and we had a passionate belief in the integrity of this new Lincoln, and in his courage, his dauntless will. We followed him to listen to his great voice balancing epigrams and hurling them at the trenches of Privilege! We saw him riding amid swarming crowds that would have touched him for the curative virtue of his genius to their own souls. And the bands played Sousa's “El Capitan,” which became his triumphal march, as it afterward sang itself in memory as the dirge of his hopes and ours. We marched for him, we lost prestige for him, some of us hurt our chances for life by our devotion to him.

As for myself, I was a precinct captain at one of the Chicago polling-places, deputed to help guard the ballots against the machinations of Mark Hanna. I stood watch all night, until seven o'clock in the morning, when some of us believed that he had been elected—particularly after an old Civil War veteran, also on duty that night, had gone out for a cup of coffee, and returned with the news that McKinley had lost his own precinct. This poor man dropped dead that day from anxiety and fatigue. And I went home to sleep; and found myself in the middle of the afternoon about to crawl out of the window and drop to the street four stories below. I was having a dream that McKinley was elected, as he was! Bryan's picture was in an afternoon paper, showing him staring with fierce beetle eyes, his face thin and drawn from the campaign. Under the picture were words of terrible contempt, of ribald exultation!

We thus gave ourselves to him, and then he left us—not immediately, but gradually, for the germ of his defection was in him from the first. He had begun with the cry of silver at the ratio of sixteen to one; in a few years he was to betray liberty for the thirty pieces of silver given him for lectures which corrupted the thought of tens of thousands of Americans. And now that he is no longer a presidential possibility nor a law-maker nor a law-giver, he is no less the most dangerous enemy that American liberty and culture has. He is the Christian Statesman, out of a job. Having imagined Gladstone in that rôle, he has evolved himself in imitation.

III

As he had no law practice of moment when he was nominated for the presidency, he had none to return to after his defeat; and he had to finance himself somehow. Lecturing was the only thing, or the writing of books (which is always profitable!). Somewhere in those years he was attacked for trying to keep a bequest against the desire of a Mrs. Bennett, whose husband had admired Bryan, and had tried to provide for him financially. Bryan went to court over this matter, and lost the case. He was then charged with loving money too well; but we who clung to faith in him did not believe it.

He had written a book in 1897, called The First Battle, which was a report of his travels and speeches in 1896. It was one of the thinnest productions ever put together by a man of equal conspicuousness, and was disfigured by a biographical sketch by his wife, lacking quality and taste. But we forgave all these things in the consideration that the book had to be composed hurriedly in order to take advantage of the waning interest in the campaign; and to write it seemed a legitimate way for him to finance himself, after the exhaustion through which he had just gone. Moreover, he was reported to be giving part of the proceeds to the silver cause, and the fact helped us to defend the charge of cupidity that was made against him. He also began now to lecture, and to make a great deal of money. His pride had been stung by the flings at him that he was poor, and he started to answer the charge and vindicate himself by getting rich. He was not an Emerson, or a Whitman, subordinating all things in life to a philosophy, a message. Here his ruin began. Also, he was always on the move, lecturing or going to Mexico to look into the matter of fifty-cent dollars; and thus he had no tranquility for reflection or growth.

The Spanish-American War came on in 1898, a war without justification, like our war against Mexico, which had angered Lincoln. Bryan was against the war because it was causeless; but also because he was now beginning to present himself as a Tolstoyan, a Christian Statesman. But when the war actually began, he enlisted and became a colonel. Still, there were some of us who did not see any moral inconsistency in this course. America lives always in a condition of unseriousness, of tenuous conviction, of childish prattle and action about everything. Beside, there is the doctrine that, while a war may be opposed on moral or political grounds while it is brewing, after it is entered upon patriotism requires everyone to support it, in spite of all scruples. Furthermore, we wanted Bryan to win in 1900, and if failing to be a colonel stood in the way of his success we were willing to subordinate our conscience to what seemed to be the greater good—at least, those of us were willing to do this who were not moralists. What did it matter? What does matter? We always see what matters when life has been made, and cannot be unmade.

But things happened in a sequence which shocked most of us profoundly. When the treaty with Spain was made known Bryan said of it: “That is imperialism. It leads us into the hateful paths of colonialism.” And we agreed, and rejoiced that he saw it so quickly. But when the treaty came into the Senate, and was in peril because of its imperialistic character, Bryan showed his elastic expediency by journeying to Washington, and exerting all his influence, which was then very great, with Democratic Senators, to get them to vote for the very treaty he had but recently so vehemently denounced! It had difficult sledding in the Senate, and with Bryan against it, it would have been rejected, Why did he do this? He resorted to an epigram as usual in explanation of his course. “It is easier to make laws with friends than treaties with enemies.” The Bible came in again as the infallible authority: Agree with thy adversary while he is in the way.

But what were the facts behind the mist of this rhetoric? The facts made a ridiculous paragram of the Bryan summation. It was not easier to make a law freeing the Filipinos than it was to make a treaty with humiliated and decrepit Spain. Spain had no power to recuperate during the consideration of the treaty, nor during the time which might have been taken after its rejection for the formulation of another treaty. Spain was whipped, and abjectly abided our will. In consequence of these facts, and because Bryan used the treaty as a basis for raising the issue of imperialism, after he had himself procured its ratification, he was accused, and with justice, of creating the object of his own virtuous indignation and his own plaintive oratory when, at Indianapolis, where he was notified of his nomination in 1900, his peroration swung to the rhythmic appeals of: “Behold a Republic!” This was his nearest approach to an oration in all the tens of thousand speeches that he has made.

So Bryan started forth clothed in the armor of a righteous cause, namely, to get a law to emancipate the Filipinos, and to undo the despotism of the treaty. But the Hamiltonians, having long had their banks of issue, and their tariff, now had their colonies. They had succeeded, after a hundred years of effort, in fastening upon the young throat of America the brass necklace of old world mercantilism. They had been trying to do it all along, whether calling themselves Federalists, Whigs or Republicans. They were as likely to legislate themselves out of the tariff as out of the Philippines. In the campaign Bryan was mocked for his course on the treaty, and reminded that long ago the far-seeing Chief Justice Marshall had called the United States an “empire,” and that it had become one to the full, as he foresaw. No, said the myopic orator of the Platte! What Marshall meant was “an empire of love.” Please pass the bowl!

Some of us were badly nauseated by this sentimental bosh, especially those of us who knew what Marshall had done to centralize the government, and who remembered how Jefferson hated Marshall, and how Jackson contemned his judicial decree in the Cherokee Indian litigation. In consequence, some of us now perceived that Bryan was not holding back a great intellectual equipment and power in order to be understood of the plain people, but that he was in truth only the “boy orator,” and “dishonest dodger” that the seasoned men of 1896 had denominated him. For that matter, the “empire of love” excited the risibilities, too, of the plain citizen of that day; for there were hemp and sugar to be had in the Philippines; and also we were going to civilize and Christianize the Filipinos; and after that we would let them run their country—maybe! It takes time and study to learn how to run a country, as America is run—and time to master the intricacies of the Westminster Confession of Faith, as well as time to believe it, even when gatling guns are used as persuaders.

Now Bryan had to deal with McKinley, a successful Methodist, who asked, looking all the while with accusing eyes, “Who will dare to haul down the flag?” Bryan was afraid to say who would do it. Who, indeed, would want to do it, if the Constitution actually followed the flag, as many averred, though this was disputed? But look how God works to good ends! The Eighteenth Amendment, that masterpiece of the Christian Statesman, keeps intoxicating beverages from all places subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, and thus the Filipinos are saved (at least in theory) from rum! So did imperialism come to good! Let us pray!

IV

Again was Bryan defeated. In this campaign of 1900 Roosevelt brickbatted him with the charge of a “cowardly shrinking from duty.” England smiled at our entrance into the world game, and wished for Bryan's defeat. Being defeated, he announced that he would continue to give his attention to public questions, and to the end of his days. He would also stick to Nebraska as long as he lived, and his ashes should repose in her sacred soil! So he founded the Commoner to keep alive the Bryan cultus, and began the custom of referring to himself in its columns as “Mr. Bryan,”—which was considered, perhaps, more delicate than the use of the capital I, while being as collective and impressive as the editorial we.

Not long after this a friend of mine went to see him—also to see the new mansion which he had built out of his lectures—and to express a regret that he had entered upon the work of an editor. “What shall I do?” asked Bryan pathetically, as this friend reported the matter to me. My friend answered, “Stay at home, study, read, lecture a little for a living, and grow.” He was then only forty years old; and my friend believed that if he would read and reflect he would deepen and strengthen his mind. That was an ill-founded conclusion; but even had it been a well-founded one Bryan was too much infected with the taste for applause, for the stimulation of audiences, for him to heed the advice. Beside, there was much money to be made, and he loved money. Everyone saw this now with perfect clearness.

In the year 1899 I happened to be a house guest over Sunday (called “the Sabbath” by Bryan) where Bryan was also a guest. He did not regard it as sinful for him to take a little time from the service of God to receive the people of the village on this Sabbath, so he consented to do so. Among the devotees of that afternoon was an old man whose son had gone to the bad with drink, or on account of the saloons, as it was then termed. This old man, in my presence, took Bryan by the hand, and in a plaintive voice inquired: “Mr. Bryan, why don't you come out against the saloon?” Bryan's reply was: “The saloon is a local question.” He was in this particular then running true to form. The same rigid respect for form made him fantastic on the railroad question in 1906, when he advocated State ownership for State lines, and national ownership of trunk lines. All in deference to State sovereignty! So the saloon was a local question; and so it would have remained if State sovereignty had not been overshadowed by Bryan's desire to revenge himself upon the liquor interests for larding the lean earth with his political gore. The contributions of the breweries and the distilleries to his campaign funds were acceptable—until he was no longer in the running. That was after 1908. In 1910 he became a Prohibitionist, a matter to be further referred to.

Of the same moral cloth was his treatment of Alton B. Parker. Bryan denounced him as a tool of Wall Street, but when Parker was nominated in his despite he came out for him, and made speeches for him, and said that he had faith that Parker was the Moses to lead the Democrats out of the wilderness. In the convention of 1904 he had made a speech in which he spoke a good word in passing for most of the nonentities who were candidates, but studiously avoided any mention of Parker. Finally, by an oratorical surprise, he threw his choice to Senator Cockrell, of Missouri, an ex-Confederate soldier of no worth-while distinction. He repeated this process in the convention of 1924. He first denounced John W. Davis, and then pledged him his support when Davis was nominated. He made a speech in the convention, just as in 1904, referring to practically all the candidates but Davis.

In 1896 he propounded doctrinal query which did not at the time, to many of us at least, connote the dangerous fallacies which he gradually evolved from his maniacal fanaticism. Because Altgeld had pardoned the men called anarchists, some of whom were anarchists, the newspapers in 1896, with their usual ineptitude of epithet when bent upon destroying someone, started the cry of “anarchist” against Altgeld, and against Bryan and the whole silver movement. Bryan's reply to this seemed to many of us exceedingly apt, what Walt Whitman would call cute. “Who shall save the people from themselves?” In truth, Bryan derived from the Bible many of his oratorical tricks. He fashioned his retorts on the principle which inspired the dangerous query: Is the baptism of John the Baptist of man or of God? All this might be well enough for the purpose of posing a dilemma, and to put sons of hell like Mark Hanna to confusion. But Bryan actually believed in the people with appalling faith, in the face of any fact whatever; and so he believed that none but the people could save themselves. Great minds could not save them; the wisdom of superior thinkers could not save them. They and they alone had within themselves the secret of their own regeneration and progress—after being made to see the light by Bryan himself!

He passed from this way of stating his faith to the open declaration that the people could rightfully have a king if they wanted one. Democracy to him was just a matter of voting, and not a matter of what the people were voting for. The desideratum was not liberty, but popular rule. There is in him no logic of life as a fundamental source of laws and instruments of government, no categorical imperative. Concretely, freedom of speech and of the press, and liberty of the individual, and of conscience rest not upon reason, but upon the sacred will of the people, and can be taken away by the people as justly as they were given. Blessed be the name of the people! Because of this conception Bryan was never a democrat, nor even a popocrat; he is better described as a mobocrat; and what he has done since 1908 shows his madness and his ignorance hurtling with fierce fanaticism toward the extravagant conclusions to which this disastrous idiocy necessarily leads.

So in 1908 he made his campaign on the slogan of “Let the people rule.” And they did, so far as his candidacy was concerned, though he went about saying that the American people would never elect a man President who disbelieved in the Virgin Birth and the divinity of Jesus, referring thus to the Unitarian faith of Taft. Jefferson, a hundred years before, had been elected President when all New England called him an atheist, and the people hid their Bibles against the day when he should come to power and search their houses for the hated book. Jefferson was a deist, and moreover had compiled a reader's Bible, from which everything but the words of Jesus was excluded. There was also before Bryan's nose, at this time, the plain fact, often evidenced directly or indirectly, that the American people will generally elect a Republican, no matter what he is, instead of a Democrat, whatever he may be. Another catch phrase, this matter of Taft and the Virgin Birth,—a spring to catch the woodcock of his fancy, like the “empire of love,” and the later epigram that it is better “to study ‘The Rock of Ages’ than the ages of the rocks!”

The campaign of 1908 finished him as a presidential possibility. Like the unbidden guest who had been thrice kicked from the dance-hall, he concluded that the American people did not want him. But “The Prince of Peace” lecture was still popular, and there was money to be made, and there was religion to be inculcated, and the saloon to be overthrown, and evolution to be voted down and proscribed by law. In general, an urban intelligence which had fully taken his measure was to be punished. All of this could be done by applying the doctrine: “Let the people rule.” He had always been more or less cavalier toward Altgeld and the radicals; and the campaign of 1896 had given him a fear, so that he now retired into every crevice that was conservative or looked conservative. Even in 1900, when he debated the trust question with W. Bourke Cockran, he announced, “I am a conservative man.” What is so conservative as religion? How can you call a believer in free silver a radical when he champions the plenary inspiration of the Bible, not excepting the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes!

Before 1908 he had done much traveling, even circling the globe; and always lecturing, or sometimes writing a book, as he did, for example, in answer to the literary hoax entitled “Letters of a Chinese Official.” Bryan, in his reply, undertook to controvert the philosophy of Confucius and Mencius, whom he had thoroughly mastered in his extensive travels! He was also solemnly assuring his countrymen that he had investigated Brahmanism, Buddhism, and all the other world religions, and that Christianity was immeasurably above them all, for these other faiths were the work of men, while Christianity was the work of God! There you have it!

The “boy orator of the Platte” had become a world figure with a mundane and even a cosmic view. What was the presidency compared to this vast opportunity to do good by lecturing? What was it compared to the moral leadership of the religious people of America, whom he could build up into a voting strength against the saloon which had not liked him, and the plutocrats who had defeated him, and the intelligent and cultured who had seen through him from the first? Political questions are moral questions at bottom! That is Fundamentalism; and he was later to appraise himself publicly as a Fundamentalist in all things, and one who had been so from his youth. So by lectures on religion, comprehending in their implications “pending problems,” he could enter the churches, in spite of the fact that they were mainly run by Republicans, and win the moral constituencies of the country. Once it was shown that a belief in evolution led to atheism and immorality, the lawful right to interfere with its teaching overcame any right of free speech. Here was a trick of reasoning with more vitality to it than that which expressed itself in the poser, “Who shall save the people from themselves?” Bryan had grown intellectually! He had discovered the police power!

V

About this time William Marion Reedy, a great Liberal and a keen analyst of human motives, began to write me: “Bryan is malicious.” I looked for his malice, and soon found it. It was not necessarily that Bryan did not believe in what he was preaching, but that he was preaching it for an ulterior and punitive purpose. Someone should collect in one book all of the good deeds that have been done in malice, and then analyze their results to see what the malice always does to the good act. Whenever I saw Bryan now I caught the malice that was gradually etching itself into the expression of his mouth and eyes. Along the way I was considering the kind of mind which believed implicitly in the Westminster Confession of Faith, and how almost invariably such a mind brings ruin upon itself. So it was that Bryan the idealist—but not the Brand type of idealist,—was also Bryan the liberticide. As a Calvinist he was a covert antagonist of all the liberal sects on the one hand, and of Catholicism on the other. In the democratic convention of 1924, instead of denouncing the Ku Klux Klan for its attack upon religious liberty, as Stephen A. Douglas, in the face of mobs, excoriated the Know-Nothings of his day, he again resorted to a trick of rhetoric: the Catholics were strong enough to take care of themselves!

In the eighties, in Illinois College at Jacksonville, from which Bryan was graduated, the course was the usual run of the classics and mathematics, with the science of that time. What Bryan read in those days, if he read anything outside of Demosthenes' Oration on the Crown, and William Cullen Bryant's poems, I don't know. In spite of his talk about democracy, he is socially protective of his privacy of mind. He is distant and cautious, and, when speaking, oratorical rather than conversational—somewhat condescending, too, in the manner of a proud Methodist bishop, and intolerant of contradiction, as well as averse to consultation. Jack Reid once broke through these barriers and extracted from him the confession that “La Paloma” was his favorite piece of music, and Ben Hur his favorite drama.

But for the most part we are remitted to The First Battle to know what he has read at all. In that book is a list of books he read on the money question. His speeches on the tariff show that he knew that question, too. To-day his lectures and books on evolution show indisputably what he has not read of science and what of science he has not understood though claiming to have read it. In this field the trouble for him is that he trained himself from the beginning to be an orator, as was the custom in his school days. No one then thought of taking a course to be a writer, a poet. If you were an orator you might go to Congress, but if you were a poet you were headed toward the poorhouse, with plenteous contempt from the moral community along the way. A poet tries to tell the truth; an orator tries to persuade. Bryan was always bewitched with the art of persuasion. Hence his epigrams, plays on thought, forensic dilemmas, appeals to fears and prejudices; they sway, coerce and use the mob psychology. With these tricks and arts he has sought to argue for immortality and against evolution. Now, after forty years, he embodies in “The Prince of Peace” a “finished bit of prose,” also quoted in The First Battle, and sees no absurdity in doing so. It was composed while he was a student at Illinois College. I quote a portion:

If the Father deigns to touch with divine power the cold and pulseless heart of the buried acorn, and to make it burst forth from its prison walls, will He leave in the earth the soul of man made in the image of his Creator? If He stoops to give to the rose-bush, whose withered blossoms float upon the Autumn breeze, the sweet assurance of another Spring-time, will He refuse the words of hope to the sons of men when the frosts of Winter come?

Bryan then answers his own interrogatories in the negative, but without demonstrating the affirmative. Since he can do no better, an audience, when he propounds these queries, would be justified in chorusing a simple “yep” or “nope,” as it might suit it. Or some village atheist might arise and point out that the heart of the acorn, which afterwards sprouts, is not dead when it falls into the earth, whereas the heart of a dead man is dead when it is buried in the grave, and sprouts no more to the knowledge of these eyes of flesh. Everyone to his hope and to its lyric expression, under the Bill of Rights! The objection to the “finished bit of prose” is that Bryan uses it to infuriate the plain people to the enactment of laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution.

In 1896 he had roared with agony and indignation when the Republican leaders warned the working men of the country not to return to work the day after election if he were named for the presidency. And in 1900 I saw him escorted by policemen through a vast crowd which choked Michigan Avenue in Chicago, and mount a platform near the Library. He was still young, and there was dramatic charm to him as he flapped a black silk handkerchief around his neck, and sailed into the trusts for threatening the workers with starvation if they voted for him, declaring that he would close every trust in America if he became President. Then, in the winter of 1923, I saw him again. The place was the Moody Tabernacle in Chicago, and he was lecturing on evolution to an audience of 4800 people, and some hundred clergymen, seated on the stage to his left. This audience went into roars of applause when he advocated the starvation of teachers who taught evolution. Separate them from their salaries and they won't be so smart!

Is this man dangerous? He has been the most potent influence in having laws passed in the western States forbidding the teaching of evolution. Kentucky escaped by one vote. There is not a State where such laws have been passed whose constitutions do not guarantee the freedom of speech, of the press and of conscience, and the separation of church and state. But what of it? “Let the people rule!” The Westminster Confession of Faith and “The Descent of Man” are in conflict. Who is to choose between them, and settle the dispute peacefully at the polls? The people! There shall be no state religion, true! But there must be law to give supremacy to the Book of Genesis. Here the Bryan mind of old comes forth. He has explained that liberty of speech is not infringed by these monkey laws, because evolution may be taught, under their careful safeguarding of the principle of free speech, as an hypothesis; and that the only thing that is forbidden is its teaching as a truth. Very well! Come now, you atheists, get laws passed forbidding the teaching of the divinity of Jesus, except as an hypothesis!

About two years ago the president of Wisconsin University was reported in the press to have declared that “Bryan is crazy.” I myself see in him evidences of an almost pathological condition of mind. But in tracing his career, reading his speeches of long ago and of late, and going over his numerous books—for the occupies about an inch in the card index drawer of the New York Public Library—my conclusion is that his mind is simply congenitally twisted, malformed, turnip-shaped, so to speak; just as the skull of the man is something between a watermelon and a squash. If you will look at his earlier photographs, before the loss of hair gave him the counterfeit presentiment of a forehead, you will see that the frontal development is crude and cavernous. But, remembering that the head of Schiller was shaped like a horse's, it may be that the product of a head is a safer test of intelligence than its shape. Already a good deal of the Bryan product has been exhibited. A few more specimens are too choice for omission.

VI

After 1908 he was changing his position on the saloon and getting ready to forsake the principle that it was a “local question,” as he had said in 1899 to the old Prohibitionist in my presence. The Prohibitionists had no foe so outspoken as the Democratic party in the days of Dow and Levering; and its platforms regularly denounced all “sumptuary legislation” as violative of the personal rights of man. If I mistake not, even the platform of 1896 contained such a declaration; I have no book at hand by which to verify this matter, and the reader may look it up for himself. But in 1908, the last year of the Bryan candidacy, Missouri went Republican, and thereby endorsed the deistic faith of Taft. So did Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and New York. Bryan concluded that the saloon had overcome the natural repugnance to deism which the electorate of those States unquestionably entertained. And so he felt impelled to take up the moral issue and make it a political one. It would never have become an issue of moment, never enlarged itself anyway to the proportions of prohibiting all drink, had it not been that the Southern States wanted to keep gin away from the Negro and that it got the aid of Bryan.

It was now July, 1910, and the Democratic State Convention was in session at Grand Island, Nebraska. A majority report had been brought in condemning county option, probably because it was not democratic, and did not confine the matter to the boundaries of a “local issue.” But the saloon was now a moral question with Bryan; and he had fully developed his theory of the equivalence of moral and political questions, and the duty of men to make laws out of them; and so he was, in this convention, evidently much berated, judging by the tone of the speech he made in support of his minority report, which contained this proposition: “We favor county option as the best means of dealing with the liquor question,”—not, mark you, national Prohibition, as the Prohibitionists had been at that time demanding for years. His morality was yet to grow from county option to national Prohibition. He was then only 50. In support of his minority plank Bryan said this:

And some have said that I am actuated by a spirit of resentment; that I am mad because the liquor interests were against me last Fall. Well, my friends, it is true that the liquor Democrats and liquor Republicans put the liquor question above all else. They traded me in this and in other States; I would have been defeated in my own State if it had not been for Republicans, who because of State pride came to my rescue and took the place of Democrats who deserted me. In Missouri, also, I have no hesitancy in saying, the influence of the liquor element was sufficient to account for my loss of that Democratic State. We had the same difficulty in Indiana and Ohio. We had the same trouble in Illinois, and in New York. And do you say that I must not refer to the liquor influence in politics for fear somebody will accuse me of being sore over being defeated?

Then as to his belated championship of the cause:

Do not accuse me of bringing this question into politics. I met an issue after it had been introduced, and if I have any apologies to offer, I shall not offer them to the liquor interests for speaking now; I shall offer them to the fathers and mothers of this State for not speaking sooner. If I am to blame at all, it is for keeping silent—when they had more reason to expect me to speak than the brewers have to expect me to keep silent now.

Yes, he met the issue after it had been made. Kansas, at this time, had long been under a State Prohibition law, so had Maine, so had several Southern States; and the matter had been constantly agitated, according to the American fashion, for seventy-five years. Bryan came to the front only after the brewers took democratic Missouri away from him! And, even then, only with the mild proposition of county option, not national Prohibition and by a constitutional amendment, creating theocratic imperialism!

Having thus started on his course of Prohibition by the route of county option, he began accumulating arguments for the abolition of all drinks, though they were mild as the wine which Jesus by a miracle synthesized for those who grew mellow and happy at the wedding in Cana. One of these arguments was that people who drink blur their minds so that they cannot serve God! Another argument was that men spend money for drink which should be given to God. According to this test, if oratory and lecturing and twisting your political course blur the mind so that God cannot be properly served; and if tours of the world, and fried chicken, and owning real estate in Florida, take money which should be given to God, then these should be prohibited too. However, Prohibition came to pass. And now there was other work to do in the service of the Master. Work while there is day—and box office receipts. Atheism must be stamped out, and the way to do it was to overthrow Darwinism. He took up the task.

In the way of supporting the proposition of special creation there was the matter of demonstrating the possibility of a miracle. It was well for the originality of his logic that he had never read Hume's “Essay on Miracles”—or digested it if he did. There is the law of gravitation, said Bryan. It can be overcome by a miracle. I hold an apple in my hand and will that it shall not fall to the earth. A miracle, and proven! Then he wrote a book, and entitled it In His Image. Herein he attacked the hypothesis of evolution. He showed first that the Bible declares that man was made in the image of God; therefore, it is false and blasphemous to say that man is related to the apes. But what are we to do? The Bible does not say that Adam and his progeny were changed as to countenance for the sin of Eve, but only that they were driven out of the Garden and made to work. We must conclude therefore that man to this day is still made in the image of his Creator. The difficulty is to decide whether Bryan himself looks like God or the tree men of South Africa do. This is one of the mysteries with which we are confronted as we allow ourselves to think on the matter.

As for Bryan himself, he has moments of inspiration. You will find him so reporting in one of his books. It occurred to him while traveling one day that the divine inspiration of the Bible could be demonstrated by a syllogism, and instantly, as if by God's dispensation, one came into his mind. Here it is; The Bible was either written by man or by God. If it was written by man, man could write another. Man has not done so. Therefore, the Bible was written by God! By the same reasoning God is also the author of the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, and the works of Voltaire. But there may be subtle reasons why this is not so as to these books. At all events, when Bryan backs this logic with his oratorical presence the work of Darwin lies in ruins on the floor of the Methodist Church of Fiatt, Missouri. He is aided by the character of the audience itself, brought together out of the ten million Americans who have never learned to write an intelligent letter, and the fifty million Americans who do not comprehend the nature of free government, and the half of the State legislators who never get beyond the grammar-school.

VII

The Westminster Confession of Faith revenged itself on Bryan at last, curiously and bitterly. He took to it because it was the natural food of his mind, and when he had eaten of it freely it built him up until he toppled with his natural and acquired imbecility. It led him, in short, to select Wilson to wear the mantle of democratic leadership. At that time, 1912 and before, there was a remnant of the free silver radicals, the Zionists of 1896, who, hearing that Wilson had looked with superior and ironic eyes upon Bryan, and had even written the hope that something would “knock Mr. Bryan into a cocked hat,” entertained a deep and scowling suspicion of Wilson's political orthodoxy. So Bryan began to quiet the apprehensions of his followers, and again blinded his and their vision by the rainbow of an orphic epigram. The epigram was en clef with his now habitual religious thinking, and was to the effect that Wilson had experienced a change of heart, or, otherwise phrased, that Wilson, having always been of the elect democratically, was also now of the saved by the grace of a mystical regeneration; and that all who understood the alchemy of the Presbyterian doctrine would know what he meant, and would trust the man.

Wilson, long before this, had published a history of the American people in which he had disparaged almost every democratic leader from Jefferson on, with a special slur upon Altgeld and references to Bryan himself that easily assayed to Bryan's disadvantage. In it he had shown his preference for Hamilton over Jefferson, and indulged himself in a lofty survey of the record of Andrew Jackson and the bank. Yet now Wilson had been washed of his sins, Bryan really believed. He did not see that a man's convictions of a lifetime, arrived at by study and adhered to by the nature of his mind, were not to be changed by argument nor by any miracle, political or religious. So Wilson, with Bryan's great aid, became President, taking the wand of leadership away from Bryan by making him Secretary of State, and closing the door of his castle upon the Bryan following. How Wilson stung Bryan in the breast when he had him thus wandless and out of hearing of his lost constituency; and how, having stung him, he also planted in the holes of the stings the eggs of a devouring consequence … these things are well known. Wilson finished Bryan; and then went on to the same disaster himself: the tragedy of the phrase-maker and the divided mind. The most dangerous thing in the world is to trifle with one's mind, said John Stuart Mill. Both Bryan and Wilson proved the truth of this observation.

Bryan has not always done the best that he could, as he plaintively asserted one time to a suffragist heckler. He has frequently chosen the lower path of expediency and party regularity when questions of great moment were pressing and much was at stake; and he has done this with slick twists and turns, and with demagogic word-plays. He never in his life showed the moral courage that Robert M. La Follette showed with reference to our entering the Great War. Though he left the Cabinet because of his opposition to the Wilson capitulation, and though he knew that the English were all along affronting our sovereignty more vitally and more impudently than the Germans, yet upon a declaration of war he tendered his services to the government, as he had done twenty years before in the Spanish-American War, which he had also condemned to the extent of his power.

Sincerity perhaps is of no moment in the valuation of a character. Sincerity in the words and deeds of a man help him as little as lack of interest helps to bring back to life a human being accidentally slain. But neither does sincerity save him from being a pest and an injurious influence to his country. Clio cares only for results. What that severe Muse will do with Bryan, who is not sincere and is also the next thing to a fool, it is easy to guess. There would not be any justification for this article, by these tokens, save for the fact that he is in his life time dangerous to the intelligence of the country. No country besides America could produce Bryan; nor could he survive in a country where there were not enough unfit to pay him a living wage for lectures on “The Prince of Peace.” McMaster's “History of the American People” has a vast assemblage of facts touching the freak characters and the freak movements with which this country has been annoyed. No one has any idea of the extent of it who hasn't turned to the hilarious pages where these things are recorded. We have had pantisocrats, Know-Nothings, Anti-Catholics and anti-divorce agitators, as well as the worthy emancipationists, the Grangers, the Populists, and the Greenbackers. We have also had teetotaler societies, and temperance societies, and societies to enforce Sabbath observance, and laws to prescribe the kind of clothing permissible to be worn, and whether people might dance, and if so in what way, and when people should go to bed, and what pictures they could paint, and what books they could read and write, and other laws sprouting from every sort of opinion, conviction and fanaticism.

These influences were in Bryan's background. Out of them he came. With people who devote their lives to the business of interfering with the business of other people, the chain of reasoning is simple enough: If a thing is good for me it is good for my neighbor. If it is good it is from God. If it is from God there should be a law to enforce it. There is one pregnant sentence in the Bible which Bryan has always passed over, but at the last it will devour the whole culture of which he is the evangelical exponent, I fondly trust. St. Paul was shouted down in Ephesus, but before that in Athens the descendants of Sophocles and Plato and Pericles took the wandering fanatic to Mars Hill, and bade him talk of the new doctrine of resurrection from the dead. “For the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing.”

All of the movements briefly catalogued in a preceding paragraph had righteousness for their inspiration; all of them wanted to do good; all of them had goodness as their God-imposed mission; all wanted to thrust goodness upon their fellows, even with the bayonet. The heirs of these American absurdities have been busier and more effective since the World War than at any time since the days of Stephen A. Douglas, who was a democrat with a brain, and a tongue fit for the ironic description of the crank movements of his day. Bryan is the Grand Kleagle of the united Ku Kluxers of to-day. He is our national Reverend Davidson, eager only to imperialize the Republic for his God. For myself I should rather see it imperialized for Mars or Plutus. Are there others?

One more picture: In the Fall of 1908 I had already read the works of Nietzsche, so far as they had been translated and published in English. Bryan called upon me, and I do no wrong to the proprieties by reporting what he said to me in a private conversation, since he has often delivered himself of the same thing in public since. The matter of his recent defeat having been explained by me, as best I could, and the subject for the time exhausted, I asked him in a pause of the conversation if he had read Nietzsche. His face turned red with wrath, his jaw set, the militant evangel flamed in his eyes. “He died crazy,” was Bryan's bitter and exulting retort. Then a silence reigned which made liquid the air of the room; and he left me!

“He died crazy!” That was Nietzsche's punishment for attacking the philosophy of Christianity. God will be avenged, you know! Sometimes! Hundreds of millions of Brahmans, Buddhists, and Jews have sane and quiet consummations, but Nietzsche had to get it! Good Methodists and Presbyterians occasionally die crazy, even from intense study of the antinomies of free will and predestination and the truth of Holy Writ, but that only proves their piety. In the case of Nietzsche sin darkened his intellect!

Ah! But there remains a true American who has taken the oratorical palm away from Bryan. His name is Elmer Chubb, LL.D., D.D. He has paraphrased Bryan's “finished bit of prose,” and made it more convincing, as it is more scientific. Here it is:

If the Father deigns to gift with virgin birth the mean and lowly aphid, which in His infinite wisdom He has made the handmaid of the ant, will He deny to His own Son the precious privilege of a stainless origin, and let the atheist's sneer blow down the fairest fame of God's own spouse?

Here I rest with his epitaph: William Jennings Bryan, Christian Logician and Statesman!