SOURCE: “Bryan, Thou Shouldst Be Living,” in These United States, edited by Louis W. Jones, William Huse, Jr. and Harvey Eagleson, Ray Long & Richard R. Smith, 1931, pp. 266-77.

I

Bryan should be living at this hour. Or if not Bryan, then Lord George Gordon, or Cagliostro, or John Brown of Ossawatomie—some first-class faker who believes in his own bunk.

It has been advanced that the decay of liberalism and the lack of a great liberal leader are to be attributed less to the apathy than to the bewilderment of this generation. With the increasing complexity of civilization, men of liberal mind are so hard put to it to know what to believe that they end by being afraid to put too much trust in anything. But the fallacy in this argument lies in the assumption that great liberal leaders think! Go back up the line—Wilson, Lloyd George, Briand, Gladstone, Jackson, Jefferson, Fox—and you will find only Wilson and Jefferson who are entitled to be rated as first-rate thinkers, and only Jefferson who might set up a fairly good claim to be rated as the greatest thinker of his day.

Nevertheless, each of the others named was responsible for some tremendous thinking. The point is that he didn't do it. It was done by the men who found themselves under the necessity of putting him down. This much is true even of William Jennings Bryan, the quality of whose own cerebration is illustrated by the fact that he stated on oath that man is not a mammal. But he made Mark Hanna think. He made Roosevelt, Aldrich, Tom Reed, E. H. Harriman, the elder Morgan, Judge Gary, Whitelaw Reid, Henry Watterson, John Hay, William Allen White, Lodge, Penrose, Platt, Quay, and William H. Taft think. Later, after he had turned from politics to religion, he made such men as Harry Emerson Fosdick, Rabbi Wise, and Henry Fairfield Osborn think. Indeed, he drew from Walter Lippmann at least one essay, re-examining the principle of the rule of the majority, which was indubitably a contribution to the theory of democracy.

I hold this truth to be self-evident—that the quality of leadership is ability to lead. He who is able to enlist vast numbers of followers and to carry them in any direction he chooses is a great leader though he be mad as a March hare. And this quality has no necessary connection with a keenly analytical or highly original mind. If Gandhi is a thinker, so was Simple Simon; but if Gandhi is not a leader, there is no such thing.

I venture to suggest that what the liberals—and likewise the reds, the conservatives, and the tories—have reason to bewail to-day is not the lack of a great liberal leader, but the lack of a leader of any sort. A first-class reactionary would help immensely. A really able bolshevist would do us no end of good. For what the country needs most are the by-products of leadership, which are frequently more important than the work of the leader himself.

It is curious that so little attention has been paid to this factor in our political history, since the United States has provided what is perhaps the most perfect illustration of it. Only once have we elected a really ignorant man to the Presidency. Even Grant had had a West Point education. Andrew Jackson, however, was almost completely innocent of book-learning when he came to the White House. Furthermore, he was the most violent of all the Presidents and the least inclined to submit his prejudices to intellectual analysis.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that it was while this unmistakable non-intellectual reigned in the Executive Mansion that our political life attained and maintained a brilliance it had not reached before, and has not approached since. It was JacksonWilson's peculiar virtue that he could heat the opposition to such a point that it burst into incandescence.

Granting that the Jacksonians were great politicians rather than great statesmen, the fact remains that they were superbly effective. The point is that such abilities as the Jacksonians possessed found full scope for their development under the banner of a man who, although glaringly defective as an intellectual was, nevertheless, perhaps the greatest popular leader we have ever produced.

However, the really startling effect of the appearance of this leader was on the men who opposed him. One has only to call the roll of their names to realize something of the brilliance of that period—John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, John Randolph of Roanoke, John Tyler, Rufus Choate, Edward Everett. It would be preposterous to insinuate that Jackson dowered these men with any part of their ability; but it is only sober truth to assert that in the enterprise of saving the country—as they saw it—from Jackson, they attained heights which they might never have reached except under the sting of a sharp and roweling spur.

Even to hold his own, much less to make headway, against such a force as Andrew Jackson a man had to be good. It may be true that Jackson thought little; but in order to stand up against him at all other men had to think furiously; and in the course of their efforts to cope with him they developed every latent power within them. The sudden efflorescence of genius in Congress at this period was not altogether an accident. Under the gruelling discipline to which members were subjected, it is entirely reasonable to believe that not a few mediocre men grew strong, and that strong men grew great.

II

All this, however, affords no answer to the question of what is the matter with our own times. The lack of leadership is apparent enough. Al Smith aroused a certain amount of enthusiasm in 1928, but nothing comparable to the hysteria which used to attend Roosevelt, and which attended Bryan in 1896; and, barring Al, where is the leader in either party whose mere appearance is enough to set the street crowds to throwing their hats in the air? He is not in sight. Our most popular President since the War was Mr. Coolidge; but I have never yet heard anybody yell for Coolidge even as much as they yelled for Al Smith. Mr. Hoover received more votes for President than any man of any party ever received before; but it is plain to the dullest observer that vast numbers of them were not pro-Hoover votes at all. They were anti-Smith votes or, rather, anti-Pope and anti-liquor votes.

Even as late as 1907 there were a few men who were able to grip the imaginations of the people. When the Knicker-bocker Trust Company blew up, Theodore Roosevelt was in the White House, and John Pierpont Morgan, the elder, was in Wall Street. When the condition of affairs became critical, it was announced in the press that Morgan had taken charge with the approval of the President; and immediately everybody, including the Democrats, felt better. For even the Democrats (perhaps I should say, especially the Democrats) believed that both of these were potent men. If they were really sound Democrats, such congenital Democrats as are produced in the South, they admired neither man, but they believed in them both. They believed that—to paraphrase a famous line—when either of these men put his foot down, something had to squush. Therefore, when word went around that Morgan had taken charge with Roosevelt's approval, everybody drew a long breath and felt better; and by feeling better, they were better.

In 1929 there was still a Pierpont Morgan in Wall Street; but in what a different light he was viewed by the country! We do not have the same sublime faith in his power, either for evil or for good. The House of Morgan has greater resources, and probably greater power, now than it had in 1907; but neither it nor any other potentate or dynasty of Wall Street any longer commands the imagination of the country.

In 1929 there was still a President in the White House, but not a Theodore Roosevelt. The present President knows more economics, in all probability, than T. R. ever guessed; but he knows less about Americans. Mr. Hoover unquestionably did everything he knew how to do in the terrific days of that terrible autumn, and he knew how to do a great deal. But he didn't know how to gesticulate.

Serious-minded people, who are always incurably romantic, will make the comment that that was of all times the worst time for gesticulations; but ribald realists know better. The world is not ruled by reason and logic. If it were, Mr. Hoover would have saved the situation, for the measures he took were pre-eminently reasonable and logical, as well as energetic. He immediately took counsel with the best business brains in the country. He had a number of sensible, practical suggestions to make and he urged them upon the people who were best able to understand them and carry them out. He labored diligently and intelligently and, doubtless, prevented a number of evils that without his efforts might have befallen the country. But at that, the thing got away from him. Instead of riding the avalanche, he was caught under it and buried deep in popular odium.

Does any man who views objectively the political history of the last thirty years believe that Theodore Roosevelt would have done any more toward re-establishing the economic balance? I, for one, do not believe that he would have done, or could have done, half as much. But I, for one, do not believe that Teddy ever would have been caught as Mr. Hoover has been caught. He might not have done as much as Mr. Hoover, but he would have seemed to be doing ten times more. He knew how to gesticulate. He could dance and yell. The roars emanating from the White House in the closing days of 1929 had Roosevelt been there would have been so loud they would almost have drowned the incessant banging of exploding banks, and so blood-curdling they would have distracted attention from the atrocities being perpetrated on the Stock Market.

Nor am I prepared to assert that they would have been all sound and fury, signifying nothing, or nothing save the preservation of the Rooseveltian hide. No economist doubts that the present depression has been prolonged and intensified by the fathomless pessimism which it has induced in the American people. The energy of the country has suffered a strange paralysis. We are in the doldrums, waiting not even hopefully for the wind which never comes. Roosevelt would have supplied wind. Whatever he did, the country would have been so vastly entertained that it would have forgotten a large part of its pessimism. It would have been amused in part, scandalized in part, infuriated in part; but each emotion would have stimulated it to some sort of action. The psychological part of the depression he could have managed.

This is assuming, of course, that we have not become so sophisticated that it is no longer possible for a Roosevelt, or a Bryan, or an Andrew Jackson to stir us. I think it a reasonable assumption. Of course, none of these men could repeat his former triumphs in precisely the same form. History never repeats itself exactly. But there is plenty of ground for suspicion that all this sophistication about which we are forever talking is in large measure what the incomparable Al calls baloney. It is true that the physicists and mathematicians have resolved the whole material universe into nothing more substantial than “the nominative case of the verb to undulate.” But who knows it? Mr. Einstein, Sir James Jeans, and Mr. Millikan, along with the fraction of one per cent of the population who have read their books. It is equally true that the psychologists have analyzed Yale, country, and God into conditioned reflexes. But who knows that? Mr. John B. Watson, and he has his doubts. It is true that the novelists, the biographers, and the historians have joined hands to convert history and literature into an endless stentorian reiteration of “Ichabod, Ichabod, for the glory hath departed!” But who knows that? Only the all but imperceptible minority which does not read the confession magazines.

Grant that the intellectuals, as a class, are fairly crushed into immobility under the weight of facts which science has heaped upon their somewhat thin shoulders—does it follow that the country is paralyzed? Not unless the country is dependent upon the intellectuals for leadership, which is an assumption not many of us would care to make. When did a genuine intellectual ever lead it? Wilson? He led, all right, but was he really an intellectual? Gamaliel Bradford remarks that, “Even in the fields which might be thought peculiarly his own his information was singularly limited,” and at the time of the fight over the Peace Treaty it was intimated in the public prints that he had never read the Constitution of the United States. But, for the sake of argument, allow that Wilson was an intellectual as well as a leader. Does one swallow make a summer?

The spectacularly successful leader has always been not the intellectual, but the histrionic genius. Even Lenin is no real exception, while Mussolini is a museum piece. It is hard to believe that Americans have been so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of modern education that they have really subverted their emotional to their intellectual natures; but until a nation does so it will always remain more amenable to the man on horseback than to the man on the rostrum. Perhaps popular education has made us require a different technic of the men who would mold us to their will. But to assume that we are, therefore, proof against mountebanks is to assume far too much. We require suaver and smoother mountebanks, that is all.

Furthermore, it is hard to believe that the present tremendous sweating through which the nation is being put will fail to produce at least one. The stage is too perfectly set, the time is too ripe, for us to escape the irruption of a Mad Mullah of some variety. The fabrication of a sufficiently crazy program always takes a little time after a great crash. Populism, distilled from the witches' broth of 1893, did not attain its full strength until the very close of the century. Greenbackism, engendered in 1873, made its strongest bid in 1876. The panic of 1837—perhaps the worst of them all—gave rise to a long series of marvelous psychoses culminating in Know-Nothingism, which flourished a dozen years after the crash. Reasoning by analogy, we should hardly expect to see earlier than 1932 whatever apparition the panic of 1929 may eventually call out of the vasty deep. It is not within the bounds of credibility, however, that nothing in the way of governmental extravaganza will be born of the present stresses and strains. Upheavals so profound are not accomplished without loosing uneasy spirits which will haunt us for many days.

But if my argument is sound, this prospect is not one to dismay honest and liberal-minded men. The Mad Mullah always loses in the long run for the simple reason that when he trumpets to the feeble-witted he rouses the intelligent; and even as the former flock to his standard, the latter take arms against him. I hold no brief for Bryanism, but it is evident to the dullest that Bryanism compelled some of the hardest and keenest political thinking of the last generation; and out of the welter stirred up by Bryan emerged both Roosevelt and Wilson, each of whom helped himself liberally to Bryan's ideas, stripped most of the lunacy from them, and employed them to excellent advantage.

III

And when all is said and done, could any madman arise with a program madder than the present polity of the United States of America has turned out to be? The proof of the pudding is the chewing of the bag. The proof of the sanity, or the reverse, of any polity is not its logical perfection but the pass to which it brings the country which adopts it. Never mind how reasonable our program for the past ten years may seem to be. Let us consider the pass to which it has brought this country.

Our present condition is deplorable on account of a terrific burden of unemployment caused by over-production. That is to say, people are going hungry because there is too much wheat, too much corn, too many swine and cattle; people are going barefoot because there are too many shoes, ragged because there are too many textiles, being evicted from their homes because there are too many houses; charitable agencies are being overwhelmed with pleas for alms because there is too much real wealth in the country.

But this is preposterous, this is insanity, this is the very essence of Bedlam. Nevertheless, this is true, and its truth constitutes the incontrovertible proof that we have been following a polity as crazy as the wildest ever preached by any crack brained fanatic from the Middle West. Our intellectuals have known for years that it was a crazy polity; but unfortunately what the intellectual knows is as completely removed from the experience of average men and women as what the Martian engineers may know is removed from the experience of earthly engineers. That which enters into the experience of the masses of the people is not what the intellectual knows, but what the popular leader feels.

But let a popular leader of a very powerful type enter the field and he arouses passions, even in intellectuals. The only passions he may arouse in their breasts may be aversion and disgust, but to that extent, at least, they begin to feel, as well as think, and as they begin to feel they begin to grow effective. There is much talk these days of the “tired liberal.” I doubt that the animal exists. It seems more probable that what we have are emotionally starved liberals. Since Wilson passed off the stage they haven't had a single man whom it was worth while to hate; and a liberal without hatred is like a fish without a tail—he moves incessantly, but aimlessly, without direction. Your hate must have a target visible to the naked eye, or it degenerates into mere disdain, which does not nourish action.

Yet action is the final, indispensable test of ideas. The truth is that the human mind is so imperfect an instrument that no sage ever lived who was capable of deciding infallibly, without the test of action, which of our ideas are lunatic and which are sane. Your leader applies this test, but he is able to apply it because he knows, not how to make men think, but how to make them feel; which means that he first feels intensely himself. If he is also capable of thinking, so much the better; in that case we have a statesman of a high order. But it is not absolutely essential that he think. If he can act, and does act, others will do whatever thinking is necessary.

It is perfectly true that the menace of a demagogic leader is very great. One such might easily wreck the country. But if it comes to that, take a look at the country now. Some statistician with a grisly mind recently checked up on the mortality rate of a business menWilson's club in my city. He found that the normal death rate among members for the last ten years has been about 15 annually; but in the year 1930 the club lost 57 members by death, of whom 10 were suicides. In the county where I was born—not in Arkansas either—no less than 500 mules starved to death last year. If it had been 500 tenant farmers who had starved, there might be some excuse to hope that things are not quite desperate; but when landlords let their mules starve, there is no escaping the fact that the situation is serious. When farmers are letting their mules starve and business men are blowing their brains out, both in unprecedented numbers, the country is in a fix about as bad as any demagogue is likely to put it in.

At any rate, after observing the results of turning the country over to be run by the magnates of big business and the high priests of prosperity, there are not a few Americans who have decided that if these are the sane men, it might be well to try putting the lunatics in charge for a while. They could hardly do worse, and they would do differently, so it is within the realm of possibility that they might do better.

At any rate, the country will follow a man who feels intensely, unless human nature has undergone a greater change in the last ten years than it ever underwent in a comparable time before. When a political leader stands up, and instead of saying, “This is logical” or “this is scientific” or “this is businesslike,” says “this is right,” I think he will strike a popular chord. It is by no means certain that he will actually be right. On the contrary, he may merely be an idiot. But if he thinks he is right, and thinks it with such burning, passionate intensity that the heat of his conviction is felt by everyone who comes within a hundred feet of him, he will be effective. “Our Federal union—it must be preserved!” Why? There was no very logical reason, but there was one most powerful reason, which was that Andrew Jackson willed that it should be preserved; and preserved it was. “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Faustian? Without a doubt, but—my sacred aunt—how it got action! “We fight to make the world safe for democracy!” Well, we seem to have failed to make it safe, but you can inform the strabismic world we fought!

Phrase-making is perhaps no contribution to the intellectual heritage of the race, but phrase-makers do snap us out of lethargy, and frequently out of ingrowing pessimism, which may be worse than frenzy. How we could use one at the moment! Bryan, thou shouldst be living at this hour!