William Jennings Bryan

BRYAN, WILLIAM JENNINGS

William Jennings Bryan was a prominent figure in U.S. politics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is perhaps best known for his role as assistant to the prosecution in the famous SCOPES MONKEY TRIAL of 1925.

Bryan was born March 19, 1860, in Salem,
Illinois. His was a devoutly religious family that
prayed together three times a day and stressed
strict adherence to a literal interpretation of the
Bible. His parents, Silas Lilliard Bryan and
Mariah Elizabeth Jennings Bryan, were firm
believers in education. His mother schooled
Bryan and his siblings in their home until they
were old enough to be sent away to school.
Bryan was an obedient and well disciplined
child who was also idealistic.His favorite subject
was math because of its orderly reason and logic.
He showed early interest in politics and public
speaking, and at the age of twelve delivered a
campaign speech for his father, who ran unsuc-
cessfully for Congress. It was the beginning of a
distinguished career as an orator for Bryan.
In 1875, Bryan was sent to live in Jack-
sonville, Illinois, to attend the Whipple Academy
and Illinois College. During college, he partici-
pated in debate and declamation and excelled at
long jumping. He graduated from college in
1881 and went on to Union College of Law, in
Chicago. In 1883 he returned to Jacksonville and
on July 4 opened a law practice. He married his
sweetheart of five years, Mary Elizabeth Baird,
on October 1, 1884. Bryan’s young wife proved
to be an intellectual match for her husband.
After the couple settled in Jacksonville, she took
classes at Illinois College, a practice unheard of
for a married woman at the time. She later stud-
ied law under Bryan’s instruction, and was
admitted to the bar in Nebraska in 1888.
Bryan had always yearned to go west, to test
himself against the frontier. In 1887, he and his
wife moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he
entered a law partnership with a friend. The
Bryans became active in civic affairs, and started
separate discussion groups for men and women
where the subject was often politics. Bryan also
began lecturing on religious topics. In 1890, he
succumbed to his interest in politics and entered his first campaign for public office. He was the Democratic candidate for Congress from a
staunchly Republican district in Nebraska, but
he won the election by a comfortable margin
and was reelected in 1892.He made a bid for the
Senate in 1894 but was defeated. He then turned
to journalism and became editor in chief of the
Omaha World-Herald. By this time, he had
developed a reputation as a compelling speaker
and was in demand for the popular Chautauqua
lecture circuit. (The Chautauqua movement
combined education with entertainment, often
offered outdoors or in a tent; it took its name
from the Chautauqua Lake region in New York,
where it originated.)
During his campaign for the Senate, Bryan
took up the free silver cause, a political movement
that advocated the free coinage of silver.
Free silver advocates, mainly indebted farmers in
the West and South, wanted the government to
issue more money, backed by silver, to ease the
debts they were unable to repay because of
declining farm prices. The money interests in
the East favored sound money and the gold
standard. These opposing forces clashed in the
1896 presidential campaign. Bryan emerged as
the nominee of four parties: the Democratic,
Populist, Silver Republican, and National Silver
parties. At the Democratic National Convention
in Chicago, he made his famous “Cross of Gold”
speech, in which he cast himself as a champion
of the common person against the forces of the
powerful and privileged. He passionately
declared that those he referred to as the idle
holders of money in Wall Street were responsible
for the United States’ financial woes.
Bryan campaigned tirelessly, traveling over
eighteen thousand miles to deliver his electrifying
speeches. In the end, he lost to WILLIAM
MCKINLEY by less than five percent of the popular
vote. But the foundation had been laid for his
lifelong themes: the people versus the power of
wealth, the workers versus the powerful money
holders, the farmers versus the industrial interests.
These themes echoed throughout his later
attempts to win the presidency.
After serving as a colonel in a noncombat
position during the SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR,
Bryan ran for president again in 1900, this time
on an anti-expansion theme that was rejected by
voters. By 1904, he was falling out of favor with
Democrats. He waged a long and exhausting
fight to be nominated for president that year, but in the end was content that he had at least
influenced the party platform enough so that it
included nothing he found objectionable. Then
the party nominated Alton B. Parker, who
promptly announced that he was in favor of a
gold standard. Parker lost the election to
THEODORE ROOSEVELT. Bryan was bruised by
the party’s renunciation of his free silver position,
but he rebounded and was nominated for
president a third time, in 1908. He ran a strong
campaign but lost to WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT.
After the 1908 election, Bryan realized he
would never be president. Neverthess, he continued
to influence DEMOCRATIC PARTY policies,
and in 1912 he supported Woodrow
Wilson’s candidacy for president. After Wilson
was elected, he selected Bryan as his SECRETARY
OF STATE, a position Bryan resigned after two
years when his pacifist ideas conflicted with Wilson’s
policies on U.S. involvement in WORLD
WAR I. After Bryan left the cabinet, his political
influence declined rapidly.
During his later years Bryan continued his
work in the newspaper business and was a popular
lecturer on the Chautauqua circuit. He
helped gain passage of the EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT,
which ushered in PROHIBITION, and
helped the suffragette movement win the vote
for women with passage of the NINETEENTH
AMENDMENT.
During the last few years of his life, Bryan
wrote numerous articles on religious topics. He
felt that World War I was at least partly caused
by a pervasive “godlessness” sweeping the world.
To Bryan, this godlessness was nowhere more
clearly reflected than in Darwin’s theory of the
evolution of the species. Bryan traveled around
the United States preaching a literal interpretation
of the Bible and campaigning for laws that
banned the teaching of evolution. One such law,
passed in Tennessee, prohibited teachers in
state-supported schools and universities from
teaching any theory of the origin of human life
other than the creation story contained in the
Bible. In 1925, a science teacher named John
Thomas Scopes violated the law and was
brought to trial. Hoping for publicity, the state
asked Bryan to join the prosecution. He agreed,
and found himself facing CLARENCE DARROW, a
famous defense attorney who was a self-proclaimed
atheist, an opponent of CAPITAL PUNISHMENT,
and a defender of unpopular causes.
The trial quickly took on the air of a circus, with
reporters and photographers from all over the
world and the first live radio coverage of such an
event broadcast by WGN in Chicago. The media
cast the proceeding as a contest between science
and the Bible. The defense tried to frame the
issue as tolerance for new ideas. Ultimately,
however, the prosecution persuaded the judge to
confine the case to a question of the state’s right
to control public education.
Sensing that he was losing control of the
trial, Darrow decided to try to unravel the state’s
case by calling Bryan as a witness. He intended
to lead Bryan away from the prosecution’s carefully
framed issue into a defense of fundamental
biblical interpretation. Bryan, whose trial experience
had been limited, and who was feeling
tired and ill, fell into Darrow’s trap and was
ridiculed and humiliated by the flamboyant
attorney’s searing and skillful questions. After
Bryan’s testimony, the trial was abruptly ended,
depriving Bryan of the opportunity to answer
Darrow’s stinging offense. Nevertheless, the jury
deliberated a mere eight minutes before returning
a guilty verdict.
The Scopes trial was a victory for Bryan and
his supporters, but he had been devastated by
Darrow. He stayed in Tennessee to finalize and
print the speech he had planned to use in closing
argument before the court. Five days after
the trial ended, on July 26, 1925, while still in
Tennessee, Bryan died in his sleep. As a train
bearing his body passed through the countryside
on its way to Washington, D.C., thousands
of the “common people”Bryan had championed
gathered to pay their respects. The nation’s capital
was in official mourning as Bryan lay in
state. At his request, he was buried with full military
honors at Arlington National Cemetery, an
ironic footnote to the life of a fervent pacifist.
Although Bryan never won the country’s top
office, he exerted a strong influence during his
long career in public service. Many of the
reforms he advocated were eventually adopted,
such as INCOME TAX, prohibition, women’s suffrage,
public disclosure of newspaper ownership,
and the election of Senators by popular
rather than electoral vote. Although he is most
often associated with the Scopes trial, his diligent
devotion to the causes in which he believed
is his most significant legacy.
FURTHER READINGS
Anderson, David D. 1981. William Jennings Bryan. Boston:
Twayne.
Cherny, Robert W. 1994. A Righteous Cause: The Life of William
Jennings Bryan. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press.
Koenig, Louis W. 1971. Bryan: A Political Biography of William
Jennings Bryan. New York: Putnam.
CROSS-REFERENCES
Scopes Monkey Trial.