1 of 8
Before they were the party of Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi, the party of Bill and Hillary Clinton, before they were the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, the Democrats were the party of William Jennings Bryan, whose apparent erasure from the pantheon of Democratic heroes recalls the clumsy removal of Trotsky from Bolshevik photographs. Not that Democrats don't have excellent reasons to forget the Great Commoner. A three-time loser in the race to the White House, Bryan also failed to turn his oratorical gifts against racism and segregation, and he ended his life with a public and imperishable display of scientific ignorance. But even as they are gloating over their resounding triumph in the 2006 midterm elections, Democrats would be well-advised to remember Bryan.
|
|
A good place to start is the famous but little-read "Cross of Gold" speech, Bryan's address to the Democratic convention in 1896. Unlike today's gerrymandered speeches—with the lexicon and syntax of demographics inscribed on every neutered paragraph—Bryan's oration was a lavish political sermon, an un-triangulated exposition of the ways of God to Wall Street. Clad only in "the armor of a righteous cause"—that of "the producing masses of this nation and the world"—Bryan preached against that leviathan his descendants are too timid and feckless to name: "the encroachments of organized wealth," the unelected government of money and property, the devotees of Mammon who consider democracy a franchise of corporate capital. This isn't the twaddle of "values," or the high-priced pabulum of consultants, speechwriters, and other peddlers of the latest fashions in euphemism and sophistry. It's the clarion of populist insurgency, leavened and propelled by the spirit of the prophets, the battle-cry of the meek and lowly who've been promised the earth as their estate.
Michael Kazin considers Bryan a prophet whose challenge to the first Gilded Age might inspire resistance to ours, the second. In his timely biography, Kazin holds up Bryan as the prototype for a resurgent populist liberalism and for a "Christian left" inspired to crusade for the peace and justice of the Kingdom. Routinely vilified by intellectuals as the exemplary rube of fundamentalism—"a peasant come home to the barnyard," as H. L. Mencken described him at the Scopes trial—Bryan becomes, in Kazin's tale, a knight of democratic nobility, a defender of the faith that commoners are wiser than pedants, clerics, and moneybags.
It's a righteous cause, and Kazin will surely lift the spirits of liberals with his account of Bryan's "applied Christianity," a "radically progressive interpretation of the Gospels" in which the Beatitudes were the measure of modernity. At its best, Bryanism was one of our broadest and most charitable political visions. That latitude and charity stemmed from Bryan's evangelical faith, and Kazin, though an avowed unbeliever, is too respectful of the abundant historical evidence to leave the American Left in its undogmatic slumber.
Alas, Bryan's vision had its limits, its degrees of myopia and patches of blindness, and they raise serious questions, which Kazin doesn't always answer or even raise, about the legacy of American populism. For all its incendiary rhetoric—perhaps even because of it—the populist tradition has never posed a serious or even genuine threat to capitalism. Its whiteness prolonged the tyranny of Jim Crow and infected the cultural nationalism now in play in debates about "immigration reform." And its evangelical religiosity, even as it provided a language of social reform, sustained the mythology of possessive individualism. Like most tribunes, Bryan was an equestrian in plebeian's clothing, a minister without portfolio in the government of property and empire. In the flamboyant and combustible art of demagoguery, Bryan was without peer, arguably the most big-hearted practitioner of an often malevolent trade. The most popular of losers, Bryan ended his life a magnificent ruin, and his relevance may lie in the lessons he drew from the magnitude of his failure.
