How William Jennings Bryan may look to the country and world-at-large
I have never much considered.
It is all in the angle of view: St. Simeon Stilites may seem
rousingly funny to some: Old King Cole may have been a frosty dullard
to those who knew him best.
To me William Jennings Bryan means bits of my relishingest brand of
gay mournful Laughter.
The ensemble and detail of William Jennings Bryan and his career
as a public man, viewed impersonally--as one looks at the moon--is
something hectic as hell’s-bells.
I remember William Jennings Bryan when his star first rose. It
was before Theodore Roosevelt was more than a name: before the
battleship _Maine_ was sunk at Havana: before Lanky Bob wrested the
heavyweight title from Gentleman Jim at Carson: before aëroplanes
were and automobiles were more than rare thin-wheeled restless
buggies: before the song ‘My Gal She’s a High-born Lady’ had yet
waned: before one Carrie Nation had hewn her way to fame with a
hatchet. I was a short-skirted little girl devouringly reading and
observing everything, and I took note of all those. So I took note
of William Jennings Bryan nominated for president by the Democratic
convention in eighteen-ninety-six. The zealous Democratic newspapers
referred to him, though he was then thirty-six, as the Boy Orator
of the Platte. Looked at as a grown man, advocating free coinage
of silver at sixteen-to-one--a daring dashing Democrat, he was a
plausible thing and even romantic. Looked at as a Boy Orator he
turned at once into a bald and aged lad oddly flavored with an
essence of Dare-devil Dick, of the boy on the burning deck, of a kind
of political Fauntleroy madly matured.
Long years later with the top of his hair and his waistline buried
deep in his past he became Secretary of State: and at the same time a
Chautauqua Circuit lecturer--entertaining placid satisfied audiences
alternately with a troupe of Swiss Yodlers. Of all things, yodlers.
Politics makes strange bedfellows and always did. But never before
has the American Department of State combined and vied with the
yodler’s art to entertain and instruct. Looked at as a monologist he
might pass if sufficiently interpolated with ah-le-ee! and ah-le-o-o!
Looked at as Secretary of State he is grilling and gruelling to the
senses: a frightful figure quite surpassing a mouse softly dead in a
tea-pot, a pair of detachable fuzzy Swedenborg-addicted eyebrows, a
presumptuously economical tailor.
And he entertained the foreign ministers at a state dinner, did
this unusual man, and he gave them to drink--what but grape-juice,
grape-juice in its virginity. Plain water might have seemed the
crystalline expression of a rigid puritanic spirit. Budweiser Beer,
bitter and bourgeois, might have been possible though surprising.
But grape-juice, served to seasoned Latin Titles and Graybeards and
Gold-Braid, long tamely familiar with the Widow Clicquot: that in
truth seems, after all the years, boyishly oratorical, wildly and
darkly Nebraskan. Looked at as an appetizing wash for a children’s
white-collared and pink-sashed party, or for anybody on a summer
afternoon, grape-juice is satisfactory. In the careless hands of
William Jennings Bryan with his soul so unscrupulously at peace, the
virgin grape-juice becomes a vitriolic thing: a defluent purple river
crushing one’s helpless spirit among its rocks and rapids.
--a terrible American, William Jennings Bryan. He is for ‘peace
at any price.’ There were some, long and long ago, who suffered
and endured one starveling winter in camp at Valley Forge that
William Jennings Bryan might wax Nebraskanly fat: and _he_ is
valiantly for peace: at any price--
For that my Laughter is tinged with fulfilling hatred.
Rich hot-livered Laughter must have in it essential love or hatred.
To William Jennings Bryan everything he has done in his political
career must seem all right.
It _is_ all right, undoubtedly. Just that.
--that Silver-tongued Boy Orator
those Yodlers
that Peerless Leader
that Grape-juice--
They come breaking into my melancholy night-hours with an odd
high-seasoned abruptness.