The subjoined estimate of William J. Bryan's character and
public career, which appeared in THE NEW YORK TIMES of June
9, 1915, is by the hand of one of its staff writers who has
specialized in American national politics.
The plain man of the prairie became Secretary of State when William J.
Bryan did; the prairie then entered diplomacy, international
controversy. The secret of all that has puzzled the land in his
behavior lies in that fact. His hold on the West lies in the fact that
he is in himself the average man of that country, with that man's
ideals, aspirations, defects, and drawbacks. There seems nothing
strange or funny in a Secretary of State who goes to New York and
signs temperance pledges, or holds Billy Sunday's platform in
Philadelphia, when you get a few miles away from the cities; and if it
seems a little queer to New York to find the Secretary of State
undertaking to demolish the Darwinian theory, there are plenty of
regions where the Darwinian theory is regarded as a device of the
devil to upset the Mosaic cosmogony. Chesterton says that Dickens
never wrote down to the mob, because he was himself the mob; and Bryan
never talked down to the men of the prairie for the same reason.
He is not a man of culture, nor of reading. He has been around the
world, but when he came back the books and articles he wrote were such
as might have been published as guide books or in encyclopedias; he
could have written them without leaving home. Travel had no
broadening or polishing effect upon his mind.
The vast influence he still has is due to the fact that the common
man, with all his mistakes and gaucheries, speaks in him, and that
when the common man hears his own thoughts spoken in Bryan's voice he
knows that the accent is sincere. Bryan may have taken up this or that
particular issue because it sounded like a vote-maker, but none of
them represented the least divergence from his course as a whole,
which has always been honestly bent in a certain plain direction. He
never hesitated to be in a minority and never dodged a fight. He is an
innocent theorist, who frequently goes wrong because of the simplicity
of his mental processes; but he acts upon his theories, right or
wrong, with an intrepidity and a whole-hearted courage in which the
ordinary man sees the qualities he himself would like to have, and
dreams he has. His mind is not broad, but it is strong; he is always
sure he is right, and always ready to fight for his beliefs, and he
keeps his hold upon his followers because he is not below them, and
not much above them, and because they know he is honest and sincere.
In 1906, the Democratic Party, picking itself out of the wreckage of
Parker's defeat, was yearning to reunite. "Big business," assaulted
and bruised and banged about by President Roosevelt, was ready to come
into line. Roosevelt or his candidate could be defeated in 1908 only
by Democratic harmony. Bryan was abroad, traveling, and somehow his
distant figure looked less appalling than the near-by figure in the
White House. The East did not ask him to recant his radicalism, but
only not to talk about it. He arrived in New York, and business went
to hear him make a harmony speech. If he made it, business would
support him for President. He made the speech; he declared for
Government ownership of railroads. Business, roaring with pain, fell
back into the Republican arms, and Bryan was defeated for President.
No, Bryan is not an opportunist--not in things that really matter.
William Bayard Hale once accurately described him as "essentially a
preacher, a high-class exhorter, a glorified circuit rider." There are
vast spaces of our country still populated by men and women of the
old-fashioned kind; Chesterton describes them as "full of stale
culture and ancestral simplicity." They are the descendants of the
Puritans--intellectually, at any rate--they look askance on cards,
dancing, and the stage; they are the kind of folks who peopled the
Mississippi Valley in Lincoln's day and Massachusetts in John
Hancock's. Bryan does not talk down to that type for votes; he is that
type. Colonel George Harvey, with sarcastic intent, alleged that Bryan
became a white-ribboner after hearing a little girl recite "The Lips
That Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine." There are regions which
would accept that parable as Gospel truth, and much to Bryan's credit.
Salem, Ill., is a little town which fairly shrieks at you its
pre-eminence as a picture of that type. As you pass through its
orderly little streets, with its little frame houses, all of the same
kind and all neat and unassuming, with its dirt roads and its typical
Town Hall, set correctly back behind a correct little patch of grass
in a neat square, you feel instinctively that the Darwinian theory
must be avoided in your Salem conversation. You know at once that the
same families have lived there for generations. So they have; one of
them was Bryan's, and he was born there on March 19, 1860.
Of course, he was the valedictorian of his class--Illinois College,
1881. Of course, he became a lawyer; and, of course, in the Middle
West, that involved politics. He lived now in Lincoln, Neb., in a
Republican district, but he was a Democrat. There was a landslide in
1890. The whole country went Democratic, and many a forlorn hope
leader in some hide-bound Republican district was swept into Congress,
Bryan among them. He made a great speech on the tariff, which won him
instantly a national reputation; but Lincoln had recovered its
Republican poise, and he did not go back to Congress. He added to his
reputation in his own State, however, as editor of its chief
Democratic organ, The Omaha World-Herald, and went to Chicago as the
head of its delegation to the National Convention of 1896.
At a moment when David B. Hill's masterly presentation of the
gold-standard case and Tillman's failure in his effort at rejoinder
had thrown a wet blanket over the silverites, Bryan came forward with
his "Cross of Gold" speech. The cheering delegations carried him
around the hall on their shoulders. None of the candidates before the
convention was dominating or really of Presidential size; the
convention was deadlocked for many ballots, and at last it turned to
Bryan and nominated him.
His defeat by McKinley really marked the beginning of his career as a
national leader. Despite the accident which had made him the
Democracy's nominal leader, he demonstrated that he was the ablest of
the radicals into whose hands it had fallen, and his nominal
chieftainship became a real one. It was evident from the beginning
that he would be renominated in 1900. When the Spanish war broke out
he offered his services and became Colonel of the Third Nebraska
Regiment. The Republican Administration was taking no chances on his
getting any military glory, and it marooned him in Florida till after
the war. He returned good for evil by going to Washington, uniform and
all, and dragooning reluctant Democratic Senators into voting for the
treaty with Spain whereby we acquired the Philippines. This was one of
his incidental opportunisms; he believed it would give the Democrats a
winning issue, that of imperialism. The cast of Bryan's mind is such
that he always gets his winning issues on wrong end foremost; it gave
the Republicans a winning issue, that of imperialism.
Bryan went down to defeat again in 1900, on this new issue, and as
usual epitaphs were written over his political grave. It is a favorite
parlor game; but Bryan never stays dead, because there is something
enduring in him. What is it? That same spokesmanship for the average
man of many regions, the man of the little parlor with the melodeon or
parlor organ, the plush-bound photograph album and the "History of the
San Francisco Earthquake" bought by subscription from a book agent,
and the grandfather's clock in the corner of the hall.
But in 1904 the Democratic leaders, tired of defeat, turned
desperately to the opposite wing of the party. The radical leaders,
really opportunists, forswore or hid their convictions for the sake of
victory, tried to teach their unskillful tongues the language of
conservatism, and joined in with the conservatives in the nomination
of Parker. But Bryan did not yield; he forswore nothing, hid nothing,
and he fought a lonely fight, the bravest of his life.
His fight was of one man against a multitude. Alone, he had to be
everywhere; he was in the Committee on Resolutions, in the Committee
on Credentials, on the floor of the convention, speaking, fighting,
working, twenty hours a day. He had no one to help him; all his
fellows were on the other side, strangling their convictions and
fighting against him. He was insulted on the platform, even by
fellow-radicals; he was elbowed aside and snarled at by men who had
been more radical than himself; attempts were made to deny him a
hearing. Nothing could daunt him or perturb him; he fought on until
Parker was nominated, went to his hotel at dawn as the convention
adjourned, and fell into his bed in utter collapse. A doctor was
summoned, who said that Bryan must instantly give up all work and
undergo treatment.
That evening the news came that Parker had refused to run unless the
word "gold" was written into the platform; the convention was thrown
into panic; the sick man rose from his bed and entered the wild and
turbulent hall, white-faced, breathing with difficulty, sweat pouring
down his face, and there took up the work again, single-handed still.
He fought on all night, was defeated again, and went under the
doctor's hands. Those speeches in that convention were really the
greatest of his life, though they may not read as well as others;
each of them was a battle.
Parker's defeat by Roosevelt again erased that ever-recurring epitaph
over Bryan's political grave. It was evident at once that nothing
could prevent him from being again the candidate in 1908. Again he was
defeated, and again the epitaph was jubilantly rewritten. He was
extinguished, he would never again be an influence in the party; it
was, to use the phrase of 1896, 1900, and 1904, "the end of Bryan."
Again the epitaph had to be erased. He was so far from being
extinguished that he became the dominating force of the convention of
1912. There is no doubt in the mind of the writer, who was there, that
Bryan had given up all hope of running for President, because, as he
expressed it in a thrilling midnight speech at that convention, he
recognized at last that he had too many enemies ever to expect to win.
But he did determine to be a king-maker if he could not be a king, and
king-maker he was.
Not even the convention of 1904 showed Bryan in better light as a
fighter than that of 1912. He was determined that the reactionaries
should not control the convention. At the beginning he was defeated,
but defeat never affected Bryan in the least in all his life, and this
time, as usual, he only went on fighting. When the convention rejected
him for Temporary Chairman and elected Parker, the embodiment of all
he opposed, he merely took a fresh hold and fought harder.
When he swung Nebraska from Champ Clark to Wilson he had won, and
thereafter Wilson's nomination was only a question of time. He was the
centre of violent scenes, as when maddened men swept down upon him and
shook their standards in his face and seemed on the verge of
assaulting him. When he tried to get a hearing and the opposition
shouted him down, he simply climbed up on the platform beside the
Chairman and forced them to hear. Once, while the whole convention
seemed to be yelling at him, and he stood in the midst of a whirlwind
of angry noise, ex-Governor McCorkle of West Virginia, jumping up and
facing him, shrieked in a voice heard above the cyclone: "Are you a
Democrat?"
"My Democracy has been certified to by six and a half million voters.
But," pointing his palm-leaf fan at McCorkle, with magnificent
contempt, "I will ask the secretary to record one vote in the negative
if the gentleman will give me his name."
He won; Wilson was nominated. He brought his great following into line
for an Eastern man, and Wilson was elected. The new President,
following a precedent set by Taylor, Garfield, and Harrison, made him
Secretary of State.
Then Bryan showed a new side of his character to the country. He
effaced himself in Wilson's interest; he became a loyal subordinate,
accepting a minor place cheerfully and laboring with might and main to
make the Administration a success. It is chiefly due to his efforts
that it was one for its first two years. The new President was unknown
to most of his party, and the legislation he recommended would have
met with internal opposition but for Bryan. The Secretary whipped his
followers into line even for legislation so repugnant to them as the
Currency bill, and the Presidential program went through. In two years
Mr. Wilson had become a definite personality to the country, and had a
following of his own; but his initial success was due to Bryan, and
but for Bryan Mr. Wilson might have had to face a party as divided as
did Cleveland, and might have seen his Administration wrecked as
Cleveland's was.
Mr. Bryan hoped to make an enduring name for himself as Secretary of
State. In the years that had elapsed since he was Colonel of the Third
Nebraska he had become an ardent pacifist, and he dreamed of going
into history with a title greater than that of any other statesman who
ever lived--for such, surely, would have been the meed of the man who
abolished war. That mind of his, honest as the day, but far from
great; strong but not broad, sees everything as simple, not as
complex. Is there a wrong? Why, then, abolish it; it is as simple as
A B C. War is wrong; therefore let us stop it. How? Why, get everybody
to agree not to fight without taking a year to look into the thing.
And he busied himself drafting and negotiating treaties with all the
world to get it to agree to this simple but certain remedy. The
"glorified circuit rider" was at the head of the Department of State
of the United States. If anybody had suggested to him that there were
nations which no treaty could bind, he would have answered, in the
style of the prayer-meeting exhorter, "Ah! I have a higher faith in
human nature." So he worked busily, building himself his niche in the
temple of fame, and meanwhile the greatest war in history broke out.
With such a mind as has been described, it is evident that this event
could not shake Mr. Bryan's confidence in himself or his remedies. To
him it was obvious that the war came because the nations involved had
not signed his treaty; if they had, Germany would have abided by it;
would not have dreamed of treating it as a scrap of paper; would have
waited the prescribed year, and Austria would have given Serbia the
same time to reply to her ultimatum. The mischief was done, but he set
about heroically to repair it; he sought to have the United States
intervene as a peacemaker; he sought to prevent the United States
from protecting its citizens on the high seas, since that seemed
likely to lead to war; and at last, finding his efforts of no avail,
he resigned.
No one who had seen him in his unequal fights for his principles on
less momentous occasions could doubt that he would fight for them to
the end on this greatest one. There is no parallel to his action in
American history. So far as its political aspects are concerned, the
nearest thing to it is Blaine's resignation from Harrison's Cabinet in
1892; but that only faintly resembles it. Blaine did not resign
because of any difference in principles, but because he wanted to
fight the Administration; and the superficial resemblance lies only in
the similarity of the relations of the two Presidents to their
Secretaries of State.
Bryan leaves the Cabinet saddened, but not disillusioned. When he had
been Secretary of State two months he said that he would not have
taken office "if I thought there was to be a war during my tenure." "I
believe," he added, "there will be no war while I am Secretary of
State, and I believe there will be no war so long as I live." It has
not come out that way; it might have so easily come out that way if
only Germany had signed that treaty of his! But he is not
disillusioned; nothing can disillusion him; his ideal is still only a
day or two ahead of him, and he resigns to fight for it, since fight
for it in the Cabinet he cannot any longer.
In the Name of Peace.
By LAVINIA V. WHITNEY.
(After Kipling.)
When the last of the soldiers has fallen, and the cannons lie twisted
aside,
When the last of all homes has been ruined, and the heart of the
youngest girl bride,
We shall wake from our terrible madness, and pause for an eon or two,
Till the Master of all the good soldiers shall call us to battle anew.
Then those that were brave shall be braver--they shall love with a
love more fair;
They shall hear, o'er a worldwide battlefield, the Voice of their God
in the air;
They shall have the real saints for their comrades--Magdalene, Peter,
and Paul;
They shall fight unembittered, and never again shall be weary at all.
And only the Master shall praise us, for only the Master shall lead;
And no one shall fight for his country, and none for his honor or
creed;
But each for the Master Who loves him, and Teuton and Briton and all
Shall fight, each the cause of the other, for the God of the Love of
us All!