William Jennings Bryan

(b. Salem, Illinois, 18 Mar. 1860; d. 26 July 1925) US; member of the US House of Representatives 1891 – 5, Democratic Presidential nominee 1896, 1900, 1908, Secretary of State 1913 – 15 Son of a baptist minister, Bryan was educated at Whipple Academy and Illinois College, Jacksonville, graduating BA in 1881 and MA in 1884. After gaining an LLB from University College of Law Chicago in 1883, he was admitted to the Illinois bar and began practising law in Jacksonville. Moving to Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1887, he continued to practice law but developed political aspirations under the tutelage of J. Sterling Morton, the local Democratic political agent. In 1890 he began to realize these ambitions by gaining election to the US House of Representative; 1894, however, brought a temporary setback when the Nebraska legislature failed to elect him US Senator. He turned instead to journalism and became editor of the Omaha World-Herald.

1896 marked Bryan's dramatic debut as a national political figure when as a little-known former Congressman, he succeeded in capturing the Democratic nomination for the presidency. It was a period of economic depression, exacerbated by an appreciating currency linked to gold, and Bryan passionately articulated agrarian discontent. His famous "Cross of Gold" speech, which ended on the much quoted peroration "You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold", swept the convention delegates off their feet. Despite a punishing campaign, during which Bryan travelled 18,000 miles and made over 600 speeches, he was defeated by Mckinley. But he did secure a position of prominence in the Democratic Party for the next thirty years, gaining his party's nomination for the presidency on two further occasions, 1900 and 1908, and influencing the convention to endorse Woodrow Wilson in 1912. Wilson repaid this political debt by making Bryan his Secretary of State. Bryan, the campaigner and orator, was ill-suited for the post. A pacifist, he felt unable to accept America's drift from neutrality towards support of Britain in the First World War, and resigned in 1915.

Equally at home in religion and politics, Bryan thereafter turned his attention to Prohibition and Fundamentalism. He became a crusader against evolution. As a prosecuting attorney in the famous "Scopes Monkey" trial he gained the conviction of John Thomas Scopes for teaching evolution. Bryan's name also became associated with white supremacy. At the Democratic convention of 1924, he failed to support a resolution denouncing the Ku Klux Klan.

Bryan was famous for his splendid voice, impressive personality, and impassioned oratory. He is remembered as a champion of lost causes, such as bimetallism. But many of the reforms he pressed for were introduced including: income tax; popular election of US senators; womens' suffrage; regulation of railroads; and currency reform. He was not an original thinker and had no clearly defined political position but his powerful oratory enabled him to move vast, often hostile, audiences. He was an evangelical politician seeking converts to what he regarded as good causes.

He published numerous articles and several books including: The First Battle (1897); The Menace of Darwin (1921); The Bible and Its Enemies (1921); In His Image (1922).

Reared in Illinois, Bryan attended Illinois College and Chicago's Union College of Law. In 1887 he moved to Nebraska, entering Democratic politics as a champion of agrarian reform. Elected to Congress in 1890, defeated in a Senate bid four years later, he won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1896 but lost to Republican William McKinley. He ran again in 1900 and 1908—both times unsuccessfully.

Having supported Woodrow Wilson in 1912, Bryan became his secretary of state. A pacifist and antiâ€imperialist with no diplomatic experience, Bryan negotiated conciliation treaties with some thirty nations providing for the submission of disputes to investigative commissions.

The outbreak of war in 1914 tested Bryan's pacifism. Embracing Wilson's call for U.S. neutrality, he opposed loans to the Allies and travel on belligerent ships by U.S. citizens; he also called on U.S. vessels to observe Germany's Uâ€boat blockade of Great Britain. President Wilson, by contrast, saw the German blockade as a violation of neutral rights.

In May 1915, a German Uâ€boat sank the British liner Lusitania (heavily loaded with munitions), killing 1,198 people, including 128 Americans. Wilson repeatedly demanded that Germany pay reparations, disavow Uâ€boat warfare, and accept his interpretation of neutral rights. Bryan resigned, believing Wilson was treating the German and British maritime blockades unequally; he also deplored the president's preempting of his role. He was succeeded by the colorless Robert Lansing, who proved highly favorable to the Allies.

Out of office, Bryan opposed the militaristic “Preparedness†campaign but endorsed Wilson in 1916. Personally opposed to U.S. entry into the war in 1917, he refused to speak out.

As a diplomat, Bryan shared Wilson's moralistic approach to world affairs, but the two men's basic principles differed: Bryan valued peace above all; Wilson insisted that Germany accept his view of neutral rights. Bryan's resignation reflected the conflict of wills that often ensues when a president seeks to conduct his own foreign policy—a conflict that has more than once upset the course of U.S. diplomacy.

[See also Lusitania, Sinking of the; World War I: Causes.]

Bibliography

Bryan, William Jennings (1860-1925) Democratic party leader, U.S. congressman (1891-95), and secretary of state, born in Salem, Illinois. In the Spanish-American War (1898), Bryan was a colonel of the 3rd Nebraska Volunteer Regiment. He was the most prominent leader of the Democratic party from 1896 to 1912. As the first secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson (1913-15), Bryan hoped to promote world peace by means of bilateral conciliation treaties through which the participating nations agreed, in event of a dispute, to observe a “cooling off†period. Bryan negotiated such treaties with thirty nations. He resigned rather than sign Wilson's note to Germany after the sinking of the Lusitania (1915). Remaining loyal to the president, he continued to demand neutrality and opposed preparedness, which, he said, “provokes war.†Bryan supported the League of Nations in 1919, and when it was blocked in the Senate, he recommended compromise in 1920 to save it.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

For 30 years William Jennings Bryan was active in American politics, emerging first as a spokesman for those who felt disregarded or slighted by the urban, industrial forces revolutionizing the United States in the period after the Civil War. Giving voice to their values and protests, Bryan advocated measures which he believed would give the people more direct control of the government and would allow the common man more economic advantages. Seeking simple solutions to complex social and economic problems, Bryan talked in pietistic terms: the controversy over coinage was viewed as a struggle between good and evil, not merely between men of conflicting points of view.

Although the increasing industrialization and urbanization of American society and greater United States participation in world affairs made Bryan an anachronism and finally thrust him aside, his attacks helped to focus public attention on serious problems and indirectly led to measures of correction and reform in the early 20th century.

Bryan was born in Salem, Ill. In his middle-class family, great emphasis was placed on religion and morality, not only in one's personal life but in politics and in the conduct of national affairs. After graduating from Illinois College in 1881 and studying for 2 years at Union College of Law in Chicago, he opened a law office in Jacksonville. Shortly afterward he married Mary Baird.

Early Career

In 1887 Bryan moved to Lincoln, Nebr., practicing law and simultaneously turning toward politics. He won a seat in Congress in 1890 and was reelected in 1892. As a congressman, he was a foe of high tariffs and an exponent of free coinage of silver, both popular positions with Nebraska voters.

In the 1880s and 1890s debtors, farmers, and silver mine owners urged the expansion of the amount of money in circulation in the United States, arguing that more money in circulation would mean better times and that when money was scarce the wealthy benefited at the expense of the less well-to-do. Exponents of silver coinage argued that the Federal government should buy large quantities of silver, issue currency based on silver, and put 16 times as much silver in a silver dollar as the amount of gold in a gold dollar. The movement had a magnetic appeal for those suffering from the agricultural depression of the 1880s and 1890s. Bryan took its rallying cries - "free silver" and "16 to 1" - as his own. A dynamic and dedicated speaker, he toured the country speaking on silver, as well as urging its merits in the Omaha World Herald. Defeated for the Senate in 1894, he had become editor of the paper. Known for his oratory rather than his brilliance or shrewdness, Bryan captured the imagination of small-town and rural people who were bewildered by the changes occurring around them, devastated by the depression of 1893, and angry with President Grover Cleveland's policies toward Coxey's Army and the Homestead strike.

Presidential Candidate and Political Leader

The silver forces, centered chiefly in western and southern states, had virtual control of the Democratic convention of 1896 before it opened in Chicago. Bryan's dramatic "Cross of Gold" speech helped him secure the presidential nomination, and he prosecuted the campaign against former Ohio governor William McKinley with unprecedented vigor. When the Populist party also nominated Bryan, the conservative "Gold Democrats" were alarmed and seceded from their traditional party and nominated another candidate. The campaign was extremely heated. To Bryan the "money men of the East" were agents of evil; to Republicans and conservative Democrats, Bryan was equally abhorrent. Bryan was the first presidential candidate to travel extensively and to use the railroads to take his case to the people.

Bryan lost the election but remained the Democratic party leader and immediately began campaigning for 1900. His activities were varied, designed to keep him before the public eye: he wrote magazine articles, made extensive speaking tours on the Chautauqua circuit, and, with his wife, compiled an account of the 1896 campaign called The First Battle.

When the Spanish-American War began, Bryan enlisted and served briefly, raising a regiment in Nebraska. The paramount issue arising from the war (which the United States won quickly) was whether the country should annex any of the overseas territories Spain had been forced to relinquish - whether the nation should embark on a policy of imperialism, as had most of the other major nations of the world. Bryan, a dedicated anti-imperialist, felt certain that by referendum the people would repudiate any administration that declared for annexation. But he argued for approving the Treaty of Paris ending the war, by which the Spanish would cede Puerto Rico and the Philippines to the United States, saying that the United States should first secure the freedom of the Philippines from Spain and then award them independence when the international situation was more favorable.

Bryan coupled anti-imperialism with free silver as the major issues of the 1900 campaign, in which he again opposed President McKinley and was again defeated. The gradual disappearance of hard times had lessened the appeal of free silver, and the American people were too pleased with the outcome of the Spanish-American War to support anti-imperialism.

Bryan launched a weekly newspaper, the Commoner, in 1901 and kept himself before the public, although many Democratic party leaders considered him a failure as a candidate. Bypassed in 1904 by the Democratic party, Bryan supported the presidential candidacy of conservative Judge Alton B. Parker. Parker and the conservatives did so poorly in the election that Bryan was able to secure the 1908 nomination for himself. Another defeat, this time at the hands of William Howard Taft, ensued, but Bryan remained active in the Democratic party. In 1912 he helped to secure the nomination of Woodrow Wilson for the presidency, and Wilson named the Great Commoner secretary of state in 1913.

Bryan's durability as a political leader stemmed from a number of sources: his control of a party faction, his appeal to the common man and his personification of traditional American values, his identification with a large number of reform issues, his constant and unremitting labor, and the paucity of successful Democratic leaders. In particular, his capacity for pointing out areas of reform turned the public's attention toward problems of trusts and monopolies, paving the way for corrective legislation. Many of the reforms he suggested were carried out, several by President Theodore Roosevelt. Federal income tax, popular election of senators, woman's suffrage, stricter railroad regulation, initiative and referendum provisions, and publicity of campaign contributions were all reforms for which Bryan had worked.

Secretary of State

Bryan helped to obtain passage of domestic legislation, most notably the Federal Reserve Act. He strove to master foreign policy, bringing more energy and dedication than insight. He had no experience in foreign policy and had been chosen secretary of state because that was the most important position in the Cabinet. For Latin America he advocated a policy of protection of American business interests, suggesting that more financial intervention by the U.S. government might prevent European influence. He was particularly interested in negotiating arbitration treaties with some 30 countries, for he believed that such treaties would prevent war. He advocated a policy of neutrality in World War I, hoping that the United States might play the role of arbitrator between the opposing sides. Wilson, however, did not follow his advice; in protest over the tone of the President's second note about the sinking of the Lusitania, Bryan resigned in June 1915.

Last Decade

Bryan remained active in politics and also promoted Florida real estate, wrote copiously, and lectured on prohibition. The old-fashioned Protestantism that had made him a hero to many people became more prominent in his thinking even as it became less prevalent in American society; he spoke out for the fundamentalists, even to the point of refusing to condemn the Ku Klux Klan because of their Christian guise. Shortly after he was howled down at the 1924 Democratic convention, he appeared for the prosecution in the Scopes trial in Tennessee, opposing the teaching of theories of evolution in public schools. The naiveté and narrowness of his thinking emerged clearly in this trial, which was Bryan's last appearance in public before his death in 1925.

Further Reading

Books about Bryan, like books by him, are abundant. The most detailed biography is Paolo E. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan: Political Evangelist, 1860-1908 (1964). Louis W. Koenig, Bryan: A Political Biography of William Jennings Bryan (1971), is a useful study. Paul W. Glad, The Trumpet Soundeth: William Jennings Bryan and His Democracy, 1896-1912 (1960), treats the rural context from which Bryan emerged. Glad's McKinley, Bryan and the People (1964) focuses on the election. The last years of Bryan's life are handled skillfully by Lawrence W. Levine, Defender of the Faith: William Jennings Bryan; The Last Decade, 1915-1925 (1965). By far the best brief treatment of Bryan is Richard Hofstadter, "The Democrat as Revivalist," in Paul W. Glad, ed., William Jennings Bryan: A Profile (1968).

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William Jennings Bryan, 1908. (credit: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

(born March 19, 1860, Salem, Ill., U.S. — died July 26, 1925, Dayton, Tenn.) U.S. politician and orator. He practiced law at Jacksonville, Ill. (1883 – 87), before moving to Lincoln, Neb., where he was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1890. In the U.S. House of Representatives (1891 – 95), he became the national leader of the Free Silver Movement; he advocated its aims in his "Cross of Gold" speech, which won him the Democratic Party nomination for president in 1896. He was the party's nominee again in 1900 and 1908. In 1901 he founded a newspaper, The Commoner, and thereafter lectured widely to admiring audiences; he was called "the Great Commoner." He helped secure the presidential nomination for Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and served as his secretary of state (1913 – 15), contributing to world law by espousing arbitration to prevent war. A believer in a literal interpretation of the Bible, he was a prosecuting attorney in the Scopes trial (1925), in which he debated Clarence Darrow on the issue of evolution; the trial took a heavy toll on his health, and he died soon after it ended.

For more information on William Jennings Bryan, visit Britannica.com.

(1860-1925), Democratic party leader and secretary of state, 1913-1915. Born in Illinois, Bryan inherited from his parents an intense commitment to the Democratic party and a fervent Protestant faith. After graduating from Illinois College and Union Law School, he married and, seeing no political future in Illinois, moved to Nebraska in 1887. In 1890, when the new Populist party disrupted Nebraska politics, Bryan won election to Congress; he was reelected in 1892. In Congress, he earned respect for his oratory and became a leader among free-silver Democrats. In 1894 he led Nebraska's Democrats to support the state Populist party.

Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic convention with his stirring Cross of Gold speech favoring free silver and thereby captured the presidential nomination. Also nominated by the Populists, Bryan agreed with their view that government should protect individuals and the democratic process against monopolistic corporations. "The Boy Orator of the Platte" traveled eighteen thousand miles and spoke to thousands of voters, but lost; William McKinley's victory initiated a generation of Republican dominance in national politics. Bryan's 1896 campaign, however, marked a long-term shift within the Democratic party from a Jacksonian commitment to minimal government toward a positive view of government.

During the Spanish-American War, Bryan served as a colonel in a Nebraska regiment, but after the war, he condemned McKinley's Philippine policy as imperialism. Nominated again by the Democrats in 1900, Bryan hoped to make the election a referendum on imperialism, but other issues intervened, including his own insistence on free silver and attacks on monopolies. McKinley won again.

After his defeat, Bryan launched a newspaper, the Commoner (based on his nickname "the Great Commoner") and made frequent speaking tours. Although he was a superb orator, he was neither a deep nor an original thinker. He used the Commoner and the lecture circuit to affirm equality, to advocate greater popular participation in governmental decision making, to oppose monopolies, and to proclaim the importance of faith in God. "Shall the People Rule?" became the watchword of his third campaign for president, in 1908, when he lost to William Howard Taft.

In 1912, Bryan worked to secure the Democratic presidential nomination for Woodrow Wilson, and when Wilson won, he named Bryan secretary of state. As secretary, Bryan promoted conciliation, or cooling-off, treaties, in which the parties agreed that, if they could not resolve a dispute, they would wait a year before going to war and would seek outside fact-finding. Thirty such treaties were drafted.

When the European war broke out in 1914, Bryan, like Wilson, was committed to neutrality. But he went beyond Wilson in advocating restrictions on American citizens and companies to prevent them from drawing the nation into war. When Wilson strongly protested Germany's sinking of the Lusitania, Bryan resigned rather than approve a message he feared would lead to war.

Thereafter, Bryan worked for peace, prohibition, and woman suffrage, and he increasingly criticized the teaching of evolution. In 1925, he joined the prosecution in the trial of John Scopes, a Tennessee schoolteacher charged with violating state law by teaching evolution. In a famous exchange, Clarence Darrow, defending Scopes, put Bryan on the witness stand and revealed his shallowness and ignorance of science and archaeology. Bryan died soon after the trial ended.

Bibliography:

Robert W. Cherny, A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (1985); Paolo E. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan, 3 vols. (1964-1969).

Author:

Robert W. Cherny

See also Elections: 1896 , 1900 , 1908; Populism; Scopes Trial.

Presidential Hopeful

He practiced law at Jacksonville, Ill., and in 1887 he moved to Lincoln, Nebr. Bryan was a U.S. Representative from 1891 to 1895 but was defeated for the U.S. Senate in 1894. The next two years he spent as editor in chief of the Omaha World-Herald. Having ardently identified himself with the free silver forces in Congress, he became their most popular speaker in a preconvention drive to control the Democratic national convention at Chicago in 1896.

At the convention his famous “Cross of Gold†speech so swayed the delegates that his nomination for President was assured, even though he was only 36 years old. The Populist party also nominated him, but the conservative gold Democrats ran John M. Palmer. The chief issue of the campaign was Bryan's proposal for free and unlimited coinage of silver, which he thought would remedy the economic ills then plaguing farmers and industrial workers. He lost the bitterly fought contest to Republican William McKinley, whose campaign was skillfully managed by Marcus A. Hanna.

Bryan controlled the Democratic convention in 1900 and saved the silver plank from removal by Eastern gold factions, but he agreed to put the campaign emphasis on anti-imperialism. Defeated again by McKinley, Bryan in 1901 started the Commoner, a widely read weekly that kept him in the public eye. His reduced party power in 1904 resulted in the compromise nomination of Alton B. Parker, a conservative New Yorker, upon a platform dictated by Bryan. Parker, however, disavowed the silver plank, and Bryan unwillingly acquiesced. Parker's overwhelming defeat by Theodore Roosevelt turned the Democrats again to Bryan, who in 1908 was nominated a third time. Roosevelt's candidate, William H. Taft, defeated him.

Secretary of State

The last Democratic convention in which Bryan played an important role was that of 1912, where his switch to Woodrow Wilson helped gain Wilson the nomination. Upon his election Wilson named Bryan secretary of state. Bryan was influential in holding the Democrats together during the first 18 months of Wilson's administration, when unity was essential to the enactment of the president's reform legislation. He had little previous experience in foreign affairs but studied international questions conscientiously. With some 30 nations he negotiated treaties providing for investigation of all disputes. Antiwar leanings made Bryan more conciliatory than Wilson toward Germany. His Latin American policies, particularly those involving Nicaragua, caused a good deal of friction. Disliking the strong language of the second Lusitania note drafted by Wilson, in which he felt the president had abandoned America's neutral position, Bryan resigned on June 9, 1915, rather than sign it. However, he supported Wilson in the 1916 election and after war was declared.

Later Years and the Scopes Trial

In the 1920 Democratic convention at San Francisco he fought in vain for a prohibition plank, and in 1924 at New York City he supported William G. McAdoo against Alfred E. Smith, but he was no longer the party's leader. In his later years Bryan, a Presbyterian, devoted himself to the defense of fundamentalism. He addressed legislatures urging measures against teaching evolution and appeared for the prosecution in the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee. Although he won the case in the trial court, Bryan's beliefs were subjected to severe ridicule in a searching examination by opposing counsel, Clarence Darrow. Five days after the trial, Bryan died in his sleep.

Bibliography

See the memoirs (1925, repr. 1971), begun by Bryan and finished by his widow; biographies by W. C. Williams (1936), P. W. Glad (1960), P. E. Coletta (3 vol., 1964–69), L. W. Koenig (1971), and W. Kazin (2006); studies by L. W. Levine (1965) and P. W. Glad, ed. (1968).

A political leader of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bryan, claiming to be the candidate of the ordinary American, lost three presidential elections as the nominee of the Democratic party, although he gathered substantial votes in the South and West. At the 1896 Democratic national convention, he delivered the much-remembered “Cross of Gold†speech in favor of unlimited coinage of silver and against the gold standard. A fundamentalist in religion, Bryan opposed the teaching of the theory of evolution in schools and assisted in the prosecution at the Scopes trial.

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 unsuccessfully for Congress. It was the beginning of a distinguished career as an orator for Bryan.

In 1875, Bryan was sent to live in Jacksonville, Illinois, to attend the Whipple Academy and Illinois College. During college, he participated 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 studied 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.

Quotes:

"Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved."

"No one can earn a million dollars honestly."

"I hope the two wings of the Democratic Party may flap together."

"If that vital spark that we find in a grain of wheat can pass unchanged through countless deaths and resurrections, will the spirit of man be unable to pass from this body to another?"

"The humblest citizen of all the land when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of Error."

"Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights; American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others."

See more famous quotes by William Jennings Bryan