Authors: Scott Farris
Now a three-time loser, Bryan, only forty-eight years old, was already a has-been as a presidential candidate. He was still idolized by millions, but it was the magic of the 1896 campaign that had bonded his followers to him in a way almost unprecedented in American history. His image hung like an icon in a million American homes next to portraits of Jesus. Overseas, the only image that hung in Leo Tolstoy's bedroom was a picture of Bryan, who had become friends with the great Russian novelist and pacifist during one of Bryan's world tours. Unlike later critics who disparaged Bryan's intellect and his politics, Tolstoy declared he found Bryan “remarkably intelligent and progressive.”
Bryan corresponded widely with the famous and the unknown. Hundreds of thousands of admirers wrote to him, to ask a favor, to tell him their troubles and ask for his prayers, and to talk about how his words and example had profoundly changed their lives. A young Presbyterian cleric wrote, “I want you to know that I am one of the thousands of young men in this country that you have helped into lofty conceptions of life and its meaning.” Still a politician, Bryan used the correspondence to his political advantage by creating a database of a half-million names that aided him in his campaigns.
Bryan radiated goodwill. His essential kindness and decency, which some mocked as yet another sign that he was a simpleton, caused admirers to open up and reveal their most intimate secrets. A woman named Amy Howley, who had attended one of Bryan's massive outdoor Bible classes when he lived in Miami, confided to Bryan in a letter that she had a husband who committed suicide and had recently watched a daughter die during childbirth. “God only knows why I am telling you all this. But somehow I thought you'd pray for me,” Mrs. Howley wrote, adding that while she never expected to see Bryan again, she hoped that they might meet in Heaven.
Such maudlin sentiments drove cynics to distraction. Historian Richard Hofstadter accused Bryan of possessing “a childish conception of religion.” The radical journalist John Reed joined Bryan on a tour of rural Florida and wrote a condescending profile of Bryan floating down the Ocklawaha River “on a gasoline yacht, in black statesmanlike cutaway, white clerical tie, light grey fedora hat, his hands clasped across his stomach, benevolently bringing love and order into his simple world.” The acerbic journalist H. L. Mencken, who had once thought Bryan's speeches as sublime as a Beethoven symphony, forgot that he had been a youthful admirer of Bryan and later wrote one of the most hateful obituaries ever published about a beloved public figure, calling Bryan “a vulgar and common man . . . a peasant come home to the dung pile.”
“What his enemies could not understand,” said University of Chicago political scientist Charles Edward Merriam, a strong supporter of Bryan's progressive policies, “was that the people are as much interested in knowing about their leader's heart as in knowing about his head, and that sympathy no less than intelligence plays its part in the great process of popular control.”
Bryan was especially sympathetic toward women, though there was never a hint of sexual scandal surrounding him. He adored his wife, Mary, who was his full partner in politics. One of his daughters, Ruth, became a congresswoman from Florida and the U.S. minister to Denmark, the highest rank a woman had achieved in the U.S. Foreign Service at that time. He paid his female employees at his magazine, the
Commoner,
the same union wages received by men. Bryan not only advocated women's suffrage years earlier than most Democratic leaders, he argued for other measures of sexual equality. He said that the age of sexual consent should be the same for women as for men and that men who solicited prostitutes deserved punishment just as much as the prostitutes themselves.
Bryan was not particularly sympathetic, however, to African Americans. While he never used racial epithets and took no steps to make the lot of African Americans worse, he held the racial prejudices common to his day, and his reform agenda never included anything to correct racial injustices. He accepted the “Jim Crow” segregation laws of the South as a fact of life, no doubt in part because the South was a large portion of his political base. This moral blind spot is a shame because Bryan did, from time to time, exhibit some cognizance of the plight of African Americans. He occasionally entertained blacks in his home, and he criticized the Republican Party for rewarding the loyalty of African-American voters with nothing more than a few “janitorships.” He also chastised Southern Democrats for failing to support expanded government power over railroads because he knew what they really feared was federal interference in segregation. “As if your personal objections to riding with negroes should interfere with a great national reform!” he said. A few black leaders, including W. E. B. Du Bois, endorsed Bryan in the 1908 election, but Bryan knew 1908 was his last chance to be president and that could not happen if he alienated the South. So he stepped back from even the very modest outreach he had made to African-American voters in past campaigns and never really applied his Christian ethics to addressing their unique problems. The same could be said of virtually all the major progressive leaders of the day and indeed most Americans.
In 1912, the Republican Party split in two, and Bryan might finally have won the presidency. He worked for an unprecedented fourth nomination but was rebuffed. Eventually persuaded of Woodrow Wilson's progressive credentials, Bryan then used his still considerable influence to make Wilson president. He led a switch of delegates at the Democratic National Convention that eventually gave Wilson the nomination on the forty-sixth ballot.
2
More as a reward for his party service than out of gratitude or friendship, Wilson named Bryan his secretary of state.
When World War I broke out, Bryan and Wilson agreed to a policy of strict neutrality, but Bryan was soon alarmed by Wilson's growing support for the Allied cause and his increasing inclination to have the United States enter the war. Bryan was not a true pacifist, but he did abhor violence and was appalled by the slaughter going on in the European trenches. Wilson was angered by Germany's use of submarines; Bryan thought the U-boat attacks were no less despicable than Britain's blockade of Germany, which was causing widespread hunger and the threat of starvation. When Wilson declined to couple condemnation of Britain's blockade with his protest of the German sinking of the
Lusitania,
which killed more than one hundred Americans, Bryan resigned.
During his short tenure as secretary of state, Bryan had proposed treaties that promoted arbitration over war in international disputes. “The killing of human beings,” Bryan said, “shall not be commenced by any nation until the world knows what crime has been committed that requires so high a penalty.” He had negotiated twenty-nine “cooling off” treaties, as they were known, and Bryan had sincerely thought, given all the advancements in science, travel, and understanding, that humanity might be on the verge of making war a thing of the past. Now, with military and civilian deaths estimated at sixteen million in the most catastrophic event in modern history, he tried to grasp how the world had gone so wrong.
Despite his earlier avowal of neutrality in the conflict, Bryan came to believe that a German culture increasingly hostile to traditional religion was the cause of the war. Before the war, Germany had been the center of the new “higher criticism” of the Bible, which was scholarship that challenged traditional beliefs about the authorship of the books of the Bible and which challenged the literal truths of its accounts. Germany had also produced the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who provocatively referred to himself as “the Antichrist,” and whose work disparaged Christianity as a religion for the weak and unhealthy. His book
Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
with its concept of “will to power,” was distributed as inspirational reading to thousands of German troops during World War I. Particularly influential on Bryan was a book by Vernon Kellogg, an American biologist who spent part of the war years with members of the German high command. Kellogg reported that the Germans had applied to international relations the theories of Charles Darwin, which Herbert Spencer had boiled down to “survival of the fittest,” thereby provoking the bloodiest war in human history.
This “Social Darwinism,” as it is known, had been used by some in America, including E. L. Youmans, founder of
Popular Science Monthly,
to discredit the type of reforms advocated by Bryan. Social Darwinists argued, essentially, that biology was destiny; therefore, the government had no power to redress social inequalities. The theory clashed with everything Bryan believed about the duty and the power of a Christian to change the world. Still, the Social Darwinism movement before the war was so small that it did not particularly disturb Bryan. In 1909, he said that while he was not convinced of the truth of evolutionary theory, “I do not mean to find fault” with those who accept evolution as fact.
But the war and his perception of its root causes changed Bryan's attitude. Bryan, as we have seen, linked the impulse for progressive reform to religious faith. If the teaching of evolutionary theory was undermining the faith of students, then it was undermining progressive reform as well. To prove his point about the impact of evolutionary instruction upon religious belief, he cited a survey conducted by a Bryn Mawr College psychologist, which found that while only 15 percent of college freshmen said they did not believe in God, more than 40 percent of graduating seniors said they did not. Coming to grips with the first wave of the American youth culture in the Jazz Age of the 1920s, Bryan was also appalled by surveys that found only 10 percent of college students were seriously interested in religion, while 50 percent gambled and 62 percent drank alcohol (then illegal under Prohibition).
Bryan believed Darwin's theories were being improperly applied to a host of human endeavorsâeven though, as far as he was concerned, it had not been proven as fact, even as it applied to biological evolution. In commentary printed in the
New York Times
in 1922, Bryan addressed the question, “Did God use evolution as His Plan? If it could be shown that man, instead of being made in the image of God, is a development of beasts we would have to accept it, regardless of its effect, for truth is truth and will prevail. But when there is no proof we have a right to consider the effect of the acceptance of an unsupported hypothesis.”
Bryan said he had no issue with the teaching of evolution as
theory
but insisted it should not be taught as
fact
. He further argued that while private schools could teach whatever they wished, public schools had an obligation to respect the wishes of those who paid the taxes to support the schools. As Walter Lippmann later observed, Bryan had flipped Jefferson's dictum regarding the “separation of church and state” on its head. If, Bryan argued, the state could not compel someone to practice a certain religion, then the state also could not compel someone to challenge his or her religious faith, either. He therefore went on a national campaign to persuade state legislatures to pass laws that would prohibit the teaching of evolution as fact in the public schools (although Bryan insisted that such laws should not carry a fine or any other form of punishment). Five states passed such laws. One was Tennessee.
The American Civil Liberties Union, only six years old in 1925, decided to challenge one of the anti-evolution laws not on the basis of adjudicating the correctness of evolutionary theory, but on the issue of freedom of speech. Dayton, Tennessee, meanwhile, had once been a prosperous iron and coal-mining town that had fallen on hard times. As industrial as it was agricultural, Dayton was known as a tolerant community with only a few members of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan. But city leaders grasped that such a trial would bring visitors and national attention. Therefore, in order to boost the local economy, city leaders thought it would be grand if Dayton, with its lovely three-story courthouse built during better times, was the site of the trial sought by the ACLU. The local high school football coach, John T. Scopes, acknowledged that he had unintentionally violated the law while substituting for the regular biology teacher and, after meeting with town leaders, agreed to be charged with unlawfully teaching evolutionâif it could help the town economy.
Bryan agreed to assist in Scopes's prosecution while the most famous criminal defense attorney in the nation, Clarence Darrow, agreed to assist with Scopes's defense. Darrow had been a progressive ally and supporter of Bryan, but he was also an agnostic who found Bryan's attack on evolution silly, dangerous, and obnoxious. Immediately dubbed “The Monkey Trial” and the focus of worldwide attention, it would be inadequate to label it a spectacle. It remains
sui generis
in American history.
It was hardly a trial at all because both sides acknowledged Scopes was guilty of breaking the law. When the judge threw out the testimony of a host of scientific and religious experts as irrelevant to Scopes's guilt or innocence, Bryan and Darrow agreed to the highly unusual idea that each would take the stand and be cross-examined by the other. Bryan took the stand first and, while he knew most of the Bible by heart, he was no theologian. He sputtered in a rare display of inarticulateness as Darrow peppered him for two hours with questions designed to show that a literal interpretation of the Bible was nonsensical. Did Bryan think God created the world in just six, twenty-four-hour days? Did he believe Jonah was really swallowed by a whale? Did Joshua literally make the sun stand still? When Darrow pressed Bryan to name the exact date of the great flood, Bryan replied, “I don't think about things I don't think about.” Darrow thrust a knife into the opening, “Do you think about things you do think about?”
The
New York Times
called Bryan's time on the witness stand “an absurdly pathetic performance.” Bryan at first did not seem aware of how badly he had done, but he looked forward to getting Darrow on the stand. Darrow, however, outfoxed Bryan again. The next day, he moved that the judge direct the jury to find Scopes guilty, ending the trial and beginning the appeals process. Bryan did not get to cross-examine Darrow, nor did he get to give his closing summation. Scopes was quickly found guilty and fined one hundred dollars.