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1924 despatch goes on: "Occasionally a white-haired man would totter up to the hotel desk and ask respectfully for 'Mr. Bryan.' Mr. Bryan would come forward, his scant hair hanging down over his coat collar, and lean his big ear against the lips of his superannuated admirer. A few words would be exchanged, and Mr. Bryan would hurry away — nowhere, too important to waste his time on a ghost from the past and too unimportant to command the time of any one in the present."

This picture of Bryan of the last phase, while serviceable for the purpose of contrast, is oversardonic. The correspondent who wrote it was one of the joint authors of that vivacious volume "The Mirrors of Washington"; and this picture of Bryan tints the facts, which were sardonic enough, with the same temperament that made "The Mirrors of Washington" one of the most cynically disillusioning books of its time. There may be equal truth, and a slightly different point of view, in a despatch that I myself sent from the 1920 Democratic convention at San Francisco, where Bryan made a plea for prohibition enforcement: "His first act was to wave aside the amplifier. Bryan was plainly an elderly man, but he scorned any help to that long-experienced voice. His plea had eloquence, but it was the spirit of an elder admonishing a newer generation. One thought of the Prophet Isaiah. The audience listened closely and gave him affectionate applause. But it was deference to his years, and contained no hint of indorsing his plea. Bryan seemed like an elderly uncle in a black alpaca coat who comes to visit us in the city. We give him the easiest chair; we treat him with affection; when he ad

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1 I hope I have made it clear that this picture of Bryan was extreme. Mr. Bryan was elderly, but not as old as the picture makes him out. While he had no vital relation to the national committee of his party, he still was able to make himself important to it if he should choose.

BRYAN OF THE LAST STAGE

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vises us about our affairs, we listen respectfully - but we go our own way.'

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This latter picture had the more accurate shading, I think. Nevertheless, Mr. Gilbert's picture was merely too heavily drawn. The fundamental assertion was true. Bryan in his later years had little authority over his party organization, little deference from it, and decreasing deference from the rank and file. In March, 1925, he was the target of very general newspaper jibes because of his delivering daily lectures as an incident of a lotselling campaign at a real-estate development in the suburbs of Miami, Fla. In July, 1925, at Dayton, Tenn., in a field other than politics, he became the central figure in a controversy almost as acrimonious, quite as potent to make for him intensely loyal partisans and intensely bitter opponents, as the political controversy that first gave him fame. In the conflict between Fundamentalism and Modernism, Bryan thought of himself as entering upon a new crusade, dreamed of eclipsing his former fame. Just as he was getting under way, before he had had time to deliver a speech prepared in the belief that it would have an even greater popular reception than his oration of twenty-nine years before, he died.

Bryan, in the year of his death, 1925, though only sixty-five, was, to more than half his fellow citizens, the Bryan of the last stage - an elderly man in baggy trousers and a black alpaca coat; mostly bald, except for a few stringy strands of graying hair that hung, a little untidily, over his coat collar; that once superbly clear and musical voice a little marred by a slightly hissing sound that came of age's imperfect teeth; the eyes, though they still flashed, flashing now with rather the cold hardness of an old fighter who has been denied success rather frequently, and lacking the warmth and depth that once

1 Mark Sullivan, in the New York Evening Post, July, 1920.

they had, the quick mobility through the widest range of feeling from satirical humor to tense earnestness.

This later Bryan was the only one known in 1925 to more than half his fellow citizens; for a generation as measured in familiarity with public characters is short. As respects reading the newspapers with any real interest in public affairs, we must measure a generation as beginning at the age of sixteen to twenty. And so, in the closing year of this quarter-century, probably we should have to say that only those over forty could remember the early Bryan. Only those of middle age or older could have known, as a personal experience, the sensation with which Bryan first burst upon the country.

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II

One read that picture of Bryan's later years as painted by Mr. Gilbert one read it, or one saw the actual scene at the national committee meeting of 1924. And then one's mind went back to another scene, twenty-eight years before, at the national convention of 1896 - and reflected on some sombre aspects of time and change which various poets and Old Testament prophets have put into familiar and sufficient words. Could that Bryan of the 1924 picture be the same Bryan of whom at the Democratic National Convention of 1896, the correspondent of the New York Sun1 had written:

From all parts of the convention hall a great roar went up for Bryan, Bryan, Bryan. These cheers were continued and rolled on and on. Mr. Bryan is a smooth-faced man of early middle life and his dark hair is long and wavy. . . . His rhetoric and English and his oratorical gestures were almost superb. His voice is clear and resonant, and his bearing graceful. He is the idol of the silver camp, and if a vote could have been taken immediately after he had finished, he would,

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1 July 10, 1896. This despatch has the more force when it is remembered that The Sun was extremely hostile to Bryan.

BRYAN OF 1896

III

without the slightest doubt, have been nominated for President by acclamation.

Or the same Bryan of whom, in his prime, John Clark Ridpath, fired by the ecstatic exaltation that was common at the time of his 1896 triumph, wrote:

was

That unanswerable oration of William J. Bryan. one of the few inspired utterances of the human soul rising to a great occasion, and pouring out the vehement river of truth. Bryan was on that day a chosen instrument. . . . He vaulted like an athlete into the wild arena, drew his sword, and stood defiant, blazing with wrath in the very face of an enemy that durst not attack him with anything but contumely and falsehood. . . . We intend that the patriot and statesman, William Jennings Bryan, shall be, as he deserves to be, the President of the United States. and that under his wholesome and patriotic administration a new century of peace shall be ushered in, in the splendor and revival of which the evil powers which have dominated American society for the last quarter of a century shall wither and perish from the earth.

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III

That early Bryan, the Bryan of that picture and that ecstatic prophecy - how shall we make him live again. for a generation that did not know his prime? How shall one tell, by what device of words can another generation be made to feel, the thrill that Bryan gave to the America of 1896? He was "beautiful as Apollo," said Stone of Missouri; he was young, he was dashing, he was magnetic.1 In nominating him, the Honorable Henry T.

1 Mr. R. L. Metcalfe, an associate of Bryan in his early Nebraska days, and for many years a coworker with Bryan on the latter's newspaper, The Commoner, wrote me feelingly of the hold Bryan's personality maintained over those who came into intimate personal contact with him: "If he had lived in any year, in any age, and had retained the capacity for leadership and the power of drawing men to him which he had in the early days he would have been THE leader. In those days it was not only his oratory but his loving and magnetic personality, his unfailing sense of humor, his practical attitude toward things of life generally, and so many things that I can feel right now but cannot name, that made him a real leader and brought men around him so that they would have been glad to die for him. That is all so true that I can't even tell about it in words."

Hardly any superlative one might use to suggest the exaltation many persons

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Lewis, of Georgia, used the words applied by Prentiss to Henry Clay: "His civic laurels will not yield in splendor to the brightest chaplet that ever bloomed upon a warrior's brow." There was romance in the mere fact that one so young should win such fame, and in the daring of his ambition; for in the year in which he seized the nomination he was only a year over the age which the Constitution fixes as the youngest at which a man may aspire to the presidency, and younger by nine years1 than any man who had reached the office.

Most of all, there was romance in the dramatic swiftness of his leap. On July 9, 1896, the name of Bryan meant nothing to probably nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand people in the United States. Even to those who knew him at all, he was merely a Western ex-congressman who had served two terms and turned to editing a newspaper in Omaha. On that day, July 9, 1896, the correspondent of the New York World, writing of the Democratic National Convention at Chicago, said:

felt about Bryan in his prime would be too great. It might be unreasonable, it might even verge on impiety, but it would be an accurate description of the way some of Bryan's followers sincerely felt at the time he emerged and for some years later. One day in April, 1918, riding with Bryan on an interurban car in northern Indiana, as we passed through a town (I think it was Warsaw) Bryan told me of a family there that used to think of him as the second coming of Christ. To compare him, favorably, to St. Paul, was not uncommon. One Bryan zealot pointed out that St. Paul was not under the handicap of having to overcome the steady disparagement of hostile newspapers. Who can say what might have been Bryan's place in history if he had emerged not in the nineteenth century, and not in sophisticated America, but in a community unfamiliar with the simplest facts of science, interpreting some of the ordinary phenomena of nature as supernatural, still thinking of thunder, for example, as the voice of Jehovah; a community highly imaginative, given to mysticism, tending to exalt unusual personalities, susceptible to leadership, with a tradition of voices from on high?

1 The youngest President before 1896 was Grant, who was forty-six when inaugurated in 1869. Grover Cleveland was forty-seven when inaugurated in 1885. Franklin Pierce was forty-eight when inaugurated in 1853. James K. Polk was forty-nine when inaugurated in 1845. Subsequent to 1896, Roosevelt was fortythree when he took office on McKinley's death in 1901, the youngest President we have ever had.

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