Mr. Bryan

SEPTEMBER, 1912

WHETHER it marks the final term of his leadership, Mr. Bryan’s valedictory at Baltimore brings to a close a period without parallel in the history of American politics. Like Clay, Mr. Bryan has thrice been an unsuccessful candidate for the Presidency. Like Clay, he has preserved through discouragement and defeat that, constant devotion of a mighty following which is the last test of democratic leadership. But in the larger matters of principle Mr. Bryan has never tried to win by compromise, and he has ever repaid his devoted followers by new demands of self-sacrifice. The great teachers have taught that the supreme reward men covet is the opportunity for service, and the light of that truth has not been lost on Mr. Bryan. Every defeat has swelled the numbers of his volunteers, and there are more men who would follow a forlorn hope led by him to-day than at any moment of his career.

Such a record indeed deserves to be noted. Although of late years the veil of prejudice has been gradually lifted, Mr. Bryan is still very imperfectly understood. While anything like a complete explanation of his character would far exceed the limits of my space and powers, I may perhaps, serve a useful purpose by setting forth a few of the causes which underlie his personal achievement.

The most familiar criticism of Mr. Bryan’s leadership is that it has ever led to failure. The Democratic sun set in 1896, precisely as Mr. Bryan’s star rose from the horizon, and now, sixteen years later, as that star wanes, comes the promise of a Democratic dawn. Thrice during that period Mr. Bryan has not only been his party’s candidate for president, but has dictated the plans of the electoral campaign; and each time the issues he has selected have been emphatically disapproved by the voters of the United States. Furthermore, upon the successful men within the party Mr. Bryan has waged unrelenting war. He never lets well enough alone. Murphy in New York, Taggart in Indiana, Sullivan in Illinois, are successful leaders. Moreover, of their conduct toward him personally Mr. Bryan has little reason to complain. These men have worked loyally for a leader they dislike, on occasions when wormwood would have been to them as balm, and gall as the waters of comfort. Finally, to compromise of all sorts,—the timehonored solvent of political feuds,— Mr. Bryan is obstinately opposed. There are few professional politicians in the Democratic party who do not approve of his abdication. His theory of politics finds its inevitable outcome in defeat. The empty chairs of Democratic office-holders tell their plain story. As the efficient enemy of success Mr. Bryan has no equal.

Straight from premise to conclusion runs the logic of the street. But that logic is founded on a false premise. It takes for granted that the success at which Mr. Bryan has aimed is the same ‘success’ writ large in every politician’s dictionary. But the truth lies in this. The success which Mr. Bryan has pursued he has abundantly enjoyed. The great object of his career has been, not to secure office, not to win Democratic triumphs, but to enlarge the people’s vision with a new conception of social obligation. He has sought not so much to gain the enactment of democratic laws as a change in the very stuff of which democracy is made.

Of the new political ideas which pass current in our time, more by far have been shaped by Mr. Bryan, or at least passed on by him from his Populist inheritance, than have come into being from any other single source. For, as everybody knows, Mr. Roosevelt’s familiar image and superscription have been stamped on coin annually borrowed from his rival’s mint. The publicity of campaign expenditures, the election of senators by the people, the system of direct nominations, initiative, referendum, and all the paraphernalia of direct government based upon complete confidence in the people— all these eclectic issues, from whatever source derived, were articles of Mr. Bryan’s faith when Mr. Roosevelt’s creed knew them not. It is a safe assertion that, in the making of the American nation to-day out of the materials of twenty years ago, Mr. Bryan has been the largest, personal factor. And if this be true, then indeed he is a successful man.

That Mr. Bryan has been a wise leader, a reader of history might well be slow to assert ; but that he has been successful is printed below the surface of the whole Progressive movement. And the first secret of this success is, I believe, that Mr. Bryan is a devoutly religious man. Brought up in the simplest tenets of an Evangelical faith, he has accepted them as naturally as though Copernicus and Darwin had never lived. A man whose Creator daily rectifies the errors of the universe acquires a confidence in the imminent triumph of right which the most gallant skeptic can never hope to achieve. If Mr. Bryan has become famous as a ‘good loser,’it is this confidence in a corrective Providence which makes him so. When he has done his best, he has done as the Lord bade him, and the event is in the Lord’s hands. There is no wasting of strength in vain regrets; he can rest in peace before new labors. In a personal record of the Silver campaign, Mr. Bryan thus describes his reception of the telegraphic news of the defeat of his hopes: —

‘While the compassionless current sped hither and thither, carrying its message of gladness to foe and its message of sadness to friend, there vanished from my mind the vision of a President in the White House, perplexed by the cares of State; and in the contemplation of the picture of a citizen at his fireside, free from official responsibility, I fell asleep.’

Another result of the religious life which is so close to Mr. Bryan’s heart is the extraordinary impersonality with which he conducts his battles. As Religion bids us hate the sin and forgive the sinner, so Mr. Bryan throws all his animosity at the principles emblazoned on the banners of the foe. How fair and free from personalities has been his attitude toward McKinley, toward Roosevelt, toward Taft! For sixteen years he has fought a fight of unexceeded bitterness. Yet it was no trick of oratory which led him, at Baltimore, when the frenzy roused by his attack on Ryan and Belmont had not yet subsided, to declare that, in all this world there was no man whom he hated. The words were literally true. Of how many of the smarting veterans of public life can this be said?

It is an interesting speculation to consider what effect upon Mr. Bryan’s character might have been produced had he been born into one of the more aristocratic sects of Protestantism. Undoubtedly his Evangelicism has immensely broadened the affection which he naturally feels for the ‘plain people,’ as the popular instinct makes him love to call them. For the tragic struggle of humanity he feels a sympathy which understanding has deepened to a poignancy unusual among politicians. The thought of crucifying mankind upon a cross of gold held for him a kernel of something sacred within the husk of the orator’s phrase.

With the formalities of religion Mr. Bryan has always been in the closest accord. His parents were Baptists, and since his fourteenth year he has been a member of the Presbyterian church. His lectures and speeches have always been colored by the traditional phraseology of the clergy. But it was more than an interest in external things which took him to the Edinburgh Conference for the securing of Christian unity, and which has prompted his continuous and earnest interest in church matters throughout his active life.

But this true religion of Mr. Bryan’s runs in a narrow channel. Charity he shows toward men, but never toward ideas. To his primitive mind a creed is right or it is wrong. God does not chequer with light and shade things so important for mankind to see. Mr. Bryan opposed with zeal an attempt to broaden the usefulness of the Young Men’s Christian Association by laying less stress upon the importance of the religious code which it maintains, thinking he saw in it that weakness which the churches have found a subtler foe than sin. And in his long war against Privilege the crude objectiveness of his faith has found new expression in his symbolic vision of the forces arrayed against him. Apollyon and the Scarlet Woman of his Bible class and Sunday-school have become the ’Wall Street’ and the ’Plutocracy’ of his maturer years. To his pictorial imagination these Devil’s children are as real as their father who forever dogs the faltering footsteps of mankind.

Mr. Bryan is an interesting man with an uninteresting mind. He has none of those powers of generalization which lead to the larger reaches of thought; nor has he that mental flexibility which enables a man to understand a position alien to his own. His ideas are cement hardening to stone before they can take rightful shape. To genius the great gift is given of seeing problems in their simple forms; but, like many uneducated men, Mr. Bryan thinks a problem simple because he sees not its complexities. He is forever telling the people that complicated questions of finance or of government should be plain to the dullest understanding. To his mind there is something shady about an intricate question. Its seeming difficulties are the hocus-pocus of interested politicians. No wonder that to his opponents he seems a demagogue,—just as he seemed in the Silver campaign, when, to bring the issue to the proof, he used such arguments as this: —

‘If you throw a stone into the air, you know it will come down. Why? Because it is drawn to the centre of the earth. The law upon which we base our fight is as sure as the law of gravitation. If we have a gold standard, prices are as certain to fall as the stone which is thrown into the air.’

In hundreds of such passages analogy is confused with logic, and the very clearness of the figure seems to Mr. Bryan to cast a corresponding light upon the problem involved. This is not demagoguery. It is but native simplicity of mind.

A demagogue, so the first master of politics has told us, is he who flatters the people, not for their own sake, but for his own. Of this Mr. Bryan is not guilty. When he tells the people they can understand finance, he recalls the childhood lessons in fiat money he learned at his father’s knee.¹ Surely these things are not difficult for the multitude to learn. The self-complacency of the crowd Mr. Bryan has not soothed. He has sought continuously to rouse them from their satisfaction, and he has not allowed his human wish for office to thwart a larger destiny.

Though Mr. Bryan is without intellectual power, he is far from lacking readiness of wit. To his surroundings he is delicately responsive. Those who have often heard him speak in public will readily remember how sensitive he is to the sympathies of his audience, and how swiftly he wins his way toward them. If oratory is Mr. Bryan’s single talent, it is a supreme talent. His voice is an organ of a hundred stops, and its modulated music has in it that Celtic strain of human pathos which, rising from the heart, goes to the heart again. No one who has been through the heat and turmoil of a national convention can forget the weary hours of listening with hand to ear for the fragmentary words drifting from the speaker. I have seen twenty thousand men, when Mr. Bryan rose, sit comfortably back in their chairs, knowing that the irritating strain was over. If conversion be the test of oratory, the value of such a mental change in a vast audience can scarcely be overestimated. Credulity ever keeps pace with comfort.

Mr. Bryan’s oratory, however, is far more than the possession of the voice of Boanerges. He speaks from conviction, and he speaks with courage. Never has he more assurance, never is he more perfect master of himself, than when he faces a hostile audience. Often indignant, he is never angry; and in moments of emotional stress he hews his speech to the exact line of his meaning, with a precision which would do credit to a discourse in a college lecture-room. To his great speeches posterity will not do justice. Preachers, actors, journalists, orators — all are judged fairly by their contemporaries alone; and, in writing their epitaphs, historians must learn that of them at least it is Tradition that speaks the truth. The magic of voice and gesture, the passion of speech, the dramatic pause which drives the argument home, the captivating assurance of the speaker that the audience must believe in his integrity and in his cause — these things lend words a deeper and a more eloquent meaning. These things men remember, but you cannot read them in books. Without a great occasion there can be no great speech. Place, hour, issue, audience, and orator make up one work of art.

I have spoken of Mr. Bryan’s simplicity of mind. It is better to be simple in character than simple in mind, and to Mr. Bryan has been vouchsafed this compensation of his defect. The homely virtues which make up the sum of the world’s happiness are his in ample measure. He is kind, direct, friendly, conscientious, enormously industrious. He has those natural good manners which Nature meant to bestow on all of us. No hint of humor colors his candid speech. The family virtues are his and the citizen’s, and through his whole nature runs a winning ingenuousness to which thousands of his chance acquaintance can testify.

Mrs. Bryan has somewhere recorded an instance of this naïve quality, which deserves to be repeated. In the year 1890, when Mr. Bryan entered his first race for Congress, he engaged in a joint debate with a certain Mr. Connell who then occupied the seat, which Mr. Bryan coveted. Local excitement was intense, and the partisans of both sides packed the house nightly. At the conclusion of the debate Mr. Bryan turned toward his rival with these remarks, which I somewhat curtail: —

‘Mr. Connell, if I have in any way offended you in word or deed, I offer apology and regret and as freely forgive. I desire to present to you in remembrance of these pleasant meetings this little volume because it contains Gray’s “Elegy,” in perusing which I trust you will find as much pleasure and profit as I have found. It is one of the most beautiful and touching tributes to a humble life that literature contains. Grand in its sentiment and sublime in its simplicity, we may both find in it a solace in victory or defeat. If it should be your lot

Th’ applause of list’ning senates to command, and I am left

A youth to fortune and to fame unknown, forget not us who in the common walks of life perform our part, but in the hour of your triumph recall the verse, Let not ambition mock their useful toil.’

Did ever hero of historic occasion appear in the light of a more engaging simplicity of heart?

Those critics who, in steadily decreasing numbers, ascribe inconsistency to Mr. Bryan’s doctrines take small pains to study his record. Those who proclaim him a man of one idea blunder near the truth. He has not a logical mind, but he has logical sympathies, and he has never put forward an important measure which was not designed to curb the control which the few exercise over the many. His mastery of himself has increased with years; experience has sharpened his political skill; but his ideas are the ideas of his youth. With him the Silver Question, the tariff, government ownership of railroads, control of the ‘Money Power,’ even the freedom of the Philippines, are but successive phases of a single purpose. No one of his ‘issues,’ indeed, is so much a distinctive measure of reform as a new voicing of the world-old protest of the sons of Ishmael against the sons of Jacob. From Mr. Bryan’s point of view, nothing is more salient about Mr. Bryan’s programme than its cohesiveness. To box the political compass a statesman must have either more mind or less character than Mr. Bryan has. An evolution analogous to that of Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. Roosevelt, or even of Mr. McKinley, is unthinkable for a man whose intelligence is static and whose heart is oak.

Any discussion of Mr. Bryan’s character leads irresistibly to a comparison with that of his famous antagonist. Not since Plutarch’s time has there been a contrast more inviting to the observer who cares to speculate on the chiaroscuro of human nature. Appearing on the national stage within a year of each other, the destinies of both men have been continuously intertwisted. The ifs of history are a profitless speculation, but after the carnival of materialism of the late nineties the people cried aloud for a revivalist, and if the nation had not followed Roosevelt it would have followed Bryan. Both men have preached the same gospel. Bryan preached it first and sowed the seed. Roosevelt preached it afterwards and reaped the harvest. He that sows the good seed, though others reap, is the good husbandman.

And here it is that I come upon an essential difference between the two men, — a difference which cuts through flesh and sinew to the heart of each. Mr. Roosevelt has taught the young men of this country to mix success wilh their ideals. He has made us believe that ideals can be successful, and for this we owe him much; but too often he has made success ideal, and in this he robs us of our birthright. There is success and there are ideals, but between the two there is nothing in common. Indeed, when the ideal is touched by success it ceases to be the ideal, for in that instant new heights are made to climb; and to the unscalable summit Mr. Roosevelt never points. With Mr. Bryan, defeat is but an incident. To press on with undampened ardor, that is success indeed. We can hardly imagine Mr. Roosevelt, fighting without the magic of popular applause, We can scarcely think of Mr. Bryan unpurified by popular defeat.

The two men furnish a comparison as striking as their contrast. Both are optimists; both born preachers. Each has the body of an athlete and that Olympian digestion which nowadays the statesman’s life demands. Both are fundamental democrats, instinctively reaching over the heads of the politicians to strike hands with the people. Mr. Roosevelt is enormously the more astute; Mr. Bryan the more tenacious. For law as law, Mr. Bryan has a sentiment which to Mr. Roosevelt cannot seem short of mawkish. Again, for Mr. Bryan’s consistency Mr. Roosevelt is too practical. Mr. Bryan follows the wide, plain road; for Mr. Roosevelt no by-path is too devious if in the end it will save time and travel. Personal unselfishness has bestowed on Mr. Bryan a moral power which would have given his rival the strength of ten. Chicago and Baltimore are fresh in men’s minds. Had Mr. Roosevelt gone to Chicago to purchase principles at the sacrifice of his own leadership, the Republican party would be to-day united behind a Progressive candidate. The drama at Baltimore had a different ending.

The glamour of the gentleman in politics still plays about Mr. Roosevelt. In a democracy the blood of ancestors tells doubly. Mr. Bryan has never touched the imaginations of college youth, and the gallant doctrine of noblesse oblige has brought no volunteers to his standard. But throughout this country tens of thousands of young men are leading different lives because he lived before them.

I shall never forget Mr. Bryan as I saw him eight years ago. The convention at St. Louis was nearing its predestined close. The conservatives were in control. The votes to nominate Judge Parker were in the pocket of David B. Hill as he sat at the head of the New York delegation, indulgently allowing the routine of the convention to proceed. In the great hall it was dizzily hot, and toward four in the morning my head fell forward on my desk. Suddenly the sound of music thrilled me. It was Mr. Bryan speaking. He was protesting against the seating of the boss-ridden delegation from Illinois through what he regarded as a fraudulent vote. And then, when his argument was finished, he spoke a few personal words. His career seemed over. The general had returned to the ranks, and this was an apologia pro vita sua. The printed record of that speech I never saw, but the sound of Mr. Bryan’s words rings in my ears: — ‘There are some of you who will say that I have run my race. There are many of you who will maintain that I have fought my fight. But there is not one man here who can say that I have not kept the Faith.’

E. S.