Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
May 2002
Abstract
Perhaps more than any other figure in American history, William Jennings Bryan is remembered for specific and identifiable moments of rhetorical action: the much-revered 1896 "Cross of Gold" speech and the much-maligned Scopes "monkey trial" of 1925. The dissonance between these two events, at least with respect to the ways in which political and rhetorical history has traditionally recorded them, could not be more striking. Bryan, the "Boy Orator," was, at thirty-six years, the youngest and most left-leaning candidate ever to receive a major party nomination for the US presidency. He is often regarded as the founder of the modern Democratic party if not much of modern liberalism. The causes for which the former Nebraska congressman and three-time presidential candidate fought anticipated and buttressed many of the Progressive Era's largest accomplishments. Years after Bryan's death, Herbert Hoover would note his legacy with some bitterness, saying that Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal was merely "Bryanism under new words and methods." Bryan would make a distinctively rhetorical mark as well. Michael Kazin calls him the first "celebrity politician," a man whose oratorical skills earned him a massive and loyal following of supporters willing to travel miles just to hear him speak. His barnstorming campaign practices and popular rhetoric changed the face of presidential campaigning, and perhaps presidential governance, by making both candidate and message more immediately accessible to the American public. For Bryan's many admirers, he was a man ahead of his time. As Myron Phillips put it simply, Bryan was born "thirty years too soon."
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 2 (Spring 2002). Published by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Copyright © 2000 Center for Great Plains Studies. Used by permission.