Loads of Learned Lumber

Thursday, March 14, 2019

Michael Kazin, _A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan_

THE UNITED STATES' lack of a robust, electorally competitive socialist party has inspired analysis and commentary for over a hundred years now. Kazin does not explicitly address that question, but his biography of Bryan even so provides parts of the answer.

Bryan, the Democratic nominee for President three times (1896, 1900, and 1908) and a crucial supporter when Democrat Woodrow Wilson finally did win in 1912, was in many respects exactly what a forward-looking politician of the left should have been: advocate for the working class, for women's suffrage, for a progressive income tax, for popular election of U. S. senators, bulldog ready to wrestle with corporate and financial power, compelling orator, charisma out to here.

At the same time, he was willing to tolerate segregation in the south in the interests of maintaining Democratic party unity, was not above emitting anti-Semitic dog-whistles in his attacks on financiers, and took his final public stand at the Scopes trial, defending the right to teach religious obscurantism in the public schools.

As to the last item, I'm willing to go along with Garry Wills's argument in Under God that what truly got Bryan riled was social Darwinism, but even so, Bryan only works as a progressive historical icon if you close one eye. And it was Bryan--not Eugene Debs, not Emma Goldman, not (decidedly not) Earl Browder--who sufficiently galvanized the public to have a shot at getting elected.

Populism's god-awful potential to backfire--grimly redivivus in our day--is a recurring note in Kazin's biography of Bryan, even though Kazin finds a lot to admire in the man.

I might not have read this had not our book club decided we should know more about the man who (it could plausibly be argued) had a larger impact on national politics than any other Nebraskan, but I'm glad I did. Nice and compact (306 pages of text, 60 of notes) but not superficial, briskly paced, intelligently written, it's both a memorable portrait of a key American political figure and a key to the gnarly enigma of the American left.

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