Almost President (13 page)

Arriving in Springfield on April 25, Douglas conferred with Democratic and Republican leaders alike, urging that they work in concert and harmony for the benefit of the nation. In an emotional address to the Illinois Legislature that brought many men to tears, Douglas said, “For the first time since the adoption of the Federal Constitution, a wide-spread conspiracy exists to destroy the best government the sun of heaven ever shed its rays upon.”

He had a special message for Democrats: Their party would one day rise again and govern, but in the meantime, “Give me a country first, that my children may live in peace, then we will have a theatre for our party organizations to operate upon.” The quickest way to peace, Douglas said, was “the most stupendous and unanimous preparation for war. The greater the unanimity, the less blood will be shed.”

After his speech, Douglas reported back to Lincoln that he had made progress in tamping down sentiment favorable to secession: “There will be no outbreak, however, and in a few days I hope for entire unanimity in the support of the government and the Union.” Now, Douglas wanted rest and recuperation. He was ill from his marathon of campaigning and all the activity since. Depressed by the breakup of the Union, he had other burdens, too. An infant daughter had recently died, and the cost of his campaigns, for the Senate in 1858 and for the presidency in 1860, had left him heavily in debt.

On May 1, while addressing a large crowd in Chicago, Douglas complained of not feeling well. By May 10, he could not use his arms because of a severe attack of what was diagnosed as inflammatory rheumatism. He also had an ulcerated sore throat and “torpor of the liver.” He became delirious as his condition worsened. When Adele asked if he had any last words for his sons, Douglas allegedly replied, “Tell them to obey the laws and support the Constitution of the United States.” He died on June 3 at age forty-eight, shocking the nation.

When Lincoln learned of Douglas's death, he ordered the White House and other government buildings draped in black crepe. Secretary of War Simon Cameron, as ardent a Republican as there was in the administration, ordered all military units to observe a period of mourning, and issued a circular that praised Douglas as “a great statesman . . . who nobly discarded party for his country.” His second wife, Adele, wanted Douglas buried in Washington near their infant daughter, but the leading citizens of Illinois persuaded her to let him stay in Illinois. He was interred on a rise overlooking Lake Michigan, on a spot where he had hoped to build his and Adele's final home.

Shortly after Douglas's death, plans were made to construct a memorial over his gravesite. The sculptor Leonard Volk, one of several young artists to whom Douglas had been a patron, created a forty-six-foot column of white marble from Douglas's native Vermont topped by a lifelike statue of “The Little Giant.” But Douglas's real monument is the living, breathing Democratic Party. It survived the war when it might have gone the way of the Whigs.

As Douglas had hoped and predicted, the Democrats emerged from the Civil War a competitive national party. In 1868, even as Republicans ran for president the most popular military hero from the war, General Ulysses S. Grant, the Democratic candidate, Horatio Seymour, was still able to poll 47 percent of the popular vote and carry eight states located in the North, South, and West—even as large numbers of Southern whites remained disenfranchised. Six years later, in 1874, the Democrats regained control of Congress for the first time in twenty years.

Douglas never became president, but saving the Democratic Party, which remains the longest, continually functioning political party in the world, was, a friend wrote, “glory enough for one man.” Once the party of white supremacy, it is the party that elected America's first African-American president. Such an occurrence would have shocked Douglas's sensibilities, had he been alive to see it, but he would have been pleased that it was at least a Democrat who broke such a long-standing taboo.

CHAPTER FOUR

WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN

1896, 1900, 1908

The poor man is called a socialist if he believes that the wealth of the rich should be divided among the poor, but the rich man is called a financier if he devises a plan by which the pittance of the poor can be converted to his use.

William Jennings Bryan believed that the evangelical Christian concept of a person's being “born again” could and should apply as readily to politics as to religion. If one person could have a radical conversion experience, Bryan said, then “it can be true of any number. Thus, a nation can be born in a day if the ideals of the people can be changed.” Under Bryan's influence, the Democratic Party was born again in a single presidential election—the 1896 election he lost to William McKinley—and became a progressive party after a century of conservatism. Fittingly for a man who doubted evolution, it was a sudden act of creation.

Bryan took a weary and discredited party that favored the laissez-faire policies of limited government and immersed it in a font of populist reform principles. He convinced millions of voters that their Christian duty required them to vote for a candidate who would expand the power of government and use that power to aggressively help those in need. Democrats emerged from this baptism of 1896 energized and reborn, clothed anew in the liberal and progressive ideals that the party continued to wear into the twenty-first century. Woodrow Wilson, Al Smith, and Franklin Roosevelt would each build upon this tradition, but the transformation began with Bryan.

Even though the sum of his experience in elected office was two terms as a junior congressman from Nebraska in the early 1890s, Bryan was the Democratic Party nominee for president three times. He lost each election by an increasingly larger margin. But it was that first campaign in 1896, when he came so close to winning despite having the entire power structure of the country against him, which still has the ability to thrill. His campaign was “an excitement that was almost too intense for life,” said a reporter who covered it. It was so vital a contest that it inspired poetry, such as this verse by Vachel Lindsay:

I brag and chant of Bryan, Bryan, Bryan

Candidate for president who sketched a silver Zion,

The only American Poet who could sing outdoors,

He brought in tides of wonder, of unprecedented splendor,

Wild roses from the plains, that made hearts tender . . .

“You are a prophet sent by God,” one admirer from Kentucky wrote Bryan during the campaign.

The great issue that inspired such idolatry was the otherwise stolid campaign topic of currency reform, yet the 1896 Bryan presidential run so took on the character of a revival that it seemed impossible to discuss it in anything other than religious language and imagery. Josephus Daniels, the North Carolina editor who would later serve with Bryan in Woodrow Wilson's Cabinet, said Bryan had “rolled away the stone from the golden sepulcher in which democracy was buried.” Bryan was described as a new Moses, a St. Paul, or a young David out to battle the Goliaths of big business, Wall Street, and the Republican Party.

This time, Goliath won. So committed were these powerful interests to Bryan's defeat that they expended campaign funds in amounts that would not be equaled for a century—well in excess of one hundred million in today's dollars.

Before Bryan, the Democrats had been the party of small government conservatism, which the party's patron saints, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, argued was necessary to protect the people. For Jefferson and Jackson, a powerful government would only serve the interests of the well connected. Better to limit what government can do then risk having government side with the powerful. This was the philosophy embraced by the only Democrat to serve as president between 1860 and 1912, Grover Cleveland, who while in the White House in 1896, was still presiding over the lingering effects of the “Panic of 1893,” with one in six workers still unemployed. “Though the people support the government, the government should not support the people,” said Cleveland.

Rejecting the policies of his party's sitting president, Bryan had a much different creed: “The power of the government to protect the people is as complete in a time of peace as in time of war.” Government was not a weapon, but a tool. More than eighty years before Ronald Reagan would be accused of advocating “trickle down economics,” Bryan criticized “those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”

During his more than thirty years in public life, Bryan was instrumental in the passage of a host of progressive reforms. The breadth of the list is extraordinary. Four major reforms—a progressive federal income tax, women's suffrage, Prohibition, and the direct election of senators—required constitutional amendment. Bryan's support and advocacy was critical to the adoption of each, causing one biographer to suggest that Bryan is personally responsible for more constitutional amendments than any person but James Madison. Bryan's influence is particularly extraordinary given that, except for his four years in Congress, the only other public office he held in his life was two years as Wilson's secretary of state. His influence came not from any office but from the roughly fifteen years he spent as titular head of the Democratic Party and the large popular following he enjoyed until his death in 1925.

Despite this lack of official portfolio, other reforms advocated by Bryan—utility and financial regulation, pure food and drug laws, the eight-hour workday, disclosure of campaign contributions, and the citizens' initiative and referendum process—became law during his lifetime. Even more, such as bank deposit insurance, subsidized crop prices, federal protection for the right of labor to organize and strike, and old age pensions would be implemented later under the New Deal, which Herbert Hoover called, “Bryanism under new words and methods.” A few Bryan initiatives are still on the progressive agenda, including publicly financed elections and a guaranteed living wage.

Bryan did not justify the need for these reforms based on social science, but on a religious imperative. For Bryan, all “great political questions are in their final analyses great moral questions.” The law, Bryan said, “is but the crystallization of conscience; moral sentiment must be created before it can express itself in the form of a statute.” Religion was the basis of moral sentiment, Bryan believed, therefore religion is “not only the most practical thing in the world, but the first essential.”

Because religion had practical value in restructuring society, Bryan deplored ministers who thought the only function of the church was personal salvation. In his Bible classes, Chautauqua sermons, and religious articles, Bryan liked to point out that only one-fifth of the Gospel is devoted to the discussion of salvation and the afterlife; the other four-fifths provide instruction in how human beings are to interact with and treat one another. “Christ went about doing good,” said Bryan, and he believed it was the duty of every Christian to do the same.

Individual charity was not enough. A Christian's duty, Bryan believed, was also to work politically for a more just and compassionate society with the goal of creating, as near as practicable, a heaven on earth. “I have no patience with those who feel they are too good to take part in politics,” Bryan said. “When I find a person who thinks he is too good to take part in politics, I find one who is not quite good enough to deserve the blessings of a free government.”

Bryan did not concern himself with the morality of citizens in their private lives. There is no record of him criticizing anyone's personal foibles or infidelities, even those of his political enemies. He cared about
public
morality. The wealthy individuals who believed a few charitable contributions could make up for the unjust methods they used to earn their fortunes disgusted him. A special target of his ire was the founder of Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller, who had become the richest man in America through ruthless business practices. Rockefeller was a great philanthropist, and he, too, liked to teach Bible school, which only caused Bryan to snort, “Many people will wonder how Rockefeller summons the courage to preach so much religion while he practices so much sin.”

Such sentiments made Bryan as much preacher as politician, although despite his many speeches and writings on religion, he was never ordained. And while he was a Presbyterian, he transcended denominations. He was a broad ecumenical spiritual leader for Protestant Middle America in his time, much as the Reverend Billy Graham would be a half-century later. Bryan admitted that even though he enjoyed making political speeches, “I would rather speak on religion than on politics.” With Bryan, however, the line between the two was indistinguishable. “When you hear a good democratic speech it is so much like a sermon that you can hardly tell the difference between them,” he said.

Despite the caricature he became in popular culture following his death, Bryan was not, in the strictest sense, a Fundamentalist, the conservative vein of Protestantism that arose in the late nineteenth century in response to historical criticism of the Bible. Bryan shared some of the Fundamentalists' concerns, toward evolution and how other forms of modernity seemed to challenge and undermine the Christian faith, but he did not share their belief in the Bible as a literal historical record. During the Scopes Trial, for example, he acknowledged that the creation story in Genesis could refer to six eons of time, not six twenty-four-hour days. He also did not believe, as many of the Fundamentalists of the time did, that Christians should separate themselves from society; rather, he wanted to bring more of society under “the Christian spirit.” Also unlike the Fundamentalists, Bryan was not pessimistic about humanity's ability to change society. Many leading Fundamentalists were pessimistic about Bryan, admitting to never voting for him.

Though he might have blanched at the adjective, Bryan was a liberal Christian. He would have preferred being tied to the Social Gospel movement, which he called “applied Christianity” and which sought to apply Christian ethics and values to the worst problems of society. The literal truth of the Bible concerned him less than his belief in the fundamental truth that “‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,' if fully lived up to, would solve every problem; economic, social, political and religious.” His enemies could rightly accuse him of self-righteousness, but all acknowledged his sincerity. Even President William Howard Taft, who foiled Bryan's third try for the presidency in 1908, acknowledged that he was “the least of a liar I know in public life.”

Bryan's total devotion to the truth (as he understood it) would sorely damage his progressive legacy. His final crusade would be a widely misunderstood (and mischaracterized) campaign against the teaching of evolution as fact in the public schools. His performance during the Scopes Trial led critics to portray him as naïve, simple-minded, and, most cruelly of all, bigoted. In truth, he was broadly ecumenical, speaking before all denominations (although the Unitarians' denial of Christ's divinity bothered him a great deal). Neither anti-Catholic nor anti-Semitic, Bryan actively courted Catholics and regularly spoke in synagogues. He studied the other religions of the world outside Christianity but found Islam appalling in its treatment of women and concluded during a world tour he made in 1905 and 1906 that Hinduism was guilty of idolatry. Bryan, as will be discussed shortly, saw his crusade against evolution as not only fully compatible with, but crucial to the cause of progressive reform.

Bryan had first demonstrated an independence of thought on religion and a willingness to buck convention when he was a youth. Born in Salem, Illinois, on March 19, 1860, to a Baptist father who had been a Democratic judge and state senator and a Methodist mother, Bryan the boy became a Presbyterian after having a personal “born again” experience at a revival at age thirteen. He later attended little Illinois College, where courses in biology and geology led him to question whether certain stories in the Bible, such as the creation story, should be taken literally or allegorically. He wrote the famed agnostic lecturer Robert Ingersoll for advice but only got a form letter in return. This seems to have been his only serious crisis of faith.

Bryan was a straight arrow even then, but not suffering from sanctimony. “For some reason Bryan's goodness was not the kind that rubbed against you and turned the fur the wrong way,” a classmate recalled. Bryan studied at the Union Law College in Chicago, but he did not like the big city and so missed some opportunities to better acquaint himself with the problems of urban workers and families. Worried that rural Illinois was too Republican to elect many Democrats, Bryan concluded that the opportunity for a political career was in Nebraska, and so he moved there in 1887, immediately diving into local Democratic politics.