He immediately let himself be heard from with a successful speech against the protective tariff. Adopting the “free and unlimited coinage of silver” as his personal plank, he was renominated in Nebraska and returned to Congress with the frenetic support of the populists. Operators of silver mines were glad to furnish his campaign funds.
Another successful oration in the House almost took the Democratic leadership away from Grover Cleveland, representing gold and the economic creeds of the Wall Street bankers, who as President was the party’s titular head. Bryan earned obloquy in financial circles and near deification from the western insurgents by following it up with a demand for a tax on the incomes of the rich. He was only thirtysix when in 1896 he joined the Nebraska delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
A few days before, as correspondent for the Omaha World-Herald in St. Louis, where the Republicans were convening, he had seen the freesilver men go storming out of the hall amid cries of “Take the Chicago train.” He had already tried out in the halls of Congress his peroration that was soon to be so famous: “I shall not help crucify mankind upon a cross of gold … I shall not aid in pressing down upon the bleeding brow of labor this crown of thorns.”
He had been experimenting for months with other booming passages of the great speech he was planning, at meetings in his home state and in private to his wife. Bryan was an orator who left nothing to chance.
His name had for some time been bruited about as presidential timber. His opportunity came when, in a conclave even more sharply torn than the Republican convention, but this time by antiplutocratic factions, he was called upon to speak. That speech was the climax of his career.
Edgar Lee Masters wrote down his recollections of the scene in the Colosseum: “Suddenly I saw a man spring up from his seat among the delegates, and with the agility and swiftness of an eager boxer hurry to the speaker’s rostrum. He was slim, tall, pale, raven-haired, beaked of nose … as this young man opened his great mouth all the twenty thousand persons present heard its thunder … He was smiling. A sweet reasonableness shone in his handsome face …”
Men and women present in the hall that day never tired of telling all who would listen of the magical effectiveness of the Cross of Gold speech. Bryan’s nomination for President followed. To the tune of Sousa’s “El Capitan” march, his oratory swept the country. Mark Hanna and the Wall Street “interests” had to strain every dollar to carry McKinley’s election.
Finding himself even in defeat one of the country’s great men and with the dignity of a presidential candidate to support, young Bryan had to find some suitable way of making a living. He had no taste for the drudgery of the law. He and his wife produced a book: The First Battle, which did well enough to clear up the debts of the campaign. As a permanent source of income he took up lecturing on the Chautauqua circuit.
When they moved to Nebraska the Bryans joined the Presbyterian Church. He soon became an elder. His speeches were lay sermons. A favorite was on reading the Bible. He tried to live the Christian life.
Although as a practicing Christian he deplored war, as a proselyting democrat he couldn’t help being stirred by the struggle for selfgovernment in Cuba that gave the American expansionists an opportunity to flex their youthful muscles by declaring war against the decrepit empire of the Spanish Bourbons.
“Universal peace cannot come until Justice is enthroned throughout the world,” Bryan declared to a shouting crowd at the Trans-Mississippi World’s Fair in Omaha. “As long as the oppressor is deaf to the voice of reason, so long must the citizen accustom his shoulder to the musket and his hand to the saber.”
The “young man eloquent” modestly enlisted as a private in the militia. Thereupon the governor of Nebraska commissioned him to raise a regiment and, after a summer spent with his troops fighting fever and mosquitoes in a Florida swamp, he emerged from the six weeks war as Colonel Bryan.
In uniform he had suffered acutely from what he called military lockjaw. His experience confirmed his inherent suspicion of the military way of doing things, and made him more than ever an opponent of the imperialism which was luring the youth of both parties away from the set-our-own-house-in-order-first creed of the reformers.
In the congressional debate over the disposition of Spain’s overseas empire, Bryan’s anti-imperialism took a turn which both his friends and his enemies found hard to explain. Ratification of the treaty by which the United States would assume sovereignty over the Philippines was bitterly contested in the Senate. In spite of remonstrances from such hearty pacifists as Andrew Carnegie and David Starr Jordan, Bryan used his influence among Democratic senators to “enthrone justice” in those distant islands by placing them under American rule. His supporters failed by a single vote to put through the justifying amendment he lobbied for desperately which would assure the Filipinos eventual independence.
The peerless leader was left impaled on the dilemma. The explanation, that the treaty, if ratified, would give the Democratic opposition to overseas expansion a better talking point in the coming campaign, never quite held water. His loss of a large part of the anti-imperialist vote had something to do with his defeat by McKinley in 1900.
After his defeat and his mistyeyed retirement from presidential politics Bryan made up for past inconsistencies by the increased ardor of his advocacy of the cause of peace. During the campaign he had been painting a picture of America as arbiter of the world’s disputes.
“Behold a republic,” he declaimed in President McKinley’s home town of Canton, “increasing in population, in wealth, in strength, and in influence … Behold a republic gradually but surely becoming the supreme moral factor in disputes.”
Bryan was not alone in these hopes. Peace by arbitration had been one of the themes of McKinley’s last speech. The world over, thoughtful men looked forward into the new century with the hope that at last they would see an end to the curse of war.
Andrew Carnegie, whom many good Bryan supporters had been excoriating as the plutocratic villain of the industrial warfare round Pittsburgh, was dedicating his vast fortune and his very considerable ability as a publicist to the cause of peace between nations.
Carnegie had early promulgated the theory that a businessman should spend half his life making money and the other half distributing his wealth “for the improvement of mankind.” He was as good as his word. After selling out his interests in steel and iron and coke to U. S. Steel for what was reputed to be the sum of two hundred and fifty million dollars in five percent gold bonds, the laird of Skibo Castle kept himself busy writing exhortatory letters to those in authority, accompanied by the relevant checks, in furtherance of the great cause.
Carnegie was the personal embodiment of the mythology of nineteenthcentury capitalism. Coming from a family of learned Scottish artisans, he was brought up in desperate poverty, since his father who was a weaver had lost his livelihood to the factories. America was the escape. The undersized towheaded boy, already a mighty reader, reached New York with his family on the old whaling ship Wiscasset in 1848.
Starting as bobbinboy at thirteen in an Allegheny textile mill, he worked as messenger for the telegraph office, then as telegraphist and private secretary to a railroad man who became Assistant Secretary of War in charge of transportation during the Civil War. When Scott retired from the railroad, Carnegie took over his job. Innovations were the air he breathed. As superintendent of the Pittsburgh division of the Pennsylvania Railroad he introduced the first Pullman cars. Still a young man he went into steel and imported the Bessemer process. He promoted some of the first oilwells and became dizzyingly wealthy.