His first benefaction was a public bath for the stony ancient capital of Scotland, Dunfermline, where he was born and had his schooling. He gave away libraries, bought a string of newspapers to promote republicanism among the English and engaged a large staff of wellpaid smoothies to talk peace at all seasons.
Arbitration had been in the air for a decade. The British and American governments had successfully arbitrated a dispute over the boundary between Colombia and Venezuela which had once seemed a casus belli. There had followed a long negotiation between the two governments for a permanent arbitration treaty. This treaty, in spite of urgent appeals from outgoing President Cleveland and incoming President McKinley, failed in ratification in the Senate in the spring of 1897. The short war with Spain, an unnecessary war if there ever was one, proved the need for renewed activity by the advocates of peace.
In 1899 they were much heartened by an appeal from Czar Nicholas of all the Russias to the principal powers to meet at The Hague to discuss the limitation of armaments, and to impose a humane code on nations that did have recourse to war. Out of this conference came a few rules of war more honored in the breach than the observance, and the Hague Tribunal. Carnegie furnished an endowment that housed the Tribunal in a handsome palace in the Dutch capital.
Bryan, having retired from the political battlefield like the sulking Achilles, kept his name and admonitions before the public by publishing a weekly magazine from his home in Lincoln “with the purpose to aid the common people in the protection of their rights, the advancement of their interests and the realization of their aspirations.” He named it The Commoner. The magazine found immediate circulation.
Through The Commoner and constant lecturing on the Chautauqua platform he remained in touch with the aspirations of the mass of the American people. From the response of his audiences he gathered that next to fair play in the economy their most ardent desire was for international peace.
The peerless leader was now assured of an income. The Bryans built themselves a new home named Fairview on a hill overlooking the state capitol. Mrs. Bryan desired the broadening influence of travel. After a couple of short peeks into Mexico and Havana, Bryan made an article writing arrangement with Hearst that paid for a nine weeks European tour.
The Bryans, as uninformed about foreign lands as any of Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, visited the British Isles, France, Germany and Italy and even Russia. Everywhere he was received as a great American. The Pope gave him an audience, and he was allowed to compliment Czar Nicholas to his face on the establishment of the international court at The Hague.
The high point of the trip was his visit to Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana. The venerable old Russian noble-in-peasant’s-clothing held forth on non-resistance and the power of love. Though Bryan followed Christ’s teachings literally indeed, he seems to have taken the doctrine of “turn the other cheek” with a grain of salt.
“Not long ago,” wrote Tolstoy soon after, “I read … that my recognition of the principle of nonresistance is a sad and partly comical error, which, taking into consideration my old age, and some of my deserts, one may pass with condescending silence. Just such an attitude … I met in my conversation with the remarkably clever and progressive American, Bryan.” Tolstoy had found more cleverness than Christianity in his visitor. “Bryan certainly does talk a lot,” he added.
Bryan regarded the interview with Tolstoy as one of the great moments of his life. His enthusiasm for nonresistance grew with the telling. “I am satisfied,” he wrote in The Commoner of the author of War and Peace, “that, notwithstanding his great intellect, his colossal strength lies in his heart more than in his mind … Love is the dominant note in Count Tolstoy’s philosophy … It is his shield and sword. He is a deeply religious man.”
Later in a lecture on peace by arbitration, trying to put the thing in practical terms for his audience, he used Tolstoy as an example: “There he stands proclaiming to the world that he believes that love is a better protection than force; that he thinks a man will suffer less by refusing to use violence than if he used it. And what is the result? He is the only man in Russia that the czar with all his army dare not lay his hand on … I believe that this nation could stand before the world today and tell the world it did not believe in war … that it had no disputes it was not willing to submit to the judgment of the world. If this nation did that, it not only would not be attacked by any other nation on earth, but it would become the supreme power in the world.”
After he had come reluctantly to the support of Judge Parker in the 1904 campaign, Bryan used his Tolstoyan convictions to belabor the Rough Rider from Sagamore Hill. “This is an exalting of the doctrine of brute force,” he said of T.R.’s New Nationalism, “it darkens the hopes of the race … It is a turning backward to the age of violence. More than that it is nothing less than a challenge to the Christian Civilization of the world.”
In the years that followed peace and social justice were The Commoner’s chief themes. Peace was the theme the silver tongue wove into the resonant orations that thrilled farmers and their families, seated on the hard chairs of Chautauqua tents; and small business men and schoolteachers and working people in crowded halls in the middlewest. Barred from high office by the vicissitudes of home politics the peerless leader aspired to become peacemaker to the world.
Theodore Roosevelt won handily in the election of 1904. He regarded his victory as a mandate from the American people to continue in the role which he had been playing with so much zest. The United States was too small a stage. With McKinley he believed that “no nation can longer be indifferent to any other.” He was the first American President to exercise a personal influence in the international drama.
Though an admirer of Admiral Mahan and an enthusiast for a powerful navy, and almost as fond as the Kaiser was of appearing in a military uniform and talking of “the fighting edge,” T.R. used his influence as President pretty successfully for world peace. He had an able assistant in his Secretary of State.
Querulous and whimsical old John Hay, who started public life as Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary, had given his country, under various administrations, a lifetime of discriminating public service of a sort unusual in America. Though one of the Americans most drenched in Europe of his generation, he never forgot that, like Mark Twain, he spent his boyhood in a Mississippi rivertown. He wrote graceful verse. The worshipful life of Lincoln he and Nicolay worked on for many years did much to enshrine the figure of the brooding emancipator in the mind of the nation. He wrote a novel on industrial strife and, from a diplomatic post in Madrid, travel sketches of a charm to rival Irving’s. McKinley brought him back from the Court of St. James to head the State Department.
John Hay and Henry Adams from their twin Richardson houses on Lafayette Square presided over the cultivated literary society of the national capital, which in T.R.’s day included, for once, the White House. Now in his late sixties Hay was an ailing, crotchety, disinterested and wise old man. Relying on his great experience in practical diplomacy T.R. steered the country through a period of competition and intrigue among European powers that kept the world on tenterhooks.