The Birthday of the Party of the Common Man

By John Aloysius Farrell

Today marks the birthday of the modern Democratic Party. On July 10, 1896, the Democrats in convention in the city of Chicago nominated William Jennings Bryan as their presidential candidate.

While writing a biography of Clarence Darrow, I have been immersed in the Gilded and Ragtime years, and have come to appreciate Bryan, who famously tangled with Darrow at the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. Bryan is the Democratic Moses – the prophet who made the Democrats the party of the common man, and opened the way for their remarkable 20th century triumphs.

At the time that Bryan gave his famous “Cross of Gold” speech, on July 9, 1896, the only Democratic president since before the Civil War was Grover Cleveland, a New Yorker beholden to Wall Street and robber barons like J.P. Morgan.
Cleveland thought it important to announce that “No harm shall come to any business interest as the result of administrative policy so long as I am President” and that “a transfer of executive control from one party to another does not mean any serious disturbance of existing conditions.” Some Democrat.
Later, after vetoing a drought relief bill, Cleveland said, “I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering…federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character….The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow citizens in misfortune.”
This is the same Democratic president who installed a railroad lawyer his Attorney General, and dispatched the U.S. Army to break the Eugene Debs-led  railway union strike in 1894.
As Woodrow Wilson once told a group of U.S. senators, “You may think Cleveland’s administration was Democratic. It was not. Cleveland was a conservative Republican.”
(I give credit for these quotations to “The Politicos,” a fine history of the era by Matthew Josephson.)
And so, when Bryan stood up in the Coliseum in Chicago, and specifically renounced the Republican trickle-down approach, while marrying his Democrats to the lot of “the struggling masses,” he was doing more than attacking the gold standard for some hard-pressed farmers.
He was rescuing the Democrats from the trough they had inhabited since the Civil War, and giving them a new and noble purpose for the industrial age. They would be the champions of the little guy, and for 70 years they did a superb job maintaining America’s essential ideals, defending them in worldwide confrontations with totalitarianism, while ensuring that the rewards and risks of capitalism were shared, and its roughest edges sanded.
“There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below,” Bryan said in Chicago. “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.”
The Democratic run came to an end in the 1960s, when they finally faced up to the contradictions of their coalition and their ideals, and chose to do the right thing. They championed the unpopular cause of African-Americans. It cost them the South, as Lyndon Johnson predicted, for a generation.
Without Bryan, or somebody like him – and there were few alternatives in that corrupt era -  maybe there is no Progressive Era, Woodrow Wilson or Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt – just a long line of McKinleys and Coolidges and Hardings.
This doesn’t mean that Bryan was a saint, or that (as Alan Dershowitz perversely argues) he didn’t commit an awful strategic, political and intellectual blunder when losing to Darrow and Henry Mencken at the Monkey Trial. Or that he actually would have been a good president: he had a far better knack for spotting a popular grievance, and riding it for political gain, than for choosing wise policy.
But it is difficult not to read the writings of Democrats, progressives and liberals from the turn of the century and not be struck by the reverence and awe with which they speak about Bryan’s campaign in 1896.
They saw themselves embarked on a holy, patriotic and invigorating crusade – nothing less than recasting the egalitarian principles of Jefferson and Jackson for the industrial era.
“It was essentially the most genuine and impromptu political movement that has been known for many a decade,” wrote one journalist at the time. “It was really the birth of a new party – a party devoted in spirit, whatever its mistakes of method, to human rights and human progress, to the welfare of the common people, to the promulgation of a newer and truer Democracy.”
Bryan “did more than any other man” of his era “to transform his party from a bulwark of laissez-faire into the citadel of liberalism,” writes Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin, in his biography of The Great Commoner.
The Democratic platform of 1896 (drafted by Darrow’s mentor, Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld) was one “of protest and transformation,” Kazin says. “The issues for which they chose to fight in 1896 set the Democrats on a course…toward the liberalism of the New Freedom, the New Deal and the Great Society.
“The platform officially declared that Democrats were in favor of beginning to redistribute wealth and power in America. In rhetoric, at least, the party has never gone back.”
I agree. Bryan was far more than the silly, fusty Matthew Harrison Brady of “Inherit the Wind.” Broadway and Hollywood have served him poorly.
He should rank up there with Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John Calhoun and a very few other American political leaders who never served as president, but left an indelible mark on our history. Not as a buffoon.
Darrow and Mencken, and the forces of modernism that they represented, whipped Bryan and fundamentalism in Dayton, Tenn. No intellectual preening or religious revisionism will change that fact. And there in Dayton the Reaper played a cruel trick on The Commoner. Had Bryan died a few days before the Monkey Trial, instead of a few days later, we would think him a far greater man.
But that he never reached the summit of his ambition is no reason to forget Will Bryan.
“The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause,” Bryan said that day in 1896, “is stronger than all the hosts of error. I come to speak to you in a defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty – the cause of humanity.”

The party of the common man is now dominated by well-educated elites, and has lost big chunks of the white working class, especially in the South, to the Republicans.

But the populist platform that the Democrats will endorse in Denver will be one that Bryan would happily stand upon.

(As, no doubt, he would appreciate Barack Obama’s trick at turning one great speech into a serious campaign for the White House.)

So, Happy Birthday Dems. Bryan would be proud of ya. You should remember him more fondly.