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"You shall not press down upon the
brow of labor this crown of thorns,
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"Once he had one leg in the White House and the nation trembled under his roars. Now he is a tinpot pope in the Coca-Cola belt and a brother to the forlorn pastors who belabor halfwits in galvanized iron tabernacles behind the railroad yards."
William Jennings Bryan is probably best remembered as the fool who argued for the prosecution in the Scopes Monkey Trial. There is another William Jennings Bryan, though, of a few decades before, whose political oratory gained him three Presidential nominations. These are, or course, the same person. The contrast was marked enough, though, to lead H.L. Mencken to make the above remark. Although the actions Bryan took in the early part of his career seem to contrast sharply with those of the later part, the conflict can be explained by recognizing the strong effect his religious beliefs had on his thinking.
Two pivotal events in Bryan's life were the 1896 Democratic National convention, where he delivered his Cross of Gold speech and received his first Presidential nomination (3), and the the Scopes Trial in 1925, where he helped to prosecute a teacher who had violated a Tennessee law forbidding the teaching of evolution ( 5). In 1896, Bryan's position on the issue of silver coinage was progressive, while in 1925 his position on evolution was reactionary.
The key issue in the 1896 election was silver coinage. Farmers, laborers, and silver miners were the main backers of coining silver. The farmers and laborers believed that coining silver would cause inflation, and that inflation would make their debts easier to pay while increasing prices for the products they sold. The silver miners’ motivations are obvious. Those with existing savings defended the gold standard, since inflation would have reduced the value of their holdings. This issue caused splits even within parties. Although the Republican party backed gold, there was a faction of “Silverite” Republicans, and a group of Gold Democrats nominated their own candidate. (3) The issue of silver was seen as a struggle of haves vs. nots, with the haves backing gold and the nots backing silver.
In the Cross of Gold speech, Bryan backed the have-nots. He presented the issue of silver coinage as an economic conflict between the rural and urban areas of the country and as a class conflict between the working and the upper class. His speech also favored the graduated income tax and establishment of term limits for elected officials, both of which were then considered liberal positions. He even makes an argument against what would now be called "trickle-down economics". Bryan represented these issues as matters of social justice (2). The speech was so successful, especially on the silver issue, that the Populists nominated Bryan as their candidate even though he already had the Democratic nomination (3, 4).
In the 1925 Scopes Trial, John T. Scopes, a high-school science teacher, was tried for violating a Tennessee law, the Butler Act, which made it illegal to teach any theory in public schools that contradicted the Biblical creation myth. The Butler Act was only one of 37 similar laws that various states passed or considered in the 1920’s. Fundamentalist Christians had called for the Butler Act and its ilk because they were worried that students who were taught the theory of evolution might question their faith. The American Society for Civil Liberties was strongly against laws such as the Butler Act, since they involved severe restriction of free speech, violated separation of church and state, and were in general grossly unconstitutional (5).
Bryan assisted the prosecution in the Scopes Monkey Trial (5). He believed that evolution represented a danger to society because it refuted religious beliefs about the origins of mankind (1). Bryan had previously published a book titled The Menace of Darwinism, and had gone as far as to propose a constitutional amendment against evolution (7). His stance in the Scopes trial appears reactionary, in sharp contrast to the leftist ideals of the Cross of Gold speech and the 1896 Democratic platform.
Such a contrast would appear bizarre in a contemporary politician. In 1896, he supports the left and alienates the right, and in 1925, he alienates the left in support of the right. Bryan’s religious views explain this conflict. His parents had been strictly religious, and he was a devout Presbyterian (1, 7). He was willing to use religion as a part of the infrastructure of his ideal society. If a set of ideas were to be presented today that were identical to Bryan's except for the religious wording, they would appear to have come from the left side of the political spectrum. Present Bryan's ideas unaltered and the religious content shifts the perceived source of the ideas to the far right.. His morals told him that the interests of labor ought to be defended, but also that alcohol ought to be prohibited and that the Bible ought to be held up as the ultimate truth. Religious concerns for social justice placed some of his opinions on the left, and faith in the literal truth of the Bible placed other of his opinions on the right. Bryan cannot be understood without recognizing that the predominant influence on his decisions was religion.