It’s been a full century since Democrats last traveled to Denver to nominate a president.
Their 1908 candidate, William Jennings Bryan, was the only major party candidate since Henry Clay to lose three presidential races. But unlike Clay — who was named as one of the five greatest senators in American history by a 1957 Senate committee chaired by John F. Kennedy — Bryan received a bad rap from historians. He’s remembered today for pushing a monetarily unsound free silver policy and as a religious bigot opposed to teaching evolution in the schools.
The real Bryan was an economic and religious liberal. At the 1896 Democratic Convention in Chicago, he took the arcane theme of expanding the U.S. money supply by coining silver at a ratio of 16-1 to gold — and crafted this masterful attack on Eastern banking interests:
Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.
Delirious Democrats made Bryan, 36, the youngest presidential nominee ever. To understand the political revolution wrought by Bryan, remember that the Democratic Party in the 19th century was dominated by “Bourbon Democrats” who supported conservatives like former President Grover Cleveland. Under Bryan, Democrats became far more populist.
The current Federal Reserve System wasn’t created until 1913. Before then, America didn’t have a mechanism to grow our money supply in tandem with the expanding output from farms and factories. A rigid reliance on a gold standard triggered repeated depressions and bouts of deflation. A farmer who borrowed $1,000 to buy land when wheat was selling for $1 a bushel would find his debt effectively quintupled if the price of wheat dropped to 20 cents. The happy banker, meanwhile, would be enriched fivefold through no effort on his part.
Introducing silver into the mix of specie was obviously inflationary, but such a policy would have been fairer — and more beneficial to the economy — than the deflationary policies Bryan sought to replace.
Recognizing the threat to the economic aristocracy, Ohio political boss “Dollar Mark” Hanna raised a then-staggering $3.5 million to buy the 1896 election for William McKinley on a platform of the gold standard and high tariffs. Bryan lost again in 1900 and 1908. He was appointed secretary of state by Woodrow Wilson in 1913 but resigned two years later because he opposed Wilson’s drift into World War I.
Bryan spent his final — and most misunderstood — years on the Chautauqua circuit, where he often preached his version of Christianity. But it was far from the politically reactionary religion associated with many “fundamentalists” today.
Bryan was in fact an advocate of the “social gospel,” which fought against poverty, inequality, war and other ills in the belief that the Second Coming could not happen until humankind rid itself of social evils.
Bryan opposed Darwinism from the left, warning it was based on “the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak. I choose to believe that love rather than hatred is the law of development.”
Bryan’s real foe wasn’t Darwin but the misuse of the naturalist’s ideas known as “Social Darwinism.” That amoral philosophy led to the sterilization of mentally retarded people in many American states under the banner of “eugenics” and presaged the Nazi holocaust.
For a true picture of Bryan and the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, read Edward Larson’s book, “Summer for the Gods.” The Democrats streaming into Denver this week deserve to know that Barack Obama is the legitimate heir to the eloquent and decent Bryan nominated here a century earlier.
Bob Ewegen (bewegen@denverpost.com) is deputy editorial page editor of The Denver Post.
