As I am writing
this, Joe Biden has achieved a rare feat – he is probably the first President
in living memory to not be the most talked-about man in America during
his first month in office. Instead, America’s number one subject of
conversation is still Donald Trump, courtesy of the one-of-a-kind post-presidential
impeachment trial which the Democrats just put him through.
Trump got
acquitted, as everyone knew he would, because only seven out of 50 Senate Republicans
voted ‘guilty.’ The reason for this is that most Republicans are like Mitch
McConnell: they are appalled by what Mr. Trump did during last month’s riot, and
in private they probably wish that he would get eaten by an escalator so that
nobody would ever have to think about him again. But they dare not vote to
banish the man whom a large portion of their base regards – however irrationally
– as a Messiah.
Call that
attitude cowardice, call it partisanship, or call it pragmatism, if you like.
The upshot is that Donald Trump – whose sons are now excitedly tweeting
pictures of their father in a boxing ring with the caption “Back To Back Impeachment
Champ” – will be eligible to run for President again in 2024. (Personally, I
really hope he doesn’t run, as there is no way that such a spectacle could end well
for the Republican Party.)
Meanwhile,
the distraction of the impeachment trial has resulted in the new Congress doing a
remarkably slow job of passing legislation and confirming the Biden cabinet. So
with little to comment on in current events, I have decided to devote my
present post to answering a historical question which was recently posed to me
by a group of politically minded Americans.
Question: Who is your favorite statesman, and why?
Answer: My
favorite American statesman is William Jennings Bryan, the Nebraskan populist famous
for running for president on the Democratic ticket three times – in 1896, 1900,
and 1908 – and losing all three elections. I admire Bryan because, behind the well-worn
figure of the noble loser, I see a great tale of man who offered to take a
modernizing nation down a road that hewed quite a bit closer to our founding
principles than did the road we actually ended up travelling.
William
Jennings Bryan was born in Salem, Illinois on 19 March, 1860. At age 24 he
married Mary Baird, with whom he had three children. Bryan practiced law until 30,
when he was elected to represent Nebraska in Congress. His oratory won him
nationwide fame, and at 36 he became the youngest man to ever run for
President. He died in 1925, aged 65.
Bryan is
a difficult figure to fit into the conventional narratives of turn-of-the-century
politics. It is depressingly common to see him shoehorned into the role of a
forerunner to Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. But it is a mistake to view
Bryan as simply a man before his time, whose core ideas would be successfully
implemented by later politicians as America continued its march of progress.
While
Bryan did indeed rouse many of the same popular passions that later put Wilson and
Roosevelt in the White House, he did so within a distinct ideological
framework. What Bryan offered was a different way forward for the forces of American
liberalism – a populist, almost Jeffersonian alternative to the siren song of technocracy
and global empire. That the United States rejected Bryan’s offer, only to later
embrace the Wilsonian and New Deal versions of progressivism, is among the
great tragedies of our national story.
Bryan’s
most famous campaign issue, free silver, is as good a place as any to begin.
For many
of today’s armchair economists, the gold standard is the starting point of
monetary history: either the paradise from which mankind fell, or the primordial
slime out of which we rose. But back in 1896, when William Jennings Bryan gave
his Cross of Gold Speech and launched his first presidential campaign, the gold
standard was a twenty-three year experiment whose results, for millions of
small farmers across the American Midwest, had been devastating.
Ever since
the Coinage Act of 1873 had privileged gold and restricted the minting of new
silver coins, America’s money supply had been unable to keep up with economic
growth, leading to severe deflation and a chain of panics and recessions. The
problem of the currency shortage could not be left unsolved indefinitely, no
matter what the monied interests who benefited from deflation might have wished.
And while Bryan had the trappings of a progressive, the solution which he
offered was downright reactionary: a return to the bimetallism which had existed from George Washington’s time until 1873.
Had
Bryan’s cause prevailed, free silver would not have required the enlargement of
the administrative state, or the concentration of power into the hands of
central bankers, on which later monetary policies relied. But because the
problem of deflation had to be solved somehow, free silver’s failure ended up
making the Federal Reserve an inevitability.
The Fed
solved the immediate problem of the currency shortage, but at the cost of
consolidating power in a baroque assemblage of financial institutions which spent
the next 16 years blowing a huge financial bubble. The bubble’s collapse triggered
the steep deflation of 1929-1933, which lasted until the gold standard was
given up entirely in favor of de facto fiat money. Again, the immediate
problem was solved, but at the cost of expanding the power of the finance
industry and the role of debt in both public and private life.
If
William Jennings Bryan had drawn more support when he offered America a return
to the monetary policy of the Founders, these disasters might have been
avoided. As it is, we still have Bryan to thank for making the present
situation a little less bad than it might have been, by convincing the Federal
Reserve Act’s drafters to have the Fed’s Board of Governors be appointed by the
President rather than elected by other bankers.
And if
the free silver debacle provides only a murky example of Bryan meeting the
challenges of modernity with a mixture of populism and Jeffersonian revival, the
anti-imperialism at the core of his 1900 campaign should throw matters into a
much clearer light.
The
question was whether the United States, after winning the Spanish-American War,
would become a colonial power. The incumbent President, William McKinley, had double-crossed
Filipino President Emilio Aguinaldo after offering him independence in exchange
for an alliance against Spain, and was now at war once again to secure the Philippines
for the United States.
Bryan ran
against McKinley on an anti-imperial platform, and enjoyed the support of a new
coalition that included men like Andrew Carnegie. (In the past, Carnegie had
been suspicious of Bryan’s apparent anti-business views, but he was willing to
bury the hatchet when he saw a clear moral issue on the line.)
Once
again, what Bryan offered (under a veneer of progressive populism) was a
revival of the principles of America’s Founders – this time, by keeping the
United States free of foreign entanglements, and by not reducing other nations
under the same colonialist boot from which America had freed itself during the
Revolutionary War.
Similar issues
would surface again during Bryan’s brief tenure as Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary
of State. At the outbreak of World War I, both Wilson and Bryan spoke in favor
of neutrality, but they clashed over Wilson’s partiality toward the British in
the wake of sensational events like the sinking of the Lusitania, a passenger
liner which also happened to be carrying war materials.
“A ship
carrying contraband should not rely upon passengers to protect her from attack,”
Bryan insisted. “It would be like putting women and children in front of an
army.”
These clashes
led to Bryan’s resignation from the State Department in 1915. Within two years,
Wilson’s commitment to neutrality had faltered, and the United States was at war
with Germany.
Apart
from taking his two great stands on free silver and anti-imperialism, Bryan
also supported a range of lesser-known reforms which, though bundled together
by later historians under the label of “progressivism,” are worthy of
consideration on their own terms.
Along
with his wife Mary, William Jennings Bryan was an early and vocal advocate for
women’s suffrage, and for greater participation of women in public life in
general. Of this I am wholly in favor. At the same time, his lack of support
for racial equality was unfortunate, though one must remember that as a
Democrat who relied on the southern vote, he had little practical opportunity
to do otherwise.
Prohibition
and the direct election of Senators both became law with Bryan’s support. In my
own opinion, both were well-intentioned mistakes. It is to our nation’s
detriment that only one has since been corrected.
The
anti-business reputation which Bryan carried with him throughout his career was
a result of (1) his incendiary rhetoric against the (genuinely corrupt) “money
power” and (2) his support for anti-trust laws, federal infrastructure
subsidies, and tougher safety regulations on banks, railroads, meatpacking
plants, etc. His rejection of laissez faire economics has led, in some circles,
to his being tarred as a progenitor of today’s socialistic Left.
What the
people who make those accusations forget is that Bryan’s economic policies,
while anathema to certain strains of contemporary Right-wing thought, were
squarely within the constitutional framework of America’s Founders, who wanted
their new government to be strong enough to regulate interstate commerce and
fund public works when Congress decided that doing so was in the national
interest.
Being a
populist, Bryan was uninterested in creating the armies of expert officials
which later iterations of progressivism, such as the New Deal, relied on to
administer their programs. Had the rising tide of American liberalism found
expression with Bryan and his followers instead, voters and their elected
representatives would likely have retained more influence in government.
The final
act of Bryan’s public life, his prosecution of the Scopes Monkey Trial, elicits
mixed feelings. On the matter of science, John Scopes was right and William
Jennings Bryan was wrong. But the trial also involved larger matters of power
and principle, because by flouting an act of the Tennessee Legislature that
required teachers in public schools to remain silent about the theory of evolution,
Mr. Scopes was asserting a power of the intelligentsia to steer public policy
without having to build consensus among the common people and their elected representatives.
Bryan was justified in opposing this.
And though
he was far from infallible, William Jennings Bryan deserves to be remembered as
a man who stood forth at a crucial time in American history to defend sensible
monetary policy, freedom from needless wars, and representative government, both
for his own nation and for all mankind.
