William Jennings Bryan

Bryan grew up in downstate Illinois, the son of a circuit judge who mixed evangelical faith with courtroom argument at the family table. He graduated first in his class from Illinois College in 1881, studied law in Chicago under former U.S. senator Lyman Trumbull, and found the legal market in Jacksonville too crowded for a young attorney to make a living. In 1887 he moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, formed a partnership with a Republican lawyer, and ran for Congress three years later, unseating the Republican incumbent to become only the second Democrat Nebraska had ever sent to Washington. A Senate bid failed in 1894. What did not fail was the discovery, on the paid lecture circuit that followed, that audiences would fill a hall just to hear him talk.

What came after is covered at length on BriefHistory: the 1896 nomination at 36, two further losing campaigns against a well-funded Republican machine, and a term as Woodrow Wilson's secretary of state that ended when Bryan judged the administration's response to a submarine sinking too close to war. BriefHistory carries that record through to Dayton, Tennessee, in the summer of 1925. Left for this page is the diplomacy in between, the religious politics that hardened around him late in life, and how a courtroom caricature outlived the man it was drawn from.

As secretary of state, Bryan negotiated conciliation treaties with 30 countries, each built on a year-long cooling-off period before any signatory could go to war — the working version of a pacifism he had preached for decades. The same State Department, under his own signature, sent Marines into Haiti and the Dominican Republic and kept forces engaged in Mexico through what the era called the Banana Wars, an entanglement the peace commissioner never fully reconciled with his own principles. He carried a second contradiction into his last years. Genuinely progressive on money and monopoly power, Bryan was, in biographer Michael Kazin's phrase, willing to accept Jim Crow with 'a studied lack of reflection' — silent about the violence enforcing segregation across the South that elected him and cheered him at the podium.

Bryan died in his sleep in Dayton on July 26, 1925, five days after the Scopes trial ended, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The image that outlasted him was not entirely his own: the 1955 play and 1960 film Inherit the Wind recast him as Matthew Harrison Brady, a blustering fundamentalist its authors built to argue about Cold War conformity, not to document the man Clarence Darrow actually cross-examined. Historians have pushed back on the substitution since. Harry Truman called him one of the greatest Democrats the party ever produced, and biographer Michael Kazin ranks Bryan with Henry Clay among the most consequential Americans who never reached the presidency.

William Jennings Bryan's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Cross of Gold Speech speech
  Delivered at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; won him the nomination on the fifth ballot 1896
• The Commoner company
  Populist newspaper he founded and edited out of Lincoln, Nebraska 1901
• Cooling-off conciliation treaties other
  Thirty bilateral arbitration treaties negotiated as secretary of state 1913
• In His Image book
  His fullest published statement of religious opposition to Darwinism 1922
• Tennessee v. John Scopes case
  Served as special prosecutor in Dayton, Tennessee, his last public appearance 1925

• March 19, 1860 aged 0 Born in Salem, Illinois
• 1881 aged ~21 Graduates first in his class from Illinois College
• 1887 aged ~27 Moves to Lincoln, Nebraska, to practice law
• 1890 aged ~30 Elected to the U.S. House, unseating the Republican incumbent Only the second Democrat Nebraska had ever sent to Congress.
• July 9, 1896 aged 36 Delivers the Cross of Gold speech and wins the presidential nomination
• March 1913 aged 52 Becomes Woodrow Wilson's secretary of state
• June 8, 1915 aged 55 Resigns as secretary of state over the administration's response to the Lusitania sinking
• July 1925 aged 65 Serves as special prosecutor in the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee
• July 26, 1925 aged 65 Dies in his sleep in Dayton, five days after the trial ends

• William McKinley 1843–1901
  Twenty-fifth president who led the Spanish-American War and overseas expansion before being assassinated. defeated by
• Woodrow Wilson 1856–1924
  28th President who led the nation through World War I and championed the League of Nations. served under
• H.L. Mencken 1880–1956
  Satirist and cultural critic whose biting prose defined American journalism in the early 20th century. attacked by
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. praised by
• Harry S. Truman 1884–1972
  33rd President who authorized the atomic bomb and implemented the Marshall Plan. praised by