The vast influence he still has is due to the fact that the common man, with all his mistakes and gaucheries, speaks in him, and that when the common man hears his own thoughts spoken in Bryan's voice he knows that the accent is sincere. Bryan may have taken up this or that particular issue because it sounded like a vote-maker, but none of them represented the least divergence from his course as a whole, which has always been honestly bent in a certain plain direction. He never hesitated to be in a minority and never dodged a fight. He is an innocent theorist, who frequently goes wrong because of the simplicity of his mental processes; but he acts upon his theories, right or wrong, with an intrepidity and a whole-hearted courage in which the ordinary man sees the qualities he himself would like to have, and dreams he has. His mind is not broad, but it is strong; he is always sure he is right, and always ready to fight for his beliefs, and he keeps his hold upon his followers because he is not below them, and not much above them, and because they know he is honest and sincere.
In 1906, the Democratic Party, picking itself out of the wreckage of Parker's defeat, was yearning to reunite. "Big business," assaulted and bruised and banged about by President Roosevelt, was ready to come into line. Roosevelt or his candidate could be defeated in 1908 only by Democratic harmony. Bryan was abroad, traveling, and somehow his distant figure looked less appalling than the near-by figure in the White House. The East did not ask him to recant his radicalism, but only not to talk about it. He arrived in New York, and business went to hear him make a harmony speech. If he made it, business would support him for President. He made the speech; he declared for Government ownership of railroads. Business, roaring with pain, fell back into the Republican arms, and Bryan was defeated for President. No, Bryan is not an opportunist—not in things that really matter.
William Bayard Hale once accurately described him as "essentially a preacher, a high-class exhorter, a glorified circuit rider." There are vast spaces of our country still populated by men and women of the old-fashioned kind; Chesterton describes them as "full of stale culture and ancestral simplicity." They are the descendants of the Puritans—intellectually, at any rate—they look askance on cards, dancing, and the stage; they are the kind of folks who peopled the Mississippi Valley in Lincoln's day and Massachusetts in John Hancock's. Bryan does not talk down to that type for votes; he is that type. Colonel George Harvey, with sarcastic intent, alleged that Bryan became a white-ribboner after hearing a little girl recite "The Lips That Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine." There are regions which would accept that parable as Gospel truth, and much to Bryan's credit.
Salem, Ill., is a little town which fairly shrieks at you its pre-eminence as a picture of that type. As you pass through its orderly little streets, with its little frame houses, all of the same kind and all neat and unassuming, with its dirt roads and its typical Town Hall, set correctly back behind a correct little patch of grass in a neat square, you feel instinctively that the Darwinian theory must be avoided in your Salem conversation. You know at once that the same families have lived there for generations. So they have; one of them was Bryan's, and he was born there on March 19, 1860.
Of course, he was the valedictorian of his class—Illinois College, 1881. Of course, he became a lawyer; and, of course, in the Middle West, that involved politics. He lived now in Lincoln, Neb., in a Republican district, but he was a Democrat. There was a landslide in 1890. The whole country went Democratic, and many a forlorn hope leader in some hide-bound Republican district was swept into Congress, Bryan among them. He made a great speech on the tariff, which won him instantly a national reputation; but Lincoln had recovered its Republican poise, and he did not go back to Congress. He added to his reputation in his own State, however, as editor of its chief Democratic organ, The Omaha World-Herald, and went to Chicago as the head of its delegation to the National Convention of 1896.
At a moment when David B. Hill's masterly presentation of the gold-standard case and Tillman's failure in his effort at rejoinder had thrown a wet blanket over the silverites, Bryan came forward with his "Cross of Gold" speech. The cheering delegations carried him around the hall on their shoulders. None of the candidates before the convention was dominating or really of Presidential size; the convention was deadlocked for many ballots, and at last it turned to Bryan and nominated him.
His defeat by McKinley really marked the beginning of his career as a national leader. Despite the accident which had made him the Democracy's nominal leader, he demonstrated that he was the ablest of the radicals into whose hands it had fallen, and his nominal chieftainship became a real one. It was evident from the beginning that he would be renominated in 1900. When the Spanish war broke out he offered his services and became Colonel of the Third Nebraska Regiment. The Republican Administration was taking no chances on his getting any military glory, and it marooned him in Florida till after the war. He returned good for evil by going to Washington, uniform and all, and dragooning reluctant Democratic Senators into voting for the treaty with Spain whereby we acquired the Philippines. This was one of his incidental opportunisms; he believed it would give the Democrats a winning issue, that of imperialism. The cast of Bryan's mind is such that he always gets his winning issues on wrong end foremost; it gave the Republicans a winning issue, that of imperialism.
Bryan went down to defeat again in 1900, on this new issue, and as usual epitaphs were written over his political grave. It is a favorite parlor game; but Bryan never stays dead, because there is something enduring in him. What is it? That same spokesmanship for the average man of many regions, the man of the little parlor with the melodeon or parlor organ, the plush-bound photograph album and the "History of the San Francisco Earthquake" bought by subscription from a book agent, and the grandfather's clock in the corner of the hall.
But in 1904 the Democratic leaders, tired of defeat, turned desperately to the opposite wing of the party. The radical leaders, really opportunists, forswore or hid their convictions for the sake of victory, tried to teach their unskillful tongues the language of conservatism, and joined in with the conservatives in the nomination of Parker. But Bryan did not yield; he forswore nothing, hid nothing, and he fought a lonely fight, the bravest of his life.
His fight was of one man against a multitude. Alone, he had to be everywhere; he was in the Committee on Resolutions, in the Committee on Credentials, on the floor of the convention, speaking, fighting, working, twenty hours a day. He had no one to help him; all his fellows were on the other side, strangling their convictions and fighting against him. He was insulted on the platform, even by fellow-radicals; he was elbowed aside and snarled at by men who had been more radical than himself; attempts were made to deny him a hearing. Nothing could daunt him or perturb him; he fought on until Parker was nominated, went to his hotel at dawn as the convention adjourned, and fell into his bed in utter collapse. A doctor was summoned, who said that Bryan must instantly give up all work and undergo treatment.