A perennial candidate for president whose highest electoral office was two terms in Congress, Bryan is unfortunately best remembered for maintaining that public schools in Tennessee had no obligation to teach young people that they shared a common ancestor with monkeys. That argument makes him seem very up-to-date. But it has also overwhelmed his importance as an advocate of social and economic reform. Bryan’s politics flowed from his religious beliefs: a brand of evangelical Protestantism that preached moral uplift and championed the common man. The Social Gospel, as it was known, was a form of Christian socialism that paved the way for the more secular Progressive movement.
During the last decades of the nineteenth century evangelical rhetoric marked nearly every mass social movement, particularly in the fundamentalist Protestant heartland. The agrarian insurgency that swept the Great Plains was fueled by protests phrased in the language of the Bible. Bryan was a product of that movement—one of its most eloquent voices, and its most politically agile exponent. Already in his twenties he was known as a great orator. His clarion voice, it was said, could be heard unaided from three city blocks away. Not only was the timbre clear and strong, but the instrument flowed on melodiously for hours. This made him a natural for politics.
The son of a Baptist lawyer, farmer, and well-known Democrat in downstate Illinois, Bryan grew up knowing the local preachers and their congregations of poor farmers; he went to law school in Chicago, practiced briefly in central Illinois, and then left for Nebraska, where he ran for Congress in 1890 when he was barely thirty. It was a propitious moment. A combination of drought, falling prices, and bank foreclosures had impoverished and radicalized the farmers of the Great Plains. Bryan, Kazin explains, seized the opportunity “to make himself the symbolic leader of the prairie insurgency.” Campaigning as a Democrat in a traditionally Republican state, and linked to the more radical People’s Party, or Populists, he took on the moneylenders and made the farmers’ appeal for cheap credit his campaign cry. Their heretical solution: liberating the dollar from the gold standard and linking it to relatively cheap silver.