bryan
FWIW I wanted them to cut the part about"The Blue Water Line" -- I thought it was about me, and not Kazin or Bryan -- but it went in there anyway. Also, this is not exactly another post on why we might want more political history, but it gets partially at the issue of looking at political history through the partisan politics of the present.
Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. xxii+376 pp., illustrations, notes, and index. USD 30.00, cloth.
If you want to read everything worth knowing about William Jennings Bryan, Michael Kazin has set it down in a lively style that moves briskly through the Great Commoner's five-act life, each episode of which contains a different epic defeat -- three times beaten for the presidency, one time shackled as a pacifist Secretary of State to an administration bound for war, and finally humiliated at the hands of Clarence Darrow and H. L. Mencken in the court of public opinion. Among the minor successes he scored we can count the sale of Florida swampland, which he shilled on the same bill as a"shimmy dancer", and the Democratic Party's adoption of Jim Crow, which he cheered on behalf of the"advanced race". But Kazin hasn't much interest in counting Bryan's wins or losses: he wants us to hear the voice of a populist Protestant preaching against the entrenched rich, because"Bryan's sincerity, warmth and passion for a better world won the hearts of people who cared for no other public figure". (306) That Bryan did not also win office doesn't detain Kazin: he wants rather to draw our attention to the phenomenon of a Christian left, irrespective of its success....
Find the rest of the essay on Altercation. Then if you want you can come back here and comment.