Bryan's Last Speech - 90th Anniversary Facsimile Edition
(This is the famous Last Speech which William Jennings Bry...)
This is the famous Last Speech which William Jennings Bryan planned to give at the end of the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial". Defense lawyer Clarence Darrow outmaneuvered Bryan by electing not to give his own summation; thus Bryan was barred from delivering this oration. The trial was an early "media sensation" and Bryan wanted to address the world via the new invention: radio. If you only know Bryan from the movie/play Inherit The Wind, then you do not know the real man. The playwrights never meant the work to be a documentary. They were writing about INTOLERANCE and used the infamous trial as a back-drop. Bryan had definite fears about how people would use evolution to hurt and exploit the weaker folks among us. Was he right? Bryan never lived to give the speech. In 1925 it was posthumously published. Now you can read his last speech and see if you agree with him - or not. This edition is a facsimile of a 1925 book obtained by the publisher and scrupulously cleaned up for reprint after 90 years.
Bryan was an American orator and politician from Nebraska. Beginning in 1896, he emerged as a dominant force in the Democratic Party, standing three times as the party's nominee for President of the United States. He also served in the United States House of Representatives and as the United States Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. Because of his faith in the wisdom of the common people, he was often called "The Great Commoner".
Background
William Jennings Bryan was born in Salem, Illinois on March 19, 1860 to Silas Lillard Bryan and Mariah Elizabeth Bryan. His father was a school superintendent and a politician. The entire family worked on the five-hundred-acre farm and was very religious.
Education
Jenning's mother schooled Bryan and his siblings in their home until they were old enough to be sent away to school. His parents were firm believers in education. He showed early interest in politics and public speaking, and at the age of twelve delivered a campaign speech for his father, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress.
In 1875, Bryan was sent to live in Jacksonville, Illinois, to attend the Whipple Academy and Illinois College. During college, he participated in debate and declamation and excelled at long jumping.
His favorite subject was math because of its orderly reason and logic. He graduated from college in 1881 and went on to Union College of Law, in Chicago. During his course he studied in the law office of Lyman Trumbull.
Career
William Jenning Bryan practised law at Jacksonville from 1883 to 1887, when he removed to Lincoln, Nebraska. In the latter during his campaign for the Senate, Bryan took up the free silver cause, a political movement that advocated the free coinage of silver. He made a bid for the Senate in 1894 but was defeated.
Bryan had always yearned to go west, to test himself against the frontier. He also began lecturing on religious topics.
Subsequently he received the nominations of the People's and National Silver parties, In the ensuing presidential campaign he travelled over 18, 000 m. and made altogether 600 speeches in 27 different states.
In the election, however, he was defeated by William McKinley, the Republican candidate, receiving 176 electoral votes to 271.
The money interests in the East favored sound money and the gold standard. These opposing forces clashed in the 1896 presidential campaign. Bryan emerged as the nominee of four parties: the Democratic, Populist, Silver Republican, and National Silver parties. In the end, he lost to William Mckinley by less than five percent of the popular vote.
In 1900 he was nominated for the presidency by the Democratic, Silver Republican, and Populist party conventions; but although "imperialism" was declared to be the paramount issue, he had insisted that the "platforms" should contain explicit advocacy of free-coinage, and this declaration, combined with the popularity of President McKinley, the Republican candidate for re-election, again turned the scales against him.
After the 1900 election he established and edited at Lincoln a weekly political journal, The Commoner, which attained a wide circulation. By 1904, he was falling out of favor with Democrats. Then the party nominated Alton B. Parker, who promptly announced that he was in favor of a gold standard. Parker lost the election to Theodore Roosevelt.
Bryan was bruised by the party's renunciation of his free silver position, but he rebounded and was nominated for president a third time, in 1908.
He ran a strong campaign but lost to william howard taft. After the 1908 election, Bryan realized he would never be president.
Neverthess, he continued to influence democratic party policies, and in 1912 he supported Woodrow Wilson's candidacy for president.
Bryan traveled around the United States preaching a literal interpretation of the Bible and campaigning for laws that banned the teaching of evolution.
In 1925, a science teacher named John Thomas Scopes violated the law and was brought to trial. Hoping for publicity, the state asked Bryan to join the prosecution.
He intended to lead Bryan away from the prosecution's carefully framed issue into a defense of fundamental biblical interpretation. After Bryan's testimony, the trial was abruptly ended, depriving Bryan of the opportunity to answer Darrow's stinging offense.
Nevertheless, the jury deliberated a mere eight minutes before returning a guilty verdict. The Scopes trial was a victory for Bryan and his supporters, but he had been devastated by Darrow. He stayed in Tennessee to finalize and print the speech he had planned to use in closing argument before the court. As a train bearing his body passed through the countryside on its way to Washington, D. C., thousands of the "common people" Bryan had championed gathered to pay their respects.
(This is the famous Last Speech which William Jennings Bry...)
Religion
Bryan's mother was of English heritage. Mary Bryan joined the Salem Baptists in 1872, so Bryan attended Methodist services on Sunday morning with his father, and in the afternoon, Baptist services with his mother. At this point, William began spending his Sunday afternoons at the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. At age 14, Bryan attended a revival, was baptized, and joined the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. In later life, Bryan said the day of his baptism was the most important day in his life, but at the time it caused little change in his daily routine. In 1906, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church joined the larger Presbyterian Church in the United States of America.
Bryan once noted: "The Christian religion has always been good enough for me—I never found it necessary to study any competing religion.' "
Politics
From 1891 to 1895 Bryan represented the First Congressional District of Nebraska, normally Republican, in the national House of Representatives, and received the unusual honour of being placed on the important Committee on Ways and Means during his first term, but he won the election by a comfortable margin and was reelected in 1892.
Views
Bryan was never comfortable with the black community, and attacked Roosevelt in 1904 for inviting Booker T. Washington to the White House to further the social equality between the races. He supported disfranchisement of Southern blacks.
Bryan favored income tax changes and also spoke out against gold as the only standard for the country’s money. He said he would support anything that would promote free citizens, just laws, and an economical government.
Quotations:
Bryan combined anti-imperialism with free silver, saying:
"The nation is of age and it can do what it pleases; it can spurn the traditions of the past; it can repudiate the principles upon which the nation rests; it can employ force instead of reason; it can substitute might for right; it can conquer weaker people; it can exploit their lands, appropriate their property and kill their people; but it cannot repeal the moral law or escape the punishment decreed for the violation of human rights."
Membership
During his time at Illinois College, Bryan was a member of the Sigma Pi literary society.
Personality
Bryan was a hard and conscientious worker and became widely known for his ability in debate. As a train bearing Bryan's body passed through the countryside on its way to Washington, D. C. , thousands of the "common people" he had championed gathered to pay their respects.
Quotes from others about the person
As noted by Bryan's biographer Michael Kazin:
"Bryan was the first leader of a major party to argue for permanently expanding the power of the federal government to serve the welfare of ordinary Americans from the working and middle classes....he did more than any other man—between the fall of Grover Cleveland and the election of Woodrow Wilson—to transform his party from a bulwark of laissez-faire to the citadel of liberalism we identify with Franklin D. Roosevelt and his ideological descendants."
Kazin, however, also emphasizes the limits of Bryan's influence in the progressive mindset:
"His one great flaw was to support, with a studied lack of reflection, the abusive system of Jim Crow—a view that was shared, until the late 1930s, by nearly every white Democrat....After Bryan's death in 1925, most intellectuals and activists on the broad left rejected the amalgam that had inspired him: a strict populist morality based on a close read reading of Scripture....Liberals and radicals from the age of FDR to the present have tended to scorn that credo as naïve and bigoted, a remnant of an era of white Protestant supremacy that has, or should have, passed."
Connections
While preparing for the bar exam, he taught high school and met Mary Elizabeth Baird, a cousin of William Sherman Jennings; the latter was also his own first-cousin. Bryan and Mary Elizabeth Baird married on October 1, 1884, and they settled in Jacksonville, which at the time had a population of two thousand.
He was survived by his daughter, Congresswoman Ruth Bryan Owen, and her four children: John Bryan Leavitt and Ruth Leavitt, by her first husband, artist William Homer Leavitt of Newport, Rhode Island; and two children by her second husband, British Royal Engineers officer Reginald A. Owen.
Ruth's eldest son John Bryan Leavitt, who had been adopted by his grandfather after his parents' divorce, became a poet and an actor, working professionally as John Bryan.