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William Jennings Bryan
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After his 1908 presidential campaign ended in defeat, William Jennings Bryan remained a popular speaker, and is seen here in Greenfield, Ohio, at the Chautauqua lecture series.
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Populism: A portent of themes to come?
America's Long Home Walk: Revisiting the Campaign of 1908
Date published: 7/18/2008
WASHINGTON --After years of deficit spending, economic turmoil, and occupation wars abroad, which have all hollowed and dispirited the nation, we are stumbling into the most important presidential election campaign in decades.
Across the country, a dazed citizenry--shell-shocked with mortgage foreclosures and soaring gas and grocery bills--searches the political landscape for a moral compass, leadership with integrity: something to grasp, to hold our nation together.
When the Democrats head to Denver for their nominating convention in late August after a grueling, divisive primary season, some echoes from a century ago will undoubtedly resonate. Then, as now, the Republicans controlled the White House albeit with the popular "rough riding" Teddy Roosevelt, but "TR" had pledged to not seek a third term. The country had just weathered a severe financial crisis with rampant speculation, a stock-market plunge, and the failure of major lending institutions in the Panic of 1907. American forces were deployed abroad, fighting a protracted, increasingly unpopular war occupying the Philippines (a holdover from the Spanish-American War 10 years earlier).
In 1908, more than 36 percent of our population was living in rural areas and working on farms, but America was coming of age in ragtime. The Great White Fleet of new battleships had circumnavigated the globe, announcing U.S. naval power. John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil monopoly, the railroads, and J.P. Morgan's trusts dominated the industrial era. It was still the dawn of the automobile. Few rural households had electricity or a telephone.
Populism, which had peaked as a rural, farmer-led political movement more than a decade earlier, was still a force--and the Democrats decided their standard-bearer would be a 48-year-old former two-term Nebraska congressman and lawyer--William Jennings Bryan. He was a spellbinding orator who cast himself in the role of a crusading, romantic evangelist.
THE GREAT COMMONER
Bryan's own hold on personal heritage was strong. His father, Silas, a native of Culpeper County, had migrated to what would later become West Virginia in the late 1820s before heading to Illinois. Bryan's maternal side--the Jennings family--traced back to early Connecticut settlements in the 1630s. Years later, Bryan retraced the steps of his paternal family and laid gravestones memorializing his grandparents near Ona, W.Va. Bryan spoke on at least four occasions in Culpeper during his political career, and always bested his rivals. In 1908, Bryan outpolled Taft nearly four-to-one in Culpeper.
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Read more stories about Fredericksburg
Date published: 7/18/2008
Most recent reader comments:
Theodore Roosevelt....The greatest of all times.
(posted by
kenderr
, July 18, 2008 3:09 pm)
He hated being called Teddy. Edmund Morris wrote about 1700 pages if you want to learn all the gory details about Theodore Rex. We're lucky to have Jim Webb as our Senator. He's as close to TR as I've seen in my life.
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