One of the greatest orators of his day, he was also a borderline demagogue with a weakness for sweeping simplicities. He championed equality but not for blacks in the Deep South. Kazin, an avowed secular liberal and author of “The Populist Persuasion,” tells us at the outset of this book that he feels ambivalent about his subject. The man known as the Great Commoner will remain a tough sell to many progressives, but Kazin has written a superb biography and a challenging reconsideration of Bryan’s place in U.S. Michael Kazin’s “A Godly Hero” is a fair-minded attempt to rescue Bryan from such condescension. Mencken wrote about the proceedings with all the acid skepticism he could muster, ridiculing Bryan for his “peculiar imbecilities” and “theologic bilge.” Two decades later, in the 1948 classic “The American Political Tradition,” liberal historian Richard Hofstadter delivered what was perhaps the coup de grace, dismissing the thrice-nominated presidential candidate as a “provincial politician following a provincial population in provincial prejudices.” Bryan spent a lifetime as an advocate of common men and women, but his appearance in the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial,” where he fulminated against academic freedom and godless intellectuals, did untold damage to his legacy. Today’s liberals mostly remember Bryan as a Christian fundamentalist yokel who opposed Darwinism, not as the fiery tribune who championed economic justice and denounced the barons of Wall Street. WILLIAM Jennings Bryan, the prairie lawyer who roared out of the Gilded Age and thrust the Democratic Party on a populist path to the New Deal, is an exile from the pantheon of modern liberalism.
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