William Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) was a Populist three-time Democratic presidential nominee, known as "The Great Commoner" due to his strong political support for farmers and laborers. [1] He was notable for advocating that the United States switch from the gold standard to the silver standard (to back up the nation's money), and for his anti-evolution stances, which culminated in his participation in the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925, shortly before his death. Bryan College, a private Christian college located in Dayton, is named for him.
H.L.Mencken wrote a powerful obituary of Bryan. It concludes:
Bryan, at his best, was simply a magnificent job-seeker. The issues that he bawled about usually meant nothing to him. He was ready to abandon them whenever he could make votes by doing so, and to take up new ones at a moment's notice. For years he evaded Prohibition as dangerous; then he embraced it as profitable. At the Democratic National Convention last year he was on both sides, and distrusted by both. In his last great battle there was only a baleful and ridiculous malignancy. If he was pathetic, he was also disgusting.
Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.
The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille. If it fails, they will devour it.''