book/history

He's something like the biggest loser in the history of American politics—a tragic figure for the ages—or so the yarn goes. William Jennings Bryan, three-time loser on the Democratic presidential ticket (1896, 1900, 1908). He of the "Cross of Gold" speech. The man who, in his waning years, found himself on the business end of the Scopes monkey trial. It would seem any study of WJB would be a cautionary tale. And certainly that story's there. But Georgetown history prof Michael Kazin's new bio, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (Knopf), tells the story of the populist Democrat and electric orator as that of a man who got a raw deal in the posterity department. Getting bested by Clarence Darrow over evolution is how most remember Bryan. But Nebraska's "Great Commoner" "was the first major-party politician to advocate what became the core of modern liberalism: expanding the powers of the federal government to serve the welfare of ordinary Americans," wrote his biographer last month in American Prospect. Bryan also represented that now-seemingly extinct faction of the population: the Christian Left. He argued that it was the role of Christians to fight inequality and the corrupting influence of wealth. It's why Kazin describes a Bryan-type as perhaps the ideal candidate for the U.S. presidency today—socially liberal but with an evangelical flair. Granted, Bryan had some flaws—foremost his pesky racism, which, while indefensible, was all too common at the time. Yet in many other ways, argues Kazin, Bryan was the father of the modern Democratic party: a Jefferson disciple who fought tooth-and-nail for the common man against big business.