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Mary Baird Bryan
“Without boasting, I am sure I understand and know him better than anyone in the world,” she wrote. The most prominent feature in a photograph of this woman with a Mona-Lisa-like turn of her mouth and eyes fixed beyond the horizon is a dark ribbon around her neck whose bow uncannily mimics his ties. Willa Cather wrote, “Decidedly the strongest and most characteristic side of this woman is the mental one. Before all she is a woman of intellect.” Cather adds she was the only woman in her law school class, ranking third among the graduates.
This granddaughter of a pioneer and daughter of a small town store-owner became one of America’s most powerful women, serving as policy analyst, political organizer, and speech editor for her husband, a man who it is fair to say lay the foundation for the American Century and Barack Obama–William Jennings Bryan. Willa Cather observed that Mary Baird Bryan did much of the research for his speeches, would note which phrases and gestures worked well, and sometimes signaled him from the gallery to regulate the pitch of his voice.
Symbolically, the two shared a large double desk so they could work directly across from each other. Writing of her husband’s uncanny memory that “resembled a number of pigeon-holes, with the contents all classified and labeled and ready for call,” she used business-like terms to describe their relationship:
A mind like that was worth working with and working for. His wife was willing to plod through heavy books in order to give him the leading thoughts, and help form for him a background of erudition which he was too busy to acquire unaided.
In the early years of their marriage, Mary Bryan had some ambivalence about her husband’s career. In a scene Stanley Kramer should have filmed, one night after Bryan had lost his 1894 Senate campaign, a family friend overheard an earnest discussion between the two in which Mary made clear her wish for her husband to “settle down.” Bryan answered that he could not give up his fight for the people.
Surprisingly, no Bryan biographer has commented on the fear Will’s career must have caused Mary Bryan. She writes, “more than once friends brought him devices for protection,” but his reply was always the same, “Mary, if my death is necessary to further this cause, I am ready to go.” She adds, “he knew no fear.” Every time he went off on one of his speaking tours she must have thought about the possibility of his assassination.
Perhaps because of this, her memoirs betray some ambivalence about her husband’s fame. After “Cross of Gold” made him one of America’s first “superstars.” Mary Bryan describes their arrival home after the 1896 convention.
Upon our small household suddenly shone the white light which is said to beat upon the throne. Our very house had altered its appearance when we returned home to it from the Chicago Convention. ..The public had invaded our lives.
Yet she would not be with him for the most critical decision of his life, one that denied him the prize they both had worked for so long and that like a weighty stone dropped in a pond would ripple through what we now term the American Century.
While the image of the simple-minded rube of Inherit the Wind remains strong in the American consciousness, to his contemporaries William Jennings Bryan had a reputation as one of the nation’s boldest-and feared–convention tacticians. In 1912 he steered the powerful Committee on Resolutions, turned down Champ Clark’s offer to serve as permanent convention chair and came within a few votes of repealing unit rule.
Then he went even further. At three o’clock on the morning before official balloting began, an unusual meeting took place in the outer room of Bryan’s hotel apartment. Charles Bryan had learned that Tammany boss Charles Murphy would throw the New York delegation behind Clark. That Charles Bryan would uncover this plot before any of Wilson’s own campaign staff, testifies to the power of the Bryan network. As a counter move, Charles Bryan hatched one of the most audacious schemes in American convention history: the Morgan-Ryan-Belmont Resolution. Named after three notorious tycoons at the center of the Bourbons, the resolution stated:
As proof of our fidelity to the people, we hereby declare ourselves opposed to the nomination of any candidate for President who is representative of or under obligation to J. Pierpont Morgan, Thomas F. Ryan, August Belmont, or any other member of the privilege-hunting and favor-seeking class.
But the real bombshell lay in the second paragraph which demanded the withdrawal of any delegate or delegation representing those interests.
Imagine today if someone introduced a convention resolution ousting all delegates who had received funds from CitiGroup and you have some idea of the audacity of Charles’ proposal. In keeping with the Bryans’ tactic of working collaboratively with their supporters, Charles convened a meeting of progressive delegates to solicit their reactions. Many of the group supported Wilson, which leads to the question of whether a hidden agenda of the meeting was to determine the leanings of the Wilson delegates. The progressives urged Charles to eliminate the second paragraph, arguing it violated the right of states to choose their own delegates. After a spirited discussion that failed to resolve their differences, the delegates then picked up their hats and coats.
When Charles glumly reported the meeting to Will, the two drafted a new version, which Bryan put in his pocket, then walked over to the convention not sure if he would introduce it or not. Bryan’s recollection of that walk gives yet another key to his transformational style:
I felt some timidity about taking the responsibility without any encouragement from those nearest to me and most in sympathy with what I was trying to do, and reached the decision more from conviction that it was my duty to act than from reasons with which I could not justify the act.
Like all transformational leaders, Bryan was driven by values, yet this paragraph belies the image of him as a rigid demagogue who gave little thought to the opinions of those who supported him.
When the delegates began filing back into the hall they could see that seated beneath the watching eyes of Thomas Jefferson was none other then William Jennings Bryan. Some speculated he would announce his own candidacy. Bryan benefited from the selection of his friend Ollie James as the permanent Convention Chair, so he expected few problems presenting his resolution.
James’ election had provided an early indication of the strength of the progressives and their supporters across the country. In some rural towns, people periodically gathered at the local railroad station to hear word from the convention over the telegraph wires, passing the news on to their neighbors. When the convention had elected Bryan’s bitter enemy Alton Parker as temporary chair and keynoter, word of Parker’s selection passed quickly through the country and Bryan supporters deluged Baltimore with over 100,000 telegrams, leading to the selection of James.
1912 Convention
After Bryan spoke, Charles Bryan observed, “The riot which followed lived up to expectations” as delegates shouted, “Beat him up!” “Throw him out!” and even “Assassinate him!”
After the crowd settled down, Bryan adroitly withdrew the second part of the resolution, but even he must have been surprised by the final 4-1 margin to unseat the three delegates, as Murphy said to Belmont, “August, listen and hear yourself voted out of the convention.”
Eleanor Roosevelt noted:
In front of me sat Mrs. August Belmont who registered righteous indignation and said she would go out and fight the part when William Jennings Bryan practically read her husband out if it.
What provided fuel for the firestorm caused by Bryan’s resolution some likened to the prairie fires of Bryan’s native Nebraska, for the turn of the last century was characterized by an unprecedented upwelling of community spirit rippling across rural America. In our world of “bowling alone,” the civic engagement of these communities is remarkable.
The Farmers Alliance movement whose two main branches centered in the South and the plains grew to a membership of over a million families in the late 1880s. A Kansas woman claimed because of involvement in Alliance activities, “people commenced to think who had never thought before, and people talked who had seldom spoken.” But something even more fundamental was at work, for what Gerald Gamm and Robert Putnam term “associational density” rocketed from 1870-1900 as Americans joined a “dramatic proliferation of voluntary groups” which were “concentrated in smaller cities and towns,” particularly in the Midwest. This was also the period when the lecture circuit and Chautauqua movements spread rapidly in many of the same towns. The Chautauqua Literary and Science Circle grew from 100,000 member groups in 1888 to 2,500,000 in 1900.
The politics that was never far from the center of this flurry of community activity was unlike anything America would see again even during the Great Depression. The lightning and thunder of incendiary speakers resounded across the prairies igniting homesteaders and rural communities. Kansas, for example, featured the former Medicine Lodge town Marshall “Sockless” Jerry Simpson, who earned his nickname when he mocked the silk socks of his railroad attorney opponent in the 1890 election, and “Mary Yellin” Lease, who was such a powerful speaker that William Allen White wrote “she could recite the multiplication table and set a crowd hooting and harrahing at her will.”
"Sockless' Jerry Simpson
This grassroots uprising remains crucial to understanding Bryan’s rapid ascent, for a civically engaged public yearned for a voice to articulate their concerns. Mary Bryan painted a picture of this political landscape:
When we removed from Illinois in 1887, to Nebraska, we entered a younger civilization in which people were even more harassed by conditions and more determined to find a solution.
Given this spontaneous uprising it was only natural some not only feared “the common people,” they despised them. The air reeked not only with the foul pollution of thousands of new factories, but also with the stench of the Social Darwinist beliefs of those who owned them. A Yale professor and Skull and Bones member named William Graham Sumner, who became popular with the plutocrats for justifying inequality, wrote:
In general, however, it may be said that those whom humanitarian and philanthropists call the weak are the ones through whom the productive and conservative forces of society are wasted. The weak constantly neutralize and destroy the finest efforts of the wise and industrious, and are a dead-weight on the society in all its struggles to realize any better things.”
One of the most widely-distributed pieces of its time was William Allen White’s anti-progressive editorial “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”
Give the prosperous man the dickens! Legislate the thriftless man into ease, whack the stuffing out of the creditors…Whoop it up for the ragged trousers; put the lazy, greasy fizzle, who can’t pay his debts, on the altar, and bow down and worship him.
Those with the “ragged trousers” worshiped William Jennings Bryan. Mary described some of the gifts he received of which canes were the most numerous and the most bizarre a stuffed alligator so big its tail hung out of the delivery wagon. Most telling were the “Bryan babies” including a set of triplets named “William,” “Jennings,” and “Bryan.” There were so many of these babies that the Bryan’s oldest daughter Ruth undertook the task of cataloging them.
Ruth Bryan Owen
Mary Bryan’s meticulous record-keeping of gift items and babies is another key to understanding Bryan’s success, for today when campaigns have more staff than the group that planned D-Day, it is hard to believe that three people, Charles, Will and Mary Bryan-coordinated a movement that played a major force in American politics for three decades.
Long before most politicians recognized the power of the media, Bryan founded The Commoner in 1901, which at the height of its popularity boasted 145,000 subscribers, a readership larger than all but a handful of other political publications of its time. Not until the age of blogging would another candidate follow Bryan’s lead.
Charles and Mary Bryan also built what ranks as the first modern a campaign organization using meticulous records organized into a card file that by 1912 had half a million names they had culled from Commoner subscriber lists and every letter Bryan received, each entry noting key information about each person. In the 1908 campaign, Charles used this list to send 6,000 letters to Bryan supporters,and it no doubt played a role in the sending of the 100,000 telegrams that inundated Baltimore.
Bryan’s political strategy anticipated Franklin Roosevelt’s use of the radio, Ronald Reagan’s mastery of television and finally Barack Obama’s mastery of the Internet. Each was fueled by a deep need to communicate directly with the American people, to see them as much as possible as individuals rather than factions, interest groups or microtargets.
While Mary served as researcher and policy analyst, Charles Bryan functioned as his brother’s political strategist. One is inclined to think of the Kennedy brothers when describing the relationship between the two, but although Charles Bryan had political aspirations, he subordinated them to work for his brother. Only after Will’s career had begun winding down did Charles enter the national stage becoming the answer to a trivia question as the 1924 Democratic Party Vice Presidential candidate.
If the fight over the Morgan-Belmont-Ryan resolution is little-known today, it symbolized the end of the Bourbons as a political movement. It signaled that the era of the Cleveland Democrats who had capitulated to the excesses of the Gilded Age was over.
A major key to understanding this comes from the pioneering photographs and essays of Jacob Riis’ 1890 How the Other Half Lives, a book that helped to establish the political career of a young New York police commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt, who coined the term “muckraking” to describe Riis’ work.
These photographs represent the birth pangs of the American Century, which underwent a long and life-threatening labor. Riis’ captured the mixture of anger, class warfare, optimism and activism that would characterize an American Century that, like Riis, would attempt to remedy the gross inequities his lens captured.
From How the Other Half Lives
In 1912 one of the emerging leaders of this new consciousness was a young New York legislator who had entered politics on the advice of his cousin Theodore and had made a name for himself crusading against corruption, particularly of the Tammany variety. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his allies chafed under the convention’s unit rule which essentially gave the majority control of the entire delegation to Murphy. With Charles’ resolution, Bryan may have hoped to isolate Murphy by banning the likes of August Belmont so the Roosevelt faction could perhaps take control of the New York delegation.
While the Roosevelt faction shared many of Bryan’s aims, the fire-eating prairie style of Bryan and others such as “Alfalfa Bill” Murray was as foreign to them as the ways of Tammany. Roosevelt and his allies represented a new generation in Democratic Party politics, one not a part of Bryan’s “band of brothers” that had fought the old battles.
FDR would never succeed in wrestling the New York delegation from Murphy, but he caught the eye of Woodrow Wilson, who would fittingly name him to cousin Ted’s old post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy where FDR would serve under one of Bryan’s closest friends, Josephus Daniels. Contrary to those who believe Roosevelt never had much use for Bryan, when he became President FDR seriously considered naming Bryan’s daughter Ruth, who kept the ledger of “Bryan babies,” as America’s first female cabinet secretary, settling instead on naming her the nation’s first female ambassador.
Bryan would also make his mark on Eleanor Roosevelt:
I had an instinctive belief in his stand for peace. I remember Mr. Bryan had miniature plowshares made from old guns and given to many people in the government. These were greeted with some ridicule but to me they were not the least ridiculous. I thought them an excellent reminder that our swords be made into plowshares and should continue this useful occupation.
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