The Reforms And Conservative Cause In The Name Of His Traditional Faith

The turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries witnessed in the United States the appearance of a distinguished political figure, William Jennings Bryan(1860-1925), whose political influence was almost second to none but President Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. He was twice elected into the U. S. Congress, three times nominated as the Democratic Presidential candidate. And his highest official post was the Secretary of State of the Wilson Administration. What’s more, he had been the actual leader of the Democratic Party for almost 16 years from 1896 to 1912. Because of his easy style and his political ideas catering to the benefits of "the common people", Bryan was nicknamed the "Great Commoner". In addition to his political achievements, Bryan was also well-known for his conservative religious viewpoints, which is best illustrated by the role he played at the "Scopes Trial" in 1925 in Tennessee. After the trial, Bryan has long been held up to ridicule as an old-fashioned, stubborn anti-science figure who failed miserably in the showdown between the Fundamentalists and Modernists on the issue of teaching the theory of evolution in public schools.It was commonly thought in the academic world that Bryan had experienced a fundamental change of thoughts between the time when he was an active reformer and the last years of his life when he was a religious conservative. Many people believed he had given up reason as a way of thinking because of his anti-science emotion. In contrast to this conventional view, this paper holds that there was no change but a consistence in the thoughts of Bryan both as a reformer and as a conservative. All he did was based on his belief in the traditional values of 19th-century America as an agricultural society, that is, the democratic idea based on the "Agrarian Myth" and the moral code of the evangelical Protestantism. As a matter of fact, Bryan had stuck to his belief throughout all his life and career.In the 1890s, Bryan supported the Populist movement because he found that the democracy and welfare of common people was in danger when small farmers, who used to be regarded as the "most precious part of a state" by Jefferson, were now suffering from some unprecedented economic hardships as a result of the upcoming of the Industrial Revolution. Thereby he made it clear that the Federal government should take some measures to give necessary aids to the farmers and the other common folks. With the failure of the Populist movement, Bryan continued to work as the leader in the Democratic party, pushing his party in the Progressive movement to stand for the benefit of the plain people, especially for the people in the countryside. During the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, Bryan and his supporters in the Congress helped the President greatly in the passage of progressive legislation, which made an enormous contribution to the easing and solving of some of the problems brought forth by the Industrial Era. In the diplomatic arena, Bryan also followed the traditional isolationist ideology of the agricultural America as well as the brotherly love principle of Christianity in his strong opposition to the acquisition of the Philippines and the entangling of the United States in World WarⅠ. Once he found there was no possibility to make a compromise with President Wilson who was determined to enter the War, Bryan didn’t hesitate to resign from the post of Secretary of State and returned to his people, keeping on his struggle for peace. In his late years, Bryan devoted most of his time and energy to the anti-evolution and fundamentalist movement because he kept his deep faith in the evangelical Protestantism as part of his belief in the traditional values of 19th-Century America. There was no room for the theory of evolution in the tradition of evangelical Protestantism which regarded the infallibility of the Bible as its core doctrine. When this doctrine was made precarious by teaching Darwin’s theory in public schools, not surprisingly, Bryan was outraged and he fought the last battle in his life for what he believed so deeply.To summarize, the early advocacy of political reform by Bryan has no contradiction with the late religious conservatism he displayed in the Scopes Trial. All these seemingly inconsistent experiences in his life could be attributed to his belief in the traditional values of 19th-century America. When this old, agricultural America was challenged by the new, industrial America, Bryan was on the side of the old one. Therefore, he was extremely sensitive to what had gone wrong in the rising, modern America. Consequently he became a great reformer to push this modern America to become a better America. This is why Bryan finally did his part for the modernization of his country at the time and left his legacy for future generations from the perspective of a traditionalist. So far as we see from Bryan’s story, tradition is not the absolute antithesis of modernization. Modernization may need some critiques, warnings, and suggestions from traditionalists like William Jennings Bryan, the central figure of this dissertation.