William Jennings Bryan

The issues faced by William Jennings Bryan as Secretary of State, and his response to them, were in some ways similar, in other ways strangely different, from the responses of American statesmen to comparable problems of war and peace today. This essay examines Bryan's ideals and his impact on American diplomacy in this critical period.

Today, the name of William Jennings Bryan is probably most widely associated with the Scopes "Monkey Trial," the famous evolutionlaw courtroom battle of 1925, in which Bryan took what we would now call the creationist side against Clarence Darrow. Some may vaguely recall that he made a fiery speech about the "cross of gold" in 1896, but this means little to us, in large part because the issue of "free silver," (unlike, for example, the creationismversusevolution controversy), has no resonance in current political life.

The full dimension of Bryan's role in American public life

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his own appointments, Bryan was none the less a firm and genuine idealist. In the eyes of a critic, Frederic Howe, he was the embodiment of the "selfrighteous missionary mind."6 The basis of his international outlook was that war was not only immoral, but on the practical point of being abandoned by the civilized world. In his whole outlook, Bryan was "almost compulsively optimistic."7 The programmatic embodiment of this was a series of "reconciliation treaties" which the United States entered into with various countries. These were designed to at least stall off an outbreak of war, to let "peacedragout."8 By the ominous month of August, 1914, Bryan had negotiated thirty such treaties, of which twenty had been ratified. Treaties had been signed with ________ 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 126. 7 Levine, 5. 8 Koenig, 511.all the major powers, with the notable exceptions of Germany, Austria, and Japan. When Bryan came into office in 1913, the items he found on top of his desk were relations with Japan and with Central America. The cause of contention with Japan was a difference over some international issue, but the domestic American politics of immigration
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Approximate Word count = 2325
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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