rtbreak for Bryan, a dedicated pacifist who deeply believed that war was obsolete as well as immoral. In the end, America's drift towards war against Germany led to his resignation.
From that point many authors begin the final phase of Bryan's career,1 in which he slowly drifted towards the edge of American public life. His tenure as Secretary of State was thus a bitter experience for him, a deep blow to his ideals. To us, it is likely to appear deeply contradictory: Bryan, the anti imperialist idealist, was highly prone to U.S. military interventions in Latin America. Yet in foreign as in domestic policy, Bryan was in many ways ahead of his time.
Woodrow Wilson was himself an idealist among statesmen, but he did not appoint Bryan as Secretary of State with the intent of launching a moral crusade. The appointment was in fact thoroughly political.2 Bryan was a leader of a wing of the Democratic Party, and a sometime rival of Wilson. Giving him the highest post of the Cabinet was in part a reward, in part an act of fence mending.
In order to understand Bryan and his policies, it is
necessary to understand the elements of change and continuity ________
1 For example, Paolo Coletta and Lawrence Levine.
2 Lawrence W. Levine, Defender of the Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 4.
in the relations of the Democratic and Republican parties. The Democrats of the early twentieth century (then often called "the Democracy") were, as today, the party of "progressive" social legislation; indeed, much of the social agenda that we associate with the New Deal and even the Great Society originally became the Democratic party program under William Jennings Bryan. The contemporary Republicans were strictly "Eastern Establishment," closely associated with large money interests.
On racial issues, however, party relationships were different. The Democrats were the...