Speaking of the nation: William Jennings Bryan, Al Smith, and the idioms of American populism

William Jennings Bryan was convinced that civic responsibility had to be fostered by cultural and political institutions pervaded by a spirit of Christian love. He found this spirit in a rural United States that was under assault by both the business elite and the immigrant working class of an increasingly urban nation. Bryan idealized a racially and ethnically homogeneous Christian nation bound to its agrarian roots as the means to foster organic ties between human beings and to resist the forces of predatory corporations and rampant individualism. His religious and political ideals excluded a figure such as Al Smith. Smith was a spokesman for the immigrant, urban, ethnically diverse, and often Catholic and Jewish masses that were gaining political power in the early twentieth century. Smith's constituents were drawn to the economic progressivism of the Democratic Party, but did not share the religious and ethnic sensibilities of Bryan's populists.;Like Bryan, Smith criticized the plutocracy and its ability to manipulate democratic institutions. However, in place of cigar-smoking railroad and banking executives from New York, the villains in his populist narrative were the members of the Ku Klux Klan and an intolerant Protestant hegemony. Smith played a crucial role in the process by which the Democratic Party came to stand for an activist state in economic matters but restricted the government's role in moral and religious regulation. Smith, along with his Catholic and Jewish advisors, shifted populist rhetoric to include protections of minority rights and religious privacy.;Judged by a rational, instrumental standard of political or economic interest, there should not have been any intractable conflict between the two men. Both were Democrats who believed that an activist state could better the lives of ordinary people. Furthermore, both were famed orators who took great pride in their ability to translate political discourse into common sense. But in practice, the affective, emotive, and visceral appeals that were the basis of Bryan's and Smith's respective popularities failed to resonate across boundaries of region, ethnicity, and religion.