William Jennings Bryan in American memory

William Jennings Bryan, Congressman (1891--1895), Secretary of State (1913--1915), and Democratic presidential nominee (1896, 1900, 1908), has been the subject of numerous historical assessments and fictional portrayals. This dissertation examines those assessments and portrayals in an effort to understand how Bryan has been remembered. It explores how Bryan's disparate images have been created by changing times and evolving historiographical currents. From my examination of the efforts of Journalists, historians, and even play-wrights who have shaped our understanding of Bryan, a fuller and more meaningful picture of the "Great Commoner" emerges. This dissertation suggests that Bryan's populism was the product of a new liberalism that emerged in the 1890s rather than of Jeffersonian Republicanism, as most historians have believed.; Despite the fascination historians have had for Bryan, the Commoner has always been, as his biographer Lawrence Levine claims, "too often judged and too little understood." Bryan has been "too little understood" for a number of reasons which this dissertation explores. The most obvious of these reasons is his death just days after his least impressive crusade at the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. But his performance at the Scopes Trial did not by itself craft America's memory of Bryan. That was the work of journalists, commentators, and historians who wrote about Bryan after his death. This dissertation is about the role of the journalist and the historian in forging the Bryan image. It is about the imperatives of scholars and analysts. And it is about how those imperatives have shaped a nation's memory.; This dissertation concludes that the Commoner's place in American memory has been the product of Political and philosophical debates that began in Bryan's lifetime and continue even today. An awareness of the relationship between these debates and the resulting images of Bryan adds greatly to understanding his place and purpose in American history as a twentieth-century Liberal and as father of the modern Democratic party.