After Hamilton, Madison and Jefferson, whose world are we living in?
In A Godly Hero, the Life of William Jennings Bryan, (Knopf, 2006), Michael Kazin, professor of history, Georgetown University, describes “the Great Commoner” as he was, as opposed to how H.L. Mencken (and the play/movie “Inherit the Wind”) said he was at the time of the Scopes Monkey trial, when Bryan was relegated to caricature status for his fundamentalist view of the Bible and opposition to Darwin’s theory of evolution being taught as fact in public school.
How would you feel if your children had to go to a school where they were taught, as fact, doctrine that was inconsistent with your religious views? This issue did not go away in Tennessee in 1925.
Before this he had spoken forcefully and with great effect to the ideals, religious, moral, economic and political, of a significant portion of America. The common people he sought to protect as a great political and moral leader did not include blacks, a moral blind spot as big as Jefferson's and the rest of the country.
So strong was Bryan politically that Woodrow Wilson appointed him as Secretary of State, shortly before America’s entry into WWI. As the Democratic Party champion beginning in 1896, Bryan was nominated and ran three times for president. To regard him as merely the laughable, benighted caricature, a la Inherit the Wind, is a mistake of history, which Kazin seeks to correct, for our benefit, not Bryan’s.
Among Bryan’s contribution to the subject of this list, he was, since the 1890s, “the leading proponent” (p. 304) of the Sixteenth Amendment (ratified 1913), providing for the income tax, after it had been held unconstitutional in Pollock, the Seventeenth, providing for the direct election of senators (also ratified 1913), and the Eighteenth, Prohibition, ratified 1919 and repealed in 1933. He was THE great reformer.
It was his ideas, or those adopted and espoused by him, that the major parties adopted as theirs, the great example being TR and his campaign against the trusts which gave him the name "trust-buster."
Recognition of labor unions, collective bargaining, minimum wages, maximum hours, workers compensation, insured deposits, the Federal Reserve System, corporate regulation, woman suffrage (Amend. 19, ratified 1920), gender equality for women, international organizations to deter war, cooling off periods, opposition to American imperialism, and many more, all the stuff of reform and the impulses that formed roots of the New Deal, were promoted early and often by WJB.
Millions of common people, mostly old-stock white Protestant, who opposed politics in religion, regarded Bryan as their Savior's leading spokesman on earth, introducing their religion and morality to our politics.
Bryan proposed “a new amendment that would make it easier to enact others in the future. Why not alter Article Five to allow a simple majority in Congress and of state legislatures to change the Constitution?” P. 223.