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Last week I wrote mostly about Rudy Giuliani and his campaign to re-model himself from a New York liberal into an all-American conservative, who didn’t really mean some of the things he used to say to pacify the inhabitants of the Red Belt and keep them from shooting him in a cellar like they did the Czar once. On 9/11 he was actually caught in a cellar but got out in time and went on to better things. It was a close call. Advantage might have been taken of his situation.
Writing about Rudy I also touched on the career of another presidential hopeful of the past, William Jennings Bryan, the paradigm for all candidates since he actually ran three times for the job and might have run again if he hadn’t died in 1925. The previous year the Democrats showed they had not forgotten him by nominating his brother Charlie for Vice President. In the family tradition he lost, but still his selection showed that there was still a soft spot for Bryans in the heart of the party.
Even before his death 1925 had not been a good year for Bryan since he had antagonized his former friends, the militant liberals of the country, by his advocacy of the Bible in the Scopes “evolution” trial in Tennessee, even though he did not deny evolution. For this H.L. Mencken denounced him the day after his death, writing that ‘he was born with a roaring voice, and it had a trick of inflaming halfwits.’ He also denied his integrity, citing various alleged ideological switches throughout his forty-year career. This was odd, because Bryan’s most famous stand for principle came in 1915 when he resigned as Secretary of State because he could not approve President Wilson’s reaction to the Lusitania sinking, believing that Wilson was holding the German navy to a different standard than he was the British. Mencken was an outspoken pro-German, but this sacrifice didn’t seem to improve his opinion of Bryan. He thought about him what he wrote about some one else, he was “the greatest demagogue since Peter the Hermit.”
I read the attack first in the Fifties and it was still funny twenty-five years after it was written. But there’s more than one side to the Bryan question. Another writer, Vachel Lindsay, an Illinois poet whose “Congo” is in a lot of schoolbooks along with others of his poems, had a different read on Bryan. He wrote a poem called, of all things, “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan” about a Bryan rally he attended in Springfield in 1896. It’s got 250 or more lines in it, and not one is boring. It’s all about the West, led by Bryan, rising up against the East, led by Ebenezer Scrooge apparently. All the money in the West was borrowed from the East and the people just hated the idea of paying it back, claiming they were being pauperized by usurious interest rates.
So it was “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West” and a lot more hot stuff along the same line until you get to the tragic end, “victory of letter files And plutocrats in miles With dollar signs upon their coats.” If anyone wrote a poem like that about me, I believe I could get along without the Presidency.
All this doesn’t mean I would have voted for Bryan. What he really was in 1896 was an inflationist, demanding inflation of the money supply through the “free coinage of silver at a ratio of sixteen to one.” I’ve forgotten what the ratio means, but I know what inflation means and even though it enables debtors to pay off their loans with devalued money, most of us aren’t that deeply in debt that we need this edge and we do have a stake in stable money. In inflation for most people the prices of things they have to buy go up faster than their paychecks do.
Writing about Rudy Giuliani led me back to Bryan but does not mean I either want or foresee a similar career for Rudy. Certainly not three unsuccessful runs for the presidency. One or two okay maybe, especially if one at least is a win. If this happens, I promise to write a poem about Rudy that will…well…be a poem about Rudy. How the hell do I know in advance whether it’ll be any good or not? I promise, though, I will only plagiarize from the best sources, preferably winners of the Nobel Prize. | |
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