Darwin's theory: Hard to swallow, then and now

Presented to the Club by Roger Linscott, about 1981

A century and a half ago, in the year 1831, a young divinity student of 22 set sail from England on a voyage to South America. Twenty-eight years later, after prolonged study and soul-searching, he wrote a book based upon his observations there. The world – certainly the world of science – has never been the same since.

The young man, of course, was Charles Darwin, and the book was The Origin of the Species. When he embarked on his historic voyage, he had already abandoned a proposed career in medicine, after fleeing in horror from a surgical theater in which an operation was being performed on an unanesthetized child, and was a rather reluctant candidate for the clergy, a career deemed suitable for the younger son of an English gentleman. An indifferent student, Darwin was an ardent hunter and horseman, a collector of beetles, mollusks and shells, and an amateur botanist and geologist. When the captain of the surveying ship H.M.S. Beagle, himself only three years older than Darwin, offered passage to any young man who would volunteer to go without pay as a naturalist, Darwin eagerly seized the opportunity to escape from Cambridge. Five years later, he returned to an inherited fortune, an estate in the English countryside, and a lifetime of independent study that radically changed mankind’s view of life and of our place in the living world.

To understand the extraordinary genius of Darwin’s theory of evolution, it is useful to look briefly at the intellectual climate in which it was formulated. Aristotle, the world’s first great biologist, believed that all living things could be arranged in a hierarchy – a ladder of nature in which the simplest creatures had a humble position on the bottommost rung, mankind occupied the top, and all other organisms had their proper places in between. Until the end of the century, most biologists believed in such a natural hierarchy; but whereas Aristotle thought that living organisms had always existed, the later biologists believed, in harmony with the teachings of the Old Testament, that all living things were the product of a divine creation. They believed, moreover, that most were created for the service or pleasure of mankind. Indeed, it was pointed out, even the lengths of day and night were planned to coincide with the human need for sleep.

That each type of living thing came into existence in its present form — specially and specifically created – was a compelling idea. How else could one explain the astonishing extent to which every organism was adapted to its environment and to its role in nature? It was not only the authority of the church but also, so it seemed, the evidence before one’s own eyes, that gave such strength to the concept of special creation.

Actually, it was geologists, more than biologists, who paved the way for overturning this concept. During the latter part of the 18th century, there was a revival of interest in fossils, which previously had been collected only as curiosities, regarded as stones that somehow looked like shells. The English surveyor William Smith, born 50 years before Darwin, was among the first to study the distribution of fossils scientifically. Whenever his work took him down into a mine or along canals, he carefully noted the order of the different layers of rock and collected the fossils from each layer. He eventually established that each stratum, no matter where he came across it in England, contained characteristic kinds of fossils.

Smith did not interpret his findings, but the implication that the present surface of the earth had been formed layer by layer over a very long period of time was unavoidable. This was a brand-new idea. Christian theologians, by counting the successive generations since Adam (as recorded in the Bible) had calculated the maximum age of the earth at about 6,000 years, and no one had ever thought in terms of a longer period. Yet the world described by William Smith was clearly a very ancient one. A revolution in geology was beginning; earth science was becoming the study of time and change, rather than a mere cataloging of types of rocks. As a consequence, the history of the earth became inseparable from the history of living organisms, as revealed in the fossil record.

Although the way to evolutionary theory was being prepared by the revolution in geology, the time was not yet ripe for a parallel revolution in biology. The dominating force in European science in the early 19th century was Baron George Cuvier, a French aristocrat who was the founder of vertebrate paleontology, or the scientific study of the fossil record. An expert in anatomy and zoology, he applied his special knowledge of the way in which animals are constructed to the study of fossil animals, and was able to make brilliant deductions about the form of an entire animal from a few fragments of bone. We think of paleontology and evolution as so closely connected that it is surprising to learn that Cuvier was a staunch and powerful opponent of evolutionary theories. He recognized the fact that many species that once existed no longer did – but he explained their extinction by postulating a series of catastrophes. After each catastrophe, the most recent of which he declared to be Noah’s Flood, new species filled the vacancies. Louis Agassiz, the great Harvard scholar and America’s leading 19th century biologist, was a similarly devout opponent of evolution. He contended that the fossil record revealed 50 to 80 total extinctions of life and an equal number of separate creations.

But the person who most directly influenced Darwin was Charles Lyell, a geologist who was twelve years his senior and whose books Darwin took with him on the Beagle. On the basis of his own observations, Lyell opposed the theory of catastrophes as an explanation for the creation of new species. He believed that the slow, steady and cumulative effect of natural forces had produced continuous change in the course of the earth’s history; and since this process is demonstrably slow, its results being barely visible in a single lifetime, it must have been going on for a very long time. Lyell was not an evolutionist. But what Darwin’s theory needed was the concept of vast amount of time – and it was time that Lyell gave him. The discovery that the earth was very ancient was the snowball that started the whole avalanche.

This, then, was the intellectual climate in which Charles Darwin set sail from England in 1831. As the Beagle moved down the Atlantic coast of South America, through the Straits of Magellan and up the Pacific coast, Darwin traveled the interior. He explored the rich fossil beds of South America, with the theories of Lyell fresh in his mind, and collected specimens of the many new kinds of plant and animal life he encountered. He was impressed most strongly by the constantly changing varieties of organisms he saw. The birds and animals on the west coast were very different from those on the east coast, and even as he moved slowly up the west coast, one species would give way to another.

Most interesting of all to Darwin were the animals and plants that inhabited the small, barren group of islands known as the Galapagos, off the coast of Ecuador. The islands had been named by the Spanish after their most striking inhabitants, the giant tortoises, some of which weight 220 pounds or more. Each of the islands has its own type of tortoise, and sailors who took these tortoises on board and kept them as a convenient source of fresh meat on their sea voyages could readily tell which island any particular tortoise had come from. Then there were groups of finchlike birds, thirteen species in all, that differed from one another in the sizes and shapes of their bodies and beaks, and particularly in the type of food they ate. In fact, though clearly finches, they had many features seen in completely different types of birds on the mainland.

From his knowledge of geology, Darwin knew that these islands, clearly of volcanic origin, were much younger than the mainland. Yet the plants and animals of the islands were different from those of the mainland, and in fact, the plants and animals of different islands of the archipelago differed from one another. Were the living things on each island the product of a separate special creation, Darwin wondered – or was it possible that from an original paucity of birds in the archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends? This problem “continued to haunt him.”

Darwin was a voracious reader. Not long after his return to England, he came across a short but much talked-about sociological treatise by the Reverend Thomas Malthus, which first appeared in 1798. In this book, Malthus warned, as economists have warned frequently since, that the human population was increasing so rapidly that it would soon be impossible to feed all the earth’s inhabitants. Darwin saw that Malthus’s conclusion – that food supply and other factors hold populations in check – is true for all species, not just the human species. For example, Darwin calculated that a single breeding pair of elephants – which are among the slowest breeders of all animals – would, if all their progeny lived and reproduced the normal number of offspring over a normal life pan, produce a standing population of 19 million elephants in 750 years. Yet the average number of elephants remained the same over the years. So, although this single breeding pair could have, in time, produced 19 million elephants, it did, in fact, produce only two. But why these particular two? The process by which the two survivors are, so to speak, “chosen,” Darwin called natural selection.

Natural selection, according to Darwin, was a process analogous to the type of selection exercised by breeders of horses, cattle or dogs. In the case of artificial selection, we humans chose individual specimens of plants of animals for breeding on the basis of characteristics that seem to us desirable. In the case of natural selection, the environment takes the place of human choice. As individuals with certain hereditary characteristics survive and reproduce, and individuals with other hereditary characteristics are eliminated, the population will slowly change. If some horses were faster than others, for example, those would be more likely to survive, and their progeny, in turn, might be faster, and so on.

According to Darwin’s theory, these variations among individuals of a species, which occur in every natural population, are wholly a matter of chance. They are not produced by the environment, not by a creative force, not by the unconscious striving of the organism. In themselves, they have no goal or direction, It is the operation of natural selection over a series of generations that gives direction to evolution. A variation that gives an animal a slight advantage makes that animal more likely to leave surviving offspring. Thus, a giraffe, say, with a slightly longer neck has an advantage in feeding, and so is likely to leave more offspring than a giraffe with a shorter neck. If the longer neck is an inherited trait, some of these offspring will also have long necks, and if the long-necked animals in this generation have an advantage, the next generation will include more long-necked animals – and so on, until, finally the population of short-necked giraffes will have become a population of longer-necked ones, thought there will still be variations.

The extraordinary thing about Darwin’s formulation was not so much his espousal of evolution — which was an idea that had at least crossed other scientific minds before his – but rather, the crucial role he gave to chance variation as the great triggering mechanism of the evolutionary process – the thread that links together all the diverse phenomena of the living world. Species arise, he said, when differences between individuals within a group are gradually converted into differences between groups as the groups become separated in space and time.

It was a truly revolutionary concert that, in one fell swoop, brought biology out of the Middle Ages – out of the realm of theology and into the realm of science.

It also profoundly influenced our way of thinking about ourselves. With the possible exception of the storm that raged about Copernicus and Galileo, no revolution of scientific thought has had as much effect on human thought as this one. The major reason is, of course, that evolution is in flat contradiction to the lateral, fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. The new astronomy had made it clear that the earth is not the center of the universe or even our own solar system. With Darwin, the new biology required acceptance of the proposition that, like all other organisms, we too are not created for any special purpose or as part of any universal design but instead rose in the course of the earth’s long history from earlier and more primitive forms.

The heretical dimensions of this proposition may explain why almost three decades elapsed between Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle and his publication of the Origin of the Species.

Two years after his return to England, he read the essay by Malthus, and in 1842 he wrote a preliminary sketch of his theory, which he revised in a 230-page manuscript in 1844. There is little doubt that he realized the magnitude of his accomplishment. On completing the revision, he wrote a formal letter to his wife requesting her, in the event of his death, to publish it – but then, with the manuscript and letter in safe-keeping, he turned to other work, including a four-volume treatise on the natural history of barnacles. For more than twenty years after his return from his voyage, Darwin mentioned his ideas on evolution only in his private notebooks and in letters to a few scientific colleagues.

In 1850, urged on by his friends Charles Lyell and botanist Joseph Hooker, Darwin set to work slowly preparing a manuscript for publication. In 1858, some ten chapters later, he received a bombshell in the form of a letter from another English naturalist, Alfred Russell Wallace, who was working in the Malay Peninsula and had corresponded with Darwin on several previous occasions. Wallace presented a theory of evolution that almost exactly paralleled Darwin’s own. Tossing in bed one night with a fever, Wallace had had a sudden flash of insight. “I saw at once,” he recollected, “that the ever-present variability of all living things would furnish the material from which, by the mere weeding out of those less adapted to the actual conditions, the fittest alone would continue the race.” Within two days, Wallace’s 20-page manuscript was completed and in the mail.

When Darwin received Wallace’s letter, he turned to his friends for advice, and Lyell and Hooker, taking matters into their own hands, presented the theory of Darwin and Wallace at a scientific meeting just one month later. Their presentation received little attention at the time, but for Darwin the floodgates were opened. He finished his long treatise in another few months, and the book was finally published. The first printing of 1,250 copies sold out the same day.

Why Darwin’s long delay? His own writings, voluminous thought they were, shed little light on this question. But perhaps his background does. When Darwin embarked on the Beagle, he was a devout Christian who did not doubt the literal truth of the Bible and did not believe in evolution any more than did the other English scientists he had met and whose books he had read. When he achieved his Malthusian insight a few years later, he was still in his 20s. He held no professional position, but he had acquired the admiration of his colleagues for his work aboard the Beagle. He was not about to compromise a promising career by promulgating a heresy that he might be unable to prove to their satisfaction. Perhaps more important, his wife, to whom he was deeply devoted, was extremely religious. In short, it seems reasonable to suppose that Darwin, as has been the case with others, found the implications of his theory difficult to confront.

Nor it is any wonder that he shrank from those implications for so long. Once the earth and its living inhabitants are seen as products of historical change, the theological philosophy embodied in the great chain of being ceases to make sense; the fullness of the world becomes not an eternal manifestation of God’s bountiful creativity but an illusion. For most of the world’s history, the vast majority of species on earth today did not exist and considerably less than one per cent of those that did exist do so today. If evolution has occurred, and if it has proceeded from the entirely natural causes Darwin envisioned, then the adaptations of organisms to their environment, the intricate construction of the bird’s wing and the orchid’s flower are evidence not of divine design but of the struggle for existence.

Moreover, and this may be the deepest implication of all, Darwin brought to biology, as his predecessors had brought to astronomy and geology, what has been termed the sufficiency of efficient causes. No longer was there any reason to look for final causes and goals. To the questions “What purpose does this species serve? Why did God make tapeworms?” the answer is, “To no purpose.” Tapeworms were not put here to serve a purpose, nor were plants, not plants, nor people. They came into existence not by design but by the action of utterly impersonal natural laws.

This was an exceedingly hard pill for most people to swallow – and it still is. The fact that the earth is not the center of the universe, though once considered heresy, is now accepted by the vast majority of mankind. The fact that man is descended of apes is not. Almost uniquely among the great scientific formulations of history, Darwinian theory remains a subject of bitter controversy more than a century after his death – not among biologists, who accept it with virtual unanimity, but among ordinary people who cannot bring themselves to face the possibility of a world that operates without a grand, divinely guided design.

Indeed, the hullabaloo over Darwinism is currently more intense – at least in the United States – than it has been since the 1920s when Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan battled the issue in Dayton, Tennessee, at the celebrated Scopes trial. Leading the attack today are the so-called Creationists, who are mostly spokesmen for fundamentalist religious groups – but their popular support is wide and deep. In a recent Gallup Poll of cross-section Americans, nearly half of the respondents agreed with the statement: “God created men pretty much in his present form at one time within the past 10,000 years.” Thirty-eight per cent of the respondents agreed with an alternative statement: “Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, including man’s creation.” A mere nine per cent accepted a third choice – that man had developed from less advanced forms of life without diving intervention. Another public poll, published in Christian Century several years ago, similarly reported that approximately half the adults in America continue to believe that “God created Adam and Eve to start the human race.”

Armed with this kind of public support, the Creationists in recent years have been zeroing in on the public school system, particularly in the South and Southwest – not with the demand that the teaching of evolution be banned (which was the issue in the Scopes trial) but with the seemingly less dogmatic demand that Creationist doctrines should be given equal time with Darwinian theory in all science classrooms. They have been remarkably successful in this endeavor. In Dallas, Atlanta, and Chicago, not to mention countless smaller cities, school committees have yielded to the equal-time pressure. And perhaps more disturbing, national textbook publishers – whose profits depend on producing books that will be marketable in every part of the nation – have been soft-pedaling Darwinism in their biology texts or specifically including Creationism as an alternative and co-equal doctrine.

“Where will we be,” asks Stephen Jay Gould, the eminent Harvard biologist, “if any pressure group can win, by legislative fiat, the ordered inclusion of its favorite doctrine into school curricula?” It’s a good question. One is reminded of Lyndon Johnson’s story about the earnest young pedagogue who, in the depths of depression, applied for an opening as a science teacher in a backwater town in Texas. Confronting the local school board at his interview, he was asked by the grim-visaged chairman: “Do you teach that the earth is flat or that the earth is round?” The young man looked from face to face without seeing a hint of enlightenment. “Well,” he said, “I can teach it either way.”

The notion that one can teach the great unifying theory of modern biology “either way” is no less absurd.

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Cleveland Amory: The Hub of the Universe

Presented to the Club by Roger Linscott in 1999. Roger was, for many years, the associate editor of The Berkshire Eagle, Pittsfield's daily newspaper. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his editorial writing in 1973, and died in 2008 at the age of 88, having been a member of the Club since 1950. We are indebted to Roger's daughter, Wendy Lamme, for a treasure trove of Roger's Monday Evening Club papers. Photo of Cleveland Amory by Ron Bull for the Toronto Star, used under Toronto Star Photograph Archive License.



The genesis of this paper, such as it is, was a lengthy obituary that appeared in The New York Times shortly before this past Christmas. Its subject was Cleveland Amory, a writer and editor whose tireless work in behalf of animal rights over recent decades had produced several best-selling books and an impressive body of state and federal human legislation.



But before becoming an animal activist in middle age, Cleveland Amory was a social historian, and a very good one at that. His first three books. The Proper Bostonians (published just 50 years ago [1947]), The Last Resorts, and Who Killed Society? were beautifully researched accounts of the mores and foibles of the American upper crust before it began crumbling under the pressure of the mass media and increasing social mobility.



And before that, Amory was an undergraduate at Harvard where – like a number of luminaries before him, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt ’04 – he was president of the Harvard Crimson, the undergraduate daily newspaper. In that role he was something of a mentor to me, who was admitted to the staff as a sophomore when Amory was a senior. He taught me a good deal more about newspapering that I could have learned from any school of journalism.



Our paths last crossed – and only briefly – some 30 years ago. But reading his obituary caused me to ferret The Proper Bostonians out of my library and to discover that it is still a very good read even though the society it depicts – with an insider’s eye, since being born an Amory automatically makes one a Boston Brahmin – has changed considerably with time. My interest in the subject, I should add, is more than academic. My own family, though of yeoman stock with no family ties to the local aristocracy, has lived in and about Boston for many generations, and I have always been fascinated by proper Bostonians as a breed that traditionally has carried insularity to a degree exceeding that of any other local elite in the country. Amory, or course, was not the first to mine that rich field. A wide range of observers, from Henry Adams and Henry James to Lucius Beebe and – most readably, James P. Marquand in The Late George Apley – were there before him. On a considerably more modest level, even I became marginally involved in the endeavor. A year after Amory’s book came out, the New York publishing house of Farrar & Strauss asked my father [Robert N. Linscott] – then an editor at Random House – to put together an anthology of writings by and about Bostonians, from Cotton Mather and Governor Bradford to contemporaries like Marquand and John Dos Passos. Since my father had other fish to fry at the time, while I was writing only a weekly column for the non-defunct New York Herald-Tribune, I ended up doing most of the work and receiving half of the modest royalties earned by the resulting volume, which was called State of Mind: A Boston Reader [1948], and went quietly out of print two years later.



One of the things that made Cleveland Amory’s Proper Bostonians such good reading is its wealth of anecdotes. It opens with one that he correctly says is basic to an understanding of Boston society’s addiction to ancestor worship. In the balmy days of the 1920s, Amory reports, a Chicago banking house asked the Boston investment firm of Lee, Higginson & Company for a letter of recommendation about a young Bostonian they were considering employing. Lee, Higginson could not say enough for the young man. Not only was his father a member of the sainted Cabot family, they wrote; his mother was a Lowell. Farther back his background was a happy blend of Saltonstalls, Appletons, Peabodys and others of Boston’s first families. The commendation to the Chicago firm was given without hesitation.



Several days later came a curt acknowledgement from Chicago. Lee, Higginson was thanked for its trouble. Unfortunately, however, the material supplied about the young man was not exactly of the type the Chicago firm was seeking. “We were not,” their letter declared, “contemplating using Mr. Cabot for breeding purposes.”



In other cities, the social arbiters ask who a person’s parent are. In Boston they traditionally have asked who his grandparents were. Being white Anglo-Saxon Protestants doesn’t in itself open doors to First Family status. Boston Brahmins do have to be WASPs, of course, and they also are expected to have money. But they have to have possessed that money at a particular time in history – specifically in the first several decades of the 19th century – with Boston’s social mold was set. Those who came to Boston before then, in the 17th and early 18th century, and thrived during the Colonial era – such names as Hancock, Gore and Boylston come to mind – never made it to modern First Family status if they happened to have suffered the misfortune of exhausting their wealth before fossilization took place in the early 1800s. Likewise, fortunes that were made after the social gates clanged shut – for example, Eben Jordan’s department store riches, and Andrew Preston’s United Fruit empire – were forever denied Brahmin status. They had missed the boat.



Cleveland Amory’s Chicago anecdote not only illustrates the proper Bostonian’s preoccupation with ancestry – a trait that outsiders have irreverently labelled “grandfather of the brain” – it also illustrates how extraordinarily provincial Boston society became in the 19th and 20th centuries – though proper Bostonians could probably contend that “self-contained” would be a more suitable adjective to use in this context.



Semantics aside, the stories testifying to this insularity are familiar and numerous, though also in some cases, no doubt, apocryphal. One thinks of the Boston lady who drove to California and, when asked what route she took, replied, “Oh, I went by way of Dedham.” Or the denizen of Beacon Hill who, when chided for not traveling more, in some puzzlement asked, “But why should I travel when I’m already here?” In The Flowering of New England, published more than 60 years ago, but still the best book about Boston’s golden era culturally –  that is, the first half of the 19th century, when giants like Hawthorne and Melville and Thoreau and Emerson were making Boston the intellectual hub of America if not, in Oliver Wendell Holmes’ celebrated encomium, “the hub of the universe” – Van Wyck Brooks quotes a favorite anecdote told by James T. Fields, a Boston man of letters and a partner in Ticknor & Fields, the city’s pre-eminent book publishing firm of the 19th century. The Fields story was about a Boston man who read the major works of Shakespeare late in life and found them admirable beyond his expectation. “Shakespeare’s work is astonishing,” he declared. “I dare say there are not twenty men in Boston who could have written those plays.”



Such immodesty about Boston’s intellectual – and moral – claims has always been regarded as a characteristic of its aristocracy. “Boston,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes the elder, “has opened, and kept open, more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and free speech and free deeds than any other city of live or dead men.” To which Bronson Alcott, the great social reformer and education pioneer (as well as the father of Louisa May Alcott) added: “There is a city in our world upon which the light of the sun of righteousness has risen…It is the same city from which every pure stream of thought and purpose and performance emanates. It is the city which is set on high. It cannot be hidden. It is Boston.”



Extravagant appraisals like these were not the self-serving hyperbole of local politicians on the make. They were the genuine beliefs of rational and educated Bostonians who felt that they enjoyed the great good fortune to live in a city unique morally as well a culturally. “Principle,” wrote Van Wyck Brooks, “was a reality in Boston. Conscience was a large reality. Everyone knew the story of the merchant who, when one of his ships was overdue, found that he was more anxious about his thoughts than the money he was losing. Was it possible, he asked himself, that he had really grown to love his money more for itself than for its nobler uses? To settle the point in his own mind, he reckoned the value of the ship and cargo and gave the sum to his favorite charity. The story was typical of the Boston merchants who, between 1810 and 1840 alone, established thirty benevolent institutions. Though derided by outlanders as “the codfish aristocracy,” Boston Brahmins did tend to listen closely to the New England Consciousness they had inherited from their Puritan ancestors.



On the down side, of course, this has often tended to produce a degree of smugness bordering on outright self-infatuation – a consequence of which is that a fair number of proper Bostonians have, over the years, declined to join the local cheering section. Probably the most prominent of these dissenters have been in the Adams family, which has always been something of an anomaly in Boston society. On the one hand, it is generally regarded as the first of the city’s First Families, having produced two American presidents (John and John Quincy) plus Charles Francis Adams (who, as Lincoln’s ambassador to the court of St. James, helped save the union by persuading the British not to recognize the Confederacy) plus the eminent historians Brooks Adams and Henry Adams. On the other hand, the Adams family has always tended to exploit its pre-eminence socially by keeping its distance from the rest of the Boston bluebloods – and by speaking its mind about Boston’s insularity quite freely. On this score, my favorite Adams quotation is from a letter Charles Francis wrote some years after his ambassadorial career was over. “In this course of my life,” he said, “I have tried Boston socially on all sides. I have summered it and wintered it, tried it drunk and tried it sober; and drunk or sober, there’s nothing in it save Boston…This is the trouble with Boston – it is provincial…There is no current of fresh outside life everlastingly flowing in and passing out. It is, so to speak, stationary – a world – a Boston world – unto itself.”



Another illustrious, if more plebeian, New Englander, Henry David Thoreau, also spoke disdainfully of Boston, though his objection may have reflected his contempt for cities in general in contrast to his love for rural Concord, 15 miles to the west. “The only room in Boston that I visit with alacrity,” he wrote in his journals, “is the gentlemen’s waiting room at the depot, where I wait for the railroad cars, sometimes for two hours, to get out of town.”



Another Concord skeptic of the same era, incidentally, was Rockwood Hoar, who served as United States attorney general under President U.S. Grant and whose most famous aphorism made bold to question the moral probity of some of the pious holders of great Boston wealth. Borrowing from the “good, better, best” comparative adjectives that school children of the era were required to recite endlessly, Mr. Hoar declared that “the three stages of the enterprising Yankee are to get on, to get honor, and to get honest.”



While wallowing about in Bostonian anecdotal materials – of which there is a virtually inexhaustible supply – I cannot resist the temptation to digress for just a few moments from my main theme to mention that in the process of developing a remarkable degree of insularity, the Boston aristocracy earned a deserved reputation for both eccentricity and wit. I cite but two of many examples. Among the amiable eccentrics was Sarah Palfrey, spinster daughter of the eminent historian. She is generally accorded the honor of being the first Boston woman to ride a bicycle, an activity she took up with great zeal in her late 70s. She painted vigorously, spoke four languages fluently, and published poetry in Latin as well as in English. At the age of 88, in her final illness, she took up the study of Hebrew with great intensity. When asked why, she replied: “I do not expect to be in this world much longer. When I die, I wish to be able to greet my Creator in his native tongue.”



My other footnote to Boston wit and wisdom, also a woman, involved Helen Choate Bell, whose father Rufus Choate was one of Boston’s richest and ablest lawyers of the late 19th century. Most of her witticisms – widely quoted during her 30-year reign as a queen of Boston society – have not survived the test of time very well, but there is one that I particularly like still. “The automobile,” she declared back in the early days of motoring, “will soon divide mankind into two classes – the quick and the dead.”



There are two institutions above all others that proper Bostonians have traditionally regarded with particular reverence: The Boston Symphony Orchestra and Harvard University.



“The day of days for the Proper Boston woman,” wrote Cleveland Amory (and it’s still almost as true today) “comes 26 times a year – every Friday all winter – at ‘symphony.’ Here she blossoms in all her glory, for Symphony – one never speaks of “the” symphony but always just as “Symphony” – is not only culture with a capital “C” but is also society with a capital “S.” Friday afternoons assume the aspect of holy days dedicated to the classics and to a vast craning of necks to be certain that the Hallowells and the Forbeses are in their accustomed stalls.”



To be a true Symphony patron one must be a “Friend” of the orchestra – in other words, a contributor to its annual deficit, as well as a regular attender at the concerts. For many years Major Henry Lee Higginson (whose descendants include Sally Begley here in Stockbridge and who founded The Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1881, made up the deficits himself, but he was finally persuaded to share the privilege with others of Boston’s best. Ever since the major gave in, Boston’s First Families have thrown their Yankee citation to the winds, loosened their purse strings and vied for the soul-satisfying distinction of digging deep for culture. So great was their zeal – when I was a child, from a very musical but unanointed family – that my mother and I used to stand in line on the Symphony Hall steps on Fridays – sometimes for more than an hour – in the hopes of getting two of the so-called “rush seats” in the balcony that were made available to non-subscribers.



The other institution traditionally revered by all proper Bostonians – Harvard University – is not within the city limits, of course, though Cambridge is closer to Beacon Hill and the Back Bay than are such outlying Boston boroughs such as Dorchester and Roxbury. In any event, Harvard has historically been the only thinkable place for Boston bluebloods to send their sons, and its undergraduate club system has always been a feeder for the social clubs of Boston, just as a seat on the Harvard Corporation, the University’s self-perpetuating governing body, has always been the most prestigious honor to which a Boston Brahmin can aspire.



There is indeed a feeling among a few proper Bostonians that even the Deity is very cognizant of the university’s crucial importance. Some sign of this was given on the final day of Harvard’s Tercentenary Celebration in 1936 by Bishop William Lawrence, then the state’s most eminent Episcopal divine. It was pouring rain that day and the Bishop, then at the age of 86, was observed by a friend in an automobile to be splashing his way across Harvard Square without even the protection of an umbrella. The friend begged him to enter his car and avoid such unnecessary exposure. The Bishop refused. “The Lord,” he said sharply, “will not allow me to take cold on Harvard’s 300th birthday.”



Another anecdote reflecting Harvard’s inseparability from Boston society involved Edmund Quincy, a 19th century leader who could speak with authority both as a mayor of Boston and a former Harvard president. It pleased him on occasion to tap his well-thumbed copy of the Harvard Alumni Directory and declare: “If a man’s in there, that’s who he is. It he isn’t, who is he?”



Finally, there is the story that goes back to the first decade of this century when William Howard Taft was serving as President of the United States. A visitor to Harvard sought to see the late A. Lawrence Lowell, the president of the university. Having been called to the nation’s capital on a matter of business, Lowell could not be seen, according to his secretary. “The President is in Washington,” she said, “seeing Mr. Taft.”



Like most of the social phenomena I have written about in this paper, the special relationship between Harvard and the Boston aristocracy has changed rather markedly over the past half-century – as has the character of the aristocracy itself. Harvard, like all other highly selective colleges, now draws its students from as broad a base as possible, both geographically and socially. Being the scion of a First Family is no longer a ticket of admission, nor is a diploma from Groton or St. Marks or Exeter. In my day, three-quarters of Harvard’s freshmen came from private schools. Today the proportion is more like one-quarter.



As long ago as 1960, Harvard’s then President Nathan Pusey made these points concisely in a verbal exchange that, in a way, addressed the whole changing world of social elites in general and Boston’s in particular.



The occasion was a Harvard 25th reunion banquet which Dr. Pusey, after delivering a routine speech to the Class of 1925 [sic –1935?] graduates and their wives, solicited questions from the audience. The first question came from an alumnus whose unsteady manner indicated that he had probably consumed a bit more than his share of the pre-dinner cocktails, but it also came from his heart.



“Dr. Pusey,” he said. “Let me tell you a story about a man who came to this country more than 300 years ago on the Mayflower, the Mayflower. His son went to Harvard, and in due time that son grew up and had a son of his own, and that son went to Harvard, and then, years later, that man had a son of his own and that son went to Harvard…”And so the question went on through a dozen more generations until, to the audience’s enormous relief, the unsteady questioner came to his closing line. “…And now, that man has a son and he can’t get into Harvard. What I want to know, Dr. Pusey, is what are you going to do about that?”



Dr. Pusey though for a moment. “I’m afraid,” he finally said, “there is probably nothing we can do about that. The Mayflower isn’t running anymore.”*

_______

* Editor’s note: A variation of this story has Pusey saying, “Well, we can’t send him back. The Mayflower doesn’t run anymore.”

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The Most Interesting American: What turned a Theodore Roosevelt skeptic into a fan

Presented to the Club by Roger Linscott in 1959.



“The most interesting American” is a phrase which Julian Street employed shortly after the turn of this [20th] century to describe President Theodore Roosevelt. It was a description that echoed the sentiments of the vast majority of Americans of the day — but perhaps it is not the most apt title I could have selected for tonight’s paper. Perhaps I should have entitled it “The Conversion of a Skeptic.” The skeptic in this case is — or rather was — myself.



The year 1958 was, as most of you know, the centennial of Theodore Roosevelt’s birth. Early in the year I was commissioned to do the bulk of the research for a new and as yet unpublished life and times of Roosevelt* — an assignment I undertook, quite frankly, for the money rather than out of any great enthusiasm for the subject. I had, when I started, what might be termed the intellectually fashionable viewpoint toward TR — in sum, a highly critical viewpoint, conditioned by a cynical age in which many of the values that he represented have lost their luster. My picture of him was an unflattering caricature — the caricature of a self-righteous and opinionated political adolescent — a somewhat bogus reformer who made loud noises but produced few tangible results — a bumptious swaggerer who conducted diplomacy with a big stick and disobeyed his own injunctions to walk softly while doing so — a jingo who had an almost psychopathic preoccupation with physical courage and with the glories of the battlefield. It was the comic opera caricature of the rather stout and bespectacled Teddy, sword in hand and medals in mind, rushing recklessly up San Juan Hill at the head of his unmounted Rough Riders.





From this skeptical starting point I immersed myself in the life and times of Theodore Roosevelt. Over a period of four months I spent eight hours a day with him and often more. I read perhaps 40 to 50 books by and about him (without, I might add, covering the bibliography very thoroughly). In a very small way — and within the limitations imposed by essentially secondary sources — I became, I suppose, something of an authority on Roosevelt. And in the process, I became —slowly, reservedly, begrudgingly, but indubitably — an admirer or Roosevelt as well.



This statement needs a little qualification. In the course of becoming a convert to the cause of Teddy, I nonetheless found that my initial skepticism was not wholly unfounded. He was a swaggerer upon occasion. He was a reformer who often talked a better battle than he fought. He was at times a bully in foreign policy — most notably, of course, when he responded to Latin-American high-handedness with even greater high-handedness by virtually seizing the Isthmus of Panama from a defenseless Columbian government in order to build his cherished canal. He was a man of violent prejudices, whose almost unlimited capacity for self-righteousness often led him into savage and unfair attacks upon those with whom he differed. He was almost childlike in his life-long love for military adventure and battlefield derring-do.



He was all of these things, but he was much, much more besides. And even his faults have a way of canceling themselves out when his life is viewed as a whole and the final accounts are cast. The TR who shouted for blood in the Spanish-American War and brandished the big stick in Panama was nevertheless the same TR who negotiated an end to the Russo-Japanese War almost single-hand and became the first American ever to win a Nobel Prize for peace.  The TR whose bark was so often much worse than his bite when it came to dealing with the depredations of the Wall Street speculators and the robber barons of industry was nevertheless the same TR who performed the enormous service of making social reform respectable by wresting its banners from the relatively incompetent and irresponsible hands of William Jennings Bryan and the Populists. And the TR who endlessly preached the virtues of intense nationalism and the manly glories of the battlefield was the same TR who (in contrast to many another super-patriot) at least had the consistency to translate his preachings into heroic practice on the firing line when the opportunity presented itself.



But to me, as to more thorough students of Theodore Roosevelt’s life and works, the truly awesome thing about him — the quality that seems far more striking than his achievements as statesman and soldier — was his incredible combination of physical energy and intellectual versatility. It is on this aspect of the man, not his politics, that I want to focus tonight. Roosevelt’s public policies shaped our national development and projected us into a new role in world affairs; yet they were only one measure of a personality that was unique in its time and, indeed, in American history. No president, Jefferson included, rivaled TR’s diversity of interests; and none made a deeper impress on the outlook and opinions of his contemporaries. “Roosevelt, more than any other man living within the range of notoriety,” wrote Henry Adams, “showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter — the quality that medieval theology assigned to God — he was pure act.”



He was “pure act” not only in politics but in a score of other fields as well. To a public conditioned by relatively colorless presidents like McKinley, who preceded him, Roosevelt seemed to have opinions on every subject under the sun and an extraordinary flair for expressing them forcefully. As one national magazine summed it up midway through his presidency: “The scrapes he gets into, the scrapes he gets out of; the things he attempts, the things he accomplishes; his appointments and his disappointments; the rebukes that he administers and those he receives; his assumptions, presumptions, omnisciences and deficiencies, make up a daily tale which those of us who survive his tenure of the presidential office will miss as we might miss some property of the atmosphere we breathe.” Visitors to the White House or at Sagamore Hill, the Roosevelt “summer White House” on Long Island, marveled at the man’s zest for life and at the fluency with which he seemed able to discuss almost any subject under the sun. John Morley, the British historian who made a pilgrimage to the White House in 1904, expressed a typical foreign reaction when he remarked: “The two things in America which seem to me the most extraordinary are Niagara Falls and President Roosevelt.” Viscount Lee [Arthur Hamilton Lee, 1st Viscount Lee of Fareham, British military attaché with the United States Army in Cuba during the Spanish–American War], another British visitor, remarked that “whether the subject of the moment was political economy, the Greek drama, tropical flora and fauna, the Irish sagas, protective coloration in nature, metaphysics, the technique of football, or post-futurist painting, Roosevelt was equally at home with the experts and drew out the best that was in them.” Rudyard Kipling, a frequent White House visitor, recalled evenings in which Roosevelt talked while “I sat curled up in the seat opposite, and listened and wondered until the universe seemed to be spinning round and Theodore was the spinner.”



There was almost literally no field or knowledge outside of Roosevelt’s ken. While still an undergraduate at Harvard he had written the bulk of his naval history of the War of 1812, which is still a useful reference work. During his lifetime, he published some two dozen books on a wide variety of subject ranging from ornithological tracts to biographies of Cromwell and Thomas Hart Benton, from accounts of his hunting trips in the Rockies and in Africa to his magnum opus, The Winning of the West, a panoramic history of the American frontier. He was a prolific contributor to periodicals of all sorts, even during his busy years in the White House, and he made a practice of reading at least five books a week throughout his life. His famous “Pigskin Library” of special favorites ranging from the Greek dramatists and Gibbons to French poetry and the nineteenth century Russian novelists went with him into the wilds of Africa and the jungles of the Amazon.



And the extraordinary thing about this was that his knowledge was not only broad but deep. He was an authority of real standing not only on this history of the American frontier but on the history of Central Europe as well. He was generally conceded to be the world’s Number 1 authority on the big game animals of North America, as well as on several species of American songbirds. Although he disparaged his linguistic abilities, he was able to speak and read in French, German and Italian with competence. And he was not only a devoted reader of poetry but a patron of it as well. Probably the only time in his career that he flaunted the principles of civil service was when he insisted upon giving Edward Arlington Robinson, then an unknown and utterly impoverished young poet, a $2,000-a-year post in the Treasury Department with specific instructions that “I expect you to think poetry first and Treasury second.”



This restlessness of intellect imparted a remarkable test to American life during Roosevelt’s years in the White House. He not only read books and periodicals omnivorously but commented upon them publicly and freely. Writers who spoke critically of him were likely to receive long letters of rebuttal from the President himself; authors whose work struck his fancy often as not were invited to the White House to discuss their ideas further. Artists, sculptors, scientists, and scholars joined the politicians and ex-Rough Riders and big game hunters at the Roosevelt table; and the President could more than hold his own with any of them. “I am delighted to show any courtesy to Pierpont Morgan or Andrew Carnegie or James J. Hill,” the President once remarked in explaining his guest lists, “but as for regarding any one of them as, for instance, I regard Professor [John Bagnell] Bury [Irish classical scholar], or Peary the Arctic explorer, or [James Ford] Rhodes the historian — why I could not force myself to do it even if I wanted to, which I don’t.”  He was in this respect the perfect aristocrat. Mere money-making, beyond the point required to ensure a reasonable share of life’s comforts, he regarded as vulgar and corrupting. For the man who spent his life accumulating wealth, Roosevelt felt nothing but contempt. For the man who spent it accumulating knowledge, he felt a reverent kinship.



The breadth of Roosevelt’s interests and associations was reflected in his speaking and his writing. On occasion, he could be, and was, movingly eloquent. But he also had an unsurpassed flair for the colorful phrase and the striking simile. It was he who gave us such terms as “malefactors of great wealth” and “the lunatic fringe” and “the square deal.” It was he who applied (somewhat unfairly) the term muck-rakers to the journalists of his day who were exposing corruption in politics and business. During the Panama crisis he said that making an agreement with the Columbians was as impossible as “nailing jelly to a wall”; and when, as vice president, he felt that McKinley was backing away from war with Spain he declared privately that the President had “the backbone of a chocolate éclair.” Of Bryan, the “Boy Orator of the River Platte,” Roosevelt said: “He is a professional yodeler — a human trombone,” though he later became somewhat more charitable and described Bryan as “a good-hearted man of precisely the temperament best fitted to make a success as a barker for patent medicine.”



The White House,” Roosevelt once remarked, is a “bully pulpit.”** But the preaching he did from his pulpit was not limited to political matters. He preached the virtues of simplified spelling, though Congress indignantly rebelled when he ordered the Government Printing Office to adopt such phonetic changes as “tho” for “though” and “thru” for “through.” He preached with equal vigor against what he labeled the “nature fakers,” who wrote what purported to be factual books and articles attributing human emotions and reasoning powers to animals; and when he finally was persuaded that a President should not engage in public controversy on such a minor matter he cut off the debate by declaring that for a competent naturalist to argue with the nature fakers was “as senseless as it would be for professional anthropologist to engage in polemics with the fabricators of the Cardiff giant.” From the White House pulpit, Roosevelt also preached the doctrine of the strenuous life, with daily demonstrations to the delight of the public and cartoonists. And he preached the virtues of large families and the sacredness of the American home.



In all these matters Roosevelt assiduously practiced what he preached, and nowhere was this more evident than in his family life, which was a separate and hallowed compartment of his existence. “I have the happiest home life of any man I have ever known,” he once wrote, and he regarded this as perhaps the greatest achievement of his career. In most areas of his life, Roosevelt accepted and welcomed his place on the center of the stage, but he did his best to keep the spotlight away from his hours with Edith, his wife, and the five children. To some extent, this effort was futile. His children shared a good deal of his exuberance and this, plus the natural curiosity of the press and public, made them the subject of a continuous flow of colorful newspaper stories. “It is truly a remarkable sight” reported a Chicago newspaperman who was stationed at the Sagamore Hill Summer White House, “to see the president of the United States at the head of a young band of savages on their way to the woods or the target grounds.”  The strenuous life which Roosevelt both preached and practiced was as strenuous physically as intellectually, for it was a basic article of faith with him that physical fitness and mental fitness should go hand in hand. As a child he had transformed a frail physique into a sound one by sheer force of self-discipline and in the Dakota Badlands, where he engaged in cattle ranching after the death of his first wife, he had developed his stamina further in range-riding and arduous hunting expeditions. Throughout his life he systematically pushed himself to the limits of physical endurance. On his first honeymoon, he ascended the Matterhorn, then a considerable feat. As a young legislator in New York he once played 91 games of tennis in one day. Riding to the hounds on Long Island a few years later he fractured his arm in two places early in the hunt when his horse rolled over on him, but nonetheless jumped back in the saddle and was first in on the kill, his arm dangling uselessly at his side. During the Bull Moose campaign of 1912 he insisted, with more valor than judgment, upon delivering a speech in Milwaukee after a would-be assassin’s bullet had lodged in the muscles of his chest. Two years later he lost 55 pounds and very nearly died of fever in the jungles of the Amazon Valley where he was engaged in what he termed his “last great adventure” as head of an exploring party for the American Museum of Natural History. In the White House he let only the gravest affairs of state interfere with his daily exercise; and when no better opportunity presented itself he would sometimes sally forth alone at night to run around the Washington Monument at top speed and back to the White House. It was in a boxing bout at the White House that he lost the sight of his left eye, though this was not publicly known until several years after the event.

Of all the President’s outdoor pastimes, perhaps the most characteristic of all were his “obstacle walks,” a form of exercise [in which the object was for a group to proceed to a destination in a straight line without] permitting any natural obstacle — whether an icy river or a sheer cliff, to divert their course. In Washington, the President’s obstacle walks were generally taken at Rock Creek, and it was counted a considerable honor, though an exhausting one, to be invited to accompany him. It was partly as an outgrowth of this pastime that he tried on one occasion to combat the indolent habits of the swivel-chair Army officers in Washington by issuing an order that they must establish their physical fitness by marching 50 miles in a three-day period or, in the case of cavalry officers, riding 100 miles in the same period. When the order was widely attacked as tyrannical and capricious, the President rode more than 100 miles in a single day over the back roads of Virginia through freezing rain and sleet to prove that the test was not unduly demanding.



It was this sort of episode, as much as Roosevelt’s trust-busting or his manipulation of the big stick, that made him the most colorful and controversial figure of his time. People could revere or deplore him, condemn this action or praise that one, but no one could ignore him. The enormous range of his interests, and his endless reservoirs of combative energy, projected him into every phase of national life, and whether the issue was big or little, he was generally to be found in the storm center. “Roosevelt,” a far-from-worshipful contemporary [biographer John William Bennett] admitted, “has the knack of doing things, and doing them noisily, clamorously. While he is in the neighborhood the public can no more look the other way than a small boy can turn his head away from a circus parade followed by a steam calliope.”



This never-ending energy — this quality of “pure act” — had still another consequence that cannot fail to impress the student of TR’s life. It enabled him to compress a truly breath-taking amount of activity into short periods of time, so that sometimes the reader of the Roosevelt record has the dizzying impression that he is watching a kaleidoscope rather than the orderly unfolding of a mere mortal’s career.



Consider, for example, one period of just six months during his early career: the period of February through July of the year 1886, when Roosevelt, at the age of only 26, was a young reform legislator in Albany. In mid-February of that year he was devastated by the greatest single tragedy of his life, when his beloved first wife, Alice, and his mother, to whom he was deeply devoted, died within 24 hours of each other at the family mansion in Manhattan. With an extraordinary display of will power he returned to his legislative duties two days after the double funeral and for the next two months dominated the activities of the session, conducting an exhaustive and productive investigation of municipal administration and corruption in New York City. In April he was in Buffalo for the state Republican convention at which he out-maneuvered the anti-reform elements of the party and emerged as the head of a liberal delegation to the party’s national convention in Chicago. At Chicago, two months later, he was the spearhead of the fight to block Blaine’s nomination for the presidency, going sleepless for days and nights on end in a heroic though unsuccessful fight to nominate a liberal ticket. And by late June, with the convention over and Blaine nominated, he was in the Dakota Badlands riding herd with his cowboy friends and embarking on a buffalo hunting expedition that was to take him through hostile Indian country into virtually unexplored areas of the Great Plains. All this, mind you, in a period of less than six months when he was a young man of 26.



Or consider the kaleidoscopic course of his life during the year 1898, when he was 39 years old. At the start of that year he was serving as assistant secretary of the Navy, a post which he had taken after a brief but dramatic stint as police commissioner for New York City. In February the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor brought to a head the growing rift between Spain and the United States over the Cuban revolution. Without the knowledge of his cautious superior, Secretary of the Navy John D. Long, Roosevelt alerted Admiral Dewey to get the Asiatic fleet in readiness to move against the Philippines — a step which was a major factor two months later in the smashing American victory at Manila Bay. Meanwhile, on the day that the inevitable declaration of war against Spain was approved by Congress, Roosevelt resigned from the Navy Department to organize a motley regiment of hardened cowboys, polo-playing dudes and free-wheeling soldiers of fortune who came to be known as the Rough Riders. After two months of training in Texas, the Rough Riders embarked for Cuba where Colonel Roosevelt led them through the most colorful and hazardous chapter of what John Hay termed the “splendid little war” with Spain. In July, with the war over, he initiated the famous “round robin” letter which, when “leaked” to the press, forced the Was Department bureaucrats in Washington to bring the bulk of the American troops home rather than leave them, as originally planned, in Cuba, where they were being decimated by yellow fever. By August, Colonel Roosevelt had returned to a hero’s welcome in New York; a month later he was the Republican candidate for governor of the state; and in November after a hard-driving campaign, he was triumphantly elected. In the short space of less than a year he had compressed a series of exploits that would have been deemed remarkable in another man if they had occurred over the course of an entire lifetime.



What gave TR such bottomless reservoirs of physical and intellectual energy? What gave him such driving enthusiasm, such an utter incapacity for boredom? Part of it must have been built in at birth — but much of it was deliberately acquired. In a sense his life was a classic example of mind over matter. The same intense self-discipline that enabled him to overcome the handicap of a sickly childhood enabled him to force himself, constantly, to drive through life with the throttle wide open. “I always believe in going hard at everything,” he once said. And to young people his frequent advice was: “Don’t flinch. Don’t foul. Hit the line hard!” He was a born actor, moreover — and he played his role to the hilt every day of his life.



Perhaps inevitably, the relentless demands that Roosevelt placed upon his energies took a heavy and inexorable toll upon his constitution. When he died in 1919 at Sagamore Hill — peacefully, in his sleep, of a blood clot in his heart — he was only two months past his 60th birthday. A few weeks earlier, when he had been hospitalized briefly with a slight stroke, he had written characteristically to a friend: “The doctors think I will be all right in the end. I hope so; but I am ahead of the game anyhow. Nobody every packed more varieties of fun and interest into sixty years.”



Across the nation, the news of Roosevelt’s death was received with shocked incredulity by Americans who had come to think of his extraordinary energy as almost a permanent part of the national life. Messages from kings and commoners poured into Sagamore Hill from all over the world. But perhaps the most apt tribute of all was the one penned in Washington the next day by Vice President Thomas R. Marshall. “Death,” he wrote, “had to take him sleeping. For if Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight.”

___________________



* The book for which Linscott did research was The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt, by Stefan Lorant (Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1959). A Berkshire County resident, Lorant was a prolific Hungarian-American filmmaker, photojournalist, and author.



** Roosevelt used the word bully as an adjective meaning "superb" or "wonderful," a more common usage in his time than it is today.

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The Great Commoner: William Jennings Bryan and the US presidential campaign of 1896

Presented to the Club by Roger B. Linscott (date of presentation unknown — sometime in the 1960s or 1970s). Roger was, for many years, the associate editor of The Berkshire Eagle, Pittsfield's daily newspaper. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his editorial writing in 1973, and died in 2008 at the age of 88, having been a member of the Club since 1950. We are indebted to Roger's daughter, Wendy Lamme, for a treasure trove of Roger's Monday Evening Club papers.



This paper is principally the story of a political campaign. But no member of the Club need tremble for fear that our unwritten injunction against political topics will be breached. Just as a statesman has been defined a dead politician, so can history be pictured as the politics of yesterday. The presidential campaign I propose to discuss is not the one that engaged our attentions so thoroughly last fall, but rather a campaign far enough removed in time to be labeled history rather than politics — so far removed, in fact, that no person here tonight is old enough to have known at first hand the enormous flood of passion and prejudice which it unleashed throughout the land.



To me, the presidential contest of 1896 has always seemed the most exciting of all our presidential campaigns, and in many respects the most significant as well. It drew a dividing line through the nation's history; it marked the last stand of agrarianism against an inexorably rising industrialism; and it marked the dramatic emergence of an arresting new personality bursting like a meteor on the American scene. This political meteor was, of course, William Jennings Bryan — Bryan the Boy Orator, the Great Commoner, the young crusader from the prairies of Nebraska who, in one magnificent flight of oratory, expressed so powerfully the dissatisfaction of the economically disenfranchised that he was catapulted overnight from obscurity to fame and, very nearly, into the White House.



It is difficult for us today to understand the tremendous impact that Bryan made upon America in that fateful year. Our judgment of him is too heavily weighted by his later follies and failures. He lived too long; he talked too much; he ran for president too often; he embraced too many foolish causes. When he finally died in 1925, it was in Dayton, Tennessee, where he had just suffered his last and most ignominious defeat, in the celebrated Scopes trial, at the hands of Clarence Darrow. His pathetic attempt to defend Bible Belt fundamentalism against the forces of scientific progress had destroyed what standing he still had with the new generation. H. L. Mencken spoke for most of the intelligentsia when, on the day after Bryan's death he wrote: "He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming halfwits. His whole career was devoted to raising those halfwits against their betters, that he himself might shine."



But the Bryan of 1896 was not a tired old man battling vainly against enlightenment. He was a dazzling new star in the political firmament, a popular messiah whose appearance was hailed by his fanatical followers as something very akin to a second coming of Christ — a spokesman for millions of Americans who had no other spokesman. Vachel Lindsay caught the electrifying spirit of his emergence when he wrote: "Prairie avenger, mountain lion, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan / Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun / Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West." Pitted against the combined forces of respectability — the businessmen, the educated, the monied, the influential — he conducted single-handedly the most spectacular political campaign in U. S. history. And defeated though he was, the bulk of the populist ideas he espoused eventually became the law of the land.



One cannot begin to understand the passions that were aroused by the 1896 presidential campaign without first understanding the bitter political and economic conditions that gave rise to them. For many of us, this understanding is impeded by the persistence of the myth of the Gay Nineties. Gaiety there was for many Americans — for those who were favored by economic circumstances. It was the decade when the introduction of the pneumatic tire brought the bicycle craze into full flower, when the clean-cut drawings of Charles Dana Gibson were establishing the "Gibson Girl" as the American ideal, when Weber and Fields were convulsing audiences on Broadway and DeWolf Hopper was reciting "Casey at the Bat" up and down the land. It was the decade when "robber barons" of American industry were building fortunes beyond the dreams of avarice — when the Vanderbilt mansions (one of them a three million dollar replica of the Chateau de Blois) occupied six blocks on Fifth Avenue — when steel magnate Charles Schwab was building a Riverside Drive chateau with 75 rooms and 40 baths while Clay Frick was preparing to top them all with a Fifth Avenue castle costing 17 millions. It was the decade when Mrs. William Astor was emerging as the unquestioned empress of New York society, aided by her social prime minister Ward McAllister, who once said that "a fortune of only a million dollars is respectable poverty" and who originated the term "The 400" to describe the number of persons who could comfortably be accommodated in Mrs. Astor's house.



But for many if not most Americans, the 1890s were far from gay. In the teeming slums of the big cities, on the marginal farms of the South and the West, it was a decade of grinding poverty, intensified by the worst economic depression the nation had ever known. Politically, it was a decade of extremism and discouraging bitterness. Throughout large areas of the nation there was a rising feeling of unrest, of deep irritation and dissatisfaction — a mood of discontent fed partly by the passing of the frontier (which had been a safety valve in the past) partly by the oppressive policies of the increasingly powerful trusts and monopolies, and partly by the mounting gap between extremes of wealth and poverty. The business depression which had begun in 1892 was so far advanced by the end of the following year that some 15,000 [corporate] bankruptcies involving liabilities of nearly one-half billion dollars had taken place. In the South and the West there was a wave of bank failures; and in the cities and mill towns a demoralized horde of nearly four million persons looked futilely for work.



Closely linked to these economic miseries in the public mind, if not in fact, was the money question, which had been simmering for a quarter-century and was now ready to boil over. It came to a head as an issue between the free coinage of silver and the single gold standard; but this was merely what showed above the surface. More basically, it was a battle of geographic sections and economic classes; a contest for power between the agrarian South and West against the industrial East. In the broadest terms, it was another chapter, indeed the final chapter, in the historic tug-of-war between the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian concepts of government.



Essentially, the money question was an issue of deflation versus inflation, of hard money versus soft. It became an issue of gold versus silver simply because the amount of currency the government could issue under a gold standard was limited by the amount of gold available to redeem the paper money. Between 1860 and 1890 world gold production, for various reasons, remained steady; but during the same period the population of the United States doubled. This meant that the number of dollars in circulation, on a per capita basis, dropped precipitously, a fact which pushed prices down and interest rates up. This worked to the advantage of the creditor classes, who had dollars to lend or contracts payable to them in dollars. It worked to the disadvantage of the debtor classes by making it harder for them to get dollars with which to pay their debts. In the classic example of the period, the Western farmer who obtained a $5,000 mortgage immediately after the Civil War was borrowing the equivalent of 2,500 bushels of wheat — but when it came time to pay it back he had to produce 5,000 bushels because of the increase in the value of the dollar. The mortgage-holder in the East had lent him a 50-cent dollar and received back a dollar worth twice as much.



In short, the farmers and debtors felt that the shortage of gold produced a situation in which there was too little money to go around. The solution they proposed was the free, unlimited coinage of silver, which they felt would increase the supply of money without risking reckless inflation of the sort that might result from printing greenbacks unsecured by bullion of any kind. In this, quite naturally, they were supported by the silver mine owners of the West, whose production was increasing by leaps and bounds and who wanted the government as a customer. It was a peculiar alliance but an effective one. The farmers gave fervor to the silver cause, and the miners gave the financial backing.



In 1873, before silver agitation became strong, Congress had demonetized silver by passing a coinage act which failed to provide for the continued production of silver dollars. Although this was later pictured as the "Crime of '73," perpetrated by "the gold conspiracy," it stirred little controversy at the time. By 1878, however, the silver miners needed to expand their market, and in that year they pushed through the Bland-Allison Act requiring the U. S. Treasury to mint at least two million dollars worth of silver a month. When this failed to increase the money supply appreciably, stronger measures were demanded; and by 1890 the stage was set with a cynical deal by which Western Republicans agreed to support high tariffs if their Eastern colleagues would line up with silver.



The result was the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which ordered the Treasury to buy 4,500,000 ounces of silver each month, paying for them with treasury notes which could be redeemed in either gold or silver at the discretion of the Secretary of the Treasury.



When the Panic of 1893 gripped the nation, Democratic President Grover Cleveland blamed it primarily on this law, which had shaken the confidence of many business interests in the monetary system and thus induced them to convert their assets into gold. Accordingly, the President called Congress into special session that summer and demanded the act's unconditional repeal. By adroit use of his patronage powers to win over wavering votes, the President had his way. The Washington Post termed it "a great personal victory for President Cleveland against the most formidable obstacles," and the New York Times pictured his "iron firmness" as all that saved the nation from fiscal ruin. But the victory irreparably alienated the silver wing of his party; and he was denounced as a tool of Wall Street by many who felt the panic was a bankers' plot against silver.



(On the very day the President called Congress back to Washington his immense personal courage was demonstrated by a dramatic episode that did not become a matter of public record until after his term ended. A few days earlier, a growth in the roof of his mouth had been diagnosed as malignant by the White House physician, and an immediate operation was decided upon. Because Vice-President Adlai E. Stevenson was a silverite, any knowledge of the President's grave condition would have caused incalculable panic in the money market; and so, with only a handful of persons privy to the secret, Cleveland went to New York and boarded a friend's yacht, ostensibly for a pleasure cruise. While the boat steamed at half-speed up the East River on June 30, two of the nation's ablest surgeons removed the entire upper left jaw, replacing it — after a second operation some weeks later — with a vulcanized rubber jaw so efficient that neither his appearance nor speaking ability were impaired by the ordeal.)



The repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was a victory for the conservative "hard money" forces, but it worked no economic magic. The panic continued, and the drain on the nation's gold reserves became more alarming than ever. The drain had begun under Harrison's administration, partly due to the demand for gold to be sent abroad to meet unfavorable trade balances resulting from the prohibitively high McKinley tariffs. It had been augmented by the fact that holders of silver certificates issued under the Sherman Act were demanding that they be redeemed in gold. By the time Cleveland took office, the gold reserve had dwindled well below the $100 million level established by custom, and by the end of 1893 it was down to $75 million. To make matters worse, when the President and his Secretary of the Treasury, John S. Carlisle, tried to meet the situation by selling bonds for gold, the purchasers of the bonds simply cashed in treasury notes and drew out gold with which to pay for their subscriptions.



Before the crisis passed, the gold reserve had dipped as low as $41 million. Worse, in the eyes of many Democrats, the Cleveland administration had been forced to go three times to the New York bankers, principally the house of Morgan, to sell its bonds. To the silver men in the party, such traffic with the money-changers of Wall Street was intolerable.



As if this were not enough for the overburdened president, the federal surplus which had caused concern four years earlier had become a deficit which caused even more concern. And when the Cleveland administration sought to bolster federal revenues with a two percent tax on incomes above $4,000, the tax was declared unconstitutional by a 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court. Senator Sherman spoke for most Republicans in contending that the court had saved the nation from "socialism, communism and devilism," but to millions of less favored Americans it seemed [as expressed in a New York World editorial] "another victory of greed over need."



[Editor's note: Linscott wrote a marginal note on the paper at this point: "Joseph Choate, Stephen Field. David Brewer gave the decision." Presumably he paused here to make an ad lib aside to the Club about the Berkshire County connections involved in the case. Joseph H. Choate, the New York attorney who argued the case against the tax before the Supreme Court, built a summer residence in Stockbridge called Naumkeag, renowned for its gardens, and is buried in the Stockbridge cemetery. Stephen Field, a Supreme Court justice appointed by Abraham Lincoln, was one of the nine children of David Dudley Field, a Congregationalist minister in Stockbridge. And a fellow justice, David Josiah Brewer, was Stephen Field's nephew.]



If 1893 was bad, 1894 was worse. Unemployment reached a new high; bread lines lengthened; farm prices continued a downward spiral; strikes were frequent and generally fruitless. From the West came pathetic little armies of "commonwealers" and hoboes in search of an outlet for the grievances, and at times they engaged in disorders with police and local officials. To Washington, also, came "Coxey's Army," a ragged assembly of unemployed who marched east from Ohio under the leadership of "General" Jacob S. Coxey, a man of considerable means who was regarded as a radical eccentric for proposing that public works be undertaken to relieve unemployment and restore purchasing power. His "army," numbering nearly as many reporters as unemployed, was generally regarded in the press as more comic than significant; and when they arrived in Washington, Coxey and his lieutenants were promptly jailed for walking on the Capitol lawn and displaying banners without a permit. But the desperation that this pathetic army reflected was widespread, and talk of civil war was even heard. In Colorado, Governor Waite was quoted as saying "I am prepared to ride in blood up to my bridles."



[Editor's note: The following three paragraphs are crossed out by Linscott on the typescript, presumably to reduce the paper to a reasonable speaking length, but are given here in the interest of continuity and supplementing the historical details:



[Barely a week after the arrest of "General" Coxey, the mounting class antagonism boiled over again with singular bitterness, this time at the Pullman Palace Car Company's "model" company town of Pullman, Illinois. The trouble originated with the refusal of Mr. [George] Pullman to listen to employees' grievances, but it soon became a far-flung battle between the Railway Managers' Association and the American Railway Union, an organization of 100,000 workers headed by the able and dedicated Eugene V. Debs. In every state and territory, Debs' men paralyzed transportation by refusing to handle Pullman cars, and in Chicago mobs seized and burned hundreds of cars. Finally, when the strikers derailed a mail train in defiance of a court injunction obtained through the efforts of U. S. Attorney General [Richard] Olney (a former railroad counsel) President Cleveland sent an Army regiment into Chicago over vigorous protests from John P. Altgeld, the liberal governor of Illinois. After further disorders Debs was jailed for contempt of court, order was slowly restored, and the strike was broken.



[Today it is apparent that Cleveland was ill-advised in the Pullman crisis by Olney, who was more interested in breaking the strike than in protecting private property. At the time, however, the President was solidly backed by the nation's press, which echoed approvingly his contention that "if it takes the entire army and navy of the United States to deliver a postal card in Chicago, that card will be delivered." Nonetheless, the fact that the strike was defeated by an unprecedented use of court injunctions, and by perverting the Sherman Anti-Trust Act into an anti-labor act, caused deep concern among liberal and labor elements.



[Together with the general economic and fiscal dislocation, this helped produce a devastating Republican sweep in the mid-term elections of 1894. The rout vindicated Speaker [Thomas B.] Reed's jubilant prediction a few months earlier that "the Democratic mortality will be so great next fall that their dead will be buried in trenches and marked 'unknown' — till the supply of trenches gives out."]



The succeeding winter, when the panic reached bottom, was the blackest of all — indeed the blackest since the Civil War. To a friend, the burdened President wrote: "Mrs. Cleveland and the babies are well. God be praised for that! I often think that if things should go wrong at that end of the house, I should abandon the ship."



[Editor's note: A full page, covering the 1894-1895 period, is missing from the typescript at this point, presumably also crossed out and discarded by Linscott in the interest of time, along with a few lines crossed out on the next page that deal with the resolution of the Venezuelan crisis of 1895.]



Such was the desperate situation in the election year of 1896. As the time for conventions approached, the central question was whether the silver Democrats would desert to the Populists, who had polled an astonishing vote of one million and one-half in the mid-term elections, or whether they would take over control of the party and run their own kind of Democrat. By the time the convention was held in Chicago, it was evident that the silverites rather than Cleveland's "sound money" wing would be in charge. The farmers of the South and West, flashing silver badges and carrying silver banners, took control from the opening gavel and held it. Cleveland and his followers were outsiders looking in.



But the silverites at the convention needed more than an issue; they needed a candidate, and none seemed to be at hand. What the silverites must have, commented the New York World on the eve of the convention, "is a Moses. They have the principle, they have the grit, they have the brass bands and the buttons and flags, they have the howl and the hustle, they have the votes and they have the leaders so-called. But they are wandering in the wilderness like a lot of lost sheep because no one with the courage, the audacity, the magnetism, and the wisdom to be a real leader has yet appeared among them. The opportunity is here; the man is lacking."



Less than 12 hours after this statement was published, the silverites' "Moses" appeared on the scene in one of the most dramatic episodes of American political history.



William Jennings Bryan had come to the convention with no national following whatever. He was not even the darkest of dark horses. His private notion that he might become the Democratic standard-bearer would have been deemed ludicrous if he had expressed it aloud. At the age of 36 — only one year older than the minimum prescribed for the presidency by the Constitution — he was a political unknown — a small-town lawyer and editor who had served one term in Congress from Nebraska and who had nothing more than a local reputation in his home state as a fluent speaker on the silver issue. Indeed, as a member of a contested delegation, he had experienced considerable difficulty even obtaining a seat at the convention.



On the second night of the convention, however, he managed to get himself included in a list of four delegates scheduled to speak on the money question as part of the debate on the party platform. This was the opportunity he had been waiting for. Fully aware that this was his challenge to greatness, he contrived to be the last of the four speakers.  It was a sweltering June night in Chicago, and the smoke-filled convention hall was jammed with nearly 20,000 noisy, milling delegates and spectators. But as Bryan rose to speak, something in the handsome young orator's manner sent a thrill through the sweating mob. The shouting suddenly subsided as his remarkably rich and resonant voice filled the huge hall.



"Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Convention," he began, "I would be presumptuous indeed to present myself against the distinguished gentlemen to whom you have listened if this were a mere measuring of abilities, but this is not a contest between persons. The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty — the cause of humanity."



In mellifluous, strikingly balanced phrases — phrases that he had tested time and time again at free silver meetings in grange halls and at country crossroads throughout Nebraska — Bryan then proceeded to document the grievances of the farmers and the working man, evoking a crescendo of cheers with each new sentence, until finally he threw down the challenge: "We do not come as aggressors. Our war is not a war of conquest. We are fighting in the defense of our homes, our families, and posterity. We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned. We have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded. We have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!"



And then came the famous, superbly conceived peroration: "If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."



It was not a great speech in the sense of being an orderly intellectual exposition. It was not a well-reasoned statement of the case for bimetallism. It was pure oratory, pure emotion. But its effect was tremendous. As one of the more perceptive observers, correspondent Harry Thurston Peck, described it, "He spoke with the utmost deliberation, so that every word was driven home to each hearer's consciousness, and yet with an ever-increasing force, which found fit expression in the wonderful harmony and power of his voice. His sentences rang out, now with the accent of superb disdain, and now with the stirring challenge of a bugle call . . . The leaderless democracy of the West was leaderless no more. Throughout the latter part of his address, a crash of applause had followed every sentence; but now the tumult was like that of a great sea thundering against the dikes. Twenty thousand men and women went mad with irresistible enthusiasm.



Such as the effect of the Cross of Gold speech, one of the great orations of American history. This was no trumped-up demonstration of the sort that commonly features political conventions. When the oration was over, it was three-quarters of an hour before the wild, hysterical crowd could be brought under control. The man and the hour had met; Bryan's nomination was assured.



The Republicans, meanwhile, had met with sublime confidence at a convention dominated by Marcus Alonzo Hanna, the Cleveland coal and iron baron who was the closest thing America has ever had to a national political boss. A personification of big business in politics, Hanna had found the perfect protégé in his friend, William McKinley, whom he had saved from bankruptcy some years earlier and who was now serving as governor of Ohio after a Congressional career distinguished by his advocacy of higher protective tariffs. Blunt and rigorously practical, Hanna had been grooming McKinley for the presidency since 1890, billing him as "the advance agent of prosperity" and sending him about the country in a private railroad car to show himself to the people and to the Republican bosses. For his part, McKinley was an apt pupil, a man of high personal principle and statesmanlike manner who, in the words of William Allen White, went about "like a bronze statue determinedly looking for his pedestal." All told, Hanna spent more than $100,000 of his own money on the grooming, and it proved to be money well spent. At the Republican convention, McKinley was nominated on the first ballot and backed by a platform unalterably opposed to the free coinage of silver.



It is hard to convey the intensity of the presidential campaign which followed. The money problem — or the "battle of the standards" as it was promptly dubbed — was the most emotionally charged issue since slavery, and it cut ruthlessly across party loyalties. Silver Republicans walked out of their party's convention; "sound money" Democrats formed a party of their own; even the Prohibitionist Party split into hostile gold and silver camps. To the gold-standard advocates, it seemed almost a question of the survival of private property. To the silverites, it was a modern version of Christ against the money changers, of God against Mammon.



"It was a fanaticism like the Crusades," William Allen White later wrote in describing the free silver movement. "Indeed the delusion that was working on the people took the form of religious frenzy. Sacred hymns were torn from their pious tunes to place to give place to words which deified the cause and made gold — and all its symbols, capital wealth, plutocracy — diabolical. For the thousands who assembled under the schoolhouse lamps believed that when their cause won, the millennium would come by proclamation. They sang their barbaric songs in unrhythmic jargon with something of the mad faith that inspired martyrs going to the stake."



At first the Republicans were sublimely confident that McKinley would carry the day. Despite the zealousness of the silverites, Bryan's obstacles appeared insurmountable. The Democratic Party had been split down the middle, with Cleveland and most of its eastern leadership opposed to Bryan. The business community, the press, the clergy, the voices of respectability everywhere, were solidly behind the Republican "sound money" cause. But as the disquieting reports of Bryan's popular support spread eastward, the conservatives began to become alarmed. Confidence gave way to fear, and fear to blind hatred in what became the most bitterly fought campaign since Jackson's time. Bryan became, in the eyes of panicky conservatives, a communist, an anarchist, and worse.



"Probably no man in civil life succeeded in inspiring so much terror, without taking life, as Bryan," reported the Nation magazine. In New York, the money capital, he was scathingly villified in the press and from the pulpit. The Tribune described him as "that wretched, rattle-pated boy, posing in vapid vanity and mouthing resounding rottenness . . . apt at lies and forgeries and blasphemies and all the nameless iniquities of his campaign against the Ten Commandments." The Rev. Thomas Dixon called him a "slobbering demagogue whose patriotism is all in his jawbone" while another prominent New York cleric, the Rev. Charles Parkhurst, declared: "I dare, in God's pulpit, to brand his doctrines accursed and treasonous." The Rev. Cortland Myers of the Baptist Temple in Brooklyn charged that the Democratic platform was "made in Hell." Theodore Roosevelt pictured Bryan and his followers as being philosophically "in hearty sympathy with their remote skin-clad ancestors who lived in caves and fought one another with stone-headed axes and ate the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros." And when Bryan was labelled by his admirers as the "boy orator of the River Platte," Republican Senator Foraker drew howls of glee from his audiences by describing the River Platte as "six inches deep and six miles wide at the mouth."



If the election had been held in the summer of 1896, Bryan probably would have won. But by early fall, the aroused and badly frightened Republicans had marshaled far more money and manpower than had ever been seen in a presidential campaign before. Mark Hanna set up headquarters in New York and systematically tapped banks, insurance companies, railroads and trusts for campaign contributions on an unprecedented scale. The larger banks were assessed one-quarter of one percent of their capital funds; Standard Oil alone contributed $250,000; and the total amount raised to fight Bryan was estimated at upwards of seven million dollars. McKinley himself waged what the correspondents labeled as a front-porch campaign, remaining at his house in Canton, Ohio, and addressing scores of delegations which came to see him, their fares paid by the Republican campaign committee. But his efforts were supplemented by an army of some 18,000 Republican campaign speakers whom Hanna sent swarming across the country to denounce Bryan and proclaim the McKinley pledge of "the full dinner pail." All told, more than 100 million pieces of campaign literature were sent out in the Republican cause; and on the Saturday before the election, the campaign came to a climax with a "sound money" parade in New York in which 150,000 businessmen, civic leaders and clergymen marched up Broadway in black hats and coats. Factory workers in scores of communities found slips in their pay envelopes reading: "If Bryan is elected, don't come back to work. The plant will be closed."



Against this solid array of money and respectability, the Democrats had no weapon but Bryan himself. He was a man of severe limitations, neither widely read nor a clear thinker; but his magnetism, his courage and his passionate belief in the wisdom of the common people enabled him to command immense personal loyalty. Without adequate funds, with scarcely a major newspaper on his side, he carried the entire burden of the campaign on his shoulders, traveling 16,000 miles back and forth across the country and making as many as 36 speeches in one day. All told, he addressed some five million people.



It was an extraordinary performance in many ways, spectacular in American political history — but it was not enough to overcome the enormous odds. On election day, the populous Northeast, with its preponderance of electoral votes, stood fast for sound money and Republicanism. Considering the obstacles he faced, however, Bryan's total of 6.5 million votes against McKinley's 7 million was a remarkable tribute to his personal appeal and his inexhaustible energy; indeed, it has been estimated that an additional 50,000 votes, properly distributed, could have put him in the White House. That this did not happen is testimony to the fact that industrialism was too firmly in the American saddle to be dislodged.



"For 100 years," wrote Henry Adams, "the American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and backward between the two forces. The issue finally came on the single gold standard, and the majority at last declared itself, for once and for all, in favor of a capitalistic system with all its necessary machinery." In the person of Bryan, Jeffersonian agrarianism had made its last stand and lost.



But the memory of that last stand lingered on to become something approaching an American legend. Men now in middle age," wrote Henry Pringle a generation later, "still recall some weird night in a Kansas or Nebraska boyhood when, well toward midnight, they waited in tingling excitement on the fringe of the crowd which packed the station plaza. The train roared in, as a hastily assembled band played Sousa's new march, 'El Capitan,' and from the back platform a man with longish black hair began to speak. Men grown old still sit in crossroads grocery stores, listening to the radio, and telling of the giants who once lived: Blaine, perhaps, and Foraker of Ohio, and McKinley and Roosevelt. They had heard them all — but Bryan, only 36 years old, Bryan had been the greatest."

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