Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [17]
AFTER THE JULY Chicago convention, William and Mary Bryan had checked out of their hotel room and prepared to return to Nebraska. Adding up his expenses for the week, Bryan noted that he and Mary had spent less than one hundred dollars, “a sum probably as small as anyone spent in securing a Presidential nomination,” he would later write.
Thrift was of great importance to Bryan’s political persona. Bryan was sitting with his friend, journalist Willis Abbot, when a message arrived from a railroad company offering the Bryans use of a private Pullman car for their return trip to Nebraska. “Mr. Bryan,” Abbot said, “you should not accept this offer. You are the great commoner, the people’s candidate, and it would not do to accept favors from the great railroad corporations.” Bryan agreed with his friend, and the journalist helped popularize Bryan’s title as “The Great Commoner.”
Wherever the Democratic nominee went, crowds formed, and local officials convened great outdoor meetings. Bryan and his wife ventured to Salem, Illinois, then St. Louis and Kansas City, before heading back to Lincoln, Nebraska. Dark clouds and the threat of rain could not deter a huge crowd from welcoming home Lincoln’s favorite son, the man whose name now echoed across the country, from newspaper headlines to private letters. The crowd roared its approval and escorted him to the capitol building, where he spoke to the adoring hometown crowd. “I desire to express tonight our grateful appreciation of all the kindness that you have shown us,” Bryan proclaimed in his booming voice, “and to give you the assurance that if, by the suffrages of my countrymen, I am called to occupy, for a short space of time, the most honorable place in the gift of the people, I shall return to you. This shall be my home, and when earthly honors have passed away I shall mingle my ashes with the dust of our beloved State.” Although a touching sentiment, this promise would not be fulfilled. Upon his death in 1925 he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Bryan’s trip west from Chicago—the cheering throngs, the speeches, the newspapermen hanging on his every word—must have made an impression on the candidate. It certainly did on his wife. “Our very house had altered its appearance,” Mary recalled of their return to Lincoln. “Streamers of bunting festooned it from porch to eaves; small boys sat in rows along the roof; the crowd which filled the front yard overflowed into the house; flowers and smilax decorated the crowded rooms. It was a symbolic atmosphere. The public had invaded our lives.” Yet it was an adoring public, a public that shared the Bryans’ rural origins and small-town values.
Bryan knew he had already won over the men and women of America’s prairies. The real battle would take place not among western farmers but among the bankers and industrialists of America’s cities. This was why Bryan wanted to give his opening campaign speech in New York, “believing,” he said, “that it would arouse the enthusiasm of our supporters to attack the enemy first in the stronghold of the gold sentiment.”
In late July, Bryan came to another controversial decision, one that would haunt him the remainder of his life. Bryan, the “Boy Orator,” author of the “Cross of Gold” speech, and one of America’s greatest public speakers, decided he would read his Madison Square Garden speech from a prepared text. In doing so, he would be following closely in the footsteps of one of his heroes, Abraham Lincoln.
Just as the Civil War remained the great watershed by which late-nineteenth-century Americans measured the life of their nation, Abraham Lincoln remained the great American figure by which most Northerners measured their politicians and, indeed, their own lives. “When an ordinary man dreamed of the future of his son,” an historian wrote half a century ago, “he thought of Lincoln as embodying everything he wanted his