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Three times he ran for president, terrifying part of the country and gripping the rest in a revival-like frenzy of adulation. His supporters regarded him with such a messianic fervor that those within his party who dared oppose him often found their political careers ended.
He crusaded against the elites and railed against immigration.
He revolutionized presidential campaigns by embracing modern technologies even as he sought to return the country to a simpler time — but there the comparison with any modern-day politician you might be imagining comes to an end.
This fall marks the 118th anniversary of when William Jennings Bryan visited the fairgrounds in Roanoke, a rare appearance by a presidential candidate in the still-young railroad boomtown.
Technically, Bryan was not a candidate at the time. The date was Sept. 16, 1906, still two years before the 1908 presidential election when he made his third and final run for the presidency. However, he was very much in campaign mode, touring the country to rally Democratic support for another presidential bid.
The speech Bryan gave that day — often called the “daily bread” speech for its Biblical allusion — was not his most famous one. That was his “cross of gold” oration in favor of abandoning the gold standard that won him the Democratic nomination in 1896. The “daily bread” speech was, though, perhaps Bryan’s most important speech of the coming 1908 presidential campaign, one in which Bryan renewed his rhetorical assault on the nation’s monied elite, one which was circulated across the country as a key campaign talking point against Republican William Howard Taft.
It was also a speech that Bryan could have given anywhere. Why Roanoke?
The answer appears to be a mix of railroads and race.
To understand the full context of Bryan’s Roanoke speech, we need to imagine the politics of the early 1900s, which bear just enough resemblance to ours today that the differences can be confusing, but it’s those differences that are important. Bryan was regarded by many in his day as a dangerous radical. In some ways, his economic views about the power of Wall Street made him the Bernie Sanders of his day — but he also blended in deep strains of xenophobia and racism. In those days, Republicans were the party most open to immigration and what passed for civil rights, an inheritance from Abraham Lincoln. President Theodore Roosevelt, who was retiring, had horrified white Southerners by hosting educator Booker T. Washington at the White House. Democrats, meanwhile, were a rural-based party that relied on Southern segregationists. The Midwesterner Bryan was a different type of rural Democrat — the agrarian populist, which made him very different from the type of genteel establishment figures who ruled Virginia.
Bryan had run twice before, in 1896 and 1900, and lost both times to William McKinley. Bryan sat out 1904, believing (correctly) that Democrat Alton Parker would lose decisively to Roosevelt and he could run again in 1908. Bryan was a shoo-in for his third Democratic nomination that year. Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin, author of “A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan,” writes: “He had built up a large following since 1896: ‘To be suspected of disloyalty to Bryan in those days,’ a journalist later recalled, ‘was almost like buying a ticket to private life.’” Still, Democrats had now lost three presidential elections in a row, with Bryan losing two of those, and there were other potential contenders starting to make noise. Bryan needed to pre-empt those, so in 1906, he hit the campaign trail.
Some of Bryan’s proposals would not seem radical today, but were then. In an era where there were “bank runs” that left depositors penniless, Bryan wanted to tax banks to provide funds to insure deposits — a forerunner of today’s Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Others were just as radical then as they would be today. Years before, Bryan had flirted with nationalizing railroads, then backed away from that in favor of simply tighter regulation. As 1908 approached, Bryan’s views on railroads made him suspect to some in the South, and without the South, Bryan could not win, not the nomination and not the presidency. It wasn’t simply that nationalizing the railroad smacked of socialism. White Southerners feared something they viewed as far more sinister. “Southern Democrats saw publicly controlled railroads as a recipe for one thing — forced desegregation,” according to the popular podcast “American Elections: Wicked Game” in its episode on the 1908 election.
Bryan used his passage through a Southern city — a Southern railroad city — to deliver a politically important message to Americans everywhere: He would not nationalize the railroads. And that meant something else that was even more politically important to white Southerners: He would not interfere with segregation.
Bryan’s official purpose for visiting Roanoke was to accompany one of his daughters, Grace, as she enrolled at what was then Hollins Institute (and today is Hollins University), according to accounts at the time in The Roanoke Times. This was no low-key parental chaperoning, though. Bryan’s train brought him through Radford, where he spent the night with former Gov. James Tyler and met with a delegation of other Virginia Democrats, including Gov. Claude Swanson and U.S. Rep. (and future Sen.) Carter Glass.
The next day, he went on to Roanoke, where the Salem Band accompanied him to Roanoke Fairgrounds (where the River’s Edge Sports Complex is today). The band played “Dixie,” Tyler presented Bryan’s wife, Mary, and daughter, Grace, with roses, and Swanson made the formal political introductions. The Roanoke Times described the crowd as “fully ten thousand” people and “the largest gathering that has ever been seen in this city.” (Thanks to Belinda Harris for helping me find those old newspaper stories.)
Much of Bryan’s speech was his standard attack on big business, although he did it with extra flair this day. “No one in America could rival his outrage, grounded in Scripture, against the corrupting influence of big business on public life,” Kazin writes. Bryan told the Roanoke crowd: “I am willing to go down on my knees and ask my heavenly father: Give us this day our daily bread, but I am not willing to make millions of my countrymen get down on their knees and say to some trust magnate and say ‘give us this day our daily bread’ and have him reply ‘I will, if you vote the ticket I want you to vote.’”
The Roanoke crowd went “wild,” the podcast says, and the “daily bread” quote became one of the key lines in Bryan’s campaign two years later. With that applause line behind him, Bryan turned to the trickier issue of railroads. “Two years ago, it has been said of me that I reached the conclusion that government ownership of the railroads was the only solution to the question,” Bryan said. The podcast says at the mere mention of this idea, the Roanoke crowd “begins to turn.”
Bryan, though, had more to say: “Now I want to say that my position has been misstated and in some places misconstrued.” He explained that while he backed federal control of trunk lines, he wanted “all the local lines under the control of the state government.” He said the idea of full federal ownership of all railroad was “fraught with danger, because I believe in the Democratic doctrine of local self-government.” Later, Bryan declared his belief that each state should be able to conduct “its own affairs” — repeating that line twice, in fact.
The podcast says those references were a code phrase that white Southerners understood quite well: Bryan would not interfere with segregation, although the Roanoke Times coverage at the time made no mention of race.
The podcast says that “with his ‘daily bread’ speech in September 1908, William Jennings Bryan hoped to convince the people of the South that his fight against big business would not come at the expense of Jim Crow. His words were printed in newspapers across the country.” His years of campaigning paid off. He won the nomination easily and, for a time, the general election seemed close. For the first time, the American Federation of Labor endorsed a presidential candidate — Bryan. That seemed to open the way for a powerful coalition of rural Americans with urban workers that could help Bryan make inroads in the industrial states along the Great Lakes and the East.
Roosevelt the trust-buster would have been a difficult target for Bryan, but William Howard Taft, who was cozier with business interests, presented just the kind of contrast Bryan wanted — Bryan “the Great Commoner” against Taft, the tool of the business class. Or at least that’s how Bryan wanted the campaign framed. Cartoons in Democratic newspapers depicted Bryan working a hayfield for relaxation while Taft golfed with John D. Rockefeller.
Taft was a reluctant candidate to begin with and not the most energetic of campaigners. After he won the Republican nomination in June, he spent the month of July resting up at Hot Springs (where 4,000 people showed up to hear him speak).
What seemed to be a rising tide for Bryan was finally enough to spur Taft into hitting the campaign trail. The podcast — hosted by Lindsay Graham, not to be confused with Sen. Lindsey Graham — says that made 1908 the first campaign in which both candidates actively campaigned for the presidency. That year also saw the beginnings of the modern outlines of the two political parties, with Bryan moving Democrats to the left (their views on race at the time notwithstanding) and Taft pulling Republicans to the right. That year also saw the beginnings of a Republican courtship of the South that seemed fruitless then but later proved successful. Taft became the first Republican presidential candidate to campaign across the former Confederacy.
In the end, the South held for Bryan but most other parts of the country weren’t persuaded. Taft won, 51.6% to 43.1%, making that year Bryan’s worst showing ever. In Virginia, Bryan polled the traditional Democratic share of the vote — 60.5% — and won almost everywhere except for Southwest Virginia, which was a Republican bastion then as it is now. Bryan was done running for office, but he wasn’t done with politics. Four years later, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, a son of Staunton, won the presidency and named Bryan as his Secretary of State. A longtime isolationist, Bryan eventually resigned when Wilson began siding with the Allies during World War I.
After leaving office, Bryan campaigned for what at the time were liberal causes — an eight-hour workday, a minimum wage, women’s suffrage, the right to strike — but also moved to the right on other issues. He embraced Prohibition, took to the radio to preach the Gospel and, increasingly, warn against the teaching of evolution. In 1925, he joined the prosecution of Tennessee teacher John Scopes and died five days after the jury had found Scopes guilty of teaching evolution.
The railroads were never nationalized, but the segregation that Bryan said he’d allow lived on for decades.
Two Virginia cities react to debate in a dramatic way
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- What the latest polls say about Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
- Two Virginia cities draw national attention for how they reacted to the Harris-Trump debate.
- Are third parties spoilers? What the data shows.
- The line that got the loudest applause at a Republican rally in Bedford County.
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