{"product_id":"a-godly-hero-isbn-9780385720564","title":"A Godly Hero","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: \u003ci\u003eTHE WASHINGTON POST, CHICAGO TRIBUNE, LOS ANGELES TIMES, ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH. \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePolitician, evangelist, and reformer William Jennings Bryan was the most popular  public speaker of his time. In this acclaimed biography—the first major reconsideration  of Bryan’s life in forty years–award-winning historian Michael Kazin illuminates  his astonishing career and the richly diverse and volatile landscape of religion  and politics in which he rose to fame. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKazin vividly re-creates Bryan’s tremendous  appeal, showing how he won a passionate following among both rural and urban Americans,  who saw in him not only the practical vision of a reform politician but also the  righteousness of a pastor. Bryan did more than anyone to transform the Democratic  Party from a bulwark of laissez-faire to the citadel of liberalism we identify with  Franklin D. Roosevelt.  In 1896, 1900, and 1908, Bryan was nominated for president,  and though he fell short each time, his legacy–a subject of great debate after his  death–remains monumental. This nuanced and brilliantly crafted portrait restores  Bryan to an esteemed place in American history.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“A powerful, timely re-evaluation.”\u003cbr\u003e —\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e“Splendid. . . . A must-read. . . . It would be difficult to imagine a biography of any early 20th-century political leader more relevant to the early 21st century than this one.”\u003cbr\u003e —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “A superb biography and a challenging reconsideration of Bryan’s place in U.S. political history.”\u003cbr\u003e —\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Instructive, illuminating–engagingly written. . . . Bryan emerges from Kazin's new biography as the founding father of the modern Democratic Party and maybe even of modern American politics.”\u003cbr\u003e —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eMICHAEL KAZIN is professor of history at Georgetown University. The author of three previous books about American history--\u003ci\u003eAmerica Divided\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Populist Persuasion\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eBarons of Labor\u003c\/i\u003e-he is a frequent contributor to \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Nation\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe American Prospect\u003c\/i\u003e and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the Fulbright Scholar Program. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.\u003cb\u003e   Education of a Hero,  1860–1890\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e    He borrows from the philosopher his principles, from the poet his   language, from the warrior his courage, and mingling with these his own   enthusiasms, leads his hearers according to his will.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    —William Jennings Bryan on oratory, 1877\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Salem may never be more than a pleasant stop along the interstate   highway that slices through the verdant prairie of south-central   Illinois. Stretched out beyond the sign listing a population of eight   thousand is the usual array of chain hotels and restaurants, gaudy gas   stations and car washes, and tiny convenience stores. An imposing new   Caterpillar rental and repair place suggests that the local economy is   thriving, while twenty-six local churches compete to fill a set of   loftier needs. Yet one can stroll down the main street of Salem in the   middle of a weekday in summer without encountering more than a handful   of residents. The nearest movie theater is down in Centralia, sixteen   miles away.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A different fate seemed possible in the 1850s, when Silas Bryan moved   to town. The Ohio and Mississippi Railroad had just run tracks down   Main Street, which made it possible to reach St. Louis in only ninety   minutes—the same time it takes to drive the distance today. A Methodist   women’s college with two faculty members had recently opened its doors,   and freshly built churches dotted the dirt streets of the newly   incorporated town, the seat of Marion County. A few miles outside town,   there lay ample deposits of bituminous coal, and three flour mills were   unable to keep up with the demand of a growing population. “Salem is   rapidly improving,” boasted the local weekly in 1854, “and its elements   of wealth and prosperity are now being rapidly developed.” Soon it   would be “a commanding point . . . where industry, sobriety, and   honesty will surely thrive; where good health may be found, where long   life may be enjoyed and where all the concomitants of competence and   oppulence [sic] are inevitable.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Silas Bryan’s own ambitions dovetailed with those of his town. He was   born in 1822, the eighth child of a farm family from Point Pleasant, a   village that then lay inside Virginia’s western border with Ohio. At   the age of eighteen, he left a crowded log cabin to move westward in   search of an education and, perhaps, a fortune. Harvesting crops and   chopping wood, he slowly amassed enough credits to graduate, at the age   of twenty-seven, from\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    McKendree College, a Baptist institution in southern Illinois. He then   followed a career path common to educated men in rural America during   the middle of the nineteenth century: a few years of teaching school   followed by reading law books and passing a bar examination. In 1851,   Silas moved to Salem and opened a legal practice. A year later, he   married Mariah Jennings—a reverent, resourceful, lovely young woman who   was one of his\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    former pupils. They built a small two-story frame house on Broadway   Street—a five-minute walk from the county courthouse, which still marks   the epicenter of Salem.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Silas matured into a man of substance and an indispensable father of   his town. He was a pioneering member of the provincial legal elite that   did much to establish genteel society in the hinterland of midcentury   America. Townspeople admired his legal skills and compensated him   well—so well that in 1866 he was able to buy a 520-acre farm a mile   outside of town with a deer park alongside it. Area voters, most of   whom were Democrats, also elected him to a series of public offices.   Over a twenty-year span, Silas served in the state senate, as a circuit   court judge, and as a leading member of the committee that drafted a   new Illinois constitution.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And he never wavered from the gospel of the Democratic Party. It was a   potent mixture of egalitarian principle and racist fear. Democrats in   the nineteenth century often spoke as class warriors, American style.   They preached that every small farmer and wage earner was equal to the   rich and the well-born, and that the “producers” who fed, built, and   clothed the nation deserved access to every opportunity society could   offer. Yet Democrats also vowed to defend the livelihood, moral values,   and families of the white majority against black Americans who refused   to accept their servile destiny. As late as the 1870s, the party filled   its campaign broadsides with images of “popeyed, electric-haired and   slack-jawed” black men straight from the minstrel shows that were the   most popular form of theater in nineteenth-century America.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    These ugly stereotypes served a populist purpose. Updating and   hardening Jefferson’s anti-elitist suspicions, Democrats accused their   political enemies of shedding tears for unworthy blacks but sneering at   the language and manners of the productive white majority. In the   party’s demonology, New England divines and schoolmarms mocked the   Irish-born men and women who built and cleaned their houses, while   speculators made quick fortunes manipulating markets instead of gaining   a just reward after “years of patient industry.” Good Democrats   believed their task was to uphold the libertarian principles of the   early Republic. The Democracy—as the party was commonly known—stood   tall, a pillar of resistance to well-born zealots who wanted to shut   off immigration, prohibit drinking and other private amusements, and   increase the powers of the federal government to enrich their friends.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Silas Bryan dated his own loyalty to the Democracy to boyhood memories   of the 1828 election of Andrew Jackson, a stalwart defender of slavery.   Later, as a Democratic partisan in Illinois, Silas Bryan endorsed the   views of Stephen Douglas, who in his famous debate with Lincoln   declared, “Our people are white people, our state is a white state, and   we mean to preserve the race pure without any mixture with the negro.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In the spirit of Old Hickory, Silas mingled a plebeian ethic with a   fealty to racist assumptions. In 1856, he ran for the Illinois Senate   against a opponent friendly to abolition. At one rally, Salem’s “hardy   yeomanry” filled the county courthouse to hear Bryan blast “the Black   Republican press” for saying that he was friendly to Mormonism. In   1872, Silas ran for Congress on a platform that advocated inflating the   money supply to rescue farmers and wage earners from the burden of   debt. But a former general in the Union army narrowly defeated him and   ended Silas Bryan’s office-chasing career. The judge remained a   prominent Democrat in southern Illinois and one of the richest men in   town.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    However, Silas was never content with the trappings of material   success. By all accounts, he embodied the virtues that   nineteenth-century Americans summed up as “character.” He was loyal and   honest, industrious and pious—qualities prized by moral philosophers   from the Hebrew prophets to Cotton Mather. And Silas attempted to apply   these virtues to the life of his local community and state. When he   died of a diabetic stroke in 1880, thousands filed by his casket as it   lay in the county courthouse, and every business and school in Salem   closed down for the afternoon. Obituary writers praised him for never   wavering from his beliefs, for routinely feeding hobos who came to his   door, and for kneeling in prayer three times a day, wherever he   happened to be. Silas had specified the hymns to be sung and the Bible   passages to be read at his funeral. Among the most memorable were   verses from Paul’s Second Epistle to Timothy: “For I am now ready to be   offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good   fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A year after his father’s death, Will Bryan paid a florid tribute to   character in the valedictory he gave at his college graduation: “If   each day we . . . plant ourselves more firmly upon principles which are   eternal, guard every thought and action, that it may be pure, and   conform our lives more nearly to that Perfect Model, we shall form a   character that . . . will bring success in this life and form the best   preparation for that which is beyond.” Others may have mouthed such   nostrums without taking them too seriously; one biographer comments   that the talk “was more suitable for an eighth-grade exercise than a   college commencement.” Yet like most Americans in the Gilded Age, both   father and son were convinced that character underlay good governance   as well as sound religion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Will Bryan spent his childhood in social tranquility, if not utter   innocence. He was born on March 19, 1860, a year before the onset of   the Civil War. More than fifteen hundred residents of Marion County   served in the Union army; one out of every six succumbed from either   wounds or disease. But no battles took place in the area, and the   bloodshed left only a mild impression on local history—perhaps because   many residents, like Silas Bryan, had migrated from the South and   didn’t favor the end of slavery and the rule of the Republican Party,   which were prime consequences of the war. Neither Will’s memoirs nor   the little early correspondence of his that survives mentions the   conflict that ruptured the nation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    As a child, he was also unfamiliar with the afflictions and joys of an   increasingly polyglot and industrial society. In Salem, Will probably   met few people of a religion or ethnic group different from his. In   1860, a large majority of the thirteen thousand inhabitants of Marion   County were native-born white Protestants of British or Irish heritage   who farmed modest plots of corn and raised pigs and cattle. A few small   mills finished lumber or ground cereals; by 1870, one lone shop in   Salem turned out wooden plows and carriages. Schoolteachers and store   clerks outnumbered day laborers and servants. Will could always find   abundant rabbits and squirrels to hunt in the woods near his house. The   Ohio and Mississippi Railroad was the only real sign that the machine   age, with its yawning if mutable class divisions, had arrived on the   prairies of southern Illinois.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A biracial society and a religiously diverse one also lay off in the   future. Although the slave state of Missouri began just seventy miles   west of town, across the broad Mississippi, Silas Bryan and his   neighbors seldom needed to police a color line. The antebellum Illinois   constitution barred blacks from entering the state, and subsequent laws   prescribed stiff penalties for hiring them. The year Abraham Lincoln   was elected president, census takers found only nine black people   living in all of Marion County.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    European immigrants were almost as rare. In the crowded port cities of   the East, Know-Nothings raged against an influx of “Papist hordes.” But   Salem had just one small Catholic church, serving a few score of Irish   and German residents. Tolerance toward whites from abroad seems to have   come rather easily to town notables. Salem Democrats published campaign   literature in German as well as English, and the town’s religious life   was relatively free of rancor. As a child, Will witnessed regular   visits to his home by ministers of every denomination; Silas reserved a   guest room for traveling divines, as well as politicians, and annually   donated a load of hay to every local church, including the Catholic   one.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Mariah Bryan, at least in her son’s eyes, was no less ethical and   open-minded. Twelve years younger than Silas, she was his equal in   character. “Mother was a very competent woman,” recalled Will, “of rare   native ability, of lofty ideals, and as devout as my father.” She   educated him at home until the age of ten, drawing lessons from the   Bible, the McGuffey’s Readers, and a geography text. She also held him   responsible for feeding the farm animals and cutting the wood that   heated their brick mansion. After he became famous, Will credited “this   drudgery” for giving him the strength “to endure fatigue and withstand   disease” during long periods on the road.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The few surviving photos of Mariah Bryan, grimly posed in high collar   and tight bun, betray no hint of her independent spirit. Raised as a   Methodist, she refused for twenty years after marriage to “take her   letter” to the local Baptist congregation in which Silas was a leading   elder. Mariah was active in the local chapter of the WCTU and the Royal   Templars, another temperance group, though the precise nature of her   work is unknown.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But her membership alone suggests she welcomed the state as a moral   guardian—a notion that made most good Democrats cringe.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Neither did Mariah confuse piety with prudishness. She played the piano   often and well, and liked to tell stories about acquaintances who took   their religion a bit too seriously. When Will asked his mother’s   opinion of his first political speech, a long-winded plea in 1880 to   support the local Democratic congressman, she responded, “Well there   were a few good places in it—where you might have stopped!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Mariah’s relaxed attitude may have influenced her son’s choice of a   church. Instead of becoming a Baptist like Silas or a Methodist like   Mariah, Will embraced an option of his own. At the age of thirteen, he   attended a revival led by a traveling minister from the Cumberland   Presbyterian Church and then helped establish a small congregation with   about seventy other teenagers. Cumberland Presbyterians—who took their   name from the Kentucky town where the sect was founded in   1813—discarded the Calvinist idea that God “elected” a minority at   birth and left all others to face the prospect of hell. Although the   Cumberland way prohibited drinking, dancing, gambling, and other   enticements to evil, it brimmed with hope for the salvation of all   Americans and, following that, the world. As an adult, Will often   attended services of other denominations, and most Cumberland   congregations, including that in Salem, joined the larger Presbyterian   Church in the U.S. in 1906. Still, he clung to the expansive vision of   his first spiritual home for the rest of his life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Yet long shadows chilled his family in the middle of the Midwest. Will   was his parents’ fourth child; a girl and a boy born earlier had both   died of whooping cough before reaching their first birthdays. The next   boy also filled an infant’s grave; another brother died at sixteen.   Following the first two deaths, Silas dolefully wrote in the family   Bible that he thought his own end was near. In the mid-nineteenth   century, with only the crudest of pediatric medical treatment   available, it was not unusual for even wealthy Americans to lose a   child in infancy. But only a bare majority of the Bryans’ nine   offspring lived to adulthood. Grief beyond the norm may have bolstered   Will’s parents in their resolve that at least one son would do the   family proud.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When he turned fifteen, Will was sent off to private school in   Jacksonville, a city of ten thousand in the central part of the state.   He stayed there for six years, attending and graduating from Whipple   Academy and then from Illinois College. In contrast to his hometown,   Jacksonville looked more like what America was becoming. It boasted a   three-story textile factory and a state mental hospital, and the local   elite of bankers and landowners wielded influence at the state capital   in nearby Springfield. About 40 percent of Jacksonville residents were   foreign-born—housemaids and laborers from Portugal, railroad hands from   Ireland, craftsmen and shopkeepers from Germany, and a scattering of   immigrants from other lands. The black population, some five hundred,   was large enough to be confined to a tiny ghetto, known as “Africa.”   Local political campaigns bristled with debates over emancipation,   prohibition, and law and order. To the chagrin of town boosters,   Jacksonville had recently lost out to Champaign-Urbana as the site of   the new state university, and it lagged behind the industrial growth of   Peoria and Decatur. But it was still large enough to acquaint Will   Bryan with the rudiments of a modernizing America.","brand":"Anchor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304025575653,"sku":"NP9780385720564","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780385720564.jpg?v=1767720495","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/a-godly-hero-isbn-9780385720564","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}