by Every writer carries a verdict he never agreed to. Mine was two words long, written in red marker across the title page of a play I cared about, by a historian whose judgment I had asked for and could not afford to ignore. BAD DRAMA. No note beneath it, no argument, no second page. I was in my twenties. I put the play in a drawer and told myself I had learned something useful about my own limits. It took me forty years to understand that I had learned the wrong lesson, and that the right one would take an entire book to say.
That book is out this week. It is called The Magnificent Loser: A Dramatist’s Reckoning with William Jennings Bryan, and it is available now as a Kindle edition, a paperback, and a free PDF you can read at David Boles Books, with the audiobook on its way. What follows is the story of how the book came to exist, which is also the story of the man it is about, because somewhere in the writing the two stories became one.
Two Words in Red Ink
I was young and certain, which is the most dangerous condition a writer can be in. I had found William Jennings Bryan, the three-time loser of the American presidency, the orator the history books treated as a footnote and a joke, and I was sure I had seen something in him that everyone else had missed. So I wrote a teleplay. I gave him a stage, a voice, and a last great speech, and I tried to make a modern audience feel what it was to stand in a hall while one man held twenty thousand people in his open hand with nothing but his conviction. I sent the script to a historian who had spent his career as a custodian of Bryan’s memory, because I wanted his blessing, and I was sure he would give it.
What I got back was the title page with two words on it. BAD DRAMA. The verdict was delivered the way a man waves off a fly, and it did its work. I stopped. I told myself the expert had spoken, and that the honest thing was to accept the ruling and move on, and for forty years that is what I did.
The wound stayed where it was, the way a stone stays in a field, and every few years I struck it again with the blade and remembered it was there. When I finally went back to look at it directly, I understood that the two words had never been only about my writing. They were a judgment on whether the man was worth the trouble of being taken seriously, and the historian had already decided that he was not. The play died of that decision. So, in a quieter way, had Bryan.
The Man They Taught Us to Laugh At
Here is the Bryan most people carry without knowing where they got him. A windbag in a Tennessee courtroom. The Bible-shouting reactionary sweating through his collar while a clever lawyer takes him apart. A relic who died a few days after the trial that humiliated him, as if the calendar itself were writing the punchline. That is the cartoon, and the cartoon has been the country’s official memory for a hundred years.
Here is what the cartoon leaves out. In 1896, at thirty-six, Bryan walked onto the floor of the Democratic convention and gave the agony of the American farmer a single sentence no one in the hall ever forgot. He told the men who ran the nation’s money that they would not press down upon the brow of labor a crown of thorns, that they would not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. The hall erupted. They nominated him on the spot, the youngest man either party had ever run for president, and for one summer the people who had been losing for a generation believed they had found their voice at last.
He lost. He lost again in 1900, and a third time in 1908, and the country told the prairie no three times running. Then watch what happened to the program he kept losing on. Within a generation the United States wrote it into law: the income tax, the direct election of senators, the vote for women, a federal department for labor. He warned a rising empire against the appetite for conquest while the rest of the country was busy celebrating it. He resigned as Secretary of State rather than sign a note he believed would drag the nation into a war. The man the textbooks file under failure had been reading the future more clearly than the men who beat him. He lost the elections. He won the century.
How the Cartoon Won
So how does a man who was that right become a national punchline? The answer is the engine of the whole book.
In the summer of 1925 Bryan went to Dayton, Tennessee, to help prosecute a young schoolteacher under a state law against the teaching of evolution. A lawyer named Clarence Darrow put the old man on the witness stand and held his certainties up to the light until they cracked. A newspaperman named H. L. Mencken filed dispatches that turned Bryan into a figure of fun, a buffoon, a holy fraud, the embodiment of everything an educated American was invited to despise about the people of the interior. Five days after the trial ended Bryan died in his sleep, and Mencken sat down and wrote one of the most savage obituaries in the language. The prose was magnificent. It was also a kind of murder, and the corpse it left behind is the Bryan we inherited.
That is the thing about a verdict. Once enough people repeat it, the repeating becomes the truth, and no one goes back to check the original ruling. The cartoon was lighter to carry than the man, and a fool asks nothing of you, so the country kept the cartoon and threw the man away. I recognized the move the instant I started reading those dispatches, because a smaller version of it had been performed on me, in red marker, on a title page.
The Whole Man, Including the Parts I Did Not Want
I need to be honest about something, because a book that only defends its subject is a brief, and I did not write a brief.
The same Bryan who warned against empire and resigned over a war was also the man who stood on a convention floor in 1924 and would not say the words Ku Klux Klan out loud. His own party tried to name the Klan in its platform and condemn it. Bryan, afraid of splitting the rural and southern voters he depended on, helped talk the condemnation down to nothing. The prophet of the common man would not spend his standing on the most common decency when the bill came due. And the Scopes prosecution, the one the cartoon was built on, was the worst public decision of his life, a great man on the wrong side of a question that mattered.
I put all of that in the book, beside the courage, because the truth was always larger and stranger than either the worshippers or the mockers wanted it to be. A man is not improved by being flattered, and neither is the memory of a man. What I was after was the whole figure, the nerve and the cowardice in one body, the man who could see a century ahead and the man who flinched when the cost of decency came due. The country has spent a hundred years choosing between a saint it could ignore and a fool it could laugh at, when the real Bryan was harder, and more useful, than either.
He is useful right now, in a country that has gone back to sorting its people into the serious and the laughable along the oldest lines we have, the coasts against the interior, the lettered against the merely felt. Bryan stood at the first great performance of that sorting, and he lost it on a national stage. What was done to him is a working map of how the contempt operates, and a map like that is worth keeping.
What the Book Is Made Of
The Magnificent Loser is built as a braid. One strand is Bryan’s life, told from the prairie boyhood through the Cross of Gold to the courtroom and the grave. The other strand is mine: the forty-year argument with the historian who wrote those two words and then spent his career guarding the same grave he had used to bury my play. The man who killed the drama was the keeper of the legend. I could not write about one without the other, and once I stopped trying to keep them apart the book finally found its spine.
Every fact in it is sourced and every quotation checked. Bryan’s scenes are built from the documentary record, and the only invention anywhere in the book is the joinery, the way I set the two lives against each other so that each one explains the other.
The cover is the wound itself. If you are reading this where it was published, you have already seen it at the top of the page: a sheet of my old teleplay, the typed lines of Bryan at his podium, with two words slashed across them in red marker. I asked for that. I wanted the verdict on the outside of the book, because the verdict is where the book begins, and a reader deserves to know what kind of argument he is holding before he opens it.
The question that runs under both strands is the one I have been circling for much of my working life, in Not My Thing and elsewhere: how does a society decide who counts, who is serious, who is allowed to be mourned and who is only allowed to be mocked? Bryan is the largest case study I have ever found for that question, because the country did its deciding in public and left a paper trail a mile long. Readers who want to know the company the book keeps will find it standing near Michael Kazin, Edward Larson, and Jon Meacham, the historians who have taken this period and its people seriously, though the personal thread is mine alone, and that is the thread that cost the most to pull.
I wrote a companion piece for PrairieVoice on Bryan as the prairie’s caricatured prophet, and an episode of the Human Meme podcast on how a caricature outlives the person it was drawn from. They are different doors into the same house. This essay is the one with my name carved over the lintel.
My Reply
It took me forty years to write the reply to two words, and the reply turned out to be ninety thousand of my own. The book ends on what I call the third verdict, because two verdicts came before it. The country handed down the first, ratified by Mencken and a hundred years of repetition: Bryan the fool. In red marker on a title page, a historian handed down the second: bad drama, not worth the stage. The third one belongs to me, and the strange mercy of writing a book instead of nursing a grudge is that it is not finally mine to keep. I hand it to you. You read the man, you weigh the courage against the cowardice and the prophecy against the prejudice, and you decide for yourself whether the country got him right.
My own answer is no. We mistook a man who was early for a man who was wrong, and we have congratulated ourselves on the error ever since. The whole point of the book, though, is that you do not have to take my word for it any more than I should have taken the word in red on my own title page.
The Magnificent Loser is available now in Kindle, in paperback, and as a free PDF at David Boles Books, with the audiobook coming soon. Read it, and then tell me who the loser was.
Leave a Reply