The Magnificent Loser
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About This Book
In 1985 the author sent a teleplay about William Jennings Bryan to the historian he most wanted to impress. It came back with two words across the title page in red marker, BAD DRAMA, and no second page. The play went into a drawer for forty years. The Magnificent Loser is what came out of the drawer, and it is built from two lives at once: the life of the three-time loser of the American presidency, and the long argument the author kept having with the man who waved his play away.
Most of us carry Bryan as a cartoon, the windbag at the Scopes trial, the Bible-shouting relic a clever lawyer took apart, the man who died a few days after his humiliation as if on cue. The record is larger and stranger. At thirty-six he gave the American farmer a single sentence the country never forgot, that it would not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold, and he was nominated for president on the spot, the youngest major-party nominee in the nation's history. He lost three times. Then the program he kept losing on, the income tax, the direct election of senators, the vote for women, became the law of the land within a generation. He warned a rising empire against the appetite for conquest and resigned as Secretary of State rather than sign a note he believed would lead to war. The textbooks file him under failure, though he had been reading the future more clearly than the men who beat him.
Across sixteen chapters the book follows Bryan from a prairie boyhood through the Cross of Gold, the wars he lost, the empire he fought, the resignation, and the 1924 convention where he would not say the words Ku Klux Klan out loud, to Dayton and the grave and the long fight over how he would be remembered. Beside that story runs the author's own, a forty-year reckoning with a verdict in red ink, until the two strands meet in the question underneath them both. How does a country decide who counts, who is taken seriously, who is mourned and who is only mocked? The book ends on what the author calls the third verdict, and it hands that verdict to the reader.
The Argument
A reputation is a verdict, and a verdict outlives the trial that produced it. Bryan stood trial twice. Once in a Tennessee courtroom in 1925, where Clarence Darrow put him on the stand and held his certainties up to the light, and a second time in the obituary H. L. Mencken wrote five days later, a piece of savage and brilliant prose that buried the man under the caricature. The country kept the caricature. A cartoon is lighter to carry than a contradiction, and a fool asks nothing of the people who laugh at him.
What the cartoon erased is a man who was right about almost everything that counted and wrong in ways that still cost him. The same Bryan who warned against empire and resigned over a war would not spend his standing to condemn the Klan when his own party tried to name it, and the Scopes prosecution he is remembered for was the worst public decision of his life. The Magnificent Loser keeps both halves in the frame, the prophet and the coward in one coat, because the truth was always larger than 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.
The argument the book leaves the reader with is practical. We are still sorting our public figures into the serious and the laughable, often along the same lines drawn in Bryan's lifetime, the coasts against the interior, the credentialed against the merely felt. What was done to Bryan is a working map of how that sorting operates, and of what it costs a country to get a man wrong for a hundred years. The book asks the reader to look again, and to deliver a third verdict of his own.
Table of Contents
Prologue. The Defacing Pen
Part One. The Believer Made
Chapter 1. Salem and the Wedding of Church and Law
Chapter 2. Jacksonville and the Wedding of Two Minds
Chapter 3. Lincoln and the Making of the Voice
Chapter 4. The Cross of Gold
Part Two. The Magnificent Loser
Chapter 5. The First Battle
Chapter 6. The Paralyzing Influence of Imperialism
Chapter 7. Tolstoy's Door
Chapter 8. The Commoner and the Chautauqua Tent
Part Three. We Become What We Hate
Chapter 9. Secretary of State and the Plowshare Paperweights
Chapter 10. The Resignation
Chapter 11. The Klan He Would Not Name
Chapter 12. Inherit the Wind, From the Stage
Part Four. The Unredeemable Removal
Chapter 13. Dayton
Chapter 14. The Funeral Train and the Soldier's Grave
Chapter 15. The Statues Come Down
Chapter 16. The Memory Wars
Coda. The Third Verdict
Acknowledgments · A Note on Sources · Principal Sources by Chapter · About the Author · Also by David Boles
The Epigraphs
"Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved."
William Jennings Bryan, "America's Mission," 1899
"Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular."
Aristotle, Poetics
"I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith."
2 Timothy 4:7
What the Book Traces
From a Salem boyhood where church and law were married in a boy's mind, through Jacksonville and Lincoln and the making of the most powerful speaking voice in American public life, to the 1896 convention where a thirty-six-year-old gave the cross of gold speech and seized a presidential nomination in a single afternoon. Then the three defeats, the war against empire, the door Tolstoy opened in his thinking, the Chautauqua tent, the years as Secretary of State, and the resignation that cost him his place in the party he had built. Then the long descent the cartoon was made of: the convention where he would not name the Klan, the courtroom at Dayton, the funeral train, the soldier's grave at Arlington, the statues going up and the statues coming down, and the memory wars still being fought over what kind of American he was. At every turn the book sets Bryan's life against the author's, and asks what a society owes the people it has decided to laugh at.
A Note on the Free PDF
A book about a man the country could not be bothered to read should be easy to read for free. The free PDF is a complete reading edition, set on 6 by 9 pages in a serif face with every font embedded so the file looks the same on any machine, with bookmarks and a clickable table of contents that reach all sixteen chapters, the prologue, the coda, and every section of the back matter. Download it, read it, and judge the man yourself.
Dedication
For Janna, who is the reason the work gets done, and for Marshall Jamison, who gave me the title and did not live to see the book.
Author Interview
Featured Articles
Companion essay: The Magnificent Loser: The Book I Wrote to Answer Two Words in Red Ink (Boles Blogs), the story of how the book came to be written.
An Unredeemable Removal: William Jennings Bryan as the Magnificent Loser (Boles Blogs) · Magnificent, the script (Boles.com) · Cross of Gold (Boles Blogs) · Ideas & Inquiry · About David Boles