Portions of this article were originally published as “William Jennings Bryan, The Round Table Club, and Religious Freedom,” in The Gospel and Religious Freedom: Historical Studies in Evangelicalism and Political Engagement, ed. David W. Bebbington (Baylor University Press, 2023). Used with permission.
In his blockbuster “Cross of Gold” speech given at the 1896 Democratic National Convention William Jennings Bryan said, “I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty — the cause of humanity.”[1] Bryan was a politician who cared deeply about Americans’ economic and religious freedom. To him, economic elites had crushed the financial well-being of the general population, and he had also became deeply concerned about a scientific oligarchy that he believed threatened religious liberty.[2] To pursue his evangelical populist vision of freedom, Bryan served as a congressman and ran as the Democratic party nominee for president in 1896, 1900, and 1908. He is still the youngest person ever nominated for the presidency by a major party and the only major party nominee to lose three presidential races. Undeterred by these losses he continued his work and became a force in Democrat politics and also served as US Secretary of State from 1913 to 1915. The ongoing relevance of Bryan and his populist influence is detected in the many similarities between the 1896 and 2016 presidential election maps.[3]
During his famed political career Bryan came to believe that schools and universities posed a problem to religious freedom. For him, religious liberty involved freedom from what he considered faith-destroying public instruction. His wife, Mary Bryan, noted “his soul arose in righteous indignation when he found from the many letters he received from parents all over the country that state schools were being used to undermine the religious faith of their children.”[4] Moreover, religious people who accepted Darwinistic scientism also presented serious challenges. Bryan’s ultimate showdown over these issues would occur at the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925. Bryan’s stand would become world famous.[5] This article supplies added context to Bryan’s thought and analyzes something biographers and historians of Bryan have not studied: Bryan’s relationship with the University of Nebraska.
Bryan’s Early Life and Thought
Bryan was born in Salem, Illinois, on March 19, 1860. On Sunday mornings he worshipped with his parents at a Baptist church and on Sunday afternoons he went to Salem Cumberland Presbyterian Church, where at the age of fourteen he was converted.[6] Later, at Illinois College, affiliated to the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., Bryan excelled, earned several prizes, and graduated as valedictorian in 1881.[7] Bryan felt the best way he could serve God was to become a lawyer and so he entered and later graduated from the Union College of Law in Chicago.
Nebraska Lawyer and the Round Table Club
After law school Bryan practiced law in Jacksonville, Illinois, from 1883 to 1887, but wanted to move west to pursue new opportunities in Nebraska. In Lincoln, he started a law practice with his old law school friend Dolph Talbot. Bryan and Talbot excelled as Nebraska attorneys, and from 1887 to 1891 they pleaded more cases together before the Nebraska Supreme Court than any other lawyers in the state. A point sometimes missed by historians and even sympathetic biographers is that Bryan was a successful appellate lawyer with considerable legal acumen.[8]
During this time Bryan and his wife continued relationships and interaction with members of the faculties at both Illinois College and the University of Nebraska. Mary Bryan wrote they had “delightful association with college faculties, and found the new friends quite as satisfying as the old ones.”[9] It was in this environment that Bryan and his wife wanted to be, at some level, intellectually engaged. Indeed, in 1889 Bryan founded the “Round Table Club,” a group including chancellors and scholars from the University of Nebraska.[10] The group’s purpose was to read and discuss papers on political, intellectual, scientific, and religious issues. Two observers of the club noted that “these meetings are sometimes vigorous and heated.”[11] By analyzing a few members of Round Table Club, we gain a somewhat better grasp of Bryan’s conversation partners and the intellectual environment in which he lived.
In 1905 frequent Round Table Club attender and Nebraska sociology professor, Edward A. Ross, dined at Bryan’s home and noticed that Bryan had just been reading Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871). Bryan told Ross — a fellow populist — that Darwin’s teaching would “weaken the cause of democracy, and strengthen class pride, and the power of wealth.”[12] This early comment from Bryan reveals that he saw evolution as not simply a scientific issue, but one that was bound up with his view of politics and society. The ability of the people to exercise power without control from above seemed to be threatened by Darwin’s understanding of the human condition. For Bryan, freedom was at stake. Interestingly, Ross, who was a founder of modern sociology, became an advocate of eugenics, holding that society could make progress only through regulated breeding. Bryan’s fears would be realized in this Round Table Club associate. While the secularizing tendencies of post-World War I America no doubt influenced Bryan’s views on evolution, there appears to be an additional way to make sense of his convictions. He became reserved about the influence of Darwinism long before the war by his participation in the Round Table Club.
Evolution was bound up with Bryan’s view of politics and society
In particular, Bryan’s friendship with a leading scientist, Charles Bessey, seems to have given him pause. This relationship is almost unknown to historians and not mentioned by any of Bryan’s biographers. Bessey was a longtime professor of botany at the University of Nebraska and was the most distinguished scientist in the university’s history.[13] He was a member of the Round Table Club and was also Bryan’s neighbor. Bessey had developed an international reputation through his teaching and publications and in 1910-11 served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[14] He had also served as president of the Botanical Society of America and the American Microscopy Society. Moreover, Bessey played the leading role in professionalizing botany and separating the discipline from serious amateurs.[15] Bessey was a famed scientist, a theistic evolutionist, and someone with modernist Christian leanings. Perhaps as a result of his more liberal theological views, he also held that there was not necessarily any conflict between science and religion.[16] It appears that this “no warfare” view of science and religion was based on a compartmentalized view of science and faith. Religion, according to Bessey, must stay out of scientific issues. This likely provided Bryan’s mind with a first-hand and personal example of a “religious” scientist who from his perspective was undermining the faith by moving religion into the subjective sphere of feelings and away from traditional conceptions of biblical truth and historical evidence. Bryan believed that theistic evolution caused many preachers and professors to deny the possibility of miracles. Once miracles were discarded then key Christian doctrines could be denied. Theological modernism which maintained a naturalistic understanding of Christianity stood in stark contrast to traditional Christianity whose foundation was based on Christ’s miracles and life in human history. Consequently, Bryan disagreed with Bessey’s strict separation between science and faith. Bryan seems to have been most upset with Christians who adopted naturalistic versions of the faith. If such opinions spread from research scientists to the mass of the people, their faith was under threat. By deferring to apparently authoritative scientific verdicts, they might be tempted to abandon Christian convictions. For Bryan such conceptions of science led to a loss of religious freedom.
Bryan’s conception of the modern university
Bryan’s battle against the strict separation of science and faith appears to have been rooted in a particular conception of the modern university. Another member of the Round Table Club was James Canfield, often considered the greatest chancellor in the history of the University of Nebraska.[17] He adopted an anti-elitist stance, making a vigorous effort to connect the work of the university to the people of the state. Canfield travelled thousands of miles to speak in towns across Nebraska and made professors go out to address audiences in Nebraska communities as well. While it is difficult to say how much influence Canfield may have exerted over Bryan, it does seem clear that in large measure the younger man shared Canfield’s populist vision of a university. In 1900 Bryan made sure that Benjamin Andrews was hired as Nebraska’s chancellor. Prior to moving to Nebraska, Andrews had been asked to resign as president of Brown University for his support of the political populism of bimetallism and the Democrat policies of 1896.[18] Bryan worked to continue the Canfield legacy by arranging the hire of Andrews to continue a populist conception of a university on the Nebraska plains.
Bryan Confronts a Secularizing Culture
For Bryan, the lawyer-politician, the central issue of later years was not simply between conservative Protestantism and the modern research university. To be more precise, the contest was between a populist understanding of the university as espoused by Bryan and a view of the university that detached it from the wider culture. Teachers or professors attacking Christian truth while being paid with tax dollars was unconscionable for him. But what exactly did Bryan think was happening in the classrooms? Based on feedback he received from parents and the various academic studies he read, Bryan summed up the situation with the following analysis. The statesman argued,
These men are teaching the children in the schools that there is no such thing as a miracle; no such thing as the supernatural. And that means that Christ was not conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary; it means that He did not come down from heaven to save men from their sins; it means that He did not rise from the dead. That is their scientific interpretation of the Bible; it undermines everything that is vital in the Bible; they ought not to be allowed to do it and draw pay from the public while they do it. Boys and girls go to these colleges from Christian homes and Christian churches and return with their faith destroyed.[19]
Bryan reasoned that publicly paid professors often went beyond neutrality towards religion. From his perspective there was a crude scientism in higher education that undermined religion. It must be resisted.
Conclusion
Academic professionalization often led to the compartmentalization of people’s faith as a dimension of life apart from academic affairs. This was highlighted at the nationally contentious Scopes trial itself when one of Scopes’s attorneys Dudley Malone argued that God must be relegated to the conscience. The suave New York attorney opined “Keep it [the Bible] as your consolation, keep it as your guide, but keep it where it belongs, in the world of your own conscience ….”[20] In a similar way Charles Bessey, the great scientist and Bryan’s friend, held that theology must be kept totally separate from scientific research.[21]
The textbook in Dayton taught eugenics
In the academic journal that Bessey helped edit, The American Naturalist, it was argued that theological study was about “faith and reverence for authority, while science demands of its devotees, if not a skeptical spirit, one of complete independence.”[22] Increasingly, “neutrality” in science became associated with unbelief, agnosticism, atheism, and naturalism. Bryan bought none of it. He constantly saw the challenges that an unrestrained science could have on culture, religious freedom, and human dignity. While science cannot be conducted by popular vote, Bryan believed that neither should it be totally unfettered from concerns for the welfare of humanity. For instance, the textbook at issue in the Scopes case taught eugenics.[23] It seems that Bryan’s close association with university culture as well as his religious perspective and political career prepared him to see problems and issues that others may not have seen. Unlike most other populists, Bryan possessed a degree of political power that enabled him to make his concerns widely known. One need not agree with Bryan’s political or religious viewpoint to concede that his fears about the secularization of education were well founded. What this article has shown is that Bryan’s views were not shaped simply by Prairie Populism and religion, but also by his engagement with the University of Nebraska.
[1] Quoted by Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Knopf, 2006), 59.
[2] Populism is a political approach that appeals to ordinary people and emphasizes that elites are ignoring the concerns of the general population.
[3] The 1896 and 2016 election maps show large portions of the American South and Upper Midwest voted for Bryan and for Donald J. Trump. In these regions, agrarian populism has been strong. On the similarities and connections between Bryan and Trump see David Frum, “The Trump Before Trump,” Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-before-trump-1468607827 accessed March 4, 2022.
[4] Mary Bryan, The Memoirs of William Jennings Bryan (Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Company, 1925), 459. Part of this memoir was authored by her husband and part of it was authored by Mary Bryan.
[5] On the enduring fame and historical importance of the Scopes Trial in American history, see Edward Larson, Summer for the Gods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
[6] Robert W. Cherney, A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1985), 10.
[7] Paolo E. Coletta. William Jennings Bryan: I: Political Evangelist 1860-1908, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964, 15-16.
[8] See Andrew B. Koszewski, “William Jennings Bryan, Attorney Before the Nebraska Supreme Court,” in John Wunder, ed., Law and the Great Plains (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996).
[9] Bryan, Memoirs, 233.
[10] Coletta, William Jennings Bryan I, 38.
[11] Albert L. Gale and George W. Kline, Bryan the Man (St. Louis: Thompson, 1908), 12.
[12] Edward A. Ross, Seventy Years of It: An Autobiography (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936), 88. On Ross’ version of populism see Marsden, Soul of the American University, 254-56.
[13] On Bessey’s life and career see Richard A. Overfield, Science with Practice: Charles E. Bessey and the Maturing of American Botany (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1993). On a somewhat humorous note, Bryan and Bessey reluctantly served as chaperones for the university’s first ever student dance in 1891: Daily Nebraskan, October 20, 1977, 4.
[14] Overfield, Science with Practice, 199.
[15] Joel B. Hagen, “Bessey, Charles Edwin (1845-1915)”, in History of Science in the United States: An Encyclopedia, ed. Marc Rothenberg (New York: Garland, 2001), 77-78.
[16] Overfield, Science with Practice, 183.
[17] Coletta, William Jennings Bryan I, 38. It is also interesting to note that the two wives, Mary Bryan and Flavia Canfield, were involved in the Sorosis Club, which was the female counterpart of the Round Table Club.
[18] J.C. Long, Bryan: The Great Commoner (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1928), 122.
[19] Bryan, Is the Bible True? 27.
[20] Malone quoted by Kazin, A Godly Hero, 290.
[21] Overfield, Science with Practice, 183.
[22] E.D. Cope and J.S. Kingsley, “Editor’s Table,” The American Naturalist 21 (1887), 59-61, “60.”
[23] The textbook Scopes used was George William Hunter’s A Civic Biology (New York: American Book Company, 1914).
