William Jennings Bryan and the Cross of Gold

In eighteen eighty-seven, a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer from Salem, Illinois, moved to Lincoln. He had no connections in Nebraska, no clients waiting. His name was William Jennings Bryan, and within three years he would be elected to Congress, and within nine years he would deliver what many historians consider the most galvanizing speech in the history of American political conventions.

Bryan moved to Lincoln because it seemed like a place where a young man could make something. He hung his shingle, got to know the farmers and workers who formed the backbone of Nebraska's electorate, and won a congressional seat in eighteen ninety representing a Lincoln-area district. The farmers he talked to were not abstract constituents. They were people paying off debts in a currency that grew more expensive every year because the money supply was fixed to gold. More dollars would help them; a silver-backed currency expanding with the economy would help them. It was the defining economic debate of the late nineteenth century.

Bryan ran as a Democrat who believed in silver coinage. His opponents believed in gold.

At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on July ninth, eighteen ninety-six, Bryan closed the debate on the party platform with a speech that had been constructed piece by piece from five years of stump talks across Nebraska and the Great Plains. He moved from economic argument to moral call, his voice, according to contemporaries, carrying to every corner of the hall. He closed by spreading his arms wide in a gesture that filled the stage: you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

The hall erupted, and the next day the delegates nominated him for president. He was thirty-six years old.

Bryan lost the general election to William McKinley, and he lost two more presidential campaigns after that. But he settled into his Lincoln home, Fairview, built in nineteen oh one and nineteen oh two at what is now the Bryan Health campus on Sumner Street, and from that porch he received visitors, gave speeches, and remained a national force in Democratic politics for the next quarter century. Woodrow Wilson came here during the nineteen twelve campaign to court his support.

Lincoln has not forgotten him. Bryan Health, one of the city's major hospital systems, carries his name still.