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  • Bryan and House:Political Leaders of the Progressive Era
  • Charles E. Neu (bio)
Godfrey Hodgson. Woodrow Wilson’s Right Hand: The Life of Colonel Edward M. House. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. xiv + 335 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00
Michael Kazin. A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. xxi + 374 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $30.00.

Few political leaders of the Progressive Era had more disparate lives and careers than William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) and Colonel Edward M. House (1958–1938). In the early 1890s Bryan launched an extraordinary political career, capturing the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1896 and becoming, for many years, a charismatic reformer and the dominant figure in the Democratic Party. In the same decade House organized a powerful faction within the Texas Democratic Party, "our crowd," putting in office men who depended on his advice and support. Bryan was a public man, happiest when he was crisscrossing the nation inspiring his followers; House was a private man, content to work in the shadows of power and to exercise his influence through others. During the early years of Wilson's presidency their different paths to political power met when Bryan became secretary of state and House the president's friend and adviser.

Both Bryan and House operated on the national and world stages, accumulating many admirers and detractors, dramatic successes and failures, and leaving behind complicated life histories with which historians have had to deal. The rich materials about each man, the largeness of their lives, could easily justify lengthy biographies. But Kazin and Hodgson both chose to write relatively brief books (A Godly Hero has 306 pages of text, Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand only 276 pages). Perhaps Kazin felt that Bryan had been heavily studied over the last forty years (especially by Paola E. Coletta in William Jennings Bryan, 3 vols., 1964–69) and needed only a compact, up-to-date life. Hodgson's decision is more puzzling, since House has been the subject of some specialized studies but of no scholarly biography.1 Despite his massive collection of personal papers at Yale University, including a diary of 2,950 [End Page 491] double-spaced pages, no historian has mastered his long and elusive career.

In twelve finely crafted chapters, along with an introduction and an epilogue, Kazin traces the various phases of Bryan's life. He explains his identification with insurgent causes and meteoric political rise, examines his role in presidential campaigns from 1896 through 1924, and analyzes the apogee of his political influence from 1913 until June 1915 when, as Wilson's secretary of state and as a powerful force within the Democratic Party, he helped push New Freedom reform measures through the Congress and played a major role in New Freedom diplomacy.

Kazin argues that Bryan, despite his acceptance of Jim Crow laws, led the way in the transformation of the Democratic Party from "a bulwark of laissez-faire into the citadel of liberalism," and that he was the "first leader of a major party to argue for permanently expanding the power of the federal government to serve the welfare of ordinary Americans" (pp. xix, xviii). After his move to Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1887, Bryan plunged into politics, won election to Congress in 1890, and called for a graduated income tax, federal insurance for bank deposits, and the freedom to join a union and strike. Six years later, as the party's presidential candidate, Bryan advocated free silver and a stronger, more interventionist state that would protect Americans from the excesses of corporate power. In 1898 he supported the war with Spain but opposed "McKinley's bloody adventure" in the Philippines and the acquisition of a new empire (p. 92). Bryan lost in 1896, 1900, and 1908, but in the process of doing so he rallied populists and progressives behind his banner and, as he moved across the nation, developed a more direct, personal style of presidential campaigning.

Kazin provides a superb account of Bryan's political campaigns, deftly sketching in the context for his efforts and arguing, on the basis of an imaginative analysis of...

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