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The Great Commoner was born in 1860 in Salem, Illinois, to Silas and Mariah Bryan. The future scourge of plutocracy grew up in a prosperous political household. A stalwart Democrat, Silas was a well-to-do lawyer, judge, and farmer who served in the state senate; Mariah ran the farm, joined temperance groups, and educated Will in the bedrock verities of "the Bible, the McGuffey's Readers, and a geography text." Though raised a Baptist, Will defected, at the age of thirteen, to the Cumberland Presbyterians, who had renounced the traditional Calvinist doctrines of election and predestination.
In Salem and in Jacksonville, where he attended a private academy to prepare for college, Will learned the gospel according to Jesus and Jefferson. Mobilized in "the Democracy," as the party was called, this credo combined a tolerant if not quite ecumenical Christianity with a romance of small proprietorship. Even after the Civil War and its acceleration of industrial capitalism, Americans still cherished the vision of a "producer's republic," an evangelical Protestant empire where the omnicompetent male freeholder, commonsensically interpreting "his" Bible, exercised firm but benevolent dominion over family, property, and government. But this Christian herrenvolk democracy was a strictly white-faced affair: as Kazin notes, Democratic campaign literature abounded with images of "popeyed, electric-haired, and slack-jawed black men." In addition to hastening the demise of Reconstruction, racism held together the motley and fractious Democratic coalition: in the industrial North, with its urban immigrants and "Bourbon" moneybags; the Jim Crow South, garrison of white supremacy after "Redemption" from Reconstruction; the Midwest, home to small-town entrepreneurs and struggling, often insolvent farmers.
After graduating from Illinois College, Bryan studied law in Chicago, where for the first time he saw the human damage wrought in the nexus of graft and industrialism. Though scandalized by the poverty and corruption, Bryan seems to have had little interest in the new metropolitan culture of ethnic and religious diversity. After passing the bar exam, he set up a practice in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he spent much of his time collecting debts that farmers owed to their corn suppliers. (When Bryan later excoriated the cruelty of "the money power," he spoke from guilty experience.) He also married Mary Baird, a steely and intelligent woman who learned German to read political economy. (Was Das Kapital on the list, I hope?)
Nebraska Democrats were led by their home-grown Bourbons, who combined fiscal conservatism with an aversion to "moral crusades" such as prohibition and redistribution of wealth. (Their ideological descendants are "fiscally responsible," pro-choice Democrats—that is, junior-varsity Republicans.) Against the Bourbons stood a younger legion of jacobins, firebrands for farmers, railroad workers, and small businessmen. Having shoveled manure for Bourbon creditors, Bryan, eager to lose his publican stench, aligned himself with the insurgents, and found therein his political salvation. Elected to the House of Representatives in 1890, Bryan soon became a national figure, bearing the banner of righteous resistance to Wall Street and "the plutocracy."
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