William Jennings Bryan: Moral Crusader and Pacifist

Remembered only as a precursor of the Religious Right, he was actually one of the closely radical mainstream politicians of his age, and three times the Democratic nominee for President. do Secretary of State when Woodrow Wilson finally won the Presidency for the Democrats in the 1912 election, William Jennings Bryan held that office through the critical months before and after the outbreak of World War One. The war was a heartbreak for Bryan, a dedicated pacifist who deeply believed that war was obsolete as well as immoral. In the end, America's drift towards war against Germany direct to his re signaliseation.

From that point many authors begin the final phase of Bryan's career,1 in which he slowly drifted towards the edge of American public life. His kick upstairs as Secretary of State was thus a acerb experience for him, a deep blow to his ideals. To us, it is likely to bug out deeply contradictory: Bryan, the antiimperialist idealist, was highly accustomed to U.S. military interventions in Latin America. Yet in conflicting as in domestic insurance, Bryan was in many shipway ahead of his time.

Woodrow Wilson was himself an idealist among statesmen, but he did non mention Bryan as Secretary of State with the intent of launching a moral crusade. The appointment was in fact thoroughly political.2 Bryan was a leader of a wing of the Democratic Party, and a sometime(prenominal) rival of Wilson. Giving him the highest post of the Cabinet wa

Coletta, Paolo E. William Jennings Bryan. v. 2. Progressive Politician and Moral Statesman: 19091915. capital of Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1969.

On racial issues, however, party relationships were different. The Democrats were the party of the segregationist South, and they had no difficulty in supporting "states' rights" when it came to state laws enforce discrimination. This would prove to be significant in the shaping of U.S. policy towards Japan.3

The affirmative side of his Latin American policy was something else again, however.

Bryan's overall pacifism and his rejection of econonic neoimperialism in Latin America did not lead him, as we might expect, to noninterventionism in the region. Instead, he became the counselor-at-law of moral reform in Latin America, imposed if neediness by at the point of U.S. Marine bayonets. He proposed reservation Nicaragua a U.S. protectorate.11 He interfered with politics in the Dominican Republic, bountiful heavyhanded assurances of support to an elected president, Jose Bordas Valdez, who showed every sign of establishing himself as a presidentforlife.12 Eventually the U.S. was forced to give in in Bordas' overthrow.

When Bryan came into office in 1913, the items he found on top of his desk were relations with Japan and with Central America. The cause of list with Japan was a difference over some internationalist issue, but the domestic American politics of immigration and racism. Nipponese immigrants were not welcome in West Coast states. In California, Progressive Governor Hiram Johnson signed legislation restricting Nipponese immigrants from owning land. All of these discriminatory measures were deeply resented in Japan, and naturally they were strenuously objected to by the Japanese government.

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