Bryan and House: Political Leaders of the Progressive Era

Abstract

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