Opinion of William Jennings Bryan

[Chunk Yogurt for President!]

Basically the most high energy presidential nominee in history.  Had a some odd ideas but overall FF.

[morgankingsley]

Regardless of what you may feel on his views, this man had the stamina of superman and a really captivating charisma so as a result I give him an FF rating

[Orser67]

FF. I don't agree with all of his views, but he had a major role in pushing American politics to the left in the era after the Gilded Age.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Dont care much about Dixiecrats

[Chunk Yogurt for President!]

Dont care much about Dixiecrats

Would you have voted for McKinley.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Dont care much about Dixiecrats

Would you have voted for McKinley.

Yes, he was conservative but McKenna wasnt a hard right conservative on the Crts, and Teddy Roosevelt was his Veep

[LAKISYLVANIA]

ultra massive FF. Best nominee Dems ever had, except for hopefully Sanders (and maybe FDR).

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

A good man, but I think his role in history - the saving of the Democratic Party from irrelevance by allowing the Populist Party to become its subordinate - was retrograde. The rise of the Democratic Party as a force beyond the south and the odd local machines was really bad (not to sound like Dinesh D'Souza), because it simply allowed a bigger platform to segregationists in the federal government. The party should have been left to wither after the Cleveland disaster so an actually left force could have emerged.

[Orser67]

A good man, but I think his role in history - the saving of the Democratic Party from irrelevance by allowing the Populist Party to become its subordinate - was retrograde. The rise of the Democratic Party as a force beyond the south and the odd local machines was really bad (not to sound like Dinesh D'Souza), because it simply allowed a bigger platform to segregationists in the federal government. The party should have been left to wither after the Cleveland disaster so an actually left force could have emerged.

That's a fair point about empowering segregationists, and WJB certainly doesn't have a good civil rights record on a personal level, either. With that said, I'm not sure if it was truly inevitable that we'd see the rise of a left wing party, or that left wing reforms could have been implemented without at least some support from the South.

I'd also note that, even after his presidential campaigns, WJB played a role in pushing his party to the left on economic issues, e.g. support for a minimum wage and an 8-hour day.

[Santander]

Dont care much about Dixiecrats

Would you have voted for McKinley.

McKinley was one of the better Republican Presidents.

[Chunk Yogurt for President!]

Dont care much about Dixiecrats

Would you have voted for McKinley.

McKinley was one of the better Republican Presidents.

He was decent, apparently a nice person IRL.

[Starry Eyed Jagaloon]

Massive HP

[The Mikado]

How could I dislike the founder of the anti-Imperialist League, a staunch opponent of the brutal conquest of the Philippines and of America participating in the Boxer war, who was willing to be honest enough about these stances that he centered his 1900 campaign around them?

[darklordoftech]

The Bernie Sanders of his day (with “Bourbon Democrats” being the “neoliberals” of his day). FF.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

A good man, but I think his role in history - the saving of the Democratic Party from irrelevance by allowing the Populist Party to become its subordinate - was retrograde. The rise of the Democratic Party as a force beyond the south and the odd local machines was really bad (not to sound like Dinesh D'Souza), because it simply allowed a bigger platform to segregationists in the federal government. The party should have been left to wither after the Cleveland disaster so an actually left force could have emerged.

That's a fair point about empowering segregationists, and WJB certainly doesn't have a good civil rights record on a personal level, either. With that said, I'm not sure if it was truly inevitable that we'd see the rise of a left wing party, or that left wing reforms could have been implemented without at least some support from the South.

Well, I don't really want to go in to historical what-ifs: but there was actually a non-racialized political party emerging in the Deep South - the aforementioned Populists. Although they are often seen as a purely western based group, they had substantial strength in the South -  in 1892, the Populists got very healthy results in Alabama especially, but also got double digits in several other Solid South states based largely on sharecroppers. Populist cadre were hated by local Democratic bigwigs, who noticed their attempts to integrate their ranks and reject racial hatred; they were among the major targets of the KKK and other racist militias. In other words, the effective truce between the Populist and Democratic national leaderships that came about in 1896 effectively sold all the Southern Populists out to their oppressors in a year they could very well have done well in. Just a few weeks after they signed the sordid "fusion" deal, another filthy decision was made in Plessy vs Ferguson and Jim Crow would be institutionalized throughout the South with no remaining opposition: can it be a coincidence that the death of the Populists was accompanied by a codification of Jim Crow across the entire region?

And for what? WJB and the Populist leadership that was inclined towards "fusionism" had become obsessed with free silver, a policy that was both kind of dumb and that would have hurt huge swathes of the urban working class but also weirdly insubstantial given the broader challenges of the late 19th century (and indeed the more explicit leftist nature of the 1892 Populist manifesto). That would just be a weird anachronism in a few years, as did Bryan himself, who became more and more religious and odd, culminating in him being cucked so hard by Clarence Darrow he literally died.

[Storebought]

I was about to write something about the consequences of Bryan's wish to revive a bimetallic standard, but that is less important than the documented intense violent racism the Populist movement he and Ben Tillman created. That cannot be wished away by any kind of claim of "economic populism!" Total HP