SOURCE: “Bryan and Wilsonian Caribbean Penetration,” in The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. XX, No. 2, May, 1940, pp. 198-226.

In the following essay, Adler examines Bryan's role in American expansion into the Caribbean.

The rehabilitation of William Jennings Bryan is a marked example of the influence of the New Deal Zeitgeist on American historiography. When the Commoner died in the midst of the golden twenties, only a remnant of the Bryan wing of the Democratic party still took Bryanism seriously. Free silver, government ownership of railroads, and Philippine independence were, along with Bryan's memory, treated with scant courtesy and much cynicism. In the middle thirties the shape of domestic and world events resulted in a new evaluation of the Commoner which is still popular. With the recrudescence of the silver question, the Tydings-McDuffie Act, the Neutrality Law of 1937, and the general assault on “economic royalists,” Bryanism began to look...