SOURCE: “The Christian Statesman,” in Odell Shepard: Essays of 1925, Edwin Valentine Mitchell, 1926, pp. 77-104.

In the following essay, originally published in the American Mercury magazine in 1924, Masters discusses the political climate in the United States during Bryan's career and Bryan's development of his Christian platform in response.

With a triumphant centralization, and with the robber tariff and banks of issue, arose the Grangers, the Greenbackers and other sharked-up resolutes, bent on restoring justice in the land. These rebels against the established order were idealists, dreamers, cranks; but they were also brave and good men, men of ideas and insight. Some of them were fanatics; a preoccupying idea which never becomes an act turns some minds to the fantastic or evil behavior of the knight errant. The Civil War had laid the Democratic party flat, but the two administrations of Grant, both within a decade of its close, were...