SOURCE: “America's Don Quixote (1920-1925),” in William Jennings Bryan: Champion of Democracy, Twayne Publishers, No. 2, 1987, pp. 175-203.

In the following essay, Ashby examines Bryan's career in the 1920s, a time of tumultuous change in American culture, economy, and politics, maintaining that Bryan remained more dedicated than ever to the ideals of democracy and rule by the people.

“The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” wrote novelist Willa Cather, a contemporary of William Jennings Bryan. Although her choice of the year 1922 was purely symbolic, she correctly sensed that American culture was undergoing a profoundly significant transformation, and she filled her fiction with sad tributes to the vanishing virtues of the Great Plains. Similarly, the hate and ugliness that followed the outbreak of war in 1914 had so disillusioned the famed Social Gospel minister Walter Rauschenbusch that he predicted sadly, “I cannot expect to be happy again in my lifetime...