Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 6:30 AM by Gene

Someone has written a sympathetic biography of William Jennings Bryan. Though his chief claim to history is as the first (and only) three-time losing Presidential candidate for a major party --twice to William McKinley, the Dick Cheney of his day -- we remember him now because some first-string NEWS HACK with a striking resemblance to Gene Kelly painted Bryan as the apotheosis of intolerance, hence we remember him as some fantastical kook from a stage and movie lecture called Inherit the Wind, who looks amazingly like Fredric March and dies a Boothian death in public he never died. The truth might be different:

Readers of "A Godly Hero" will also get a fresh perspective on the Scopes Trial. Bryan, who paid scant attention to theological controversies, was "not a fundamentalist." He "burned only and always to see religion heal the world."

There was much to fix: Social Darwinists of the Gilded Age had turned the naturalist's ideas about "the survival of the fittest" into a tool of class hierarchy. By the 1920s, eugenicists were hoping to harness evolution and purify the race by sterilizing the weak.

Kazin persuasively shows that Bryan's real crusade in Tennessee was not against free inquiry (he never opposed altogether the teaching of evolution), but against the enormous condescension of scientists who knew what was best for ordinary people - the same battle, in other words, that Bryan fought throughout his life.

But that's news hacks: nothing ever gets in their way of their desire to tell a good story -- THEIR story.

P. S. The first-string NEWS HACK largely kept his clattering typewriter shut about the Nazis as he shared their ethnicity.

(Corrected 1/29/2007 to correct a boneheaded mistake: I thought Spencer Tracy played THE VILLAIN.)