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Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses.… Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.
--
Memorial by H. L. Mencken in the Baltimore Evening Sun (27 July 1925)

 

William Jennings Bryan

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It is the national custom to sentimentalize the dead, as it is to sentimentalize men about to be hanged. Perhaps I fall into that weakness here. The Bryan I shall remember is the Bryan of his last weeks on earth -- broken, furious, and infinitely pathetic. It was impossible to meet his hatred with hatred to match it. He was winning a battle that would make him forever infamous wherever enlightened men remembered it and him. Even his old enemy, Darrow, was gentle with him at the end. That cross-examination might have been ten times as devastating. It was plain to everyone that the old Berseker Bryan was gone -- that all that remained of him was a pair of glaring and horrible eyes.
But what of his life? Did he accomplish any useful thing? Was he, in his day, of any dignity as a man, and of any value to his fellow-men? I doubt it. Bryan, at his best, was simply a magnificent job-seeker. The issues that he bawled about usually meant nothing to him. He was ready to abandon them whenever he could make votes by doing so, and to take up new ones at a moment's notice. For years he evaded Prohibition as dangerous; then he embraced it as profitable. At the Democratic National Convention last year he was on both sides, and distrusted by both. In his last great battle there was only a baleful and ridiculous malignancy. If he was pathetic, he was also disgusting.
Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.

 

H. L. Mencken

 

I was truly sorry for Mr. Bryan. But I consoled myself by thinking of the years through which he had busied himself tormenting intelligent professors with impudent questions about their faith, and seeking to arouse the ignoramuses and bigots to drive them out of their positions.

 

Clarence Darrow

 

"Dear LiveJournal (Sent to its parent company, Six Apart, in SF,CA):
For weeks, I have repeatedly asked the person in your San Francisco office to have a lawyer representing your company regarding the above to contact me. He refuses to help. He has repeatedly said the Abuse Department will contact me. It has all been a falsehood by this employee of yours.
Please be advised that I presently intend to proceed against your company not only for its direct role in the publishing of false and defamatory material about me at www.gamepolitics.com but also for your company's willing and knowing participation in this ongoing tortious activity.
Not only are you doing this, but your company is also assisting GamePolitics from letting me correct the actionable lies at its site by assisting GamePolitics in blocking my posts through LiveJournal.
I have had enough. Either have your lawyers contact me immediately, or I shall proceed.
Jack Thompson
PS: Dennis McCauley, you were warned, sweetie

 

Jack Thompson

 

The development of science has produced an industrial revolution which has brought different peoples in such close contact with one another through colonization and commerce that no matter how some nations may still look down upon others, no country can harbor the illusion that its career is decided wholly within itself.

 

John Dewey

 

The poor yield to the rich, the common people to the upper ten, the servants to their masters, the ignorant to the scholars; but there is nobody who does not imagine that he is really better than others.

 

John Calvin