NEXT Monday the 2008 Democratic National Convention assembles in Denver, Colorado, to nominate the party's candidates for president and vice-president of the United States. With suspense confined to Barack Obama's choice of running mate, the convention is primarily an occasion for hoopla, self-congratulation and 21st-century political marketing - as much trade show as political event, writes Kevin Stevens.
The national convention has returned to Denver for the first time since 1908, when the nomination went to lawyer and politician William Jennings Bryan. Irish in descent, Bryan was a dominating political figure, a prominent populist and a splendid orator. He was also a friend of my grandfather, Charles Stevens.
Bryan and Stevens met in Chicago in the 1890s and maintained a lifelong friendship. Both grew up in small towns in Illinois; both were teetotallers, Presbyterians and staunch Democrats. Having lost two presidential bids to the Republican William McKinley in 1896 and 1900, Bryan thought carefully about running in 1908. On a fishing trip in Montana the previous summer, my grandfather encouraged him, certain he would be third time lucky.
A century ago, nominating conventions were very different — all-white-male affairs marked by political intrigue and back-room brokering between candidates, political bosses and delegates. With no state primaries to secure delegates prior to the event, winning a nomination involved intensive negotiations and many rounds of voting. Oratory was a critical skill. In the highly volatile convention atmosphere of horse-trading and multiple ballots, a candidate's fortune often turned on the right speech at the right moment.
Bryan, who was an electrifying speaker, had delivered such an address at the Democratic convention of 1896. Called "The Great Commoner" because of his faith in the goodness of common people, Bryan was an ardent opponent of the gold standard, which pegged the value of the US dollar to a fixed weight of gold. Freeing the dollar from the gold standard, Bryan believed, would increase the amount of money in circulation and help cash-poor and debt-burdened farmers and labourers. His convention speech crystallised populist sentiment, and his concluding line - "You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!" - became one of the most famous quotes in US political history.
Bryan was the first presidential candidate to travel across the nation and meet voters in person. In the 19th century, it had been considered undignified for candidates to travel widely before an election. Bryan toured by train from town to town, drawing huge crowds in that pre-radio era and delivering as many as a dozen one-hour speeches a day.
By 1908, however, running against President Theodore Roosevelt's hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, Bryan's political capital was long spent. Drawing attention to his record of failure, Republicans featured the slogan: "Vote for Taft now - you can vote for Bryan anytime". Despite running a vigorous campaign against big money and the eastern business elite, Bryan suffered his worst defeat in three presidential campaigns, losing in the electoral college by a ratio of two to one.
Though he would never again run for political office, Bryan remained a powerful force in American politics, serving as Secretary of State from 1912 to 1915, and throwing his considerable energy into the campaign to ban the sale and consumption of alcohol, which succeeded in 1918 with the passing of the 18th Amendment.
But the most notable feature of Bryan's later years was his move towards Christian fundamentalism. He lectured throughout the country on a range of socio-religious themes, including the dangers of drink, gambling and Darwinism - which, he argued, represented "man reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate — the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak".
He advocated banning the teaching of evolution in church-run universities. In 1925, he headed the prosecution team at the Scopes "Monkey Trial", at which Tennessee teacher John Scopes was tried for teaching evolution. Earlier that year, the Tennessee legislature had passed a law forbidding the teaching in public schools of "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible".
Hugely publicised, the trial became a battleground for the debate between science and religion and something of a media circus. Trained chimpanzees performed on the courthouse lawn. More than 200 reporters from all over the world descended on the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, and Chicago's WGN radio station provided the world's first live coverage of a criminal trial.
Inevitably, perhaps, the jury took only nine minutes to deliberate, found Scopes guilty, and ordered him to pay a $100 fine. Bryan, who died five days after the trial ended, became the butt of jokes in the media and attracted the venom of the greatest satirist of the age, H.L. Mencken, who called him "a quack pure and unadulterated."
However, unlike Mencken, an elitist who defined democracy as "the worship of jackals by jackasses", Bryan maintained to the end his faith in the common people. And as the quintessential Middle American, he is a sound illustration of the populist strain in American culture - democratic, religious, optimistic, some would say naïve - which remains an important part of the national character and continues to play a big role in US politics.