A review by samle1e
A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan by Michael Kazin

4.0

I devoured the first third of this biography, which describes Bryan's rise as a progressive hero nicknamed The Great Commoner. He was a bit more Trump in style and less Bernie than I expected--he spoke a lot about the tyranny of the elites. The second third lags while he loses campaign after campaign. In the last part, I ended up liking him more than I expected as the Scopes prosecutor. He opposed teaching evolution to encourage virtue, not necessarily to discourage science, and Kazin makes a good point about how Bryan could have saved his reputation by arguing more about the perils of social Darwinism.