Careful where you aim that historical allusion

This week for my US History II students I’ve been preparing an annotated copy of William Jennings Bryan’s 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech. Giving the text of Bryan’s speech the kind of close scrutiny required to plop explanatory notes into it has brought two things to mind.

First, whether teaching Andrew Jackson, Bryan, or later populists, I emphasize to my students that populism is an attitude or style, not a set of policy prescriptions. Read “The Cross of Gold” closely and yeah, it’s true. The style, posture, or rhetorical mode of populist movements really never changes. But that’s a blog post of its own for… some other time. Probably never.

Second, Bryan, despite being a “Great Commoner,” was a learned man and could count on his audience to pick up a lot of literary, biblical, and historical allusions. Their density in this six-page speech is remarkable—just based on the notes I added to the text, I count three biblical allusions, two to modern French history, three to American history, and one each to Roman and medieval history. His use of these allusions can be pretty sophisticated, as when he suggests that coastal elites (see point one above) not only feel scorn for the poor but also nurse a blasphemous pride by putting the words of Proverbs 1:26 into their mouths.

But not all of these allusions do the work that Bryan seems to think they’re doing. Two in particular stand out.

Early in the speech, in describing the groundswell of populist support for policies like bimetallism and a federal income tax in the months leading up to the Democratic convention, Bryan says that the Populists “began the conflict with a zeal approaching the zeal which inspired the crusaders who followed Peter the Hermit.”

Peter did attract a surprising amount of enthusiastic support through his preaching in 1095, but his ramshackle following made it only as far as Anatolia before they met a smaller but better organized Seljuq army and were slaughtered.

Then again, maybe popular enthusiasm leading to an unsustainable movement that ends in disaster might actually be a good metaphor for the 1890s Populist Party. Not what Bryan was going for, though.

The other allusion comes in Bryan’s admittedly stirring call to defend the common people from the financial rapine of the elites. After invoking Andrew Jackson as a model, Bryan borrows a comparison from an old speech by Thomas Hart Benton, a comparison guaranteed to get my attention:

If you will read what Thomas Benton said, you will find that he said that in searching history he could find but one parallel to Andrew Jackson. That was Cicero, who destroyed the conspiracies of Cataline [sic] and saved Rome. He did for Rome what Jackson did when he destroyed the bank conspiracy and saved America.

As always, I hesitate to entertain a hypothetical, but I doubt Cicero would be flattered.

As with the earlier invocation of amateur crusading zeal, this comparison does work on a superficial level. Cicero was a novus homo, a new man, a commoner risen to senatorial rank and even the office of consul, and Catiline was a corrupt aristocrat. That’s pretty easily mapped onto American populist prejudices, especially since Cicero was able to detect and defeat Catiline’s conspiracy and preserve the Republic—something Cicero never let anyone forget. But…

Cicero also steadfastly opposed the political machinations of other demagogues who made recognizably populist appeals: Clodius early on and, later, Julius Caesar, godlike champion of the Populares. Cicero’s moderation and constitutionalism, Caesar’s resemblance to Andrew Jackson—a beloved general using his success and his popularity with the masses to flout the constitutional limits placed upon him—and Cicero’s eventual murder at the hands of Caesar’s loyal lieutenant Mark Antony not only complicate Bryan’s comparison but more or less rubbish it. If you know more than Bryan uses to make his point, that is.

A final example. This allusion to modern history would turn out, within months, to be grimly ironic:

Mr. McKinley was the most popular man among the Republicans; and everybody three months ago in the Republican Party prophesied his election. How is it today? Why, that man who used to boast that he looked like Napoleon, that man shudders today when he thinks that he was nominated on the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. Not only that, but as he listens he can hear with ever increasing distinctness the sound of the waves as they beat upon the lonely shores of St. Helena.

This is, I believe, known popularly as “asking for it.”

Historical allusions are useful, of course, but be sure to think them through. A point worth considering ourselves, since Bryan is often invoked now as a sloppy, imprecise parallel to certain present-day leaders.