After delivering one speech, he told his wife, “Last night I found that I had a power over the audience. While many rallied to the Populist cause, Bryan worked from within the Democratic Party, using the strength of his oratory. When economic depressions struck the Midwest in the late 1880s, despairing farmers faced low crop prices and found few politicians on their side. Bryan would later win recognition as one of the greatest speakers in American history. After his marriage to Mary Baird in Illinois, Bryan and his young family relocated to Nebraska, where he won a reputation among the state’s Democratic Party leaders as an extraordinary orator. At twenty, he attended Union Law College in Chicago and passed the bar shortly thereafter. Wikimedia.īryan was born in Salem, Illinois, in 1860 to a devout family with a strong passion for law, politics, and public speaking. Artist’s conception of William Jennings Bryan after the Cross of Gold speech, 1900.
Bryan’s Cross of Gold speech at 1896 Democratic National Convention, which he concluded with the fiery statement that “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold,” secured him the Democratic nomination for President in 1896. With the country in financial chaos after the Panic of 1893, William Jennings Bryan arose as a political star when he advocated bimetallism – the acceptance of both gold and silver as legal tender.