Perish From the Earth• Invokes the memory of Abraham Lincoln by

paraphrasing the Gettysburg Address – Situates the Great War in continuity with

what Lincoln had called “that great unfinished work,” calling upon the political and moral authority of the martyr-President whose stature had only increased since his death.

• Alludes to Job 18 and Jeremiah 10, with the implication that national ruin would follow deviation from the nation’s divine charge – Invokes the double authority of the Bible

and Lincoln himself • Equates the United States with the

principles of democratic government, meaning that if one fails, the other cannot be long for the earth. (231-32)

2

War’s End• Wilson: Versailles Treaty produced “by the hand of God”

– Boston, 1919: Europeans saw Americans fought not for themselves or even for national benefit but for the ideals of human freedom and liberty, which at last “converted Europe to believe in us”

– “They raised their eyes to heaven, when they saw men in khaki coming across the sea in the spirit of crusaders.”

• “Men have testified to me in Europe that our men were possessed by something that they could only call a religious fervor. They were not like any of the other soldiers. They had a vision, they had a dream, and fighting in the dream they turned the whole tide of battle and it never came back”– A religious war for political goals (where’s God?)– Americans exceptional, sacralized by their particular relationship to

their ideals, (previously described as serving a kind of mediating role between America and its God). They don’t fight for the dream, they fight in it, in a kind of religious exaltation (234-35)

3

Memorial Day 1919• “American soldiers, whose “like has not been seen

since the far days of the Crusades” – “had a touch of the high spirit of religion, that they knew

that they were exhibiting a spiritual as well as a physical might, and those of us who know and love America know that they were discovering to the whole world the true spirit and devotion of their motherland.”

• Spiritual obligations of Americans are not concluded by the end of hostilities; rather, the blood of martyred soldiers presents the nation with new obligations – “it is our privilege and our high duty to consecrate

ourselves afresh on a day like this to the objects for which they fought”(237-238)

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• “These men have given their lives in order that the world might be united.”– Speaking in the voice of the dead soldiers, asks all

Americans to “make yourselves soldiers now, once and for all, in this common cause” of supporting the spread of democracy and thus the League.”

• July 1919: “The stage is set, the destiny is disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who led us into this way… It was of this that we dreamed at our birth. America shall in truth show the way” (238-39)

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Pueblo, CO 1919• Disgusted with politics, Wilson goes directly to the people• “Mothers who lost their sons in France have come to me and,

taking my hand, have shed tears upon it not only, but they have added, "God bless you, Mr. President!’ – Why, my fellow citizens, should they pray God to bless me?”

• Because they believe that their boys died for something that vastly transcends any of the immediate and palpable objects of the war. They believe and they rightly believe, that their sons saved the liberty of the world. … These men were crusaders. – They were not going forth to prove the might of the United States.

They were going forth to prove the might of justice and right, and all the world accepted them as crusaders, and their transcendent achievement has made all the world believe in America as it believes in no other nation organized in the modern world. (242-243)

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Why did civil religious effort to build support for the League fail?

• Like much propaganda of the First World War, it was badly undercut by the news of the reality of combat that came home with returning soldiers

• Core to the civil religious tradition is the idea of American exceptionalism, the belief that the United States is set apart from other nations by its very nature. – How can it be exceptional if it is bound to act as an equal in an

international league?• Wilson had throughout the war depicted the opponents of

his vision of American mission in terms of religious evil. – How could he compromise with political opponents in the

service of evil?

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William Jennings Bryan• 1860-1925• Lawyer• Populist orator, the Great Commoner

– Spoke for the rural people of the midwest & west, massively popular

• Democratic presidential nominee 1896, 1900 and 1908

• Peace activist & anti-imperialist• Wilson’s Secretary of State• Scopes Trial

• Bryan vs. Clarence Darrow• Equality, missionary, outside (inside)

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Bryan• Subjected political issues to a two-criteria test:

– Whether they were compatible with the tenets of Christianity as he understood them

– How they would affect the masses of the American people. • 2 criteria of judgment were almost always collapsed, as Bryan understood

the laboring masses to be deeply and piously Christian (not to mention Christ-like), and for a thing to benefit or be approved of by the masses was functionally to have that thing be approved by the tenets of Christianity. – Identifying the perspective of the Midwestern and Southern agricultural

communities with the civil religious good provides a critical standard that could be used to judge national and international political practice

– but could not be used to criticize the practices of the rural majority itself • Legitimates racism

• American people good by definition, made moral by their Christian virtue and made instinctively democratic through Christian fraternal love. – All political questions were ultimately moral, and all moral questions were

ultimately religious. (245)

9

Bryan• Like O’Sullivan believed God’s will to be comprehensible by mortal men,

and saw the United States as divinely obligated to spread democratic institutions across the globe. – Opponents of his conception of democracy as agents of religious evil.

• Like Lincoln & Wilson, believed that the moral wellbeing of the individual and of the American polity were intimately interdependent. – The faithful community makes possible individual salvation, and when the

individual embraces the faith of the community, he in turn expands and strengthens it.

• Equality as the reduction of suffering and the uplifting of the humble. – Grounds opposition to colonialism & commitment to redistribution

• Goodness & truth always win– “One with God shall chase a thousand and two, put ten thousand to flight” – Thus, majority consensus can be understood as the recognition of truth

10

Bryan• Every Democrat “who knows what democracy means—it is

a religion, and when you hear a good democratic speech it is so much like a sermon that you can hardly tell the difference between them.” – Like a sermon, a democratic speech is built on “the

commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself… and a good democratic speech is built upon the doctrine of human brotherhood, equal rights and self-government”

• Grounds Bryan’s advocacy of social reform at home and opposition to imperialism abroad. – Democracy is only the political expression of Christianity, as

when “you get down to bed rock you find that the love of mankind is the basis of both, and democracy can never die as long as there is in democracy a love of mankind.” (260-61)

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Cross of Gold• The money question: should the dollar be backed by gold or by

silver?– Major issue in late-19th C. American politics

• Gold: stable, “Sound Money”– Backed by the banks, industry, landlords

• Silver: inflationary, “Free Silver”– Backed by debtors, farmers, workers

• Themes of the ‘Cross of Gold’ speech– Equality– The people = farmers, laborers– The State should serve & protect the people– America belongs to the common people, not to elites– Major business interests are capturing the government

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Cross of Gold• I would be presumptuous, indeed, to present myself

against the distinguished gentlemen to whom you have listened if this were a mere measuring of abilities; but this is not a contest between persons. The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. I come to speak to you in defence of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty—the cause of humanity.– The cause of the masses is the cause of all human beings– Moral righteousness above all

13

Cross of Gold• “With a zeal approaching the zeal which inspired the crusaders who

followed Peter the Hermit, our silver Democrats went forth from victory unto victory until they are now assembled, not to discuss, not to debate, but to enter up the judgment already rendered by the plain people of this country. In this contest brother has been arrayed against brother, father against son. – The warmest ties of love, acquaintance, and association have been

disregarded; old leaders have been cast aside when they have refused to give expression to the sentiments of those whom they would lead, and new leaders have sprung up to give direction to this cause of truth. Thus has the contest been waged, and we have assembled here under as binding and solemn instructions as were ever imposed upon representatives of the people.”

• Crusade, believers vs. unbelievers

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• We do not come as individuals. As individuals we might have been glad to compliment the gentleman from New York [Senator Hill], but we know that the people for whom we speak would never be willing to put him in a position where he could thwart the will of the Democratic party. I say it was not a question of persons; it was a question of principle, and it is not with gladness, my friends, that we find ourselves brought into conflict with those who are now arrayed on the other side.– A conflict not over policy, but between good & evil

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Cross of Gold• “We object to bringing this question down to the level of

persons. The individual is but an atom; he is born, he acts, he dies; but principles are eternal; and this has been a contest over a principle.”– A matter of ideals, which are more important than even life

• Equality– To the charge that silver will disrupt business, “We say to you

that you have made the definition of a business man too limited in its application. The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer; the attorney in a country town is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis”

• Power in language

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Cross of Gold• To whom does America belong? To "the idle holders of idle capital”

or to "the struggling masses, who produce the wealth and pay the taxes of the country”?– What is here the appropriate role of government intervention? On

whose behalf should it act? To whom does it belong?• “There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe

that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”– for Bryan that the state should act to preserve and protect those who

are the most numerous and at the same time most vulnerable.

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Cross of Gold• “You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in

favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”

• The rural people are the base of the American way of life– Morally– Economically

• The producer of wealth seen as prior to the aggregator of wealth• A matter of justice

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Cross of Gold• Our ancestors, when but three millions in number, had

the courage to declare their political independence of every other nation; shall we, their descendants, when we have grown to seventy millions, declare that we are less independent than our forefathers? [...]– Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and

the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

• What is called to mind by this imagery?

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Prohibition• Liquor interests: “the most unpatriotic and conscienceless group

[that the United States] has ever known,” now stood revealed to him as a pressing threat to democratic practice – Agrarian virtue both the foundation and guarantor of democratic

practice, is due to the structural differences between city and country life, and any potential corruption of the agrarian citizen would be a corruption of the American polity

• Drink a sin because it corrupts both the individual and the polity. Beyond reinforcing yet another anti-democratic interest, it produced in the individual mental and physical degradation – “There is only one side of a moral issue, and that is the moral side”– To corrupt the people is to undermine democracy

20

Prohibition• Democrats also the party of urban workers and European

immigrants, both of who oppose Prohibition• Urban-rural divide• Illinois

– 26 representatives, 9 (5 Republicans and 4 Democrats) voted “nay”.

– Eight of these are from Illinois congressional districts 1, 4, 5, 7, 8 and 9, which are all of the districts that include the Chicago area. The ninth is from district 21, which includes Springfield.

– 15 “aye” votes from Illinois (14 Republicans, 1 Democrat; two representatives, both Republicans, abstained) are from rural and small town areas of the state

• For Bryan, rural Americans are “the people”

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Scopes• Let me, in the first place, congratulate our cause that circumstances

have committed the trial to a community like this and entrusted the decision to a jury made up largely of the yeomanry of the state.– Virtue of the agrarian masses

• “This is not an interference with freedom of conscience. A teacher can think as he pleases and worship God as he likes, or refuse to worship God at all.”– Issue is not with the individual, but with his function as public servant

• The “state can direct what shall be taught and also forbid the teaching of anything ‘manifestly inimical to the public welfare.’”– What is the public welfare? Who decides?– How much influence should the community have over the education

of its children?

22

Scopes• Science has brought many useful & beneficial things to

modern life, and “Christianity welcomes truth from whatever source it comes, and is not afraid that any real truth from any source can interfere with the divine truth that comes by inspiration from God Himself.”– But: “Evolution is not truth; it is merely an hypothesis—it is

millions of guesses strung together.”• Bryan’s claim here rests on a misunderstanding of the

scientific term “theory”– A scientific theory is a hypothesis that has been tested many

times and has a large amount of evidence to support it• Functionally factual• Newton

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Separation of Church & State• The “evolutionary hypothesis, carried to its logical

conclusion, disputes every vital truth of the Bible. Its tendency, natural, if not inevitable, is to lead those who really accept it, first to agnosticism and then to atheism.– Darwin “drags man down to the brute level, and then, judging

man by brute standards, he questions whether man’s mind can be trusted to deal with God and immortality? How can any teacher tell his students that evolution does not tend to destroy his religious faith?”

• “Christians must, in every state of the Union, build their own colleges in which to teach Christianity; it is only simple justice that atheists, agnostics and unbelievers should build their own colleges if they want to teach their own religious views or attack the religious views of others.”

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Scopes• “Do bad doctrines corrupt the morals of students? We have a case in

point. Mr. Darrow, [and lead attorney for the defense] one of the most distinguished criminal lawyers in our land, was engaged about a year ago in defending two rich men’s sons who were on trial for as dastardly a murder as was ever committed.”

• Leopold & Loeb, 1924• Nathan Leopold had been an enthusiastic reader of Nietzsche, Beyond

Good and Evil– Darrow’s defense: “Is there any blame attached because somebody took

Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it?[..] Then who is to blame? The university would be more to blame than he is; the scholars of the world would be more to blame than he is. The publishers of the world are more to blame than he is. Your Honor, it is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university.”

• For Bryan, this exactly supports his argument that a belief in the atheistic dominance of the strongest leads to violence and depravity

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Scopes

• Darrow defense Richard Loeb: “I do not know what remote ancestor may have sent down the seed that corrupted him, and I do not know through how many ancestors it may have passed until it reached Dickey Loeb. All I know is, it is true, and there is not a biologist in the world who will not say I am right.”– Bryan: “That doctrine is as deadly as leprosy; it may

aid a lawyer in a criminal case, but it would, if generally adopted, destroy all sense of responsibiity [sic] and menace the morals of the world.”

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Scopes

• Evolution teaches that change can occur only over millions of years, stifling hopes for change today– “Its only program for man is scientific breeding, a

system under which a few supposedly superior intellects, self-appointed, would direct the mating and the movements of the mass of mankind—an impossible system!”

• Eugenics

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Scopes• Darwin: “The weak members of civilized society propagate

their kind [via vaccinations, asylums, poor laws]. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.”– “The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly

an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts”

• Bryan: “All of the sympathetic activities of civilized society are condemned because they enable “the weak members to propagate their kind.” Then he drags mankind down to the level of the brute and compares the freedom given to man unfavorably with the restraint that we put on barnyard beasts.”– Evolution erodes Christian pity & solidarity

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Scopes• Evolution, “if taken seriously and made the basis

of a philosophy of life, it would eliminate love and carry man back to a struggle of tooth and claw.”

• “What else can the spirit of evolution can account for the popularity of the selfish doctrine, ‘Each one for himself, and the devil take the hindmost,’ that threatens the very existence of the doctrine of brotherhood.”– Embracing evolution will not only enable capitalist

competition & exploitation, but legitimate it as morally good.

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Scopes• “In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war

more terrible than it ever was before.”– It has given us planes and submarines, “but science does not teach

brotherly love. Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future.

• If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene.”

• “The world needs a savior more than it ever did before.” (14)– The eroding of Christianity will unleash powers of exploitation and

destruction• “Again force and love meet face to face, and the question, “What

shall I do with Jesus?” must be answered.”

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