This was simply a well-written, intelligent review. THIS is the type of article Salon should be writing.

Brilliant review, finely crafted and right on the mark about Bryan and American populism.

Interesting review, but sounds like Mencken was right all along.

A great review by O'Hehir ruined by one line.

"And given the popular view that the Jews had killed Christ, and the fact that the biggest international bankers, many of them Jewish, were among Bryan's targets, wasn't there, at the very least, a troubling potential subtext here?"

I don't know how to respond or debunk this, so I'll just refer to the maxim that any phrase that begins with "given . . ." is usually propaganda.

Some nice points in the review, but saying that Bryan's populism led to anti-intellectualism in American politics is patently ridiculous. American politics in the late 19th century was a cesspool of moneyed interests and corruption, not some intellectual debating society, and this gave a lot of force to Bryan's critiques. O'Hehir's review often sounds like those sniffy liberals who criticized (and now criticize) Bryan, and who cannot find a way to connect the beliefs and values of working people to a political program, leaving them to be taken up by right-wing politicians. Religious populism, and the racism of Bryan's day, need to be sharply criticized, but the desire to strip all values and passion out of politics in favor of some alleged "intellectualism" simply means that liberals (then and now) will continue to lose elections.

macheath32,

Bryant was full of passion and "values" and he lost repeatedly. Being intelletual and having "passion and values" are not the mutually exclusive groups you seem to think they are. I didn't see any argument in the article that these things should be removed or that one must be trumpeted at the expense of the other.

Bringing Bryan back 'alive' is about as difficult as bringing Lindsay back as a 'modern' poet; his appeal is really that of a proto-SlamPoet: he performed his poems in-the-round, just like they do; how long will it take for them to 'rediscover' him?

...who was shoved out of the State Department by Wilson just in time, before he could muck things up for us in World War I.

"muck things up for us" how? We never should have been in that war in the first place.

O'Hehir's opening statement: "McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist; Taft was enormously fat. Who among us knows, or cares to know, more than that?" Left me cold and shaking my head.

"Fat" bigotry in this country is costing the enjoyment of life, social acceptance and respect, even lives of thousands of Americans every year. Yet even a magazine as liberal and as staunch a fighter of bigotry has succumb to this very popular prejudice. Before you say that it is different because "Fat" is an indication of "character" you should read some of the New England Journal Of Medicine’s articles on this miss-conception. Approximately 95% of all diets fail and they still do not know why. The medical community is just beginning to understand the complex nature of the human metabolism and weight gain. Yes over eating will cause you to gain weight, but if it is just over eating that is causing that, then dieting works. I believe that these people represent the 5% success rate mentioned in the Journal of Medicine (not counting severe psychological problems with no underlying medical conditions).

In my four decades of researching and personally dealing with this issue, I can say that simply reducing calories and exorcising is not the issue. I began to gain weight when I hit puberty, as all the women in my family do. At the time I was training as a dancer (dancing for several hours a day), hardly ate, sometimes starving, yet remained over weight by 10 to 15 pounds. When I was forced to stop dancing due to a medical condition my weight increased no matter what I did. It took the medical community to over 20 years to diagnose and treat my failing thyroid (an auto-immune disease) even though I presented a small goiter and classic symptoms most of my life. I now have multiple auto-immune diseases, many that affect my metabolic system, YET the medical community still looks at my FAT, clucks their collective tongues and treat the FAT, not the person that I am, nor my complex metabolic disorders as a whole.

To give you a picture of how invasive this cultural disgust with FAT is, a study found that a large portion of the medical community found it hard to treat FAT people, many not wanting to touch FAT patients because their weight so grossed them out. Imagine, nurses and doctors who face horrible situations, ones that the ordinary people would be naturally grossed out over, YET touch a FAT patient in order to treat them, no that is apparently the limit for many doctors and nurses. Try being FAT and getting decent medical treatment with that prevailing attitude in this country. I have and it is not easy nor pleasant. I must fight and demand fair treatment, even when I was hospitalized with pneumonia and my FAT was being used as the explanation as to why I was sick. Not the fact that I am a severe asthmatic (auto-immune type of asthma) and I had just had a very potent virus that filled my lungs with liquid. No, I was told by the attending doctor that is was my FAT that had got me there. In other words it was apparent to him that I was a sloth even though I was at the time swimming a mile a week and eating a balanced diet. This was not an exception to the rule, it is par for the course in what I have to fight for on a regular basis.

FAT bigotry is supported in this society and is made legitimate by a medical community that will not admit they do not understand it. Their so called medical pronouncements are waived by those practicing FAT bigotry as justification for their nasty behavior in just the same manner as 19th and early 20th century bigots waived so called scientific and anthropological pronouncements that whites are the superior race to justify their abhorrent behavior.

Lilith De' Anu