The great loser.

A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan, by Michael Kazin (Knopf, 400 pp., $30)

WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN has got to be the greatest loser in American political history. No other major-party nominee has run for president so many times, only to have lost each time by an increasing margin. The 1896 vote was somewhat close, but 1900 was less so and 1908 a trouncing. "We have beaten them to a fizzle," as Teddy Roosevelt put it. Perhaps this explains why there is so little mention of Bryan in a Democratic pantheon dominated by Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and LBJ. And yet, like Barry Goldwater, this loser led a successful grass-roots insurgency against his party establishment, caused that party to become aligned to a new set of ideas, and laid the groundwork for a major movement that would permanently alter the political landscape.

Still, Bryan's story is more complicated. Goldwater was affirmed within conservatism; Bryan ultimately met with rejection within his own movement. This makes his part in the development of modern liberalism all the more significant--and much more interesting.

In this fascinating new biography, Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin makes a compelling argument that Bryan "did more than any other man--between the fall of Grover Cleveland and the election of Woodrow Wilson--to transform his party from a bulwark of laissez-faire into the citadel of liberalism we identify with Franklin D. Roosevelt and his ideological descendants." Kazin's case is hard to dispute.

By the end of the 1880s, a divide already existed in the Democratic party--between the so-called Bourbon conservatives and a growing number of reformers. Bryan, the son of a staunch Jacksonian Democrat, came to side with the reformers. Shortly after Bryan moved from Illinois to Nebraska to practice law, his eloquence attracted the local party leaders just as the Populists (and their anti-big-business reforms) were becoming significant in state politics.

In 1890, Bryan became only the second Democratic congressman in Nebraska history. He was reelected, but instead of seeking a third term Bryan ran in (and won) a non-binding election for the Senate. The Republicans captured the legislature and appointed someone else.

Bryan embraced the key Populist ideas, but it was his advocacy of "free silver" (the policy of a bimetallic standard for currency rather than a unitary gold standard) that made him a national voice of reform and assured his first presidential nomination. It wasn't good economics, but made a winning political argument: Financial magnates ruled the country by controlling the money supply, and a silver standard would make currency cheaper and send more money back to the little guy. Bryan famously closed the deal with his dramatic "Cross of Gold" speech at the Democratic convention of 1896.

While losing a national realigning election to William McKinley that year, the Great Commoner traveled 18,000 miles and delivered some 600 speeches to 5 million people, attracting a tremendous and loyal following. In doing so, he popularized and mainstreamed ideas previously rejected out of hand by both political parties. "You are at this hour the hope of the Republic--the central figure of the civilized world," proclaimed Eugene Debs.

That was because free silver was the leading edge of a whole array of policies--regulation of corporations, tariff reform, an income tax, direct election of senators, an insurance fund to protect bank depositors--meant to advance social reform. In his 1900 campaign, Bryan emphasized the growing evil of trusts and attacked imperialism. In 1908 (after conservatives captured the Democratic nomination for one last time in 1904), Bryan ran as a full-throttle progressive reformer. While Theodore Roosevelt's popularity elected his chosen successor, William Howard Taft, Bryan effectively shifted the mantle of progressive reform to the Democratic party.

Significant signs of party revival were already evident by 1908, leading up to the Democratic congressional landslide in 1910. When the Republican party suffered the schism of TR's Bull Moose party in 1912, the door was opened for the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who won with Bryan's endorsement--and with fewer votes than Bryan had garnered in any of his previous defeats. Wilson made Bryan his secretary of state, only to have him resign in protest of Wilson's increasingly "belligerent" policies.

In capturing the party, Bryan led the Democrats in rejecting the limited-government approach of Andrew Jackson and moving toward a new sort of populism--one more committed to state intervention in behalf of "the people" and against predatory economic interests. The later success of this new-style liberalism would not have been possible without the working coalition forged between rural supporters and the new urban reform vote--a coalition made possible by Bryan's fusion of populism and progressivism.

Bryan himself was at once more radical and less revolutionary than the progressives. He, too, wanted to nationalize the railroads, legislate a living wage, and enact public financing of political campaigns. Bryan's philosophy was essentially statist: "The power of the government to protect the people is as complete in time of peace as in time of war. The only question to be decided is whether it is necessary to exercise that power." Too much for some progressives, this was perfectly compatible with the New Deal--Herbert Hoover once quipped that the New Deal was "Bryanism under new words and methods"--and with the liberalism of today.

It is significant, though, that Bryan was never enamored of the possibility of applying new scientific methods to politics in order to achieve "progress." (He was, for instance, an old-fashioned racist--as opposed to those who, like TR, espoused pseudo-scientific theories of race inferiority.) Bryan wanted to transform the old system into an instrument of the popular will and an agent of reform, but he didn't buy into the progressive theory (advocated by Wilson and Herbert Croly) of a dynamic, evolving state based on scientific knowledge and administrative bureaucracy.

The reason might have something to do with Bryan's lifelong animosity toward Darwinism, which became a crusade in the last part of his public life--and for which liberal historians have never forgiven him. Although Kazin tries to rehabilitate him by claiming he wasn't really a fundamentalist, Bryan was actually quite illiberal: He believed the Bible was unerring and that "there is nothing unreasonable about Christianity, and there is nothing unscientific about Christianity." He objected to teaching the theory of evolution. Indeed, he believed public schools should not be allowed to teach "atheism, agnosticism, Darwinism, or any other hypothesis that links man in blood relationship to any other form of life." In the words of Richard Hofstadter, Bryan "was never a rebel at all ... He never felt the excitement of intellectual discovery." A "poor clod," wrote H. L. Mencken, "deluded by a childish theology."

Such comments overlook something important: Bryan's opposition to Darwinism encompassed a deep concern about the corrupting influence of materialism and modernism on society and intellectual life. But Kazin's sanguine assessment is just as dismissive: "In retrospect, his anxiety seems irrational."

In the end, Kazin wants today's liberals to reconsider the early Bryan, and use him as a model of how to combine progressive policies with the rhetoric of liberal religious values. The problem is that class-oriented politics is increasingly unattractive to most Americans, and secular liberalism is inherently skeptical of (if not hostile to) morality and religion: This hardly seems a likely recipe for rebuilding a Democratic majority. Indeed, the stronger advocates for populist reform grounded in faith are to be found in red-state America. If the Great Commoner were around today, he would be supporting intelligent design and nonsectarian prayer in schools; criticizing his party's embrace of abortion on demand; and favoring the constitutional protection of traditional marriage. Now that's a realignment.

Mr. Spalding is director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation.