At the 1896 St. Louis convention of the People's Party, an Associated Press
reporter wrote,
 
One of the striking things . . . is the extraordinary hatred of the Jewish
race. It is not possible to go into any hotel in the city without hearing
the most bitter denunciation of the Jewish race as a class and of
particular Jews who happen to have prospered in the world. (Leonard
Dinnerstein, _Anti-Semitism in America_ [OUP, 1994] 50)
 
And yes indeed, Bryan's "Cross of Gold" acceptance speech at that
convention was a quintessence of anti-Jewish themes that can be traced all
the way back to the Gospel of John. Here's the difference between Bryan and
Pound, though: Bryan was articulating an ancient and normative part of
Christianity, while Pound was a modern "scientific" racist in the
nineteenth-century tradition of Houston Stewart Chamberlain or Wilhelm Marr
(who coined the term "Antisemitismus" by way of dissociating his ideas from
mere theological prejudice). And Chamberlain and Marr and Edouard Drumont
and Charles Maurras and G.K. Chesterton and the rest of that antisemitic
_galere_ had one more thing in common with Pound: their primary political
medium was journalistic propaganda. I'd therefore suppose it's to them, not
to Bryan, that we should look if we're interested in putting Pound's
antisemitism in a context.
 
For the rest, a look at Richard Hofstadter's classic _Social Darwinism in
American Thought_ will show you a Bryan who comes pretty close to being a
tragic hero. The sad debacle of the Scopes trial, for instance, had its
origin during World War I, when Bryan interviewed some captured German
officers and was shaken by their calm assumption that, as members of a
superior race, they were only fulfilling biological destiny by killing off
whoever they felt like killing off. From those interviews stemmed Bryan's
visceral fear of Darwin, and his retreat into fundamentalist irrationality.
Yet it was he that paid John Scopes's $100 fine after the Monkey Trial. As
Hofstadter says (this is a paraphrase; I don't have the book at hand),
Bryan's tragedy was that he had a great heart without a great mind.
 
Jonathan Morse
Co-editor, H-Net list H-Antisemitism