e has been an environmentalist, a centrist, an alpha male, an earth-toned model, and a vice president. Now Al Gore is becoming a populist, a label with a stirring, but not winning, history.
America's most famous populist, William Jennings Bryan, died in Gore's home state 75 years ago today. Bryan's career had as many dips and hollows as the hills of Tennessee, but his beliefs were rooted in the dictionary aim of populism: ''a more equitable distribution of wealth and power.''
But who would distribute what? That question has dominated American politics ever since Bryan denounced Wall Street in three losing campaigns as the Democratic nominee for president.
Gore hopes to co-opt a minor candidate, Ralph Nader of the Greens, who has a clear vision: more regulation and more government. In 1896, Bryan pilfered the populist platform of the People's Party, which in 1892 had won three states and 22 electoral votes. Its platform resonated with echoes heard today: ''We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress.''
Bryan seized on a populist cure, ''free and unlimited coinage of silver and gold,'' that would help farmers with mortgages. The gold standard was the enemy, Bryan said, and treating gold and silver alike would mean cheaper money.
At 36, he was only a two-term congressman from Nebraska, but Bryan's oratory swept the Democratic convention in Chicago by denouncing ''sound money'' forces. He warned Wall Street: ''You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.''
The poet Vachel Lindsay, 16 at the time, later rhapsodized:
I brag and chant of Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
Candidate for president who sketched a silver Zion,
The one American poet who could sing outdoors.
That he did, some 600 times, whistle-stopping for 18,000 miles, the first presidential candidate to speak for himself. His opponent, William McKinley, campaigning from his front porch in Ohio, won with 271 electoral votes to Bryan's 176. Republicans outspent Democrats by a 30-1 margin. Voter turnout was 79 percent. It was the first modern presidential campaign featuring, as Lindsay wrote, ''All the funny circus silks/Of politics unfurled.''
Bryan ran against McKinley again in 1900, but downplayed free silver. In 1908, again the nominee, he injected his Christian fundamentalism into politics. ''He gradually forsook politics for more ghostly concerns,'' H.L. Mencken wrote in an obituary. Those beliefs brought him to the Tennessee town of Dayton in 1925 as the special prosecutor of John T. Scopes, accused of teaching Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
The play and film, ''Inherit the Wind,'' show how the defense lawyer, Clarence Darrow, tricked his old political ally, Bryan, into denying that man was a mammal. A few days after Scopes was convicted and dismissed with a $100 fine, Bryan died in his sleep at 65.
Bryan made populism a captive of the Christian right. Today's Democratic Party is home to the heathen left, a skeptical lot. Gore must mesh the left's social-sexual agenda with populism, without offending too many campaign contributors. To big business, populism is a crackpot notion. In Bryan's era, voters agreed. In today's era of 401(k)s, when half of US households invest in the stock market and two-thirds own their own homes, will voters buy populism?
Making big tobacco and big oil the John T. Scopes of 2000 is a formidable task for Gore, but he can at least depend on home state loyalty. Mencken called Bryan ''a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity,'' but admitted: ''His place in Tennessee hagiography is secure. If the village barber saved any of his hair, then it is curing gallstones down there today.''
Martin F. Nolan's column appears regularly in the Globe.
