(SHORT—BRY.AN) /(HJS/WS.169) 1(3/181/91*)

VL: B4

[VACHEL LINDSAY:

BRYAN, BRYAN, BRYAN, BRYAN]

[The Poet’s Discourse on

William Jennings Bryan

and the Campaign against William McKinley in 1896]

This paper was presented at the Chicago Literary Club,

which at that time met at the Cliff Dwellers,

on the top floor of Chicago’s Orchestra Hall.

The paper was read on March 18, 1991 by its author,

Hugh J. Schwartzberg)

© 1991,Hugh J. Schwartzberg, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

all rights reserved

Time scrapes meaning from even the simplest verse. This provides some excuse for the work of critics. Words are lost to the language; even obvious facts become forgotten history. Tonight I propose to take one poem apart, to examine some of its pieces with you, to identify them, to play with them, and then to reassemble that poem as the piece of public declamation it was designed to be.

Like any red-blooded American audience, most of you are now certain that you will be bored, that poetry is someone else’s strange thing. I mean to surprise you; I would like to delight you. While the information provided here may not do so, the poem that ties this all together should do the trick. It is called “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan” The poem itself will be the final fourteen minutes of this evening’s presentation.

Our author, Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, was born in Illinois, in Springfield, on November 10, 1879 in a fine family home. He grew up with a set of 400 toy wooden blocks and a memory of the deaths (by disease) of three of his five sisters.

Lindsay never met a payroll; never held a steady job for any substantial length of time. He was the victim of periodic, severe depression, of occasional fits which may have been petit mal, sometimes saw visions; and ultimately developed disabling, paranoid hostilities. He had tried to live by his poetry alone, a juggling feat which no one else in our century has accomplished. All this apparently helped precipitate his suicide in 1931 by ingestion of Lysol, in that same home into which he had been born. So when he says this poem is designed to “knock your old blue devils out,” he is presumably talking about anti-depressive medicine of rather high order.

In 1896 (which is one subject of this poem) Lindsay was 16, a third year student in a Springfield high school. The next year, Lindsay went off to Hiram College. While there, he wrote an oration on his Springfield neighbor, Governor John Peter Altgeld. After three years, Lindsay dropped out of college.

The drop-out came to Chicago, where he studied Art across the street [at the Art Institute of Chicago] for three years. Next came a year’s study of Art under the great Robert Henri in New York, who (when asked) felt Vachel would do better as poet than as artist. Lindsay tried to sell his poems to individuals he met in the street. He saw visions.

At 26, Vachel Lindsay wandered through the United States trying to trade rhymes for bread.

A few people showed some interest in young Lindsay. William James saw Lindsay as “brilliant being that you are,” but told him to “leave me to my decrepitude.” Marsden Hartley remembered him as a face “filled with blond light, glowing with its own splendors.”

Lindsay self-published some of his works, to no success. A handful of his articles and poems were published by others.

Then, in 1911, at the age of 31, he wrote about Altgeld in “The Eagle That is Forgotten.” Printed in his local newspaper, this poem was widely republished.

Hamlin Garland asked Lindsay to send some of his work to Chicago. Garland invited Lindsay to address a group called “The Cliff Dwellers.” [They were meeting then, as now, in this same place where I am reading this paper, in

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this room at the top floor of Orchestra Hall.] Lindsay was introduced to the members at lunch, and said a few words. Lindsay then went across the street, to address a few more words to the students of the Art Institute. That night, Lindsay recited poems for Garland, Henry Fuller and Laredo Taft. Afterwards, he was elected a non—resident member of the Cliff Dwellers, and his dues were remitted for that year. Lindsay did not come back to visit this club, reports biographer Eleanor Ruggles, who tells us several of these stories. He couldn’t afford it, felt shy, doubted his own worth.

In April of that year, Hamlin Garland went down to Springfield. At 31, Lindsay was still being supported by his physician father. Garland told Dr. Lindsay that his son was a genius, that he should be patient with him a little longer.

Once again, Vachel set off wandering; he headed West. To Lindsay, the vast western desert was “the American splendor.” This time, his attempt at playing 20th Century troubadour was to fall apart, was to become a combination of tramping and migrant labor, but only Lindsay knew the full, painful story.

Meanwhile, Harriet Monroe was busy [three blocks to the

North of where we sit, over at what was then the Chicago Public Library] looking for some poetry for a proposed new publishing venture of her own, the beginnings of Poetry, a Magazine of Verse.

Harriet, coming across a mention of Lindsay as a “young artist—poet,” wrote to Vachel asking that he send her some of his poetry. This correspondence with Lindsay preceded the initial issue of the new magazine. A Lindsay poem led off the fourth issue of Poetry in January, 1913. In April, 1913, says biographer Ruggles, Lindsay took the train to Chicago and went to the Poetry office and sat in The Poet’s Chair. Harriet said Mr. Lindsay was “the real thing.” Three months later, he had twelve more poems in the magazine. That Fall, in her introduction to his first book, Harriet Monroe spoke of this [q~] “young Illinois troubador.” That November, Harriet talked one of the magazine’s guarantors into popping for a $100 prize for Vachel.

Understanding that Americans “hate and abhor poetry,” Lindsay invented a form of what he called “the higher vaudeville,” a new kind of public declamation, while striving to keep his work “real art.” Writing in Poetry Magazine, Lindsay said: “I respectfully submit these poems as experiments in which I endeavor to carry this vaudeville form back towards the old Greek precedent of the half-chanted lyric.”

In February, 1914, Miss Monroe said he had made a beginning: ~ “one stout foot on the slope of Parnassus.” Harriet gave Vachel a $10.00 advance so he could attend what his biographer describes as a Cliff Dwellers dinner for William Butler Yeats. [The dinner was held not in this room, but a few blocks South at the Fine Arts Building.] The dinner was sponsored by Poetry Magazine, according to Miss Monroe. At the dinner, Yeats referred to Lindsay as a “fellow craftsman,” and Lindsay ended the evening by reciting one of his poems, quite successfully.

Later that same year, Miss Monroe tried to fix up Lindsay with Sarah Teasdale, a poet from St. Louis. Eventually, to Lindsay’s regret, Miss Teasdale married someone else.

Lindsay’s role as reciter and national figure took off quickly. In February, 1915, Lindsay declaimed before half of President Wilson’s cabinet. Present was the then Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan. But the story of Lindsay’s struggle, rise and fall, is not tonight’s subject. His poem is.

Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan was written at the height of Lindsay’s public reputation. The poem was begun on January 1, 1919. His thoughts were colored by the recent death of

his Democrat father, and Lindsay knew that he himself voted Democratic in national presidential elections because of his paternal forebears. He saw all the characters of our poem, even Bryan, as dead or approaching death. That summer, he and his mother were alone at the family summer camp, while he finished the work. Lindsay looked back on a world when he and his father had been successful Democrats in a Republican town, to a world when Lindsay still thought of himself as a probable physician, following in his father’s footsteps. A threnody for the death of the poet’s father became the death of a different dream.

It was about then that William Lyon Phelps, of Yale, listed Lindsay as one of the five greatest living American poets. For Louis Untermeyer, he was the greatest lyric poet since Poe. Five years later, writing in Poetry Magazine, Harriet Monroe would call him “the best and furthest known of all our American poets.”

Lindsay became one of the most popular poets who ever lived in terms of books sold and public recitations given. His readings proved sensational, not only at Harvard and Yale, Oxford and Cambridge and Westminster Cathedral, but also in middle-town America. The Brits in particular liked Bryan. In 1927 the British Observer said he was “easily the

most important American poet.” In Oxford, said Robert Graves, who had arranged the reading, he scored a “knockout.” The current Dean of Sangamon State, who is eighteen hundred pages into a Lindsay biography, has estimated that Lindsay’s total audience numbered in the millions.

Fame is fleeting, and Lindsay’s fame fled. Poetry Magazine sponsored a final dinner in his honor in 1929. On December 5, 1931, at 52, he was dead.

If our poet has been forgotten, our subject poem was never well known. The style, like Lindsay himself, is out of fashion. This poem was always too long for the anthologies.

The poem has a sub-title, which is missing in the only paperback version of Lindsay’s Poetry now in print, and abridged in the only hard-back. That subtitle is crucial to any understanding of the poem. It tells us the poem is about

“THE CAMPAIGN OF 1896, AS VIEWED AT THE TIME BY A SIXTEEN YEAR OLD, ETC.” The principal subject of our poem, therefore, is Bryan’s first campaign against McKinley. At least since Browning, we have all understood that one of the questions to ask of a poem is, “Who is the speaker?” When Lindsay tells us that this is the Campaign of 1896 as Seen Through the Eyes of a Sixteen—year Old, Etc., he is telling us that the speaker (at least in large part) is

Lindsay himself, but the “Etc.” tells us something else: that there are things in this poem which are beyond the vision of that sixteen-year old; there is a final portion of the poem which looks at that campaign through older eyes.

Bryan, Bryan is Art, and not autobiography.

The real Bryan, says Dennis Camp, probably never visited Springfield until much later in the campaign. And at sixteen, the real Lindsay was busy collecting every story or photograph he could find which chronicled Governor Altgeld, and mounted them into a scrapbook. It is not believable that the real Lindsay would have failed to mourn the unsuccessful re-election race of John Altgeld on that election eve of 1896, but bringing that into this poem might have destroyed the poem’s focus.

The subtitle also tells us that for most of this poem Lindsay wants us to forget the Bryan his audience already knows (the man who is later to run again and again, unsuccessfully, for President), and to think about what it felt like to cheer Bryan as a youngster in 1896. It is only at the end of the poem that we are allowed to return to the reality of the time in which the poem was written. But remember, that’s not 1991 either; it’s 1919. And the Bryan of 1896 is certainly not the Bryan we think we know.

For all of us here tonight, Bryan is almost inescapably the Bryan of “Inherit the Wind,” both play and movie, the man whose skull is full of undelivered presidential addresses, and who leads the prosecution of Scopes in the anti—evolution trial of 1925, with Bryan as villain facing off against Clarence Darrow, the hero. The Bryan of 1925 is a Bryan whom Lindsay, unlike us, did not yet know. So we, as readers and listeners, have an even more difficult job of suspending disbelief than Lindsay thought he was requiring of his audience in 1919.

For 16—year old Lindsay, Bryan was a Homeric super—hero, capable of setting loose against the East all the mythic force of the American West. And Bryan’s mythic opponents are Tubal Cain and the devils who let loose the dark force of landlords, back alleys, and bank vaults. Remember, this is in part an adolescent’s view of the world.

The structure of this poem is to view the Campaign of 1896 as a sort of American Iliad: the Western [and Southern] States (the good guys) against the Eastern States (the bad guys) . The Iliad had its campaign, fought on two levels, with different sets of Gods struggling against each other, one group helping the Greeks and the other the Trojans. Similarly, Lindsay’s vision of the Campaign of 1896 is also

fought on several levels: in part, the birds, beasts and flowers of the American West are fighting against the office equipment of the American East, its roller—top desks and its filing cabinets.

If Homeric Bryan is casting spells for the Wonderful West, it is Tubal Cain who is performing this same function for the Evil East. In the Bible, Tubal Cain was the great-great-great-great-grandson of Cain. The Book of Genesis credits Tubal Cain with inventing every cutting instrument of brass and of iron: all weapons. Tubal Cain is part of the world the great flood was designed to destroy.

In our poem, Tubal Cain is the evil spirit which stands behind McKinley and Hanna.

If setting a Homeric figure against Tubal Cain seems an odd mixture of Greek and Biblical imagery, we might remember that Lindsay’s mother also provided an odd mixture of Greek mythology and Christianity. There were daily bible recitations in the Lindsay household, but there were also miracle plays based on Greek myths which mother Lindsay wrote and successfully staged in her local Christian church. Years later, Lindsay said, “It takes an epic poetess to call a heathen show a ‘colloquy’and have the associated elders and

deacons openly approve.”

The ideas behind a poem are not the poem.

There is a story about a famous scientist who approached a famous poet and announced that he had some interesting concepts for a poem. The poet is reported to have replied, “Poems are made out of words, not concepts.” The words of this poem are not the poem either, but they are important, not only for the structure on which they are strung together, not only for their music, but in small part because Lindsay provides us with a catalog of various terms which the American West introduced into the English language. He sets these Western words against his image of an American East, which had always failed to understand the West’s message.

Lindsay, our first important movie critic, sometimes seems to give us a series of movie takes. For example, as we approach the State House in Springfield to hear Bryan speak, it changes in size: “a speck, a hive, a football,/A captive balloon.” The “hive” is a reference to an earlier Lindsay poem about Bryan, but a football?!? _______

Lindsay understood that America’s true totems are the animals which symbolize its sports teams. “Why do we have

eleven football teams named for Longhorns, Mustangs, Lions... 7” asked American linguist J. M. Dillard in 1976, in his book American Talk.

Dillard answered himself that this is because the frontier was the “biggest promotional scheme in our history.’ It was a matter, said Dillard, of “cultural lag.’ But Lindsay stood closer to the Age of the Frontier; Lindsay believed in our roots, and understood them.

In Bryan. Bryan, Lindsay posits two opposing poetic orders, to match our political sectionalism, West against East, Homeric Bryan against Tubal Cain; and Bryan, in his Homeric guise, casts a series of real and imaginary beasts loose, as an Army marching against the East Coast. The list

begins with the Longhorns of Texas and the Jayhawks of Kansas. The fact that these are also symbols for the athletic teams of these two states passes almost unnoticed.

Lindsay himself, writing later, spoke of the University of Kansas cheer for its football team: “Let all students of the University of Kansas teach the tune of the Jay Hawk Yell to the world, especially to those inclined to true United States poetry.”

Lindsay manages to smuggle into the list of Mckinley’s opponents a series of imaginary beasts, including the Thingamajig and the Hellangone, and other non-existent

beasties such as the Prodactyl, the Wampus and the Plop—eyed Bungaroo, as well as the Giant Giassicus. Throughout much of our history, the unknowing tenderfoot has been sent in search of skyhooks and spotted paint, and some of these Bryan-beasts have no greater reality than those.

Take the bat-fowl for example. To go batfowling was to stun a bird with a light and then hit that bird with a bat. So a bat-fowler was one who practiced bat-fowling, and also a swindler, a sharper who made victims of the simple and credulous. Which left a batfowl, presumably, as one who had been swindled. So a batfowl isn’t really a beast at all. It is simply a friendly bogey of revenge to swell the list of things with which the West could frighten the East.

.

Bryan’s western menagerie is led by its eagles. The eagle is our national bird, but we might also remember that Bryan had already dubbed Altgeld as an Eagle, and during this campaign, Bryan was sometimes referred to as the “black eagle of Nebraska.” These two, then, Altgeld and Bryan, are the Eagles of the West.

Lindsay makes vaudeville out of the political invective which was dumped on Bryan. The language of our political discourse has changed so much since the Gay Nineties that we

may think that the examples Lindsay gives of the East’s attack upon Bryan are unrealistic. In actual fact, even the most respectable Eastern newspapers engaged in such billingsgate. In the poem, Bryan is called a “cheapskate, blatherskite, populistic, anarchistic, deacon--desperado.” A “blatherskite” in the ‘90’s, as now, was defined as a “babbling, foolish person.”

In the lead story on Page One of the New York Times for July 11, 1896, the Times reported the Democratic Convention at Chicago Illinois, under the head, “Bryan, Free Silver and Repudiation,” “Chicago Convention Chooses a Fit Candidate to

Stand on Populistic Platform.”

The story itself included this line:

“It was not until Governor Stone, speaking for Missouri, hauled down the Bland standard and cast 34 votes for Bryan that the gifted blatherskite was selected as the presidential candidate of this Democratic Populistic Convention.”

Nor was the Times alone. The New York Tribune reporter telegraphed from the convention Bryan’s reference to a Cross of Gold and added: “This blatherskite declaration stirred up the depths of the popu1istic convention.”

Harper’s Weekly assured its readers that Bryan “would be as clay in the hands of the potter under the astute control of the ambitious and unscrupulous Illinois communist...” The New York_Tribune that year called the defeat of “Altgeld the

Anarchist a “cause for national rejoicing.”

~ _/

When it was all over, looking back on the campaign, the New York Tribune said: Bryan “was only a puppet in the blood-imbued hands of Altgeld, the Anarchist, and Debs, the Revolutionist, and other desperadoes of that stripe

There are fourteen real people whose names appear in this poem. Some of these players cannot be identified without a scorecard. While twelve are public figures, two are not.

Referring to the parade for Bryan in Springfield, Lindsay speaks of “Tom Dines and Art Fitzgerald/Ah the Gangs That They Could Get.” These are not the names of local political bosses, but rather record Vachel Lindsay’s actual albeit minor role in the campaign. Lindsay had approached two friends to help gather recruits for the political line of march. Art Fitzgerald and Lindsay were both on the high school track team together, when Vachel won the mile walk for the school. Fitzgerald later recalled that his father had been a Republican, but that Lindsay had successfully drawn him into Democratic politics.

If this seems only slightly less obscure than that point

in the Four Quartets where T. S. Eliot may be changing subway trains, I submit that who these two are is less important than that the adult poet persona here remembers nostalgically that in those days there were people who could successfully bring out throngs for torchlight parades.

Writing in 1922, Lindsay recalled that, as children, he and his cousin did not tell each other fairy stories, but instead played at Democratic parades. And he remembered the cparad~ ratifying Cleveland’s election, when he was twelve, as being [quote] “millions of miles long.”

The other dozen names are easy to research, even if one or two are starting to fade out of the history books. Seven of them came to stand as heroes for Lindsay, who believed that it was important to recite a litany of heroes and to urge people to choose at least one hero and to emulate him.

The first hero is Altgeld. You may recall tha± Altgeld had pardoned the Haymarket Rioters in 1893. This not only served to defeat Altgeld, but was used as a club with which to beat upon Bryan.

Republican boss Mark Hanna of Ohio plays first villain. He sent young Iheodore Roosevelt westward to speak at the

Chicago Coliseum on October 15, 1896. T.R. was making his first major political address, and he said:

Mr. Altgeld is a much more dangerous man than Bryan. He is much slyer, much more intelligent, much less silly, much more free from all the restraints of public morality.”

He went on to say,

“Mr. Bryan and Mr. Altgeld are the embodiment of the two principles which our adversaries desire to see triumph; and in their ultimate analysis these principles are merely the negation of the two commandments, ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ ‘ and ‘Thou shalt do no murder.’ Mr. Altgeld condones and encourages the most infamous of murders.” . .“

This same Theodore Roosevelt will be cheered by Lindsay years later because TR was later to adopt much of the 1896 platform upon which Bryan had stood. Accordingly, at the close of our poem, it is not the young boy of 1896 but the poet of 1919 who speaks of Theodore Roosevelt, who had died the year before, in 1918. Lindsay asks, in our poem:

“Where is Roosevelt, the young dude cowboy,

Who hated Bryan, then aped his way.

Gone to join the shadows with mighty Cromwell

And tall King Saul

Till the Judgment day.”

Before Bryan, Bryan, Lindsay had written a poem about Theodore Roosevelt entitled, “In Which Roosevelt Is Compared to Saul.” Elsewhere, in another poem, Lindsay cries, “Hail to the sons of Roosevelt” and in still another speaks of the Theodore Roosevelt Administration as “seven years of wonder.”

We learn from these other poems that King Saul, the

first King of Israel, probably appears in our poem as an emblem of the flawed hero, the great political leader whose own direct heirs will not carry on the great tradition, but whose political message will be carried forward by others from a different line.

Cromwel1 (one of Lindsay’s twenty major historical dreamer-heros) plays a similar role. Cromwell, too, was a great but flawed political leader, the creator of the modern political state, whose direct line is overthrown by the Restoration, but whose political tradition as a Progressive was later to be claimed by Theodore Roosevelt, among others. The image of the Regicide, the sword of God, (complete with John Milton as Foreign Secretary) appealed to Lindsay.