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Why do you think that Bryan was a buffoon? I urge you to take your copy of inherett the wind and throw it in the trash. It is bad history. Of course he was an intellectual lightweight, but he didn't invent the monetary theory you mention and her certainly didn't start the temperance movement. The latter goes back to the early 19th century and the huge problem the country had with drunkedness. Abraham Lincoln belonged to the movement and was a teetotler.

As for the connection of eugenics with Darwin, the fact is that Hitler's racist statements in Mein Kampf were basically sophomoric paraphrases of Haeckel's textbooks.

I'm so relieved to hear Bryan didn't come up with the free coinage of silver plank in the 1896 party platform. It makes all the difference. And he delivered his "Cross of Gold" speech just to be polite.

I haven't bothered with "Inherit The Wind" in many years, and I'm not foolish enough to think any movie has any more than a coincidental relationship to actual history.

Bryan's foolishness truly made him stand out in the first twenty-five years of the twentieth century. Your attempt to exonerate him for his ardent advocacy of bad ideas is just as illogical as your attempt to connect the Theory of Evolution to the Nazis. Using the same "logic," one could say that, really, Hitler wasn't such a bad guy ... after all, he didn't actually write the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Bryan was the sort of officious busy-body who perfectly fitted the definition of the prohibition movement: he lived in fear that someone, somewhere might be having a good time. When Will Rogers visited France in the 1920s, he appeared in a newsreel "toasting" Americans with (IIRC), a glass of beer. Bryan's response was to try to get a law passed to make it illegal for Americans to consume liquor while overseas. Exactly how this would have been enforced is something of a mystery.

Bryan seemed to have a soft spot for unenforceable laws; he advocated a system of International Arbitration to prevent war. How this would have worked is anybody's guess. He was Wilson's Secretary of State, from 1912 - 1915, but left when it became clear that Wilson's sternly-worded response to the Lusitania sinking might hurt German feelings.

Bryan was also a shameless huckster for Florida real estate.

But go ahead and claim him for your side. You're more than welcome to him.

I'll grant that Hitler twisted the Theory of Evolution to suit his own purposes. How about responding to this image from an earlier post:

Has God caused Hitler yet?