“You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. In one of the most famous speeches in American history, Bryan proclaimed his vision of a pure agrarian culture that sustained the nation, telling the 1896 Democratic convention, Bryan became the voice of the farmer, railing against bigness, the bigness of railroads, the bigness of banks, and the cozy relationship these corporations enjoyed with the Republican party. Crop prices were declining, railroad rates remained high, and banks were foreclosing on family-owned farms throughout the heartland. Farmers had been suffering for some time. He embraced the populism rooted in the agrarian west and south. Bryan, despite his youth and inexperience, somehow landed the Democratic nomination for president in 1896. He remained in the public eye by writing columns for the Omaha World Herald. He served two terms in the House of Representatives but lost a bid for the U.S. William Jennings Bryan was a devoutly religious man who adopted agrarian populism with the same degree of fervor he embraced his fundamentalist Christianity. Yet high school students typically learn less about him than about Clay. Bryan’s legacy lives on in some of the policies he embraced in his political career, including the 8-hour workday, the direct election of United States senators, and the graduated income tax. Clay’s legacy was tempered by the failure of those compromises to prevent the Civil War. Bryan was a skilled orator who advocated populist and progressive policies that shaped quadrennial political debates well into the 20th century. Clay was a talented legislator, engineering compromises that postponed the Civil War. Both men were nominated for the presidency three times, both lost all three times, both impacted American politics in ways that defined their eras. Yet two men stand out as notable exceptions Henry Clay and William Jennings Bryan. By 1966, the one-room country school had become a thing of the past.History teachers rarely focus on the losers of presidential elections. School districts consolidated, pooling their resources to provide more teachers, broader curriculum, and opportunity for extracurricular activities. Equipped with little more than a blackboard and a few textbooks, teachers passed on to their pupils cultural values along with a sound knowledge of the three Rs.īy the turn of the century, the population began to shift to the cities and country schools began to lose students and tax support. She had to be a nurse, janitor, musician, philosopher, peacemaker, wrangler, fire stoker, baseball player, professor, and poet for less than $50 a month. The school teacher, sometimes slightly older than her pupils, was a renaissance individual. When they arrived on their first day of school they may have only known how to speak a foreign language but they soon learned how to speak, read, spell, and write English. They got to school on foot, on horseback, or in a wagon. The children who attended ranged in age from five to 21 and endured dust storms, prairie fires, and cattle drives swirling past the school house in order to get an eighth grade education. They were called names like Prairie Flower, Buzzard Roost, and Good Intent. For a hundred years, white frame or native stone one-room schoolhouses dotted the section corners across Kansas.
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