The Great Commoner

The Great Commoner was William Jennings Bryan’s familiar political title, and for Harry S. Truman it named more than a candidate: Bryan embodied the voice of ordinary people. Truman and his father attended the 1900 Democratic convention as committed Bryan supporters. Although Bryan lost that year, he remained an idol for Truman, making the expression an early marker of the populist ideal that would continue to illuminate Truman’s own political career.

Bryan and the 1900 convention

In the summer of 1900, Truman accompanied his father to Kansas City, Missouri, for the Democratic convention that nominated Bryan for a second presidential race against William McKinley. His father watched from a box seat as a guest of William T. Kemper; Harry took in the proceedings from the balcony or ran errands. The scale of the gathering stayed with him: seventeen thousand people filled the hall, a crowd nearly three times the population of Independence, Missouri. Bryan’s nominating speech set off a demonstration that lasted half an hour.

The convention was a formative spectacle of popular politics for the boy. Truman and his father declared themselves thorough Bryan men, and the convention’s vast crowd gave the title Great Commoner a public setting: Bryan’s appeal was bound up with the people gathered to hear him and with the political identity they shared. The phrase thus carried both a personal memory and an idea of representation.

Defeat and lasting allegiance

Bryan and his running mate, Adlai E. Stevenson, lost in November to McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. The result did not undo Truman’s attachment. Bryan remained his idol as the voice of the common man, a distinction that outlasted the particular campaign and its defeat.

The election also set the title against a competing account of political success. Democrats made imperialism the issue, while Republicans campaigned on prosperity with the Full Dinner Pail slogan. The book leaves uncertain how much the boy recognized that his own family was then entering an unprecedented period of prosperity: his father’s grain speculation, aided by contacts such as Kemper, was bringing him closer to his dream of riches. That juxtaposition complicates the memory without displacing its emphasis. Truman’s admiration centered on Bryan’s claim to speak for ordinary people, even as the election turned on prosperity and Bryan lost.

A political ideal in later perspective

The phrase is not presented as a slogan Truman repeatedly applied to himself. Its significance lies instead in the political example he retained. Later in Truman’s career, the account repeatedly places his fortunes in relation to popular support and the effort to reach voters directly. In the 1948 campaign, he made an exceptionally strenuous personal effort, while organizers and other campaign workers also contributed to the result. Subsequent analysis suggests that many voters who expected Thomas E. Dewey to win nevertheless went to the polls and voted for Truman.

That later electoral story gives the youthful memory of Bryan an illuminating, but not identical, counterpart. The Great Commoner belongs specifically to Bryan; its lasting resonance in Truman’s story is the idea that political standing could rest on a perceived connection with ordinary people, even when predictions, party circumstances, or an earlier defeat pointed the other way.