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Museums are more than places we visit on a field trip across the country. Museums protect our shared history, care for wildlife and collections, strengthen local economies, support job training, and spark curiosity in people of all ages. Right now, you can help make sure museums stay strong for future generations. Museum Advocacy Day is a national moment when people contact Congress to ask for continued support for museums and the federal agencies that fund them. Learn how to take action@aam-us.org and tell your representatives that museums matter to education, to communities, to the economy, and to our democracy. You're pretty smart when people talk about you. Too smart comes up a lot. So why are you trying to prove them wrong? Why aren't you pushing the limits of science and powering the nuclear engines of the world's most powerful navy? If you were born for it, isn't it time to make a smart choice? You can be smart, or you can be nuke smart. Become a nuclear engineer@navy.com nukesmart America's Navy
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forged by the sea this is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate dimeo. Could they even hear him there in the hall? They had heard of him. There's this misunderstanding or myth that developed around William Jennings Bryant that when he took the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago In July of 1896, he was an unknown. That the delegates saw this man step to the podium, cut from a different cloth than all the politicians who had droned on before him, stodgy and stiff and old. And then suddenly there's this different kind of cat, young, just 36 and fit, a bit shy of six feet, which was weirdly tall at that time, prematurely balding, but I don't know, owning it. And out comes this big baritone voice, not reedy or mealy mouthed or whatever the speakers before him were giving, but the story that has been passed down that Brian bounded up to the podium and people are like, who is this guy? Isn't true. They knew who he was. A former two term congressman from Nebraska, a failed Senate candidate who then made his name in the lecture circuit railing against the gold standard. The government pegged the value of the dollar to the value of gold. And Brian was in the camp that was against doing that. It was a defining argument. It was the most central issue of that time. Politically, economically, culturally. It was utterly crucial to a whole era of American life. And I'm not sure you need to know a thing about it now, but they all did. The thousands of people, the 906 delegates plus the alternates, the press, the food vendors, security janitors and the spectators filling the Chicago Coliseum, they cared about the gold standard tremendously, and they followed the debates about it closely. And they had heard that Bryan was supposed to be great at talking about it. He was an up and comer, and with the convention basically spinning its tires, unable to agree upon a presidential candidate, just stuck, hair splitting, pussy footing, middle grounding, half stepping, building consensus on sand, they were excited to hear him and excited to see him, see anyone with some energy, some life in them, see someone actually stride to the stage with some purpose, like he wanted to be there, like he had something to say, something straight and real. But could they actually hear him? The Colosseum had opened up just the month before and had Wild Bill Hickok and his Wild west show kicking up dirt, horses and gunshots, war whoops. And now there was a parquet floor and folding chairs and grave deliberation, cigars flaring orange, their smoke gathering in a doleful cloud beneath the steel girders of a roof a hundred feet above the delegates and the stage and the cavernous space below. Could they hear him? Could his voice really carry to every ear and every corner of the room? The story goes that it did. But how? With no amplification, no microphones, that huge hall, something like 20,000 people listening to this one guy, could his voice, baritone and booming though it may have been, really fill the room? And what did it sound like? Did it echo? Was it clear? Were some people coughing or talking? Can they make out the words or merely feel the emotion, read it on his face, feel it course through the crowd, radiating out row by row as this one voice talked monetary policy? Could they even hear him? But the next day it didn't matter if they could, because the paper sent his speech everywhere. You can still find it easily online or in collections of the greatest speeches in American history. And so you could read his Cross of Gold speech right now, if you want to. It is well written, but it is about monetary policy in the late 19th century, so read it or don't. But they did then, and they read about how it was delivered, how he leapt up from his chair with the urgency and energy of a young boxer. Read about the vigor in his voice and about the rapturous applause that met him like a grand burst of artillery, one of the papers wrote, that had the delegates and spectators up on their feet and then up on their chairs, throwing hats and handkerchiefs up in the air, divesting themselves of their coats, wrote one reporter, tossing them high as bedlam broke out. Delirium reigned as the floor of the convention seemed to heave up and everybody seemed to go mad and acted like demented things. Men who'd lost all idea or thought of dignity, who danced to no music, pounded their feet, slapped at their chairs for 20 minutes straight. People went crazy at the end of his speech as Brian took a Christ pose, arms out, head bowed for five full seconds like he was the dude from Creed or something, like Jim Morrison or the Undertaker, which is wild. And then he leaves the stage having just crushed a speech about monetary policy and the crowd surges toward him and police step in to protect him and they cannot. And the next thing, he is floating. He's 36 years old. He is a failed senatorial candidate. He is a boy from Nebraska. And he is being carried on someone's shoulders aloft above a crowd who is cheering for him, who is mad for him, who will make him before he knows it, before he can barely catch his breath. The youngest person, then or now, to lead the presidential ticket for a major party. And he hardly touched the ground for months because people wanted to hear him. William Jennings Bryan went on a speaking tour unlike anything that had ever been done before or since. He spent the next four months on trains. Wasn't entirely his choice. His party had very little money and had very little faith in him as a candidate. And so the only way he was going to win was to get in front of as many people as possible to watch him do his thing, this thing that only he could do. And so he just went for it, went from town to town, train station to train station. At first, on his own. He would book his own ticket. He would ride in public cars, but he was never alone. When the train would roll up, people would have been lining the tracks, would have been waiting all night. They would pile into the station to hear him talk about gold and silver, would take their own journeys, book their own tickets to see William Jennings Bryan in the flesh, hear him with their own ears. He did 20 to 30 stops, 20 to 30 speeches every day, except for Sundays. He'd get so hoarse that he started doing the shtick that he had left his voice in the last town. It was exhausting, but it was exhilarating. He was young and it was all happening. And he would lose, but he was always going to lose. He was the underdog, and there was glory in being the underdog. It was the most remarkable time in what would be a remarkable life. He was in such command. He had such energy. He spoke with such conviction and such power. He was the greatest speaker anyone who heard him had ever heard speaking on the most vital issue of his time. There is no recording of any of it. William Jennings Bryan died of what was either a stroke or a cerebral hemorrhage in 1925 at the age of 65. He had run unsuccessfully for President three times. He had served as Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State. He advocated for an eight hour work week and minimum wage, and for women's suffrage, also for Prohibition, and then doggedly against the teaching of evolution, which would just before his death, have him arguing for the losing side in the Scopes Monkey trial. But in 1921, at the age of 61, he went into a studio in Richmond, Indiana to record for the only time the speech that had sent his life skyward 30 years before. Can we even hear him.
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Never before in the history of American politics has a great issue been fought out as this issue has been by the voters of a great party. On 4 March 1895, a few Democrats, most of them members of Congress, issued an address to the Democrats of the nation asserting that the money question was the paramount issue of the hour, declaring that a majority of the Democratic Party had the right to control the action of the party on this paramount issue and concluding with the request that the believers in the free coinage of silver in the Democratic Party organize, take charge of and control the policy of the Democratic Party. Three months later at Memphis an organization was protected and the Silver Democrats went forth openly and courageously proclaiming their belief and declaring that if successful they would crystallize into a platform the declaration which they had made. Then began the conflict with a zeal of.
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Foreign. This episode of the Memory palace was written and produced by me, Nate DeMaio in February of 2026. This show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw. It is a proud, proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independent artist owned listener supported podcasts from prx, a a not for profit public media company. If you ever want to drop me a line you can do so@natehemmorypalace.org you can follow me on Instagram and threads, at the Memory palace podcast, on Facebook at the Memory palace and on blueskyatemeo, which if you only listen to this and you haven't, I don't know, bought my book or follow me on any of those social media platforms. You might be like the couple of folks who emailed me yesterday with wildly different spellings of that last name. So if you're ever wondering, dimeo is spelled D I M E O with a capital M just to keep you on your toes. That's all I got for today. Talk to you again. Radiotopia
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from prx.