Burial

Last week they buried William Jennings Bryan. They brought his body to the Capital, where it lay in state in the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church for 24 hours, guarded by Spanish War veterans, while crowds filed past it. At the same time his last speech, prepared for the evolution trial at Dayton, Tenn., but never delivered, was given to the public by his family (see EDUCATION) his last gift to the country.

The Reverend Dr. Joseph R. Sizoo spoke the Commoner's funeral oration before a crowded church: "There was a threefold splendor about this noble man. . . . He had a capacity for noble living. . . . He had a deep capacity for love. . . . He had a rich capacity for faith. . . . God bless and hallow the heritage and memory of William Jennings Bryan."

They carried his coffin out into the street, took it through Washington and across the Potomac. It was a rainy, chilly day and thousands shivered.

In Arlington Cemetery they laid the great pacifist to rest among the bodies of soldiers. Soldiers were on hand to give him military burial, taps were sounded and they lowered him into the earth, into the very spot that a few years ago had been chosen by Secretary of War John Wingate Weeks as his own final resting place,* below the empty tomb of Dewey, across the hill from the Unknown Soldier, on the heights overlooking the city of politics.

There they left him. For him they could do no more.

Flags were at half mast in Washington, in Des Moines; Oklahoma, Arkansas and Arizona observed the hour of his burial by cessation of official business.

In Ohio, at Dayton and Toledo, Ku Klux Klansmen fired tall crosses in the night: "In memory of William Jennings Bryan, the greatest Klansmen of our time, this cross is burned; he stood at Armageddon and battled for the Lord."

Following the burial of Mr. Bryan a host of stories and anecdotes about him began to be published.

Mark Sullivan, Washington correspondent, vouched for the fact that Bryan for two years before the 1896 Democratic Convention had been stumping up and down the Missouri Valley speaking for free silver, hammering out the similes and metaphors and phrases that went into the making of the "Cross of Gold" speech. Several people testified that Bryan had his plans for capturing the Democratic nomination in 1896 laid long in advance, had asked at least one delegate to the convention, Colonel Franklin Pierce Morgan, a newspaperman, to vote for him, had secured for himself the last place on the list of speakers in preparation for the great dramatic effect which was to nominate him.

A new version of the reason of his resignation as Secretary of State was also promulgated (the common story is that he refused to sign the second Lusitania note to Germany). It was said that he had prepared a note to the Austrian Government (accounts of the new version differed as to the exact matter in question) which Mr. Wilson recalled and revised without consulting him, and that he thereupon resigned. Some doubt was cast upon this account.

*Secretary Weeks gave up the plot when his class at Annapolis ('81) decided to be buried together in another part of the cemetery.