The Tragedy of William Jennings Bryan

A long-standing theme of American politics in the 1890s involves alternative scenarios. What might the United States look like had William Jennings Bryan won the presidential election of 1896? What would have been the consequences of a successful Populist party? Gerard N. Magliocca's study of the Supreme Court's reaction to Bryan and Populism offers new perspectives on these old questions. The book's primary argument is that the combined effects of the Bryan and Populist movements resulted in a backlash by conservative justices. Frightened by the possibility of rule by farmers interested in wealth redistribution and public control of banking and railroads, the Supreme Court invented a new form of constitutional law that limited the power of legislators while aggressively protecting property rights. That transformation in law prevailed until the 1930s, when it was swept aside during the high tide of the New Deal. According to Magliocca, key evidence for the backlash thesis rests in a series of Supreme Court rulings made between 1894 and 1900. When Populism surged, the Court used the Fourteenth Amendment to limit state power to regulate railroad rates; it narrowed the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act by defining the commerce power in a way that excluded its application to manufacturing; it struck down the 1894 federal income tax; in novel fashion it praised the power of judicial review enunciated in Marbury v. Madison (1803); it approved the use of federal executive power to crush the Pullman strike in 1894 based on the commerce power; it simply fabricated the concept of “liberty of contract”; and it allowed southern states to impose Jim Crow regulations and to disfranchise black and poor white voters. In other words, the Supreme Court acted politically with the goal of defeating the Bryan-Populist challenge

Constitutional law · Law and economics · Political science · Politics · Populism · Power (physics · Presidential system · Sociology · Supreme court · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Judicial and Constitutional Studies · Law

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