Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Articles
On 27 September 1905, following a reception at the San Francisco Press Club, William Jennings Bryan boarded the steamship Manchuria with his wife Mary, his son William Junior, and his daughter Grace. Bryan had lost to William McKinley in the presidential contests of 1896 and 1900 but that afternoon, as he sailed through the Golden Gate bound for Hawaii and the world beyond, he remained one of the most popular and powerful politicians of his era.1In fact, no other Democrat came close to matching the political appeal of Nebraska's Great Commoner. When Bryan's party nominated Alton B. Parker, a sound money conservative, for the presidency in 1904 they suffered a disastrous defeat, winning only twelve states (none of them outside the south) to Theodore Roosevelt's thirty-three. Not since 1872 had the Republicans won such a crushing victory. In these circumstances, Bryan might easily have chosen to stay at home to help lick the Democratic party's wounds, and then to deploy his formidable charisma and rhetorical powers to secure the 1908 presidential nomination. But Bryan did not want to stay at home: he wanted to see the world and to be seen seeing it.2And so, together with his family, he embarked upon a great adventure, an eleven-month world tour which would take him across Asia, the Middle East and Europe.3
The first, and in many respects most important, phase of the Bryans' tour took them to Japan, Korea and the Philippines. They travelled at a politically sensitive time: Japan's victory over Russia in the war of 1904-5 had cemented its status as a major imperial power; Korea was losing its autonomy as Japan accelerated the plans for annexation which came to fruition in 1910; and parts of the Philippines - now under a mix of US civilian and military control - were unstable, while the annexation itself, which Bryan had opposed, remained unpopular. The second stage of their tour took them through the early months of 1906 to the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, Ceylon, Burma and India, giving the Bryans manifold opportunities to observe colonialism at close quarters.4The third and last stretch of the tour began in the spring of 1906, when...