Akkam’s Razor

Slate:

[As] a crowd bludgeon in modern political speechmaking, “my friends” can be laid at the feet of one man: William Jennings Bryan. His famed 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic National Convention invoked the phrase a mind-crushing 10 times. Inveighing against “those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below,” Bryan declared, “My friends, the question we are to decide is: Upon which side will the Democratic party fight; upon the side of the idle holders of idle capital or upon the side of the struggling masses?” Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” is historically considered to be among the most viscerally powerful speeches ever made by an American politician, with one New York World journalist reporting the crowd’s reaction as “tumult—hills and valleys of shrieking men and women.” The temptation to bottle that kind of lightning again is alluring.