(1854-1903) Indian reform activist, lecturer, writer, artist
A stirring advocate of Indian rights who helped stop the removal of Native Americans to Indian Territory, Bright Eyes, an Omaha, was born on her people’s reservation in Nebraska. Her father, Chief Iron Eye (Inchtamaza or Joseph La Flesche), valued education for his children and sent Bright Eyes to the Presbyterian mission school on the reservation. Impressing her teachers, Bright Eyes was awarded a scholarship to Elizabeth Institute in New Jersey to complete her education. After her graduation she returned to her reservation and found that whites had all the teaching jobs. When she protested, she was offered a job in Indian Territory, which Two Crows, her adopted uncle who was like a second father, would not allow her to accept because of the numerous deaths there from malaria. Two years later, after pointing out in a letter to Washington a neglected provision that stated that a qualified Indian was to be preferred for any Indian service position, she finally became an assistant teacher on her reservation. She got half the pay that white teachers received.
A group of Ponca chiefs, returning from a scouting trip to Indian Territory, stopped briefly with the Omaha, with whom they were closely related. Bright Eyes recognized a kindred spirit in Standing Bear’s son, who was accompanying his father. Later, when the Omaha heard that, despite the scouts’ negative report, the Ponca had been torn from their ancestral lands and were en route to Indian Territory, Bright Eyes, her father, and eight or 10 other Omaha rushed to catch up with them to offer comfort and bid them good-bye.
Two years later Standing Bear appeared, carrying the body of his son, Bright Eye’s kindred spirit. Determined to fulfill his dying wish, to be buried with his ancestors, Standing Bear, his wife, nine men, and 21 women and children traveled 500 miles in 10 weeks in the dead of winter. While they were resting with the Omaha, U. S. troops seized them for having left Indian Territory and jailed them in Fort Omaha. Believing his orders were unjust, General George Crook, the commander in charge, urged Thomas Henry Tibbles, assistant editor of the Omaha Herald, to initiate a lawsuit to stay his orders. Tibbles, who took up the Ponca’s cause, was also a reformer and a Methodist minister. After alerting big city papers of the Indians’ arrest, he brought a writ of habeas corpus for their release. Bright Eyes answered the letter Tibbies wrote to the Ponca for information and with her father and brother went to Omaha, where they gave more information for the trial before attending it. Presiding over Standing Bear v. George Crook, which would become one of the nation’s important civil rights cases, was Judge Elmer S. Dundy. He determined that “an Indian is a person within the laws of the United States” and that the government had no right to remove him to Indian Territory.
Having won their first legal battle, Tibbles and the committee formed to help him planned for battles to come. They sent Bright Eyes and her father on a fact-finding visit to the Ponca in Indian Territory. Then Tibbles went east, raising money and securing friends for the fight ahead. When the Episcopal bishop in Omaha persuaded Bright Eyes to speak at an Indian reform rally in his church, she was eloquent and persuasive, despite her innate shyness. Tibbles and the committee asked 25-year-old Bright Eyes to be part of a second eastern tour featuring Standing Bear. On this trip she was accompanied by her 19-year-old brother Francis La Flesche.
Quickly becoming a crusade against the removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands, their tour drew enormous crowds. They stopped in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore before reaching Washington, D. C. There they visited and spoke at the Hayes White House and testified before a Senate committee. Everyone wanted to hear Bright Eyes, so exceptions were made for her at a time when women were seldom allowed to speak in churches or in public gatherings. In Boston she was the first woman to speak in Faneuil Hall and the only woman present when she addressed an audience of 500 at the Board of Trade. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow thought of her as Minnehaha in his poem “Hiawatha” and declared he would give all he possessed to speak the English language with her “simplicity, fluency, and force.” Others who became active Indian reformers after hearing her lecture included orator Wendell Phillips, poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, writer Helen Hunt Jackson, anthropologist Alice C. Fletcher, and Senator Henry L. Dawes, who fathered the Dawes Severalty Act.
In 1881 Bright Eyes married Tibbles, whose wife had died two years earlier. She found being a stepmother to his two daughters and living in two worlds difficult. That same year her book, Ploughed Under, the Story of an Indian Chief, came out, illuminating the problems Native Americans had living in a changing world. She also presented a paper to the Association for the Advancement of Women, called “The Position, Occupation and Culture of Indian Women.” She illustrated Fannie Reed Giffen’s Oo-Mah-Ha Ta-Wa-Tha and contributed numerous illustrated stories to magazines.
During most of the 1880s Bright Eyes and Tibbles continued their lectures, assisting in the passage of the 1887 Dawes Act, which gave individual American Indians allotments of reservation land and citizen rights. In 1886 they lectured for 10 months in England and Scotland, where to her chagrin she was called an “Indian Princess.” Back in the United States they lived briefly in Washington, D. C.; five years in Lincoln, Nebraska; and also in Omaha. They built a small house on Bright Eyes’s reservation allotment and did some farming. When Tibbles returned to newspaper work, Bright Eyes sometimes worked with him. They were covering the Ghost Dance in 1890 when it turned into the Battle of Wounded Knee (Sioux wars), with soldiers gunning down everyone in sight, including women and children. Tibbles managed to get out the first report of the battle, and Bright Eyes spent the night helping wounded women and children. Tibbles later became very active in the Populist Party and was named its vice presidential candidate in 1904.
Although Bright Eyes’s father, Joseph, who died in 1888, was fond of Tibbles, many Omaha resented him when he took sides in their controversies. They seemed to forget that he and Bright Eyes had started the Indian reform movement that kept them and other Native Americans from being removed to Indian Territory. When she was back on the reservation, Bright Eyes thought that Tibbles should have more respect and could not keep from envying her siblings, who had more influence on the reservation than she and Tibbles. Her sister Susan, the first Native American woman to become a medical doctor, had a hospital on the reservation; Marguerete taught school there; and Rosalie, even with seven children, successfully ran the reservation’s common grazing area. Her brother Francis, like Alice C. Fletcher, with whom he worked, became a noted anthropologist, tracing the roots and recording the customs of Omaha and other Indians.
Aware of the divided world Bright Eyes had inhabited, Tibbles sat in a nearby room while her family surrounded her on May 26, 1903, the night she died, in their house on the reservation. It was his turn the night before her funeral. He asked a close friend, John G. Neihardt, who would become the poet laureate of Nebraska, to sit up with him. That night Tibbles relived his years with Bright Eyes and said repeatedly to Neihardt, “Look at her. My Bright Eyes. Isn’t she beautiful.”
Further reading: Valerie Sherer Mathes and Richard Lowitt, Standing Bear Controversy: Prelude to Indian Reform (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Dorothy Clarke Wilson, Bright Eyes: The Story of Susette La Flesche, an Omaha Indian (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974).
—Olive Hoogenboom
Brooks, Phillips (1835-1893) Episcopal minister, bishop
A superb preacher and an Episcopalian minister renowned for his sermons, Phillips Brooks was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 13, 1835. He excelled at Boston Latin School and Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1855. He then taught Latin at Boston Latin School, where he was a poor disciplinarian and was mortified when he was fired. From 1856 to 1859 he attended the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, from which he received his bachelor of divinity degree. There he read widely everything from the church fathers to literary classics. Theological fine points did not intrigue him, since he believed they were not the key to salvation. His emphasis was on faith and the grace of God and on how to communicate them in sermons.
Ordained in 1859, Brooks served in Philadelphia as rector of the Church of the Advent (1859-62) and then Holy Trinity (1862-69). He was an instant success. He liked people of all ages and conditions and was an excellent pastor, giving freely of his time to counsel and encourage those in need. His eloquent sermons, lasting only 30 minutes, were clear, precise, purposeful, and persuasive. They were not doctrinal but aimed at transforming individuals and inspiring them to emulate Jesus of Nazareth. Apart from abolition and temperance, he was not a social reformer. He disliked the controversy of ritualistic-liturgical-minded Anglo-Catholics versus broad-minded, evangelical Protestants, which was wracking the Episcopal Church. He did not wish to be labeled but privately admitted to being a “Broad Churchman.” His fear was that the “High Church” stress on symbols would impede the free flow of religion and that means would replace ends and prove suicidal for the church. Brooks’s approach was popular, and his churches grew.
Brooks soon attracted attention outside Philadelphia. In his well-publicized April 23, 1865, sermon on “The Life and Death of Lincoln,” he blamed the president’s murder on the sin of slavery. Three months later his short prayer at the Harvard Commemoration of its Civil War dead proved for Charles William Eliot, Harvard’s future president, to be “the most impressive utterance” of the day. Experiencing Christmas Eve in the Holy Land inspired Brooks, who often wrote poetry for his own pleasure, to write the familiar carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” published in 1868. Its plea to Christ to “Cast out our sin and enter in; Be born in us today” was a recurring theme in his sermons.
In October 1869 Brooks moved to Trinity Church in Boston. He was attracted to and challenged by his new position as Boston was his hometown, and the Episcopal Church had made little impact on New England or his alma mater Harvard. He met these challenges successfully, using the approaches he had honed in Philadelphia, and his swelling congregation outgrew its building. It acquired a new site on Copley Square and by 1871 had selected Henry Hobson Richardson to plan a new church. The need for a new building became acute when the great Boston fire of November 1872 destroyed Trinity Church. It was proof of Brooks’s power as a preacher and his care as a minister that his congregation expanded while occupying temporary quarters. The new Trinity Church, Richardson’s masterpiece, was consecrated on February 9, 1877. Brooks had played a major role in its successful completion by mediating between the church’s building committee and its architect. His cousin Henry Adams centered his novel Esther (1884), a roman a clef, on the construction of Trinity Church; its rector, Stephen Hazard, is obviously Brooks; and Esther possibly was the young woman Brooks loved but never proposed to, perhaps because of his commitment to his church.
Brooks worked constantly. He published 10 volumes of sermons, counseled young ministers, and lectured on preaching at Yale and on Jesus in Philadelphia. Brooks traveled and read widely for relaxation and to broaden himself. He was familiar with the evidence compiled by the advocates of evolution, and rather than perceiving conflict between science and religion, he believed that the findings of scientists confirmed the Christian faith. Conservatives feared his heterodoxy, but religious scientists and liberal Christians trusted Brooks. In 1891 he was elected bishop of Massachusetts over the vehement opposition of conservative, High Church Anglo-Catholics. They objected to his Broad Church ideas and his participation with non-Episcopalians in marriages, ordinations, and other services. His tenure as bishop was short. He died on January 23, 1893, apparently from diphtheria.
Further reading: Raymond W. Albright, Focus on Infini-ty: A Life of Phillips Brooks (New York: Macmillan, 1961).
Brown, Olympia (1835-1926) women's rights activist, minister
Olympia Brown, a minister and a suffragist, was born in Prairie Ronde, Michigan, on January 5, 1835, and grew up on a farm. Her parents were Universalists and valued education sufficiently to send Brown to Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary in Massachusetts in 1854, but she felt stifled by its religious orthodoxy and left after one year. In 1856 she went to Antioch College in Ohio and graduated in 1860. While there, she heard Antoinette Brown Blackwell, a Congregational minister, preach and resolved to become a minister, but it was difficult to gain admission into a divinity school. After several rejections Brown was admitted in 1861 into the Canton School of Theology at St. Lawrence University in New York. Despite encountering prejudice, she graduated in June 1863, and later that month—after some controversy—was ordained by the Northern Universalist Association. While Blackwell had the distinction of being the first American woman minister ordained by a congregation (1853), Olympia Brown was the first to be ordained by a denomination. Small in stature but large in voice, she was an excellent speaker and preached in several Vermont churches before she was installed in 1864 as the minister of the Weymouth, Massachusetts, Univer-salist Church.
Brown had been an advocate of women’s rights since she was a child, and her parents received—and she read—the weekly edition of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. In 1866, at the invitation of SusAN B. Anthony, Brown attended a woman suffrage meeting in New York City; met Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucy Stone, and joined them as charter members of the American Equal Rights Association. The following year Brown spoke in New York State for woman suffrage and, at the behest of Stone and her husband Henry Blackwell, journeyed to Kansas, where from July to October she gave over 200 speeches in support of a suffrage amendment to its constitution. In 1868 Brown organized the meeting in Boston that established the New England Woman Suffrage Association. Differing in tactics, suffragists in 1869 split into two organizations: Anthony’s more confrontational National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), which was incensed by the exclusion of women from the Fifteenth Amendment (extending the vote to black males, whom, she believed, in some cases, to be less qualified) and advocated immediate redress; and Stone’s more patient American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), which was unwilling to destroy the prewar abolitionist-women’s rights alliance and concentrated its efforts on state and local levels. Brown, although friendly with the AWSA, leaned toward the militant NWSA.
In 1870 Brown accepted a call to be minister of the Bridgeport, Connecticut, Universalist Church. There she met and married in 1873 John Henry Willis, a businessman, and following the example of Lucy Stone, she retained her maiden name. They had two children. Her family, which had been most supportive in her ministerial and reform endeavors, was concerned that marriage might harm her career, but Willis proved to be a helpful mate. In 1878 the family moved to Racine, Wisconsin. In 1887 she gave up her pastoral work and devoted her energies to the cause of woman suffrage.
In 1884 Brown became a vice president of the NWSA and, the same year, was elected president of the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association (WWSA), serving until 1912. Broadly interpreting the Wisconsin law as allowing women to vote in elections “pertaining to school matters,” Brown in 1887—in the aggressive spirit of the NWSA— tried to vote in a Racine election but was refused, took her case to court, lost, and ran up a considerable debt for the WWSA. After the NWSA and the AWSA united to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890, Brown objected to its emphasis on state campaigns and in 1892 formed the Federal Suffrage Association, but its influence was minimal. In 1912 younger suffragists in Wisconsin, having formed the Political Equality League, eclipsed and then merged with the WWSA. Brown disapproved and resigned her presidency of the WWSA. The following year, however, she was elected to the advisory board of Alice Paul and Lucy Burns’s Congressional Union, which later became the National Women’s Party. In 1920, thanks to the Nineteenth Amendment for which she had fought so long, Brown finally voted in her first election. She died in Baltimore on October 23, 1926.
Further reading: Dana Greene, ed., Suffrage and Religious Principle: Speeches and Writings of Olympia Brown (Metuchen, N. J.: Scarecrow Press, 1983); Catherine F. Hitch-ings, Universalist and Unitarian Women Ministers, 2d ed. (Boston: Unitarian Universalist Historical Society, 1985).
Bryan, William Jennings (1860-1925) politician, orator
William Jennings Bryan, Democratic presidential candidate and secretary of state, was born on March 19, 1860, in Salem, Illinois, the son of Silas Bryan and Mariah Elizabeth Jennings. An 1881 graduate of Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois, Bryan also spent two years at Union College of Law in Chicago, graduating in 1883. From 1883 to 1887 he practiced law in Jacksonville. Bryan married Mary Baird in 1884, with whom he had three children.
In 1887 Bryan moved to Nebraska in search of new career opportunities. He rose rapidly in the local Democratic Party ranks and in 1890 was nominated for the U. S. House of Representatives in a normally Republican district that included Lincoln and Omaha. Although Bryan’s main focus throughout the campaign was the tariff issue, he also took advantage of Nebraska’s newly created Peopie’s Party (Populist Party) by endorsing some of its proposals, such as the direct election of U. S. senators and bimetaffism, and won the election by 6,713 votes.
In Congress, Bryan gained national attention by advocating a federal income tax and strongly opposing repeal of the 1890 Sherman Silver Purchase Act. His relentless criticism of President Grover Cfevefand over his demand for its repeal pushed Bryan to the forefront of the Free Sifver movement. Free Silver advocates sought to achieve an inflated currency through the unlimited coinage of silver. It was a hotly contested issue in late-19th-century America, and Bryan rode it to political stardom.
William Jennings Bryan (Library of Congress)
When the 1896 Democratic National Convention met in Chicago, Free Silver advocates were firmly in control. Bryan attended the convention as a member of the Nebraska delegation. He served on the platform committee and was chosen by its members to address the convention on the Free Silver issue. Bryan captivated his audience by stating: “Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” The “cross of gold” speech won Bryan the Democratic presidential nomination on the fifth ballot. In the 1896 presidential election, Bryan faced the Republican candidate William McKinley of Ohio. McKinley ran on a platform that endorsed the gold standard and a high protective tariff. Bryan’s nomination and the Democratic Party’s adoption of Free Silver created a dilemma for the Populists. If they supported Bryan, they could possibly lose their identity as a party, but if they nominated their own candidate, they would split the protest vote and elect McKinley. The Populists decided to support Bryan but nominated one of their own, Thomas E. Watson, for vice president. McKinley defeated Bryan by 7,104,779 to 6,502,925 popular votes and collected 271 electoral votes to Bryan’s 176. Nearly 80 percent of the eligible electorate voted in one of highest turnouts in American history.
During the Spanish-American War (1898), the governor of Nebraska named Bryan colonel of the Third Nebraska Volunteer Regiment. However, the regiment did not serve outside the United States. In December 1898 the Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the war, required Spain to cede the Philippine Islands to the United States in return for $20 million. Although a staunch anti-imperialist, Bryan surprisingly urged the Senate to ratify the treaty. Bryan had opposed annexation but defended his position by arguing that to reject the treaty would leave the United States technically still at war with Spain and the fate of the Philippines undetermined. He argued that it was better to accept the islands and then grant them independence. His opponents charged that Bryan supported ratification only because he hoped to make the issue the subject of a national referendum in the presidential election of 1900, when he expected to be the Democratic candidate once again. The Senate ratified the Treaty of Paris on February 6, 1899, and Bryan was renominated in 1900.
The Republicans also renominated President McKinley in 1900. The Republicans focused on the nation’s prosperity, arguing that it had resulted from the gold standard and the protectionist Dingley Tariff of 1897. Bryan campaigned on a platform that condemned imperialism and again called for Free Silver. President McKinley won 7.2 million votes to Bryan’s 6.4 million and captured 292 electoral votes to Bryan’s 155. The election demonstrated that Bryan was less popular in 1900 than he was in 1896, and it failed to revive the silver issue or to condemn imperialism.
Nevertheless, Bryan remained a progressive force in the Democratic Party. He favored a strong national government to regulate big business, advocated woman suffrage, and supported prohibition. Although strongly supported by organized labor, Bryan in 1908 was again defeated for the presidency, but in 1913 he became Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state. After trying to pursue an even-handed policy of neutrality during World War I, he resigned in 1915, since Wilson tilted in favor of the Allies. Bryan did, however, favor American entry into the League of Nations. He was also a fundamentalist Christian opponent of evolution and, just prior to his death on July 26, 1925, helped convict John Scopes, who had defied Tennessee law by teaching evolution.
Further reading: Robert W. Cherny, A Righ-feous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985); Paolo E. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan, 3 vols.
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964-69); Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Knopf, 2006).
—Phillip Papas
Bryce, James, first viscount Bryce (1838-1922) scholar, British ambassador
James Bryce, a keen observer of American democracy in the Gilded Age, was born in Belfast, Ireland, on May 10, 1838, the eldest of five children of James Bryce, a Scots Presbyterian schoolmaster, and Margaret Young. He was educated at the University of Glasgow and at Oxford, where in 1863 he won the Arnold Historical Essay Prize for “The Holy Roman Empire,” which he enlarged and published in book form the following year. Bryce was admitted to the bar in 1867 and served as Regis professor of civil law at Oxford from 1870 to 1893, as a Liberal member of the House of Commons from 1880 to 1907, and as the British ambassador to the United States from 1907 to 1913. Before taking that post he had made four trips to America between 1870 and 1890. On his visits Bryce discussed several topics with many of the leading political, educational, and literary figures of America. Perhaps the most influential of these sources was Edwin L. Godkin, editor of the Nation. Informed by travels and conversations, Bryce wrote The American Commonwealth (1888), which ranks with Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835) for its perceptive analysis of American political institutions.
In The American Commonwealth, Bryce gave his readers a keen yet sympathetic insight into American life, expressing his admiration for the American people and their government. He believed America’s uniqueness stemmed from the soundness of its founding principles. Bryce was especially intrigued by the American ideal of equality in economic and educational opportunities and by the formation of political decisions that respected both majority rule and minority rights. He discussed the roles played by political parties and public opinion in American politics. Although he found much to admire in America, Bryce criticized the rapid growth of cities and their lack of individuality. He was also critical of the American political system’s inability to formulate new approaches to solve the nation’s growing social problems; the lack of a legal basis for American political parties; the role of urban political machines; the American drive toward material success; the concentration of power in the central government; the American penchant for exploiting the nation’s natural resources; and the relative weakness of state and local governments.
Bryce retired as ambassador to the United States in April 1913. Elevated to the British peerage as a viscount in 1914, Bryce later that year was appointed to the International Court of Justice at The Hague. During the First
World War, Bryce presided over a British commission investigating alleged German atrocities in Belgium and France. After the war, Bryce advocated the creation of the League of Nations. He died in Sidmouth, Devon, England, on January 22, 1922.
Further reading: Edmund Ions, James Bryce and American Democracy, 1870-1922 (New York: Humanities Press, 1970).
—Phillip Papas
World History
