family to Lincoln, Nebraska. The legal profession never
held great attraction for him, despite the encouragement and assistance
of his wife, who herself took up the study of law after her marriage
and was admitted to the bar. Public questions and politics held greater
interest for the young man, who had already, in his college career,
shown his ability as an orator. Nebraska offered the opportunity he
craved. At the Democratic state convention in Omaha in 1888 he made a
speech on the tariff which gave him immediately a state-wide reputation
as an orator and expounder of public issues. He took an active part in
the campaign of that year, and in 1889 was offered, but declined, the
nomination for lieutenant governor on the Democratic ticket. In 1890 he
won election to Congress by a majority of seven thousand in a
district which two years before had returned a Republican, and this he
accomplished in spite of the neglect of party managers who regarded the
district as hopeless. In Congress he became a member of the Committee
on Ways and Means. On the floor of the House his formal speeches on the
tariff, a topic to which nothing new could be brought, commanded the
attention of one of the most critical and blase audiences of the world.
The silver question, which was the principal topic before Congress at
the following session, afforded a fresher field for his oratory; indeed,
Bryan was the principal aid to Bland both as speaker and parliamentarian
in the old leader's monetary campaign. When Bryan sat down after a
three-hour speech in which he attacked the gold standard, a colleague
remarked, "It exhausts the subject." In 1894 a tidal wave of
Republicanism destroyed Bryan's chances of being elected United States
Senator, a consummation for which he had been laboring on the stump and,
for a brief period, as editor of the Omaha World-Herald. He continued,
however, to urge the silver cause in preparation for the presidential
campaign of 1896.

Taller and broader than most men and of more commanding presence, Bryan
was a striking figure in the convention hall. He wore the inevitable
black suit of the professional man of the nineties, but his dress did
not seem conventional: his black tie sat at too careless an angle; his
black hair was a little too long. These eccentricities the cartoonists
seized on and exaggerated so that most people who have not seen the man
picture Bryan, not as a determined looking man with a piercing eye and