SOURCE: “Henry Adams and William Jennings Bryan: The American Turns the Century,” in Mainstream, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1943, pp. 131-49.

In the following essay, Basso examines similarities and differences between Bryan and his contemporary Henry Adams regarding cultural, social, and scientific forces in America at beginning of the twentieth century.

In 1893, when Grover Cleveland was in the White House for his second term, the world's Fair in Chicago was opened—all the earth's peoples were invited to come and bear witness to the brawn and bustle of the strapping young giant of the West.

John Applegate was then only a boy of nine, but memories of the Fair, to which his father took him on a three-day excursion, often return with an extraordinary vividness. He found himself telling Sonny, when Chicago again played host to the world many years later, that this new and more garish exposition could in no...