This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate Tomeo.

Could they even hear him there in the hall?

They had heard of him.

There was this misunderstanding or myth that developed around William Jennings Bryant

that when he took the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in July of 1896,

he was an unknown, that the delegates saw this man step to the podium,

cut from a different cloth and all the politicians who had droned on before him,

stodgy and stiff and old, and then suddenly there's this different kind of cat,

young, just 36 and fit, a bit shy of six feet, which was weirdly tall at that time, prematurely balding, but I don't know, owning it.

And out comes this big baritone voice, not reedy or mealy-mouthed or whatever the speakers before him were given.

But the story that has been passed down that Brian bounded up to the podium and people are like, who is this guy? Isn't true. They knew who he was.

A former two-term congressman from Nebraska,

a failed Senate candidate who then made his name in the lecture circuit,

railing against the gold standard.

The government pegged the value of the dollar to the value of gold,

and Brian was in the camp that was against

doing that. It was a defining argument. It was the most central issue of that time. Politically,

economically, culturally, it was utterly crucial to a whole era of American life, and I'm not

sure you need to know a thing about it now.

But they all did.

The thousands of people, the 9606 delegates plus the alternates, the press, the food vendors,

security, janitors, and the spectators filling the Chicago Coliseum, they cared about the

...