During the previous five years the nation had mourned several fallen leaders: Theodore Roosevelt, Warren Harding, and Woodrow Wilson. But those presidential state funerals fell short of the everyday glory surrounding Bryan’s semi-divine passing. As the special train made its way from town to town in Tennessee and Virginia on its way to the nation’s capital, it was met along the way by grieving throngs - people who personally identified with Bryan. What these largely rural Americans had in common with him was more than political affinity, it was deeper – something quite spiritual.

People came from miles around to rail stations in Tennessee towns like Garysville, Coulterville, Melville, Hixon, and Boyce, en route to Chattanooga - and Cleveland, Athens, and Sweetwater, beyond - all just to catch a glimpse of the flag-draped, bronze coffin. They took off their hats and bowed their heads.

When the train arrived at Knoxville shortly after 2:30 in the afternoon there were more than ten thousand people waiting at the station, and the decision was made to extend the planned stop there by twenty minutes to give the crowd time to process it all.

When they reached the next station, in Jefferson City, four young men, students at Carson-Newman College, climbed on a pile of railroad ties and sang a hymn.

The widow, Mary Baird Bryan, who was largely confined to a wheelchair due to severe arthritis, was deeply moved by the crowds she saw at each stop and “appreciated the sympathy” of those who came to pay their respects.

As night fell, the train crossed into Virginia stopping first at Bristol and then Lynchburg. At 2:15 a.m., Bryan’s daughter, Ruth Owen, was amazed to see a great crowd had gathered. She “ordered the doors of the funeral car opened so the crowd might pass through.” A few hundred made it through, but the train began to move on after ten brief minutes, disappointing hundreds of other mourners.

The journey ended with the train’s arrival in Washington, D.C. shortly before 8:00 a.m. on the 30th. It was met by hundreds of railroad employees who removed their hats in respect.

The next day, the funeral service at the church of the Presidents, New York Avenue Presbyterian, in Washington, D.C., was broadcast live across the country by radio for millions of Bryan’s fellow-citizens to hear. Then the bronze coffin was carried through the capital city and across the Potomac toward Arlington Cemetery. There “they laid the great pacifist to rest among the bodies of soldiers.” Flags flew at half mast across the country.

Barack Obama wants to claim the mantle of John Kennedy. But his candidacy is more like that of Robert Kennedy – with a little William Jennings Bryan in there somewhere. The issues today are not those of forty or a hundred years ago, but the “impulse” is very much in evidence. Political boundary markers are being obscured by a populist fog and redefined faster than pundits and other cultural surveyors can chart.

Obama is, in fact, a very effective populist – probably the most skillful one to come along in decades. That he gets so many to abandon or suspend long-held positions on this or that because he inspires them is quite impressive.

And not a little scary.