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I'm reading A Godly Hero right now, and at the end of chapter 2 it recounts how his wife, Mary Baird Bryan, asked him to retire to law practice and quit politics. Now while Bryan wasn't the type to quit, in that moment declaring "...I was born to this life and I must continue to fight the battles of the people for what I think is just and right", he also was young and could afford to take time off. Lets assume he does so and never really parlays back into politics. What would happen to the Democratic Party and America over the next 20 years?

Again, while Bryan was important in the transformation of the Bourbon laissez-faire Democrats into his camp of silverites, suffragettes, and reformers, he wasn't the only man with soaring rhetoric or a following and it would have likely happened without him. But obviously things wouldn't be quite the same without the Great Commoner. What would the immediate changes (like Presidential nominees in 1896, 1900, and 1908) and long term changes (the New Deal and co.)?
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