Whenever it’s election season in the USA, political junkies look for historical parallels amidst the swirling chaos of the moment. Right now there’s talk in the blogosphere about Barack Obama riding a wave of new Democratic ascendency, akin to FDR’s breakthrough national sweep in 1932. Four years ago, Karl Rove was quoted as asserting that George W. Bush was going to secure Republican domination of the Electoral College in the manner of William McKinley. If nothing else, drawing comparisons help justify the reading of stodgy old American history books–and I’m all for that.

There may or may not be a profound shift in the air this year. Certainly, a lot of people seem to be fed up with the way things are now. But rarely does that anger get fully articulated in an election campaign. It seems as if any time a candidate offers a pointed message accusing one segment of society of wronging another segment, that candidate is considered too negative to be elected. Obama, for instance, emphasizes “hope” and “change,” implying that even groups that oppose each other can be inspired into joining forces for the common good. Sure, there’s a flailing of greedy CEOs and lobbyists in his speeches, but that’s not where his eloquence lies. He’s running as a unifier–just like the current Chief Executive did in 2000. Righteous indignation is not the stuff of his–or almost anyone’s–soaring oratory these days.

If you actually want some genuine anger eloquently presented, you have to go back a long time–maybe 112 years. The other day, I was reading William Jennings Bryan’s celebrated “Cross of Gold” to get a taste of great confrontational speechmaking.

Bryan is mostly remembered today for his sorry performance at the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. He was old and worn out by then, fighting a rear-guard action against a changing culture. The Cross of Gold speech is something quite different. He delivered it at the 1896 Democratic Convention, and it was largely responsible for making him the party’s nominee that year against William McKinley. Even as a text, it’s a powerful, gutsy document of defiance that puts current political platform talk to shame. Anyone fighting an election campaign today could learn from it–that is, if he or she was willing to actually get hostile in the public arena.

It usually takes a little dynamite to shake things up. In 1896 the Democrats were in real need of rebranding. Except for fighting over the tariff and a few other issues, they weren’t a whole lot different from the Republicans. Bryan jerked the party into the 20th century as a vehicle for liberal reform with the Cross of Gold speech. The closest thing in modern times to such an incendiary act was Barry Goldwater’s “Extremism Is No Vice” speech at the 1964 Republican Convention. And even then, he was mostly jousting at the ideology of liberalism, not at specific people.

Bryan, on the other hand, was speaking on behalf of poor farmers and wage-earners to the bankers and bosses and fat cats who had dominated the Democratic Party in the 1890s. They were at that convention, and he was looking into their faces as he spoke. Imagine Obama or any other serious candidate for president saying words like these: “We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them.”

You could hurt some people’s feelings with words like that. And you could inspire as well.

Do we need a new Cross of Gold speech ringing out over the airwaves and through the internet? This kind of hot rhetoric doesn’t go over well anymore, supposedly. And maybe it’s counterproductive to actually running the country. But I can’t help but admire someone like Bryan “speaking truth to power” a hundred years before the phrase was coined–and getting away with doing it in the Victorian 1890s. Maybe Karl Rove is right about the Republicans channeling McKinley. If so, maybe someone should be reincarnating Bryan.

Barry Alfonso is a writer and independent historian living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.