Death
After the trial, Bryan continued to edit and deliver speeches, traveling hundreds of miles in the next few days. On Sunday, July 26, 1925, he returned from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Dayton, where he attended a church service, ate a meal, and died in his sleep that afternoon (the result of diabetes and fatigue) — just five days after the Scopes trial had ended. School Superintendent Walter White proposed that Dayton should create a Christian college as a lasting memorial to Bryan; fund raising was successful and Bryan College opened in 1930.
Bryan is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. His tombstone reads "He kept the Faith." He was survived by, among others, a daughter, Congresswoman Ruth Bryan Owen, and her four children: son John Bryan Leavitt and daughter Ruth Leavitt, (by her first husband, Newport, Rhode Island artist William Homer Leavitt), and two children by her second husband, British Royal Engineers officer Reginald A. Owen.
John Bryan Leavitt had been adopted by his grandfather, William Jennings Bryan, after his parents divorced. He dropped 'Leavitt', shortening his name to simply John Bryan. He became an actor.
Read more about this topic: William Jennings Bryan
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“... the heart monitor,
the death cricket bleeping.”
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“Death does determine life.... Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous. However, to be sincere I must add that for me death is important only if it is not justified and rationalized by reason. For me death is the maximum of epicness and death.”
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“O mortal folk, you may behold and see
How I lie here, sometime a mighty knight;
The end of joy and all prosperity
Is death at last, thorough his course and might;”
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