Bryan's campaign in 1896 as "the first great struggle of the masses in our country against the privileged classes". In a 1934 speech dedicating a memorial to Bryan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said: I think that we would choose the word 'sincerity' as fitting him [Bryan] most of all... it was that sincerity that served him so well in his life-long fight against sham and privilege and wrong. It was that sincerity that made him a force for good in his own generation and kept alive many of the ancient faiths on which we are building today. We... can well agree that he fought the good fight; that he finished the course; and that he kept the faith. More recently, conservative Republicans such as Ralph Reed have hailed Bryan's legacy. Reed described Bryan as "the most consequential evangelical politician of the twentieth century". Bryan's career has also been compared to that of Donald Trump. In popular culture It has been suggested by some economists, historians, and literary critics that L. Frank Baum satirized Bryan as the Cowardly Lion in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was published in 1900. Those assertions are based partly on Baum's history as a Republican supporter who advocated in his role as a journalist on behalf of William McKinley and his policies. Vachel Lindsay's 1919 "singing poem" "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan" is a lengthy tribute to the idol of the poet's youth. Bryan played a minor role in Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel (1929). Bryan also has a biographical part in "The 42nd Parallel" (1930) in John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy. Edwin Maxwell played Bryan in the 1944 film Wilson. Inherit the Wind, a 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, is a highly fictionalized account of the Scopes Trial written in response to McCarthyism. A populist thrice-defeated presidential candidate from Nebraska named Matthew Harrison Brady (based on Bryan) comes to a small town to help prosecute a young teacher for teaching evolution to his schoolchildren. He is opposed by a famous trial lawyer, Henry Drummond (based on Darrow) and mocked by a cynical newspaperman (based on Mencken) as the trial assumes a national profile. The 1960 film adaptation was directed by Stanley Kramer and starred Fredric March as Brady and Spencer Tracy as Drummond. Bryan appears as a character in Douglas Moore's 1956 opera The Ballad of Baby Doe. Ainslie Pryor played