Fascinating: The First Sound Bites. Old phonographic recordings of Bryan and Taft from '08. (1908, that is).

Two things that strike me:

1. People spoke differently then. I don't mean they used longer words or more complex syntax (though that is arguably true); their pronunciations were different - it seems that regional dialects would be more pronounced in a less-mobile, untelevised era.

(Taft's voice is a lot higher than I'd expect it to be, just looking at the man.)

2. Bryan's speech is kind of startling, in that TODAY we are dealing with financial instability. It's a little different (He's talking about a sort of proto-FDIC), but I get the same sense-of-comfort mingled with sense-of-annoyance I get from reading Paul's letters: Comfort, because it seems that things have not got much worse over time; we are dealing with some of the same issues that our ancestors did. But annoyance that we cannot learn to act better.

Incidentally, Bryan is the person after whom the county where I live is named. I don't know much about the man other than the Scopes trial and the Cross of Gold speech and the fact that he was an early Populist.