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
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