e program as a whole. But that plank had not been seriously
intended, and by 1916 the march of events had made it a dead letter.

A more serious difficulty, in March, 1913, lay in the fact that the
President was not the party leader. There was an enormous amount of
Wilson sentiment over the country, and there were many enthusiastic
Wilson men; but a good many of these were of the old mugwump type, or
men who had hitherto held aloof from politics. In 1912, as later in
1917 and 1918, there was seen the anomaly of a leader who was himself
an orthodox and often narrow partisan, yet drew most of his support
from independent elements or even from the less firmly organized
portions of the opposition. And not only were most of the Wilson men
independents or political amateurs; a still greater stumbling block lay
in the fact that very few of them had been elected to office. In the
great Democratic landslide of 1912 the Democrats who had got on the
payroll were mostly the old party wheel-horses who had been lingering
in the outer darkness of opposition for sixteen years past, or more or
less permanent representatives of the Solid South.

In so far as the party had a leader at that time, it was Bryan. Bryan
had played the leading part in the Baltimore Convention. If he had not
exactly nominated Wilson, he had at least done more than anybody else
to destroy Wilson's chief competitors. There were not enough Bryan men
in the country to elect Bryan, not even enough Bryan men in the party
to nominate Bryan a fourth time; but there were enough Bryan Democrats
to ruin the policy of the incoming President if he did not conciliate
Bryan with extreme care.

So the first efforts of the new Administration had to be a compromise
between what Wilson wanted and what Bryan would permit. This was seen
first of all in the composition of the Cabinet, which Bryan himself
headed as Secretary of State. Josephus Daniels, who as Secretary of the
Navy was to be one of the principal targets of criticism for the next
eight years, was also a Bryan man. Of the "Wilson men" of the campaign,
William G. McAdoo was chosen as Secretary of the Treasury, not without
some grave misgivings as to his ability, which were not subsequently
justified by his conduct of the office. The rest of the Cabinet was
notable chiefly for the presence of three men from Texas, a State whose
prominence reflected not only its growing importance and its fidelity
to the party but also th