Отрывок из книги
Frank B. Lord, James William Bryan
Published by Good Press, 2019
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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.
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