A MAN AND A WOMAN
The celebrating started early. News of the victory reached Madison by wire at 10:30 on the night of May 7, 1879. A waiting crowd of University of Wisconsin students surged from the telegraph office to the campus. There they built a bonfire on the baseball diamond and danced around it until after midnight, their cheers rising with the sparks that died out at treetop height, their exultant faces lit by the flickering flames. Finally the fire died down, the revelers grew tired and drifted away, and only quiet and the eternal noises of nighttime on the shore of Lake Mendota remained.
Saturday afternoon another student throng, with a brass band, was at the depot to meet the winner. Bob La Follette, a member of the senior class, stepped down from the coach into a thrilling wave of adulation. A short, slender man still a few weeks short of his twenty-fourth birthday, he was fully enjoying the role of conquering hero. They put him at the head of a long procession of carriages and pedestrians that wound its noisy way back to the university for an official reception. It was a great day in the history of the thirty-one-year-old state.1
The honors that Bob brought back to Wisconsin from Iowa City had been won in an interstate oratorical contest. Not basketball, football, or baseball, but public speaking was the attraction—a competition to see which collegian could present the most eloquent, convincing, and learned talk, prepared in advance, on a chosen subject. Bob had swept away half a dozen other finalists with his presentation of the character of Shakespeare’s Iago. He repeated it that night, “by demand of the audience,” at a mass meeting held in the state capitol, but not until the president of the board of regents, two professors, and two attorneys had first made speeches in his praise. Only when the popular appetite for declamation was satisfied did the celebration end with an hour of dancing. Then there was quiet again.
That was how some Americans respected and honored the spoken word in 1879. La Follette would become a star of the last generation of American politicians to prosper by the magic of the unamplified human voice trying to move a face-to-face audience.
In the welcoming crowd was his fiancée and classmate, Belle Case. She had been the first to hear the winning speech when he read a draft of it to her as they sat under a tree on the campus one afternoon. She had been through the many repetitions and revisions in which he practiced each gesture and inflection. He consumed hours recklessly in thorough preparation, and in other extracurricular activities as well, so that his overall academic standing was endangered. It did not seem to worry him.
Belle, on the other hand, would have been very upset if it had been her own record in question. She was a model student, gifted in composition, but too shy for public speeches. She hadn’t skipped a class in her four years of college. When Bob reached the statewide finals at Beloit, she faced a dilemma. Going to hear him would require leaving a recitation early in order to catch a train, and she was worried about tainting that perfect attendance record. Not to go would be disloyal to her fiancé. In the end love won and she went, but it cost her a soul-struggle that haunted her for years.2
Each was disciplined, principled, and dedicated, but their basic characters were refracted through different strong personalities. He was dynamic, extroverted, changeable, engrossed in the moment. She was steady, retiring, consistent, and anxious. Both challenged the world as it was, but he enjoyed the fight whereas she pressed on in the face of fear. Still, their identical ideals, their shared vision of life’s purposes, held them together in a love story that only death could end, half a century later. Theirs was the kind of marriage that has become, with each passing year, almost as rare as oratory contests.
His political career was not a conventional story of temporarily triumphant reform. He fitted no particular profile but his own. It showed strong elements of egotism and theatricality, but no one could question his courage, consistency, and the blazing conviction that underlay all his specific proposals. He wanted Americans to make the realization of government by the people the highest priority in their lives, every day of their lives.
Belle embraced Bob’s causes (plus others of her own), and their children, bred to these high standards, continued the battle to realize a dream of perfect democracy that may have been beyond the nation’s readiness and will. At all events, it was a dream that time never brought to full reality.
The fire leaped, and hands applauded, the words rang, and the hope soared. Then the glow faded, the crowd went elsewhere, the night grew dark and cold. Tomorrow came, but in its hard clarity things looked somehow different than expected. Was this what progress meant?
Bob and Belle were rural Wisconsin children, apple-pie ordinary, with roots at least three generations deep in American soil. His people were Huguenots—French Protestants—by background. They made family togetherness a virtue. Bob’s great-grandfather Joseph was one of three brothers (LeFollet was the name in the old country) who arrived sometime before 1750. He served as a wagoner in the Revolution. The brothers and their families settled near each other in Virginia, then moved together to Kentucky. There one of Joseph’s sons, Jesse, had a farm adjoining that of Abraham Lincoln’s father.
Jesse begat boys prolifically: William, Warren, Elhanan, Robert, Harvey, and Josiah, who was Robert M. La Follette’s father. In the 1820s they all moved to Indiana. There, grown to young manhood, Josiah met and fell in love with Mary Ferguson. Her family was Scotch-Irish, drawn from another wave of the great Protestant exodus to the American colonies in the eighteenth century. The courtship was not smooth. She broke their engagement to marry another man in 1840, but soon experienced a loss that was not uncommon on the frontier. The man died young, leaving her pregnant with a daughter. Josiah had taken his broken heart back to Kentucky. But on hearing the news he resumed his pursuit and after five years was accepted.
Josiah and his five brothers moved collectively again around 1850, this time to Dane County in southern Wisconsin. By then his family included Mary plus her daughter by the first marriage (Ellen Buchanan) and a new son, William. In 1853 daughter Josie arrived, and on June 14, 1855, Robert Marion La Follette.
Bob would later describe himself as “one of the greenest of all the ‘plebs’—a boy right from the farm.”3 He could also have claimed birth in a log cabin, but both statements leave a mistaken impression of Lincolnesque poverty at birth. Josiah was already a respected citizen of the town-ship of Primrose, chosen as town clerk by unanimous decision of its voters, all thirty-six of them. He was promoted to assessor the following year. By 1856 he owned four hundred acres of land, eight cows and heifers, plus dairying equipment and additional livestock. The two-story, double-log home in which Mary gave birth to Bob had a stove, an oven, a cellar that would be filled with food the following winter, and even a bookcase with books. Two of the volumes were Lives of the Presidents of the United States and A Practical System of Modern Geography . . . Simplified and Adapted to the Capacity of Youth, both published in 1844.
Josiah had also accumulated the tools and lumber to convert the “double log” into a finished frame house. He was never to do so. Eight months after Bob’s birth he died of pneumonia, leaving a yawning hole in the little boy’s life.
Thoughts of his lost father haunted the grown man. When Mary Ferguson La Follette died in 1894, Bob had Josiah’s bones dug up for reburial next to her. He took the skeleton out of the rotting coffin with his own hands and stood in the open grave amid the smells of corruption, trying to visualize the six-foot-three bearded giant who had sired him. In a private journal kept just after his college graduation Bob had already written in agony: “Oh, my idolized father, lost to me before your image was stamped on my child-mind—nothing left me but your name! What would I not give to have known the sound of your voice, to have received your approval when it was merited.”4
The idealized father mattered to him from earliest childhood, though he was raised by another man. Even as a very little boy, he would firmly correct anyone who called him by the name of his stepfather, John Saxton. No, he insisted, “My name is La Follette.” And it was no wonder, for Saxton was forced on him by the realities of life, especially for women like his mother in the 1850s. Mary La Follette, widowed a second time, could not raise her three youngest children alone, not even with the help of neighboring La Follette brothers-in-law or her son-in-law, Dean Eastman, whom Ellen Buchanan had married in 1856 at age sixteen. Respectability and necessity required a man of Mary’s own. When she found him in 1862, he was the wrong one.
Saxton was a somberly clad widower seventy years old, a storekeeper and leading citizen in the nearby town of Argyle, and a Baptist deacon incorrectly reputed to be prosperous. Far from helping Mary with her financial problems, he burrowed into her estate, charging it with all the expenses of his new family down to the last penny’s worth of elastic or candy for the children. She was soon forced to go to court to sell a part of her farm, and it would have happened again if a friendly judge had not made it clear to Saxton that he would not tolerate any further depredations, especially while Saxton had a business of his own.
He was a “spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child” disciplinarian who clashed frequently with his scrappy seven-year-old stepson. Bob spoke little of him in adult life and never mentioned him in his 1911 Autobiography. The silence says more than paragraphs could. His own later behavior testifies to his rage and pain under the yoke of a hard-fisted ancient who turned life and joy into darkness and mourning with mandatory Bible readings, Sundays of drawn shades and stillness, and preachments about the eternal hellfire that must be the lot of those who died unbaptized, as Josiah La Follette had. Justifiably or not, Bob’s models of adult manhood were dominated by contrasting double images: on one hand, an idolized dead father rich in virtues to imitate; on the other, a despised enemy somehow married to a beloved mother. “Hyperion to a satyr” runs the phrase from Hamlet, in which the prince compares father to stepfather. It was La Follette’s favorite play as a man. No wonder that “its language and thought,” Belle said, “were a part of his life.”5
Little Bob could not wait to escape Saxton’s clutches, which circumstances fortunately made easy for him. Saxton’s business lost money steadily during the 1860s, possibly because he was growing too deaf to understand his customers. After a while he folded it, tried business in another town, and finally washed up in Primrose on what remained of Josiah’s old farm. By then he was too old and sick to run it, but Bob’s older brother, Will, now about twenty years old and back from brief service in the Civil War, was available. Mary, faithful to her part of the bargain, nursed Saxton as he slipped toward death in 1872, as did their daughter, Josie, who would read to him from the Bible and the Christian Standard. For all practical purposes he was now an invalid dependent on the La Follettes of Primrose. That family consisted of Mary, Will, and Josie, but not yet Bob in any full sense.
Bob had dropped out of the family in 1868, at thirteen, choosing and getting permission to stay and continue school in Argyle. He supported himself by cutting hair in the local hotel after he talked the owner into letting him set up an improvised barber chair there. Adolescence was still an undiscovered realm, especially among working Americans. First you were a child, then a responsible man or woman.
Bob was both child and man. At three and a half he was boosted onto the teacher’s desk in the newly built Primrose schoolhouse to lisp: “You’d scarce expect one of my age / to speak upon the public stage,” a staple recitation for little beginners, guaranteed to bring applause and laughter. From then on he was a confirmed show-off. Public acclaim is a great balm to private hurts. As he grew older he performed, by popular request, patriotic and classical set pieces, comic songs, poems in Scottish, Irish, or Yankee dialect. His mimic’s ear helped him to pick up German and the rudiments of Norwegian from immigrant neighbors.
Bob’s formal schooling was indifferent. One of his schools had a hundred ungraded students in one room, tutored in all subjects by one teacher. In another the schoolmaster was a thrasher, like Saxton. But the boy picked up things quickly on his own. He played fife in a band, danced and wrestled, and learned hair cutting along with other manual skills. By the time he got to the age of independence he had the makings of a popular small-town sport—bright, well liked, slightly wild, without direction—until a first turning-point experience. One night in Argyle, when he was fifteen, he was drunk, probably not for the first time, and was caught by his teacher, Frank Higgins.
Higgins told him in no uncertain terms that he ought to be at home with his mother. In a repentant frame of mind, and perhaps feeling unthreatened now by Saxton, Bob went. It was a good time for him to return. Brother Will wanted to go west on his own. Bob took over for him and made two crops in two years, showing impressive abilities. He could plow a straight furrow, do a neat job of carpentry, judge cattle and horseflesh, and get a good price for a wagonload of produce driven in to the Madison market twenty-four miles away. Competence and perfectionism flowed unprompted from the same inner fountains. His daughter Fola would later report that he could not so much as watch calmly while someone sharpened a pencil if he thought it was not being done correctly.6
In 1873, he was eighteen and the unquestioned head of the household, and ambition was pushing him beyond the farm. After renting it to Dean Eastman, he drove with Mary and Josie to the outskirts of Madison in a wagon piled with their furniture, trailing a tethered cow behind. He rented a house with a barn and pasture and supported them all by scrounging and odd jobs like selling books. Meanwhile he prepared himself to enter the university through courses in private academies and a “sub-freshman” program of the university. No public high schools were available to him to do that job.
Bob’s aim in this hard and bold move was not entirely clear. He left evidence with Belle that he was thinking of either a stage career or of becoming a “statesman” through the study of law. In either case he would bring strong assets. A fellow student in one of his precollege courses re-called, “[W]e had no one who could compare with him as a declaimer—he was the feature of every program.”7
Belle’s annals were simpler and less troubled. Her great-grandfather Case had come from Vermont, so her marriage to La Follette merged two classic streams of westward migration, one from the upland South and the other from New England. The dominating family figure of Belle’s childhood memory was her grandmother Lucetta Case, who could recall her own parents’ yard-by-yard struggle to Ohio through uncleared forests when she was ten years old. Lucetta’s mother died not long after arrival, leaving the teen-age girl with the full burden of caring for the household and younger children. “I had no chance for an education,” she lamented to Belle.
That meant, of course, no formal education. Grandmother Case “merely” knew the Bible, how to tell time by the stars and name the constellations, how to make vegetable dyes and medicinal herbs, and, of course, how to spin, weave, knit, and sew. She dipped candles, gathered sap and made maple syrup, hived bees and collected the honey, made butter and cheese, and dried fruits. “She always had such good things to eat,” Belle wistfully recalled.
Grandma Case was never idle. Once when the two of them were stitching together rags for carpets, Belle innocently asked if Grandma didn’t hate to sew short rags that took a long time and made only a small ball. “No, child,” was the answer, “I don’t hate to do anything that needs to be done.”
A photograph of Belle at ten, chubby in a checked woolen dress made by her grandmother, shows her looking gravely into the camera’s eye. She very much wanted the schooling that had eluded her grandmother and her mother, Mary Nesbit Case. She got the rudiments at a country school near Anson Case’s farm in Baraboo. She walked two miles a day each way, fair weather or foul, never late, never absent, finishing at the head of her class. Fortunately her parents recognized that their bookish daughter deserved to go to college and become something more than another farmwife. They saved for her education, and for that reason if no other she applied herself at college in an almost driven way.
The ancestries and upbringing of Bob and Belle were, according to her, “fundamental to our lives and our understanding of each other.”8 They culled out from the harshness and materialism (and violence) of pioneer life the positive virtues they respected: hard work and self-sufficiency. They honored these in practice and deliberately tried to pass them on by seeing to it that their own children spent plenty of time on their grandparents’ farm and on one that they themselves bought in middle age. But what their son Phil remembered most in his sixties—after surviving the Great Depression—was the security. The warm kitchen stove, the well-stocked woodpile, the thick homemade quilts, the crocks of butter, jars of fruit, and sides of meat in the cellar. “What millions,” he asked, “could buy that life today?”9 In 1875 Belle was sixteen, Bob twenty. Each was a bundle of as-yet-unjelled talents. Outwardly gregarious, inwardly hungry and self-absorbed, he required a focus that would provide a balance point. She was ready to give herself to some larger purpose, but what would it be?
For the two of them the University of Wisconsin furnished the beginnings of an answer. There they met young friends and competitors like themselves from around the state. There they grew in awareness of the economic, social, and intellectual revolutions that were hammering old certainties into dust. And there they found ideas of public usefulness that provided a mold into which their energies could be poured. That was due in good part to an extraordinary mentor, the president of the University of Wisconsin, John Bascom.
Bascom had been appointed by the trustees in 1874, the year before Bob and Belle’s class entered. He was forty-seven years old and did not know the meaning of the word rest. He was a minister’s son from upstate New York who, like Bob, had lost his father in infancy and, like Belle, was helped through college by the sacrifices of a willing family, primarily an older sister.
After graduation from Williams College, Bascom passed up the law and the ministry as possible careers in favor of becoming an educator. He returned to Williams in 1855 as an instructor in rhetoric and philosophy and began to pour out books. He was the old-fashioned kind of philosopher, prying into every specialty in search of some unifying principle. He wrote confidently and freely about psychology, political economy, esthetics, and mathematics, convinced that philosophy was at “the center of university instruction.”
He had a tough-minded respect for reason but it didn’t destroy, merely changed, the faith of his New England forebears. Bascom was a Christian evolutionist who married Darwinism (as a shorthand for following the evidence of science wherever it led) and God as the author of instinctive moral principle. He rejected both corrosive skepticism and bigotry. Religion was the meeting ground for philosophy’s explorations in heaven and earth. “Man should walk the earth with the bounding life of an archangel,” he wrote, leaving room for men and angels both.
This kind of liberalism did not endear him to conservative colleagues at Williams. His social outlook, unfurled in dozens of articles, outraged them even more. To Bascom the world might be big enough for evolution and Christ, but not for selfishness. “Society,” he declared, “must be converted, as distinctly and fully converted as the individual; and the conversion of the individual will be very partial till this conversion of the community.”
In practice this meant protecting the weak from the exploitive. Liberty, he argued, “stands for the use of powers, not their abuse . . . If we allow the individual to seek what he regards as his own liberty without relation to that of others . . . the commonwealth itself . . . crumbles away.” So, in the teeth of a wealth-worshiping age, Bascom supported labor unions and the regulation of business. When he decided to leave for Wisconsin it was with a keen perception that his presence was becoming “less agreeable” to Williams.
Over twelve years Bascom would make it less and less agreeable to the board of regents of Wisconsin, too, but that was partly because of his constant battle to improve the quality of the university, which he judged on arrival to be in an unripe and shameful condition due to the board’s neglect.
The university was a curious frontierlike mixture of high ideals and pinch-penny crudeness. Founded in 1848—the year of statehood—it aimed to be the crown of a “well-regulated system of public instruction,” but the lawmakers left it to wring support money out of tiny fees, plus the interest from a small share of public land sales, plus annual appropriations usually under ten thousand dollars. New buildings had to be fought for one at a time. By 1864 the commencements were impressive-sounding occasions, commanding the attendance of the governor, the justices of the state supreme court, and other high officials and featuring addresses in Latin and German. But neither of the two dormitories had indoor plumbing, and the total number of alumni was fifty. All were men, and twenty-eight of them either were or had been in the Union Army.
Wisconsin’s citizens were not sure what to expect from a university, the very idea of which was changing with the new times. Was its purpose moral and traditional? To train young generations in the way they should go, armed with the wisdom of the past? Or was it to break new ground in learning? The two objectives were not always compatible, and the uncertainty was reflected in the mirrors of curriculum, faculty, and student body.
There was the matter of women, for example. The university began by admitting them only to a “normal department” for the preparation of teachers. They were not admitted to regular programs until 1870, and as late as 1877, when Belle was already a sophomore, the board of regents debated whether to end the “experiment” of coeducation. Besides the conventional doubts about the effects of college on the health and expectations of the “gentler sex,” a lingering puritanism dreaded the risk of mingling boys and girls far from home. In 1878 two men and two women were expelled for “repeatedly . . . seeking each other’s society.” Undergraduate social rules were devised to chill the possibilities of flirtation. The library, as an instance, was open only on separate afternoons to men and women students.
Not that much time was expected to pass in the library. It was closed for three days of the week and numbered only four thousand volumes. An official visitor called it “a disgrace to the state.” The impressive-sounding required program rested uneasily on such a foundation, which was hardly adequate to the “classical course” expected of all B.A. candidates until 1873—Latin, Greek, and mathematics with electives in chemistry, mechanics, physics, astronomy, political economy, international law, English literature, rhetoric, and history.
Even if new scholarly writings in these disciplines had been freely available, their use would not have been much encouraged. Classes were conducted by the traditional recitation method, which asked the students simply to repeat back memorized portions of standard texts. That was all right with some of the professors. John Sterling, for example, who taught physics, chemistry, and astronomy, was unperturbed by the absence of laboratory and research facilities. An ex-minister, he held that in scientific matters, “the testimony of the humblest Christian is worth more than the opinion of all the Darwins and Huxleys in the world.” Few students would have objected to the narrow scope of instruction, either, being primarily interested in a comfortable ascent toward professional status. Homogeneous and earnest, they were likely to ask few questions and be content with traditional answers. Of the thirty-one men in the Class of 1877 eleven were bound for law, medicine, the pulpit, or business; all were American born; two-thirds were from Wisconsin and Republican; all but one were Protestants. (Only five smoked and six admitted to an occasional drink.)
Bascom aimed to shake the place up, and there were already some promising openings toward making it a university rather than a rural academy. William Allen, professor of Latin and history, had done graduate work in Germany. He gave Belle, she recalled, a “first glimpse of the relation of history to life.” (He was also a model scholar-activist, having served during the Civil War in the U.S. Sanitary Commission and the Freedmen’s Bureau.) John B. Feuling, who taught modern languages and philology, also held a rare European doctorate. Edward A. Birge, a youthful biology instructor, introduced his students to laboratory work by insisting on minute scrutiny of the specimens he provided. Belle was so impressed that she wrote her prize-winning senior essay on the topic “Learning to See.”
Bascom wanted more of this kind of education, and to get it he battled unsparingly with the politically appointed regents, harassing them for appointments and facilities plus a specific, regular share of tax moneys for higher education until they gave in. His persistence did not endear him to his official bosses who, he publicly charged, rarely had “any special knowledge of the methods of education or interest in them.” He was also defiantly insensitive to Wisconsin’s political niceties. Besides his forthright opposition to the worship of money and success, he was a prohibitionist in a state of beer lovers and powerful brewers and an advocate of women’s rights and suffrage in advance of public opinion. “Every human being,” he insisted, “has the right to the exercise of all the powers that belong to him . . . in consistency with the well-being of society.” The pronoun was gender-specific but the intent was resolutely in favor of equality. He got coeducation firmly established at last. But all of his successful battles spent political capital, and in 1887, as he described it, he quit before his resignation became compulsory. He returned to a professorship at Williams and lived, unsubdued, to be eighty-seven.10
Bascom’s involvement with Wisconsin campus life was of a direct kind that the intimate setting of a small school allowed. He taught a philosophy class required of all seniors, who also had to attend Sunday evening talks in his home and his annual baccalaureate sermon. His own son and daughter were in Belle and Bob’s Class of 1879 (as were Charles Van Hise, a future president of the university, and his future wife, Alice Ring). Though some of the youngsters found him snoopy, the majority appeared to agree that his courses, taught with “healthy enthusiasm,” conferred more “real mental strength” than any other part of their academic work.
Of his many convictions, the one Bascom impressed most powerfully on Bob and Belle was that the academic establishment, especially the students, owed something to the taxpayers. The university, ran one of his declarations, would be “permanently great in the degree in which it understands the conditions of the prosperity and peace of the people and helps to provide them.” He was “forever telling us,” Bob remembered, “what the state was doing for us and urging our return obligation not to use our education wholly for our own selfish benefit.” Belle’s memory matched Bob’s; her recollection was that “[a]gain and again he would tell us what we owed the State and impress upon us our duty to serve the State in return.”11
To both of them, Bascom was a torch to kindling—probably the father-figure in Bob’s life and a preacher of the secular idealism that was Belle’s gospel. She was awed by him and had a “vague and general” understanding of his message; to Bob it was “concrete truth . . . whose application was plain as a pikestaff.”
The lovers met in freshman German class—he already had a smattering of the language from his friend Robert Siebecker—and what first struck Belle was La Follette’s sense of humor, which he later underplayed deliberately as a public man. Whenever she saw some of the male students laughing he, sitting straight-faced in their midst, turned out to be the source of the mischief. Soon he was making her smile, too, and when they began to keep company their conversations were “lighthearted and joyous” and free from sentiment.
But Bob’s easygoing facade was a deceptive defense against anxiety and struggle. He could barely afford the university, though its charges were modest enough—no tuition for state residents after 1876, and only three dollars a term for room rent. But firewood and washing and food cost money, and he had to support his mother and sister as well. So he earned his way by the kind of consuming work that became a lifetime habit. He taught in a country school, riding five miles each way every day and squeezing assignments into his sleep-fogged brain at night. His mother and Josie took in boarders and scrimped to the bone, but there was still a struggle for existence. In good Darwinian fashion it produced an evolutionary step for La Follette when it made him a journalist.
The student newspaper, the University Press, was then a privately published, for-profit operation. At the end of his freshman year, Bob bought it with four hundred dollars borrowed from a Madison lawyer friend. This act of small-town solidarity led to his discovery of a new aptitude. He loved running a newspaper, particularly the luxury of total control and freedom. He was editor, publisher, and owner all in one. He chose the stories to cover, gathered the information, wrote the copy, supervised layout and production, took ads, and sold subscriptions. Some customers paid in merchandise, which he then had to sell. It was a killing responsibility but at the year’s end he had earned seven hundred dollars in gross profit.
In the Press he had a platform, a spotlight, and a chance to give discipline and muscle to his writing, which was still trimmed with Victorian nosegays. When he wrote his autobiography in 1911, he said little about his campus days except to honor Bascom and to tell the story of how he had organized an independent slate to beat an all-fraternity ticket for student government offices. That episode, possibly exaggerated, fitted his sense of being a lifelong rebel. But his editorial days may have left a deeper stamp. For years after graduation he itched to get his hands on a paper of his own again and finally did so in 1909 with La Follette’s Weekly Magazine, even though it was a heavy drain on his time, energy, and money.
The Press enhanced Bob’s standing on campus, especially among the serious students who followed its pages and shared his own love for telling phrases and cutting ideas. He ran essays by faculty members, exchanges of opinion, and reviews of plays and of the lectures that were both entertainment and education in Madison. And he attentively reported the debates among the campus literary societies.
The societies were more like model assemblies than social and speaking clubs. Athenaean and Hesperian were the two for men (Bob was Athenaean); Laurean (Belle’s society) and Castalia were the women’s counterparts. They had privately donated libraries better than the university’s, where students could consult new books, government publications, periodicals, and documents in preparation for “presentations” at the Friday night meetings. In these, as many as fifteen speakers to a side were given ten minutes each to argue a position on some issue—up to six hours of speech-making by lamplight in crowded, stuffy rooms.
On special holidays the societies gave speaking “exhibitions” in the Assembly chamber of the capitol, and the event of the year was the “Joint Debate” between Athenaean and Hesperian. Only those with good academic records could take part—which eliminated Bob—and those who did worked especially hard to shine, because a noteworthy performance before a blue-ribbon audience could lay a firm foundation for a legal and political career.
Speech was nothing to be taken lightly, and it was not—not even by Bob La Follette the mischief-maker, the entertainer of his friends with dialect poems, the onetime barber boy of Argyle. In John Olin’s rhetoric class, which he and Belle both attended, memorized orations were a requirement. On Belle’s first try she muffed a word and slunk back to her seat “overwhelmed with a sense of disgrace.” During one of Bob’s presentations he forgot a line in mid-gesture. The prompter fumbled for seconds to find the place, and La Follette remained on tiptoe, arm raised, body frozen in a stretch, oblivious to the roars of laughter around him.
Everyone with an education respected the moving power of language and the attraction of drama. Celebrated orators like Robert Ingersoll enjoyed prestigious and rewarding careers in politics and at the bar. Famous actors were lionized, and genteel families amused themselves and fortified moral instruction in “playing one’s part in life” by amateur theatricals at home. La Follette loved the stage and even at his busiest took time to go to Milwaukee or Chicago to see touring companies with noted stars, a practice he continued throughout his life.
Acting would have been his first choice, but genes betrayed him. He took after his undersized mother, not his tall father, and did not grow to more than five and a half feet. It cut him out of the running for important leads. He consulted John McCullough, a popular Shakespearean star, who gave him disheartening advice. “Suppose we were in Othello,” he conjectured, “and I, as Othello, tried to throttle you as Iago. The gallery would shout: ‘Leave the little fellow alone.’”
In the long run Bob was lucky. He would find in politics a different theater, one in which success also appealed to his moral sense and his practical interest in affecting the world around him. Both were powerful drives. Belle observed that while she had higher marks in some classes, like science, “his understanding . . . was practical; mine was confined to what the book said.” He bore down hard on what he needed to know, and in time became exceptional in the detailed mastery of political subjects dear to him, but his effort stopped at the boundary of immediate application. As a result of that, and his outside burdens, his classwork suffered. One classmate recorded that La Follette was “just hanging on by the skin of his teeth.”
Yet he kept an outward self-assurance in spite of his hard times with grades, while bookish Belle’s shining record did not soothe her inner doubts. Professors Carpenter and Olin both told her she had writing talents. “I did not take these suggestions as seriously then,” she mused toward the end of her life, “as I would if I were beginning over again.” But she was perseverant enough to win declamation prizes herself. Bob reported one of her talks at a literary society exhibition with a combination of journalistic and lover’s verve:
The audience were on the qui vive as the president announced the next orator’s subject—“Children’s Playthings”—and Miss Case, of the Laurean Society, took the stage. She fully sustained her reputation as a writer of uncommon merit. Gracefully, and in a clear ringing voice heard easily in every part of the Assembly Chamber, she pronounced an oration that for force and originality of thought and finish of composition was probably not equalled during the evening. She clearly showed how all the best natural impulses are cramped and stifled at the very beginning of life by substituting silly artificial baubles as children’s playthings, for real animated living things; . . . that if children had living objects with which to amuse themselves and were not forced to supply with a strained imagination the animation that companionship craves, the mind would grow and develop together into a perfect unit and the other faculties would not be dwarfed by, and subject to, a wild imagination—an imagination that is the source of much injurious reading, that leads to the formation of erroneous, hurtful ideas of the world and results in the whole manhood and womanhood being spent in considering misspent childhood.
Bob’s own talk at the same “Ex” was on “The Stage,” and he used it to argue that the drama was “an art above painting and sculpture” in power and influence, and a medium of “often arousing people to the appreciation of their political state of affairs.” Belle’s talk signaled a lifelong interest in education and, despite its utilitarian dismissal of “silly baubles” and “strained imagination,” was notable mostly for the earnest horror with which she considered a misspent childhood reading the wrong books.
He was no less a moralist in his fashion. The theme of the following year’s prizewinning oration on Iago was that Iago was a case of intellect divorced from conscience, and therefore run wild.
What he lacks in emotion he has gained in intellectual acuteness but the result is deformity . . . His reasoning power is abnormally developed; but he has no feeling, no sympathy, no affection, no fear. His is the cold passion of intellect whose icy touch chills the warm life in all it reaches . . . His contempt for all good is supreme. The emotions are the native soil of moral life. From the feelings are grown great ethical truths one by one, forming at last the grand body of moral law. But Iago is emotionally a cipher, and his poverty of sentiment and wealth of intellect render him doubly dangerous.
“The grand body of moral law” was out there, palpable and needing enactment in human affairs. To be insensitive to it, however brilliant, was to be, like Iago, more devil than human. (La Follette contrasted him with Shakespeare’s other great villain, Richard III, who was passionate and violent, stung by conscience at the end of his life, and driven to expiate the moral law by his death on the battlefield.)12
Belle and Bob suited each other in the earnestness that they would take together into a world that, by and large, shared their premises. He proposed to her at the end of the junior year. She was at first hesitant, wanting to keep the friendship light and unencumbered, even questioning his seriousness. “How could I be sure he was not joking?” she told their children later. In fact, he overpowered her slightly. He had been the leader and coach, she the acolyte, and she had enough independence left to be afraid of losing it. But, she recorded, “he had his own way as he usually did.”
Marriage could not take place right after commencement. It would have to wait until earning power was established. They talked of career alternatives, dismissed the idea of teaching literature that they both loved, and had no problem in deciding realistically that agriculture had its social virtues but was more of a passport to hard work for a meager living than to fulfillment of higher purposes. Law seemed an obvious answer. An ambitious young man with a silver tongue and a good head for detail could make it a stepping-stone to reputation, advancement, and income. Besides, a courtroom was itself a wonderful theater, as any trial buff and generations of lawyers-turned-writers can testify.
So Belle went off to teach school at nearby Spring Green, and Bob began to prepare himself for a career at the bar. The idea of living close to the soil wasn’t entirely forgotten. “The most practical and ideal plan,” Belle said, “was the law for a profession and at some time a farm for a home.” Practical idealists both, they went forth from Bascom’s campus to serve together.
Becoming a lawyer was not hard for him. He attended one term at the university’s recently established school of law (whose professors were mainly local judges) and got enough additional training in a Madison attorney’s office to pass the bar exam at the end of seven months. Only six months after that, in the summer of 1880, he ran for the office of district attorney of Dane County and won. It was a headfirst splash into political waters from which he would never emerge for the rest of his life.
Naturally it would be Republican politics for La Follette. He had been born into a Republican family the year after the party’s birth in Ripon, Wisconsin. By 1880, in his own words, “It had fought a desperate war for a great and righteous cause. It had behind it the passionate enthusiasm of a whole generation . . . It was the party of Lincoln and Grant and Sherman.” As the party of patriotism, it drew thousands of young strivers automatically into its ranks. “We may never see its like again in this country,” was Bob’s adult verdict. His lifelong war with conservative Republicanism began, at least, as a lover’s quarrel.13
In his autobiography he claimed that his motive for running was financial—the job paid eight hundred dollars a year—but that his candidacy furnished an eye-opening initiation into politics. Soon after announcing, he was summoned to see the county’s Republican boss, Elisha W. Keyes, who bluntly said, “You are fooling away your time, sir.” Keyes, “absolute dictator in his own territory,” expected would-be officeholders to clear their plans with him, and he already had another candidate in mind. La Follette thereupon went out on his own, mobilized a network of friends to work for him, and captured both the nomination and the election.
The inspiring story, however, may say more about La Follette’s state of mind in 1911, when he wrote the autobiography, than about Dane County in 1880. Keyes was actually on the way out as a party kingmaker. Nor does the evidence show that Bob ran an antimachine campaign. What he promised the voters was to run the office more cheaply than his predecessors, and his one reported campaign speech was apparently an appeal for the national Republican ticket, since it ended with a boilerplate appeal “to old soldiers and young men to reclaim the country from threatened rebel domination, and not to allow the fruits of the war to go unplucked.”14 The trademark he established in his first campaign was not independence so much as hard, grass-roots-level work as he canvassed the countryside tirelessly by horse and buggy, organizing networks of friends to get out the vote for him.
But Keyes may have served a need for antagonism smoldering within the young lawyer.15 The evidence is in La Follette’s own hand. For a month, beginning in the fall of 1879, he kept a revealing diary that he called “Private Journal and Night Thoughts.” Journal-keeping was an enterprise that the culture encouraged for a serious young man, especially a lonesome and lovesick young man.
Belle naturally figured often in those private musings, but so did a haunting dark streak, invisible to those who saw La Follette only in public. One weekend she visited, and they had a quarrel of some kind. There was an exchange of letters, and hers plunged him into gloom. “Oh, how she has misunderstood me and how much pain her words cost me,” he wrote. “I know she did not mean to hurt me but it seemed like the black days of the past and it brings me face to face with my old enemy. I had thought him well out of my way but he came, dark counselor that he is, with a power that I had nearly forgotten.” That mood did not last long, for the next Friday evening he took the train to Spring Green, groped his way through a fog to her boarding house, and found that “she was ‘herself’ again and made the old house merry with her laughter.” He wanted to continue the discussion, but she insisted on joking, and “so I at last gave it up and had a lovely time.” But the dark counselor was back forty-eight hours later, a gloomy November day that reminded him of some unexplained episode a year earlier, “the darkest day I have known.” And just three weeks thereafter, when the north wind howled outside the window, Bob was “unconsciously and helplessly given over to thoughts of the past. It is on such nights as this that my thoughts go out over the long dark road—over the high bleak prairies, where the uninterrupted wind flies apace with the messengers of the mind . . . until in imagination I am standing beside my father’s grave . . . How altered [would] have been the whole course of my life had it not received this cruel stroke.”
But the journal entry did not end on that self-pitying note. Instead, the firm, expressive handwriting went on: “And still there are some things, many things that I would not have altered . . . Out of the responsibilities and cares and privations and struggles of the past I have gathered much good—the very flints I have been dashed against have brought forth living fire from the steel of my nature—have taught me the value of antagonisms!”16
What he meant was clear. His depressions were unavoidable, but they drove him to resistance in the form of action and hope. “Out of that day of clouds and fogs and shadow and suspense,” he had written of an earlier attack, “out of that day of doubt and despair came my life.” Gloom was his inner enemy. But hard knocks, physical illness, and, above all, political opponents were external adversaries. They could be overcome, and to challenge them gave life acceptable meaning.
Attaching modern clinical names like “manic-depressive” or “paranoid” to these traits far outruns the evidence. And reducing the man to labels in the effort to grasp him trivializes both biography and the standards of definition used by serious psychologists—to say nothing of the independent value and historical context of La Follette’s ideas. But La Follette’s inner storms cannot be overlooked in any story of his life. It was in the glare of their lightnings that he saw the human landscape around him.
As a lawyer he was fearful of slipping into professional admiration of courtroom cleverness on either side of a case. Nor did he adopt the potentially humane relativism of the adversary system at its best, which assumes that exact truth is unreachable and a lawyer’s job is therefore to be the client’s best possible advocate and hope that some form of justice prevails in the long run. In his first private case he got a tramp exonerated from a charge of shooting a constable by proving, through a doctor’s testimony, that the wound was too small to have been made by the defendant’s gun. Congratulations on the victory left him suspicious: “I have been many times complimented for getting him acquitted by . . . Col. Keyes and others but I do not like the way they bestow their praise. They seem to consider that I did a smart thing—that I was sharp in the management of the matter . . . but they don’t seem to think that I did it all because I thought he was innocent—that I was simply fighting a fight for the truth . . . This must be my rule in all my work and will give the approval of my conscience and my little girl.”
In those early youthful days Bob saw Belle as his “little girl” and as an antidote to a professional cynicism that he feared. Lawyers, dealing regularly in the mucky gutters of deceit and greed, are not apt to hold idealistic views of “human nature” for long. La Follette was afraid of his ideals corroding, of perhaps becoming an Iago, brilliant but empty of feeling or principle. In those night thoughts of his twenty-fifth year of life, he thought he saw safety in the vine-covered cottage of marriage as sentimental fiction painted it. In the throes of missing Belle, he wrote:
Oh hasten, time, when I can see her the center of a home into which shall flow plenty from my own hands, over which shall hover happiness wooed thither by the loving content that glorifies the perfect home. Yes, yes, the life, the honest, happy life, revolving within the home . . . When the whole being grows more and more noble and generous and tender and true because all its surroundings invite and nourish just that growth . . . And in this home I may only find a little harbor for a little rest each day. Mine must be a life of warfare—giving and taking blows—to deal in disputes—to sound the hollows of horrible crime, listen to the tale misery tells, and study to know all the ingenious devices which assure man’s meanness to man. This is in part the life of the lawyer.
La Follette did not invent these pieties or the idea of home as a place where a “true woman” created a haven for her male and saved him from moral collapse in a brutal and competitive world. The idea was widely cherished in middle-class Victorian America and was so ingrained that leading male citizens of every political shade and attitude were apt to share it. Certainly the one sure way to political ostracism was openly to defy it.
For Bob, however, it became a guiding abstraction rather than a reality as his career carried him into heavy travels, with only intermittent visits home. Belle believed in the ideal, too, but did not fit with total comfort into its presumed role for a wife of someone with no interests beyond kitchen and nursery. Both of them would show signs of the strain created by the discord between ideal and actuality.
Bob’s misgivings about the coarsening effects of the law on his sensibilities did not block him from becoming a first-class practitioner. He was relentless in building a solid case, and he could also woo juries with any orator in the state. By the end of 1881 his future looked secure enough for them to marry. The ceremony took place on the last day of the year at Belle’s home. A Unitarian minister officiated, but only the immediate families were present and the word “obey” was dropped from the vows.
Fola was born just under nine months later—on September 10, 1882. Whether she was intentionally conceived is slightly unclear, because there would not be another child for thirteen more years and that was definitely by design, at least according to Belle’s recall in the 1920s. “I made up my mind,” she wrote then (referring to the 1890s), “that we would have more children and raise the family we had always planned.” In any case, Fola’s birth was a joy to them both and left Belle unwavering in her conviction that “the supreme experience in life is motherhood.” But she promptly added: “I am sure there is no inherent conflict in a mother’s taking good care of her children, developing her talents, and continuing to work along lines adapted to motherhood and homemaking.”17
Belle meant it, obviously, because in the fall of 1883 she too enrolled in the university’s law school. The first woman graduate, she completed the course in 1885 without fanfare and without hanging out a shingle.18 Her motives seem to have been mixed. Developing her talents was important to her, but her law degree made her better able to support her husband’s work. “Different types of women meet life’s obligations according to their different standards,” she later wrote to a magazine editor who asked for a piece on career choice. “The woman who is consciously striving to help her husband” but whose contribution consists in planning a dinner or joining a church “really lives outside her husband’s life work.” Such a woman would “have different experiences from the coeducated woman in perfect sympathy and full understanding, who sees first of all his life work as the big thing, whose first effort is to direct support, not from the outside, but from within.” Not for a long time, if ever, did Belle clearly separate her own growth from the job of supporting Bob’s career.19
Their early married life set lasting patterns. He was still in demand locally as an “elocutionist.” He gave speeches at Fourth of July celebrations and readings at church benefits, a small, dapper figure in a Prince Albert and white vest, charming the audiences that he needed as much as he needed resistance and combat. He read poems in comic dialect, like Darius Green and His Flying Machine, and thrillers like Sheridan’s Ride and Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight. And he read Shakespeare to smalltown men and women who had not yet found out that such “high culture” as Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, and The Taming of the Shrew was supposed to be beyond them. The readings made him better known and helped him politically and professionally. He was careful not to overemphasize the comic side, and grew sideburns and a temporary moustache to make himself look less boyish.
In their home at night, with Belle’s help he sweated over case preparation and scholarly legal volumes that he had missed in his brief training. They furnished their modest home with the books they both loved, Goethe and Schiller in German, and volumes of Cooper, George Eliot, Washington Irving, and Walter Scott. And they passed through the usual adjustment period of newlyweds.
Belle described those days in the biography of Bob that she began in 1925. Her narrative keeps him in the foreground and is almost completely uncritical, but a careful reader catches asides and silences that tell more than she may have intended. She says that they rarely quarreled, but “at times one or the other or both may have been deeply hurt, as happens in making life’s adjustments; but we did not nurse the sense of wrong, nor did we discuss it. We treated it as we would physical pain—a cut or burn which it was useless to think much about and would heal in time.”
Bob was generally cheerful even in the face of “professional checks.” But the “old enemy” of his night thoughts was not vanquished by marriage, as Belle learned. “Only a few times did he ever yield to depression,” she recorded. “And those were dark days.”20
In 1882 Bob was reelected as district attorney. In 1884 an old mentor, Judge George E. Bryant, proposed that his young friend run for the House seat in Wisconsin’s Third Congressional District. La Follette secured the nomination and just beat out his Democratic opponent by 495 votes. At twenty-nine he became the youngest member of the Forty-ninth Congress. He would repeat his victory in 1886 and 1888.21
Serving in the House meant spending six winters and three springs in Washington. Under the system existing until 1936, in even-numbered years Congress met from the first Monday in December until March 4 of the following year. The alternate-year “long” sessions continued until business was done, usually by June, leaving the lawmakers free to escape Washington’s heat and to campaign for the autumn elections.
La Follette’s service was not especially noteworthy. His oratorical talents had limited scope, since the 332-member House had been forced (unlike the Senate) to put strict time limits on individual speeches. He voted faithfully for the tariff, which was on the way to becoming Republican holy writ, and for most measures endorsed by the leadership or especially popular in Wisconsin, such as a tax on oleomargarine. He showed some signs of independence when he dug in his heels against a grab of Menominee Indian reservation land by the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad and against party-endorsed bills for shipping subsidies and a Nicaraguan interoceanic canal. These did not interfere with his general reputation as a “regular” who was rewarded with a promotion in his third term from the Indian Affairs Committee to the more prestigious tax-writing Committee on Ways and Means.22
But simply being in the capital was a transforming experience for the two young westerners, for Belle went with him to share boardinghouse life. Neither had ever been east of Chicago before. Washington was just coming into its own as a modern capital, with wealthy senators building and tastefully furnishing permanent homes in town and a population of well-educated civil servants staffing the growing number of bureaus. It was a place to meet aging lions and rising stars like Ohio’s Representative William McKinley and the dudish young civil service commissioner from New York, Theodore Roosevelt, whose first meeting with Belle was mortifying. Gesturing broadly at a crowded reception, he knocked a cup of coffee all over her white dress.23
Belle was put off at first by the rigid routine of obligatory calls on other official wives in order of seniority, but she “proceeded to do this social ‘stunt’ religiously” and “[f]ortunately . . . did not take it too seriously,” though her soul was offended by a social life “too much influenced by women without any special occupation, whose thoughts were centered on society, dress, cards, and gossip.” Bob also hated engagements where a politician could be trapped for an entire evening by rattlebrains.24
But at their second session in town—this time accompanied by Fola and Bob’s mother—they found a boardinghouse whose woman owner was a suffragist and the organizer of a literary club. On the five thousand dollar annual salary, a very decent sum for the 1880s, they treated themselves to feasts of theater provided by the touring companies that stopped in Washington. They heard comedy and opera by Gilbert and Sullivan, Wagner, and Verdi, and they saw plays starring the likes of Ada Rehan, Helena Modjeska, Sarah Bernhardt, and Edwin Booth. For Booth they had to travel up to Baltimore, because he could not bring himself to perform in Washington after his younger brother’s assassination of Lincoln. “Our Washington experience outside Congress was like a continuation school for us,” said Belle. Madison, population ten thousand, had been a step up from the unpaved villages of their childhood, and Washington was a gigantic boost in sophistication. In their last year there they lived on the site of one of the present Senate office buildings (at Second and B, N.E.), and Fola’s playground was the Capitol park. She rejected kindergarten with five-year-old firmness, and Belle willingly taught her at home instead.
The “continuation school” offered new political lessons, too. Bob had to enlarge his old Dane County support network into a team covering a congressional district that embraced five counties. He got the clerks of those five to send him lists of voters in the preceding election, by townships. These he forwarded to friends in each township who would fill in all they knew—interests, occupations, family and personal history—about at least twenty-five “active Republicans” and fifteen “fair-minded Democrats” considered community leaders. Bob saw to it that these target voters (and others) got copies of speeches on topics of concern to them, public documents, free garden seeds, and anything else dispensed by the federal government.
But these activities ate away at his resources. He began a lifelong pattern of putting personal funds into his campaigns, which led to a debt-burdened existence. The postage for constituent mailings was free, but the reprints from the Congressional Record had to be paid for by the congressman ordering them. Bob sent out “hundreds of thousands” of them, and his bills from the Government Printing Office were among the reasons “why I found myself so poor when I left Congress.” Poor and tired, too, because the perks of incumbency did not then include offices or staffs, except for committee chairmen. He and Belle spent long evenings up to their knees in sacks of reprints to be addressed by hand, learning how to build a “machine” with their own sweat.25
At campaign time back home he went out to the countryside to meet the recipients. Belle went along to jog his memory and to heed Bryant’s advice that “the good people of the district like to see a Congressman accompanied by his wife.” Their education in practical politics continued on long days of clopping along rural roads behind a horse’s rump on the way to speaking engagements or hanging about depots waiting for trains—opportunities for handshaking and making new friends. His own spontaneity and warmth made his constituency intensely personal, and on the stump he had a knack of shifting out of formality at the beginning of a speech and dropping into “a heart-to-heart way of talking.” He could go on for hours with the crowd urging him to continue, while Belle, to everyone’s amusement, sat behind him shaking her head and tugging at his coattails to call it a night.26
All of it turned out to be in vain in his fourth campaign of 1890, when he was defeated in a stunning upset. He had won reelection easily in 1886 and again in 1888, when he had lined up with Republican supporters of William D. Hoard, who backed Wisconsin dairy farmers and was subsequently elected governor. It was therefore a confident La Follette who faced the voters in 1890. But the year turned out to be disastrous for the Republicans both in the nation at large, where they lost control of the House of Representatives, and in Wisconsin, where Democrats captured all the state offices, including that of treasurer—which turned out to be pivotal in the La Follette story. But no one could foresee that development on election day, when Bob ate supper at home and then whistled and strummed a guitar before going down to headquarters for the returns. At eleven he came back and shouted up the stairs to Belle, who had gone to bed “Well, Belle, [Allen] Bushnell is elected to Congress from the Third District and I am elected to practice law.” He ran seven hundred votes ahead of the ticket but it was not enough. The Democratic flood washed away every Republican seat in the House except that of the La Follettes’ good friend Nils P. Haugen.
It was the sixth straight election in which La Follette had run, and the first he had lost. Yet the defeat was the making of him.
According to their own testimony, Bob and Belle returned to Madison somewhat deflated but apparently ready to say good-bye to politics. He admitted to “bitter disappointment” at losing his seat and later blamed it on the opposition of the state bosses. The question that lingers is why he did not simply bide his time, cultivate his Republican friends in Wisconsin, and try for Congress again in 1892. He had good friends in high places, including the former Speaker of the House, Thomas B. Reed, and a future president, William McKinley. The answer may well have been financial. He could still inspire lines waiting to get into the courtroom when he took on a case, and with a good set of partners the return to full-time law work offered an attractive prospect of money. Belle, back to earth, decided on enlarging the family and for the first time took note of the shabbiness of their surroundings. They bought furniture, acquired debts, and settled in to await the prosperity and honor that would rightfully accrue to a luminary of the Madison bar.
But only six months after the final gavel of the Fifty-first Congress, Bob was “forced” into the fight for good government when, as he insisted all his life, Philetus Sawyer offered him a bribe.
Sawyer was a seventy-five-year-old self-made lumber millionaire from Oshkosh. He was also a United States senator and one of the three Republican bosses in the state, the other two being John C. Spooner and Henry C. Payne. He was unpolished, undevious, and unapologetic for his success and power—a prototype of the gruff men at the top of the business heap a century ago, before education and professional management and public relations moved in to smooth the edges. He and La Follette had exchanged words in Washington when Bob voted against a ship subsidy bill that Sawyer supported. The old man had come over to the House in a rage and shouted at La Follette, “You are a bolter, sir; you are a bolter.” La Follette reminded him that under the rules a senator had no business on the House floor and that he would have the Speaker run him out if he did not leave on his own.
Sawyer did go and, what was more, with surprising graciousness apologized to his exceedingly junior antagonist the next day saying, “You have a perfect right to vote as you please.” Even La Follette admitted that Sawyer had a “blunt, frank, simple way” about him and that he merely “regarded Congress as a useful agency for the promotion of business enterprises in which he and his friends were . . . interested.”27
But it was another story, according to La Follette, when on September 17, 1891, he met Sawyer in Milwaukee at the old man’s request through a note sent a couple of days earlier. In a corner of the second-floor parlor of Plankinton House, Sawyer unburdened his mind. The Democratic sweep of the preceding November was threatening him with personal disaster.
A time-honored graft of the Republican state administrations had been the practice of allowing the state treasurer to deposit public funds in banks of his choosing. The choice always lit on friendly Republican bankers, and in exchange the treasurer kept the interest, using it as a party slush fund. But now the incoming Democratic administration had launched a suit to recover the money against five previous treasurers and also against the rich Republican bondsmen who guaranteed their financial liability. As one of those bondsmen, Sawyer stood to lose as much as $300,000.
One of Sawyer’s cases was due to come up in the Circuit Court of Dane County before Judge Robert Siebecker, a friend from Bob’s boyhood who had become his law partner and, by marrying Josie La Follette, his brother-in-law.
In La Follette’s version of the interview, Sawyer said that the cases were causing him considerable anxiety. “Now I came down here to see you alone,” said the old man. “No one knows I am to meet you here. I don’t want to hire you as an attorney in the cases, La Follette, and don’t want you to go into court. But here is fifty dollars. I will give you five hundred more, or a thousand [or five hundred more and a thousand, La Follette could not remember which] when Siebecker decides the cases right.”
La Follette sprang to his feet, crying, “Senator Sawyer, you can’t know what you are saying to me. If you struck me in the face you could not insult me as you insult me now.”
“Wait—hold on!” Sawyer broke in, trying to clarify—or to change, depending on whom one believes—what he had said. He protested that he was just offering La Follette a retainer to take the case. “No,” the other insisted, “you don’t want to employ me as an attorney. You want to hire me to talk to the Judge about your case off the Bench.” The argument continued for a bit, with Sawyer trying to placate the furious attorney, saying, “[P]erhaps I don’t understand court rules” and asking if he might at least pay La Follette for the trip from Madison. “Not a dollar, sir,” snapped Bob, and flung out through the crowded lobby, pursued part of the way by Sawyer.
When he got home, shaken, he announced to Belle: “Something has happened. Our life will never be the same.”28
To see the next year through La Follette’s eyes is to hold the skeleton key that opens doors to the rest of his life. He believed that he had been placed in an agonizing dilemma. His conscience (and Belle’s) demanded that as a member of the bar, if nothing else, he should inform the court that an effort to corrupt it was afoot. But he knew that blowing the whistle on Sawyer would embarrass the Republican party which, despite the recent loss, still was the dominant power in Wisconsin. The scandal could take good men down along with bad ones, and the party would punish La Follette by destroying him professionally. Friends with whom he talked it over urged him to forget principle and keep his mouth shut.
He took the problem to a discreet, older federal judge who said what La Follette wanted to hear. “You must tell Judge Siebecker. You cannot permit him to sit on the case without telling him all about it.” Bob did tell him, and Siebecker announced forthwith that he could not adjudicate the case. He gave no reason, but the lawsuits were an ongoing sensational story, and reporters, smelling something suspicious, leaped in and began pumping their sources. Late in October a Chicago paper’s headline blazed: BRIBERY THEIR GAME. Persons Interested in the Wisconsin State Treasury Suits Attempt Desperate Means.
No names were mentioned but Sawyer, according to Bob, sent an emissary to set up a new meeting between the two. Bob answered that he would never have any communication with Sawyer again as long as he lived. Then Sawyer, in advance of any accusation, went public with a story of injured innocence. He had offered a retainer and been ridiculously misunderstood. He had not even known that La Follette and Siebecker were related. Responding, Bob at last went public with his version, and the damage was done.
Without a fly on the wall to testify there is no way, under strict rules of evidence, to know what was actually said or intended at the Plankinton. But whatever his failings, La Follette was never known to lie whereas Sawyer was a businessman in an age of rough play. The subsequent judgment on the matter of former Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed—a good Republican but a hard-boiled observer of the human animal—is worth citing: “You never can tell about those old commercial fellows.”29
Throughout the winter the Republican state press lashed out at La Follette as a liar and a spoiler. “No one can ever know what I suffered,” he wrote in 1911 as he summoned up his haunting memories of that bleak season. Acquaintances shunned him. Death threats came in the mail. He kept an imperturbable face in public but depression engulfed him at home. Belle feared that he might not come struggling up from the blackness this time. And then, in the icy solitude, as if to a born-again convert, light came. “I went back over my political experiences. I thought over many things that had occurred during my service in the House. I began to understand their relation. I had seen the evils singly . . . But I had [now] been subjected to a terrible shock that opened my eyes, and I began to see really for the first time.”
What Bob saw was a pattern. In the rush to develop state and nation, “corporations and individuals allied with corporations were invited to come in and take what they would” so long as they made factories, railroads, and towns spring out of the emptiness. Inevitably they had taken too much and bought or bludgeoned the political order into consent. “The experiences of my Congressional life now came back to me with new meaning—the Ship Subsidy bill, . . . the Railroad Rate bill, the Sioux Indian land grant and the Menomonie timber steal.” A system was at work of which Sawyer was simply the agent. “Against this organized power it had been my misfortune—perhaps my fortune—to be thrown by circumstances.”30
“Perhaps my fortune”? Indeed so. Twelve years earlier, a brooding young lawyer had written that the sufferings of his fatherless boyhood had hardened the steel of his nature and taught him “the value of antagonisms.” Now, on the threshold of maturity, he faced an antagonist with the freedom of an entire state at stake on the outcome of the fight.
So out of this awful ordeal came understanding; and out of understanding came resolution. I determined that the power of this corrupt influence, which was undermining and destroying every semblance of representative government in Wisconsin, should be broken.
I felt that I had few friends; I knew I had no money—could command the support of no newspaper. And yet I grew strong in the conviction that in the end Wisconsin would be made free.
. . . I knew that Sawyer and those with him were allied with the railroads, the big business interests, the press, the leading politicians of every community. I knew the struggle would be a long one; that I would have to encounter defeat again and again. But my resolution never faltered.
So the Fighting Bob of legend was born. This was the self-image he cherished and would display to the world, the lone insurgent, grappling with the hosts of unrighteousness on the people’s behalf. It is, of course, the view of an actor in the role of a lifetime. Some recent biographers and historians have dismissed it as self-aggrandizing, theatrical, unfair to La Follette’s opponents, and untrue to the complexity of the American political system in which he operated, when necessary, as pragmatically as any other player. He has been charged with vanity and ambition, with using or even creating the bribery incident to get himself back into politics and into power. He has even been put on the couch, old Sawyer supposedly becoming the surrogate for the dreaded stepfather, John Saxton, and needing to be symbolically slain for Bob to assume his own manhood.
But those “explanations” say as much about the biographers and their times as they do about their subject. Value-neutral “scholarship” may seriously underestimate the sincerity with which an earlier generation believed in its causes. Spotlighting La Follette’s quarrels with his own supporters, or his unacknowledged borrowings of ideas, or his wooing of specific constituencies is legitimate historical work but carried to excess it needlessly diminishes the man and his contemporaries. La Follette was a harsh antagonist himself because democracy for him was a passion, not a slogan. He was a loner because he was completely without fear of falling out of step with the majority when he thought the majority was temporarily wrong. And there really were—and are—corrupt alliances between money and politics, corporate crimes and injustices that only the comfortable can easily ignore. The evidence is in the record. La Follette did not confront imaginary dragons.31
Most important of all, however, the post-1891 Robert La Follette needed and drew upon his wife and family as never before. “Mine must be a life of warfare,” he had predicted in his 1879 night musings, and so it had become, and home was needed more than ever as a center of peace and a fountain of renewal in a world that resisted truth and crucified prophets.
But nursing, supporting, and emulating a visionary could be a hard burden for loved ones. Scripture does not tell us that the prophets had contented families. What it does say is that they were extremely demanding of their followers.
So was La Follette as he began to throw Wisconsin politics into turmoil. The year 1892 was the turning point of his life, his transformation from an independent-minded but manageable young Republican into the great insurgent. It was a crossroads for the state, too, because the state was ready for the message.
La Follette never claimed to have invented progressivism. Quite the contrary, he specifically denied it. When he wrote about his irreverent insistence on running for D.A. without consulting county “Boss” Keyes, he said: “I was merely expressing a common and widespread, though largely unconscious, spirit of revolt among the people—a movement of the new generation toward more democracy in human relationships.”32 And he said that in his most public self-portrait, the 1911 autobiography.
Just a year before 1911 when a correspondent had asked him why embattled insurgent congressional Republicans did not bolt and form a new national party, he had been equally unequivocal. “New parties are brought forth from time to time and groups of men have come forward as their heralds and been called to leadership and command. But the leaders did not create the party. It was the ripe issue of events . . . [S]ome will say that the leaders made the party. But all great movements in society and government, the world over, are matters of growth.”
He burned no bridges to the national party in 1892, that year of his second “graduation” into the world, twelve years after leaving Bascom’s classroom. The next twelve were intensely tangled with Wisconsin politics, whose intricate details need not be mastered to understand La Follette completely, but cannot be ignored because personal, political, and family matters were inseparably welded together in his being. The first fact of political life was that he could not afford the complete loss of a footing in Republicanism. He might win control of the party machinery; he could not possibly replace it with something new.
La Follette’s popularity as a speaker allowed him to strike a deal with the State Central Committee that summer. If they did not excommunicate him, he would campaign for the G.O.P. presidential candidate, Benjamin Harrison, and ignore all questions about the Sawyer affair. After that he began to point toward a challenge in 1894. He started to draw more heavily on an antimonopoly, anticorporation tradition in Wisconsin politics going back twenty years to the so-called Granger Laws (later struck down by the Wisconsin Supreme Court) to regulate the railroads. The state’s chief justice in 1873, Edward G. Ryan, had sounded the theme in a speech to graduating seniors at the university. “There is looming up a new and dark power . . . For the first time really in our politics money is taking the field as an organized power . . . The question will arise . . . ‘Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect . . . ?’” Bob loved to quote that, and it struck a resounding note in the 1890s when the Populist party’s crusade against the symbolic and actual power of banks, trusts, and “gold” was reaching a crescendo.33
Populism did not play well among Wisconsin citizens, but what would be called progressivism did. Changing times made the hour ripe for a change in leadership. Wheat farms, lumber camps, and railroads had been the first props of the state economy, and in the 1880s Wisconsin’s two Republican senators were Sawyer, the lumber millionaire, and John C. Spooner, who was what La Follette might have been if La Follette had been a conservative. Twelve years older than Bob, he was also a University of Wisconsin graduate and a gifted lawyer who had become not only the attorney but the chief lobbyist at Madison for three major railroads. The 1890 census, however, confirmed a major shift in agriculture from wheat to dairy farming and the rise of urban industrial centers. Breweries, foundries, machine shops, and packing plants were growing in Racine, Oshkosh, and La Crosse while Milwaukee, the metropolis, had a population of over two hundred thousand. Accordingly, in 1890 the powerful secretary of the Republican state committee was Henry Clay Payne, whose business interests included Milwaukee telephone, street railway, and utilities companies. Payne was also a supporter of oleomargarine manufacturers in their intrastate warfare with the dairy farmers whom La Follette courted.
Both conservatives and reformers wooed a changing, volatile population. A good part of it—about 45 percent—consisted of foreign-born or first-generation German and Scandinavian immigrants. Compared with still-developing Great Plains states to the west, Wisconsinites were better educated, or at least had more high school diplomas and degrees from the university. As cities and factories bloomed on the landscape, there were more socialists and union members, and also more doctors, dentists, lawyers, teachers, ministers, journalists, managers, and engineers ready to lend an ear to fresh ideas.34
These were the waters in which La Follette and his supporters fished. It is impossible to overstate how convinced all of them were that the world was moving forward. It suffused everything they thought and did. For them, material and intellectual progress could not be separated or halted in an inexorable march toward greater democracy.
The rest is detail. In 1894 La Follette launched his revolution by getting Nils Haugen, who had a strong base among his fellow Norwegian-Americans, to be the antimachine candidate at the state convention to nominate the next Republican governor. Haugen agreed, and La Follette wrote no fewer than twelve hundred letters to potential supporters, the community leaders whom he had culled and cultivated when he was in Congress. The final organizing meeting took place in La Follette’s home, the letters came from his busy desk, and while Haugen was the man on the ballot, La Follette was the focus of controversy. Haugen was beaten out by the conservative William Upham, who went on to win the general election and inaugurate a long period of Republican dominance.
Two years later La Follette was back as a candidate on his own. This time he thought he came to the convention, held in Milwaukee, with enough delegate pledges to have the nomination locked up, but it was not to be. Charles Pfister, a new Republican kingpin and the heir to a leather-tanning fortune, was working against him. According to La Follette, Pfister made a midnight visit to his hotel room just before the balloting started and announced: “La Follette, we’ve got you skinned. We’ve got enough of your delegates away from you to defeat you . . . tomorrow. Now, we don’t want any trouble . . . We don’t want to hurt the party. And if you will behave yourself, we will take care of you when the time comes.”
La Follette declined the offer but Pfister’s prediction was on the mark. Enough delegates defected to the Pfister-Payne choice, Edward Scofield, to put him over. La Follette was sure they had been bought—some of his loyalists swore to having rejected cash offers for their votes—but he had no proof on others who, he believed, had not refused. He gathered his faithful ones at headquarters afterward for one of those tableaux he loved, unimaginable today, and recited consoling poetry to them.
Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole
to pole I thank whatever gods there be
For my unconquerable soul.
Then he went forth, bloody but unbowed, to support the national ticket headed by his Washington friend Major McKinley. After the victory McKinley offered him a Washington job, comptroller of the currency, but by now La Follette was committed to battling it out in Wisconsin.35
Until then he had hoped to break the machine through the uphill work of winning delegates at local caucuses. Now he discovered the direct primary as a way of changing rather than capturing the nomination process. It was a perfect issue. He had as yet no economic program other than fair taxation and opposition to a small but visible and irritating corrupt practice—free railroad passes to state judges and legislators. And it would take time to educate both himself and the voters to the nuances of a new kind of economic democracy. But taking the naming of candidates out of the hands of bosses and lobbyists and giving it back to the people was straight-forward and surefire. “Go back to the first principles of democracy,” he exhorted in February 1897 in a speech in Chicago called “The Menace of the Political Machine,” which he was to repeat hundreds of times. He painted a utopian picture of the results. It hurts to read it ninety-five years later, with the reform accomplished and voter participation steadily shrinking all the same.
[E]very citizen will share equally in the nomination of the candidates of his party and attend primary elections as a privilege as well as a duty. It will no longer be necessary to create an artificial interest in the general election to induce voters to attend. Intelligent, well-considered judgment will be substituted for unthinking enthusiasm, the lamp of reason for the torchlight. The voter will not require to be persuaded that he has an interest in the election. He will know that he has.”36
The direct primary put solid ground of principle under his feet and was bigger than merely statewide issues. His speech and a model direct-primary bill were widely reprinted and gave him valuable exposure. That fall of 1897 he began his campaign a year in advance, stumping the county fairs that were the high-water marks of the harvest season. Standing on wagon beds amid whickering horses and piles of prizewinning pumpkins, he set rural audiences ablaze. “His words bite like coals of fire,” said a reporter. “Disgust, hope, honor, avarice, despair, love, anger, all the passions of man he paints in strong words and stronger gestures . . . He never wearies.”37
Nevertheless, La Follette lost the nomination again in 1898, while the direct-primary bill, plus other reforms, died in the state legislature. And he did, in fact, weary. He would travel and talk for hours, day after day, toss sleeplessly in strange beds, live on sandwiches and milk wolfed down in stolen minutes once or twice a day.
Such compulsive overwork had its price in breakdowns. In the fall of 1896 he became “seriously ill” and had to take a long, recuperative trip south with his friend and family doctor, Philip Fox. In 1898, after the convention that climaxed the county-fair campaign, he was felled again. Fox again prescribed a warm climate, free of respiratory illnesses. This time Bob went to Southern California, already a health-seeker’s Mecca. Without hesitation, Belle left the children with relatives and joined him. They spent several weeks in San Diego, which then had fewer than twenty thousand people, and took beach rambles in the vicinity of lonely La Jolla. Even after returning, he spent much of the next six months in and out of bed.
Without more specific information on his symptoms it is impossible to submit Bob’s medical history to modern doctors for diagnosis. The complaints in his correspondence are usually of chronic inability to sleep and of cramps, nausea, and diarrhea that he generically called “bowel trouble.” There isn’t any question of their psychological components as reactions to conflict and defeat and the simple, crying need to let down. The sicknesses of 1896 and 1898 had special usefulness. They gave him legitimate reasons not to campaign for the organization candidates who had beaten him. But in June of 1901, when he was already governor and had lost some bruising fights in the state legislature, he collapsed again with weight loss, generalized pain, and, this time, profound and debilitating depression. “I do not remember ever having felt so helpless,” said Belle.38
In 1900 his hour came round at last. It was not quite the sweet and clean victory that would most have satisfied the pure of heart. Rather, it was the classic pattern of a revolution succeeding when infighting breaks out among members of the establishment. A prosperous lumberman, Isaac Stephenson, was angry at the machine for denying him a Senate nomination in 1899. He joined and bankrolled La Follette, as did a number of Milwaukee businessmen and attorneys disgusted by a bribery scandal. Sawyer was at the point of death; Spooner, Payne, and Pfister were more preoccupied with national ambitions and business problems than with the war on La Follette.
Through intermediaries, conferences were arranged. La Follette assured the conservatives that he stood for fair but not confiscatory taxation of railroads, and of his reasonableness on other matters. In fact, they all misunderstood each other. He thought his enemies had seen the light. They thought they had him tamed. But one way or the other there was a truce, a 1900 convention of sweet harmony, and a Republican nomination for Robert Marion La Follette. He turned his guns on the Democrats, delivering 208 speeches in 61 counties—ten to fifteen speeches a day, six days a week. He won by a hundred thousand votes, just eight years after the galvanizing meeting with Sawyer. It was a generally good year for the Grand Old Party, which won a second term for McKinley largely through support of keeping the island possessions recently won from Spain. (La Follette was in favor of it, too, at the time, though he was later to become a convinced anti-imperialist.) But the moment of triumph in Madison was temporary. Progressivism had not won anything like total victory.39
“We are slow to realize,” La Follette argued five years after he left the governorship, “that democracy is a life; and involves continual struggle.”40 His own education in the matter came soon enough after his inauguration. Wresting the nomination from party regulars was one thing. Getting a program enacted was another. In the legislative session of 1901 the “stalwarts,” as the defenders of the old way called themselves, killed his two key campaign pledges, the direct primary and a bill to tax railroads on the actual value of their property as determined by independent experts rather than their own auditors. He stormed at the stalwarts, accused their lobbyists of buying votes with money, liquor, and “lewd women,” and sank into months of sick melancholy. But he bounced back into the fight in 1902. It would take him three terms to win the next round, and in that “continual struggle” he added more polish to his weapons and tactics and began to become a national figure.
A governor battling for his program was a novelty to the Wisconsin legislature, long accustomed to go-along executives. The stalwarts—that is, conservatives—were taken aback. They charged that La Follette was self-righteous, used the club of patronage freely, talked democratically but acted like a dictator, and would not “consult,” meaning primarily that they no longer had their accustomed free access to the governor’s office.41
La Follette’s counterattacks were unrelenting. When his direct primary bill was gutted and replaced by a feeble compromise, he vetoed it with a message so vitriolic that it got him censured in the state senate. Told by moderates that politics was, after all, the art of the possible and he should accept the compromise under the old principle of “half a loaf is better than no bread,” he answered that “in legislation no bread is often better than half a loaf. I believe it is usually better to be beaten and come right back at the next session and make a fight for a thoroughgoing law than to have written on the books a weak and indefinite statute.” Half a loaf dulled the appetite and clouded the principle that the public was being educated to accept. “I believe in going forward a step at a time, but it must be a full step.”42
By 1902 the conservatives who had come to terms with him two years earlier were in open opposition again, but this time they were the outsiders and he had no trouble winning renomination and reelection. But the stalwarts still controlled enough seats to fight off another direct-primary bill in 1903, setting up a major test of the issue in 1904.
By that time La Follette’s platform had broadened to include one or more permanent commissions to control railroad and telephone rates, and grade crops independently. (Farmers had long complained that companies buying their harvests persistently declared them inferior and paid accordingly.) The logic of reform was pushing him toward the regulatory state. He had started by simply attacking the domination of the bosses over nominations. Then he had been forced to go after the railroads and corporations who paid off or provided the bosses, and now he had learned that even when the corporations could be beaten at an election their influence lingered on, a permanent force amid the changing waves of popular feeling registered in frequent elections.
A permanent mechanism would therefore have to be devised to make them answerable in season and out. The whole nation was making the same transition from the trust-busting philosophy of the 1880s and 1890s to the new idea of commission control—trying, so to speak, to leash the beast rather than kill it. In time, business itself would warm to the idea of independent regulators imposing safeguards against waste and crookedness, and creating a more predictable economic climate than pure laissez-faire allowed.
In time, but not in Wisconsin in 1904. Stalwarts continued to hammer at La Follette as an agitator and a demagogue who was ruining the state economy. And La Follette found, in fighting back, a perfect field for playing knight-errant and dragon-slayer. Taking his case to the people, he tried to nullify the demagogue label by avoiding simple appeals to emotion and dealing instead in hard numbers. Illinois and Iowa already had railroad rate commissions, and on the stump La Follette quoted freely from their rate tables to show Wisconsin shippers that they were disgorging much higher rates to carry the same products the same distances. The figures made dry reading, but he had an extraordinary talent for holding audiences with them. Perhaps it was because he genuinely did trust their intelligence.
In addition to almanacs and commission reports, his road baggage contained legislative journals, and he began a practice that he named “calling the roll.” In each district he read off the voting record of its state lawmakers on reform measures and asked listeners to consider whether their representatives had voted for their interests or those of the corporations. It was effective enough, and unusual enough, to raise howls of protest. It seemed like picking on individuals who might have a variety of local or party motives for particular votes, or honest disagreement. As Belle noted, “It was a new thing to judge public men by their votes instead of by their neighborly conduct and good standing in the community.” Whether it was in fact a complete novelty is debatable, but it certainly had not been the custom since the passionate days of pre–Civil War abolitionism, and it struck many as especially abrasive. But Bob’s rejoinder was that taking responsibility for one’s vote was part of the democratic process; otherwise, why did the national government print the Congressional Record? Furthermore, he said, “this is no time for bouquets or soft words; we are getting none.”43
When convention time came in 1904 the stalwarts organized a walkout and nominated their own ticket, which they claimed to be the legitimate Wisconsin Republican slate. But the courts denied them the Republican line on the ballot and they pulled only a feeble twelve thousand votes in the fall general election. Meanwhile Bob undertook a grueling statewide campaign by auto—a hallmark of being up-to-date—and won his third election by a huge majority. What was more, for the first time, his progressives got majorities in both houses.
Some last-minute publicity was an important break for Bob. In June, Lincoln Steffens had shown up in Madison to interview him for an article. Steffens was then forging a national name as a muckraker. His book The Shame of the Cities had been a best seller, and now he was working on a series of exposures of corruption and reform in the states. He was promptly brought home to dinner where he began a lifelong friendship with Belle, Bob, and Fola. A few days earlier, Fola had been graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the university.
Steffens was then thirty-eight years old, a keen and curious figure who was the kind of journalist of ideas rare in America, which tended to produce hard-boiled reporters or book-writing academics. With his hair combed over his forehead, pince-nez eyeglasses, and a little goatee, Steffens actually looked professorial. The son of a rich Californian, he had done graduate study in philosophy in Germany and, undecided on his life’s work, worked as a police-beat reporter in New York City. Pounding the streets, he became a friend of the young commissioner of police, Theodore Roosevelt. After a while street-life and crime stories bored him. He quit, tried a novel, then joined the staff of a national monthly, McClure’s magazine. It was a series for McClure’s that made his name. Assigned to do a piece on machine rule in St. Louis, Steffens found a career and a calling. He was fascinated by the search for behind-the-scenes causes and larger meanings, and though he was an idealist and reformer, he did not fit the do-gooder’s mold. He enjoyed the company of some toughly realistic bosses and businessmen who were allied in the drive to get things done, even crookedly, and preferred it to that of the righteous. (His political goal came to be to legitimize the boss system’s better parts.)
The St. Louis article became the nucleus of his first book, and in 1904 he was carrying his pursuit of the story to the next highest levels of government. In 1904 friends had steered him out to Wisconsin to check on La Follette’s war against “the system.”
Steffens spent many hours closeted with Bob, and then left to interview a long list of Bob’s enemies. Belle said she awaited the article “with anxious heart,” but when it appeared it turned out to be an almost complete endorsement and an unrelieved indictment of Sawyer, Payne, Spooner, Keyes, and the stalwart chieftains. “[T]he fight in Wisconsin,” Steffens concluded, “is for self-government, not ‘good’ government; it is a fight to reestablish a government representative of all the people . . . [N]o matter how men may differ about Governor La Follette otherwise, his long hard fight has developed citizenship in Wisconsin—honest, reasonable, intelligent citizenship.”44
Coming a few weeks before election day the piece not only helped in the victory, but it turned a benign national light on the forty-nine-year-old governor. His next term was a huge success. He got not only a final version of the primary bill but measures to regulate railroads and telephone and telegraph rates and likewise to strengthen the civil service, force lobbying activity into the open, protect labor rights, safeguard forests, and monitor waterpower franchises and electricity charges. This package, known as “the Wisconsin Idea,” made the entire state an “experiment in democracy.” La Follette originated neither phrase—each furnished the title of a book about the state’s progressive movement—but he was that movement’s most visible champion. He denied charges that it was radical and insisted that it merely embodied the enlightened intelligence of the day. In time, he argued, even investors in utilities and railroads found that fair regulation brought them higher returns. Why? “Simply,” he answered, “because the regulation is scientific.” That was the key to the faith.45
L’ENVOI
But these victories came while La Follette was a lame duck governor. In January of 1905 he consented that the legislature elect him to the United States Senate, though he stayed on for a year to complete his work. His motives are still unclear. Some believed that he did it to forestall a destructive, divisive quarrel among several progressives who wanted the seat, in effect, becoming the compromise candidate himself. Others said he was itching for the national stage. He himself explained, not entirely convincingly, that greatness was thrust upon him. He said that “I never went anywhere that leading progressives did not urge me to go to Washington and carry forward the fight on the wider national platform.” And, he agreed, “there is no reason now why the movement should not expand until it covers the entire nation.”46
It was in fact beginning to cover the entire nation, and it was spreading from centers other than Wisconsin. Now he probably believed that his work was done there and it was time to leave for new scenes, new fights, and greater personal opportunities. He was prematurely optimistic. The stalwarts were not done in. They would war with the progressives throughout La Follette’s lifetime (and beyond), often winning temporary control of the state. He was never free of the tug of local political battles to preserve and extend his victories, and what is more, his departure left a vacuum in Wisconsin’s progressive leadership that was not filled in good measure because he discouraged other aspirants. It is even arguable that he was leaving a job where he had genuine power for one in which he could never be more than marginal.
But that is clear only in hindsight. In 1905 he was ready for a larger stage, where he expected once more to rise to top billing. A new chapter of his life began, and with his entry into the Senate, so did the real family history of the La Follettes.
