U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [156]
everywhere Polonius?)
riding home in a buggy after commencement he
was Booth and Wilkes writing the Junius papers and
Daniel Webster and Ingersol defying God and the
togaed great grave and incorruptible as statues mag-nificently spouting through the capitoline centuries; he was the star debater in his class,
-365-and won an interstate debate with an oration on the character of Iago. He went to work in a law office and ran for dis-trict attorney. His schoolfriends canvassed the county riding round evenings. He bucked the machine and
won the election.
It was the revolt of the young man against the
state republican machine
and Boss Keyes the postmaster in Madison who
ran the county was so surprised he about fel out of his chair.
That gave La Fol ette a salary to marry on. He
was twentyfive years old.
Four years later he ran for congress; the univer-sity was with him again; he was the youngsters' candi-date. When he was elected he was the youngest rep-resentative in the house He was introduced round Washington by Philetus
Sawyer the Wisconsin lumber king who was used to
stacking and sel ing politicians the way he stacked and sold cordwood. He was a Republican and he'd bucked the ma-chine. Now they thought they had him. No man could stay honest in Washington.
Booth played Shakespeare in Baltimore that win-ter. Booth never would go to Washington on account of the bitter memory of his brother. Bob La Fol ette and his wife went to every performance.
In the parlor of the Plankinton Hotel in Mil-waukee during the state fair, Boss Sawyer the lumber king tried to bribe him to influence his brother-in-law
-366-who was presiding judge over the prosecution of the Republican state treasurer; Bob La Fol ette walked out of the hotel in a white
rage. From that time it was war without quarter with the Republican machine in Wisconsin until he was
elected governor and wrecked the Republican machine; this was the tenyears war that left Wisconsin the
model state where the voters, orderloving Germans
and Finns, Scandinavians fond of their own opinion, learned to use the new leverage, direct primaries, ref-erendum and recal . La Fol ette taxed the railroads John C. Payne said to a group of politicians in the lobby of the Ebbitt House in Washington "La Fol-lette's a damn fool if he thinks he can buck a railroad with five thousand miles of continuous track, he'l find he's mistaken . . . We'l take care of him when the time comes."
But when the time came the farmers of Wisconsin
and the young lawyers and doctors and businessmen
just out of school
took care of him
and elected him governor three times
and then to the United States Senate,
where he worked al his life making long
speeches ful of statistics, struggling to save democratic government, to make a farmers'
and smal business-men's commonwealth, lonely with his back to the wal , fighting corruption and big business and high finance
-367-and trusts and combinations of combinations and the miasmic lethargy of Washington.
He was one of "the little group of wilful men
expressing no opinion but their own"
who stood out against Woodrow Wilson's armed
ship bil that made war with Germany certain; they
cal ed it a filibuster but it was six men with nerve straining to hold back a crazy steamrol er with their bare hands;
the press pumped hatred into its readers against
La Fol ette,
the traitor,
they burned him in effigy in Il inoisi
in Wheeling they refused to let him speak.
In nineteen twentyfour La Fol ette ran for presi-dent and without money or political machine rol ed up four and a half mil ion votes
but he was a sick man, incessant work and the
breathed out air of committee rooms and legislative chambers choked him and the dirty smel of politicians,
and he died,
an orator haranguing from the capitol of a lost
republic;
but we wil remember
how he sat firm in March nineteen seventeen
while Woodrow Wilson was being inaugurated for the
second time, and for three days held the vast