Determined to go to college, he rented the farm to his brotherinlaw and moved the family into Madison. His schooling had been so sketchy he had to take preparatory courses for a year at the Wisconsin Academy. He never did learn to spell. He taught school. He coached debaters. He edited and mostly wrote The University Press, the college paper, which he distributed at enough profit to pay for his college course. All this, and acting in amateur plays, kept him so busy his grades weren’t of the highest.
When he fell in love with Belle Case he won over her family by his readings from Hamlet. His graduation would have been doubtful if he hadn’t won first prize in an interstate contest by a speech on the character of Iago which for years was the pride of midwestern oratoricals.
Probably his fiancée influenced him towards studying law. He’d hardly passed his bar exam before he was running for district attorney. Riding from house to house with horse and buggy, the way he’d sold vegetables as a boy, he became an irresistible campaigner.
He stood for the people against the interests.
In 1884 he ran for the House of Representatives and at twentynine became the youngest member of the Fortyninth Congress. Belle and her small children moved with him to Washington. He served three terms, learned everything there was to know about the lawmaker’s profession. In a day when politicians were supposed to serve business for retainers his independence made him enemies. In 1890 he was defeated. The opposition of the state Republican machine threw the election to the Democrats. He went back to the practice of law but politics was his world.
New forces were stirring in the Republican Party. He became friends with T.R. but McKinley was his chosen leader. In 1896 La Follette and Roosevelt were McKinley’s two most effective campaigners. While Bryan thundered for the common man among the Democrats, Progressivism raised its voice among the Republicans.
In 1900 La Follette was elected governor of Wisconsin. With a large following, based on the student body at the university and on the farmers he visited on his famous horse and buggy circuits, or harangued from a spring wagon at country fairs, he started a systematic restoration of the processes of selfgovernment. If the people knew, he passionately believed, the people would vote right.
In New York the sword of righteousness which T.R. had brandished as police commissioner and then as governor, fell into the hands of an austere young man named Charles Evans Hughes.
Born in a tiny frame house in Glens Falls in the spring of 1862, the man who was to be reform governor of New York was the only son of a raven-haired Welshman, who emigrated to the United States in the middle fifties eager to do God’s work. By dint of preaching and teaching he managed to dig himself out an education in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and to find himself a blueeyed bride from an upstate farming family. Raised a Baptist Mrs. Hughes soon convinced her husband that the Baptist faith was nearer to the primitive religion of Christ’s disciples to which they both aspired, so it was as a Baptist that they brought up their son.
Young Charles was precocious. His parents started training him for the ministry from the time he started to read at the age of three and a half. He was literally raised in church, because there was no one to leave him with at home while his father was preaching and his mother was playing the organ.
At fourteen Hughes was ready for college and was sent to board at the Baptist seminary in Hamilton, New York, which later developed into Colgate University. “Pray for me,” he wrote back to his doting parents, then living on Great Jones Street, in Manhattan, where the Reverend Hughes was secretary of the American Bible Union, “that I may be a useful servant in God’s vineyard.”
Already secular interests were crowding into God’s vineyard. As a precocious youngster living in the heart of Boss Tweed’s New York Hughes came to know something of the savagery and sin of the old brick seaport where masts and yards and steamboat funnels crowded in a forest about the wharves at the end of each crosswise street.
He honed to strike out on his own. He argued theology with his father in his letters home. In spite of their differences in points of doctrine his father loyally helped him transfer to Brown University where he obtained a small scholarship and, as a minister’s son, had his room free of rent.
At Brown his horizons broadened. He found he had inherited a Welshman’s flair for public speaking. He helped edit the magazine. For pocket money he tutored the duller students or occasionally wrote their themes for them for a price. He graduated in 1881, a slight, lively, smoothfaced lad of nineteen, the youngest in his class and third in scholastic standing.
A generation earlier he might well have been attracted to a career in the ministry, but growing up into the bustling moneymaking confident eighties, the law appeared to be the avenue to success for an able and impecunious young man.
Eking out the slender allowance his parents were able to spare him with teaching jobs and clerking, he passed his bar examination with record high marks at twentytwo, and was taken into the office of a successful attorney named Walter S. Carter. Not many years went by before Hughes, with the boss’s enthusiastic consent, was marrying the boss’s daughter.
During his college years he had missed out on many a good teaching job on account of his youthful and beardless appearance. Now he encouraged a bushy mustache and soon supplemented it with a neatly trimmed beard.
He worked himself down to skin and bone. He was so thin no company would give him life insurance. When Cornell offered him a professorship in law he jumped at the chance.
Hughes enjoyed teaching. He liked the country life and the walks over the hills overlooking Lake Cayuga. He gained weight. The life insurance company no longer turned him down for a policy. His courses were popular with the students.
A new baby was born. Responsibilities were multiplying. He hadn’t been able to sell his New York house and the mortgage payments were a drain. In spite of a heavy teaching load and a new course in international law he was induced to undertake, all Cornell could offer him for a salary was three thousand a year. Hughes loved Ithaca; he stoutly turned down an offer of five thousand from the New York University Law School; but at last his fatherinlaw’s cajoling letters and firm promise that by 1900 the business would be netting a hundred thousand dollars a year decided him to go back to New York … “if there is anything in this big money-making world I can win I’ll win it for wife and babies,” he wrote his wife. “I have no business to be out of the great rush.”
He taught the young men’s Bible class at the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, and was elected a trustee. This was different from the impoverished meeting houses he had known as a boy. John D. Rockefeller was president of the board of trustees.
His work was all absorbing. He was the lawyer’s lawyer. Attorneys and even judges consulted him on knotty points. Outside of his profession he was unknown. “My dear,” he told his wife, who was complaining that though all the other lawyers’ names were mentioned in connection with a notorious lawsuit she couldn’t find her husband’s in any of the papers, “I have a positive genius for privacy.”
It wasn’t until after his fatherinlaw’s death when he was heading the Carter lawfirm that Hughes suddenly emerged into the light of the front pages as counsel for a committee of the state legislature which was investigating the gouging of the public by the company that furnished the city’s gas.
The early nineteenhundreds were the heyday of muckraking. In a moment of annoyance at the scandalmongering which had become habitual in newspapers competing desperately for the public’s pennies, T.R. had pulled the term out of a quotation from Pilgrim’s Progress.