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 all his life making long speeches full of statistics, struggling to save democratic government, to make a farmers’ and small businessmen’s commonwealth, lonely with his back to the wall, fighting corruption and big business and high finance 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 bill that made war with Germany certain; they called it a filibuster but it was six men with nerve straining to hold back a crazy steamroller with their bare hands;
the press pumped hatred into its readers against La Follette,
the traitor,
they burned him in effigy in Illinois;
in Wheeling they refused to let him speak.
In nineteen twentyfour La Follette ran for president and without money or political machine rolled up four and a half million 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 smell of politicians,
and he died,
an orator haranguing from the capitol of a lost republic;
but we will 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 machine at deadlock. They wouldn’t let him speak; the galleries glared hatred at him; the senate was a lynching party,
a stumpy man with a lined face, one leg stuck out in the aisle and his arms folded and a chewed cigar in the corner of his mouth
and an undelivered speech on his desk,
a wilful man expressing no opinion but his own.
Charley Anderson
Charley Anderson’s mother kept a railroad boardinghouse near the Northern Pacific station at Fargo, N. D. It was a gabled frame house with porches all round, painted mustard yellow with chocolatebrown trim and out back there was always washing hanging out on sagging lines that ran from a pole near the kitchen door to a row of brokendown chickenhouses. Mrs. Anderson was a quietspoken grayhaired woman with glasses; the boarders were afraid of her and did their complaining about the beds, or the food, or that the eggs weren’t fresh to waddling bigarmed Lizzie Green from the north of Ireland who was the help and cooked and did all the housework. When any of the boys came home drunk it was Lizzie with a threadbare man’s overcoat pulled over her nightgown who came out to make them shut up. One of the brakemen tried to get fresh with Lizzie one night and got such a sock in the jaw that he fell clear off the front porch. It was Lizzie who washed and scrubbed Charley when he was little, who made him get to school on time and put arnica on his knees when he skinned them and soft soap on his chilblains and mended the rents in his clothes. Mrs. Anderson had already raised three children who had grown up and left home before Charley came, so that she couldn’t seem to keep her mind on Charley. Mr. Anderson had also left home about the time Charley was born; he’d had to go West on account of his weak lungs, couldn’t stand the hard winters, was how Mrs. Anderson put it. Mrs. Anderson kept the accounts, preserved or canned strawberries, peas, peaches, beans, tomatoes, pears, plums, applesauce as each season came round, made Charley read a chapter of the Bible every day and did a lot of churchwork.
Charley was a chunky little boy with untidy towhair and gray eyes. He was a pet with the boarders and liked things allright except Sundays when he’d have to go to church twice and to sundayschool and then right after dinner his mother would read him her favorite sections of Matthew or Esther or Ruth and ask him questions about the chapters he’d been assigned for the week. This lesson took place at a table with a red tablecloth next to a window that Mrs. Anderson kept banked with pots of patienceplant, wandering jew, begonias and ferns summer and winter. Charley would have pins and needles in his legs and the big dinner he’d eaten would have made him drowsy and he was terribly afraid of committing the sin against the holy ghost which his mother hinted was inattention in church or in sundayschool or when she was reading him the Bible. Winters the kitchen was absolutely quiet except for the faint roaring of the stove or Lizzie’s heavy step or puffing breath as she stacked the dinnerdishes she’d just washed back in the cupboard. Summers it was much worse. The other kids would have told him about going swimming down in the Red River or fishing or playing follow my leader in the lumberyard or on the coalbunkers back of the roundhouse and the caught flies would buzz thinly in the festooned tapes of flypaper and he’d hear the yardengine shunting freightcars or the through train for Winnipeg whistling for the station and the bell clanging, and he’d feel sticky and itchy in his stiff collar and he’d keep looking up at the loudticking porcelain clock on the wall. It made the time go too slowly to look up at the clock often, so he wouldn’t let himself look until he thought fifteen minutes had gone by, but when he looked again it’d only be five minutes and he’d feel desperate. Maybe it’d be better to commit the sin against the holy ghost right there and be damned good and proper once and for all and run away with a tramp the way Dolphy Olsen did, but he didn’t have the nerve.
By the time he was ready for highschool he began to find funny things in the Bible, things like the kids talked about when they got tired playing toad in the hole in the deep weeds back of the lumberyard fence, the part about Onan and the Levite and his concubine and the Song of Solomon, it made him feel funny and made his heart pound when he read it, like listening to scraps of talk among the railroad men in the boardinghouse, and he knew what hookers were and what was happening when women got so fat in front and it worried him and he was careful when he talked to his mother not to let her know he knew about things like that.
Charley’s brother Jim had married the daughter of a liverystable owner in Minneapolis. The spring Charley was getting ready to graduate from the eighth grade they came to visit Mrs. Anderson. Jim smoked cigars right in the house and jollied his mother and while he was there there was no talk of biblereading. Jim took Charley fishing one Sunday up the Sheyenne and told him that if he came down to the Twin Cities when school was over he’d give him a job helping round the garage he was starting up in part of his fatherinlaw’s liverystable. It sounded good when he told the other guys in school that he had a job in the city for the summer. He was glad to get out as his sister Esther had just come back from taking a course in nursing and nagged him all the time about talking slang and not keeping his clothes neat and eating too much pie.
He felt fine the morning he went over to Moorhead all alone, carrying a suitcase Esther had lent him, to take the train for the Twin Cities. At the station he tried to buy a package of cigarettes but the man at the newsstand kidded him and said he was too young. When he started it was a fine spring day a little too hot. There was sweat on the flanks of the big horses pulling the long line of flourwagons that was crossing the bridge. While he was waiting in the station the air became stifling and a steamy mist came up. The sunlight shone red on the broad backs of the grain elevators along the track. He heard one man say to another, “Looks to me like it might be a tornado,” and when he got on the train he half leaned out of the open window watching purple thunderheads building up in the northwest beyond the brightgreen wheat that stretched clear to the clouds. He kinda hoped it would be a tornado because he’d never seen one, but when the lightning began cracking like a whip out of the clouds he felt a little scared, though being on the train with the conductor and the other passengers made it seem safer. It wasn’t a tornado but it was a heavy thundershower and the wheatfields turned to zinc as great trampling hissing sheets of rain advanced slowly across them. Afterwards the sun came out and Charley opened the window and everything smelt like spring and there were birds singing in all the birchwoods and in the dark firs round all the little shining lakes.