Ideas for the Ice Age: Studies in a Revolutionary Era by Max Lerner & Roger L. Geiger

Author:Max Lerner & Roger L. Geiger [Lerner, Max & Geiger, Roger L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138525634
Google: FNAezgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 56465646
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1941-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Case of Governor La Follette (1938)6

6 At the end of April 1938, something of a sensation was caused by the announcement that Governor Philip La Follette, of Wisconsin, would lead a new national party, the National Progressives of America; the movement was launched at a mass meeting at Madison, the capital of Wisconsin. The essay that follows is the result of talks with Governor La Follette early in May. The new party was still-born, but the issues raised by it and by Mr. La Follette’s ideas are of continuing interest.

I CAME out to Madison to talk with Governor La Follette because overnight he had vaulted into the national picture as a potential progressive leader, yet no one was clear where he was going or how he proposed to get there. And of the two La Follettes, it is Phil rather than Bob7 who is the prime mover in the new National Progressives of America. Phil received me cordially. We had a two-hour talk in the morning at the State House and another two-hour talk in the afternoon at the Executive Mansion. I came primed with many questions. I cannot quote the answers, but I have his permission to set down my interpretation of the gist of our discussion and my deductions about his thinking. If some of these deductions are not sympathetic, it is because they have been filtered through my own hopes and fears about the future of our country.

7 Senator Robert M. La Follette, Jr.

No one in Wisconsin thinks of calling the Governor anything except Phil. His people either love him or hate him, quarrel and make up with him as they might do with members of their family. And Phil cultivates that feeling. He received me at his home in shirt-sleeves, as if I were a neighbor who had dropped in for a friendly call. Madison, far away from the fierce antagonisms of urban centers such as New York or Chicago, is folksy and middle-class in tone.

But Phil is not just small-town stuff. At forty-one he is already the stuff that legends are made of, and I heard many of them. He is a man of enormous ambition and personal mastery, grooming himself for a great destiny and believing utterly in that destiny. There are some who think that the new party grows out of the local Wisconsin situation, that Phil faces a fight for his fourth term as governor, and that he knows he cannot be governor unless he finds a place in the national political sun. I doubt that. Phil’s prestige in Wisconsin has never stood so high as today,8 and it has grown especially with the more liberal business men. Besides, he does not talk like a man who wants only to be governor. He is playing for high stakes.

8 I was wrong. He was later defeated for the governorship.

The first impression one gets of him is of a frank, warm, alert, but unassuming person. Despite his gray hair, he looks at times and from a certain angle, infinitely young, like an eager schoolboy—small, lithe, round-faced.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.