Wisconsin; an experiment in democracy

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Preface

Wisconsin is doing for America what Germany is doing for the world. It is an experiment station in politics, in social and industrial legislation, in the democratization of science and higher education. It is a state-wide laboratory in which popular government is being tested in its reaction on people, on the distribution of wealth, on social well-being.

The American state is probably our most conspicuous political failure. It has not awakened the interest of reformers as has the city. Nor has it aroused the ambitions of men as has the national government. Some writers have suggested there is no place for a quasi-sovereign commonwealth in our governmental system. They look upon it as a political vermiform appendix that has outlived the functions it was designed to perform. Decisions of the courts have impaired the dignity which the state enjoyed before the Civil War, while the resentment of business to any kind of interference has depreciated the status of the state still further.

Yet the state has wide possibilities. It controls

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the machinery of nomination and election for federal, state, and municipal officials. Representatives in congress, United States senators, as well as candidates for President and Vice-President are nominated as its laws provide. Cities have only such powers as the state permits them to enjoy. Municipal charters, the power to promote health, to control tenements, to supervise the franchise corporations, issue from the state. Home rule, commission government, the form of the ballot, the initiative and referendum and recall, are all of its providing. So is the right of suffrage. The success or failure of the city is traceable to the laws which the state enacts.

If the state is corrupt, the cities will reflect its conditions. Nor can the national government rise above its source. It will mirror the machinery of nomination and election, as well as the character of the legislature, which selects the members of the United States senate.

The state is the source of civil and criminal law, of domestic and industrial relations. It is the guardian of the peace, of the health and education of the people. It controls the roads and highways. It regulates the railroads and common carriers. Industrial and labor legislation fall within its jurisdiction, as does the care of women and child workers.

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Its taxing power is ample to promote a social policy. Only the federal taxes are denied to it. It can tax and through taxation destroy, as it does in the liquor business. It controls education. Our western states have developed a comprehensive programme of higher education. They are extending it to all classes by extension teaching and the application of scientific methods to agriculture. The indigent, unfortunate, and criminal classes are wards of the state, while the promotion of almost any policy for the improvement of social conditions is within its power.

Wisconsin has raised the state from the low estate into which it had fallen and converted it into a vital political agency. It is utilizing the latent powers of commonwealth building. Twenty years ago Wisconsin was not unlike other states. Its legislature was discredited and corrupt. The biennial bartering of legislation, of place and privilege, the boss and machine control were not dissimilar from conditions disclosed in other states. All this has passed away. In a few years time Wisconsin has become the most efficient commonwealth in the Union. Of the honesty of the legislative and administrative departments there is no question. Executive offices are filled with trained men who are animated by enthusiasm for the public service.

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The state university, situated at the state capital, is a scientific research bureau, using its faculty and equipment in the service of the state. Professors are connected with almost every department of public administration. State problems are studied in the schools of politics, of agriculture, of mechanical engineering. Experts from the university are employed on railway, taxation, and industrial problems, and in extending the influence of the university throughout the state. Extension study has been developed into a serious rather than a recreative pursuit, while farming has been made a highly profitable vocation through the activity of the agricultural department. The university is largely responsible for the progressive legislation that has made Wisconsin so widely known as a pioneer.

Wisconsin has carried democracy farther than any state save Oregon. It has adopted simple direct primary laws, with the second choice, for all elective officials. It has provided for the direct nomination of United States senators, for a presidential primary and the control of corrupt practices, and the use of money in elections. Constitutional amendments have been approved by the legislature for the initiative and referendum and the recall. The question of woman's suffrage has been submitted to the people. The railway and public

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utility laws are models which have been widely copied by other states.

Scientific thoroughness characterizes politics as in no other place in America. Legislation is preceded by exact knowledge of the abuses to be corrected and the ends to be achieved. Laws are made as simple and direct as possible. The politician has almost disappeared from the state-house. He does not thrive in this atmosphere. There is little partisan thinking, and little partisan legislation. There is an enthusiasm among officials that is a high tribute to the state. Men think in terms of Wisconsin. Permanent party ties have been greatly weakened. Voters support men and measures, rather than empty emblems. The people themselves reflect the new motives in politics.

Wisconsin has developed a comprehensive social programme for the protection of the working classes through insurance against accident, by provision for the regulation of factories and unsanitary conditions. It has adopted the German idea of continuation schools, and borrowed the labor exchange from Germany and England. The state insures its own property against fire, it offers state life insurance to its citizens. It has developed a forestry policy and is planning a comprehensive programme of state conservation through a board of public affairs.

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Just as the German burgomaster builds with a far-seeing vision to promote the comfort, the convenience, the health, the beauty of his city; just as the German empire has been consciously developing the education, training, and efficiency of its people, just as the state-owned railways, water-ways, harbors, forests, and mineral resources are used for the upbuilding of the fatherland; just as Denmark has consciously set about to become the world's dairy farm and agricultural experiment station; just as New Zealand and Australia are types of industrial and social democracy, so Wisconsin is building a commonwealth in a conscious, far-seeing, intelligent way. It is becoming an experiment station for America.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

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I. La Follette, The Builder 3

Chapter I La Follette, The Builder

Twenty years ago Wisconsin was not unlike Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Indiana, or Illinois. It had its bosses, who gave the people such government as suited their personal and business interests. The state was a feudatory of the railway, lumber, and franchise interests, which, with the machine of federal office-holders, nominated and elected governors, United States senators and congressmen, who, in turn, made use of their power to enrich their creators. Federal and state patronage was used for the same ends. The biennial session of the legislature was a carnival of legislation for the benefit of the few. Politics was a privileged trade, into which ambitious men entered only when approved by the state machine. Few believed any other methods were possible, and no one challenged the rule of the oligarchy which distributed elective as well as appointive offices for the maintenance of its political and industrial power. There was no organized protest. The press was indifferent or controlled. The great fortunes of the state had been made from timber taken

from government lands, from railroad and franchise corporation promotion, and from building contracts identified with these interests.

Privilege was woven into every fibre of the state, as it was in most of the states of the Union. It had been so for a quarter of a century.

Robert M. La Follette challenged this system almost immediately after he graduated from the University of Wisconsin. He had practised law for three months, and then decided he wanted to be district attorney. He was then twenty-five years of age. , That was in 1880. E. W. Keyes was the most powerful man in the state, a maker of governors and United States senators, and a national political figure. He was generally known as "Boss Keyes." Dane County was the least of his feudal possessions, but he prized it the most. He carried it in his vest pocket, and his control had never been questioned. And he had a candidate of his own for the office of district attorney. He might have picked young La Follette for the office had he sought it by the regular route. But La Follette had a way of his own. It was novel in Wisconsin, novel anywhere in America. La Follette decided to go to the people directly. He went out into the townships among the farmers. He had a horse, and he borrowed a harness and buggy. He needed no introduction to his constituents, for the year before he had won the interstate oratorical contest against the best orators from the colleges of seven states. On his return he was met in triumph by students and towns-people, who carried him on their shoulders to the university, and in the evening gave him a reception at the state-house. He had brought renown to the university and the state. The farmers had read of his success in the papers; many of them had been in Madison on the day of his triumph. They knew, too, of his struggles, of how he had worked his way through college by teaching, by doing odd jobs, and by editing a college paper.

La Follette had a real issue even then. The district attorney then in office had put the county to great expense by employing outside lawyers to try his cases. La Follette said he would do all the work himself.

Keyes and the county organization sneered at the young candidate. They contemptuously termed him and his friends the "night riders/ ' because they conducted their campaign on horseback, day and night, out in the country among the people. But when the caucuses were over, the people were in control. The farmers had believed the promises of the young candidate and enjoyed being taken into the game. They had never heard of the "interests," but they could neither be bought nor bullied into deserting La Follette. He was nominated, and later elected by a majority of ninety-three votes, the Democratic nominee being his law preceptor in whose office he had studied a few months before.

La Follette kept his pledges. He tried his own cases, and he won his spurs. Before many months the ablest lawyers in the state were called in against him. Even then he was thorough. He was an indefatigable worker. Night after night he remained in his office until long into the morning hours. He rarely brought a case until sure of the facts. And he never tried it until he had mastered every detail of the law and the evidence. On the expiration of his first term he was renominated and again elected, this time being the only Republican on the county ticket to pull through.

La Follette enjoyed politics. He relished public work. When his second term expired there was an opening in his congressional district. It was not Dane County's turn to have the nomination, and hhe bosses had a candidate of their own. One day one of them said to him, " I hear you are going to be a candidate for congress. Don't you think it is presumptuous for you to be a candidate without consulting us?"

La Follette replied that he didn't know why he should consult any one but the people. Four years before he had learned a lesson, a lesson he has remembered for thirty-two years. For he has always gone back to the people. And he and his "night riders" went out among the people again. The farmers knew of his legal victories, knew he had justified their confidence, and relished being consulted at the caucuses as they were at the polls. La

Follette was nominated and elected to congress with a majority of 491. He knew very little about state or national politics. I doubt if he had any vision other than that of doing his work and winning his way. He just wanted the office. But his Scotch- Irish-Huguenot stock would not permit him to bow his neck to get it.

La Follette has always been inflexible in matters involving principles. Time has not weakened his insistence on issues which he holds to be fundamental. Nor have his contests been personal. They have always been identified with large issues. And to-day, after thirty-two years of ceaseless conflict, and at an age when most men seek peace and quiet, La Follette is still a dynamo, throbbing with restrained conviction for the things he holds to be true. His body is short and stocky, his frame close knit like that of a Japanese wrestler. His muscles are hard. Out from a face that is still youthful, blue-gray eyes smile friendship or flash indignation. He talks with enthusiasm. When moved, his voice is resonant with suppressed feeling. The personality of the man suggests compact, harnessed force.

La Follette went to Washington at a time when the tariff interests, railroads, and land-grabbers were unchallenged in their control of congress. The great West seemed a limitless domain that could never be peopled, nor its resources exhausted. Population had crossed the Mississippi, but unnumbered millions of acres still invited the homesteader. Railroads seeking land grants got what they wanted for the asking. The senior senator from Wisconsin was Philetus Sawyer. He was a multi-millionaire lumberman and one of the bosses of the state. Sawyer took La Follette to call on the President and members of the cabinet. He introduced him as "our boy." La Follette was still young, scarcely thirty, and it was pleasant to be noticed in this way by a United States senator. Presently a bulky bill granting rights of way across the Sioux Indian Reservation to the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul and the Chicago and Northwestern railways came before his committee. It made generous grants to the railroads, and La Follette protested that they included town sites which were not essential to a right of way. His neighbor on the committee whispered suggestively: "But those are your home corporations."

"Yes," said La Follette, "but I suppose I ought to be as careful about our home corporations as foreign ones."

Senator Sawyer sent for him. He said : " You know, Bob, that Sioux Indian bill provides for our folks, the St. Paul and the Northwestern railroads. I want you to look after it." "I will," said La Follette, "after I have amended it, but I don't think the bill is right."

In forty-eight hours, Henry C. Payne, chairman of the Wisconsin State Central Committee and chief lobbyist for the St. Paul Railroad, arrived in Washington. Payne was angry. He labored with La Follette. The next day one of La Follette's colleagues in the house said: "Bob, you have trouble on your hands. Henry Payne was giving you the devil at the hotel last night. He said you were a fool if you thought you could oppose railroads, with 5,000 miles of track, running through your district."

La Follette was young. At that time most men believed, as Sawyer said to him, that "the railroads had a hard time of it." It would have been very easy to drift with the crowd. For the country acquiesced in the land grants and subsidies granted the Pacific railroads as an aid to the development of the West.

La Follette queried: "Can't a fellow do what he thinks is right down here? If I can't I'm going back home and practise law."

The bill was defeated, but the railroads did not forget. They strengthened their machine at home and prepared to prevent La Follette's renomination. But La Follette was renominated and re-elected for three successive terms. Then he went down to defeat in the Democratic landslide of 1890.

When his last term expired in 1891, La Follette's law business had gone to pieces, but by the end of three months he had organized a firm which in a short time was on a prosperous basis. Professional success was easy. The premiership of the Wisconsin bar was

La Follette's for the taking, for he had an immediate success as an advocate. But political life was inevitable. It lured him. He was the natural heir to the leadership of his party in the state, when a political tragedy threw him into the bitterest fight of his life. It raised up powerful enemies who never forgave.

For years the state treasurers of Wisconsin had been loaning the state's money to favored banks without interest. The attorney-general brought suit to recover hundreds of thousands of dollars of back interest. Senator Sawyer was bondsman of many treasurers. He was sued personally for $300,000. The case was pending before Judge Robert J. Siebecker, a brother-in-law and former law partner of La Follette. Sawyer was alarmed. He sent a note to La Follette, asking him to meet him in the Plankington Hotel, Milwaukee. Thinking it was a political appointment, La Follette met him in the hotel parlor. Sawyer and La Follette told different stories about what happened. Sawyer said he endeavored to employ La Follette as his attorney in the case; La Follette said he crowded a bunch of bills into his hands and said there was that much more coming if Judge Siebecker decided the cases "right." What happened became public. Senator Sawyer made a statement which called forth a denial from La Follette. The state won its case. It recovered a large sum of money as back interest, but La Follette had won the undying enmity of the most powerful man in the state. Not only that; he split the party asunder, for the " interests " and the machine resolved to destroy him for daring to speak out.

Had it not been for the Sawyer incident, La Follette would quite naturally have slipped into the governorship or the senate. He was a good campaigner, a splendid organizer, and he almost always won. After the Sawyer episode his political demise was universally predicted. He probably would have been retired had he not immediately taken the stump against the protests of the members of the organization. That was in 1892. They said he would be mobbed by the Sawyer men; that there was sure to be trouble. The whole state was in a white heat of excitement. La Follette had been vilified by the newspapers, many of which were subsidized then as they were during the next ten years. But he replied, that he would go to the meetings if he had to carry a gun and lay it on the table before him. His meetings were packed. He had no interruptions. His courage set at rest any question as to the integrity of his motives.

Then began an eight years' war to free a commonwealth; a war that drove one after another of the old bosses out of office; that stamped out machine politics and corruption, that sent an insurgent delegation to congress; that perfected the machinery of government, regulated the railroads and public service corporations; that placed them on the tax list on the same basis as other property and laid the foundations for what is probably the most intelligent, free-minded, independent, and progressive commonwealth in America.

La Follette had learned much by this time, but he was to learn more. In 1894 he cast about for a candidate for governor. He sent out 1,500 personal letters requesting an expression of opinion on the candidacy of Nils P. Haugen, one of his colleagues in congress. The response was so satisfactory that Haugen consented to be a candidate, although it probably meant the permanent sacrifice of his seat in congress.

For six weeks the lights were rarely permitted to go out in La Follette's office. He slept on the floor with his law books for a pillow, and, with dynamolike energy, forced the fighting all over the state. Haugen was defeated, but the little band of delegates nominated every other candidate on the ticket.

For two years La Follette practised law and continued to build sentiment back among the people. He cast about for another candidate, but was unable to find any one to undertake the contest against the organization. Finally, he said he would go on with the fight if he had to be a candidate himself. When he announced himself a jeer went up over the state. The machine said it would "eat him up." But a brigade of young supporters began to pour into his office. Stenographers worked for their employers all day, and then worked for the cause at night.

The La Follette forces went into the convention with enough delegates instructed and pledged to nominate their candidate on the first ballot. But the delegates were lured away by money and promise of place. Scores of them signed affidavits of attempted bribery. Pfister, the boss of Milwaukee, told La Follette they had him beaten, but if he would take his medicine and be quiet, they would take care of him when the time came. La Follette replied that he would take care of himself. But the organization beat him the next day in the convention as they had beaten Haugen two years before.

La Follette saw the difficulties of the delegate and convention system. The people were honest, but those whom they chose to represent them at the convention betrayed their instructions. Then he began the study of means to supersede the convention and the caucus with some other method of making nominations. There were no compulsory primary laws in the United States. Nominations were made by caucuses and conventions, just as they are to-day in many states. Delegates honestly chosen by the people sell out the people, and candidates nominated by the bosses and big interests behind the bosses serve those who nominate them, rather than the people who elect them. This is what they had done in Wisconsin. And La Follette saw that the delegate systern must be destroyed before any other progress was possible.

In 1898, La Follette plunged into the gubernatorial contest for a third time. He was the general and the commissariat of the movement. He crystallized his issues about the direct primary, the abolition of railroad passes, the curbing of the lobby, and the taxation of railroads at their full value. Again he was defeated for the nomination. But this time the machine accepted the La Follette platform. He had scored a moral victory. His reforms could not long be delayed. The people of the state were aroused, and when Scofield's administration temporized and failed to enact the measures to which it was pledged, a call went up to La Follette to be a candidate again. The machine was as bitter as ever. By all the rules of the game, defeat should have suppressed this troublesome agitator, but he kept right on, and in 1900 he was nominated and elected by the unprecedented plurality of 103,745.

La Follette was elected governor for three successive terms, in 1900, 1902, and 1904. Unable to destroy him as an agitator, the machine decided to wreck him as a builder, to discredit him by failure. All of the power of the federal and state organizations was thrown against the primary election bill, as was every influence that the public service corporations could command. The state senate was organized against him. It defeated the primary bill, as well as the measures for equalizing the taxes of railways. In derision, the legislature enacted a bill imposing a license fee on dogs. But La Follette turned this sneer into a reproof by a message that went ringing round the state.

Many men would have abandoned the field, disheartened by failure. And failure was the argument now used against the governor. Sickness, too, laid its hand upon him. The winter had been one of killing work, for, as in his district-attorney days, he seemed to need no sleep. His old enemy, his stomach, suddenly suspended operations. There were rumors of physical decline. Then he pulled himself together; set himself to the task of conserving his own life, and for years lived upon the rigorous and abstemious diet I of toast, milk, and one or two vegetables.

Privilege closed the news channels against him. Inspired editorials, news-letters, and cartoons were distributed to 300 newspapers in the state, which were paid from $50 to $1,500 to use their columns against him. By the fall La Follette was on the stump again. His followers were now known as "Half-Breeds." This was an epithet of contempt. In time it became a name to be proud of.

Always poor, La Follette entered the campaign of 1902 with a debt of $15,000 hanging over him, the savings of years swept away, and only his indomitable resolution and the affection of the people to sustain him. Every possible abuse was heaped upon him. The manufacturing, business, and commercial interests were lined up with the railroads. He was driving out capital, it was said. The state was suffering from demagogic agitation. His defeat was demanded to avert industrial ruin.

But the victory was easy. La Follette was nominated on the first ballot and elected by a majority of 47,599.

The senate was "Stalwart' 7 and hostile, as before. But public opinion was behind the primary bill. The legislature could no longer withstand the pressure from the folks back home. The measure was finally enacted. Nor could the bill for the taxation of railroads be longer delayed. The inequalities were too glaring. Then after fighting it for years the railroads naively said: "Oh, well, it doesn't make very much difference to us, for if you increase our taxes we will simply increase our rates and so make the people pay the increased taxes."

This was an unfortunate threat to lodge in La Follette's mind. It was the seed that gave birth to his next great constructive reform, the regulation of railway rates and charges by a utility commission. For, if the railroads could thwart justice in this way, it was necessary that their arbitrary rate-making power be controlled. La Follette worked out the doctrine that railway rates should be fixed by a commission and at such a point as would yield a fair return on the property actually employed in the service. To accomplish this it was necessary that railroad property should be valued. This was his great contribution to the railway question. It has become the central feature in his railway programme in national affairs.

The problem was confused by all sorts of legal questions, and La Follette was finishing his second term. There was a tradition against a third term in Wisconsin, and the railroads were able to muster enough votes to defeat the railway commission bill. But by so doing they gave La Follette an issue. They made it necessary to appeal to the people again. His work was incomplete and would be as long as the menacing power of arbitrary freight rates lay uncontrolled in the railroads' hands. Another campaign followed. It has been estimated that hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent to defeat him for re-election. But La Follette carried the relentless logic of statistics to the county fairs and showed the people how they were being plundered by discriminating freight rates and charges. The convention of this year (1904) resulted in a split, the " Stalwarts" nominating a ticket of their own. Litigation followed. But the La Follette ticket was declared to be regular. He was again elected, this time by a majority of 40,000 in spite of the third ticket placed in the field by the "Stalwart" Republican organization.

There was a vacancy to be filled in the United States senate. La Follette was chosen by the legislature, but declined to relinquish his post as governor until his programme was complete. The railway commission bill was passed, both parties uniting on the measure. A special session was later called (1905) to rivet down the railway bills, which had been defied by the railroads. Additional laws were enacted, and within the next forty days the railroads paid into the state treasury over $1,000,000 in tax arrearages.

It is as an orator, an agitator, a fighter, that La Follette is most widely known, but it is as a commonwealth builder that he has best served the country. He has always had a programme of legislation, a programme that made for democracy, for liberty, for the square deal.

The legislation with which he is identified in Wisconsin has served as a model wherever the progressive movement has gained a foothold. The direct popular primary has spread from state to state. Through it representative government has been vivified in city, state, and nation. Congress has reflected it within the past four years. The states of Kansas, Nebraska, California, Iowa, Michigan, New Jersey, and others have had the breath of democracy breathed into them by means of this agency for expressing the popular will.

This was his first great achievement. It made others possible. Through it the politics of Wisconsin have been purified. The state has been educated on political questions, and party lines have been broken down. Politics have become the ambition of a new type of men. University graduates are rilling the state legislature, while the Wisconsin delegation in Washington has for years reflected the new ideals of the state.