John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

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 fell out of his chair.

That gave La Follette a salary to marry on. He was twentyfive years old.

Four years later he ran for congress; the university was with him again; he was the youngsters’ candidate. When he was elected he was the youngest representative in the house.

He was introduced round Washington by Philetus Sawyer the Wisconsin lumber king who was used to stacking and selling politicians the way he stacked and sold cordwood.

He was a Republican and he’d bucked the machine. Now they thought they had him. No man could stay honest in Washington.

Booth played Shakespeare in Baltimore that winter. Booth never would go to Washington on account of the bitter memory of his brother. Bob La Follette and his wife went to every performance.

In the parlor of the Plankinton Hotel in Milwaukee during the state fair, Boss Sawyer the lumber king tried to bribe him to influence his brother-in-law who was presiding judge over the prosecution of the Republican state treasurer;

Bob La Follette 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, referendum and recall.

La Follette taxed the railroads

John C. Payne said to a group of politicians in the lobby of the Ebbitt House in Washington “La Follette’s a damn fool if he thinks he can buck a railroad with five thousand miles of continuous track, he’ll find he’s mistaken… We’ll 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 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’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.