On January 30th, 2007, the always essential Arthur Silber lamented that we seem to have no contemporary equivalent to Robert La Follette in our current crop of elected representatives.
The reference is a passing one, most of the way down the essay, which
is yet another of Silbert's marvelously lucid, yet simultaneously
utterly impassioned, pleas for the U.S. government, and, more
important, the U.S. citizenry, to rethink U.S. international policy
from an actually moral viewpoint, instead of using the calculated real-politiks embodied in our ongoing, century and a half old "Open Door" strategy.
Reality is reality, and the world has always pretty much sucked, and
nations being comprised of men, it seems to me to be wildly idealistic
and borderline delusional to expect anything except the most naked self
interest from any group of humans, especially rich humans with lots and
lots of mindless, gun totin' lackeys. Still, Silbert's reference to La
Follette led me to another article on the former Senator,
and what I found there reminded me yet again that however dark things
may be now (and they undoubtedly are) on the world and U.S. national
stages, and however poisoned and corrupted our current national
dialogue between citizenry, media, and elected officials may seem,
there really is nothing new under the sun. We've been here before; in
fact, we've been here over and over again -- led into unnecessary war
by the charismatic elected figureheads of shadowy corporate interests
whose only interests in American military engagement abroad are
strictly monetary.
Yet, when an entirely media manufactured 'war fever' swept over America
in 1917, Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin stood up against it:
By the time he was elevated to the U.S. Senate in 1906, La
Follette was already a national figure. He soon emerged as a leader of
the Senate's burgeoning progressive camp and by 1912 was a serious
contender for the Republican Party's Presidential nomination. The fight
for the nomination exposed divisions within the progressive camp,
however, as La Follette's more radical followers battled supporters of
a more centrist reformer who also claimed the progressive mantle:
former President Teddy Roosevelt.
The Roosevelt/La Follette split grew more pronounced five years later,
as the nation prepared to enter World War I. While Roosevelt urged U.S.
participation in the war-the position supported by the nation's
political establishment-La Follette emerged as the leading foe of a war
he described as a scheme to line the pockets of the corporations he had
fought so bitterly as a governor and Senator.
La Follette personally held up the declaration of war for twenty-four
hours by refusing unanimous consent to Senate resolutions. From the
Senate floor, La Follette argued: "We should not seek [to] inflame the
mind of our people by half truths into the frenzy of war." He painted
the impending conflict as a war that would benefit the wealthy of the
world but not the workers, who would have to fight it. And he warned:
"The poor . . . who are always the ones called upon to rot in the
trenches have no organized power.... But oh, Mr. President, at some
time they will be heard.... There will come an awakening. They will
have their day, and they will be heard."
Those words sounded treasonous to some, and La Follette's constant
efforts to expose war profiteers only heightened the attacks upon him.
He was targeted for censure by the Senate, portrayed in Life magazine
as a stooge of the German Kaiser, and denounced by virtually the entire
media establishment of the nation-including the Boston Evening
Transcript, which announced, "Henceforth he is the Man without a
Country."
As mounting domestic oppression sent more and more anti-war activists
to jail, La Follette emerged as their defender, berating his colleagues
with the charge that "Never in all my many years' experience in the
House and in the Senate have I heard so much democracy preached and so
little practiced as during the last few months."
His critics declared that La Follette would never again be a viable contender for public office.
And yet, less than four years after the Armistice, running on a
platform that explicitly recounted his opposition to the war and his
opposition to imperialism, La Follette won reelection with more than 70
percent of the vote in Wisconsin. And two years later, he earned one
out of every six votes cast for the Presidency of the United States.The bolding is my own emphasis; to me, that paragraph more than any
other brought home that, indeed, those who will not learn from history
are doomed to repeat it. For the past six years, we have seen our
entrenched corporate media repeating the Administration's most
jingoistic, pro-war lies without so much as a twitch of so called
journalistic ethics, while simultaneously attacking anyone who dared to
dissent from the party line like a pack of ink stained jackals.
And we have seen, to our even greater shame, that our current crop of
elected representatives and national leaders responds to this
propaganda bombardment with the most scurrilous and cowardly displays
of fawning, lickspittle toadyism imaginable. The apparent fear that
they might be accused of 'cutting and running', or failing to 'support
the troops', has all but paralyzed our newly elected Democratic
majorities in both houses of Congress.
While it is clear that the American people want to see definitive
action taken -- our troops recalled from Iraq immediately, our economic
woes directly addressed, and our criminal executive and legislative
leadership impeached, indicted, arrested, tried, and imprisoned for
their crimes -- the representatives we have sent to Washington to carry
out this mandate are far too terrified of what the Washington Post or the New York Times
might say about them on their op-ed pages, and what impact this might
have on the Presidential and general election in '08, to stand up
decisively and take the actions they know they should, and must, if
they are to truly serve their electorates.
And, again, those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. From that same article on Fightin' Bob La Follette:
In March 25, 1921, at the age of sixty-five, Robert M.
La Follette Sr. took the greatest risk of his long political career.
Four years after he chose to lead the Congressional opposition to World
War I, La Follette was still condemned in Washington and in his native
state of Wisconsin as a traitor or - at best - an old man whose
political instincts had finally failed him. But La Follette was not
ready to surrender the U.S. Senate seat he had held since leaving
Wisconsin's governorship in 1906. He wanted to return to Washington to
do battle once more against what he perceived to be the twin evils of
the still young century: corporate monopoly at home and imperialism
abroad.
The reelection campaign that loomed just a year off would be difficult,
he was told, perhaps even impossible. Old alliances had been strained
by La Follette's lonely refusal to join in the war cries of 1917 and
1918. To rebuild them, the Senator's aides warned, he would have to
abandon his continued calls for investigations of war profiteers and
his passionate defense of socialist Eugene Victor Debs and others who
had been jailed in the postwar Red Scare.
The place to backpedal, La Follette was told, would be in a speech
before the crowded Wisconsin Assembly chamber in Madison. Moments
before the white-haired Senator climbed to the podium on that cold
March day, he was warned one last time by his aides to deliver a
moderate address, to apply balm to the still-open wounds of the
previous years, and, above all, to avoid mention of the war and his
opposition to it.
La Follette began his speech with the formalities of the day,
acknowledging old supporters and recognizing that this was a pivotal
moment for him politically. Then, suddenly, La Follette pounded the
lectern. "I am going to be a candidate for reelection to the United
States Senate," he declared, as the room shook with the thunder of a
mighty orator reaching full force. Stretching a clenched fist into the
air, La Follette bellowed: "I do not want the vote of a single citizen
under any misapprehension of where I stand: I would not change my
record on the war for that of any man, living or dead."Where is the contemporary politician with this kind of guts today? Had Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton ever even whispered in some locked and
shuttered back room that they were considering a similarly unequivocal public
statement of their own personal political principles, and a thousand so
called 'wise and knowledgeable' campaign operatives would have
simultaneous aneurysms. This is not how we do it in politics today, such chin-strokers and hand-flutterers would caution.
The presence of the modern electronic media, with its instantaneous
capacity to communicate across the nation to members of every different
type of special interest group, makes it impossible to get elected to a
national office with such uncompromising statements. You will offend
too many people, alienate too many powerful interests. You must swaddle
yourself in comforting, non-specific aphorisms and emotionally powerful
but semantically meaningless buzz phrases. You must always unite, never
divide; you must continually reassure, and never, ever offend.
Well, Bob La Follette would have had two words for that sort of
political advice, and those two words would not have been "Happy
Birthday":
The crowd sat in stunned silence for a moment before
erupting into thunderous applause. Even his critics could not resist
the courage of the man; indeed, one of his bitterest foes stood at the
back of the hall, with tears running down his cheeks, and told a
reporter: "I hate the son of a bitch. But, my God, what guts he's got."
...It was this militant faith in the people that enabled him to win
reelection to the Senate in 1922 by an overwhelming margin. And this
faith guided the Midwestern populist as he embarked on the most
successful left-wing Presidential campaign in American history.
Running with the support of the Socialist Party, African Americans,
women, organized labor, and farmers, La Follette terrified the
established economic, political, and media order, which warned that his
election would bring chaos. And La Follette gave them reason to fear.
His Progressive Party platform called for government takeover of the
railroads, elimination of private utilities, easier credit for farmers,
the outlawing of child labor, the right of workers to organize unions,
increased protection of civil liberties, an end to U.S. imperialism in
Latin America, and a plebiscite before any President could again lead
the nation into war.
Campaigning for the Presidency on a pledge to "break the combined power
of the private monopoly system over the political and economic life of
the American people" and denouncing, in the heyday of the Ku Klux
Klan's resurgence, "any discrimination between races, classes, and
creeds," La Follette told his followers: "Free men of every generation
must combat renewed efforts of organized force and greed to destroy
liberty."
Obviously, La Follette did not win his Presidential campaign, and that
is all the lesson that contemporary aspirants to the Oval Office like
Clinton and Obama are willing, or, probably, able, to draw from his
example.
But La Follette's ideas were not defeated. He laid an important
foundation of Socialist/Progressive thinking that greatly influenced
politics over the next two generations:
The 1924 campaign laid the groundwork for the resurgence of
left-wing populist movements across the upper Midwest - the
Non-Partisan League of North Dakota, the Farmer-Labor Party of
Minnesota, and the Progressive Party of Wisconsin. It spurred
labor-based independent political action by New York's American Labor
Party and other groupings. And La Follette gave inspiration, as well,
to those who swung the Democratic Party to the left in the late 1920s
and early 1930s. Harold Ickes Sr., a key aide to La Follette's 1924
campaign, would become an architect of the New Deal of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt who, in the words of historian Bernard Weisberger, "completed
the elder La Follette's work."
Roosevelt acknowledged the inspiration of La Follette. But the
Wisconsinite's truest heirs were of a more radical bent-people like his
sons, Bob Jr. and Phil, who served respectively as U.S. Senator from
Wisconsin and governor of the state; Minnesota's Floyd Olson, who was
very possibly the most radical figure ever to govern an American state;
author Upton Sinclair, whose 1934 foray into gubernatorial politics
borrowed heavily from La Follette's 1924 platform and promised to "end
poverty in California"; and New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a
veteran La Follette partisan who nominated the Senator for President in
1924 with the announcement that "I speak for Avenue A and 116th Street,
instead of Broad and Wall."
And times do change, and indeed, there are different conditions at work
in our society right now than there were in 1924, when La Follette's
Presidential campaign was defeated. How hungry do you think the
American people are now, after decades of steadily increasing corporate
corruption on every level of our government, for a candidate who would
run on such a platform?
You may point to Ralph Nader's historic failure in 2000, which common
(and incorrect) 'knowledge' dictates did nothing except deliver the nation and the world
into an eight year long Dark Age that we as yet see only dim signs we may ever
emerge from -- but Nader was a political outsider whom the media hated,
who ran as a private citizen and who had no electoral base to build
from. (Nader and his followers are also not even remotely responsible for Bush's success; to lay appropriate blame there, you must look to either the 40 million or so idiots who voted for Bush, or the 4 Supreme Court justices who handed him an election he hadn't actually won. Nader, and those who voted for him, aren't in the equation.)
Imagine if Obama or Clinton, or one of the other serious
Democratic contenders, was to actually stand up and declare ringingly
their opposition to American foreign interventionalism, to corporate
cronyism, to political corruption, to everything about our current
entrenched political system and its bloated, plutocratic, war profiteer
campaign contributors that every American knows on some level is
deeply, deeply wrong... yet that none of our politicians ever seems to
want to even mention, much less openly confront?
I don't know. Maybe their actual message wouldn't get any TV time, maybe the newspapers
wouldn't cover it, maybe the people would never hear what they really had to say.
Certainly, any such candidate would be denounced and derided from every
political direction by every media outlet known to man.
But maybe... just maybe... the American electorate would
respond to this kind of honesty and integrity in the same way as the
people of Wisconsin did in 1922.
Of course, it may be that they simply can't do it... that
the paranoids are correct, and that you cannot get elected to a
national office anywhere in America these days without selling out,
body and soul, to the powerful corporate interests that seem to control
every facet of contemporary life.
It may be that no one who reaches Congress, or a State governor's
mansion, really can take this kind of position, without immediately
being shut down by the real powers of the world. Perhaps everyone who
is allowed to hold a so called 'powerful position' of public trust is
actually in someone else's pocket. Maybe there really ARE horribly
compromising pictures and/or videotapes featuring every powerful man
and woman currently alive (and many who are now dead, for that matter) sitting in some secret safe somewhere, just
waiting to be leaked to the media if anyone sets so much as one toe off
the reservation.
Paranoid though such speculations are, this hypothesis would certainly
explain the absolute gutlessness of every politician we have.
In which case, you have to wonder what terrible sin against power Mark
Foley must have committed, to reap the punishment handed down to him a few years back... but I digress.
Still, I have to hope that not everyone is in the bag, and
that somewhere out there, we have a modern day Robert La Follette
lurking on the political horizon... and that this time, should such a
man or woman stand up and pound their fist on the lecturn and declare
such principles in so uncompromising a way, the end results would be
different.
Can you imagine what the world might be like today, if LaFollette had actually won his Presidential campaign?
As a slightly bitter afterthought, let me say that I had allowed myself to think for a few months there that Senator Obama might indeed be a modern day reincarnation of Senator Robert LaFollette. Alas, it would seem this isn't so; Senator Obama's recent vacillations and equivocations make it apparent that he's simply another Politician As Usual.
By the way, for those who can't read my new graphic, I apologize. I had no idea it would end up so small. You can see it in its full glory here. And kudos to Sifu Tweety and The Editors.
