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La Follette’s Woes in Wisconsin and Washington The year 1918 began for La Follette with continued worries about mounting personal animosity against him in Wisconsin. He wrote to Alfred T. Rogers, his law partner, on 2 January: “I am sure there are people in my neighborhood who would ruin me financially and beggar my family if the slightest chance offered.”1 His expulsion from the Madison Club he thought was part of a campaign to ostracize him in the place where he lived. He thought that at its root his ousting, which attracted national attention, had an economic motive. Writing to John D. Moore of New York City on 4 January 1918, he explained that his magazine had published an exposé of “the war profits of a certain local concern, namely, the Gisholt Machine Company. The Johnson[s] who own the company, and their little coterie of friends, the Local Street Railway Company, the Light and Gas Company, etc., dominate the Madison Club. I think no further comment is necessary.”2 To one of his lawyers in Madison and a prominent progressive who had managed his campaigns in 1910 and 1916, Charles H. Crownhart, he advised that same day, “By the way I suppose you understand that you can start some cases for libel, slander, conspiracy or any other old thing against newspapers and against individuals there, just as soon as the time seems propitious.”3 He especially wanted to go after the Madison Club: “the Board of Directors and their immediate advisors in that little affair would make a very pretty case, and I would like to make an example of them.” To Wisconsin Supreme Court justice James C. Kerwin, La Follette described his concerns about the deteriorating situation in Wisconsin, also in a letter on the fourth. An old friend, Kerwin had warned La Follette that the attacks against him on his home ground at Madison had become intensified. The 208 10  The Nation at War,  senator replied: “The newspapers and the newborn patriots have the stage now and are filling the public eye and ear with malicious libels and violent denunciations .”4 He still thought that he had the people with him. He believed in them and they in him, no matter what the newspapers said. His enemies had not changed. He identified them as “that element directly or indirectly connected with interests which for twenty-five years have denounced me for reasons which we pretty well understood at the time.” In the letter to Judge Kerwin, La Follette addressed issues that transcended state politics, most importantly, the principle of freedom of speech in the United States. “It is coming to be accepted belief,” he observed, “that in war no man has a right to criticize any act of administration.” In other words, the Constitution ceased to be operative in wartime, the president assumed dictatorial powers, and opponents of the government had no protection under the law. La Follette reflected on this un-American philosophy: “War is a terribly destructive force even beyond the limits of the battlefront and the war zones. It warps men’s judgment, distorts the true standard of patriotism, breeds distrust and suspicion among neighbors, inflames passions, encourages violence, develops abuse of power, tyrannizes over men and women even in the purely social relations of life, and terrifies whole communities into the most abject surrender of every right which is the heritage of free government.” We could not and must not surrender the Constitution, even in wartime, especially in wartime. That was when we needed it the most, when the potential for government ’s abuse of power reached its maximum extent. La Follette cited his ordeal over the St. Paul speech as an example of how a war-crazed society functions as a freedom-killing machine. He recalled that a terrorized committee of the Nonpartisan League would not let him deliver his prepared speech. That presentation had dealt with the meaning of free speech, and the committee thought such a theme too dangerous for the times. La Follette would give that speech on 6 October in the Senate, to the ecstatic praise of Debs and many others. In St. Paul, though, the conference officials had forced him to give a different speech. He had expected to avoid trouble by saying nothing, as he put it to Judge Kerwin, that “Lincoln, Sumner, and others didn’t say at the time of the Mexican War.” He had thought that the speech would offend no...

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