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During the five years spent on this book’s preparation, I accumulated a large number of professional and personal debts. I would like to acknowledge them here. Of the many historians who assisted me, I owe the greatest debt to Walter LaFeber, the Andrew H. and James S. Tisch Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Cornell University. At an early stage of the book, he encouraged me to think that I had a project worth doing. Coming from a master in the field of American history, his encouragement sped me along the path that I had marked out for myself. His careful scholarly reading of the chapters that I sent him introduced me to a level of collegiality in the history profession unexampled in my experience. The only way to repay such a debt is to try to follow his generous example. I also have ample cause to thank Richard Baker, a past historian of the United States Senate, for his penetrating criticism of the chapter that I gave him. Richard and his wife, Pat, kindly invited me and my wife, Laure Pengelly Drake, to stay in their home on one of my research trips to Washington, D.C. Two readers for the University of Wisconsin Press, Lloyd C. Gardner, the Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History Emeritus at Rutgers University, and Susan Brewer, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, rendered evaluations of my manuscript that greatly broadened my understanding of the major historical events of Robert La Follette’s times. They also made excellent suggestions for tightening the text. I want to thank them and my editor, Gwen Walker, for a model experience with a university press. Also deserving of special notice at the University of Wisconsin Press are my copyeditor, Jane Curran; the managing editor, Adam Mehring; the copy chief, Logan Middleton; the press director , Sheila Leary; and the Studies in American Thought and Culture editor, Paul S. Boyer, who passed away in 2012. Milton Leightenberg, Senior Research acknowledgments ix Scholar at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, shared with me his encyclopedic statistical knowledge of America’s wars and gave me quantities of documents, articles, and books on this same subject. Among my colleagues at the University of Montana, I have a particular reason to thank Anya Jabour, who alerted me to the existence of documentation crucial for this study. Janet Sedgley, a computer systems analyst at the University of Montana, helped me to prepare the manuscript files for electronic transmission to the press. Greg Gordon, a former student at the University of Montana and now an assistant professor of environmental studies at Gonzaga University , shared with me his knowledge about current scholarship in nineteenthcentury American history. Librarians and archivists at the Library of Congress provided vital assistance in my research. For efficiency and cooperation, the Library of Congress set a standard unsurpassed and rarely equaled in the more than thirty years that I have worked as a historian. I wish especially to thank Bonnie B. Coles, Senior Searcher Examiner at the Library of Congress. She assisted me in collecting some of the photographs that appear in this book. Lisa Marine and John Nondorf at the Wisconsin Historical Society also treated me with exquisite professional courtesy in responding to my requests for photographs. John also did some deeply appreciated name-checking for me in the Wisconsin Historical Society archives. In the Butler Library’s Bakhmeteff Archive at Columbia University, Tanya Chebotarev guided me through the Charles Richard Crane papers and sent me the photograph of him that appears in this book. I wish to thank Thomas S. Crane for giving me permission to consult his grandfather’s papers. Tom Cutterham of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University and Catherine McIntyre, Archives Assistant at the London School of Economics, aided me in finding a rare photograph of the British economist John A. Hobson. Tom also tracked down the photograph in London’s National Portrait Gallery of John Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova. Archivist Patricia McGuire and Assistant Archivist Peter Monteith helped immeasurably to facilitate my work in the Personal Papers of John Maynard Keynes, King’s College Library, Cambridge. I wish to thank Professor Renato Moro, Professor Luigi Goglia, and Professor Maurizio Zinni at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre for sending me the portrait of Francesco Saverio Nitti. Ken Grossi, College Archivist at Oberlin College, found the photograph of the King-Crane Commission. Robert M. Thornton, Secretary of the...

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