9UNP0205SD_Bob_Kann_WordPress

- Well, good afternoon, and welcome to History Sandwiched In, once again. Glad to see you here. Today's speaker is Bob Kann. And he's an author, a lecturer, a storyteller, an entertainer. And he is an author of two books in our Badger Biography series. One is Bob and Belle LaFollette, and the other one is on Lizzie Candor, with the settlement cookbook. I'll tell you, Wisconsin's a wonderful place to live. And one of the reasons why it's a wonderful place to live is because it's kind of a clean place to live. I don't mean clean, physically, I mean clean politically, relatively, I should say. One of the reasons, in fact a big reason is Bob and Belle LaFollette, and that legacy has stayed with us a long time. 

These books are available at book stores. And our author, Bob Kann, will be happy to sign them for you afterwards. But in the meantime, let us now welcome to the Wisconsin Historical Museum, Bob Kann. 
(applause)
 
- Thank you. Thank you, Wisconsin Historical Society, for giving me the opportunity to speak today, and the privilege of being affiliated with it through their book series. The concept of what if, is one of history's most tantalizing topics. What if JFK hadn't been assassinated? What if Martin Luther King had not been assassinated? 

What if the Japanese had continued negotiating with FDR instead of bombing Pearl Harbor? All of these what ifs for a historian and a storyteller like myself are the stuff dreams are made of. We get to fantasize about how the world might have been different. I thought by way of introducing you to the LaFollettes, who I've spent the past several years studying and living with, so to speak, I thought I would share with you three what if questions, speculations, that have been running through my mind on and off for a couple of years. One of them is a personal speculation about what if I knew then back in 1981, what I know now about the LaFollettes. How much more might I have learned about them on this opportunity. The second one is what if Bob had actually won the first election that he lost, when he ran for Congress in 1890. How the face of the American landscape might be different. And the third is a speculation about Belle, another opportunity that she did not take advantage of after Bob died in 1925. And also, if the world were different, and Belle had other certain opportunities, how I think our political landscape might have been different. 

First, my own indulgence. In 1981, I was a graduate student at UW. I was working on my doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction. And I was teaching a class called Reading in the Secondary School, a class that all people who are getting certified to teach high school in Wisconsin have to take. My students were mostly 20-25 years old, getting certified to teach Social Studies, English, Math, Art, and Physical Education. But there was one noteworthy exception amongst that class of undergraduates. I had a 57-year-old, seemingly ancient, ancient man. When I think about it now, very close to my own age. Wrinkles on his face. Golden silver hair. 

Robert LaFollette Sucher, the first grandchild of Bob LaFollette and Belle LaFollette by their youngest daughter, Mary. Now, I was only 27 years old. I grew up in Illinois. But I had a sense that this was a touch of Wisconsin royalty. I think of the LaFollettes of Wisconsin like the Kennedys of Massachusetts. This was the first family. And I somehow knew that Robert LaFollette Sucher was attached to this family. But I was too young, and too naive, and too lacking of knowledge to even begin to know what kind of questions I wish I had asked him. What I do know is that he was getting certified to teach high school Social Studies. I can't remember why at that particular age he was doing so. 

I remember that he was extremely loquacious. And it was a great challenge for me with him, as with many students I've had through the years, to figure out how to let him say his piece, and participate in class, but when he got too talky, to kind of cut him off, so I didn't lose the attention of other students. It was a major challenge with Mr. Sucher. Perhaps most memorable in the 25 years or so I've been a professor of education in various forms, his was the only paper in which a student quoted Latin. 
(laughter)
 He ended his paper, it's the only paper I remember from the hundreds I've read, with the statement in Latin, "Let the buyer beware." An appropriate LaFollette statement, if I've ever heard one. Well, I subsequently learned that Robert LaFollette Sucher was the democratic candidate for the State's Attorney General in 1956. He had defeated Frank Nicolet in the primary. 

Nicolet decided he was going to run as an independent. William Proxmire was then the democratic nominee for Governor. He supported Nicolet, even though he was an independent in that election, because he said, and I quote, Sucher was not, what was it, "temperamentally or personally equipped to hold that high office in the state." Sucher lost the election. So did Proxmire. But the next year after Senator Joseph McCarthy died, Proxmire replaced him and served in the US Senate for 20 years. So I wonder now, why didn't I ask these questions of Robert LaFollette Sucher. I have so many questions like, what was it like to grow up in the LaFollette family. He was one when his grandfather died. But nonetheless, he must have known his grandmother, at least in his early years, and all the aunts and uncles and family. 

Just kind of a lost opportunity for me. For Bob, my speculations go to 1890. He was running for re-election, his fourth term as Congressman from Wisconsin. In 1884, he had won his first term to serve Wisconsin as a Congressman. He was 29 years old, the youngest congressman in the United States. So, running for re-election in 1890, election night he comes home, reportedly shouts upstairs to Belle, "Well, Belle, Bushnell," that was his democratic opponent, "Bushnell's been elected to serve in Congress. I have been elected to practice law." 
(laughter)
He maintained his sense of humor, even in the face of defeat. So my speculations have explored and gone into, what would have happened if Bob had won that election? 

And then, how is it he could have gone about winning that election, if he so chose? So here's my line of thought. He lost the election. He came back to Wisconsin, instead of remaining in Washington. The next year, he was offered a bribe by Senator Sawyer from Wisconsin, a millionaire lumberman, because he wanted Bob to intervene with his brother-in-law, Robert Seebecker, who was adjudicating a case in which some of Sawyer's cronies were involved. They basically wanted to bribe Bob to influence his brother-in-law. The circumstances are a little bit questionable in exactly what happened, whether in fact the bribe really happened at all, how much was the bribe, whether it was serious. Sawyer said that it was a retainer. But whatever actually happened, Bob took it as an opportunity to go into what eventually would become a lifelong campaign to root out corruption in government, to root out corporate greed in government, to root out undue influence of the wealthy in government. This sent Bob on a crusade, which he would continue his entire life. 

The next ten years, he's traveling around Wisconsin, giving speech after speech, trying to begin to root out corruption in state government in Wisconsin. He runs for governor several times. He loses election after election. Finally, around 1900, he's elected, and serves until about 1906. Had he not returned to Wisconsin, I would speculate perhaps he never would've been governor of Wisconsin. Perhaps he would've remained in Washington as a congressman, and maybe he might have made the leap to senator. But never been Wisconsin's governor. Now as governor, he led the way for reforms and changed the face of American landscape to this day. Child labor laws, workers’ rights laws, workers compensation laws, unemployment compensation laws. Some of these laws weren't passed until after his term of office, but he certainly set them in motion. 

Anti-lobbying laws, civil service laws, the direct primary is something he got successfully passed in the legislature. He initiated the roll call strategy, where politicians were actually accountable for their votes. Back then, remember there wasn't this widespread media. So somebody could vote however they wanted. Then if they were a nice guy back then, they could go back to rural Wisconsin and everyone would vote for them, simply because they were nice, until Bob started making public what actually it was they were voting on, on certain issues. Then if you listen to the democratic convention when they were talking about the roll call vote, when Hilary Clinton eventually interceded, immediately I think about Bob. Anything related to the roll call, we can harken back to Bob. So all of these major reforms, which are very shaped in American democracy, in part were initiated by Bob during his terms as governor during the early 1900s. Adapted by many others, adopted by many other states in the United States and nationally, as well. So how might Bob actually have won that election in 1890 that I'm saying was potentially so pivotal in American history? 

Well, there are two main explanations typically given for why Bob lost that election. One was there was a democratic landslide, both nationally and in Wisconsin. There had been a very high tariff imposed by the republican administration that many people felt was bad for business. A lot of people in Wisconsin thought they weren't going to be able to sell their goods abroad. So they were very much opposed to this tariff, and ultimately to the republicans who imposed it. But more specific to Wisconsin, was what was called the Bennett Law. In 1889, the republican Governor Hoard, and the republican legislature passed what seemed like a very simple educational reform bill. It mandated that children ages 7-14 actually had to attend school. Very uncontroversial. However, there was provision in that law that mandated that instruction be given in English. 

Here we are, 100 years later, still having that same debate. Well, that caused a great uproar in Wisconsin, because Wisconsin had a very large German population. German Catholics and German Lutherans, who had many parochial schools, and the parochial schools were taught in German. This was a direct assault on the German population of Wisconsin. Clearly, the Germans felt that way. And in fact, that's basically what it was in its own way, at least that provision. And so, eventually, I started to do some research on that particular election, with the help of my friend Booth Fowler, my political science professor at UW back in 1971, who wrote a marvelous book called "Wisconsin Votes." He'll be speaking about it as part of the series in October. By all means, go see it. It's the definitive book on voting history in Wisconsin. 

And I exchanged some emails with Booth. And he looked at the specific election results of that 1890 election. And basically, the voting patterns were very similar to the 1888 election, which Bob had won when he ran for Congress, with two exceptions. One was that he usually got huge support from Scandinavians in his district. And this also proved true in 1890, but fewer voted for him. But the biggest difference was in the German population. They annihilated him in that election. Now, he had 48% of the vote in a losing cause, so it was kind of close. When I finally kind of heard those results, then I started thinking okay, how could Bob have won that election. Here's some of the scenarios I came up with. 

One, what if he had taken on what later became his Fighting Bob persona? Back then, he was pretty much a party line kind of a guy. It wasn't until many years later that he would actually fight his own party on certain issues. But what if he was precocious, and very early on, he decided he would buck the party trend? What if he opposed his party's support of the Bennett Law? Oh, those Germans in Wisconsin would've just loved him, had he taken that position. That alone, I think, would've been enough to turn the tide. Of course, Bob didn't. Bob was kind of neutral on the Bennett Law. He didn't feel strongly about it either way. 

I think he was very surprised that he was defeated very much because of that. Another possibility I thought of, because when he won his first election for District Attorney of Dane County, one of the reasons he attributed to his 93-vote victory was the fact that he could speak some Norwegian. He grew up in Primrose. There was a large kind of Norwegian population out there. And he thought the fact that he could speak the language of some of his potential electors was enough to swing the election. So I thought, okay, Bob and Belle met at UW in 1875 in a freshman German class. I thought, what if Bob was a good enough student where he could've learned to speak German? Then he could've campaigned in 1890, in German. And that itself might've won some votes. And perhaps by speaking German, minimally, he could've articulated why he supported the Bennett Law, in German, and maybe that would've swayed some votes. 

And so it seems like had he been a better student than he was, he was a notoriously poor student, and in fact, when he graduated in 1879, back then, the faculty would vote whether students graduated or not. And in Belle's case, of course it was unanimous, because she was probably the best student in the university. In Bob's case, it was a tie. 
(laughter)
 And many of the professors said he was a terrible student, he shouldn't graduate. But others said he had great extracurricular activities. He owned and ran the university paper called the University Press, kind of a precursor to the Daily Cardinal and the Badger Herald. He won the interstate oratorical contest, which ultimately launched his political career. He had great extracurriculars, but it was a tie vote. The UW President, John Bascom, who had been a professor of LaFollette's, and liked him very much, voted in favor of Bob graduating. 

So he did indeed graduate. So, Bob was not a particularly good student. But had he actually studied German very well, maybe he could've learned it, and maybe ultimately he would've won that election some 10 or 15 years later. My speculations went further, though, to include Belle. My book is called "Belle and Bob LaFollette, Partners in Politics," because they were partners in absolutely the best sense. Anything Bob accomplished there should be a footnote. Actually, Belle's name should be right next to it, executed by Belle and Bob LaFollette. They did everything together. And I'll talk more about that in a little bit. So I went back and thought, okay, what could Belle have done to help Bob win that election in 1890. 

I thought well, in 1924, when Bob ran as an independent presidential candidate, Belle gave campaign speeches. She's the first presidential candidate's spouse to give electoral speeches. So when you saw Michelle Obama or Cindy McCain this election, they can thank Belle for being the pioneer who set the way for women giving speeches for their spouses for those kind of campaigns. I thought what if Belle was precocious as well, and she started giving speeches for Bob in 1890, might that have made a difference? I think so. Belle was incredibly smart, and an incredibly competent person, and an incredibly competent speaker. Bob was considered eventually one of the best orators in the United States. And I read some reviews of Belle's speeches. Once, she gave speeches 64 days in a row for women's suffrage. They basically thought that she was as effective as Bob, just in a little more subdued way, because he was a great shouting orator. 

So I thought, what if Belle gave speeches in support of Bob. She probably would've been very effective. Maybe she could've garnered additional votes for him. But then I thought, Belle met Bob in a German class. So I did some research with the help of my friend Booth Fowler. Belle was fluent in German. She could read German. She could write German. She could've campaigned in German. And I think some combination of those factors may indeed have swayed that election and changed history in ways that I mentioned before. 

My speculations about Belle, though, are even more grandiose than Bob. Because, and this may be controversial, particularly to people who are Bob LaFollette fanatics or great devotees of Bob LaFollette. I would argue that anything Bob could do, Belle could do as well if not better. I think, actually, she was the more competent of the two. And Bob would be the first to agree. In 1925, after Bob died, the voters of Wisconsin and the political leaders of the republican party pretty unanimously told Belle that if she wanted to have the Senate seat, she was welcome to it. Because people at that time sort of recognized how competent that she was. And so my speculations are, what if she had taken advantage of that opportunity and became a US Senator? My bigger fantasy, though, is what if the times were different, and say 10 or 15 years earlier, Belle and Bob were senators, side by side, representing the state of Wisconsin. I mean, if you think about what Bob accomplished, what could Bob and Belle have accomplished, particularly if she wasn't weighed down by all sorts of things in society, and all the men who, you know, would've just gone crazy had she done it at that time. 

And here's why I think Belle would've been such an extraordinary senator. One, she was good at everything. Everything she tried in her life, I think, with perhaps the exception of parenting, where she had some great shortcomings, at least from my opinion. Aside from that though, she was just good at everything. She's 16 years old. She grew up on a farm in Baraboo. Her parents raised hops. She spent most of her time with her grandmother because her parents were working so hard, just barely getting by. But they scraped together enough money to send her to the UW in 1875, at a time when it was very, very rare for girls to attend the university. They had just opened the university to girls about ten years earlier. 

Co-education was a very, very brand new enterprise. And even when she came in 1875, the university library was open four days a week. Two days for girls. Two days for boys. They didn't let them mix even back then. But somehow, her parents and her grandmother knew that this was an exceptional young woman, and she should have this opportunity. She goes to the university. By her senior year, she's got more than enough credits to graduate. So she's the only girl who takes a class taught by Edward Birge, a natural sciences class, a class in kind of zoology. She's one of the few students who actually stayed through the class through the whole year. 

For graduation, she was chosen as one of the top 16 students at the university. Back then, they gave orations, and you had a contest to see who could give the best oration, judged on content and on style. And the winner would win the prestigious Lewis Award. Now, Belle basically did not like speaking in public. The year before, in one of her English classes, she had to give some kind of oration, and she was so freaked out that she couldn't say a word and she had to go back to her seat. She was told she wasn't going to pass the class unless she could do it, and Bob helped her. By then they were engaged. And with his assistance, she then gave that speech and passed. Nonetheless, she was one of the 16 graduation speakers. And like everything else, she did it well. 

She won first prize. She gave a talk called Learning to See. She talked about what she had learned in that class with Edward Birge, about seeing, about not just naming an object. She specifically mentioned that in that class, he had them look at a starfish, a sea urchin, and at some coral. And he said, "What do you see?" She began to study these objects, and their relationship to each other, and they adapted. And she realized that learning by rote, essentially, was inadequate. So she wrote her graduation oration about that, and she won first prize. Bob goes to law school. Belle begins teaching, first in Spring Green, then in Baraboo. 

When Bob passes the Bar, they get married. Bob spends his nights reading law books. Just for the fun of it, this very, very smart young woman decides that she'll read the law books alongside of him. She does. Before long, she's giving him advice on how he should be practicing his cases. She starts doing research for him. When he becomes District Attorney for Dane County, she begins writing briefs for him when he's busy. One of them, he submits to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Bob wins the case. Afterwards, Supreme Court Justice Lyon said it's one of the best briefs he's ever read. 

Bob said that's because it was written by my wife, the brainiest member of the family. He knew it. Bob said that Belle was the ablest person in the land. When Belle died in 1931, the New York Times wrote that she was perhaps the least known, yet most influential of all the American women who have had to do with public affairs. When Bob was in the Senate, he referred to the time of his governorship in Wisconsin, as when "we" were governor. Because Belle did everything for this guy. Not only did she take care of his health, and his granddaughter speculated eventually that he was a manic depressive, of course undiagnosed, because she was, as well. But she was his campaign manager. She wrote campaign speeches for him. She was his strategist. 

She was his moral barometer. She was his sounding board. I don't think there's any position he ever took without threshing it out with Belle. They didn't agree on everything, but most things, they did. And she forced him to really think very, very clearly about what is it that he believed. He'd be the first one to say that he couldn't have done and accomplished what he accomplished without Belle's assistance. And she had causes of her own, aside from Bob. She was a co-founder of the Women's Peace Party, which we now know as the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Both she and Bob formed a magazine called LaFollette's Weekly, which is now called The Progressive Magazine. That was originally the LaFollette's magazine. 

She was as fearless as Bob was. In 1913, an African American woman working for the US Treasury Department was fired because she sat at a table that was supposed to be whites only. When Belle heard about this, she took her complaints all the way up to President Wilson, to no avail. So she then began writing in LaFollette's Weekly about the racial segregation policies, and discrimination of the administration. She received hate mail. She received threatening letters. Let me read one of the threatening letters she got. One of the letters, she was so fearless that she took these letters and she published them in LaFollette's Weekly. She wasn't afraid. They said, "This does not raise you very much in the estimation of decent white people. 

Don't do it again." Another one said, "It may be that you do not belong to the white race, it just happens that you are a little light in color." She was unafraid. She continued to speak before white audiences and black audiences. And she was a very, very active suffragette, as I mentioned. She spoke many, many times, day after day, after day. And she didn't like public speaking. But she did it because she felt she had to do it. I guess this is all to say that I think having Belle as a senator, it was a great loss to us that we didn't have her as a senator. And publicly, she said the reason she didn't accept that position in the US Senate was because one, she didn't particularly like public life, which was true. 

And also, because she wanted to spend her time working on Bob's, what turned out to be mammoth autobiography, which was how she would spend the next six years primarily working on. Privately, though, I have two thoughts. One of them, and I think that she was just good mother. She wanted her son Bob to take over his father's seat in the US Senate, which is exactly what happened. And Bob, Jr. went on to serve in the Senate for the next 21 years. So she wanted him to have that opportunity. My fantasy, though, is she was a new grandma. Robert LaFollette Sucher, that little baby who was in my class. She wanted to spend her time with her grandson. 

We'll never know. Well, my book and if you really want to read a superb book about Bob LaFollette, Nancy Unger's book was my Bible when I was doing research. There's also a very good biography of Belle written by her granddaughter Sherry Freeman, I guess it would be her granddaughter's husband, George Zabriskie, called Belle, which is a very good biography of Belle. In my research about the LaFollette's, I'm sure there's so many just breathtaking moments of courage and things I admired about them. But I thought I would end my presentation with sharing two of my favorite, kind of signature moments for both of them. Then I'll open it up to questions and comments from you. First one, for Belle. In 1913, Belle testified in Washington, DC, before the Senate Committee on Women's Suffrage. In her speech, she repeated the words spoken by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address. "This nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth." 

Belle then added the question, "Are women not people, too?" And that committee made up of all men broke out into spontaneous applause. For Bob, at least for me, his signature moment occurred in 1922. During World War I, Bob led the opposition to the United States participation in the war. He basically said it was an imperialist war, it was a war about capitalists just trying take the spoils of nations. So he was vehemently opposed to it. He became, many people considered, the most hated man in America. He was burned in effigy at the UW. Many of the people who had been allies of his in Wisconsin suddenly turned into his enemies. Well, five years after the war had ended, Bob was returning to Wisconsin to speak in the state capitol. 

He hadn't spoken in Madison in four years. A lot of his friends, a lot of his age, encouraged him that this was an opportunity to mend fences, to build bridges again with people who he'd a falling out with. They said under no circumstances mention anything to do with what had happened when you had opposed the war. That's like throwing cinder, or whatever it is, into the flames. So Bob is in the state capitol. He sort of does some general niceties, recognizes friends. Then his son Phil recalled he changed. "The muscles of his jaw tightened. His blue eyes shot fire. He raised his right arm, fingers together, hand upright, waving aloft like a banner. 

'I am going to be a candidate for re-election to the United States Senate. I do not want the vote of a single citizen under any misapprehension of where I stand. I will not change my record on the war for that of any man living or dead.'" 
(laughter)
 There was stunned silence and then the audience broke out into thunderous applause. One state legislator, who had been fighting with LaFollette for decades, broke down into tears and said, "I hate the son of a bitch, but my God, what guts he's got." 
(laughter)
 And I think we can say that for Bob and Belle, what guts they had. Thank you. 
(applause)

 In case you're wondering, this is my bobble head Bob and my Belle puppet. 
(laughter)
 And if you're interested, I'll leave it up here. I'll open it up to questions. I copied from the plats book in the Historical Society the land that the LaFollette's owned in Maple Bluff. They owned 60 acres that they bought as a farm back then in about 1906. It's right next to the Maple Bluff Country Club. You'll see here that they and their next door neighbors owned what is now an extraordinary amount of Maple Bluff. Anyway, I'll leave that up here. Any questions or comments? 

Yes? 
- Wasn't Belle the first graduate of the UW Law School? 
- Yes, I apologize. It takes a wife to correct a bad lecturer. 
(laughs)
 Yes, Belle, after she was reading those law books with Bob recreationally, and then she had a child, Flora, in 1882, she decided that she wanted to learn more about the law. So she went to law school in 1883, in part, I think, because she was living in a house with her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law, and had a new baby. I think she wanted to get out of the house, frankly, among other things. So she went to the UW in 1885, and became the first woman to graduate from UW Law School. She never practiced law, but she used her legal knowledge to help Bob for the next 30 or 40 years. 

Yes? 
- Was Bob LaFollette ever physically attacked or assaulted because of his World War I stand? 
- Not that I know of, but there were some very tense moments. At one point in time, he was going to bring a gun to the Senate floor to defend himself. And Bob, Jr. hid it, because he thought it was just too incendiary. But tensions were high enough where they were expecting physical confrontation. There was a story, I remember he went somewhere in the south, and they were going to cancel his speech. But he didn't want any part of canceling it. There were dangerous situations, but I don't know of any specific physical confrontations. 

Yes? 
- LaFollette once said that democracy is a constant struggle. Would you care to elaborate on that, or maybe speculate on what he might say about the struggles today? 
- He'd say fight on, dig in. Dig in deep, fight hard, don't give up. Fight the good fight. Don't compromise. Half a loaf of bread is half a loaf. And it's not enough, that's what he'd say. 
- Is there anyone on the current political scene who reminds you of Bob or Belle LaFollette? 

- That's a very good question, anyone who reminds me of Bob or Belle. There are aspects of Russ Feingold that remind me. I don't always agree with him, but he stands on principle. And Bob believed in principle more than pragmatics. But he accomplished a lot despite that. So, certainly, Feingold. Tammy Baldwin's got elements of it, for me. She's very principled, I think Bob and Belle were both very principled. Those were the first, at least local politicians, who come to mind. Well, thank you all for coming. 

I'm sure you'll hear many fine lectures as part of the series. Be sure to come back. And enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you. 
(applause)