The LaFollette Politics

...Although there is some fascinating personal material in the book, the emphasis is upon politics and public life, even in the first hundred pages devoted to Phil's childhood and youth before he was a candidate for public office...

...Phil opposed President Roosevelt's interventionist foreign policy in the 1939-1941 period, but soon after Pearl Harbor he volunteered his services to the Army Chief of Staff and subsequently accepted a captaincy in the Military Police...

...Most of the book is concerned with the years Phil was in Wisconsin politics during the 1930s...

...Politics played a role even in Phil's earliest memories...

...Phil was district attorney of Dane County (Madison) when his father died...

...To lose, to be defeated, rankled him far more than it does most people...

...Adventure in Politics : The Memoirs of Philip LaFollette...

...Young shortened the manuscript by eliminating material of little interest to the general reader, much of it, I should judge from conversations I had with Phil during the early 1960s, about his experiences during the war...

...Bob, Sr...

...as a stimulus and a reward...

...The LaFollette brothers, each enormously able and progressive yet with quite different personalties— Phil was considerably more dramatic, extrovert, and impulsive—lost their last elections to narrow reactionaries...

...Phil's father, Robert M. LaFollette, Sr., first won the Wisconsin governorship in 1900, when Phil was three years old...

...The editing is competent...

...moved from the state Executive Mansion to the U.S...

...In 1938, after a disastrous effort to build tne Wisconsin Progressives into the National Progressives of America, a move his brother thought mistaken, Phil lost by a wide margin in his attempt to be reelected...

...In the LaFollette family, family life was political life...

...Despite all the politics in this book there are few political surprises...

...Such is the peculiarly polarized politics of Wisconsin that Phil's successor as governor was Julius "The Just" Heil, a Milwaukee manufacturer whose only distinction lay in his unusually acute case of foot-in-mouth disease, and Bob's successor was Joseph R. McCarthy...

...But he was not nearly so perceptive an observer of personal relationships as his wife, whose comments about people in this book are shrewd and subtle indeed...

...About thirty years after his defeat in his bid for reelection in 1932 Phil was still in agony, although he recognized that a Republican, even as liberal a Republican as himself, stood little chance of survival...

...Encourage . . . industrial progress through rapid depreciation deductions...

...BOOKS The LaFollette Politics by DAVID SHANNON For readers who knew The Progressive when it was called LaFol-lette's Weekly—or even during the 1930s and 1940s, when it was a weekly under its present name—Adventure in Politics: The Memoirs of Philip LaFollette will be largely an exercise in nostalgia, although they will learn some new things from it...

...For example, Phil mentioned not at all that William T. Evjue, one of his most vigorous journalistic supporters, criticized his methods of dealing with the legislature in 1937...

...The 1930s were intensely political years for Phil LaFollette, and the politics of the period were still intense for Phil when he wrote this book a generation later...

...7.95...

...299 pp...

...Phil was then twenty-eight years old, two years under the constitutional minimum age to become a Senator...

...He won the gubernatorial election in 1930, lost, as a progressive Republican in the Democratic landslide of 1932, won again in 1934 after he and his older brother pulled the LaFollette wing out of the Republican Party and formed the Progressive Party, and won again in 1936...

...Both boys had access to the Senate floor and paid careful attention to its proceedings, sometimes briefing their father on what had happened when he had to be out of the chamber...

...At no time is the reader confused about who is speaking or about the nature of the source...

...They had met when Phil was a law student and she an undergraduate at Wisconsin, and they married in 1923...

...Fundamentally, Phil LaFollette was a restless, hyperactive, impatient, almost amusingly competitive person...

...Phil LaFollette never again held elective office...

...Adventure in Politics is an aptly descriptive title of these memoirs...

...his cause had to prevail...

...In a few places the editor has provided background necessary to understand the memoir, basing his work usually on the best secondary sources...

...Younger readers and grayheads who did not follow Wisconsin events before World War II will find these memoirs an exciting introduction to a fascinating public family and to its political leadership during the first half of this century...

...To the inadequately planned, ideologically fuzzy, and disastrously timed National Progressives of America Phil devoted only four pages, as compared to ten on his experiences, interesting though they were, as Dane County district attorney...

...Bob, Jr., barely meeting the age requirement, won the special election to succeed his father...

...it was a deep and profound humiliation...

...Phil had not completed the memoirs before his death in August, 1965...

...Donald Young, an editor for the Encyclopedia Americana and author of a book on the Vice Presidency, had a great deal of work to do in preparing the manuscript for publication...

...He had to win...

...Hardly a radical point of view...

...The editor refers to Evjue's criticism, but Phil's version should have been enlightening...

...What kind of man emerges in this self-portrait emerges between the lines rather than explicitly...

...Proper government policy "produces profits and the continual expansion of the economy...

...While outwardly I kept a good face, inwardly things looked black, and the future looked bleak," he wrote...

...he genuinely liked people...

...Finally, Phil LaFollette, while certainly a liberal or progressive in his political generation, was often not so radical as he himself, his followers, or his enemies thought he was...

...He wrote these memoirs after he resigned from Hazeltine and moved back to Madison in 1959...

...He spent most of the war, however, as a public relations officer on the staff of General Douglas MacArthur...

...Edited by Donald Young...

...he became one of the ablest and most widely respected members of the Senate, and remained there until his defeat in the Republican primary of 1946...

...By quoting from letters in Phil's papers and from his widow's memoirs Young has also beefed up sections that Phil slighted...

...Senate in 1906, to remain there until his death in 1925...

...Holt, Rinehart and Winston...

...I suspect that his National Progressive fiasco and defeat for reelection in 1938 were still so humiliating to him in the 1960s that he could not bring himself to write more than the brief, superficial account we have here...

...Use the tax power...

...From the time he was eleven years old he read his father's mail, as did his older brother...

...the years between his leaving office in 1939 and his death in 1965 are covered in less than thirty pages...

...He was charming...

...I had been defeated—the first LaFollette to take a licking in Wisconsin since 1898...

...Phil disappointed his readers by saying little or nothing of some political matters about which he must have had interesting things to tell...

...In writing the memoirs Phil used his own papers, including notes he had taken during or just after interviews, as well as a diary kept by his wife, the former Isabel Bacon of Salt Lake City...

...Nor would a radical list enactment of a tax on oleomargarine and "other measures to protect the dairy industry from competition of butter substitutes" among the accomplishments of his first legislative session...

...After some legal work for the Hazeltine Electronics Corporation soon after the war, he moved to Long Island to become that company's president...