BOOKS
BOOKS The Elusive Belle BELLE: The Biography of Belle Case LaFollette by Lucy Freeman, Sherry LaFollette, and George A. Zabriskie. Beaufort Books. 253 pp. $18.95. by David Thelen Abiography...
...Much later, when I knew him, he was all this—but a most likable man...
...She continues to exist mainly as a counselor to Robert...
...His father was an itinerant peddler who sold dry goods and notions to Scandinavian farmers in Minnesota...
...They do not attempt to mislead readers about their familiarity with scholarship by people outside the family...
...A dish's history and provenance is described, as is the way the Egertons came to decide on the version included here...
...Paul in 1879 of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Reitman paid little attention to the traditions of his Jewish heritage...
...A narration followed of the various birth-control campaigns he had fought at the side of Emma Goldman, many of which led to arrests and jail...
...He hopped on slow-moving freights, met hobos (including James Eads How, the millionaire hobo), slept in boxcars, spent years tramping through this country and Europe—and eventually became known as the "king of the hobos...
...Much tasting and testing are in evidence...
...Born in St...
...The problem with this is that many scholars over the past twenty-five years have questioned both the details and context offered in earlier family biographies of Robert and Belle LaFollette...
...Samizdat A CUP OF COFFEE WITH MY INTERROGATOR by Ludvik Vaculik Readers International, P.O...
...I think Sherry LaFollette is right about that, too...
...14.95...
...Goldman was fascinated by this doctor who had offered her a speaking platform...
...Those were the opening words of a lecture by Dr...
...They found him vulgar, ribald, loutish, and an exhibitionist...
...The book, rather, appears to lean heavily on published accounts, particularly those by earlier family members...
...Others included free speech, leading a march of the unemployed in Chicago, and identification with, and defense of, the outcasts of society...
...In time he became her press agent, her lecture manager, and her lover...
...His subject was always sex, and the meeting room always overflowed...
...He was a frequent visitor to Chicago's Dill Pickle Club and to Bughouse Square, a mecca for soapbox orators...
...Good God, what things I haven't done...
...She didn't have any children because she knew what to do...
...He chaired her meetings and sold anarchist literature...
...This chapter and one on the strike and massacre in the town of Ludlow are the most poignantly dramatic in Roger A. Bruns's biography, The Damndest Radical: The Life and World of Ben Reitman, Chicago's Celebrated Social Reformer, Hobo King, and Whorehouse Physician...
...There are other problems that show a lack of indeDavid Thelen is professor of history at Indiana University and editor of The Journal of American History...
...The most original and intriguing speculations in Belle art contained in the "Epilogue" by Sherry LaFollette, who suspects that her grandfather suffered from manic-depressive bouts of pain, energy, and depression...
...His affiliation with the anarchist movement began when he met Emma Goldman...
...BOOKS BRIEFLY Down Home SOUTHERN FOOD: At Home, on the Road, in History by John Egerton Alfred A. Knopf...
...Senator, the mother of another U.S...
...They are mystified because to them religion is piety, morality, and inhibition...
...22.95...
...Red Emma," as she was known, had not been allowed to rent a lecture hall in Chicago...
...Future President William Mc-Kinley in 1891 was a Representative, not a Senator, from Ohio, not Illinois...
...Bruns, director of publications for the National Historical Publications and Records Commission at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., has written a splendid biography of this robust, fascinating character who had an enormous appetite for life...
...Many of his mailing envelopes, I recall, carried the admonition, "VD Can Be Cured...
...And he is as interested in the cooks, waiters, owners, clientele, setting, atmosphere, and table talk of a place as he is in the food...
...It's not a restaurant guide, though...
...Ben's mother eventually settled in Chicago with her children, where she rented a room in the red-light district near a house run by one of Chicago's most notorious madams...
...This small book is a joy to read and a testament to one writer's free spirit...
...Egerton's section on "Eating Out" is a grand tour of the restaurants that still serve down-home cooking...
...140 pp...
...And yet there is a way in which the private torments of a person can intensify the public contribution that person makes...
...Arthur Weinberg (Arthur Weinberg is co-author with his wife Li la of seven books, including "Clarence Darrow: A Sentimental Rebel...
...Disillusioned and embittered, he left the Minneapolis area for New York, leaving behind his wife and two sons...
...With more shrewdness than many psychohistorians possess, Sherry LaFollette empathizes with her grandparents' private torment even as she appreciates its central role in their battle to make the world a more peaceful and just place...
...On a 1912 lecture tour to the West Coast where the Wobblies (the Industrial Workers of the World) were engaged in a free-speech fight in San Diego, a band of vigilantes seized Reitman as he and Goldman arrived in the city...
...We know now (contrary to the assertion in his autobiography and his wife's and daughter's biography), for example, that Robert LaFollette opposed the Grange movement at the time it existed, in the 1870s...
...He would write later that it did not appear to him that "these girls were vicious or immoral...
...408 pp...
...He opened the first VD clinic at the Cook County Jail in Chicago...
...Reitman offered her the hall in which he held meetings with his hobos...
...it's an evocation of a way of life that seems not to be disappearing as quickly as those who see only fast-food franchises and interstate highways would have us believe...
...To me religion is love and service...
...Doc" Reitman traveled from the hobo jungle to Greenwich Village, from IWW strikes to Chicago's bohemia, from anarchist agitation to birth-control campaigns...
...And, because the book's wide margins offer space for appropriate quotations from possibly every other book ever published on the subject, one is tempted to say Southern Food is the only book on Southern food you need...
...Some of Ben's earliest acquaintances were prostitutes for whom he ran errands...
...by David Thelen Abiography of Belle Case LaFollette has long been needed...
...They were kind, jolly, sympathetic, generous—human...
...Ludvik Vaculik is a Czech writer who has come to believe "that the individual is more than the state, that the state is nothing but an artificial and changeable human invention...
...Because he holds that peculiar view, Vaculik is unpublished in his own country—or, rather, published only by "padlock press," the Czech form of samizdat that he invented...
...The authorities interfered and Goldman could not hold her lecture...
...Another chapter, "Belle Battles for Her Own Causes, 1912-1914," is the main contribution to what is known about her...
...Birth control was one of many of Reitman's causes...
...My real problem with this book is that it is not about Belle...
...They toured the country together...
...Although the bibliography refers to the large LaFollette family manuscript collections in Madison, Wisconsin, and Washington, D.C., the text itself shows little independent use of those resources...
...Four years later he opened his first office directly across the street from a "gaming parlor" and became the doctor for prostitutes, pimps, underworld types, and down-and-outs...
...For a quarter of a century, this "clap doctor," as he was known, practiced medicine and specialized in treating victims of venereal diseases...
...There was a modern woman who didn't live in a shoe...
...He authored two books—The Second Oldest Profession and Sisters of the Road...
...Belle is sadly not the biography that is needed...
...332 pp...
...The bibliography, for example, lists none of the works by independent scholars...
...My religious life may be a mystery to others but to me it is perfectly clear...
...Bouts of energy and depression clearly fed Robert LaFollette's courage and his determination to represent the majority instead of the powerful...
...He and his wife, Ann, put in 27,000 miles and eight months on the road searching out these places...
...When he gets around to recipes— about half the book—he includes the classics...
...The authors do not pretend that this is a work of scholarship...
...At the age of twenty-one, Reitman enrolled in medical school...
...Box 959, Columbia, LA 71418...
...Belle's granddaughter, Sherry LaFollette, and her husband, George A. Zabriskie, worked with Lucy Freeman, an author of numerous popular works, to write this book...
...Though he did not remain part of the anarchist movement after he and Goldman broke up, he was always ready to speak at an anarchist forum...
...The Nashville writer—his most recent contribution to The Progressive was his interview with James Earl Ray in the November 1986 issue—has given us a social history of the South as manifested in its eating habits...
...He continued: There was an old woman who lived in a shoe...
...Radical Doctor THE DAMNDEST RADICAL by Roger A. Bruns University of Illinois Press...
...Not just another recipe collection, not just another tome on Southern cooking, John Egerton's Southern Food is those things and more...
...Her articles were published in her husband's magazine, LaFollette's Weekly, now known as The Progressive...
...14.95 (clothbound), $7.95 (paper...
...We know, contrary to the account in both earlier family reports, that the 1880 election was not a fight against a powerful boss and that neither the context nor his behavior following what he described as Senator Philetus Sawyer's offer of a bribe was as he later depicted them...
...Although that is not the label doctors then placed on his health problems, I think she has come closer than any other person to identifying the problem correctly...
...Senator, and the mother of a governor of Wisconsin...
...Although she was a respected lecturer and writer who fought on her own for such causes as woman suffrage, racial desegregation, and world peace, she is primarily remembered as the wife of one U.S...
...Both received critical acclaim from sociologists...
...They became his confidantes...
...She had so many children she didn't know what to do...
...She reports that it helped her in dealing with her own problem to discover the advice Belle had given Robert...
...It is perhaps a mistake to make too much of these omissions...
...His relationship with Goldman was stormy and torrid, and he was not readily accepted by Goldman's comrades...
...Well, almost...
...pendent familiarity with the events of the times...
...Ben Reit-man at the press club on the Chicago campus of Northwestern University in the mid-1930s...
...Business was poor...
...They drove him to the desert, where they beat him, burned the letters IWW on his buttocks, tarred him, rolled him in the sagebrush, and forced him to kiss the American flag...
...He always insisted, however, that he was a religious person...
...Finally, here is a book that gets the mix of ethnic influences straight, with African and Native American contributions getting their long-awaited due...
...She suggests that it was too bad that Robert was unable to follow that advice...
...His collected feuil-letons—brief, informal essays—reveal him as a witty observer and humane commentator...
...He was invited, particularly, when there was a need for funds...
...He would brag to the anarchist audience that he was a reformer, not a revolutionary...
...Always fascinated by railroads, he took to the road at the age of twelve...
...The chapter "Motherhood in Madison," for example, contains fewer than three pages that deal in any way with Belle or motherhood and thirteen pages that deal with her husband's political career...
...She helped to create and define this shadow for herself by spending the six years of her life after her husband Robert's death in undertaking a biography of his life in which she portrays herself less as mother or independent activist and more as partner of her husband...
Vol. 51 • September 1987 • No. 9
