LA FOLLETTE
Sullivan, Mark
LA FOLLETTE By MARK SULLIVAN in Collier's Senator La Follette is what folks often call "a trying person." Last March and April he put himself in the forefront of public attention by a stubborn and...
...It may well turn out that no man in Congress will have made so useful a contribution to the conduct of the war as the one who most stubbornly resisted our entering it...
...Senator Lodge of Massachusetts said of it: "The senator from Wisconsin (Mr...
...La Follette) has a bill on a different system from ours—a coherent system, but a different theory...
...He faces the business of paying for a war as a new problem...
...His career has been divided between performances which can only be described as capricious obstinacy, and the successful performance of unique tasks, the solving of new problems born of changed economic conditions, which could only be done thru high intelligence, intense application, and real courage...
...Senator La Follette's tax bill drops all that long and complex business of imports on coffee, tea, and other subjects of general consumption which formed the bulk of the bill originally written by the Ways and Means Committee...
...Last March and April he put himself in the forefront of public attention by a stubborn and spectacular effort to prevent our entrance into the war—a performance which flooded the press with execrations of him...
...In any event, the Ways and Means Committee is now utterly discredited...
...He makes no change in existing taxes except to increase those on incomes and liquor...
...it would be difficult to exaggerate the amount of devoted application, of midnight oil, involved in this self-imposed task...
...Thereupon he retired from public view, passing four months with only infrequent participation in the debates...
...Now he emerges, and it turns out that he has been busy framing a tax measure whicli takes no account of the bills prepared by the committees, a piece of pioneering work which commands the respect even of persons who, politically, do not like him...
...I do not agree with the theory, but there is no doubt that it is a coherent and intelligent system of raising revenue...
...He proposes to pay it, logically, chiefly out of the excess profits made by those who make and sell war supplies...
...Probably the ultimate form of the Revenue Bill will be some variation of Senator La Follette's idea...
...On the part of Senator La Follette, it is characteristic...
...he ignores that committee's arbitrary and unintelligent dip into an increased tariff of 10 per cent on imports...
...Taking his more than thirty years of participation in public affairs as a whole, the balance is on the credit side...
Vol. 9 • August 1917 • No. 8
