Chapter 20
THERE is more to Minnesota than just politics, Stassen and the Twin Cities. Consider merely what Sinclair Lewis calls the “radiant, seafronting, hillside city of Duluth.” I drove up to Duluth from Minneapolis, and in fact it was Mr. Lewis who was my host there. We looked at what is called Minnesota Point from a tall bluff, and watched the freighters come in with coal, and go out again with their mammoth burdens of ore, against the swelling blue backdrop of Lake Superior. Duluth is the end of the line. Here is the extreme westernmost tip of the Atlantic Ocean. Duluth, together with Superior (Wisconsin), is a seaport, though its shining water is fresh, not salt. But it is difficult, up in this piney stillness, to appreciate the well-known fact that this is the second biggest port in the nation; there is something incongruous about its commercial activity. “Port” connotes smoke and slums and men hurrying down greasy cobbled streets, whereas Duluth tingles with openness, the atmosphere of campfires, placid sunshine, and the free spirit of the viking north.
Second busiest American port! But, if the local folklore is to be believed, Duluth is also a city where bears wander in from the woods every spring, push their way into back yards, and imperturbably invade the lobby of the chief hotel. Greatest iron ore city in the world! But the booster pamphlets call it “America’s air-conditioned city, in the Hay Fever Haven of America.”1
Speaking of folklore, one might mention a renowned speech in the House of Representatives by Proctor Knott of Kentucky on January 27, 1871, and several times reprinted in the Congressional Record. A proposal was being debated for railway development in the Duluth area. Mr. Knott opposed the bill on the ground that nobody knew where Duluth was, and embroidered his theme with the kind of exaggeration common to American rhetoric at the time:
Duluth! The word fell upon my ear with peculiar and indescribable charm, like the gentle murmur of a low fountain stealing forth in the midst of roses, or the soft sweet accents of an angel’s whisper in the bright, joyous dream of sleeping innocence. Duluth! Twas the name for which my soul had panted for years, as a hart panteth for the waterbrooks. [Renewed laughter.] But where was Duluth? Never, in my limited reading, had my vision been gladdened by seeing the celestial word in print. [Laughter.] And I felt a profound humiliation in my ignorance that its dulcet syllables had never before ravished my delighted ear. [Roars of laughter.] … I rushed to my library and examined all the maps … but I could nowhere find Duluth! Nevertheless, I was confident that it existed somewhere, and that its discovery would constitute the crowning glory of the present century, if not of all modern times. [Laughter.]
I knew that if the immortal spirit of Homer could look down from another heaven than that created by his own celestial genius, upon the long lines of pilgrims from every nation of the earth to the gushing fountain of poesy opened by the touch of his magic wand; if he could be permitted to behold the vast assemblage of grand and glorious productions of the lyric art called into being by his own inspired strain, he would weep tears of bitter anguish that, instead of lavishing all the stores of his mighty genius upon the fall of Ilion, it had not been his more blessed lot to crystallize in deathless song the rising glories of Duluth. Yet, sir, had it not been for this map kindly furnished me by the Legislature of Minnesota, I might have gone down to my obscure and humble grave in an agony of despair, because I could not nowhere find Duluth. [Renewed laughter.] Had such been my melancholy fate I have no doubt but that, with the last feeble pulsation of my breaking heart, with the last faint exhalation of my fleeting breath, I should have whispered, “Where is Duluth?” [Laughter.]
Originally the Duluth area was Sioux and Chippewa country. The French explorers came in early, and in 1679 Daniel de Greysolon Sieur du Lhut raised the French flag near where the city named for him now stands. But not for 138 years did a white settlement become permanent in the region, when the well-known German immigrant John Jacob Astor set up a fur trading post on the St. Louis River.
Mesabi: Iron on the Range
From Duluth, through the courtesy of officials of the Oliver Iron Mining Company, I drove to Hibbing to look briefly at the Mesabi Range (sometimes this puzzling word is spelled Mesaba, and sometimes Missabe, as in the name of the railway serving it).2 Again, let me allude to the tranquillity, the remote sylvan calm of this area. Then reflect that this is the essential heart of the steel industry of the United States. From these gentle meadows and serene hills comes, basically, the wealth of General Motors, J. P. Morgan & Co., and the United States Steel Corporation, to say nothing of the American industrial effort generally in war and peace.
The Lake Superior region, comprising the Mesabi, Vermilion, and Cuyuna ranges in Minnesota (range means district, not hill), the Gogebic range in Wisconsin, the Marquette and Menominee ranges in the upper peninsula of Michigan, produce normally 87 per cent of the iron ore in the United States. Minnesota alone produces 65 per cent. In the peak year 1942, when the region as a whole produced 92 million tons of ore, an all-time record, Minnesota produced almost 70 million tons. This is about triple the average annual production of all Soviet Russia. By far the biggest company operating is Oliver, which is responsible for about 48 per cent of all production. Along with the Duluth, Missabe, & Iron Range Railway and the Pittsburgh Steamship Company, which transfer the ore from the mines to Duluth and then to the Lake Michigan and Lake Erie ports, Oliver is a subsidiary of the U. S. Steel Corporation, and is by far the greatest iron-ore-producing organization in the world.
Route 53 leaps out of Duluth northward. A great fire destroyed the forests here in 1918, eating its way into the outskirts of Duluth itself, and burning up whole towns like Cloquet. So the timber is all second growth today—poplar, birch, tamarack. To the north is the watershed of the great divide; on the far side, the rivers flow to Hudson Bay; on the near, to the Mississippi. We saw a gray bulge on the horizon—this is the range. In the near-by farmers’ gardens, gladioli make bursting sprays of salmon pink. We drove briefly over a section of road actually paved with iron; this was an experiment of the 1930’s. The surface is of corrugated steel bricks, laid on a concrete base. It will last for all time.
We visited first the town of Eveleth. Here, my guides told me, we stood right on “the ore body.” All this land was covered by an ice sheet during the era of the glaciers. The first mine we saw, known as the Spruce, gave us a nice geological cross section. At the top of the open pit is the “overburden” or glacial drift. This is stripped off, and the brownish-red ore lies exposed. At one mine we saw how naked ore comes right up to the roots of the grass, and in the bottom of another grass was actually growing. From this point we could see the “twist” in the range itself, as it swings around. Once the towns here, like Virginia, were timber cities, with the greatest sawmills in America. The mines—lucky country!—started to be big business just as the timber gave out as a result of merciless spoliation. What will succeed the mines, if they too give out some day?
Then at Hibbing we saw “the biggest hole ever made by man,” one of the most extraordinary sights on earth. “This,” my guide said with a kind of flip reverence, “is the real reason why the United States is great, and maybe it’s the baby that won the war.”
The Hull-Rust-Mahoning Open Pit Iron Ore Mine, as it is officially called, is about three miles long, half a mile to a mile wide, and 435 feet deep; it covers 1,250 acres, and has 55 miles of railway track in its exposed bowels; out of it have come, to date, more than 650 million tons of material, more than the total excavations of the whole Panama Canal. We stood on the rim. The huge trough looks as if it has been stamped into the earth by a terraced skyscraper upside down. Clawing at its sides and hollows—to change the metaphor—are what seem to be ice cream scoops. We drove down into the actual pit, along bumpy zigzags, and saw that the scoops are 350-ton slowly rotating electric shovels that eat 16 tons of ore at a snap.
Several companies—in fact a good many—wallow competitively in this pit. Bethlehem has 51 per cent of the Mahoning area. Two tracts are owned by the Northern Pacific Railroad. Oliver is however the biggest holder. Most of the properties are held on lease, not owned outright. There are no discernible frontiers between the rival properties, and so engineers from each keep a lookout. Originally, long before people knew they were standing on the greatest deposits of iron ever known, this was forest land. Owners who held the stumpage, even after the trees were felled, became heir to the ore underneath. Directly on the edge of the pit today are several houses, the owners of which still refuse to move or sell.
The ore is shoveled into railway cars, which switch back and forth to reach the top; the “shovel runners” who operate the scoops are the highest-paid men in the pits, getting about $1.50 an hour. Near the end of the Oliver tract, we saw a rock hill, of pinkish purple, in the middle of the ore, which the shovels nibble up to, and then let severely alone. Finally—the sight must be seen to be believed—a corps of women sweep the last bits and specks of ore out from tiny crevices, so that no ounce will be lost, the way a child licks a chicken bone. “We have a very clean type of mining here,” my guide said.
Up top, the ore is sampled, tested, “beneficiated” in some cases, and then shipped. Part of these processes were explained to me in the laboratories; I hope I understood them. Actually while the cars are en route to the loading docks at Duluth, it seems, samples are analyzed, so that the shipment may be properly classified and graded on arrival. Then each special type of ore awaits its passage down the lakes; usually a ship carries only one type of ore. The mines fill a freighter to meet the exact specifications of the purchaser, set out in advance, so that there will be no delay at Gary or South Chicago.3
Hibbing, the town, has had curious adventures. For one thing most of it was once moved—bodily picked up and physically moved, house by house. The Hull-Rust open pit was getting bigger, so big that it was on the point of swallowing Hibbing itself. So Oliver bought a forty-acre tract covering about three-quarters of the town as it then was, and moved building after building to a new area a mile and a half away.
The Mesabi range presents a nice demonstration of how capricious history may be. But for a famous accident most of this region would belong to Canada. A British scientist named John Mitchell, mapping the region in 1755, thought that the Lake of the Woods led directly into Lake Superior by way of the Pigeon River. He was, it happened, wrong. When, in 1783, Benjamin Franklin negotiated the Treaty of Paris, which first delimited the American-Canadian frontier, he and the other commissioners accepted this map as accurate, although it would have been more logical to follow the line of the St. Louis River further south. One story is that Franklin, somewhat of a sharp dealer, knew well that the original map was wrong, but saw to it that it was accepted anyway. So the Minnesota “arrowhead” went to the United States.
The Minnesota ranges have in the sixty-odd years since their discovery produced just under a billion and a half tons of “merchantable” iron ore.4 The existing reserves are calculated at 1,150,000,000 tons. So considerably more has gone out than remains. If the average rate of production continues on a prewar level, Minnesota ore will last only another thirty-five or forty years; if production should ever again be that reached during the war, it will last only another fifteen years. Naturally this somewhat alarming rate of drain, at best, gives pause not only to conservationists but to anybody who realizes how cardinally the basic strength of the United States is hinged to steel. On the other hand steel is durable. It will not, like wood, catch fire or rot. As scrap, it can be used again and again. Also immense deposits of inferior iron ore, including a variety with a low iron content known as taconite, exist widely. Iron, next to aluminum, is the most common of all minerals; 5 per cent of the entire earth’s surface is iron. But at present the process of extracting steel from low-grade ores is too expensive to be practicable, i.e. profitable. On some future date, new technologies may be discovered that will change this picture. Even as of the moment, Minnesota officials advocate “a gradual shift” to production from taconite by companies whose reserves of “merchantable” ore are getting low.
Oliver is, of course, an overriding factor in the economy of the state. Its attorney, Elmer Blu, watches its interests carefully; he is one of the most influential men in Minnesota. The chief issue is of course taxes. Oliver, by far the biggest local taxpayer, thinks it is paying quite enough; its critics think it might well pay more. The Oliver people point out they pay four different kinds of state tax, and that the total may reach as much as 25 million dollars a year. Their opponents argue that the company itself, since U. S. Steel is both producer and consumer, both seller and purchaser, is in a position to set the price on which taxes are based. Half the internal politics of Minnesota, for years, devolved on whether what is known as the “Lake Erie price” was, or was not, fairly calculated.
I heard commonly that Oliver “ran” Minnesota. The best proof that this is not really true is that taxes are as high as they are. If the company could run the state as it chose, they would of course be lower. Almost everywhere in America, the power of the great industrial companies is tempered to an extent by the power of the public interest. This is not to argue that Oliver should not make a greater contribution than it does. And although Minnesota is not remotely a “colony” of Oliver or anything else, it is indisputable that the company has a wide influence in the legislature, in particular the senate. It would be difficult to pass a bill in Minnesota that it actively opposed.
Old Eagle’s Nest
I drove from Hibbing to Sauk Centre, where I wanted to see the prototype of Main Street; on the way Sinclair Lewis suggested that I drop in at Little Falls, where Charles A. Lindbergh grew up. The Lindbergh house rests in a grove—now a state memorial park—on the Mississippi. It was built and lived in for many years by Lindbergh’s father, a Minnesota congressman who was a kind of Minnesota La Follette. It has a very pleasant, screened-porch rocking-chair canoe-in-the-boathouse atmosphere.
Lewis, who as everybody knows is a Minnesotan himself, published in 1915 The Trail of the Hawk; it was the first serious novel about aviation ever written. H. G. Wells and Jules Verne had written fantasies, but this was not a fantasy. Yet, in a way, it was. Because its hero, by remarkable coincidence, happened to be a lonely boy named Carl (= Charles) who after a spectacular career in aviation marries an eastern heiress. The resemblances between this imaginary character and Lindbergh are quite striking. But when Lewis, with the strange prescience of the artist, wrote The Trail of the Hawk, Lindbergh himself was only thirteen years old; the two could not possibly have ever heard of one another, though they lived only thirty-nine miles apart, and at that time Lindbergh had probably never so much as seen an airplane.
Incidentally Lewis had great admiration for Lindbergh’s father. “Only man in Little Falls with a decent library; only man in town with sense enough to build a house on the river, not away from it.”
Main Street Up to Date
How has Main Street—the street, not the book—changed in a quarter of a century? What would Dr. Will Kennicott and Carol find if they walked today in Gopher Prairie? Main Street was published in 1920, and a whole generation of Americans has grown up since the phrase imbedded itself into the language. The model for Gopher Prairie was of course Lewis’s own birthplace, Sauk Centre. The house where Lewis was born is still in good shape and is lived in today by a mail carrier; the one to which he moved later is now the residence of the local manager of Swift & Co. I talked with a dozen of his oldest friends, and tried to find out how, if at all, the community has changed. Does the tawdry provincialism and vulgarity that shocked Carol still exist? Do the good qualities symbolized by the stout Kennicott—devotion to hard work, neighborliness, frugality, deep roots in sound native soil—still play their role?
First, the population has scarcely risen; it is still about 3,000—3,016 to be exact. (“3,000 swell folks—and 16 skunks!” is the way I heard this subdivided.) The railway station is as it was, but the bus service is new, and, wonder of wonders, Sauk Centre is soon to have its own airfield, with a half-mile landing strip! The lines of elms have grown twenty-five years older, and Kennicott would marvel at the overhead lights on the road leading into town. The post office is new; the library is a vast improvement on what it was. How proud Carol—who saw that indecent author, Balzac, driven from the shelves—would be to learn that it now has the largest per capita circulation of books of any community in Minnesota!
Nothing is livelier in Main Street than the ironic passages purporting to come from the local newspaper. But today’s paper is a quite substantial sheet, and not at all uncivilized. There was no Rotary Club in Gopher Prairie; today, Sauk Centre has one. The old town had neither a golf course nor a hospital; today, its citizens can play golf (for nine holes), and a hospital is being organized.
Remember the barbed and glittering description of the shops on Main Street, as Carol took her first walk downtown? Today she would see few buildings that existed twenty-five years ago; the old frame structures have given way to brick. She might look for Hedine’s, where Kennicott had his shoes resoled; now it’s a Ben Franklin store. Of all the buildings on the west side of Main Street between Third and Fourth, she would remember only three: a bank, Hanson’s Home Brand Foods, and the corner drugstore, drugstores being imperishable. On the east side every shop but one would be new to Carol, including a Chevrolet agency, a neat mortuary, and a movie.
Take a trip from Sauk Centre to the lush dairy farms surrounding it. The standard of living has jumped to a level that would leave Kennicott incredulous. Remember how he charged one of his country patients $11.00 for an operation, and told him he could wait till next year to pay up—if his crop was good enough? Today the mortgages and “barnyard loans” are largely paid off.
There are several reasons for this prosperity; one is the phenomenal growth of co-operatives, in everything from telephones to coal, and another is rural electrification, which began on a substantial scale in the late thirties. Not all farms are electrified, by any means; but the good ones are. A family with rural electrification is at one jump removed from peasanthood, because not only does electric power bring “luxuries” like telephones and running water; it means cream separators, milking machines, and twice as many pigs per litter.
Three other main elements have contributed to the development of Sauk Centre—and a thousand other middle western Main Streets—since Lewis wrote his book.
(1) Enormous advance in the use of the automobile. No one who has read Main Street will easily forget its arduous winter journeys on horse-drawn sleighs. Today, these have virtually vanished. Automobiles did, of course, exist in Carol’s time, but they couldn’t be used in winter. As motoring became universal, more and better highways cut across the land, and the whole picture of rural society was altered irremediably. The automobile—plus good roads—changed Sauk Centre from a village into a metropolis; instead of being an outpost, it became a pivot. On the other hand, the automobile came near to killing the near-by hamlets, with populations of two hundred to five hundred, because their people could drive into bigger towns to market. This phenomenon we have already observed in Colorado and the West.
(2) Chain stores. These were of course unknown in Kennicott’s day. I heard two contrary points of view about them. The chain store obviously makes it easier, more economical, for Main Street to shop. In 1920, a shopping tour for outright necessities could be a day’s work; now, it takes half an hour. The other attitude is that the chain store undermines civic spirit; it has made small business migratory, and thus destroyed the town’s homogeneity. The manager of a chain store will stay in Sauk Centre, say, for six months to a year; then he moves on, never having become a real ingredient in the life of the community.
(3) Movies and radio. It is almost unthinkable, but neither Will nor Carol ever saw a newsreel. Nor could they have ever heard a radio show. Main Street itself may not have moved very much; but the world itself has moved to Main Street’s door, and people have become broadened, willy-nilly.
These factors have helped to modify another aspect of the former life of Main Street—it does not have to hibernate in winter. Winters in Minnesota are still bitterly long and trying, but no longer does the citizen have to dig in and insulate himself from the outside world for five or six solid months. The roads are open, and he can even keep warm at home. (An incidental point is that the relative comfort of modern living has given rise to the illusion that “Minnesota’s climate is getting milder!”)
The automobile has contributed, so Sauk Centre admits, to juvenile delinquency. Sixteen-year-old girls wander down Main Street nowadays in red slacks, or even shorts! Other social patterns have changed too. In 1920, the town’s bar was a refuge for the healthy male seeking to get away from home for an hour or so; today, it is no longer a masculine inner sanctum—the youngsters, boys and girls both, swarm all over it. Again, in Kennicott’s time, an important and distinctive role was played by the lodges and fraternal organizations, not only at business meetings but on picnics and excursions. Now the social functions of the lodge have been largely usurped by the movies, luncheon clubs, automobile drives, and golf.
One Sauk Centre veteran lamented what he called a decline in the “pioneer spirit.” In the old days, he told me, two men who quarreled would go into the back yard and slug it out. Then, like as not, they would be arrested—briefly—for disturbance of the peace. But in the last few years, only one fist fight and consequent arrest has taken place in the whole town!
The gist of Main Street, the book, was Carol’s revolt against the ironclad taboos of her environment. Has Main Street, the town, grown up at all in this respect? Yes. Carol would certainly be talked about, today as in 1920, but the criticism would probably be more diffuse, more tolerant. A suggestive confirmation of this is that Lewis himself was, of course, reviled and calumniated when his book appeared. Today he is something of a hero, and is considered by all to be the most distinguished citizen the community has ever produced. There was even a movement to change the actual name of Sauk Centre to Gopher Prairie! Some years ago Lewis returned for a visit. He wrote a brief inscription for the new movie theater, which the town proudly cast in bronze, and which adorns the wall today:
THESE ARE THE PORTALS OF IMAGINATION.
RECOVER HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.
Minnesota Medley
Minnesota has millers like Pillsbury and General Mills, families like the Heffelfingers, and quite possibly the best public schools in the nation. In Minnesota are both the Mayo Clinic at Rochester and the Hormel packing plant (Spam) at Austin. Minnesota gave birth to the modern bus industry, and was the original home of Greyhound; it is the home today of one of the most aggressive air companies in America, Northwest Airlines. It has the Cowles papers in Minneapolis, and also the Ridder chain. Minnesota has co-operatives ranging from the immense Land o’ Lakes Creameries, Inc., one of the largest and most conservative in the nation, to the six hundred small burial associations. It pays 575 million dollars per year in federal taxes, and has both the biggest calendar printing business in the world and the biggest law book printing business. Its fiercest local political issue is over liquor licensing, and it has 10,000 lakes, including Itasca, the headwater of the Mississippi. In Minneapolis is the only skyscraper I ever saw built to taper like an obelisk, and one of the best mayors in the nation, H. J. Humphrey Jr., the leader of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor coalition.
In the St. Paul telephone, book I saw a melting pot item not without interest: CURTIS (see also CURTICE—CURTISS—CURTS—KERTESZ—KURTZ).
Brief Mention of Wisconsin
Where there was nothing there is something.
—Charles McCarthy
Wisconsin is a splendid, virile, and sometimes a cross-grained state. I could write about it at considerable length, if only because I vacationed in it for many years, and a dozen Wisconsin towns—Sheboygan, Manitowoc, Green Bay, Ephraim—are indissolubly part of the America I once knew best.
Wisconsin is the state of a remarkable eighty-four-year-old governor, Walter S. Goodland, of the La Follette dynasty now out of power, and of a long-standing guerilla war between butter and oleomargarine.5 It is a state full of cream and cheese and containing bland cities like Milwaukee and superlative beer like Van Merritt. It is also a state so strongly industrialized, though people usually think of it as overwhelmingly agricultural (it is of course the first dairying state and produces 12.5 per cent of all milk in the union), that not less than one-half of all its wealth comes from manufacturing. It has an erosion problem—where Lake Michigan chews steadily into the shoreline—and a road problem; a long-standing political issue is the “highway lobby,” and a newer one has to do with slot machines. It is a state packed with vitality, hard-headed, with dreamily beautiful country landscapes and two of the longest and most stubbornly fought strikes in the history of the American labor movement.
Among widely known Wisconsin industrial enterprises are Fairbanks Morse at Beloit, Parker Pen at Janesville, Kohler bathtubs at Kohler, Oshkosh trunks at Oshkosh, Nash Motors at Kenosha, Johnson Wax at Racine, and the great paper companies at Neenah, near Appleton, the home of Kotex and Kleenex and the Sensenbrenner family with its unique local influence. One should also mention H. L. Nunn in Milwaukee, a shoe manufacturer with an enviable record for good relations with labor; the A. O. Smith Co., which is a famous maker of automatic machinery and the like; the great Milwaukee brewers like the Uihleins (Schlitz) and the makers of Blatz and Pabst; and of course the cheese processors, like Kraft and Borden. There were once some 2,700 cheese factories in Wisconsin. Amalgamations and so on have reduced the number to about 1,800.
On December 26, 1945, workers at the J. I. Case Company, manufacturers of agricultural machinery at Racine, went out on strike. As of the moment of writing, fourteen months later, this strike is still rancorously going on. The Case company is a kind of feudal principality, run strictly as a one-man show by Leon R. Clauson.6 He was born on a farm in 1877; he has been dictator of Case for a quarter of a century. A compromise might possibly be effected on wages (the workers want a 25¢ an hour raise, and Case offers 13¢), but the management has refused to consider other demands by the union. The present strike is the fifth since 1934. The only contract the company ever gave labor was one imposed by order of the National Labor Relations Board. A year after the present strike began this board ruled against Case, ordering it to bargain with the union.
Workers of the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company near Milwaukee, one of the most important industrial units in the country, similarly began a long and obstinate strike early in 1946. These two strikes cut down by one-quarter the production of all farm machinery in the United States, at a time when such machinery was more urgently needed than at any time in decades. Demands for the federal government to seize and operate the struck plants came naturally from all over the country, and particularly from the Middle West; in fact, a seizure order was prepared in regard to Case in midsummer, but the cabinet split on the issue and Mr. Truman never signed it. The unions involved in these disputes are both locals of the United Automobile Workers, CIO, but they are very different. At Case is Local 180, a strong right – wing and anti-Communist union; at Allis-Chalmers is Local 248, just as distinctly on the left. There was, however, little of the political in either strike. The principle at stake was of the simplest—basic and primitive labor rights.
Wisconsin is probably the most isolationist of American states. It breeds senators like Wiley and congressmen like O’Konski, with his superb melting pot name and his record not so superb. It makes conspicuous in the person of several representatives one of the ugliest paradoxes in America: that those same men who voted against every defense measure, who opposed Lend Lease and Selective Service, who would not budge one inch or spend one cent to assist Roosevelt and the administration to prepare for American defense were exactly those who in the Pearl Harbor inquiry and on other occasions whined the worst about the lamentable condition our defenses happened to be in.
Wisconsin is also one of the two or three best-run and best-governed states and, on almost all domestic issues, one of the most liberal. For this the La Follette tradition is to a great extent responsible. Wisconsin had the first workman’s compensation law in the United States, the first direct primary law, the first state traveling library, and the first state unemployment insurance. Its legislation was very hard boiled. When companies found that it was costing them money if workmen got killed in industrial accidents on their premises, they saw to it soon enough that fewer workmen got killed. Wisconsin has more credit unions than any other state, the lowest syphilis record, the second highest literacy rate, and the best record in state aid to education. It was the first state to revoke the old charter of the Ku-Klux Klan, when this uncomely organization began to re-emerge in the 1940’s. It was one of the first states, after World War II, to organize direct relief, hospitalization services, and educational aid for its veterans, and it is the only state, so far as I know, where public school students are insured against accidents in athletics.7
Like Minnesota, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, the Badger State has a formidable basic German-cum-Scandinavian coloration. But it differs from these neighbors in that it was settled earlier and came into the union earlier; it was populated in the first instance by Yankees, as one may see by observing old tombstones; for instance Bob La Follette’s great-great-grandfather fought in the Revolutionary War. Mostly the Germans came after 1848. They not only brought sound agricultural techniques but they are the foundation (as in southern Ohio) of the state’s highly diversified craft industries. The Scandinavians were more purely agricultural. There are today solid German counties completely ringed by Norwegians. But Germans, Norwegians, Poles (the south side of Milwaukee is 97 per cent Polish) were not the only folk who came to Wisconsin. There are Finns in Superior, Danes in Racine, Canadians almost everywhere, and an astonishing community of Swiss in Green County. Here, not anywhere in Switzerland, is the Swiss cheese capital of the world. Its atmosphere is, indeed, much more Swiss than anything I ever saw in Zurich or Geneva. Swiss from the old country sent emissaries here many years ago, who tested one Wisconsin area after another until they found a place where conditions of soil and water most closely resembled those in Switzerland itself. Then they moved over and have lived happily ever since. The smallest whisper in Green County is still a yodel.
Perhaps Wisconsin gives an aroma of the staid, the bourgeois; actually it has produced or strongly influenced a remarkable lot of individualists. One factor in this is the university at Madison, which for a generation anyway ranked as the most progressive of all American state universities. Among well-known public servants associated with Wisconsin are Lloyd K. Garrison, David E. Lilienthal, and Julius A. Krug, whose father was the local sheriff and who is still assistant state fire marshal. Among artists and literary people and professional men are, or were, Thorstein Veblen, Frank Lloyd Wright, Edna Ferber, Zona Gale, the Lunts, Professor Frederick J. Turner, Emily Hahn, Thornton Wilder, and, among military folk highly picturesque, General MacArthur, whose father lived in Milwaukee, and the late Admiral Marc A. Mitscher.
Word About the La Follettes, Past and Present
Roughly from the Civil War to 1900, Wisconsin was dominated by the railroads and, until the forests were denuded, by the timber interests; these controlled the Republican party, and ran the state government.8 Came a new era in 1900, with the election of Robert Marion La Follette as governor. La Follette was a young lawyer who rose steadily in public jobs. Probably because it was richer, Wisconsin has never been as belligerently radical as North Dakota or even Minnesota; La Follette was a liberal. Milwaukee had a strong Socialist nucleus—in fact it had a Socialist mayor, Daniel W. Hoan, for twenty-four years—but only incidentally did this contribute to the Progressive movement.9 La Follette was more than a great man. He became a myth. His technique was, by and large, to take up specific concrete issues one at a time. For instance, his first considerable campaign was for regulation of the railroads; then he fought for the direct primary and direct election of senators; then he forced the railways to pay their fair share of taxes, and to modify the rebate system whereby the big companies were favored as against the small. Theory meant little to him, and his approach was seldom ideo-logical. He did not, like the Socialists or Communists, present a program as the corollary of a theory. But he was a profound believer in both expert knowledge and education; he was one of the first American men of politics to build up a brain trust, and he believed heavily in the scientific method. One of his tenets was that the government should be able to step in and help the people solve a given problem, by having at hand an expertly worked-out applicable program. Also he sought to educate the people as a whole so that they might truly understand what the issues were. Hence, when he himself went on to Washington and the national scene, his domestic reforms stayed put. Conservative governors that followed him could not write his reforms off the books, because the citizenry had become sufficiently educated to see that they remained.
From 1901 until 1946, for almost half a century, a La Follette was either senator from Wisconsin or governor of the state. No record quite like this exists in American history.
La Follette’s two sons, Robert M. Jr., the elder, and Philip F., have always complemented one another nicely. Bob equals Washington in La Follette language; Phil equals Wisconsin. Bob was his father’s secretary for some years, and then senator; Phil has been governor three times. Bob, I heard from friends of both, resembles his mother in character and temperament; Phil is more like his father. Bob is studious, more reserved, gentler; Phil is volatile, quick minded, capable of some extremely errant judgments, more ambitious probably, and less sound. In a curious way, though the elder, Bob has usually tended to defer to Phil. Possibly this is because, midway through college, Bob had a long, almost mortal illness; he never got a university degree (whereas Phil’s scholastic record was exceptionally brilliant) and did not think he had the stamina for public life, which Phil had amply. The whole family is very devoted. Phil married before Bob, and had a son first. Bob insisted that he be named Robert Marion La Follette III although Phil wanted to leave the name free for the time Bob should marry and have a son. Indeed Bob has two sons today; their names are Bronson Cutting La Follette and Jo Davidson La Follette. One of the boys, while working his way through school, became ill. Father Bob got up at three in the morning and delivered his son’s paper route.
The story of the creation, rise, collapse, and eventual disappearance of the Progressive party may be told briefly. The movement started back in the 1890’s. Its spearhead was, of course, Bob Senior. But he was first elected governor as a Republican, and during most of his political life he worked within the Republican party.10 Hence most electoral issues were decided in the primaries; a Progressive would oppose a conservative (“stalwart”) Republican; the general election was mostly a formality, since both Republican wings would generally unite to beat whoever was the Democratic candidate. But in 1932 the Progressives, after Phil was beaten in the primaries by a conservative, bolted the Republican ticket, and two years later the Progressive party was formally organized at a convention at Fond du Lac. Phil ran for governor and Bob for the senate as Progressives, and both won handsomely. They supported the New Deal on various measures; FDR smiled upon them, and presently, instead of being a splinter Republican party, the Progressives became close allies of the New Deal. Bob didn’t agree with Roosevelt on foreign policy, certainly. But even in 1940 he ran with New Deal blessing, and folk like Harry Hopkins assisted his campaign.
But I am getting ahead of the story. Phil wanted to build up a real countrywide party. He called it the National Progressives of America, and it was launched in 1938. He invented a device, a cross within a circle, as an insigne, which was supposed to signify, among other things, the ballot box, “the multiplication of wealth” and “the unity of the nation.” But promptly it was dubbed a “circumcised swastika” by folk who didn’t take Phil as seriously as he took himself. At about the same time, as a Wisconsin friend of mine put it, he “began to talk a lot of damn strange stuff.” He had visited Europe and old-line Progressives were horrified to hear him speak in accents that seemed unduly to reflect European influences of the time. He told friends that democracy had become too cumbersome, that it needed more direction, that people liked to feel in a positive way that they belonged to a movement, and that maybe new techniques in uniforms, pageantry and the like might be useful. At this period it was never quite clear whether the National Progressives were to remain an independent movement, rescue the Democratic party from the town bosses, or go back to the Republicans. Some of Phil’s old comrades said that, since FDR had put into the law of the land most of what his father had fought for, any attempt to fight him would be lunatic. It was during this time, I was told in Madison, that Phil thought that the procedure of government in Wisconsin might be made simpler if the governor, not the legislature, should initiate legislation; the function of the legislature would merely be to approve. Shades of the Reichstag! At the mass meeting where the movement was launched, a big banner, with Cross in Circle, was spread out behind the stage; uniformed ushers, spotlights, and a band were part of the regalia. It was all somewhat ridiculous and somewhat Caesarian.
After the 1940 campaign and then Pearl Harbor the Progressives began to decline seriously. Phil went into the Army and became an officer on the staff of General MacArthur. Bob, however, stuck to his knitting as a senator and an extremely able one. In 1944, instead of being a force that could tip the balance either way (after all, the Progressives had been the chief influence whereby Roosevelt carried the state three times) they were ground out between the two big parties, and got only 6 per cent of the vote. Once again, it was proved that no third party in America can succeed for long, unless it ties onto a national ticket. The political picture became highly fluid. Progressives on the conservative side slipped out and joined the Republicans; the liberals joined the Democrats. This disintegration went on for some time, and in March, 1946, the Progressive party met in convention at Portage and voted by a large majority to kill itself. So ended, after twelve years, the life of the only third party organized on a state basis in the United States. Phil, back from the wars, was lying low and saying little. Bob ran for re-election to the senate—as a Republican—and was beaten.
Phil’s political plans are, as of the moment, not precisely known. What he talks about mostly is MacArthur. For this general he has, like almost all isolationists and Europe-haters, an admiration frenzied and idolatrous.
Bob will be grievously missed in the new Senate. He is a man of pith and substance. Few public servants have ever done a sounder domestic job. For one thing it was he, along with Monroney of Oklahoma, who was mostly responsible for the recent congressional reform bill. Bob was never quite the overt isolationist that most people believe him to be; he was never so violent as Phil. He likes to recall that his father introduced a bill back in 1916 favoring a League of Nations, that both he and his father wanted recognition of the Soviet Union as long ago as in 1922, and that it was his father who was largely instrumental in getting American troops out of Siberia after World War I. Bob voted for, not against, Bretton Woods, the reciprocal trade treaties, and the Charter. On the other hand he opposed the British loan.
What beat Bob? There were several factors, among which isolation was merely one. His opponent in the primaries, who later won the election easily, was Joseph R. McCarthy,11 a farmer’s son who at twenty-nine had become the youngest circuit court judge in the history of the state. He entered the Marines as a private, and came out as a captain with a brilliant record. Naturally he was able to make use of this with advantage. But isolationism was not nearly so decisive an element in La Follette’s defeat as in the cases of Shipstead, Wheeler, et al. The best proof of this is that several extremely isolationist Wisconsin congressmen, like O’Konski and Keefe, were re-elected easily. One factor obviously contributing to the result was that Bob, completing a long job of work on the Congressional Reorganization bill, selflessly thought that it was his duty to stay in Washington and see it through; he made no real campaign, and did not even visit Wisconsin except briefly. Another was that plenty of Progressives disapproved of the coalescence with the Republicans so strongly that they went into the Democratic primaries. Hannegan, incidentally, had wanted Bob to run as a Democrat, with administration support; this he would not do. Finally, by an irony cruel enough, what beat him was labor, though he has as liberal a labor record as any senator. He came into Milwaukee with a light lead; Milwaukee turned against him by some nine thousand votes, and that finished him. Some urban Catholics opposed him (McCarthy is a Catholic incidentally) because he had taken a stand against Franco Spain; more importantly, the strong Communist-inspired fringe of the Milwaukee CIO went all out to beat him, because he had often attacked Stalinist Russia.12 At any rate he was defeated. For the first time in more than a generation, there is no La Follette in the U. S. Senate.
Wisconsin is not an easy state to take apart and diagnose. The Republican state chairman, Thomas E. Coleman, is a wealthy industrialist, the president of the Madison-Kipp Company. He has been anti-La Follette practically since childhood; almost all reactionary interests in the state are marshaled behind him. Coleman worked hard, in fact, to prevent the La Follettes from re-entering the Republican party; he even got a bill through the legislature (the governor vetoed it, however) that would have served to keep them out. What beat Bob was, in short, strange as it may seem, a kind of Catholic big business Communist coalition.
Coleman, I heard it said, runs the legislature, but he does not run the governor. No one runs this tough old man. In fact Goodland, the Republican governor, whom La Follette opposed, was also opposed by the Republican machine. But he won easily—although he endorsed his own Progressive opponent! Figure it out for yourself. Goodland is a craggy character indeed. He made no campaign speeches in 1946, and returned all campaign contributions.
The Case of Mr. Crowley
The most powerful figure for years in Democratic politics in Wisconsin, though this influence was expressed mostly on the national level, was Leo T. Crowley, at one time or another Alien Property Custodian, chairman of the Export-Import Bank, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, head of the Board of Economic Warfare during part of World War II, and then Foreign Economic Administrator. Many first-class American business and professional men went to Washington during the war, giving up their jobs, sacrificing their homes in some cases and their savings, to work for the United States of America and freely give every inch and ounce of themselves for victory. The honor roll is impressive. Think—to pick a few among dozens—of John J. McCloy, Dean Acheson, Byron Price, Patterson and Lovett in the War Department, Thomas K. Finletter, Elmer Davis, Adlai Stevenson. There were also folk like Leo Crowley.
Crowley was a poor boy born in Milton Junction, of Irish Catholic parentage.13 He had a talent for politics and business both. He became head of a paper jobbing firm and then expanded into real estate and banking; he was president for a time of an important bank in Madison. When, in the 1930’s, the big bank chains, in Wisconsin as well as Minnesota, started buying up small banks, Crowley’s institution was taken over by the Wisconsin Bank Shares Company. How successful Crowley was as a businessman is difficult to assess from one point of view, since he accumulated substantial debts. He turned to politics, and became secretary to a Democratic governor, Albert G. Schmedeman, in 1933. He went to Washington a good deal, became close to Roosevelt during the banking crisis and in 1934 was appointed head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. His appointment to a second important federal job, Alien Property Custodian, followed some years later.
Also Crowley had other interests. He became chairman of the board of the Standard Gas & Electric Company, a big middle western utility, in 1939. His salary was $50,000 for a time and $75,000 later. This job he held along with his federal jobs. He would not, he announced, accept his salary as Alien Property Custodian while working for Standard Gas & Electric; he did, however, for a time at least continue to keep the $10,000 a year he got from FDIC. Behind Standard Gas is a complex personal and financial panorama. This company, once controlled by H. M. Byllesby and Co., was later taken over by the well-known promoter Victor Emanuel. Standard Gas, when Emanuel and his friends took it over by formation of a holding company called U.S. Electric Power Corporation, became “part of a utility empire stretching over 20 states and worth $1,119,000,000.”14 The depression came along, however. So did the Securities Exchange Commission. Standard Gas “went into reorganization,” and Victor Emanuel stepped out of the chairmanship, which then went to Leo Crowley.
That any man should accept a very large salary from a private utilities company, while at the same time accepting another smaller one from the federal government, which through the SEC often had brushes with utility companies, naturally provoked some criticism. Also that Crowley, whose own banking record was not too brilliant, should be head of just such a federal agency as the FDIC, seemed peculiar to some. Moreover as Alien Property Custodian he had to deal with several foreign companies, like I. G. Farben, that had been interlocked in one way or another with some of the people who formerly ran Standard Gas.15
In 1943, after the quarrel between Henry Wallace and Jesse Jones, Crowley became head of the short-lived Board of Economic Warfare. This was merged, along with Lend Lease, into the Foreign Economic Administration, which he ran until the end of the war in a style best described as lumbering. Recently he gave up all his public jobs, and returned to private life.
Wisconsin state income tax returns are open to the public, by law. Anybody can look at anybody’s in the state house or the regional tax districts. It is, therefore, possible to survey details of Crowley’s financial life. In one year, 1942, his listings of “interest paid” amount to $19,-436.40, which would indicate that his debts at the time totaled a considerable sum. Three among the payees are large insurance companies. From 1940 to 1942 inclusive Crowley’s return under “wages and salaries” includes $10,000 each year from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and from Standard Gas and Electric $50,000 in 1940, $65,625 in 1941, and $75,000 in 1942.16
When FDR turned the Board of Economic Warfare over to Crowley, the Capital Times of Madison printed several of the details given above, and concluded, “Can anything be more incongruous than a situation in which a high personage in the Roosevelt administration is receiving $75,000 a year from a vast holding company empire when the Roosevelt administration itself has taken the position that holding company set-ups … are against the public interest and should be broken up?”
Why did Roosevelt give Crowley so many jobs? The late Harry Hopkins once gave me a quadruple answer to this. First, he never got into trouble; none of his agencies ever had any public fracases. Second, he did what FDR wanted him to do, without fuss or argument. Third, he was a powerful middle western Catholic. Fourth, he got along well with Congress.
1 This whole region is hay-fever conscious. Papers in Minneapolis print a daily “pollen count.”
2 Cf. Iron Brew, by Stewart H. Holbrook, p. 91.
3 Underground mining goes on all the year, but the open pits only keep up a limited activity during winter. Of course shipping is impossible for the five or six months when the lakes are frozen. Sometimes the cars full of ore freeze. These must be thawed out by steam, because frozen ore won’t go through the hoppers.
4 These figures and several that follow are from a pamphlet called Economic Analysis of the State of Minnesota, published by the Minnesota Resources Commission. For a contrary view on most of these matters, see a brochure Minnesota, a Duped State, published by the Civic Association of Northeastern Minnesota in Hibbing.
5 The ravages of this famous conflict extend into Iowa and other states.
6 Cf, Luke Carroll in the New York Herald Tribune, August 24, 1946.
7 This insurance covers fourteen sports, and the fee is $1.00 a year, or only 50¢ if you don’t play football. Benefits range from $15 for a broken nose to $200 for injury to an eye. Cf. News-Week, August 27, 1945.
8 In the entire history of the state there have been only two Democratic governors.
9 Also Victor L. Berger of Milwaukee was the first Socialist ever to sit in Congress.
10 Of course he ran for president as a Progressive in 1924.
11 Not to be confused with the Charles McCarthy who was one of the founders of liberalism in Wisconsin
12 Foreign affairs and Communism are noisily acute issues in Milwaukee. One Polish-descended Democrat, alleged to be a Communist, beat another of Polish origin in the last Congressional primaries, in part because the community is divided almost as much on Polish as on Wisconsin issues. At the 1946 state convention of the CIO, however, the Communists were sharply spanked down.
13 He is today a Knight of St. Gregory, K.C., and Knight Commander with Star of the Order of Pius IX.
14 Time, October 7, 1946.
15 Details of most of these interrelations were first revealed by I. F. Stone in The Nation and PM.
16 In July, 1946, Crowley was barred by the Federal Power Commission from continuing as a director of three other utility companies, because he had not attended the minimum number of meetings that FPC regulations require, as a result of his duties in Washington. PM, July 9, 1946.