POPULISM TO INSURGENCY 35 



independence, he was sufficiently satisfactory to the party leaders that he 

 had been made a member of the important Ways and Means Committee, 

 and in this capacity he had participated as a believing protectionist in 

 the drafting of the McKinley tariff bill. His defeat for re-election to a 

 fourth term was in part the culmination of a long period of agrarian 

 discontent that swept scores of Republicans out of office throughout the 

 Middle West. In Wisconsin, however, the Democratic landslide was 

 greatly accelerated by the unpopular Bennett law, recently enacted by a 

 Republican legislature. 10 This measure sought to promote a more stringent 

 enforcement of the state's compulsory education laws, and the foreign 

 elements particularly German, Scandinavian, Irish, and Polish patrons 

 of parochial schools regarded it as a direct attack on their educational 

 institutions. After his defeat, La Follette decided to confine his immediate 

 political future to the state and began to formulate his plans. Once when 

 asked how he could ever hope to create a truly progressive state out of a 

 nondescript "foreign-born, foreign-bred, slow-moving population," he 

 pointed confidently to the predominance of the agricultural population 

 in Wisconsin and "the absence of great congested centres, which are 

 always the stronghold of machine control through a corrupt combination 

 of big business with municipal graft." 11 



La Follette's full realization of the need for reform probably dated 

 from the day in 1891 when, as he implicitly believed, he was offered what 

 amounted to a bribe by United States Senator Philetus Sawyer, a rich 

 Wisconsin lumberman whose wishes in regard to state politics were gen- 

 erally respected. Out of this ordeal, the facts of which are still in dispute, 

 La Follette emerged with a passionate conviction that he must take the 

 lead in freeing his state from the corrupt influences which were "under- 

 mining and destroying every semblance of representative government 

 in Wisconsin." 12 Believing that the mainspring of his reform movement 

 would be found among the farmers, La Follette proceeded at once to ally 

 himself with the outstanding farmer politicians of Wisconsin. Foremost 

 among these was A. R. Hall, "the statesman of the hour immediately 

 preceding the La Follette movement." 13 Hall was a former speaker of the 



10. Ibid., pp. 133-34. ii. Ibid., pp. 222-23. I2 - Ibid., p. 164. 



13. Albert O. Barton, La Follette's Winning of Wisconsin (Madison, Wis., 1922), 

 P-93- 



