POPULISM TO INSURGENCY 51 



tively that reluctant legislatures were obliged to enact a large number of 

 the reform measures for which the times called laws for the more effec- 

 tive regulation of the railroads and public utilities, an antilobby law, a 

 direct primary law, and a constitutional amendment making possible the 

 use of the initiative and referendum. The Missouri constitution limited 

 the governor to a single term of four years ; thus Folk had no opportunity 

 to run for re-election. His Republican attorney general, Herbert S. Hadley, 

 who had successfully brought suit against three Missouri railroads for 

 combination in restraint of trade and had won an important case against 

 the Standard Oil Company, succeeded Folk as governor and continued 

 in similar vein. Folk, perhaps unwisely, sought election to the United 

 States Senate in 1908, but was defeated in the primary he had helped to 

 establish by the veteran politician, William J. Stone. It is of some sig- 

 nificance that Folk carried seventy-four counties to forty for Stone, and 

 that the issue was settled by Stone's decisive victory in the cities. The 

 country population remained loyal to Folk. 53 



What happened in all the other states of the western Middle West 

 differed only in detail. No doubt, as time went on, governors sought con- 

 sciously to imitate the records of such reformers as La Follette, Cummins, 

 Johnson, and Folk. A reform attitude paid dividends; even the President 

 of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, had been quick to discover and 

 exploit that fact. In South Dakota Coe I. Crawford turned his back upon 

 his earlier career as railroad lobbyist, sought the Republican nomination 

 for governor upon a platform that was strongly reminiscent of the La Fol- 

 lette demands in Wisconsin, and after a defeat in 1904 at the hands of 

 the machine, won easily in I9o6. 54 In Kansas a well-to-do businessman, 

 Walter R. Stubbs, was impressed as a member of the legislature with the 

 inefficiency of state government, and started out to do something about it. 

 Eventually he realized that corporation control was the principal affliction 

 from which Kansas suffered and became an ardent proponent of all the 

 leading progressive reforms. After a decisive defeat by the machine in 

 1906, Stubbs won nomination and election to the governorship in 1908 



53. Frank Warren Crow, "Joseph W. Folk and the Reform Movement in Mis- 

 souri" (unpublished master's thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1937), pp. 58-84. 



54. Doane Robinson, Encyclopedia of South Dakota (Pierre, S. Dak., 1925), p. 



147. 



