ABSTRACT
Bob La Follette was elected to the Senate in 1916 and would be again in 1922, by which time Americans were reexamining the war’s costs and thus its opponents. In 1922, he initiated Senate investigation of oil leases at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and other sites for which Warren Harding’s Secretary of the Interior had been accepting bribery payments, and he ran for president on an independent ticket in 1924. During World War I, as during the 1924 election, he was an independent rhetor steadfastly battling for his vision of a democratic, peaceful nation, continually provoking opposition, such as Wilson’s declaration that La Follette led “a little group of willful men, representing no opinion of their own” after their filibuster in the Senate blocked the passage of a bill that would have authorized the arming of merchant ships, a key step toward war (Thelen 133-34). Dos Passos repeated Wilson’s line in his eulogy for La Follette in The 42nd Parallel:
Willful men and women expressing opinions-or hiring others to do so for them-were creating the cacophony of modern persuasion by the time of La Follette’s death in 1925. The strategies of writing and speaking learned in World War I and before had created the modern American media-that could change a company’s reputation, publicize new developments, and sell any product including war. Between the world wars, in the professions and the universities, the genres were separating, with their own codes and purposes, but they still shared the often contradictory missions of explanation and persuasion. With separation, they became more critical of each other: Each genre claimed that it alone tried to tell a story responsibly and thus offer service, whereas the others tried only to manipulate. At odds but mutually dependent, they all had a strong impact on the United States, shaping the reality that its citizens perceived. Although these professionals often turned on each other, as can be seen for example in their reaction to public relations counsel Ivy Ledbetter Lee, together they were creating America.
