Book Review

Canada and the United States

"The supreme issue, involving all the others, is the encroachment of the powerful few upon the rights of the many" (p. 103). Robert M. La Follette, the prophetic icon of midwestern progressivism, wrote these words in his autobiography nearly a century ago, in the context of the industrializing, urbanizing world then being born, yet they seem more relevant than ever in our "postindustrial" moment of rapid change. La Follette is a figure of first importance in American political history precisely because the issues he so persistently grappled with, mostly flowing from the dangers of concentrated wealth and its corrupting effects on the ideal of self-government, remain urgent to those who are today interested in preserving and reinvigorating democracy. The thought of this man who, for decades, waged a war of uncompromising vigor and principle against the encroachments of private greed on the public interest, underscores the alarming absence of such voices in the globalized Gilded Age of the twenty-first century. Aside, arguably, from Ralph Nader, they don't make American politicians like this anymore, individuals admired "because they are honest and fearless and stand for something" (p. 4), and that is our loss.

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