Versatility

Examine photographs of all candidates for the Presidency. Pick out the one that shows the most dynamic gesture, the most vigorous expression of face. It needs no magician to tell which candidate's picture you hold. It is the picture of Robert Marion La Follette.

He is the only candidate who is thoroughly at home before a camera. His face does not sink into flabby, meaningless lines. When he steps before the camera he becomes an actor. It is hardly too much to say that he is the only first rate camera-actor in politics.

The fact remains that, when he was a student at the University of Wisconsin, he wrote and had published an oration on logo. He had several offers to go on the stage, "once to play with Booth in Hamlet." But, in general, he felt that the uncertainty of artistic emoluments and the shortness of his own stature barred him from the stage. So he turned to law; from law went to politics in order to get a job as prosecuting attorney at $66 a month. From politics he went to journalism--La Follette's Weekly--and, of course, on the side he had his farm. Mrs. Belle Case LaFollette has some of the same spirit. She was graduated from Wisconsin, with her now husband. Several years later, after marriage and motherhood, she went back and took a law degree. Later, beside rearing four infants, she went into politics, especially woman suffrage. The four LaFollette children apparently have specialized in their parents' several talents. Robert M. Jr. is his father's junior partner in politics. Philip is carrying on in his father's shoes as a lawyer. Fola, after an apprenticeship in the woman suffrage movement, went on the stage, played ingenue parts with Ada Rehan, played with Leo Ditrichstein, and then suddenly left the stage to marry playwright George Middleton. The youngest, Mary, studied Art.