Then too LaFollette entered the Senate when minorities were less tolerable than they are today. He got the stamp of impossible when Roosevelt led a movement in his direction and he refused to be a part of it. Thus he became isolated, neither Progressive nor Old Guard. You can not safely be too uncompromising, too serious. It makes no difference if you were right in rejecting both wings of the party as reactionary which they speedily proved to be. It makes no difference if you were right in opposing the war, and no one is so sure today that LaFollette was wrong in doing so as men were when it was proposed to expel him from the Senate. Justification after the fact does no good. It is not your wrongness that they hate; it's your uncompromising quality, and that remains more unbreakable than ever. An unusual loyalty explains the unwillingness to compromise. LaFollette attaches himself deeply. A characteristic act was his leaving the Senate for months to nurse a sick son back to health. It sets him apart from most men, who do not let sickness in the family interfere with their business and perform their full duty when they hire a trained nurse. People think of LaFollette, the public man, as an egoist but this nursing of his son showed the utmost absence of egoism. And so it is with all his intimate relations, which are unusually sweet and tender. Whatever he is like privately, publicly he is placed, rated, catalogued; the general mind is made up. The farm bloc no more turned to him than to Borah for leadership. He will always remain isolated. Now that party discipline has been broken down, what nonconformist Senators suffer most from is the tyranny of the teapot. Senator Kenyon referred to it when he said Newberry on trial for fitness for his seat "floated back into the Senate on an ocean of tea." An unparliamentary version of the same reference to the social influence is: "The Senate is one long procession of dinners and hootch." If you are regular politically you are regular socially. Given the habit of voting with the crowd, of putting others at ease by a not too great display of intellect, a good cook, a pre-war cellar, and a not impossible wife, and you belong to the Senatorial middle class, the new rich insurance agents, lawyers, miners, and manufacturers who control the fate of the socially ambitious. You may not be invited to the Wadsworths', or may be seldom asked there. But you are accepted by what Mencken might call the wealthy "booboisie," the circle Mr. Harding frequented before he was advanced to the White House. If you don't you are of the Senatorial proletariat. You are invited out seldom or not at all. You have to organize a little set of intellectuals, not found in the Senate, for your wife's tea parties.