Progressive Presidential Campaigns Part 3: Robert La Follette's 1924 Presidential Campaign

 

One of the interesting side notes of La Follette’s career is that while he was never able to realize his ideals as President, America managed to get behind them without him leading the way. Part of that was due to the work of the man who became President due to the split in the Republican Party in 1912.

Woodrow Wilson’s reputation has taken a hit over the past decades because of his segregationist views and his single-mindedness towards obtaining his ideals. (Ironically, this behavior is one of the habits held by Progressive extremists such as La Follette.) This is ironic because his platform and the first years of his administration were at least as progressive as  Theodore Roosevelt’s had been, if not more so. His platform included a lower tariff, enforcement of antitrust laws, utility regulation, direct election of senators and worker’s compensation. Despite the fact that these were just as much part of the progressive platform, during the campaign La Follette’s repeatedly called it inferior. La Follette, like too many of today’s Progressives, continued to see all things in terms of black and white with no shades of gray.

La Follette helped pass many bills he had either introduced or long endorse, including the income tax, and a bill that helped protect Sailors under the thirteenth Amendment. However he was a major opponent of the passage of the act promoting the Federal Reserve Act and when the Clayton Bill, which strengthened labor managed passage, Progressives considered it weak no matter what representatives of labor said. No matter how progressive Wilson was  - and during the first two years the sixteenth and seventeenth amendments which guaranteed both the Income Tax and direct elections of Senators as part of the Constitution, progressives like La Follette were never satisfied. Because Wilson, like TR was compromising, La Follette refused to accept them as actual victories.

This became increasingly clear as the War in Europe became more and more likely to involve America in the conflict. He attempted to run for the Republican nomination for President in 1916 even though he was facing a close reelection campaign for Senate that same year. He had already proposed bills opposing the draft and broadening exemption for conscientious objectors, he also supported non-intervention which drove men like TR – his most direct opponent for the GOP nomination – to distraction. La Follette applauded Wilson’s determination for neutrality and then would later attack the newspapers as being influenced by the mission for preparedness discussed avidly by men like Roosevelt, led many to think that he had lost whatever sanity he had. La Follette again easily won reelection to the Senate but refused to endorse his Republican nominee for President Charles Evans Hughes for the Presidency.

La Follette’s behavior increasingly isolated him from much of Washington. When William Jennings Bryan, Wilson’ Secretary of State and a pacifist resigned after the Lusitania was sunk, La Follette defended him. He was convinced the ship contained munitions despite their being no evidence. La Follette’s opposition to war remained steadfast even in the face of the attacks of Germany. La Follette repeatedly spoke towards non-intervention. When Congress finally declared war, he was one of only six senators to vote against it. Then when the Treaty of Paris went to the Senate, La Follette voted against all the versions of it . “He voted against war, now he voted against peace,” a Democratic senator justifiably sneered. He railed against Wilson even after the President suffered a stroke. When his junior Senator Irvine Lenroot ran for reelection, he unsuccessfully campaigned against him because he thought his votes for, among other things, the League of Nations were a betrayal of the American people. La Follette might have been on the right side of history but he was unwilling to share the spotlight with his rivals and would turn on anyone who he considering acting against Progressive ideals – which in La Follette’s mind, were anything he did not agree with.

In 1919 the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted woman’s Suffrage, was ratified by the Senate and would be ratified a year later. It was one of the major causes of La Follette’s entire career. But while it’s ratification was taking place, La Follette yet again lost the Republican nomination for President, this time to Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding. Harding’s campaign slogan ‘A Return To  Normalcy’ lead the Republican to a landslide victory in November – and the end of the Progressive Era. The end of World War I would lead to the Roaring Twenties and the era of conspicuous consumption, something that horrified the world of men like La Follette. La Follette was one of the major investigators into the Teapot Dome scandal  that would eventually bring down the Secretary of Interior Albert Fall.

With the Senate back in Republican control La Follette had an influence in an administration he had not had since the end of Taft’s term. This increased after the 1922 midterms when the Republicans lost seven seats in the Senate. La Follette’s influence over 20 of the Republican Senators gave him a power he had not had in years and with the influence among Progressive democrats, many thought he might have a chance for the Presidency again.

La Follette made a European tour in 1923 and while he did show some foresight when he saw the conditions that Mussolini’s fascist government had laid in Italy, he also showed the naivete far too many leftists would demonstrate when it came to the newly formed Soviet Union. Despite the growing totalitarian nature of the state, he believed that “Russia would become one of the greatest democracies on Earth,” even going so far as to invite Russians to come to Wisconsin to study the reform he had implemented there.

In late 1923 La Follette suffered a series of heart attacks but despite that determined to make a third party run for the Presidency in 1924, believing that the progressive senators would not do well without his leadership. By this point Calvin Coolidge had ascended to the Presidency, by far the most conservative President La Follette had served under and whose popularity showed America’s satisfaction with the status quo.

After the 1924 Republican Convention ended with Coolidge easily winning the nomination in his own right, La Follette announced that he would run as an independent. The Progressive platform involved his own platform for the party and among its twelve planks was the proposal of a ‘constitutional amendment giving Congress the power to reenact a statute over a judicial decision.”  This decision caused huge controversy even among progressives and many were angered by his refusal to denounce either the Ku Klux Klan, which had become a major figure in American politics or Prohibition. But the latter decision, which went against the fundamental idea of checks and balances,  destroyed whatever glimmer there was for a La Follette candidacy.

Of the progressive campaigns for the White House, La Follette’s 1924 run was the most grounded in reality, albeit a remote one. La Follette believed that he could carry enough states in the west and northwest to deprive Coolidge of a majority in the Electoral College. This would move the election to the House which was under Republican control and La Follette would have a chance of victory. But La Follette was already 68 and in poor health, and even supportive publications acknowledged even if this happened, any realistic possibility of realizing his agenda was non-existent.

La Follette hopes for victory were in large part driven by dissatisfaction with the corruption in the Harding administration and the near collapse of the Democratic party. The 1920s would be the nadir of the Democrats existence in the balance of power and it did not help matters that their candidate for President John W. Davis was colorless and unexciting. Davis was a Wall Street lawyer who had only won the nomination for President after an exhausting Democratic convention that had lasted two weeks and required 104 ballots before compromising on Davis almost out of exhaustion. (In a different series I will explain how these circumstances came about.) Both Coolidge and Davis were among the most conservative candidates for President in either parties history to that point in time.

La Follette reached across the aisle for his running mate, Burton Wheeler, a Democratic senator from Montana who would overtime develop a reputation as a progressive Democrat. Reformers across all social platforms endorsed La Follette from W.E.B Du Bois to John Dewey to Jane Adams to Helen Keller. Even some of the most unlikely of sources supporting him. H.L. Mencken, a markedly conservative journalist gave full support to La Follette in his columns. “What if more people were like La Follette? What a sweet world this would be!” one of the most famous cynics of all time wrote in one of many columns endorsing him.

La Follette managed to get his name on the ballots of all but one of the forty-eight states (Louisiana). Not all of them were under the label of Progressive, he was also listed as an Independent, a Socialist or Farmer-Labor. La Follette tried his best to win over former Bull Mooser’s, something that did not appeal to the former supporters of TR.

La Follette began his campaign on Labor Day when he gave the first political address ever delivered on radio. He was also one of the first Presidential candidates to give an address on film with sound, an innovation that was slowly beginning to become part of the industry.

Both parties went out of their way, rather than campaign against the other, to use La Follette as the boogeyman going out of their way to say he had more support than he actually had. Coolidge’s campaign actually went so far as to argue that voting for Davis was fundamentally voting for La Follette while Davis’s advisers him not to take swings as La Follette because they thought he would take states away from Coolidge. Some press reports actually thought La Follette could carry anywhere from eight to twelve states and throw the election to the House.

Most of La Follette’s campaigners were realistic about their chances. Few thought La Follette had any real chance of winning the Presidency. La Follette, however, initially did harbor some hope of victory. As the campaign progressed his chances grew dimmer as prices rose for farmers, one of the critical demographics to his chances.

The 1924 Presidential election bares the dubious distinction of having the lowest voter turnout percentage of the 20^th century, with less than 49 percent of all eligible voters casting a ballot. Coolidge won in an electoral landslide with 382 electoral votes and more than 16 million popular votes. Davis did little better than James Cox four years earlier, getting barely 9 million votes and 136 electoral votes.

Robert La Follette’s performance seemed poor compared to TR’s 12 years earlier; he only carried his home state of Wisconsin and its thirteen electoral votes and while he received nearly five million votes, his total percentage of the vote was roughly 17 percent compared to TR’s total of nearly 26 percent of the popular vote and six states. But in hindsight La Follette’s campaign was the most successful Progressive campaign for the White House.

La Follette finished second in ten states, including California, Minnesota and Washington. He came within eight thousand votes of winning Montana and just five thousand of winning North  Dakota. While most of his second place totals were in smaller states, he did surprisingly well in many of the bigger electoral prizes, capturing nearly half a million votes in New York, over 300,000 in Pennsylvania and more than 400,000 in Illinois. An analysis revealed he took more votes from Davis than Coolidge, nearly a quarter of the vote in the ten largest cities in America and thirty percent of the vote in the Pacific and Mountain states. This total is more remarkable when one considers the money the campaign spent. The Progressive campaign could only amount less than 10 percent of the funding of both major parties, and by the measure of the dollars at the time, it cost him less than five cents for every vote he won, as supposed to the Bull Moose campaign which spent 16.2 cents for every vote it got. Considering that much of the 1912 campaign’s success was much due to the presence of Roosevelt on the ticket, La Follette’s totals are actually more remarkable. No third party candidate would do nearly as well on the popular vote from until George Wallace in 1968, and Wallace’s campaign was the polar opposite of everything La Follette stood for.

It was the old warhorse’s last hurrah. His health got worse at the end of the campaign and on June 21, 1925 he died just four days after his seventieth birthday. In a special election  not long after his death, Wisconsin voted for his son Robert Jr, to take over his father’s seat in the Senate. He would hold the title and the Progressive Party mantle in his state for more than twenty years, until he was defeated in a Republican primary by Joseph McCarthy in 1946.

Many senators baring the progressive mantle continued to have a vital role in the years to follow, including Hiram Johnson, George Norris and Burton Wheeler. However the Progressive mantle began to move away from the Republican party to the Democrats with FDR actively seeking their support  starting in his 1932 run for the Presidency.

Robert La Follette represents Wisconsin in National Statuary Hall is D.C. and in 1959 he was named one of the five greatest Senators in the history of the body. John C. Calhoun’s legacy has always been questionable and in recent years we’ve had reason to frown on that of conservative Robert Taft. But there are few senators in the twentieth century – with the exception of Hubert Humphrey – with a devotion to liberal causes as well as being on the right side of history, often far ahead of his contemporaries.

I will deal with some of the problematic issues with La Follette as a Senator and presidential candidate at the conclusion of this series but I admire and respect the reasons for running in 1924. At that point both major parties were more conservative than they would be at any time in the 20^th century and La Follette’s cause, futile as it was, was necessary to offer a true progressive alternative that many voters clearly deserved. The policy of laissez-faire and the business of America is business, the doctrine of Coolidge were one of the most critical factors in the Great Depression that would come at the end of the decade and La Follette was far more ambitious to the ideas that could have stopped it. Many of the progressive ideals he founded were at the center of the New Deal and it is possible he could have helped lead the nation out of the spiral it was headed to. La Follette may not have had the character to be a great President but he had the great ideas and in a world where so many politicians have none, that is something to be admired.

In the final part of the series I will relate the career of Henry Wallace, how he chose to run as a Progressive in 1948, and how his campaign very quickly took on the worst aspects of so many leftist ideals in the worst possible of eras.

 

 

Will Trent Is Back For Season 2

 

 

During 2023 I quickly became a huge fan of ABC’s Will Trent, arguably the best network drama in all of 2023 and a series that very quickly has the potential to become one of the best new dramas as Peak TV enters its next phase. Over the last several months, various awards shows (if not the Emmys) have been more than willing to give the show its due. Ramon Rodriguez was nominated for Best Actor by the Critics Choice Awards this December and Rodriguez received a corresponding nomination from the Independent Spirit Awards. The show itself was among the most nominated network series in the HCA TV (now Astra awards) in the summer of 2023, receiving eight nominations. It deservedly took the Best Network Drama prize in January. I’ve been waiting for a lot of series to return after the strikes in Hollywood spent five months delaying things but there are few dramas I’ve been anticipating more. Finally last week Season 2 began, and while it wasn’t worth the wait (because of the reason we had to wait) it has not disappointed one bit.

Before we get into what has happened in the two part series premiere, I think its worth doing not only a review of what happened last season but the differences between the series and the Karin Slaughter novels which have been its inspiration. While I was spending months waiting, I have since read a total of seven books in the Will Trent series, though I have read them almost entirely out of order. However, since I originally wrote an article about the differences last spring I think its worth dealing with the similarities as well, because both of them are part of why I think Will Trent is as good as it is.

In Slaughter’s novels, Will is a tall, bulky and blonde which Ramon Rodriguez is not. That does not change the fact that Rodriguez is still the perfect Will Trent because he has both the awkwardness of the novel around so many other people, difficulties bonding with other people and the scars of his life in foster care. During the two part season finale the series paralleled a major storyline from the book involving Will’s backstory, which was related in the novel Broken. Will was the child of a prostitute who was tortured and eventually murdered by a serial killer whose identity was not revealed until the end of Season 1. (I am grateful I hadn’t read the books until that point.) The crimes were investigating by a young Amanda Wagner and Evelyn Mitchell, both beat cops in 1984 Atlanta. In the novel both women are white; in the series both are African-American.

I suspect in part this change was due to the series taking place in 2023 as opposed to the novel which takes place in 2014. The hills women had to climb in the 1970s are paralleled by the ones that African-Americans had to climb in the 1980s, and the fact that the series like the novel, is set in Atlanta is part of the reason. In both the book and the series, the killer is revealed after he begins a series of murders in the present and in both cases, the killer is Will’s father who is revealed to be the slimy attorney James Ulster. Greg Germann gives arguably the greatest performance in his career on television as Ulster; almost all of his characters drip of slime but this is the first one where you can practically smell the sulfur coming from him. At the climax of Season 1, Will delivered a beatdown, but stopped short of killing him choosing to arrest him for the murders he committed. (I’ll get to the consequences later on.)

Amanda is played brilliantly by Sonja Sohn in the series. (Sohn deservedly was nominated for Best Supporting Actress by the Astras.) In the novels there is no real sympathy in Amanda Wagner at all. She is a bully to everyone, including Will and Faith, never admits she is wrong on anything and almost never shows a sign of humanity. There is an assumption much of this is due to how she came up in the ranks of law enforcement in Broken but it does not make her character any more likable when we see her in action.

Sohn has the same toughness and brutality to her, but there are always signs of humanity in her that make the series work far better. In the first season finale she confided in Evelyn (Lisa Gay Hamilton) that she had been hiding the truth about Will his whole life. “Will is gonna hate me forever. He almost does already,” she confided. When she tells him about how she ended up discovering him and that she knew who his mother was, it was a painful scene but Sohn showed in it how much it broke her as well, something I can’t imagine playing out in the novels. The final scene of Season 1 showed the two of them talking and for the first time Amanda seemed fragile. We’ve seen scenes of humanity in Amanda throughout the first season and the second that I really think the character would have needed if the show was going to work, and in that sense Sohn is perfectly cast.

Faith Mitchell is played exceptionally by Ianthe Richardson and while her character is African-American in the series, every other aspect of her is the same. Will did end her mother’s thirty year career because of a corruption scandal and she was very reluctantly paired with him. Faith is diabetic and Will was one of the first people she confided in. Faith also had a child when she was only fourteen and both her mother and Amanda went out of their way to make sure she’s had next to no interaction with the boy’s father ever since. Faith has had a problematic relationship with her mother, but there have been signs it has been improving over the last few episodes. At this point in the series Faith and Will have a real rhythm that is more than earned.

Perhaps the biggest deviation has been the character of Michael Ormewood. If you are familiar with the novels you know all too well that Ormewood is the villain of the very first novel and doesn’t survive it. The decision to make him a foil of Will rather than a heavy has been one that has been slowly paying off as the series progressed. Jake McLaughlin has been doing a solid job as he has been an Atlanta detective with family issues. (At one point he had an affair with Angie, and its clear that there have been many. One of the nicer stories has been the parallel of Angie and Ormewood’s partnership with that of Will and Faith’s. He was a critical part of the Season 1 finale and McLaughlin’s work has been a service.

The second critical change has been that of Angie Polaski. As in the novel Angie is an Atlanta detective who was in many of the same foster homes as Will. They have been on and off throughout their whole life and they can’t decide whether they are good for each other or bad for each other. In the novels, there’s no question as to that: Angie is poisonous to Will. The books tell us that she has been abusive, refusing to ever offer comfort, calling him an idiot and a loser, utterly horrible to be around. The two are married in the books but it is more out of a dare than love: Angie is an agent of chaos. She is also barely capable of functioning as a cop. She has been using drugs and alcohol for as long Will knows her, has been having multiple affairs with people of both genders, and has committed countless illegal acts.

This is a polar difference from the version we see played by Erika Christensen (like Sohn, also nominated for an Astra). Angie has been sober for more than a year when we first meet her and her relationship with Will, while not healthy, is also not toxic. Angie also has been able to turn to Ormewood to deal with her demons and has a support system she clearly didn’t in the novels. That does not mean she isn’t capable of spiraling – late last season, a former foster father who had molested and impregnated her at fourteen, resurfaced and she spent much of the second half of the season, alternating between helping the new family he found and planning to kill him. That led to her ultimately being suspending from the force and at the climax of last season, abducted and nearly killed by James Ulster.

Now that I’ve brought you up to date on the difference, it’s time to deal with Season 2. Will has spent the first two episode, dealing but not really dealing with the trauma of last season. He has been learning Spanish in a way to be closer with his birth mother but he’s also had to deal with the fact that Ulster has been stalking him from prison. We learn that he has spending much of the last few months receiving lavish gifts from Ulster which he has been disposing off. The trauma is still haunting him in a way we haven’t seen before.

Angie has spent the last several months going through physical therapy. She and Will have not been together since then (the first time we see her, she’s having sex with her doctor – and using the opportunity to coerce him into signing her physical report) something they are both aware of. They haven’t spent a lot of time together in the first two episodes; Angie’s trying to put her own life back together. In the second episode, she was a sponsor of a teenage boy and spent much of the episode trying to get that kid out of his house. But she also encountered Crystal, the teenage girl she tried to ‘rescue’ from her foster father and who ended up killing him. I have a feeling this is going to be an issue going forward.

The first major investigation that made up the series involved a series of car bombing and a blackmail scheme that operated out of an Atlanta prison. The first episode had some superb moments as Will and Faith tracked down one of the targets, played with superb humor by that brilliant character actor Clark Gregg as he spent the episode trying to deny that there was anything that had gone wrong. Will also spent much of the episode in a flirtation with an explosives expert played wonderfully by Susan Kelechi Watson. When she managed to defuse a bomb Will told her: “I want to have dinner with you then go home and have sexual intercourse” with an enthusiasm we hadn’t seen in a while. But in keeping with how TV works, she died sacrificing herself from another bomb at the end of the first episode in front of Will’s eyes.

This led Will, still bearing the scars from the explosion, to go into the maximum security prison to find the men behind the bombing. When told by Amanda no one would talk to him, he said he knew someone who was dying to – and the season premier ended with him face to face with Ulster.

The second episode was far darker. Will spent the start of the episode using Ulster to get intelligence on the bomber – and when that led to him getting a beat down, he watched over a close-circuit feed for quite a few minutes before saying that should intervene. The smile on his face was not one we liked. As the investigation continued Will eventually found himself trapped in a cell with Ulster, answering questions he did not want to, clearly using every impulse he had not to snap his neck. The episode ended with Will tracking down the mastermind – and Ulster killing him in front of his eyes. “I killed for you,” he told Will proudly. I have a sinking feeling this is far from the end of it, and not just because Ulster is a prominent character for several of Slaughter’s novels.

Ormewood has spent the first two episodes dealing with his wife having an affair and the fact that his family may not love him. During the first episode Ormewood had a fight with his teenage son and ran through the Atlanta station that might soon blow up hoping the find him. He also spent much of last night’s episode helping his son with a science project and showing a familial warmth that the novels would never show. It’s not clear the fate of his marriage (that’s completely off-canon) but it’s a credit to the writers of the series that we care about this as much as anything that Will and Angie are dealing with.

There’s also the fact that Faith has hooked up with a reporter during the last few months and the two have been getting close. If you know the novels, you know that at some point Faith is going to get pregnant again. Amanda has spent the last two episodes with more of a human touch, in the last episode helping Angie rescue her sponsor. As always Amanda denied that she was doing it for anything other than selfish purposes.

If you’ve never read a single Karin Slaughter novel, you will absolutely love the series. If you have read every single Will Trent novel (another one came out this past year) I think you might be able to love the series despite all the differences. It is possible that the version we are getting is in part due to the fact it is on ABC and not cable or streaming. Had the novels been adapted for, say, Netflix or Showtime, we might get a version that is far closer to the original. There are TV version of mystery adaptations that follow this: Bosch from the Michael Connelly series that has been a staple of Amazon almost since it got into original programming or Dark Winds, which are a faithful version of Tony Hillerman’s novels. Considering the high quality of both series, it’s easy to imagine that a Will Trent series might follow a similar version: spend an entire season on a single novel and be closer to it in characters and personalities that what the ABC version is.

But honestly, it’s hard to imagine that potential cable or streaming version being anywhere near the caliber of the one ABC has produced. And just as honestly,  this Will Trent is the kind of series that network TV – and in fact all TV – needs more of going forward. There’s an elegance to every aspect of the series – from writing, directing and acting – to all of the technical aspects (by now the viewer loves waiting to see how the title will appear on screen). And Will Trent has a humanity and layers to its characters that far too many of the current crop of ‘appointment TV’ (I’m thinking of Euphoria and The Morning Show in particular) don’t even pretend to have for either its characters or the viewers. You connect with the characters in Will Trent in a way that is absent from too much of the best television these days and that’s a quality I cling too.

Can Will Trent break into the Emmys this year? That may not be impossible considering that much of the 2024 nominations for Drama will be dealing with the ramifications from the strike. With Succession gone, The Last of Us and Yellowjackets not due back until 2025 and House of the Dragon not coming back until the summer, there will be a lot of gaps to fill in the drama category this year. Will Trent certainly has the capability to do it and a high caliber list of performers who could. I hope that when it comes to recognizing quality, the Emmys can be as observant of this show as the title character is of practically everything around him.

My score: 5 stars.

Yesterday Cris Panullo Became The Latest in A Long Line Of Upsets In The Tournament of Champions

 

In my more than thirty years of watching Jeopardy, I have watched nearly as many Tournaments of Champions. And one of the things you learn after enough time has passed is that how any of these champions did in their original appearance will have nothing to do with how well they’d do in the Tournament.

During the era when the limit was five wins and the dollar figures ran from $100 to $500 in the Jeopardy round, it was somewhat easier to expect the unexpected. That didn’t make it any more shocking when it happened. One of my earliest memories of a major upset in a Tournament of Champions came in the semi-finals of the 1994 Tournament when Steve Chernicoff and John Cuthbertson, who’d each won over $82,000 in five games were defeated by College Champion Jeff Stewart in Final Jeopardy. That tournament was eventually won by Rachael Schwartz, the first female to win a Tournament of champions. Of the three female players who qualified, she had by far won the least amount of money, so I’m pretty sure that anyone who thought a woman would win the TOC that year, Rachael would have been third on the list.

There were similar upsets over the next several years, albeit none quite as striking. The one that had the greatest context was in 2001 when Doug Lach, who’d won $85,400 in five games – one of the highest five game totals to that point - was absolutely demolished in his quarterfinal appearance by a 23 year old recent college graduate named Brad Rutter, whose $55,102 in five games was one of the lowest totals of any of the participants in that year’s Tournament. Anyone who told you, even after he won the TOC in 2001, that they thought he was going to win more money in Jeopardy history back then, would have been lying through his teeth. I certainly didn’t think so.

When the dollar figures were doubled and the five game limit lifted, if anything, it became harder to predict how was going to win a Tournament of Champions.  This was made clear in the first Tournament of Champions in the post Ken Jennings era when David Madden won 19 games and just under half a million dollars, both of which would be the second to Jennings for more than a decade. I remember thinking that the 2006 Tournament of Champions was an exercise and that David Madden would waltz to the $250,000 grand prize. Instead, he didn’t even make it to the finals where he was beaten – flattened is really more accurate – by Bill MacDonald, who’d won four games and $75,399 the past November.

Over the last ten years, even  as we have seen the slow but steady rise in the number of super-champions, we have seen this play out time and again. Arthur Chu, who won eleven games and Julia Collins, who had managed to win 20 in the spring and summer of 2014, respectively, did both make it to the finals of the 2014 Tournament of Champions. Both, however, ended up losing to Ben Ingram who back in 2013 had ‘only’ won eight games and ‘merely’ $176, 413.

The following September Matt Jackson began to put together a run that reminded many of Jennings when he won 13 games and $411,612. He got to the finals that year – and was absolutely destroyed by Alex Jacob, who’d only won six games and just under $150,000 (albeit in a similarly destructive fashion.)

Two years later, the 2017 Tournament of Champions featured a pair of 12 game winners Seth Wilson who’d won $265,000 and the more dynamic Austin Rogers who’d won $411,000. Admittedly the field of competition that year had some of the most impressive champions in a very long time, and few could argue that Buzzy Cohen, who ended up the ultimate winner, was not a similarly impressive player.

In the first Tournament of Champions in the post Alex Trebek era in 2021, many thought that Jason Zuffranieri, who had managed to win 19 games and more than $500,000 in the midst of what would be the last two full seasons of Trebek, would waltz to the finals. He only qualified for the semi-finals via a wild card and in his semi-final match was defeated by Jennifer Quail, who’d won eight games and just over $228,000.

So you’d think by this point in my history of watching Tournaments of Champions I would be prepared for these kinds of upsets. The thing is, no matter how many times it happens, no matter how much you know about Jeopardy, you still go in to every tournament with a narrative that the biggest winners are going to dominate. Like all of you who watched in 2022, I was certain we were going to see Matt Amodio, Amy Schneider and Mattea Roach face off in the finals. The idea that any of them would lose in their semi-final match – and in the case of Mattea be flattened by an opponent – was unthinkable. Yet that is what happened to Matt in the case of Sam Buttrey and Mattea in the case of Andrew He. (Though considering how last year’s Masters Tournament played out, both of them got revenge on the players who’d beaten them.)

Similarly I was sure that last night Cris Panullo – who in the fall of 2022 had won 21 games and just under $750,000 – was going to dance all over his two fellow champions Ben Goldstein and Jared Watson. I might have been willing to give shorter odds had he been facing Ray LaLonde or Stephen Webb, but a five game player who hadn’t cracked the $50,000 mark or a three game winner who I had dismissed just last week? Not a chance. It was in the bag. I had every reason to keep thinking this in the first half of the Jeopardy round as Cris built up an early lead. I kept thinking until Jared managed to get to the Daily Double near the end of the round. At the time Jared had half Cris’ total so he bet everything he had in a $400 clue in ALL THINGS DISNEY:

“At Walt Disney World in 1975, Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper and Jim Irwin attended the grand opening of this ride.” Jared knew it was Space Mountain and the game was tied. It was still tied at the end of the round: Jared and Cris had $8800 apiece. A temporary condition, I thought.

I was right on that. Absolutely wrong as to how it would play out. Cris couldn’t even manage to ring in until the twelfth clue of Double Jeopardy. By that point Jared had found both Daily Doubles. The first was in WORLD CITIES:

“Fittingly, this capital is the Yukon headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mountain Police.” Jared somehow knew it was Whitehorse and gained $6000. Two clues later he found the other in ALLOYS: “This 7-letter word for an alloy used in dentistry is also used to mean any combination of 2 or more substances.” He knew it was an amalgam and gained another $5000. By that point Jared had $27,000 and there was no possibility that Cris could close the gap even had he been at peak condition.

For the record after his return, he wasn’t. He managed to give 22 correct responses to Jared’s 21. But Cris also gave a whopping five incorrect answers where as Jared didn’t make a single mistake. In all the games watching him, I don’t remember him making this many errors, even in the game he eventually lost. The end result was that by the end of Double Jeopardy Cris Panullo had been flattened in a way I’d never seen. He had just $14,000 to Jared’s $32,000.

And as a further sign of how much he had lapsed, he also got Final Jeopardy wrong. The category was ART HISTORY: “The Royal Academy of Arts has this man’s ‘La Fornarina’ & in the 1800s the RAA’s love of him made some artists retreat to an earlier style.” Cris thought it was Botticelli, which was wrong. Jared knew the correct response: “Who is Raphael?” (the pre-Raphaelites)

What happened, I imagine millions of Jeopardy fans are asking? Was it simply a level of fatigue due to having been absent from the show for more than a year? Jared did win his 3 games comparatively recently (the summer of 2023) but Ben’s five wins game two weeks after and he played horribly in comparison to Cris.

The answer is…there is no answer. Cris has merely fallen victim to the same rule of every Tournament of Champions since they began; that trying to handicap them based on their previous performance is a fool’s errand. It played out to a similar extent in the previous tournament even before we got to the semi-finals. Not only did Jonathan Fisher, who had managed to win eleven games (and had defeated Matt Amodio to begin his streak) end up losing in Final Jeopardy to none other than Andrew He, but in the previous quarterfinal match Ryan Long, who had managed to win 16 games that year could never truly get started against Megan Wachspress or Maureen O’Neill. He ended up getting into the red early in the Jeopardy round, was in third by the end of it, and never managed to get going. He was essentially out of it by the end of Double Jeopardy.

The fact of the matter is that even the best Jeopardy champions will one day have a mediocre day or run into a player who is significantly better than them. Frequently that will happen in the Tournament of Champions when the best of the best are all assembled. No one manages to qualify for a Tournament of Champions because they are a terrible player. (Well, you know that I think the Second Chance Tournament may be damaging that concept but the recent play of Juveria Zaheer is causing me to rethink even that.) Is it difficult to believe that Cris, who as he told us was an alternate for the first Masters Tournament, would end up meeting his demise this early in the Tournament of Champions? Perhaps, but no less unbelievable than what has happened to David Madden and Jason Zuffranieri in earlier Tournaments and Mattea Roach and Matt Amodio in the one just past.

Like with all sporting events, every Jeopardy champions knows that somewhere out there is a player who will end their streak. Even Brad Rutter, who for eighteen years was the only undefeated player in Jeopardy history, had moments in his career where there were players (some of whom I’ve even listed above) nearly unseated him before he finally met his demise at the hands of both Ken Jennings and James Holzhauer. That is equally true in the Tournament of Champions as was proven just last night and will no doubt be proven a few times more even before we get to the semi-finals. I’ll give a full report on that when the first round ends next Wednesday but we should be prepared for the fact that we can’t be prepared for things to go as planned.

Justin Hartley Returns To TV In Tracker

 

Before we were deluged with superhero movies, even before the Arrow-verse began, Justin Hartley was Oliver Queen. He debuted on the sixth season of Smallville, which was about to move from the introductory phase of the life of Clark Kent into a more advanced version of the world of DC, something that either immensely improved or ruined the show, depending on who you ask.

What I do know is was that in many ways Hartley was a brilliant Green Arrow, less troubled and more congenial then the version Stephen Amell would make his own, a contrast to Lex Luthor who in this show had been an old friend of his growing up. Even at that age Hartley had the good looks and leading man status that he’s always had, and there were supposedly plans for a Green Arrow spin-off that never came to fruition. Instead he was one of the few stalwarts during the final three seasons of the show.\

After Smallville ended, Hartley spent the next five years with semi-regular roles either in series that failed (Emily Owens, M.D.) or in later seasons of shows that were on the decline (Revenge). He spent a couple of years on The Young and the Restless and then landing the role of the lifetime as Kevin in the classic This is Us. Hartley was, unfortunately, one of the only actors in the series to never get an Emmy nomination for his work (though the Critics Choice Award nominated him four consecutive years, so go us) but his work was at the level of Sterling Brown and Chrissy Metz, his siblings. Struggling with his career, dealing with alcoholism, a constant string of failed relationship and the most complicate relationship of all with Randall, Hartley had demons in a way his fellow siblings did but that they often never realized and that his mother never seemed to get.

Now a full year after This is Us came to an end; his co-stars have been moving on to other projects. Brown has been working more in movies (he has been recently nominated for Best Supporting Actor for American Fiction); Milo Ventimiglia had a moment of brilliance in the gone-too-soon The Company You Keep and now Hartley has finally been cast in the lead in Tracker, one of the few new broadcast series that will likely air in what remains of the 2024 season. CBS has been willing to put its weight behind it in a way that most networks don’t: it aired after this year’s Super Bowl, the first time in decades a network has been willing to debut an untested project rather than a favored series. (How many people stayed up to watch it after the series went into overtime is an open question.) CBS is known for formula shows and I have little doubt that many would consider it just some variation on it. Still, having watched three episodes I can say it has more than its merit.

Much of this comes from the presence of Hartley, who in a sense is tweaking the persona of his Oliver Queen – and possibly the kind of character Kevin Pearson would play – enough in the character of Colter Shaw. Colter calls himself a ‘rewardist’  (he is told repeatedly that’s not a thing, something he keeps saying is). Colter lives out of a trailer in the West – the first few episodes have seen him in Colorado, Idaho and Montana – and his job is tracking down missing persons who disappear and claiming the reward that’s offer. He is not exactly a bounty hunter, but he has the same level of willingness to bend the law to the point where it might snap in order to help the missing people.

Colter has a firm grip on how things work to a statistical science, something he has no trouble using to comfort people in their moments of trauma and try to talk people with guns from using on him. He also has the ability to handle himself in a fight, which he does to defend himself  - or causes depending on how you look at it. He is aided in his work with his partners’/ surrogate big sisters a lesbian couple played by Robin Weigert and Abby Mcenany, neither of whom are stretching the kind of characters they play that much. Colter is also aided. He has a tech expert Bob Exley (Eric Graise) and his frenemy Rennie Green, an attorney who once shared his bed and now thinks he’s a piece of detritus. Colter has the great ability to get women to sleep with him on a moment’s notice, but he also doesn’t form attachments easily – which makes sense when you learn how he grew up.

During his childhood, his father (Lee Tergesen in flashbacks) went a little crazy and took their family off the grid. He basically raised them in the wilderness but was also bipolar convinced people were out to get them. One day when his mother was late coming home, his father was trying to get them to leave without her and both he and his elder brother ran off. By now Colter, who was the best student of the siblings, tracked them down – and found his father dead, and his brother running away. They haven’t spoken in twenty years.

Going through the episodes is the fact that his brother has spent the last three episodes calling him. He went to see his mother in the pilot and asked him if there was something he needed to know about what happened that night. His mother told him just to block the number. His brother has been calling Rennie recently and he gave the same instructions. In the second episode, it seems very clear that someone visited the family home but his mother chose to say she got nervous. What exactly is going on is not clear, but I hope that this is not yet another fine procedural that gets bogged down in an underlying mythology. (Then again Tracker is based on Jeffery Deaver’s The Never Game so there is a very real chance that this backstory may be part of the canon.)

The more Hartley ages, the better a performer he becomes. There’s a tough façade that he shows the rest of the world as well as many of the people who try to stop him. However when it comes to the people he tries to save, he shows warmth and compassion along with his honesty. His mindset is statistical and he is a realist. In last night’s episode when a woman told him that her sister had been missing for more than fifteen months, he told her it was almost certain she was dead. The woman told him she’d made peace with that but she wanted to know for sure. Halfway through the episode when they found her sister’s van, Colter kept trying to talk her out of coming, but she insisted.

Colter has an ability, almost superhuman, to know when he is being lied to. Sometimes, he’s direct about it – like in the pilot, when after talking to a missing teenager’s family, he asked his mother why he was lying to her – but most times he keeps it in check. He doesn’t pretend to be the smartest guy in the room or the strongest; but he is determined to do his job. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Tracker is set in what used to be the frontier; it’s not much of a stretch to see Colter Shaw as some version of Shane or Paladin, only in his case, he does not bring about death but tries to save lives before moving on to the next small town. In that sense, Tracker is a formula but it’s closer to a modern western that a crime drama.

I won’t go out of my way to say that Tracker is as earth shattering as Found or as genre-breaking as So Help Me Todd. But as entertainment goes, it’s more than solid. How much of a future it will have is an open question – it’s airing on Sunday nights against American Idol – but it is on a network that’s in better shape than ABC was when The Company You Keep died. It’s entertaining and I’m glad to see Hartley finally got the leading man role he’s deserved for twenty years. When will Christy Metz grace us with her presence?

My score: 3.5 stars.

1900th Post: How Aaron Sorkin and Adam McKay's Movies Show How Each Views The World - And Why McKay's Movies Are Less Entertaining

 

There are some things that you can’t get out of your head even years after the fact. For nearly three and a half years, I’ve been trying to understand a remark that Adam McKay made in a New York Times Magazine Article three years ago in which he was being ‘interviewed’ in regard to his film making and politics. (Interview is a loose term; McKay interrupted him more than once.) When asked to discuss his politics McKay said something I’ve never been able to get out of my head. He claimed that if he had an equivalent on the right in Hollywood, it was Aaron Sorkin.

My head all but exploded. Aaron Sorkin? The man whose West Wing was at the time and twenty years later still considered by the right as prove of the leftist messaging of Hollywood? The writer whose follow-up show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was essentially a political harangue on Hollywood in a post-9/11 world which occasionally had to do with the making of a sketch comedy show? The man who had the first season finale of The Newsroom climax with Jeff Daniels’ character, while claiming he was not ashamed to be a Republican, referring to the Tea Party as ‘The American Taliban?” That Aaron Sorkin has been a closet conservative all this time?

I actually wrote an article about this back in 2021 dealing with Sorkin’s movies and McKay’s as a comparison trying to understand if there was something going on that I didn’t see. That served as a reason as to why Sorkin’s movies were more entertaining than McKay’s but it still didn’t make it clear how any rational person could reach that conclusion.

Now, having spent three years and far too much time among the leftists in this country, I think I finally understand how McKay could say something like that and genuinely believe it. It has nothing to do with Sorkin’s films or even his politics but the way that leftists see the world.

As I think I’ve made clear throughout my articles on both Sorkin’s movies and several pieces on The West Wing, Sorkin’s politics are clearly Democratic but throughout his TV shows he has never gone out of his way to antagonize or dehumanize Republicans or the people who vote for them. That was probably enough for McKay to consider him conservative right there. But Sorkin’s TV shows and many of his movies are stories about having faith in institutions and that if people work together towards a common goal,  you can win out. This is idealism which leftists think is irrational.

  In movies like A Few Good Men and Molly’s Game, Sorkin tells the story of defendants who are being railroaded by an unjust government but with the work of their counsels they manage to prevail against impossible odds. This is anathema as to how leftists see the world, in which if good triumphs over evil it must be a mistake or not a real triumph. You’d think given his stories of The Social Network and Steve Jobs some on the left might at least consider he can see the malevolence in Silicon Valley but as we all know he tried to make these men human beings and that’s too much.

And all of Sorkin’s characters are literate, intelligent, well-spoken and entertaining because of how clever they sound. If you have watched McKay’s movies with Will Ferrell, you know the common theme: from Ron Burgundy to Ricky Bobby, the characters played by Ferrell and John C. Reilly are charitably speaking morons and proud of their stupidity. In The Campaign, he tells a political satire of a campaign for a House Seat in the South where everybody from the idealistic Zach Galifianakis to the people running the campaign are ridiculously, incredibly stupid and proud of it. McKay’s comedies are popular because of how brainless the characters are. That should tell you a lot about his approach to people and it’s pretty prevalent in the left.

I think if we can compare McKay’s more ‘serious’ movies with a similar Sorkin film you can see just how both men view the world. Both men adapted a Michael Lewis best seller, books that most considered unfilmable and turned them into movies that received Best Picture nominations. But while McKay won an Oscar for his adaptation of The Big Short, I am still inclined to find Sorkin’s Moneyball the superior entertainment, even though Sorkin lost to The Descendants.

With Moneyball Sorkin tells what should be an impossible subject – how Billy Beane used sabermetrics to help the A’s contend – and turns it into a funny and gripping film. He does so by creating composites of characters to a fictionalized version to make a point,  makes the film about Beane rather than the A’s and goes out of his way to build to a climax, even though Beane’s character never succeeds at his goal.

By contrast The Big Short never makes you forget you are watching a movie. McKay constantly has his characters breaking the fourth wall, lecturing to his audiences rather than telling them what is happening through subtext and goes out of his way to make sure that even the people we are rooting for are essentially profiting off a financial disaster. While I grant you Big Short deals with a far darker subject than Moneyball, it is conditional of McKay’s approach to filmmaking. In his comedies, he thought the subjects were stupid. In The Big Short, he assumes his audience is.

One could draw a parallel, albeit a less exact one, between McKay’s next film Vice and Charlie’s Wilson War. In the latter film Sorkin decides to tell the story that goes against the nature of the conservative narrative that Reagan won the Cold War by arguing that it was actually done by a Texas Congressman, a CIA operative and a Republican fundraiser. In this film Avrakotos, the CIA man has a very low opinion of the fundraiser and only a negligible one of Wilson. He considers Julia Roberts’ character a dilettante but he knows there’s a larger goal. And the movie makes it very clear, very subtly, that Avrakotos knew that this is a long game and that despite Wilson’s best efforts, our government refused to play it. We are living in the aftermath of that.

Vice by contrast is essentially everything that is a part of the leftist’s repudiation of the Republican party during Dick Cheney’s tenure in it. It goes out of its way to make Rumsfeld and W. look life buffoons and Cheney look like a man climbing the rungs of power. It does so with the same methods that The Big Short did but they are less subtle, if possible. At one point Dick and Liz Cheney talk to each other in Shakespearean blank verse. There are false endings to show to make us think were watching a different kind of film when we know we’re not.  By the time McKay gets to W’s administration, the viewer has already been convinced that Cheney is a monster. The creation of ISIS basically unfolds almost as an afterthought. In McKay’s mind I have little doubt Charlie Wilson was just a tool as part of the American war machine.

Then we get to Don’t Look Up. By the time this movie came out Aaron Sorkin had already been nominated for writing The Trial of the Chicago 7. I don’t need to remind you that the Chicago 7 themselves featured some of the most famous leftists of their era, among them Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden and Jerry Rubin, along with the infamous Black Panther Bobby Seale. These men were very deliberate in how they felt that their trial was a mockery to justice and went out of their way to make it a circus. One of Sorkin’s own line says as much:

Judge: “Are you familiar with contempt of court?”

Abbie Hoffman: “It’s practically a religion for me.”

Hoffman says the government has contempt for him and he says he’s on trial for his faults. He says that his bringing ideas across state lines has gotten him punished. These are the ideas that leftists love to berate. It’s hard for anyone to hear some of the dialogue Sorkin has his characters say and still consider him a conservative. He makes it clear of the rage that Bobby Seale justifiably has towards white America and some of the 7.

I think the reason that McKay can hear this and still consider Sorkin conservative is that these days, those on the left consider the Chicago 7 sellouts. After all, Hayden became a Congressman and that’s the worst thing to a leftist. Plus he has Sorkin give this exchange between William Kunstler and Hoffman:

Kunstler: How do you overthrow or dismember, as you say, your government peacefully?

Hoffman: in this country, we do it every four years.

To say something in favor of the peaceful democratic process is anathema to the left who either believe that democracy is a fraud or that both parties are fundamentally the same.

I have written many columns in this blog referring to doomporn but Don’t Look Up (which I admit I have not seen) actually seems like the first ever cinematic equivalent of it. McKay uses the story of two astronomers discovering that an asteroid is coming to destroy Earth to tell a ‘satiric’ tale of how if this were to happen, the media, the corporations, the politicians and the internet would make sure that the world did nothing to stop it. Ostensibly this is supposed to be a metaphor for climate change but this film is too over the top for any metaphors to be expressed.

McKay goes out of his way to show that every single character in his film – except the scientists – are too stupid, self-involved, or corrupt to do anything to solve the problem. The scientists are idiots because they naively think that the world will galvanize to save themselves which is another form of contempt. The movie ends with the asteroid destroying the Earth, all of the rich and powerful people escaping to another planet – and once they get there, all of them are quickly devoured by aliens. Most films about the apocalypse actually have some tenor of regret or sadness at the end. Don’t Look Up takes the approach that it might actually be a good idea. I have sensed a similar vein of contempt in the future in basically ninety to ninety-five percent of articles written by the left. I have a feeling Don’t Look Up was made for them alone.

The reason that McKay can say with no real irony that Sorkin is a conservative filmmaker is the same reason that some leftists say that there is no difference between both political parties. Sorkin believes in institutions, the free-flowing exchange of ideas and that there are some good and smart people out there who can solve problems. In the minds of the left, his movies are no doubt just propaganda for ‘the man’ because they don’t lecture the audience, consider all people who don’t think like them beneath them, and believe we’re all doomed no matter what we do. I imagine McKay thinks those are his people.

McKay was able to start making ‘serious’ movies because he built his career on making ‘brainless’ comedies about idiots. His serious movies show that he seems to view all his viewers – and humanity in general – the same way. Perhaps this is why I always prefer Sorkin’s work to McKay’s. For all the heavy handedness of his subjects, he never tried to insult his audience’s intelligence. His films all have a brain. McKay’s assumes that no one does. Sadly, that explains a lot about the latter’s ideology too.

Constant Reader Valentine's Day 2024 Bonus: The Last Girls Standing By Jennifer Dugan

 

Note: I am aware that my entry for February was just last week. However, at the time I was in the midst of reading this book as well and had I not finished Wilder first, this book would certainly have been listed. As you’ll see the book I’m about to review lists many of the larger themes that have been part of many of previous reviews – and does have a love story at its center. So for that reason, I’m breaking my own rule.

 

Throughout my reading of The Last Girls Standing, I couldn’t help but think that Sloan Allison, the protagonist at the center of the story, might have been best served in she had been able to avail herself of the services of Mulder and Scully. After all, the overarching action involves the ritualistic slaughter of eight people by a cult that considers themselves eco-terrorists and commits suicide after their crimes. This is the kind of thing the FBI investigates and has elements that are pertinent to the X-Files.

I can see that if Sloan went to see them, Scully would be all too aware  - because it’s obvious to everyone in the book – that Sloan is understandably suffering from massive amounts of both PTSD and survivor’s guilt and that this kind of trauma can lead to the paranoid beliefs she has almost from the start. Mulder would naturally suspect this as well, but he would do her the courtesy of a further investigation before telling her that there are no connections.

If Sloan went out of her way to point out the ‘connections’ she sees, Mulder and Scully would no doubt be gentle and tell them that some of the scariest cases they ever investigated seemed to involve paranoid conspiracies but at their cores involved just ordinary people. Scully would tell them how she had been certain that an ordinary death fetishist appeared to her as a monster when he was just an ordinary man. Mulder would tell her how he can be called in by his former profiler to tell them that there was a possible a supernatural being was committed murders when in fact his old mentor had spent so much time in the killer’s head that he could not get out of it and became a killer himself. Scully (not Mulder) would tell her that she once went on a date with a man who believed his tattoo was telling him to kill people when in fact it was just his built in psychosis. And both would say that there are things that go bump in the night out there, but in this case the people who killed eight counselors and left only Sloan and Cherry alive were just crazy people who had lost their way. They would conclude by telling Sloan the best thing she could do for herself was find a way to move forward and try to get help from the people who loved her and supported her.

If you look at the cover and book jacket of Last Girls Standing, you would assume that what you are about to get is some kind of horror novel. Sloan and Cherry have been bonded by their trauma and that Sloan is learning that there is a chance the teenage girl she had fallen in love with is part of the cult that killed her. I don’t know if Jennifer Dugan, who is a writer of lesbian love stories, made this decision deliberately or whether it was a decision of her publisher to lead the reader to think that’s what we were getting. It’s certainly what I assumed when I began to read this novel. But as it unfolded, I realized that Dugan was doing a trick that The X-Files sometimes did to great power – have a story with the atmosphere of supernatural trappings with a great conspiracy to reveal at the center something more banal and painfully, ridiculously simple. The result is a story that is more frightening than any conspiracy theory could ever be because it is one of the stories I’ve ever read of a descent into madness.

When the novel begins it has been months since the tragedy but Sloan is still there. Her parents (mostly her mother) have spent an infinite amount of time and patience trying to get their daughter to find a way to move forward. Sloan has refused. She has not agreed to go to any kind of therapy that has been suggested to her. She has only agreed to see someone who isn’t a therapist but rather part of regression hypnosis. She has stopped seeing all of her friends from before the killings. She has ‘deferred’ going to NYU for one year, but as we see in a sad scene halfway through the novel Sloan clearly has no intention of ever going to college. She hasn’t tried to get a job. She barely interacts with her parents. The only person she has any relationship with at all is Cherry, the other survivor of the massacre.

No one is happy with the relationship. Sloan’s parents believe that it is holding her back from moving forward with her life. They’re right, to be clear. What they don’t get is that is a toxic and one-sided relationship – for Cherry. Sloan has not been able to remember what happened to her after a certain point in the massacre but Cherry has. Sloan has been making Cherry tell her this story over and over. Most of their interactions when we meet them in the novel involve Cherry picking Sloan up from therapy which is the only part of the session Sloan looks forward to. They have spent weeks and months googling the crime and putting it on the wall of Cherry’s room as part of a collage. The two of them treat it as a game which at the end they get to make out. Cherry has also been doing a lot of things to help Sloan – she has been making flower arrangements for all the funerals they’ve gone too, she made a story up about one of the counselors to make him the hero, even though it’s clearly something that bothered her. Sloan has been sleeping at Cherry’s house because it’s the only time she can sleep at all. As the novel progresses, it’s increasingly clear how much wear this has been putting on Cherry, but she is doing this because she loves Sloan and wants to help her.

The problem is that Sloan has gotten to the point that she doesn’t want help, not really. There are numerous occasions throughout the novel that Sloan makes it clear she wished she had been killed to, which is sad but not uncommon. The old Sloan Allison effectively was killed along with everyone who actually got murdered, something she’s willing to acknowledge. The problem is there is no sign that Sloan has any interest in trying to move forward. She has fixated on the idea of the missing time because she thinks that if she remembers what happened to her, she can move on. But as the novel progresses, it increasingly becomes clear that’s just an excuse to stop her from doing anything to get better.

In the scenes with Sloan’s mother, Sloan sees how much damage she has done basically wearing her down to a nub. By this point only one of her friends from ‘before’ is still reaching out to her because she’s been shutting them out. Sloan has no interest in any part of her old life. She only cares about Cherry and that is clearly because of her connection to what happened. When Cherry increasingly tries to get her to move forward, and when she begins to take steps to get past the horrors, Sloan takes this as a betrayal even though there is never a moment in the entire novel where Cherry is anything but supportive of Sloan.

And the thing is Sloan knows it, but she doesn’t have the capacity to move forward. So she does what far too many people do in the aftermath of a tragedy: they go down a rabbit hole. In this case, it’s more literal. Sloan finds a box in Cherry’s home that has a rabbit carved on it. Cherry doesn’t want to share it with her. This starts a splinter in Sloan’s mind. When the lone survivor of the murders – “The Fox’ as they have nicknamed him – takes a plea, his sister reaches out. Sloan is convinced that she knows something about what happened. Cherry tells her nothing good can come from this. Under the guise of reconnecting Sloane convinces one of her friend Connor to drive her to an out of the way meeting place, something he clearly does not want to do.

Sloan meets with this woman who tells her about her younger brother and how he got involved with the group that called itself Morte Hominus and a man named Marco. It’s clear that his sister doesn’t believe any part of their rituals and thinks they were lunatics. But when Sloan learns that the leader of the cult called himself The Rabbit, Sloan goes catatonic and is now convinced that Cherry’s mother is part of the cult. Connor is horrified by her reaction – and even more horrified when she tells him that even if Cherry is part of the cult, that isn’t a reason to end the relationship.

Sloan begins to read a book which is Morte Hominus’ Bible. The moment she sees the first page she passes out. Cherry tries to convince her to leave the book alone and she agrees – but then notices pages are torn out.

By this point in the book Sloan is almost certainly beyond help. The final straw comes when Sloan learns that ‘The Fox’ has been reaching out to the survivors’, something everyone has gone out of their way to avoid mentioning to her. Sloan wants to accept his invitation. Not for closure or any kind of therapy. She wants to know if Cherry was part of the cult and she was left alive for a reason. When you are so far gone that you think that the person who killed eight people and utterly destroyed your life has anything constructive to say to you, there may be no way back.

As the novel continues Sloan’s mind has clearly fractured to the point that even when reality violates the narrative she has built for herself, she keeps trying to twist it to mean something that isn’t. She keeps acknowledging even to herself how gossamer thin the strands she’s weaving are for this conspiracy. The thing is, the longer the novel goes on, it’s clear that Sloan just can’t do it:

“She would come to terms with the fact she wasn’t special…That she survived a mass murder because of a random roll of the dice. That it could just have easily been (one of the other counselors sitting her with Cherry.”

But each time she refuses to turn away. Sloan is constantly being offered help throughout the novel. The last time her therapist sees her she tells her: “I can only help you if you want to be helped?” When Sloan says she does, the therapist asks: “Are you sure about that?” And by this point we know she doesn’t.

In the final act of the novel, Sloan is alone in her home going to see the Fox. Her mother is working early and staying late. Her father is constantly taking their brother to see friends.

“Sloan understood what they were really doing.

They were running. Running away from the monster in their house, the memory of what was lost. The shell of what remained. They ran from Sloan…and now Cherry was running too.

It was fine, Sloane thought, it was fine.”

The prison the Fox is being held in is in the town where the camp where the murders took place in. We understand going in just how horrible this must be for Cherry and how much she must love Sloan to be willing to do this for her. When they arrive at the prison, Cherry is clearly horrified just being there and Sloan is so detached she almost thinks of it as ‘disappointing’

I won’t reveal the ending of the novel, though at this point you might well be able to figure it out for yourself given Sloane’s degeneration to this point. There are certain elements that do fit the model of the horror film but the only monster still around is the one that made herself. In perhaps the most twisted way imaginable, you might even consider the final pages a happy ending. I have little doubt Sloan does.

The ending its worth noting would not be out of place on an episode of The X-Files – or Criminal Minds or Law and Order or any of so many procedurals we’ve become familiar with over the years. That said I am reminded of the conclusion of so many episodes of The X-Files over the years: the final bloody conclusion of a case and either Mulder or Scully in a detached fashion, narrating their final case notes to the viewer. They would be able to make sense out of what happened at the end of The Last Girls Standing far more than a liver-eating mutant or a giant bloodsucking worm or an alien conspiracy. Because we’ve met people like Sloane Allison before, even if they haven’t survived a trauma like this. We run into people who get lost in the dark and thinks that the people with flashlights are just their to lead them even deeper.

 

 

Progressive Presidential Campaigns, Part 2: How Robert La Follette's Failed Campaign for the 1912 Nomination Shows The Many Flaws Progressive Had and Still Have Today

 

 

During the battle between Taft and Theodore Roosevelt for the Republican nomination a principled but arrogant Senator from Wisconsin hoped to serve as a compromise candidate and take over the roots of the progressive movement.

His name was Robert M. La Follette and he had already been the proud leader of the Progressive movement for more than a quarter of a century and would carry the banner long after most members of his party – and the country – abandoned the cause.

La Follette was born on June 14^th 1855, the son of a pioneer couple in the new state of Wisconsin. His father Josiah as well as most of the La Follette family were members of the barely hatched Republican Party and full-fledged abolitionists. Josiah died before his son was a year old and he was essentially raised by his mother Mary.

The state of Wisconsin was quickly beginning to grow and Wisconsin quickly became one of the most Republican states in the country. His new stepfather, a prominent merchant, lost money in the business of and took his wrath out on his stepson. Though his mother took his stepfather’s name of Saxton, La Follette refused too.

He eventually studied at the University of Wisconsin, at the time the eleventh state to found a public university. During his tenure he would meet Belle Case, his future wife, who would become critical to his political life in a way that few political wives had been to that point. At the time the University President was John Bascom whose progressive principles became a guiding force for La Follette the rest of his life. Bascom promoted organized labor, the distribution of wealth, women’s suffrage and social and economic justice.

From an early age he became known as a gifted orator and in an era where oratory was as essential to politics as policy Robert La Follette was practically without peer. He was such a gifted speaker that he considered a career in the theater before moving to law. He became an attorney and in December of 1880 won his first elected office, District Attorney of Dane County. He made an aborted run for Congress two years later, but because of ill-health had to withdraw.

La Follette spent his entire political life plagued by illnesses, many of the common, some related to his gallbladder. Throughout his career he would work until exhaustion from the illnesses overcame him, then frequently rest for extended periods.

Two years later La Follette was elected to Congress for the first time, representing  Dane County. From the start of his Congressional career he advocated fully for the rights of African-Americans, taking up the bar by previous Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens and Benjamin Butler. He also advocated for women suffrage, an issue that the newly settled Western states were beginning to consider seriously. He also spoke avidly for the rights of indigenous people and began to put his principles into action. In 1890, he was one of the votes for the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. But even then he had a reputation as a trouble maker. Not long after Benjamin Harrison was elected to the Presidency, he wrote a long letter protesting the tariff which Cleveland had campaigned against. La Follette’s self-righteousness was one of many factors which would cost him a better chance at winning the Presidency later on.

He lost reelection in 1890, but one year later after an incident that involved bribery, he determined that he would fight against corruption in every form. In the 1890s, he began to take on the cause of the direct primary, then considered a blow against the party machines that controlled every aspect of the government across the country. He declined a position in William McKinley’s administration to fight for his ambitions in Wisconsin. In November of 1900 those ambitions were realized when he became the first Wisconsin-born governor.

La Follette’s ambition – known as ‘The Wisconsin Idea’ – was the most progressive any governor had tried for their state to that point. It called for the restriction of lobbying and campaign activities, the improvement of public education, the regulation of food, child labor, and workman’s compensation, and the curbing of monopolies. An ambitious agenda, it showed some of La Follette’s far more unattractive side as he got the reputation as being a browbeater and a messiah complexes, refusing to accept responsible for the enemies he made, calling it betrayal. As a result the majority of his reforms would not be adapted in Wisconsin until after his tenure as governor.

The ascension of Theodore Roosevelt to the White House after McKinley’s assassination gave La Follette and his fellow Progressives hope that his agenda would soon receive nationwide interest. In 1906 he was named to the Senate and returned to Washington where he would reside for the rest of his political career.

Almost from the moment he arrived, La Follette would clash with Roosevelt, a pattern that would last with every subsequent President. It had not helped that while La Follette had been governor, he had refused multiple meetings with the President and found most of his policy – while revolutionary to the Old Guard – tepid reforms and called him an insincere grandstander. In this we see what would become a constant problem of the progressive never satisfied with the White House no matter what the circumstances, though at the time it was more built on professional rivalry. Roosevelt believed that leadership came from preserving order between the old guard and the radicals like La Follette. When La Follette presented a bill and spent two hours defending to TR, the President pointed out that it would never get through Congress. La Follette told him that passage of the bill was not his first consideration. “But I want to do something,:” TR said. The clash between idealism and pragmatism has been something that the extremists have never been able to reconcile, and it was certainly true in the case of La Follette. The idea of half a loaf, the whole purpose behind democracy and government, was something that La Follette refused to accept.

In 1908 with TR announcing he would not seek a third term, La Follette began a campaign to win the Republican nomination. However, he refused to delegate any responsibility for it, choosing to fight for it in the Senate by attacking multiple bills. At one point he engaged in a record setting filibuster that lasted more than nineteen hours against a bill that was an emergency currency reform. When the bill passed anyway, he refused to acknowledge defeat. His campaign was a disaster as he received only 25 votes at the Convention (all but one from Wisconsin).

Halfway through Taft’s term, the number of elected Progressives were beginning to grow, particularly in the Senate. The movement he had been advocating for was growing nationwide and he was becoming one of the biggest voices for Progressives in elected office. But even then some were beginning to think La Follette was taking on a messiah like complex. Hiram Johnson, a California progressive who would run with TR in 1912 on the Bull Moose Ticket summed it up: “There were those with us who thought the pain of the world was in their special keeping and that we did not with sufficient rapidity apply the remedies that should eliminate this pain. There were others who believed they bore the weight of the world on their shoulders and after 1910 in their omniscience desired to direct the exact political course we  should steer.

La Follette spent much of 1911 trying to convince TR to join the National Progressive Reform League, a League that despite having many noble principles (including the direct primary, direct election of Senators and amendments for the initiative and the recall) was also meant to keep Taft from winning the Republican nomination. La Follette constantly cancelled meetings with TR out of envy of Roosevelt and his reluctance to share the limelight with anyone. The two men were too much alike to ever get along, but because Roosevelt had a nationwide popularity that La Follette could never match, he refused to compromise.

La Follette declared his candidacy in July of 1911 and for many months it was thought he had a real chance. However, he could not avoid the specter of TR who had not yet declared but for whom many considered La Follette a stalking horse. Then in January of 1912, at a dinner for the Philadelphia Publishers, La Follette gave a speech that almost certainly killed any chance of winning the nomination.

He was already nervous about it, and his anxiety was not helped by his young daughter’s impending surgery. Before he began the speech (after giving a pleasing reference to Woodrow Wilson who was in attendance)  he took out his speech and told everyone he was going to read it for two reasons. The second was the most harmful: he was constantly upset at being misquoted by the press. It was a tactless and insulting remark to the newspaper heads that were there, and he instantly lost any respect from his audience.

Observers described the speech of La Follette, normally a master orator as tedious, inappropriate and extreme. He used his platform to attack the newspapers whose heads were in attendance, and he repeated himself multiple times . At a certain moment, his hostile audience began to put him and chant for him to ‘get out’. Ill from exhaustion, La Follette left the stage and vomited. He then got on a train back to DC to make sure he could observe his daughter’s surgery. The reception in the papers in the aftermath was worse, with many thinking that he was drunk or even insane.

La Follette’s campaign was crippled and was enough to convince many wavering moderates to go to Roosevelt. Despite that La Follette insisted on continuing his campaign for the nomination, hoping that the existence of the Presidential primary which twelve states had adopted might be enough to help him.

He won the North Dakota primary (the first one) with nearly 58 percent of the vote to TR’s 39 percent. In Wisconsin, he swamped Taft by a margin of nearly three to one. He also campaigned well in Illinois and Oregon. But many of his fellow progressives were unimpressed. When La Follette arrived in California – where his decision to keep his name on the ballot had already cost him influential supporters -  he ran a bitter campaign against Johnson and George Norris, fellow Progressives who thought there was a better chance winning with a united party.

In the space of a few months La Follette had sacrificed the general but less devoted approval of the powerful many for the passionate, even fanatical support of the devoted few. This appeal, sadly, has become the driving force of so many primary campaigns run by the extremists of members of both parties. He continued his behavior at the Republican National Convention. With only 36 delegates, he refused to ally with the Roosevelt forces at the convention. When the convention was over, he insisted to the press that neither Taft nor Roosevelt had honestly won enough delegates. Even after Roosevelt left to form the Bull Moose party, La Follette refused to endorse him or Taft, essentially sitting the campaign out.

La Follette’s unwillingness to bend was as much a factor in the breakdown of the Progressive coalition in the GOP as TR’s decision to form his own party. His decision not only cost him a leading role in the Progressive movement that followed but any chance he might have ever had in the future of becoming President. Had he been willing to merely sit out the battle between Taft and TR, he very likely could have been the Republican nominee for President in 1916. He might have been able to help his own ambitions had he been willing to reconcile with Roosevelt in the aftermath. But he refused to acknowledge the limited support of his agenda, was unwilling to compromise or delegate authority and his dedication to principles whatever the cost would lead to his political undoing.

That said La Follette’s ambitions for the Presidency were not done nor was the Progressive campaign over. In the next article in this series, I will deal with the remainder of La Follette’s career in Washington, and the circumstances that led to his own third party run in 1924.