What Would Fighting Bob Do...about Cindy Sheehan?
Fighting Cindy
By
Nancy C. Unger
On August 18 Gold Star Mother Cindy Sheehan left “Camp Casey,” the protest site near President Bush’s ranch, in order to be with her mother, who had just suffered a stroke. It remains to be seen whether Sheehan will return to Texas to resume her quest. She wants to personally ask the president what her son -- an Army mechanic who was killed in Baghdad -- died to achieve. What is sure is that Sheehan has done something untold professional politicians have failed to do: inspire members of the public to political action.
Bob La Follette would support Cindy Sheehan for a variety of reasons. As developed in a previous article in this series, in his own day La Follette noted the hypocrisy of Americans as self-proclaimed “custodians of peace and instructors in democratic ideals to less enlightened peoples” while their own nation continued to be plagued by serious problems of inequity, including racism, sexism, and political corruption. Like Sheehan, he was outraged by politicians whose tears for the fallen did not prevent them from continuing to spout platitudes rather than genuinely grapple with the effectiveness and professed goals of a war with no end in sight.
But perhaps more importantly, La Follette would support Sheehan because, rather than retreating into her grief, she has the courage to bring her very personal pain into the political arena. As part of the group Real Voices, she and others who lost loved ones in the Iraqi conflict ran television ads speaking directly to President Bush about the impact of his failed policies and lies.
More recently, Sheehan’s decision to travel from her home in California to Texas, and her initial vow to remain in a makeshift campsite until Bush meets with her or his vacation ended, galvanized the nation. Her camp grew to more than a hundred people, many of them relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq. Her protest inspired more than 1,600 candlelight vigils across the country, generated scores of op-ed pieces and letters to the editor, and prompted a counter campaign that produced a national TV commercial to say that Sheehan does not speak for military families.
Even this last would hearten La Follette, who fervently believed that “democracy is safest where its entire citizenship is most enlightened, most interested, most alert.” Sheehan has inspired Americans with diverse points of view to take action and to make their voices heard. This is crucial to democracy because politicians, as La Follette emphasized, are not sovereign but servants: “The sovereign are in the workshops, on the farms, in the factories, in the stores and counting rooms.”
La Follette would approve any action that worked to ensure that the politicians served the people and not the other way around. “The will of the people,” he urged, must “be the law of the land.” Cindy Sheehan has vividly demonstrated that effective venues for displaying that will are not limited to the voting booth.
Fighting Bob was confident that when Wisconsin’s rank and file understood political issues they would “make themselves heard.” Whether it is holding a candlelight vigil, petitioning the president and/or Congress, or participating in the September 10 Fighting Bob Fest at the fairgrounds in Baraboo, it is time for the people of Wisconsin to follow the powerful example of Cindy Sheehan and make themselves heard on the political issues that matter most to them.
(Editors' note: This article is the latest in a series that repeats irregularly on FightingBob.com. Information about Nancy Unger's La Follette book, Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer, is available online.)
August 25, 2005
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Nancy C. Unger is a professor of history at Santa Clara University, the author of "Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer," and a writer for the History News Service.
