The Republican, a leading Progressive of the era, spoke for 18 hours, setting a Senate record. He stood against a banking bill, which he found too friendly to big business. At the eleventh hour, according to historian Lewis L. Gould, a colleague brought the vegetarian La Follette a mixture of milk and eggs for sustenance. La Follette took a sip and then shouted, “Take it away, it’s drugged.” “The brew was indeed undrinkable,” Gould writes in his
Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern United States Senate, “but it had gone bad because of the heat of the Senate in the days before air conditioning and the long trip from the kitchen where the drink had been prepared.” The bill passed and became the basis for the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
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