Robert M. La Follette Credit: Journal Sentinel Files

It costs money to get elected these days, a fact no one knows better than Gov. Scott Walker. Whether you subscribe to the "criminal scheme" theory advanced by John Doe prosecutors or believe that Walker's campaign did nothing wrong in aggressively courting outside cash during the 2012 recall election, the current case has shone a harsh new light on campaign finance in Wisconsin.

What's hard to believe is that the very term "campaign finance" would once have been considered an oxymoron in our state, right up there with jumbo shrimp and civil war. For much of Wisconsin's history, "PAC" might have stood for Pan-American Congress, and "polls" would have been heard as those polka-loving people from Eastern Europe.

When Frank Zeidler campaigned for a second term as Milwaukee's mayor in 1952, his expenditures totaled $14,138. Nearly 30 years later, Rep. Clement Zablocki, the south side's congressman for decades, spent a paltry $14,593 on his 1980 re-election bid. Only in the last generation have costs crossed the six-figure threshold, and today's multimillion-dollar campaigns would have seemed the height of absurdity, even insanity, to our ancestors.

Not that they were all simon-pure Solons who judged every candidate on his or her merits and chose the person who could best serve the community. Quite the opposite, in many cases. Political parties were all-powerful in Wisconsin's formative decades, and the people who ran them were often as cynical as the paid provocateurs who manage so many of today's campaigns.

Candidates usually were chosen by party bosses in closed conventions, with a minimum of input from party regulars, much less the general public. There really were smoke-filled rooms, many of them in Milwaukee hotels, and railroads and utilities typically paid for the cigars. Two of the local electric utility's key executives in the 1890s were Henry Clay Payne, head of the state Republican Party, and Edward Wall, his counterpart on the Democratic side.

This easy, almost casual mingling of business and political interests was an unsavory fact of life in America during the late 1800s. The opportunities for corruption were everywhere, and they were everywhere seized, without an independent press to blow the whistle. Most newspapers of the time had an undisguised and unrepentant partisan bias.

In Wisconsin's largest city, the Milwaukee Sentinel was a Republican paper, the Journal was considered a Democratic organ, and the wall between their news and editorial departments was wafer-thin. After a prominent Republican endorsed a Democratic congressional candidate in 1890, the Journal reported the defection and added, in what was purportedly a news story, "When such a man breaks away from political associations it is but the indication that the tendency of honest and thinking men is in the same way."

Public impatience with the status quo found expression in a reform movement that came to life both nationally and locally in the 1890s. The movement's standard-bearer in Wisconsin was a legendary figure in national as well as state politics: Robert M. La Follette. A great deal of folklore surrounds "Fighting Bob's" career, much of it self-generated, but his place in the progressive firmament is secure.

La Follette sounded one of his early themes in an 1897 speech titled "The Menace of the Machine." Taking direct aim at the prevailing convention system, he charged that the "minority from their quiet corner in the hotel have ruled the great majority of the plain citizens of the state." The solution, La Follette urged, was to "go back to the people" and let everyone "share equally in the nomination of the candidates of his party and attend primary elections."

It's sometimes forgotten that the "machine" La Follette so loved to lambaste was his own Republican Party. The GOP dominated state politics from 1896 to 1932, but it split into Progressive and Stalwart factions that were regularly at each other's throats. The intramural strife of the early 1900s makes the party's current cleavage between right and far right seem like a church picnic.

As Wisconsin's governor from 1901 to 1906, La Follette led a team that, despite stout opposition, made significant progress on the Progressive agenda. The direct primary went into effect in 1905, eroding the king-making power of party bosses. Stricter civil service laws slowed the flow of patronage jobs to party retainers. In a decision with modern echoes, the Legislature banned campaign contributions by corporations in 1905.

The ball was pushed farther down field under Gov. Francis McGovern, another Progressive who was in some ways more effective than La Follette. With Fighting Bob frying larger fish in the U.S. Senate, McGovern pushed hard for campaign finance reform during his 1911-1915 tenure. "The influence of money in political campaigns in Wisconsin must be removed," he declared, and a like-minded Legislature imposed limits on campaign spending, required a strict accounting of all expenditures and set fines and prison terms for violations. The McGovern forces also laid the groundwork for the referendum, recall and initiative — tools that the state's chief executive argued would "bring the government closer to the people."

In all these reforms and many others, Wisconsin was a national pioneer, and the state's experiments earned it a reputation as "the laboratory of democracy." The measures were often flawed in design, imperfect in practice and subject to regular amendment, but they established the principle that the will of the people is paramount and that vested interests of any kind play a distinctly secondary role.

What we've witnessed in recent years is a steady erosion of that principle. Corporations have somehow been reincarnated as individuals, and campaign finance limits now turn on the lawyerly distinction between "express" and "issue" advertising. It's money all the same, and rich folks who don't live anywhere near Wisconsin now help choose not only their representatives but ours.

We have circled back to realities that Robert La Follette and Francis McGovern would find eerily familiar. Advertising works. Spreading the message is expensive. The fences are down, and if one candidate steps over, so will all the others. What we're seeing is the same kind of escalation that has driven professional athletes' salaries into the stratosphere. The gold standard of an effective campaign today is how much gold you have at your disposal.

Where will it end? In the courts, I'm sure, and so I'll give the last word to a judge. Edward G. Ryan was chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court from 1874 to 1880. Shortly before taking office, Ryan gave a memorable speech to the University of Wisconsin Law School's graduating class, and his words left a deep impression on young Bob La Follette. Looking out across the pre-reform political landscape, the jurist found cause for alarm:

"The accumulation of individual wealth seems to be greater than it ever has been since the downfall of the Roman Empire. And the enterprises of the country are aggregating vast corporate combinations of unexampled capital, boldly marching not for economical conquests only, but for political power. We see their colors, we hear their trumpets, we distinguish the sound of preparation in their camps. For the first time really in our politics, money is taking the field as an organized power....Wealth has its rights. Industrious wealth has its honors....But money, as a political influence, is essentially corrupt; is one of the most dangerous to free institutions; by far the most dangerous to the free and just administration of the law....The question will arise and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine, which shall rule — wealth or man?"

John Gurda, a Milwaukee historian, writes for the Crossroads section on the first Sunday of each month. He won a gold for column writing in the 2013 Excellence in Journalism contest sponsored by the Milwaukee Press Club.