Sons of the Wild Jackass

OF all the mugwump mutineers who swarmed out of the West in the early twenties--Wheeler, Brook- hart, Couzens, Dill, Norbeck, Frazier, Shipstead and Howell--none produced more jitters among the country's apprehensive Bourbons than Henrik Shipstead, the Norseman. He alone had led his hairy barbarians over the battlements boldly flying their own ominous banner.

"Farmer-Laborite!"

It foreshadowed the "class war" as Socialist theorizing never had. In Eastern eyes, as he first descended from his Minnesota fastness in 1922, this modern Rolf the Ganger lacked only the wild yellow beard and horned casque of his Viking forbears.

But before his first term ended, the big, blond, blue-eyed infidel was pictured as spending his idle hours strumming a lilied lute to the fair damsels who dwelt within the castle walls. The conqueror, so Washington whispered, had been caught in the perfumed nets of the conquered, like many a braw lad before him.

Bourbon bouillon had diluted his fiery blood, it was asserted, and pate de foie gras had spoiled his appetite for broiled reactionaries.

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