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Thursday, December 15, 2005
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Life and Death Of an English Major One of UD’s heroes, Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire, died today. He was in his nineties and had had Alzheimer’s for ages. He graduated from Yale in 1938, an English major. His first-rate writing in part accounted for the impact his Golden Fleece Awards had. He wrote them up in funny ways. He gave them annually to federally funded projects that seemed to him particularly wasteful, as when, in 1978, the Department of Education “spent $219,592 to develop a curriculum to teach college students how to watch television.” He was one of those stubborn impossible people, unpleasant as a personality, hyperproficient as a legislator. “In more than two decades, Proxmire did not travel abroad on Senate business and he returned more than $900,000 from his office allowances to the Treasury…. Proxmire made a point of accepting no contributions. In 1982 he registered only $145.10 in campaign costs, yet gleaned 64 percent of the vote.” He killed the SST supersonic jet airliner, which looks prescient. He fought for and won important anti-genocide legislation. "Ralph K. Huitt, [a] former UW political scientist, described Proxmire as well as anyone in a scholarly publication more than 30 years ago. 'The essence would seem to be a driving ambition to succeed, to which almost everything else in his life is subordinated, coupled with a puritan's belief in the sanctity of unremitting work,' Huitt wrote." Another longtime observer says: “He was incorruptible." UD finds this description of him toward the end of his life moving. Did she see him, she wonders, as she read newspapers in the same reading room? She would have been able to tell him how much she admired him. Despite his progressively worsening condition, Proxmire for years traveled most days from his home in northwest Washington, D.C., to the Library of Congress, where he would read newspapers in the reading room named after Wisconsin Progressive Robert La Follette. |