I remember when I first became an admirer of Robert M. La Follette, Sr. It was 1937. I was fifteen years old and deep in Walter Millis’s Road to War, a chronicle of how the United States got involved in what was then the one and only world war. I was strongly influenced by antiwar novels, memoirs, movies, and plays like A Farewell to Arms, All Quiet on the Western Front, and many others. I thought that the war itself was a cruel and meaningless slaughter and America’s entry a tragedy. (I haven’t changed my mind about that.) Anger and sadness swept over me when I came to the climax of the book, the rainy April night in 1917 when Woodrow Wilson read his war message to a joint session of Congress amid applause and cheers so furious that even the president later expressed surprise. But one senator did not join the hysteria. He listened in stony silence, arms folded on his chest, chewing gum—an immovable rock in the raging current. That was La Follette of Wisconsin, a hero if ever I had met one in the pages of a history book.
He seemed to me to belong to a time long gone. Like all youngsters, I made little distinction between things that happened five or fifty or five hundred years before I was born. I’m not sure that I even knew in 1937 that although La Follette was dead, one of his two sons, Robert, Jr., was in the United States Senate and the other, Philip, was governor of Wisconsin, thereby creating a one-of-a-kind brother act in American politics. Both were still young men, younger than my father.
I’m certain that I did not know that “Old Bob,” my invincible war resister, had run as an independent presidential candidate in 1924 and gotten just under five million votes out of some twenty-nine million cast. One voter in six had gone for him, and that was only thirteen years earlier, very recent history. It might as well have been an official secret for all our school-books had to say about it, and I had not encountered the 1924 election in any of my outside reading on current events. America’s capacity to forget losers is legendary.
Not for another ten years did La Follette re-enter my awareness and then in a big way. In 1947, as a graduate student in United States history, I learned that he was one of the stars of the Progressive movement that swept the nation in the opening years of the twentieth century. In 1891, a seemingly faithful Republican, he had suddenly discovered that Wisconsin was tainted with corruption. For the next nine years he went up and down the rural byways of the state, rallying the people to join him in breaking the unholy alliance between greedy corporations and political bosses, to take back their government. He did not simply harangue listeners. He held them spellbound for hours with avalanches of facts. He told them in precise detail and hard numbers how they were being overtaxed, overcharged, and sold out, how nominating conventions were rigged, how judges were fixed and legislators bribed. He began with most of the money and respectability in the state against him, but in 1900 he won the first of three two-year terms as governor.
He gave Wisconsin a model administration, according to his lights. He pushed bills through the legislature that provided for open primary elections and fair taxation, safeguarded natural resources from land-grabbers and exploiters, and created commissions to regulate banks, insurance companies, utilities, and railroads. To these he appointed independent experts, many of them professors at the state university. He believed they would set competitive rules and rates that would bring the benefits of economic growth to the whole public instead of selected stockholders and insiders. He did not invent all of these ideas, or realize them without other people’s help. They were part of the culture of reform that forward-looking, educated, “modern” men and women were beginning to share in every big city. But the fires he kindled were visible to national progressive journalists a long way off. They called his state “a laboratory of democracy.” They popularized the term “the Wisconsin Idea” to describe his mixture of government by popular will and trained, disinterested intelligence.
La Follette became a national figure. Wisconsin sent him to the Senate in 1905, where he had less power but a bigger stage, and he went on battling, usually in the minority, against the monopolists and their allies in Congress to the end of his days. He made no deals and gave no quarter. He was already known as “Fighting Bob” when he threw himself in the path of the stampede to war. Only someone of absolute political fearlessness could have done it, and it cost him dearly for a time. But he came back for that last 1924 crusade as the presidential candidate of workers, farmers, and consumers who chose not to vote for Calvin Coolidge, corporate America’s front man, or the Democrat John W. Davis, a conservative lawyer whose economic views were indistinguishable from Coolidge’s. The next year, weary and aged far beyond his seventy years, Old Bob died of heart failure. “Young Bob,” barely thirty, was chosen to fill his vacant seat. In 1930 Phil, just thirty-two, captured the Wisconsin statehouse.
The boys carried on the tradition in their fashion. During the thirties Robert, Jr., became best known in the Senate for his chairmanship of an investigating committee that revealed how employers planted thugs and spies in the workplace to break unions. Phil, as a Depression-era governor, was largely preoccupied with public works and relief measures, but he also fought hard for conservation, public power, and tight control of banks and holding companies. Both were first elected as Republicans but in political reality became supporters of the New Deal. Still, they had no love for the Democrats or for Franklin D. Roosevelt, so in 1934 they bolted and ran on the ticket of a newly created Progressive Party of Wisconsin.
But the “reign” of the second La Follette generation in the state was not to be long. In 1938 Phil tried to expand the third party into a nationwide organization, the National Progressives of America, to challenge Roosevelt. The effort was an unqualified flop, and he was badly beaten in his run for a third term. His elective career was ended at forty-one. In 1940 Bob barely won reelection to the Senate. In 1946 the Wisconsin Progressives disbanded, and Bob returned to the Republican fold, only to be beaten in the primary by Joseph R. McCarthy. He, too, still only middle-aged, was finished as a political force.
That was what I knew about the La Follettes when it was proposed to me that I undertake a biography of the family. I thought it was all there was to know. I welcomed the chance to try to answer the question of where my admired old rebel chief had gotten that remarkable courage. How had he come by and held onto his blazing integrity? And how had he passed these qualities on to his young lions? That too intrigued me as a father and a son, because I saw this as basically a story about a father and his sons. But as I dug into the material, I learned that I was completely wrong about that.
I was wrong because the books I had read rarely if ever mentioned Bob’s wife and the boys’ mother, Belle Case La Follette. Until recently, official history tended to overlook women. In this case it was an especially gigantic mistake, for it is impossible to understand Old Bob and Belle and their children as individuals isolated from one another.
As I worked my way deeper into an enormous archive of La Follette correspondence, I found myself in the middle of a love story. It began with a man and woman, then grew to include the family they raised. It radiated through their lives, their friendships, and their careers. It shaped the expression of their principles and explained why they clung to them with such resolve in the face of inner doubts and the world’s discouragement.
Belle was no ordinary spouse. She was a law school graduate and a columnist and occasional lecturer. Besides helping Bob with his speeches, contacts, and correspondence, she wrote on behalf of sensible diet, dress, and exercise; spare-the-rod childrearing; hygienic housekeeping; and voting rights for women. She argued the case against racial segregation long before it was usual for whites to do so. She was a committed pacifist.
Belle was also a full-time wife and mother. She ran homes in Washington and Wisconsin with little help and supervised—sometimes actually conducted—the education of four children. In addition to Bob, Jr., and Phil, there were two daughters. Just as this book was going to press a member of the staff of the Wisconsin Historical Society, in the course of some photographic research, made the discovery that Fola, the La Follettes’ first child and one of the story’s principal characters, was in fact named Flora Dodge (La Follette) after a college classmate of her mother and father’s. “Fola” was apparently a childish mispronunciation that she chose to perpetuate around the time of her own entry into the University of Wisconsin, though she is recorded as Flora both in the 1900 census and in the records of the Wisconsin Academy, the private high school that she attended. The change was permanent and total; “Flora” appears absolutely nowhere in any of the source material—published, oral, or in manuscript letters (which Fola herself preserved and arranged) that I consulted. Whether there is any significance beyond personal choice to this suppression I do not know, but no evidence suggests it. Nevertheless I insert the facts here for the record, and express my thanks to Mr. John Holzhueter, of the WHS office, for his serendipitous solution to the question (which in fact had puzzled me) of the origin of so unusual a name as “Fola.” Fola went on the stage and incidentally was one of the earliest members of Actors Equity, the performers’ union. She married a dramatist, campaigned in the battle for suffrage, lectured on social forces in the theater, and taught at a progressive school. The boys were born a considerable time after Fola, and finally there was Mary. She was the only one not to spend at least part of her life in some kind of work that involved addressing the public. These four were the products of a marriage based on an extraordinary matching of backgrounds, outlooks, and needs.
Bob and Belle, independent farmers’ children both, met and fell in love at the University of Wisconsin, from which they were graduated in 1879. They were equally convinced that they owed something to the taxpayers of the state, who had footed the bill for their educations. But for each of them, public usefulness was much more than an obligation. It was their vocation, and democracy was their religion. To spend themselves in extending and purifying it was to live life at its highest. They thought that nothing mattered more than civic participation to right wrongs, to fight special privilege and selfishness, to enlarge the quality and not simply the rewards of self-government. They expected to teach these ideals diligently to their children, who would join them someday as comrades in arms.
They might have been impossibly self-righteous but for a sense of humor visible only to intimates and for the emotional warmth that was the glue of their lives together. Neither of them was naturally tough enough to be a full-time political crusader alone. He was sometimes moody and paranoid. She was often anxious and guilty. Each one needed the assurance of love and frequent infusions of encouragement and support. They disagreed and even quarreled occasionally but for the most part they nourished and strengthened each other in their mutual dedication. Each brought out the best qualities of the other partner.
The short answer to the question of what sustained Old Bob in his bravery was “marriage to Belle.” And Belle’s strength was increased by his need for her, his thankfulness that she existed. It was a perfect self-reinforcing circle of love.
As the children grew older, this circle opened to receive them. It was a wonderful parental gift, but like many such gifts it carried with it heavy burdens and the seeds of wrenching personal problems.
All of this I learned from the enormous treasure trove of their letters. Bob and Belle believed in and lived by the power and beauty of spoken and written words. Both were trained in elocution, loved to read or be read to aloud, and wrote with strength and clarity. When travel separated them they corresponded almost daily. They passed the habit on to the children. It took especially firm root in Fola and Phil, who would cover page after page. And almost all of these thousands of letters are still available, because Bob could not bear to destroy anything written by someone he loved, and Belle and the family spared him and themselves that pain by becoming compulsive savers of every scrap of writing.
The family papers contain few letters written by Bob and Belle before their adulthood, but their offspring’s childhoods are well represented. The children’s letters begin with postcards or notes solemnly “dictated” by five- and six-year-olds to amused parents or parental secretaries. They continue through school, college, travel, marriage, and career launchings. All of the family letters show a prodigious investment of effort. They were written at office desks, on kitchen tables, in jerking railroad cars and lonely depots, in steamer lounges, in fleabag hotel rooms, and in sickbeds. They bear spidery ink strokes or grayish pencil scrawls, but only rarely and late in life the mark of a typewriter. Usually they were long, and almost always they were full of praise for the “beloved,” or “dearest,” or “blessed” recipients. Passed around, folded and refolded, treasured and preserved, they were the way the La Follettes unpacked their hearts with the private words of devotion, conviction, consolation, and encouragement that meant everything to them.
The La Follettes saw themselves as an embattled clan forging intimate bonds in a joint uphill battle for a better country. Sometimes the line between their inner selves, their identities within the family, and their public lives seemed to be nearly nonexistent.
I also found in them a strange mixture of political radicalism and the “traditional values” that conservatives now claim as their exclusive property. The La Follettes believed in reading “the classics,” but doing so did not set them apart from workers and farmers. They worshiped “Daddy” like a patriarch but backed women’s demands for equal professional and civic rights. They loved their country but worked for the day when it would need neither an army nor a navy. They believed in public regulation right up to the edge of socialism, yet were dedicated to the proposition that individual hard work and responsibility were the building blocks of citizenship. They supported the idea of private property, but none of them assigned a personal priority to accumulating very much of it. For most of their lives they all lived on incomes that ranged from modest to inadequate.
As much as any traditionalists they believed in the objective existence and importance of character, intelligence, reason, and duty. But they never identified these qualities with any single group. And they never sanctified tradition or form. As Old Bob himself put it: “Democracy is a life; and involves continual struggle.”
All of these things are better expressed in their words than mine. I have tried to tell the story of Bob and Belle and the children here as straight-forwardly and simply as possible and primarily out of their own pens. I have done that partly because the story itself is as good as any novel and partly because there are things worth learning from it. I myself think that right now we need, and do not have, many more men and women like Bob and Belle La Follette and more families like theirs.
I do not, however, suggest that these pages contain a recipe for producing them. Even the La Follette family did not weather the storms of our time unchanged, as the narrative itself will show. One small but important evidence is in the letters themselves, the main quarry of material that I used. Those that passed among the four children (and their spouses) became less frequent and more businesslike after Belle died in 1931, just six years after Bob.
I’m not certain why the correspondence dwindled. It may be that she and Bob really kept the exchanges going by their own persistent example. With them gone, the binding love that overflowed onto paper was weakened. Or perhaps it is simply that the telephone was beginning to intrude and take over.
Perhaps the busy public lives that Phil and Bob, Jr., led took up too much energy, and they could not sit at their writing desks, “visiting” far into the night as their father had done. Perhaps the common tribulations of middle age in Depression and World War II America touched all the surviving children and quelled the high spirits that had flowed into those long messages to each other.
Or maybe the answer lies in the outside forces that abruptly broke off the “dynasty.” Maybe as progressivism turned into the bureaucratic and welfare state, and the country embarked on yet another war that the La Follettes found unpalatable, the old fighting faith in “the people’s” repeated struggle from adversity to triumph melted. There was no longer the impulse to write to each other as comrades in arms. A “cooler” politics made for a chillier connection among Bob and Belle’s sons and daughters.
Maybe as letter writing itself in America grew more and more “old-fashioned,” so did the La Follettes and their ideas. To explain that would require an excursion into the dense and tangled context of our history since the 1940s.
I offer no such explanation here, nor anything as ambitious as a theory about the rise, fall, and natural history of progressivism as the La Follettes illuminate it. Political science, sociology, and psychology can bring illumination to the story, but first it must simply be told. Here it is, for you the reader.