CREDIT: Library of Congress, Prints and Photos Division. National Photo Company Collection
IN 1921, Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin had to decide whether to seek reelection. He was scheduled to give a major speech before the Wisconsin legislature, and his aides urged him to tone down the fiery antiwar rhetoric.
La Follette had opposed US involvement in World War I. In 1917, two days after President Woodrow Wilson’s call for the United States to enter the war, La Follette attacked Wilson’s decision: “The poor who are always the ones called upon to rot in the trenches have no organized power,” La Follette said. “But oh, Mr. President, at some time they will be heard. . . . There will come an awakening. They will have their day, and they will be heard.”
After the war, La Follette continued to voice these views. He called for investigations of corporate “war profiteers” and defended socialist Eugene Debs and others who had been jailed for their opposition to the war. Some Wisconsinites, as well as many Washington, DC, insiders and newspapers, condemned him as a traitor. La Follette realized his speech before the state legislature would be an important turning point in his political career. He pounded the lectern and clenched his fist into the air. “I am going to be a candidate for reelection to the United States Senate,” he boomed. “I do not want the vote of a single citizen under any misapprehension of where I stand: I would not change my record on the war for that of any man, living or dead.”
After a moment of stunned silence, the crowd erupted into thunderous applause. Even one staunch critic, standing at the back of the chamber with tears running down his cheeks, told a reporter: “I hate the son of a bitch. But, my God, what guts he’s got.”
Perhaps La Follette simply had a better understanding of Wisconsin voters. They reelected him that year with 80 percent of their votes.
“Fighting Bob” La Follette spent his entire political career—as a US congressman (1885–1890), governor of Wisconsin (1901–1906), US senator (1907–1925), and candidate for president (1924)—challenging militarism and corporate power. During his life and after his death, La Follette inspired generations of reformers and radicals.
Born in Dane County’s Primrose township, La Follette worked as a farm laborer before enrolling at the University of Wisconsin in 1875, graduating four years later. The following year he ran successfully for district attorney. In 1884 he was elected to Congress on the Republican ticket, but he was defeated by a Democrat in 1890.
After returning home, the state’s Republican leader, Senator Philetus Sawyer, offered La Follette a bribe to fix a court case against several former state officials. Not only did La Follette refuse the bribe, but he also publicly denounced the way money was used to corrupt democracy. For the next ten years, as a leader of the progressive wing of the Republican Party, La Follette spoke out against the political influence of the railroad and lumber barons who dominated his own local party. In 1900 he ran for governor pledging to clean up the corruption. He gave an average of ten to fifteen speeches a day. He won handily.
While he was governor, the state became a laboratory for progressive reform that influenced progressive movements and farmer-labor alliances in other states and the New Deal three decades later. La Follette weakened the power of big business and party machines by enacting campaign spending limits and direct primary elections, which gave voters the right to choose their own candidates for office. He supported measures that doubled the taxes on the railroads, broke up monopolies, preserved the state’s forests, protected workers’ rights, defended small farmers, and regulated lobbying to end patronage politics.
Elected to the US Senate in 1906, La Follette became a leader of the Senate’s progressives. In 1909, as the progressive movement grew across America, La Follette launched a publication that became a major voice for radical ideas. It was originally called La Follette’s Magazine. Its goal, La Follette wrote, was “winning back for the people the complete power over government—national, state, and municipal—which has been lost to them.” The magazine championed women’s suffrage, led the fight to stay out of World War I, criticized the post-war Palmer Raids as a violation of civil liberties, and supported workers’ rights and control of corporate power. Although never a commercial success, the magazine was popular among progressive farmers and working people and helped raise La Follette’s national profile even more. In 1928 it was renamed The Progressive. Since his death, the publication has remained a major voice of dissent and is still published in Madison, Wisconsin.
Breaking again from his party, La Follette supported Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 presidential election over former president Theodore Roosevelt (a fellow Republican running on the Bull Moose Party ticket), William Howard Taft (the Republican candidate), and Eugene Debs (the Socialist candidate). But after the election, La Follette became Wilson’s biggest Senate foe over the issue of US involvement in the European war. He was one of only six senators to vote against Wilson’s declaration of war. As Wilson rounded up antiwar radicals, including Debs, La Follette became the dissenters’ biggest defender. “Never in all my many years’ experience in the House and in the Senate,” he told his Senate colleagues, “have I heard so much democracy preached and so little practiced as during the last few months.”
After the war, La Follette advocated measures to protect workers and consumers against big business, for women’s suffrage, for a progressive income tax, and for farm loan programs. He also continued to attack “war profiteers” who had backed US involvement in World War I and even profited from it. Many La Follette–watchers viewed his momentous 1922 reelection victory as a vindication of his anticorporate and antiwar stances.
A coalition of unions, socialists, and farmers convinced La Follette to run for president in 1924 as an independent progressive. During the campaign, La Follette called for government takeover of the railroads, elimination of private utilities, workers’ right to organize unions, easier credit for farmers, outlawing of child labor, stronger protection for civil liberties, an end to US imperialism in Latin America, and a requirement for a plebiscite before any president could declare war. He promised to “break the combined power of the private monopoly system over the political and economic life of the American people” and decried “any discrimination between races, classes, and creeds”—far ahead of most political figures.
La Follette won almost 5 million votes (about one-sixth of the popular vote). He came in first in Wisconsin and second in eleven Western states and won working-class districts of major cities. Since then, no radical candidate for president has ever won that many votes. Less than a year later, in June 1925, the seventy-year-old La Follette died of a heart attack.
Not only did La Follette forge a popular labor-farmer alliance, but his legacy also included the many activists who worked in his campaigns and whose work and ideas shaped American politics for many decades. Harold Ickes Sr., an influential adviser to La Follette’s 1924 campaign, became part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inner circle and a major architect of the New Deal. In 1964, only two US senators—Democrat Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Republican Wayne Morse of Oregon—courageously voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which Lyndon B. Johnson used to get the authority to take military action in Vietnam without a declaration of war. Gruening, a one-time editor of The Nation, had served as spokesman for La Follette’s 1924 campaign. Morse was a Wisconsin native, born in 1900, who told Time magazine in 1956 that his fondest memory as a young man was lapping up liberal philosophy “at the feet of the great Robert La Follette Sr.”
In 2011, Wisconsinites organized a mass movement to protest Republican governor Scott Walker’s steep budget cuts and attacks on workers’ collective bargaining rights. At rallies and in the media, many protesters invoked the memory of a previous Republican governor who made Wisconsin a laboratory for progressive reform and whose bust stands in front of the state capitol building. Under La Follette, columnist Bill Wineke wrote in 2011, Wisconsin had “championed the rights of working people and upheld the dignity of the unfortunate.”