During the
battle between Taft and Theodore Roosevelt for the Republican nomination a principled
but arrogant Senator from Wisconsin hoped to serve as a compromise candidate
and take over the roots of the progressive movement.
His name was
Robert M. La Follette and he had already been the proud leader of the
Progressive movement for more than a quarter of a century and would carry the
banner long after most members of his party – and the country – abandoned the
cause.
La Follette was
born on June 14th 1855, the son of a pioneer couple in the new state
of Wisconsin. His father Josiah as well as most of the La Follette family were
members of the barely hatched Republican Party and full-fledged abolitionists.
Josiah died before his son was a year old and he was essentially raised by his
mother Mary.
The state of
Wisconsin was quickly beginning to grow and Wisconsin quickly became one of the
most Republican states in the country. His new stepfather, a prominent
merchant, lost money in the business of and took his wrath out on his stepson.
Though his mother took his stepfather’s name of Saxton, La Follette refused
too.
He eventually
studied at the University of Wisconsin, at the time the eleventh state to found
a public university. During his tenure he would meet Belle Case, his future wife,
who would become critical to his political life in a way that few political
wives had been to that point. At the time the University President was John
Bascom whose progressive principles became a guiding force for La Follette the
rest of his life. Bascom promoted organized labor, the distribution of wealth,
women’s suffrage and social and economic justice.
From an early
age he became known as a gifted orator and in an era where oratory was as
essential to politics as policy Robert La Follette was practically without
peer. He was such a gifted speaker that he considered a career in the theater
before moving to law. He became an attorney and in December of 1880 won his
first elected office, District Attorney of Dane County. He made an aborted run
for Congress two years later, but because of ill-health had to withdraw.
La Follette
spent his entire political life plagued by illnesses, many of the common, some
related to his gallbladder. Throughout his career he would work until
exhaustion from the illnesses overcame him, then frequently rest for extended
periods.
Two years later
La Follette was elected to Congress for the first time, representing Dane County. From the start of his
Congressional career he advocated fully for the rights of African-Americans,
taking up the bar by previous Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens and Benjamin
Butler. He also advocated for women suffrage, an issue that the newly settled
Western states were beginning to consider seriously. He also spoke avidly for
the rights of indigenous people and began to put his principles into action. In
1890, he was one of the votes for the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. But even then he
had a reputation as a trouble maker. Not long after Benjamin Harrison was
elected to the Presidency, he wrote a long letter protesting the tariff which
Cleveland had campaigned against. La Follette’s self-righteousness was one of
many factors which would cost him a better chance at winning the Presidency
later on.
He lost
reelection in 1890, but one year later after an incident that involved bribery,
he determined that he would fight against corruption in every form. In the
1890s, he began to take on the cause of the direct primary, then considered a
blow against the party machines that controlled every aspect of the government
across the country. He declined a position in William McKinley’s administration
to fight for his ambitions in Wisconsin. In November of 1900 those ambitions
were realized when he became the first Wisconsin-born governor.
La Follette’s
ambition – known as ‘The Wisconsin Idea’ – was the most progressive any
governor had tried for their state to that point. It called for the restriction
of lobbying and campaign activities, the improvement of public education, the
regulation of food, child labor, and workman’s compensation, and the curbing of
monopolies. An ambitious agenda, it showed some of La Follette’s far more
unattractive side as he got the reputation as being a browbeater and a messiah
complexes, refusing to accept responsible for the enemies he made, calling it
betrayal. As a result the majority of his reforms would not be adapted in
Wisconsin until after his tenure as governor.
The ascension of
Theodore Roosevelt to the White House after McKinley’s assassination gave La
Follette and his fellow Progressives hope that his agenda would soon receive
nationwide interest. In 1906 he was named to the Senate and returned to
Washington where he would reside for the rest of his political career.
Almost from the
moment he arrived, La Follette would clash with Roosevelt, a pattern that would
last with every subsequent President. It had not helped that while La Follette
had been governor, he had refused multiple meetings with the President and
found most of his policy – while revolutionary to the Old Guard – tepid reforms
and called him an insincere grandstander. In this we see what would become a
constant problem of the progressive never satisfied with the White House no
matter what the circumstances, though at the time it was more built on
professional rivalry. Roosevelt believed that leadership came from preserving
order between the old guard and the radicals like La Follette. When La Follette
presented a bill and spent two hours defending to TR, the President pointed out
that it would never get through Congress. La Follette told him that passage of
the bill was not his first consideration. “But I want to do something,:” TR
said. The clash between idealism and pragmatism has been something that the
extremists have never been able to reconcile, and it was certainly true in the
case of La Follette. The idea of half a loaf, the whole purpose behind
democracy and government, was something that La Follette refused to accept.
In 1908 with TR
announcing he would not seek a third term, La Follette began a campaign to win
the Republican nomination. However, he refused to delegate any responsibility
for it, choosing to fight for it in the Senate by attacking multiple bills. At
one point he engaged in a record setting filibuster that lasted more than
nineteen hours against a bill that was an emergency currency reform. When the
bill passed anyway, he refused to acknowledge defeat. His campaign was a
disaster as he received only 25 votes at the Convention (all but one from
Wisconsin).
Halfway through
Taft’s term, the number of elected Progressives were beginning to grow,
particularly in the Senate. The movement he had been advocating for was growing
nationwide and he was becoming one of the biggest voices for Progressives in
elected office. But even then some were beginning to think La Follette was
taking on a messiah like complex. Hiram Johnson, a California progressive who
would run with TR in 1912 on the Bull Moose Ticket summed it up: “There were
those with us who thought the pain of the world was in their special keeping
and that we did not with sufficient rapidity apply the remedies that should
eliminate this pain. There were others who believed they bore the weight of the
world on their shoulders and after 1910 in their omniscience desired to
direct the exact political course we
should steer.
La Follette
spent much of 1911 trying to convince TR to join the National Progressive
Reform League, a League that despite having many noble principles (including
the direct primary, direct election of Senators and amendments for the
initiative and the recall) was also meant to keep Taft from winning the
Republican nomination. La Follette constantly cancelled meetings with TR out of
envy of Roosevelt and his reluctance to share the limelight with anyone. The
two men were too much alike to ever get along, but because Roosevelt had a
nationwide popularity that La Follette could never match, he refused to
compromise.
La Follette
declared his candidacy in July of 1911 and for many months it was thought he
had a real chance. However, he could not avoid the specter of TR who had not
yet declared but for whom many considered La Follette a stalking horse. Then in
January of 1912, at a dinner for the Philadelphia Publishers, La Follette gave
a speech that almost certainly killed any chance of winning the nomination.
He was already
nervous about it, and his anxiety was not helped by his young daughter’s
impending surgery. Before he began the speech (after giving a pleasing
reference to Woodrow Wilson who was in attendance) he took out his speech and told everyone he
was going to read it for two reasons. The second was the most harmful: he was
constantly upset at being misquoted by the press. It was a tactless and
insulting remark to the newspaper heads that were there, and he instantly lost
any respect from his audience.
Observers
described the speech of La Follette, normally a master orator as tedious,
inappropriate and extreme. He used his platform to attack the newspapers whose
heads were in attendance, and he repeated himself multiple times . At a certain
moment, his hostile audience began to put him and chant for him to ‘get out’.
Ill from exhaustion, La Follette left the stage and vomited. He then got on a
train back to DC to make sure he could observe his daughter’s surgery. The
reception in the papers in the aftermath was worse, with many thinking that he
was drunk or even insane.
La Follette’s
campaign was crippled and was enough to convince many wavering moderates to go
to Roosevelt. Despite that La Follette insisted on continuing his campaign for
the nomination, hoping that the existence of the Presidential primary which
twelve states had adopted might be enough to help him.
He won the North
Dakota primary (the first one) with nearly 58 percent of the vote to TR’s 39
percent. In Wisconsin, he swamped Taft by a margin of nearly three to one. He
also campaigned well in Illinois and Oregon. But many of his fellow
progressives were unimpressed. When La Follette arrived in California – where
his decision to keep his name on the ballot had already cost him influential
supporters - he ran a bitter campaign
against Johnson and George Norris, fellow Progressives who thought there was a
better chance winning with a united party.
In the space of
a few months La Follette had sacrificed the general but less devoted approval
of the powerful many for the passionate, even fanatical support of the devoted
few. This appeal, sadly, has become the driving force of so many primary
campaigns run by the extremists of members of both parties. He continued his
behavior at the Republican National Convention. With only 36 delegates, he
refused to ally with the Roosevelt forces at the convention. When the
convention was over, he insisted to the press that neither Taft nor
Roosevelt had honestly won enough delegates. Even after Roosevelt left to form
the Bull Moose party, La Follette refused to endorse him or Taft, essentially
sitting the campaign out.
La Follette’s
unwillingness to bend was as much a factor in the breakdown of the Progressive
coalition in the GOP as TR’s decision to form his own party. His decision not
only cost him a leading role in the Progressive movement that followed but any
chance he might have ever had in the future of becoming President. Had he been
willing to merely sit out the battle between Taft and TR, he very likely could
have been the Republican nominee for President in 1916. He might have been able
to help his own ambitions had he been willing to reconcile with Roosevelt in
the aftermath. But he refused to acknowledge the limited support of his agenda,
was unwilling to compromise or delegate authority and his dedication to
principles whatever the cost would lead to his political undoing.
That said La
Follette’s ambitions for the Presidency were not done nor was the Progressive
campaign over. In the next article in this series, I will deal with the
remainder of La Follette’s career in Washington, and the circumstances that led
to his own third party run in 1924.
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