Progressive Presidential Campaigns Part 3: Robert La Follette's 1924 Presidential Campaign

 

One of the interesting side notes of La Follette’s career is that while he was never able to realize his ideals as President, America managed to get behind them without him leading the way. Part of that was due to the work of the man who became President due to the split in the Republican Party in 1912.

Woodrow Wilson’s reputation has taken a hit over the past decades because of his segregationist views and his single-mindedness towards obtaining his ideals. (Ironically, this behavior is one of the habits held by Progressive extremists such as La Follette.) This is ironic because his platform and the first years of his administration were at least as progressive as  Theodore Roosevelt’s had been, if not more so. His platform included a lower tariff, enforcement of antitrust laws, utility regulation, direct election of senators and worker’s compensation. Despite the fact that these were just as much part of the progressive platform, during the campaign La Follette’s repeatedly called it inferior. La Follette, like too many of today’s Progressives, continued to see all things in terms of black and white with no shades of gray.

La Follette helped pass many bills he had either introduced or long endorse, including the income tax, and a bill that helped protect Sailors under the thirteenth Amendment. However he was a major opponent of the passage of the act promoting the Federal Reserve Act and when the Clayton Bill, which strengthened labor managed passage, Progressives considered it weak no matter what representatives of labor said. No matter how progressive Wilson was  - and during the first two years the sixteenth and seventeenth amendments which guaranteed both the Income Tax and direct elections of Senators as part of the Constitution, progressives like La Follette were never satisfied. Because Wilson, like TR was compromising, La Follette refused to accept them as actual victories.

This became increasingly clear as the War in Europe became more and more likely to involve America in the conflict. He attempted to run for the Republican nomination for President in 1916 even though he was facing a close reelection campaign for Senate that same year. He had already proposed bills opposing the draft and broadening exemption for conscientious objectors, he also supported non-intervention which drove men like TR – his most direct opponent for the GOP nomination – to distraction. La Follette applauded Wilson’s determination for neutrality and then would later attack the newspapers as being influenced by the mission for preparedness discussed avidly by men like Roosevelt, led many to think that he had lost whatever sanity he had. La Follette again easily won reelection to the Senate but refused to endorse his Republican nominee for President Charles Evans Hughes for the Presidency.

La Follette’s behavior increasingly isolated him from much of Washington. When William Jennings Bryan, Wilson’ Secretary of State and a pacifist resigned after the Lusitania was sunk, La Follette defended him. He was convinced the ship contained munitions despite their being no evidence. La Follette’s opposition to war remained steadfast even in the face of the attacks of Germany. La Follette repeatedly spoke towards non-intervention. When Congress finally declared war, he was one of only six senators to vote against it. Then when the Treaty of Paris went to the Senate, La Follette voted against all the versions of it . “He voted against war, now he voted against peace,” a Democratic senator justifiably sneered. He railed against Wilson even after the President suffered a stroke. When his junior Senator Irvine Lenroot ran for reelection, he unsuccessfully campaigned against him because he thought his votes for, among other things, the League of Nations were a betrayal of the American people. La Follette might have been on the right side of history but he was unwilling to share the spotlight with his rivals and would turn on anyone who he considering acting against Progressive ideals – which in La Follette’s mind, were anything he did not agree with.

In 1919 the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted woman’s Suffrage, was ratified by the Senate and would be ratified a year later. It was one of the major causes of La Follette’s entire career. But while it’s ratification was taking place, La Follette yet again lost the Republican nomination for President, this time to Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding. Harding’s campaign slogan ‘A Return To  Normalcy’ lead the Republican to a landslide victory in November – and the end of the Progressive Era. The end of World War I would lead to the Roaring Twenties and the era of conspicuous consumption, something that horrified the world of men like La Follette. La Follette was one of the major investigators into the Teapot Dome scandal  that would eventually bring down the Secretary of Interior Albert Fall.

With the Senate back in Republican control La Follette had an influence in an administration he had not had since the end of Taft’s term. This increased after the 1922 midterms when the Republicans lost seven seats in the Senate. La Follette’s influence over 20 of the Republican Senators gave him a power he had not had in years and with the influence among Progressive democrats, many thought he might have a chance for the Presidency again.

La Follette made a European tour in 1923 and while he did show some foresight when he saw the conditions that Mussolini’s fascist government had laid in Italy, he also showed the naivete far too many leftists would demonstrate when it came to the newly formed Soviet Union. Despite the growing totalitarian nature of the state, he believed that “Russia would become one of the greatest democracies on Earth,” even going so far as to invite Russians to come to Wisconsin to study the reform he had implemented there.

In late 1923 La Follette suffered a series of heart attacks but despite that determined to make a third party run for the Presidency in 1924, believing that the progressive senators would not do well without his leadership. By this point Calvin Coolidge had ascended to the Presidency, by far the most conservative President La Follette had served under and whose popularity showed America’s satisfaction with the status quo.

After the 1924 Republican Convention ended with Coolidge easily winning the nomination in his own right, La Follette announced that he would run as an independent. The Progressive platform involved his own platform for the party and among its twelve planks was the proposal of a ‘constitutional amendment giving Congress the power to reenact a statute over a judicial decision.”  This decision caused huge controversy even among progressives and many were angered by his refusal to denounce either the Ku Klux Klan, which had become a major figure in American politics or Prohibition. But the latter decision, which went against the fundamental idea of checks and balances,  destroyed whatever glimmer there was for a La Follette candidacy.

Of the progressive campaigns for the White House, La Follette’s 1924 run was the most grounded in reality, albeit a remote one. La Follette believed that he could carry enough states in the west and northwest to deprive Coolidge of a majority in the Electoral College. This would move the election to the House which was under Republican control and La Follette would have a chance of victory. But La Follette was already 68 and in poor health, and even supportive publications acknowledged even if this happened, any realistic possibility of realizing his agenda was non-existent.

La Follette hopes for victory were in large part driven by dissatisfaction with the corruption in the Harding administration and the near collapse of the Democratic party. The 1920s would be the nadir of the Democrats existence in the balance of power and it did not help matters that their candidate for President John W. Davis was colorless and unexciting. Davis was a Wall Street lawyer who had only won the nomination for President after an exhausting Democratic convention that had lasted two weeks and required 104 ballots before compromising on Davis almost out of exhaustion. (In a different series I will explain how these circumstances came about.) Both Coolidge and Davis were among the most conservative candidates for President in either parties history to that point in time.

La Follette reached across the aisle for his running mate, Burton Wheeler, a Democratic senator from Montana who would overtime develop a reputation as a progressive Democrat. Reformers across all social platforms endorsed La Follette from W.E.B Du Bois to John Dewey to Jane Adams to Helen Keller. Even some of the most unlikely of sources supporting him. H.L. Mencken, a markedly conservative journalist gave full support to La Follette in his columns. “What if more people were like La Follette? What a sweet world this would be!” one of the most famous cynics of all time wrote in one of many columns endorsing him.

La Follette managed to get his name on the ballots of all but one of the forty-eight states (Louisiana). Not all of them were under the label of Progressive, he was also listed as an Independent, a Socialist or Farmer-Labor. La Follette tried his best to win over former Bull Mooser’s, something that did not appeal to the former supporters of TR.

La Follette began his campaign on Labor Day when he gave the first political address ever delivered on radio. He was also one of the first Presidential candidates to give an address on film with sound, an innovation that was slowly beginning to become part of the industry.

Both parties went out of their way, rather than campaign against the other, to use La Follette as the boogeyman going out of their way to say he had more support than he actually had. Coolidge’s campaign actually went so far as to argue that voting for Davis was fundamentally voting for La Follette while Davis’s advisers him not to take swings as La Follette because they thought he would take states away from Coolidge. Some press reports actually thought La Follette could carry anywhere from eight to twelve states and throw the election to the House.

Most of La Follette’s campaigners were realistic about their chances. Few thought La Follette had any real chance of winning the Presidency. La Follette, however, initially did harbor some hope of victory. As the campaign progressed his chances grew dimmer as prices rose for farmers, one of the critical demographics to his chances.

The 1924 Presidential election bares the dubious distinction of having the lowest voter turnout percentage of the 20^th century, with less than 49 percent of all eligible voters casting a ballot. Coolidge won in an electoral landslide with 382 electoral votes and more than 16 million popular votes. Davis did little better than James Cox four years earlier, getting barely 9 million votes and 136 electoral votes.

Robert La Follette’s performance seemed poor compared to TR’s 12 years earlier; he only carried his home state of Wisconsin and its thirteen electoral votes and while he received nearly five million votes, his total percentage of the vote was roughly 17 percent compared to TR’s total of nearly 26 percent of the popular vote and six states. But in hindsight La Follette’s campaign was the most successful Progressive campaign for the White House.

La Follette finished second in ten states, including California, Minnesota and Washington. He came within eight thousand votes of winning Montana and just five thousand of winning North  Dakota. While most of his second place totals were in smaller states, he did surprisingly well in many of the bigger electoral prizes, capturing nearly half a million votes in New York, over 300,000 in Pennsylvania and more than 400,000 in Illinois. An analysis revealed he took more votes from Davis than Coolidge, nearly a quarter of the vote in the ten largest cities in America and thirty percent of the vote in the Pacific and Mountain states. This total is more remarkable when one considers the money the campaign spent. The Progressive campaign could only amount less than 10 percent of the funding of both major parties, and by the measure of the dollars at the time, it cost him less than five cents for every vote he won, as supposed to the Bull Moose campaign which spent 16.2 cents for every vote it got. Considering that much of the 1912 campaign’s success was much due to the presence of Roosevelt on the ticket, La Follette’s totals are actually more remarkable. No third party candidate would do nearly as well on the popular vote from until George Wallace in 1968, and Wallace’s campaign was the polar opposite of everything La Follette stood for.

It was the old warhorse’s last hurrah. His health got worse at the end of the campaign and on June 21, 1925 he died just four days after his seventieth birthday. In a special election  not long after his death, Wisconsin voted for his son Robert Jr, to take over his father’s seat in the Senate. He would hold the title and the Progressive Party mantle in his state for more than twenty years, until he was defeated in a Republican primary by Joseph McCarthy in 1946.

Many senators baring the progressive mantle continued to have a vital role in the years to follow, including Hiram Johnson, George Norris and Burton Wheeler. However the Progressive mantle began to move away from the Republican party to the Democrats with FDR actively seeking their support  starting in his 1932 run for the Presidency.

Robert La Follette represents Wisconsin in National Statuary Hall is D.C. and in 1959 he was named one of the five greatest Senators in the history of the body. John C. Calhoun’s legacy has always been questionable and in recent years we’ve had reason to frown on that of conservative Robert Taft. But there are few senators in the twentieth century – with the exception of Hubert Humphrey – with a devotion to liberal causes as well as being on the right side of history, often far ahead of his contemporaries.

I will deal with some of the problematic issues with La Follette as a Senator and presidential candidate at the conclusion of this series but I admire and respect the reasons for running in 1924. At that point both major parties were more conservative than they would be at any time in the 20^th century and La Follette’s cause, futile as it was, was necessary to offer a true progressive alternative that many voters clearly deserved. The policy of laissez-faire and the business of America is business, the doctrine of Coolidge were one of the most critical factors in the Great Depression that would come at the end of the decade and La Follette was far more ambitious to the ideas that could have stopped it. Many of the progressive ideals he founded were at the center of the New Deal and it is possible he could have helped lead the nation out of the spiral it was headed to. La Follette may not have had the character to be a great President but he had the great ideas and in a world where so many politicians have none, that is something to be admired.

In the final part of the series I will relate the career of Henry Wallace, how he chose to run as a Progressive in 1948, and how his campaign very quickly took on the worst aspects of so many leftist ideals in the worst possible of eras.