La Follette, Robert Marion

LA FOLLETTE, ROBERT MARION (1855–1925). The foremost progressive political leader of his time, Robert Marion La Follette, Sr., was born and raised on the Wisconsin frontier. In a 1913 autobiography, he recalled his youth as a time of hard work that gave him a lifelong appreciation for the land and farming. He clashed with his evangelical stepfather and found intellectual liberation in the ideas of religious skeptic Robert G. Ingersoll. As a student at the University of Wisconsin, La Follette did not excel academically, but won recognition for oratory. In his other major undergraduate accomplishment, he successfully courted Belle Case, who would become the University of Wisconsin Law School’s first female graduate and an important figure in the women’s suffrage movement. He graduated from the university in 1879 with conventional Republican ideas about the glories of laissez-faire capitalism. Following some course work in the law school, he became a lawyer, married Belle, and moved up swiftly through the ranks of the Republican Party, becoming in 1884 at age twenty-nine a congressman in Washington.

Although La Follette held enlightened ideas about women, commiserated with the suffering of black people, and sought redress for the exploitation of Native Americans, on all fundamental economic questions he spoke in defense of the Republican status quo. A regular party man in the House of Representatives, he followed the lead of Thomas B. Reed and William McKinley. Nothing in his congressional record betokened radicalism. He took up the cause of railroad reform and supported the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, arguing that government control of rogue corporations would be good for capitalism. He also voted for the protectionist McKinley Tariff of 1890, for which business interests zealously had lobbied.

The voters turned La Follette out of office in the election of 1890, primarily over his support for the McKinley Tariff, widely criticized in Wisconsin as a cause of high prices and negative consequences for vital agricultural interests. He spent the next several years in private law practice but remained active in state politics as the leader of reform-minded Republicans concerned about corruption in the party. Though La Follette went down to defeat in the 1896 governor’s race, he gained national stature for his speech in support of the pro-business McKinley at the Republican National Convention in St. Louis. He would give more than two dozen speeches for McKinley against William Jennings Bryan, condemned by him as the candidate of irresponsible radicals.

Yet the grinding depression of the 1890s had begun to change La Follette’s run-of-the-mill Republican politics, away from reflex boosterism accompanied by concern in a distinctly minor key about anomalous imperfections in the way the system worked. He now feared that unchecked corporate growth constituted a mortal threat to the democratic way of life in America. Many years would pass before concerns of this kind would affect his foreign policy views. La Follette stood loyally with President McKinley in support of the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War that followed.

Elected governor of Wisconsin in 1900, La Follette fought political battles of legendary fierceness to wrest power from the controlling lobbies. His legislative program would include reform measures regarding child labor, political corruption, workers’ compensation, public utilities regulation, taxation, the railroads, and the direct primary. In crafting this legislation, he turned to the University of Wisconsin for expertise. The “Wisconsin Idea” of a close relationship between the state and the university attracted national attention. Under his leadership, Wisconsin became the most progressive state in the country.

La Follette returned to the national stage in 1906 when he became a United States Senator. He remained absorbed in domestic politics, continuing to promote reform ideas for railroad legislation and developing a special interest in the management of coal lands. On both these issues he faulted the Roosevelt administration for favoring the corporations and judged his reputation as a trustbuster overdrawn. La Follette continued to deepen his convictions about the dangerous growth of monopoly political power. In 1909, he founded La Follette’s Weekly Magazine, which would serve as a forum for his brand of strongly anti-corporate progressivism. That same year, the conservative William Howard Taft took office. Opinions hostile to the Taft administration found ready accommodation in the magazine. During the Taft years, La Follette’s attention turned for the first time to foreign affairs. He attacked the president’s Dollar Diplomacy as a policy of meddling everywhere to gain concessions for American financiers.

La Follette mounted a progressive campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 1912. Republican progressives that year, however, supported Roosevelt, who then split the party by running against Taft. Hating Roosevelt and contemptuous of Taft, La Follette voted for Woodrow Wilson, calling him “the only present hope.” His honeymoon with the Wilson administration lasted about a year. He gradually lost faith in Wilson’s commitment to rein in the trusts, but a full rupture occurred in the spring of 1914 over the President’s policy of military intervention against Mexico. He republished in his magazine articles about the Mexican Revolution by the left-wing journalist John Reed, who more than anyone else during these years educated him about the exploitative role of American foreign policy in Latin America.

The outbreak of war in Europe that summer initially had the effect of reviving La Follette’s hopes for the Wilson administration. He enthusiastically endorsed the President’s declarations of American neutrality. The war itself he denounced as an insane slaughter caused by imperialist rivalries. The relationship between the two men grew closer in the early months of 1915, when the President backed La Follette’s bill to reform the conditions of American seamen. Following the sinking of the Lusitania on May 1st, however, the administration embraced the military preparedness movement, which La Follette denounced as a ploy to overcome neutrality. American loans to the Allies in September intensified his fears about Wilson’s course. It seemed to him that a financial investment in the Allies inevitably would lead to military intervention. Yet in the presidential campaign of 1916, he deemed Wilson to be the more likely candidate to keep the United States out of war and voted for him again.

Almost immediately following the election, Wilson stepped up his support for military preparedness. La Follette took the lead in the U.S. Senate in opposing the President on a February 1917 bill to arm American merchant vessels. He deplored this measure as tantamount to a declaration of war on Germany. Wilson attacked him personally. He became one of the most vilified and hated men in America, enduring verbal abuse unprecedented in American politics and facing constant death threats. Two days after the President’s war message on April 2, La Follette gave a four-hour rebuttal. American troops, he charged, would be going to Europe not for the reason given by Wilson about making the world safe for democracy. The real reason was America’s completely one-sided Anglophile foreign policy, which had made a mockery of our neutrality.

Denounced as little more than a German agent, La Follette continued throughout 1917 to face a ferocious personal onslaught for his opposition to the Selective Service Act and the Espionage Act. He also lost standing in the anti-war movement. As the war had been declared in accordance with legal and democratic means, La Follette reasoned that even in opposition he had the duty to work for the best means to win it while trying to preserve American democracy from the encroachments of militarism. He staunchly defended the rights of war protestors while making a clear distinction between his position and that of anti-war socialists like Eugene V. Debs. Notorious speeches that he gave in the fall of 1917 criticizing wartime profiteering and militarism did not call into question the legality of the American military effort. He nevertheless had to face a trial for expulsion from the Senate, which would end only in January 1919 with his full exoneration.

Wilson’s January 8, 1918 idealistic Fourteen Points Address marked a transformation in La Follette’s thinking about the war. He thereafter supported it, but on the condition that the government would work sincerely for a just peace at the end of hostilities, including the elimination of militarism, as promised in Point Four. He continued to criticize the administration on specific matters pertaining to free speech and war financing. His greatest fear concerned the secret treaties among the Allies revealed by the Bolsheviks after their October 1917 takeover in Russia. The Paris Peace Conference, unfolding from January to August 1919 as the imperialist implementation of those treaties for the acquisition of land and resources, horrified him as the absolute betrayal of the Fourteen Points and the seedbed of another war.

La Follette ridiculed Wilson’s pet project, the League of Nations, as a farcical organization that would be under the total control of the war’s victors whose only real aims, far from having anything to do with the cause of peace in the world, would concern the consolidation and maintenance of their ill-gotten gains in the war. He most feared the League’s economic agenda, involving the international control of work laws by the secret and undemocratic methods used for the creation of trade treaties. La Follette predicted that American workers and farmers would face certain economic destruction in a competition with the ill-paid labor of countries deprived of union protections. He was one of the Senate “irreconcilables” implacably opposed to the Treaty of Versailles.

The presidential election of 1920 brought to the White House one of La Follette’s conservative opponents in the Republican Party, Warren G. Harding. While continuing to denounce the war settlement as a disgrace for the Western world, he focused his attention increasingly on corruption in Washington and American imperialism in Latin America. He helped to launch the Teapot Dome investigation. To acquire a better understanding of world affairs, he made a trip to Europe in the summer of 1923, at about the time Calvin Coolidge became president following the death of Harding. He met with numerous labor and political leaders throughout Europe. Of all the countries he visited, the Soviet Union interested him the most. While recognizing some of the Bolshevik achievements, he found the Soviet system lacking even the faintest glimmer of democratic potential. He also met and had a conversation with the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini. Fascism, too, seemed to him an anti-democratic aberration produced by the war. He returned to the United States confirmed in his conviction about the moral and practical superiority of the American progressive political tradition.

Despite declining health, La Follette mounted a third-party presidential campaign in 1924, running as a Progressive with Democratic Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler. Assailing corruption, pro-business Republican economics, American imperialism in Latin America, and the Ku Klux Klan, they presented a message that Wheeler in later years would proclaim to have been a forerunner of the New Deal. Suffering from a serious heart condition, however, La Follette could not campaign at full strength. An upswing in the economy sealed Coolidge’s victory. Though underfunded and poorly organized, the La Follette-Wheeler ticket did garner nearly five million votes, won the state of Wisconsin, and finished ahead of the Democratic candidate, John W. Davis, in several states. Though defeated and sick, La Follette to the end lived up to his “Fighting Bob” reputation, calling on the American people to reject the militarism, imperialism, and oligarchy infesting the country. His example remains an inspiration to Americans, left and right, concerned about these threats to the country’s democratic civilization.

Drake, Richard. The Education of an Anti-Imperialist: Robert La Follette and U.S. Expansion. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013.

La Follette, Belle Case, and La Follette, Fola. Robert M. La Follette, June 14, 1855-June 18, 1925. 2 vols. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1953.

La Follette, Robert M. La Follette’s Autobiography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960.

Thelen, David P. Robert M. La Follette and the Insurgent Spirit. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976.

Unger, Nancy C. Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Robert M. La Follette, Sr. Papers, 1879-1910, 1924-1929. Finding Aid, Wisconsin Historical Society. http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi/f/findaid/findaid-idx?c=wiarchives;cc=wiarchives;view=text;rgn=main;didno=uw-whs-wis000qr