LA FOLLETTE, ROBERT M. 1855-1925

Governor of wisconsin, 1901-1905

U.s. senator, 1906-1925

"Battlin' Bob."

With his election as governor of Wisconsin in 1900, Robert La Follette emerged as one of the most impassioned American progressives, battling the entrenched power of the corrupt political "machine" by putting into practice his "Wisconsin Idea" of entrusting his administration to non-partisan civil servants drawn largely from the University of Wisconsin faculty. Largely because of Lincoln Steffens's articles about his efforts in McClure's Magazine he was soon marked as a rising star in the nationwide progressive movement, earning him the nickname "Battlin' Bob."

Background

La Follette was born into a poor but respectable farming family in pioneer Dane County, Wisconsin, on 14 June 1855. Despite their poverty, La Follette's family managed to scrape together enough money to send him to the University of Wisconsin. His love of oratory and the need to perform drew him to the stage, but fearing he could not support a family as an actor, he turned to law. After graduation in 1879, he stayed at the university to study law and was admitted to the bar in 1880. Within a year he had been elected district attorney of Dane County, Wisconsin, and married Belle Case, with whom he subsequently had four children, including two sons, Robert M. Jr. and Philip Fox, who followed their father into politics. Driven by ambition and local popularity, Robert La Follette Sr. was elected to the first of three terms in Congress in 1884 as a more or less orthodox Republican. After his district unseated him in 1890, he spent the next eight years in private practice in Madison, where populist rumblings could be heard. During this period La Follette gained an understanding of what he described as the sinister alliance between the "interests" (Wisconsin's lumber and railroad corporations) and the "bosses" (the majority-party leaders, predominantly the Republicans) who worked together to "cheat" the people—the farmers, workers, and small businessmen. La Follette became the popular champion of "the people" as he crisscrossed the state on a speaking campaign that finally landed him in the governor's mansion in 1900, after two unsuccessful tries. His election signaled the temporary defeat of the Republican machine in Wisconsin.

Fighting for Reform

While trying to reform state government, La Follette was engaged in a continual struggle against a conservative legislature and a Republican political machine dominated by "the interests." La Follette's strength came from his seemingly infinite energy, his firm belief in the need to restore representative democracy, and his willingness to borrow ideas such as railroad taxes and direct primaries from other states and adapt them for Wisconsin. Not until around 1903 did he, and the rest of the country, recognize that there was a nationwide reform movement afoot. Once he recognized this upsurge of progressivism La Follette, like other insurgent governors, decided to take his program to Washington and try to make it a national one. Elected to the Senate in 1905, he never became a successful insider despite his long tenure there. He had the same problems he had while governor—an unwillingness to compromise and an ideology far to the left of the general public.

Progressive Candidate

Never a team player in the Senate, La Follette did well at independently and uncompromisingly fighting for progressive legislation on the floor of the Senate and on the nationwide lecture circuit. In 1912 he was the leading candidate of progressive Republicans who unsuccessfully attempted to take away the Republican presidential nomination from the incumbent William Howard Taft. After the Progressives formed their own party, La Follette hoped to be their candidate to oppose Taft, but his presidential ambitions sustained a setback when Theodore Roosevelt re-entered the national political scene. La Follette lost his supporters when rumors spread that he had suffered a "nervous breakdown" while giving a long, rambling speech on 3 February 1912, and the Progressive Party nomination went instead to Roosevelt. After progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson won the election, La Follette supported his domestic programs but broke with him over American entry into World War I. La Follette was vilified and ostracized for his position and nearly expelled from the Senate. After the war, he was forgiven and assumed a new role—the respected elder of a progressive movement that went into an eclipse during the administrations of Warren G. Har-ding and Calvin Coolidge. In 1924 La Follette ran for the presidency on the Progressive Party ticket, polling almost six million of the nearly thirty million votes cast, but he carried only one state, Wisconsin, for a total of thirteen electoral votes. The campaign took its toll on his health, and he died of a heart attack on 25 June 1925.

Source:

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