Career
La Follette was admitted to the bar in February 1880 and began practice in Madison. He was already a prominent figure in the community. Though he was short of frame and at this time slender, his upstanding hair and resonant voice drew attention to him. He yearned to be an actor but took instead to declamation, preparing an Iago that won him the championship of an interstate oratorical contest in 1879, and that often had to be repeated before admiring friends (Wisconsin State Journal, May 12, 1879).
Neither he nor his wife showed an interest in legal practice for the sake of money; and the abundant time which the young lawyer had on his hands in the early years was invested in political friendships. He canvassed Dane County in 1880, and was elected district attorney without the permission of the local leader, Col. E. W. Keyes. Upon his renomination in 1882, he was the only Republican elected on the county ticket.
That year, in his district, there was controversy over the Republican nomination for Congress; this resulted in the election of a Democrat but made it easier for La Follette, on his own initiative, to secure the Republican nomination in 1884. The older leaders underestimated his industry and charm. He was elected in November 1884, in spite of the activity of a third candidate, a Prohibitionist, who drew away nearly two thousand votes. Twice again he was nominated and elected, his service in the House of Representatives thus covering the six years 1885-1891.
While he was establishing himself in Congress, where his industry and power in debate served him well, the control of the Republican party in Wisconsin was vested in Senator Philetus Sawyer of Oshkosh, a lumberman of great wealth and a business politician of unusual sagacity. Sawyer was aided after 1885 by the junior senator, John Coit Spooner, a railroad lawyer from the western side of the state, and with them was associated Henry Clay Payne, whose position at various times as postmaster of Milwaukee, chairman of the state central committee, and national committeeman, gave him great political opportunities.
La Follette was a younger man and at first an outsider, but during his six years in Washington he gained a place on the committee on ways and means, and did valiant service as a junior in the preparation of the McKinley tariff. Still relatively a conservative, he was headed for greater responsibilities when the political landslide of 1890 separated him from his office. The reaction against the protective tariff, which was the chief cause of the Republican defeat of that year, was felt in Wisconsin as elsewhere; but in Wisconsin the feeling against the Republicans was embittered by the Bennett Law, enacted by the last legislature, which prescribed that all schools in the state should give a portion of their instruction in the English language. The adherents of the foreign-language parochial schools were inflamed by this legislation and for the moment they outrode every other political force in Wisconsin. Only one of the Republican representatives, Nils P. Haugen, was returned to Congress, and a Democratic state government was installed at Madison. Sawyer and Spooner, in their struggle to survive and to retain control of the Republican state organization, were disposed to discard those whom the Bennett Law had struck and to abandon La Follette with the rest.
La Follette returned to the practice of law in Madison. He found himself outside politics, not pliant enough to retain the active support of the leaders, and less available for new favors than men who had not been caught among the animosities of 1890. Before the time came for the nominations of 1892, he had given additional reasons for his abandonment by the leaders, and had acquired a new point of view.
In the autumn of 1891 Senator Sawyer summoned him to Milwaukee to offer him law business in defending certain former state treasurers (whose bondsman Sawyer was) against a suit brought by the Democratic state government to compel them to account for the interest they had received on state moneys in their charge. The case was about to open in the Madison court of Judge Robert G. Siebecker, the Democratic brother-in-law of La Follette, when the latter startled the political world by announcing that Senator Sawyer had tried, through him, to bribe Judge Siebecker, offering him large contingent fees payable after the case had been "decided right" (Milwaukee Sentinel, Oct. 29, 30, 1891). Judge Siebecker at once withdrew from the case. Sawyer, though conceding that in ignorance of the family connection he had offered the work to La Follette, disclaimed an intent to bribe and denied that La Follette had instantly and indignantly repulsed his advances. La Follette, however, adhered to his charge, and was convinced that this effort at bribery was only a small evidence of the political corruption practiced by the party managers.
It is not possible to measure with precision the relative degrees in which resentment for his abandonment after 1890 and determination to clean up politics now entered his life. Both influenced him; and as his campaign against the bosses advanced, his vision of a new political system grew in definiteness. The caucus and convention system he believed to be unrepresentative and corrupt, and a means of maintaining political control in the hands of industrial, railroad, and financial interests so that they might escape their due share of taxation and reap illicit profit.
In the ten years that elapsed between his retirement from Congress and his inauguration as governor in 1901 he elaborated a definite program of reform, comprising: (a) a system of direct-primary nominations protected by law; (b) an equalization of taxation of corporate property with that of other similar property; (c) the regulation of charges by railroads and other corporations to ensure fair play and to prevent them from passing on their taxes to the public; and (d) the erection of commissions of experts for the regulation of railroads and for other public interests.
His first steps as a reformer were directed toward the reclaiming of the state government from boss control. La Follette found himself an unwelcome aid in the Republican canvass of 1892, but he assisted as a free-lance speaker, for he was and continued to be a Republican. He toured the state for followers in his crusade, finding them most numerous in the western sections where the farmers had been permeable to Granger ideas and those of Populism, and in northern counties where railroad dominance and the power of the timber barons had aroused real animosities. In the more populous southeast, from Milwaukee on the east to Janesville, on Rock River, he made the fewest of his converts.
In 1894, through the medium of a Wisconsin Republican League, he and his friends pushed the candidacy of a Scandinavian congressman, Nils P. Haugen, for the nomination as governor; but the organization procured with ease the selection and election of Major W. H. Upham, an upstate businessman. It now became easier, however, to make way against the Republican managers, for both Sawyer and Spooner were out of the Senate.
In 1896 La Follette sought the nomination as governor, and went to the state convention in Milwaukee believing that he had a majority of the delegates pledged to his candidacy. When they failed him, and nominated an Oconto lumberman, Edward S. Scofield, on the sixth ballot, La Follette believed that a corrupt use of money had accomplished his defeat.
In 1898 he returned to the attack, but again Scofield was nominated and elected. There were reasons to suppose that the struggle of La Follette was now hopeless. McKinley was president; Payne was in high favor; Spooner was back in the Senate, where a Milwaukee "Stalwart" joined him. The Democratic interlude was over, and the conservative Republicans had seemed to meet one of the leading La Follette demands by setting up a tax commission (1899). In 1900, however, he found new recruits in the persons of Joseph W. Babcock, congressman and chairman of the Republican congressional committee in 1894, who had been passed over for senator in favor of Spooner, and Isaac Stephenson, a wealthy lumberman whose senatorial aspirations had been similarly checked. With this new backing, the campaign against the Wisconsin bosses was so successfully resumed that all open resistance was withdrawn. La Follette found himself nominated by acclamation in 1900; but his associates were the conservative associates of Governor Scofield who were renominated, and in the legislature the "Stalwart" Republicans had surrendered nothing.
He took the office of governor in January 1901, committed to a program of direct-primary legislation, tax reform, and railroad control. This was partly reminiscent of Populism, partly anticipatory of Progressivism; but nowhere else was such a program so aggressively presented in a Republican state, and before the trend of the times was fully realized elsewhere the "Wisconsin Idea" had taken a place at the head of liberal political thought (Charles McCarthy, The Wisconsin Idea, 1912; Frederic C. Howe, Wisconsin: An Experiment in Democracy, 1912). La Follette attacked, as corrupt and greedy political manipulators, the leaders whom he had found in power and created a deep and lasting schism in the party in the state. When his opponents blocked him, as they did at every step, he countered by going to the people, whom he understood. They listened to him for long hours at county fairs, or in a thousand Chautauqua audiences, when he recited in full his statistical proofs of the unfair system of taxation and the need for a public control of railroad rates. His labors racked his body to its permanent injury, but assembled a loyal following of common people who remained his until, and after, death.
The legislature of 1901 did none of the things that he had urged in his campaign, and he believed that its recalcitrance was another proof of the plot of the bosses against reform. They had allowed him the empty shell of office, but had retained the reality of legislative control.
At about this time one of the wealthy "Stalwarts, " Charles F. Pfister, secured control of the Milwaukee Sentinel, upon which La Follette had relied for support, and turned into its columns a persistent attack upon his aims and motives. To fight the Sentinel, the Milwaukee Free Press was soon set up as a new daily by Isaac Stephenson, who differed from most of La Follette's associates in having money (Isaac Stephenson, Recollections of a Long Life, 1829-1915, 1915, p. 219). The conservatives responded to La Follette's charge of treachery by denouncing his "rule-or-ruin" ambition, and his refusal to cooperate.
In 1902 the governor made a thorough canvass not only for his own renomination but also for the election of a legislature that would work with him. He was so successful that his own lieutenant, Irvine L. Lenroot, was chosen speaker of the Assembly, and his primary law was enacted in 1903, subject to a popular referendum the next year. He had removed the Republican state convention of 1902 from the hostile influences of Milwaukee to the friendly atmosphere of the university gymnasium at Madison (Barton, post, p. 201). When Lenroot began the keynote speech before the convention of 1904, the prospect of victory for the primary law was so good that he was warranted in reminding his auditors that they constituted "the last republican convention in Wisconsin" (Wisconsin State Journal, May 18, 1904).
In the legislature of 1903 the conservative forces had blocked the passage of railroad and taxation laws acceptable to La Follette, and after the session they had set to work to put him out of politics. They contested every step in the campaign of 1904, but a majority of the state central committee were now La Follette men, and these decided to nominate a state ticket and to select delegates at large to the Republican National Convention in a single state convention to be held in May. The selection of the delegates to this convention was a matter of warm partisanship, and gave rise to many contests which the state central committee was disposed to settle in favor of the La Follette contestants. There was rumor of an intended seizure of the gavel by "Stalwarts, " and the gymnasium hall was policed by University athletes and so fenced as to keep physical control in the hands of the friends of the governor. The precautions were so complete that the convention renominated La Follette with ease, and chose him to lead the delegates at large in Chicago; whereupon the "Stalwart" delegations and contestants held a rival convention in the opera house, nominated their own state ticket, and chose a set of delegates for the national convention with Payne and Spooner at their head.
The Republican National Convention at Chicago seated the anti-La Follette delegation in spite of the fact that they were the choice of a bolting faction. The president designate, Roosevelt, made no opposition to the seating of the "Stalwarts, " thereby arousing in La Follette a conviction that his progressivism was neither genuine nor dependable. In spite of the schism, the Republican party carried Wisconsin in 1904, and La Follette met a friendly legislature in 1905. A railroad commission was set up, the bill erecting it receiving constructive support from the railroad politicians who now accepted it as inevitable. The Progressive movement and the "Wisconsin Idea" were fully launched, to be elaborated during the next few years by the lieutenants of La Follette. He himself was elected to the United States Senate in 1905, replacing Quarles. He deferred his resignation as governor and his qualification as senator until January 1906, in order to complete the work in hand.
For the next ten years men trained as civil servants in Wisconsin found unusual opportunities in the federal service, although La Follette, who had been the leader of many of them, was "alone in the Senate. " Thrice after 1905 La Follette was elected to succeed himself. His popular following in Wisconsin defied any attempt to break his hold upon it, but at no time did his associates in the Republican party recognize his right to lead, or accept cheerfully his direction in those fields in which he could qualify as expert. His speeches continued to be elaborate statistical treatises, and he revealed on the floor of the Senate the same qualities of vision, courage, and persistence that had enabled him to organize and direct his crusade against the bosses in Wisconsin. Undependable as a unit in the Republican organization, he insisted upon a right to dominate that was not accorded him and a freedom to stigmatize his opponents that was bitterly resented.
As the years went on, however, a surprising number of the measures advocated by him were enacted. Before the World War checked the movement for reform, the direct primary was established by law in most of the states of the nation. This served to break in a measure the tight grip of party bosses on the personnel in office, but resulted also in the bringing to Washington and into the state governments of men as stubborn and refractory as La Follette himself, to the destruction of party coherence. His reforms in taxation made Wisconsin a leader in fair assessment and in the adoption of the income tax, which soon became national. In the matter of railroad control, La Follette advocated in the Senate physical valuation as a basis for rate-making, and was generally dissatisfied with any measure that could command a majority of votes. Regulatory commissions, advocated by him as means to the bridging of the gap between the electorate, which can pass intelligent judgment only on general propositions, and technical experts, who can strive for scientific exactitude, rebuilt his state and to some extent changed the whole aspect of American government.
Because of its dependence upon laboratory men in economics, law, and science, the movement toward government by commissions gave definitive impulses to the University of Wisconsin, which was perhaps the object of La Follette's greatest affection, and through his influence that institution rose to national prominence. Unalterably at variance with the dominant wing of the Republican party that represented industry and finance, La Follette regarded himself and was regarded by his followers as the logical man to take over the principles of the Roosevelt administration and translate these into enactment. They failed to perceive that the "Stalwart" faction, with which Roosevelt himself had not been able to maintain more than an armed truce, would not have tolerated a genuine Rooseveltian.
La Follette's name was presented to the Republican National Convention of 1908, but it was Taft who secured the nomination, while Roosevelt gave no sign of seeing in La Follette more than a progressive local leader. The latter, remembering his own rebuff of 1904 and perceiving Roosevelt's willingness to find a working basis with the "stand-pat" wing of the party, became deeply convinced that Roosevelt was not a genuine reformer. The Taft administration could never convince him that it was progressive. La Follette led the Senate opposition to the Payne-Aldrich tariff, and espoused the cause of conservation.
His hopes for the nomination to succeed Taft in 1912 were advanced by the Democratic gains of 1910. The schism that had been scarcely concealed in the Republican party since 1901 broke out in open warfare. In the opinion of La Follette the foundation of American society was imperiled by the unrestrained greed of business, which he felt would inevitably engender Socialism. He was no Socialist, but he feared for the continuance of the "American principle" unless democracy could develop agencies powerful enough to overcome the selfish power of wealth. He founded a personal organ for maintaining contact with his followers when, on January 9, 1909, appeared the first number of La Follette's Weekly Magazine, carrying the caption: "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. " Believing that in the nation, as previously in Wisconsin, it was necessary to gain control over the organization before reforms could be attained, he drafted the manifesto upon which the National Progressive Republican League was organized in his Washington residence in 1911.
The League aimed at such mechanical reforms as direct primaries and the direct election of senators, and hoped to bring about the nomination of a Progressive candidate to succeed Taft. It was generally conceded that La Follette was the logical leader of this insurgent group, although defeat was expected to be the immediate reward of its activities. He was encouraged to fight by many who would have preferred to support Roosevelt, but who believed that the latter was outside the contest. He thought that Roosevelt was himself one of his backers. But, by the end of 1911, the revolt against Taft ceased to appear hopeless and Roosevelt, in secrecy, became convinced that it might be won, if only he took the lead.
In February 1912, a temporary breakdown of La Follette on a public occasion (Owen Wister, in "Roosevelt and the 1912 Disaster, " Harper's Magazine, May 1930) gave the pretext for many of his supporters to switch to Roosevelt. La Follette believed for the rest of his life that he had been used only as a decoy and never forgave either Roosevelt or the deserters among his own followers. He remained in the race at the Chicago convention, but to no avail. His prominence as a Progressive soon threw him into close contact with the Wilson administration when the latter undertook to enact progressive measures with Democratic votes.
On numerous occasions the Democrats received La Follette's support, paying for it by joining with him in the passage of a seaman's act in 1915. His strong sympathy with labor, too, brought him close to much of the activity of the Democrats; but he broke away when the problems of World War I and neutrality began to require American attention. Such positive testimony as La Follette's private correspondence may contain with reference to the reasons for his war attitude has not yet become available. Roosevelt's early and vigorous support of the Allies may have helped to fix his attitude. He retained throughout his life that critical attitude toward Great Britain that was nearly universal during his service in the House of Representatives. The German or Scandinavian origin of many of his constituents did not tend to soften it. When imperialism began to be discussed during his senatorial career, his sympathies were with the people of the dependencies. His characteristic hostility to the larger agencies of wealth made him critical of the profits which some Americans derived from the munitions trade, and made it easy for him to believe that the drift of the United States into World War I was the result of a conspiracy of Wall Street to protect its loans to the Allies. Really anti-British, he could not avoid the reputation of being pro-German.
Never a man to conceal his sentiments or to take cover in a fight, he became an open critic of the diplomatic course of President Wilson. He engineered the filibuster that prevented the passage of the armed merchant-ship legislation at the close of the short session in 1917, and he spoke and voted against the declaration of war against Germany. In the latter debate he used the almost fatal words: "Germany has been patient with us" (Congressional Record, 65 Cong. , 1 Sess. , p. 234). After the declaration, he "supported all other war measures because if we were to send an army in a foreign war at all, it was right and necessary to send them perfectly equipped and amply supplied in every way" (La Follette's Magazine, July 1919, p. 1). He used every effort, however, to make the war a charge upon the current income of the rich, rather than a bonded obligation upon posterity.
In September 1917, the incorrect press version of one of his speeches at a Non-Partisan League meeting in St. Paul exaggerated his unpopularity, and directed against him a movement for his expulsion from the Senate. There was no ground for an expulsion, but the Senate evaded compliance only by protracting its proceedings. La Follette continued to be the scapegoat for excited patriots. No piece of criticism wounded him more deeply than an adverse memorial from members of the faculty of his university, and a censure by the legislature of his state. But when his partisans later wished to retaliate upon those who had censured him it was his hand that restrained them.
Active as he was in criticism of the avowed aims of the war, his activity was lessened by the long and desperate illness of his eldest son. He opposed the ratification of the Covenant of the League of Nations, and the accession of the United States to the World Court. He strove to organize farmer and labor opinion, to protect these classes against the consequences of deflation, and to prevent "big business" from entrenching itself in the legislation of the postwar period. La Follette had been reelected easily in 1916; and at the next senatorial election, in 1922, the war was over, the reaction had set in, and he was stronger than ever among his constituents.
In the Senate from 1919 to 1925, he and his "little group of willful men, " as Wilson had previously characterized them, were able to hold a balance of power. His Republican associates resented his independence but dared not risk the consequences of turning him out of the party. His hold on liberal opinion was steadily becoming stronger, and his character stood every test in the trying years of the Harding administration.
He was the author of the resolution which authorized the senatorial investigation of the Teapot Dome and other naval oil leases. There was no chance that his party would ever accept him for the presidency, but there was in 1924 a possibility that the forces in revolt might be welded into a new party of liberalism, and that a third candidate might throw the election into the House of Representatives, where on the vote by state delegations the insurgents might hold a balance of power and determine the choice. "Coolidge or chaos" was the phrase of George Harvey, who exaggerated the possibility of this to the advantage of the Republican candidate.
A conference for Progressive political action, meeting at Cleveland in July 1924, invited La Follette to run independently; this he did, selecting his vice-presidential associate, Senator Burton K. Wheeler, from among the progressive Democrats. He carried out as active a canvass against both Coolidge and Davis as his health would permit, and received nearly 5, 000, 000 votes in November, or one-sixth of the votes cast; whereas the Populist ticket of 1892 had received only one vote in twelve. It was his last campaign. He had long worked against physical disabilities which now got the better of him. He died in Washington during the following summer, but the magnetism of his name placed his eldest son and namesake in his Senate seat.
