Can Representative Government Do The Job?: A Radio Discussion By The University of Chicago Round Table No. 428 (639TH Broadcast in Cooperation With the National Broadcasting Company, June 2, 1946)
Robert Marion La Follette Jr. was an American politician. He served as U. S. senator from Wisconsin from 1925 to 1947. He kept the Progressive Party alive in the US Senate until 1946.
Background
Robert Marion La Follette Jr. was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the eldest of two sons and the second of four children of Robert Marion La Follette and Belle Case La Follette. His father, governor of Wisconsin (1901 - 1906) and United States senator (1906 - 1925), was a leader of the Progressive movement and one of the nation's most prominent and controversial politicians. His mother, a lawyer, was active in woman suffrage, civil rights, and peace movements. "Young Bob" La Follette (as he was called to distinguish him from his father) thus grew up in an intensively political environment.
Education
He entered the University of Wisconsin in 1913 but was, at best, an indifferent student and illness twice forced him to leave; he finally withdrew entirely in 1917 without completing his degree. The University of Wisconsin awarded La Follette an honorary LL. D. degree in 1938.
Career
In 1918 La Follette suffered a near-fatal streptococcic infection, and poor health plagued him for the rest of his life. In 1919 he became secretary to his father, and for the next six years he served as one of his father's principal political advisers. In 1925, when the elder La Follette died, Young Bob, at the age of thirty, became the candidate of the Wisconsin Progressives for his father's vacant Senate seat. Politics would not have been his choice for a career (he would have preferred business, banking, or journalism), but he was probably the only candidate who could have united the La Follette following.
Although inexperienced as a campaigner, La Follette was carried to an overwhelming victory in the special election by his father's name. Although lacking the elder La Follette's flamboyant style, Young Bob patterned his ideology after the issues long associated with his father. He opposed Hoover's presidential candidacy in 1928, and with the onset of the Great Depression he became one of the president's most vociferous critics.
It was during the early years of the depression that La Follette emerged from his father's shadow to become a national leader in his own right. In 1932 La Follette supported Franklin D. Roosevelt for president (as he did again in 1936 and, with considerably less enthusiasm, in 1940), and he was generally sympathetic with the president's leadership. He believed, however, that the New Deal was too timid in its spending policies, too unwilling to make the income tax fully progressive, and too often inconsistent and insufficiently planned.
In 1935, when Roosevelt proposed a $4. 8-billion program of public works, La Follette advocated spending twice as much. In 1937 he criticized Roosevelt's cuts in public-works spending as a prime cause of the recession. To balance the heavy expenditures he advocated, La Follette favored maintaining the credit of the federal government by increasing taxes sharply on high personal incomes, on inheritances, and on corporations.
A champion of organized labor, La Follette probably reached the height of his national prominence between 1936 and 1940 when he served as chairman of a special Senate investigating committee, commonly called the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee, which exposed the techniques of espionage, subversion, and violence that some employers had used to prevent their workers from organizing. He came to be recognized as one of the handful of truly important and influential senators, and one of those most highly respected by his colleagues.
La Follette's sharpest difference with Roosevelt came in foreign affairs, where he was one of the leading spokesmen for those who wanted to keep the United States out of the European war. After Pearl Harbor La Follette supported the war effort, but by 1944 he was beginning to express reservations about Soviet intentions in the postwar world, and he was afraid that Roosevelt was carving out too large a role in world leadership for the United States.
La Follette was elected to the Senate in 1925 and 1928 as a Republican, but the ideological ferment and political realignments of the early 1930's gave control of the Wisconsin Republican party to the conservative, anti-La Follette faction. Accordingly, in 1934 the Wisconsin Progressives left the GOP to form their own party. Led by La Follette and his younger brother, former Republican governor Philip Fox La Follette, the new party won an impressive victory in 1934. La Follette was reelected to the Senate by a substantial margin, his brother won the governorship, and the new Progressive party also won most of the seats in the House of Representatives and nearly a majority in the state legislature.
The Progressive party quickly faded, however, and after Young Bob narrowly won reelection in 1940 he was the party's only notable officeholder. By 1946 the Progressive party had so deteriorated that La Follette and the few remaining Progressives decided to return to the GOP. The Republican organization in Wisconsin waged an intensive fight to defeat La Follette in the August primary, while the senator, apparently confident of victory, remained in Washington to guide the La Follette-Monroney Legislative Reorganization Act (which streamlined the committee system and provided greater staff assistance for all congressmen) to final enactment. La Follette narrowly lost the primary election to Joseph R. McCarthy. Thereafter, he made no effort to return to elective politics.
After his defeat in 1946 La Follette remained in Washington, serving as a business consultant and as a foreign aid adviser to the Truman administration. He also worked for the Hoover commission on executive reorganization. His chronic poor health became worse during these years, and in 1953, at the age of fifty-eight, he died in his home in Washington of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Achievements
La Follette became one of the most outspoken of the progressive Republican senators, resisting the pro-business policies of Coolidge and Hoover. He was one of the first to insist that the federal government assume the primary responsibility for confronting the economic crisis, and he strongly criticized Hoover's reluctance to expand public works and his adamant opposition to direct relief financed by the federal government. In 1931 he sponsored a $5. 5-billion program of public works, and he also favored a massive program of direct relief to the unemployed.
He received Collier's magazine award for outstanding public service in 1947.
