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Robert Marion La Follette, a son of farmers, was born on June 14, 1855, in Primrose, Wisconsin. At age twenty he entered the University of Wisconsin, graduating in 1879. In 1880, after briefly attending law school, he was elected district attorney of Dane County, where Madison, the capital of Wisconsin, is located. In 1884 he was elected as the youngest member of U.S. House of Representatives, where he was so orthodox in his Republicanism that he ardently supported the high rates of the McKinley Tariff. The victim of a Democratic landslide in 1890, he resumed his law practice in Madison. An attempted bribe by the Wisconsin senator Philetus Sawyer, who asked La Follette to intervene in a case in which his brother-in-law was judge, radicalized the young attorney, who henceforth became a strong foe of entrenched interests.

After two abortive bids for Wisconsin's governorship, La Follette won the race in 1900 and was reelected in both 1902 and 1904. He pushed through a battery of reform measures, including conservation acts, antilobbying laws, and regulation of telephone and telegraphs companies, educational expansion, public utility controls, consumer protection, tax and civil service legislation, a direct primary, and railroad and industrial commissions. He also pioneered what was called the "Wisconsin idea," by which university experts aided in drafting significant legislation. While still governor, he was chosen in January 1905 by the state legislature to represent Wisconsin in the U.S. Senate, where he would serve until his death in 1925.

In the Senate, La Follette was one of the more vocal members, focusing in particular on giant business, which he saw as an evil in itself. In 1906, breaking the unwritten rule those freshman senators should not speak, he delivered an address on strengthening the pending Hepburn Act, a railroad regulation bill that was so detailed that it filled 148 pages of the Congressional Record. He produced similar documentation in advocating the direct election of senators, more powerful antitrust legislation, income redistribution, lower tariffs, and protection for American workers. He led the attack against the Aldrich-Vreeland bill in 1908, a measure to allow banks to issue emergency currency against securities and bonds. In his presentation, he claimed that fewer than a hundred men dominated and controlled business and industry in America. Although he was nominally a Republican, he broke with the presidency of William Howard Taft over the high Payne-Aldrich Tariff and over alleged corruption in the Department of the Interior. He sought to gain the Republican presidential nomination of 1912, but his major supporters abandoned him once former President Theodore Roosevelt entered the race.

When Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913, La Follette backed such "New Freedom" proposals as the Underwood Tariff and the Federal Reserve System. La Follette authored only one major bill, the Seamen's Act, legislation that abrogated one-year contracts and mandated safety measures for passengers and crew. Always a foe of military intervention, he spoke forcefully against armed involvement in Mexico and the Caribbean. In March 1917 he led a filibuster against Wilson's proposal to arm American merchant ships in the aftermath of Germany's declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare, at which point the president snapped, "A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible" (Link, p. 362). La Follette was equally outspoken in his opposition to American entrance into World War I, conscription, the curbing of the freedoms of speech and the press, the Treaty of Versailles, and entry into the League of Nations. In 1924 he ran for president on an independent Progressive Party ticket, gaining 4.8 million votes. His platform included collective bargaining, public ownership of water power and railroads, aid to farmers, a ban on child labor, and the recall of federal judges. On June 18, 1925, he died of heart failure in Washington, D.C.

References:

1. Burgchardt, Carl R. Robert M. La Follette, Sr.: The Voice of Conscience. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992.

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

3. Link, Arthur S. Wilson: Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace, 1916-1917. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965.

4. MacKay, Kenneth C. The Progressive Movement of 1924. New York: Columbia University Press, 1947.

5. Maxwell, Robert S. La Follette and the Rise of the Progressives in Wisconsin. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1956.

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

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

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