Robert M. La Follette and the Insurgent Spirit

Library of American Biography

by David P. Thelen, Oscar Handlin (Editor)

Robert M. La Follette and the Insurgent Spirit is a closely argued, lively, and readable biography of the central figure in the American Progressive movement. Wisconsin's “Fighting Bob” La Follette embodied the heart of Progressive sentiment and principle. He was a powerful force in shaping national political events between the eras of Populism and the New Deal

Genres: Nonfiction, History

224 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1976

About the author

David P. Thelen received his B.A. from Antioch College in 1962 and his M.A. (1964) and Ph.D. (1967) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He joined the History Department at Indiana University in 1985 and became Distinguished Professor in 2004.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Even though he was short in stature, Robert Marion La Follette was a giant of twentieth-century American politics. Born in Wisconsin, he attended the University of Wisconsin, where he distinguished himself as an orator. Passing the state bar a year later, he almost immediately thereafter launched himself in a career in state politics, where he enjoyed a rapid ascent, winning election first as a district attorney, then to the United States Congress. It was not until he lost his seat in the Democratic landslide of 1890, however, that La Follette began the transformation into the insurgent activist who would become a leader of the progressive movement at both the state and the federal level.

La Follette’s insurgency is a defining theme of David Thelen’s biography of the politician. Yet it is a testament to the quality of the author’s work that other, equally defining characteristics of his career stand out. Among them is La Follette’s embrace of demagoguery once he set himself against the political leadership of his state’s leaders. This began with a September 17, 1891 meeting between La Follette, who had resumed his legal practice after his defeat, and Philetus Sawyer, the state’s senior United States senator, who was due to lose a significant sum in an upcoming legal case that was about to be heard before La Follette’s brother-in-law and who offered to pay La Follette for his help with it. Though Sawyer later claimed ignorance of La Follette’s familial relation and insisted that he was merely seeking to retain La Follette’s assistance in the case, La Follette accused the senator of bribery, a charge for which Sawyer’s many friends would never forgive him.

Recognizing this, La Follette spent much of the next decade building a personal organization within the state. Such organizations were not unusual in Gilded Age politics, as outsiders often resorted to them as a means of wresting power from the establishment. And initially there were few issues that divided La Follette from the bosses he sought to dislodge. It was not until after his defeat for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 1896, according to Thelen, that La Follette embraced insurgent progressivism as an issue that would appeal to voters. Here the author sees him tapping into the growing discontent over the economic inequality created by the Gilded Age, an issue that seemed more salient with the ongoing depression of the era. While the Republican Party bosses thwarted La Follette’s ambition again in 1898, it came with concessions that foreshadowed the insurgent’s success in winning both the nomination and the governorship in 1900.

Thelen situates La Follette squarely in the progressive movement then in ascendance. As governor, he championed a range of progressive reforms, prioritizing in particular the direct primary and a higher tax on railroads. His success in the state soon drew to him the attention of muckraking journalists, making him a national figure. Yet while the governor succeeded in getting these measures through the Republican-run legislature, Thelen argues that his inability to embrace the full range of issues and methods of Wisconsin’s insurgents, particularly their desire for direct democracy in the form of the initiative and referendum process, limited his achievements during his time in office.

Relief came in the form of election to the United States Senate in in 1906, where La Follette was free from the factional concerns that plagued him as governor. Here he joined a growing roster of insurgents from throughout the region, who united in a challenge the dominance of the party’s conservative leadership in the body. La Follette soon assumed the leadership of this movement, and waged war against opponents of reform measures by traveling to their home states and reading roll call votes in favor of corporate power. These trips also helped La Follette build a budding alliance between taxpayers and consumers who shared a hostility towards the entrenched corporate power that La Follette saw as the greatest threat facing the nation. By 1910, La Follette was mentioned as a leading contender for the presidency, only for his hopes to win the Republican nomination in 1912 dashed by Theodore Roosevelt’s entry into the race.

The Republican Party split engendered by Roosevelt’s candidacy ensured the election of the Democratic nominee, Woodrow Wilson. The shift in the direction of progressivism under Wilson away from insurgency to what Thelen terms “modernism” – an acceptance of large-scale industrialism and a focus instead on regulation and the demands of job-oriented pressure groups – crushed La Follette’s hopes that Wilson might prove an ally. Instead, La Follette found himself in opposition to the president over the issue that would do more than any other to define his presidency: the First World War. Thelen sees La Follette as the foremost critic of Wilson’s foreign policy, and continued to speak out against intervention even after the United States entered the war in April 1917. Though he argues for the popularity of the senator’s stance among millions of Americans, the evidence Thelen provides to support this is inconclusive at best.

By the end of the war, La Follette found himself facing a nation in which industrial concentration and modernization were irreversible. The conservative trend of politics in the 1920s saw the senator fighting a series of holding actions simply to preserve the achievements of progressivism’s heyday. Progressive gains in the 1922 midterm elections raised La Follette’s hopes for the upcoming presidential election, yet his candidacy on a third-party ticket found him out of touch with the evolving American political environment. Despite winning the endorsement of a wide swath of progressive and liberal political groups, La Follette was unable to navigate successfully the increasingly important ethnic politics of the region, while too many of the farmers who long made his base were unwilling to risk their recently-returned prosperity by casting aside the Republican incumbent.

Long plagued by poor health and exhausted by the toll of the campaign, La Follette died soon after its end. Thelen sees La Follette’s passing as marking an end to his era of insurgent politics, leaving little in the way of a legacy for those who shared his agenda. While this conclusion is debatable, what is not is the value of Thelen’s book as an overview of La Follette’s political career. Though his argument about progressivism is a little too neat in its categorization, and his analysis leaves underexplored other aspects of La Follette’s career, this doesn’t detract from the author’s overall engagement with his subject’s ideas and their impact upon the politics of his time. Despite its age, it retains its value both as a study of La Follette and as a provocative analysis of the Progressive movement he championed.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

On Election Day, the state in which I've lived for my entire life gave its ten electoral votes to the Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump. In doing so, it broke a nearly three-decade trend of voting for the other party: ever since the election of 1988, when George H.W. Bush faced off against Michael Dukakis, Wisconsin has cast its lot in with the Democratic candidate.

What makes this fact worthy of note is that the voters of Wisconsin have long embraced their state's progressive history with pride. After all, this was the home of Robert LaFollette, the anti-war Progressive who championed civil rights, economic parity, and an end to party control, all in an era when such positions were not always celebrated; and Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day, who served the state as both governor and senator. For decades, Wisconsin was the epitome of a blue-collar state, where agriculture and industry mixed well together, its universities ranked among the best in the country, and its citizens chose their politicians based less on party identification and more on a shared set of ideals. After all, this is the same state that elected a Tea Party Republican, Ron Johnson, to the Senate in 2010, then elected an openly gay liberal, Tammy Baldwin, to the same body two years later.

Wisconsin has a history of blurring the lines between Democrat and Republican, between liberal and conservative, and embracing the idea that a good politician should be approachable, reasonable, and a defender of democratic principles, rather than a partisan who only scores points for his or her side. William Proxmire, a Democratic senator for more than three decades, devoted much of his career to fighting government waste, to the point of making enemies among many liberal institutions. Similarly, Lee Dreyfus, a Republican governor in the early 1980s, signed a law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation--the first state in the nation to do so--and explained his decision by stating, "It is a fundamental tenet of the Republican Party that government ought not intrude in the private lives of individuals where no state purpose is served, and there is nothing more private or intimate than who you live with and who you love." Wisconsin elected a socialist to Congress in 1910, watched as he was removed from office for speaking out against World War I in 1919, and returned him to the same Congressional seat in a special election five weeks later. And when Joseph McCarthy, the state's junior senator, forced his witch-hunt on the American population, more than 300,000 Wisconsinites signed recall petitions against him. (The "Joe Must Go" movement did not succeed in its goals, but McCarthy's career was over nonetheless; he was censured by his colleagues in the Senate and died in 1957, before his term ended. Proxmire was elected to replace him and served until 1989.)

But these political juxtapositions do not explain why a reliably blue state, even one with a Republican governor and Republican-controlled legislature, went for the Republican candidate this year. Some have pointed to the final results--Clinton lost to Trump by around 27,000 votes, a minuscule number in a state that cast more than three million ballots--and placed the blame on third-party candidates, who received more than 150,000 votes, enough to have put Clinton over the threshold of victory if even a fraction of those votes had gone to her. Others note that Bernie Sanders, whose policies were much more liberal than Clinton's, won the state's primary 56.6% to 43.1%, a suggestion that perhaps Clinton's message did not resonate with enough of Wisconsin's historically progressive electorate. Others still noted how Clinton had not campaigned in Wisconsin since April of this year, perhaps believing her lead in Wisconsin to be more secure than it was. And while these are legitimate theories, they do not take into account other possibilities that I find much more believable, based on all of the years I've spent living in rural areas of Wisconsin.

To understand the election of 2016 as it relates to Wisconsin (and other blue-collar, Midwestern states), we must return to 2009, to the days and weeks after President Obama took office for the first time. Across the country, millions of Americans were suffering under the most devastating economic downturn in 75 years. More than half a million jobs had disappeared in December alone, a month before Obama took the oath of office, and unemployment in 2008 had exceeded 11 million people, almost twice the number of Americans who were considered unemployed before the recession began. (Eventually, the unemployment rate would reach 10%.) The number of foreclosures throughout the country was also continuing to rise and would eventually surpass 1.2 million by 2010, forcing many families into a state of uncertainty, if not outright homelessness. Food insecurity skyrocketed; state and municipal budgets were slashed, affecting everything from pensions and infrastructure to education and basic public services; and economic growth came to a standstill. To say that the country was suffering would have been viewed as the ultimate understatement.

This was the dominant problem facing Obama and the new Congress. It was far from an insurmountable problem, but solutions would not be quick or easy. Difficult votes would need to be taken, especially considering the amount of money required to assuage the damage that had been done. Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, had managed to pass legislation in the closing months of his second term, which was designed to lessen much of the recession's economic damage. The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, or "bailout," was introduced in the final days of September and promised to infuse more than $700 billion into the economy while helping rescue faltering banks and financial institution. When it was brought up for a vote, however, the bill failed due to concerns over the legislation's benefits to "big banks," its disregard for individual Americans who were suffering, and the possibility that it might hurt taxpayers even more. Eventually the act did pass, but most agreed that the next president--whether it be Obama or McCain--would need to do more. This gave rise to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, known informally as "the stimulus," an almost $800 billion infusion of money into the economy in order to incite job growth and shore up faltering public institutions.

To most economists, these two legislative acts were necessary: you could not shore up the American economy without first stabilizing its major institutions, especially in a country in which so much of the economy was based around banking. But to the millions of Americans who were suffering, this seemed like a betrayal. Instead of moving to secure the financial lives of its citizens, the American government appeared to be handing over an unconscionable amount of money to the very same people whose greed and carelessness had undermined the economy and brought about the recession in the first place.

In their eyes, this was comparable to the local fire station handing over control of the firetrucks to a group of arsonists.

This was the perception, and it so angered the American population that it gave rise to the Tea Party, a supposedly grassroots movement among conservative voters who were angered over the government's assistance to Wall Street. (The Tea Party was actually funded and encouraged by vested interests in the Republican Party and conservative circles, including those in the conservative news media.) In the end, however, the bailout and stimulus both prevailed, and in the years since the latter proved to be one of the great successes of Obama's first term--the economy rebounded, the stock markets stabilized, and unemployment fell below 5% by the end of Obama's second term. Supporters of the stimulus, as well as members of the president's party, hailed the bill as a major success, and more often than not their adulation took the form of the same laudable claim: he had prevented a second Great Depression.

The problem is that, at least in American politics, you rarely get credit for preventing something from happening, no matter how successful you may have been at it. Those who had looked to the government for support were not helped by the bailout or the stimulus, at least not in a way that they could sense in their everyday lives. But still they waited, perhaps expecting Obama and Congress to turn their attention to the recession's many victims once the banks had recovered. Unfortunately, their elected officials moved on to other pressing issues without addressing many of the economic problems that remained; they did not raise the minimum wage, institute a living wage, strengthen Social Security, prevent jobs from moving overseas, or enact a myriad of legislation that could have lessened the growing wage gaps and class disparities. To those Americans who worked long hours, perhaps even multiple jobs, while taking home paychecks that barely sufficed, no explanation could have been good enough: a politician talking about policy will never mitigate what blue-collar workers see and feel on a daily basis.

These same voters became buried under credit card debt, often because the companies charged exorbitant interest rates; could barely afford life-changing medical visits, even as millions of previously uninsured men and women gained access to the marketplace; had difficulty paying their mortgages, despite the sudden profitability of their banks; watched their children suffer under crushing student debt, to the point that many moved back home; and saw their jobs disappear while Wall Street executives saw record-breaking profit margins, gave themselves large pay raises, and claimed incredible retirement packages.

And while they waited for help, they watched as the very same politicians who had been elected to help instead them took millions from lobbyists, cut the number of days they would be in session to less than 150 and, in some cases, took up permanent residence in Washington, D.C. rather than back in their state or district. Even more, House districts were redrawn to make them politically safer, to the point that most congressional districts were no longer competitive; as long as an incumbent won his or her primary, which is easy to do with large donations and support from super-PACs, the general election was no longer a viable threat, and the need to moderate views and compromise on legislation became not only unnecessary but a potential liability. As a result, these elected officials, who were supposed to be acting as public servants, were instead treating their seats in Congress as well-paying, highly influential, top-tier jobs...and they were willing to say and do what they needed in order to keep them.

This enmity towards Washington D.C. became the first ingredient in the vile concoction that would elevate Donald Trump to the presidency. But anger alone cannot drive a presidential campaign, especially when the outgoing commander-in-chief has a high approval rating, unemployment is under 5%, and the party's chosen candidate has an unprecedented amount of baggage. And anger at Washington D.C. is not the same as anger at those of other religions, nationalities, ethnicities, or sexual preferences. Even Hillary Clinton understood this. In her now infamous "deplorables" speech, in which she characterized half of Trump's supporters as "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic--you name it," Clinton said he had lifted the fringes of his party into the mainstream and made their beliefs a cornerstone of his campaign. However, she added, there was another basket, one that needed to be separated from the first:

...[I]n that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures. And they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.

The point, Hillary said, albeit inelegantly, was to try and appeal to that second basket of people--to show them that Trump would not be their savior in Washington, that he would not fix the status quo, that he would not rescue them from their despair. The point was to give them a better option, one that did not force them to endorse Trump's bigotry and hate out of desperation and fear. It was an argument that made sense and should have guided the final months of Hillary's campaign, but instead it became a source of controversy for her, to the point that she had to apologize publicly. In that realm, Trump won, and in doing so, he could paint Clinton once again as the embodiment of the D.C. establishment he hoped to remove.

Now, at this point, some clarification is needed. For much of this year's election cycle, Republican pundits and party spokespeople claimed that Trump's surprising amount of support was due to this inaction on economic issues--that people suffering from "economic anxiety" were frustrated enough with Washington D.C. that they could no longer tolerate career politicians like Jeb Bush, John Kasich, or Hillary Clinton. These were candidates, it was said, who had become so ingrained in the system that they could not be trusted to look out for the interests of anyone but themselves and their friends on Wall Street. Only someone like Donald Trump--a man so rich he could not be bought, so outspoken he could not be silenced, so confident in his ideals that he could not be swayed--could possibly restore the federal government to working condition.

This, to be perfectly honest, is bullshit.

Characterizing the economy as the sole reason for Trump's victory is beyond misguided. Yes, there is actual economic anxiety throughout the country, but that does not excuse those Trump supporters who cast a vote for him with full knowledge of his bigoted positions. During the campaign, Trump called for the exclusion of an entire religion from a country whose very Constitution ensures religious liberty; who characterized Mexicans as rapists and criminals; who derided the status of all POWs, including one who was the Republican Party's nominee in 2008, as less than heroic; who refused to denounce the support he received from hate groups, including neo-Nazis and the KKK; who refuses to release his tax returns, thereby hiding any conflicts of interest he might have; whose campaign was in regular contact with members of the Russian government; who announced that he would jail his political opponent, despite the fact that she had been cleared by various Republican officials and committees; who supported the bombing of innocent women and children in war zones, the textbook definition of a war crime; who endorsed the use of torture; who defended the sexual assault of women; and so on. Each one caused endless controversy for Trump, and yet he remained relatively unscathed. In fact, it could even be argued that this brazen, unapologetic attitude actually enhanced his reputation as the only candidate who could not be bossed or shamed--as someone who was genuine rather than shaped by focus groups, even if that genuineness was disgusting and disqualifying.

After all, a person's bigoted views don't matter so much when you're one missed paycheck away from total poverty. If Trump claims he can fix the system that has kept you in financial shackles for more than a decade, a system that also threatens to keep your children and grandchildren in those same shackles, then what he says doesn't matter so much as what he can do.

There is another reason for Trump's victory, one that extends beyond economics and is supported by much of the exit polling, not to mention the hundreds of localized events that happened during the campaign, and have continued well into the wake of Trump's victory: that the American population, and specifically the white voting block, holds many of the same bigoted views as Trump. There has always been an undercurrent of prejudice in the Republican platform. After all, this is the same party that has pushed voter ID laws designed to disenfranchise those in low income, African American, and Hispanic neighborhoods, as well as areas in which college students live in large numbers; has worked to undermine the health care options of women; has prevented meaningful immigration reform, which would help millions of people "come out of the shadows"; has demonized Muslims as part of a nation-wide conspiracy of terrorism; has characterized those on welfare programs like Medicare and Medicaid as lazy; and has refused to extend civil rights to the LGBT community, among other issues. Many of these views were codified into actual legislation over the previous decades, and others were promoted endlessly by talk radio and 24-hour cable news, which advanced ugly stereotypes about specific minority groups while also encouraging viewers to see their country as one that was changing for the worse due to those same groups. When Donald Trump spoke of "making America great again," he was continuing this narrative, which imagined a return to a time when gay people could be persecuted without repercussion, women worked in the home without demanding equal treatment, and people of color "knew their place."

In the years that followed the stimulus, Obama and his administration championing the rights of minority groups--celebrating same-sex marriage, pushing for acceptance of transgender individuals, advocating for immigration reform, accepting Syrian refugees, and so on. This was in keeping with Obama's belief that a country can only be strong when every one of its citizens is strong, that a country can only be free when every person living within its borders is free, that a country leads in the world when it does so by example and not by chastisement or hypocrisy. For millions of Americans--older, white, working class Americans--these actions reeked of betrayal. "Obama is helping everyone," they told themselves, "everyone but me and the people like me." Instead of increasing the minimum wage, they saw him pushing states to make bathrooms accessible to transgender individuals; instead of reigning in the power of Wall Street, they saw him commenting on the shooting of black men and women by police; instead of working to refinance their mortgages or reinstate Glass-Steagall, they saw him bathing the White House in colors of the rainbow to celebrate same-sex marriage. In their eyes, Obama was purposely ignoring them to the benefit of other minority groups, and they construed this as a threat to their own livelihoods. As Heather C. McGhee, a policy analyst, said of this perception, "When you're so used to privilege, equality feels like oppression."

In other words, Obama's efforts to raise others up to the level of fairness and equality so long enjoyed by white voters was seen by those same voters as evidence of Obama's disregard for their needs and disinterest in their rights.

.......

The rest of this review can be found at There Will Be Books Galore.

[Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert La Follette embraced the politics of a nation in wholesale transition. Thelen details this biography with excellent accounts of La Follette's actions as well as his personal world view and motives. A great political history read that connects well with contemporary movements like occupy wall street. I most appreciated the defining and contrasting of modernization politics, which can be summarized as job focused interest groups co-opted by business interests in the name of efficiency and the "self made man" story.