Kenneth MacKay
The Progressive Movement of 1924
Chapter VI
Born To Set It Right
IN the same municipal auditorium where, just three weeks before, Coolidge had received the proper blessings from the Republicans, the Progressives gathered on July 4, 1924. The delegates to the Republican meeting had been cast in the familiar mold; to them eccentricity consisted of failing to vote a straight Republican ticket. But now, like a refreshing and unexpected breeze—out of the four corners of the compass—came these men who had visions of a brave new world; who had heard the rumblings of thunder on the left. About a thousand had come, “broad-shouldered men and earnest women.”[1]
The informal, enthusiastic nature of the CPPA convention should not obscure the fact that much planning and organization had anticipated the event. The great majority were there as chosen representatives of some liberal group or society. In addition to the delegates representing the labor organizations, the farm-labor units, the Socialists, and the Committee of Forty-Eight, (the four most influential parts of the CPPA), there were duly accredited delegates acting for such organizations as the National Unity Committee, the Food Reform Society of America, and the Davenport, Iowa, Ethical Society; organizations hardly calculated to frighten the managers of the Republican and Democratic campaign.[2]
The necessarily elastic rules under which the status of a delegate would be determined put a heavy strain upon the credentials committee. With a perspicacity lacking in many of his liberal colleagues, LaFollette was keenly aware of the dangers of Communist infiltration. Perhaps recalling the fiasco of the Farmer-Labor party in 1920, or remembering the Communist predilection to kidnap political orphans, a predilection so evident a few weeks earlier at the Chicago Farmer-Labor convention, the LaFollette managers made sure that there would be no repetition of any such capitulation to the Reds. The credentials committee, headed by Chester Thorpe of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, scrutinised the delegates so carefully that the roll of the convention was delayed a whole day. One hundred husky sergeants-at-arms were recruited to prevent any possible intrusions from Moscow.[3]
Cleveland must have presented a colorful picture that Fourth of July in 1924 when the independents gathered to organise the forces of discontent. It was different in so many respects from the stereotyped convention.[4] One of the members summarised his reaction by stating that “the Republican convention was a gathering of Babbitts, the Democratic a meeting of Southern gentlemen and Northern sportsmen and politicians. This is a gathering of students.”[5] The delegates were mostly serious—dead serious—and their earnest visages contrasted with the light-hearted, indulgent attitude of so many of the members of a convention of one of the old parties. They were young too. One observer estimated that the majority of them were under forty.[6] Undergraduates flocked in, one of the largest groups coming all the way from Columbia University. Other student pilgrims came from such institutions as Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Barnard, Vassar and Union Theological Seminary. The political clubs of some colleges had sent accredited delegates to the convention.[7] LaFollette’s crusading zeal and flamboyant disregard for conservative sensibilities made much the same appeal to socially-conscious youth that Norman Thomas was to make in 1932. In wealthy Yale, LaFollette’s popularity had prevented the mock election of Calvin Coolidge.
The mechanical precision, the sophisticated formalities of the Republican convention that had nominated Calvin Coolidge were absent. Even the New York Times, unfriendly as it was to LaFollette, had to admit that there “was nothing artificial” about this gathering.[8] Probably the delegates and visitors who attended the CPPA Cleveland convention represented the most diverse pot-pourri of our body politic that ever convened for the purpose of selecting a presidential candidate.
It was a strange and timeless admixture of old and new. Old “General” Jacob Coxey was there vainly hoping to take the floor on behalf of his proposal to abolish all interest. The self-designated “last of the Populists,” John J. Streeter, editor of the Vineland (N.J.) Weekly, was more in evidence than the other octogenarians because of the length and thickness of his whiskers. Mr. Streeter had taken an oath, in the Nineties, not to cut his beard until Populism triumphed. Eighty-three-year-old Robert Springer, who had witnessed the nomination of Abraham Lincoln and felt sure that LaFollette’s nomination would be equally historic, had ingeniously borrowed enough money from a Republican to make the trip to Cleveland from the Old Soldiers’ Home in Milwaukee. As forthright in his willingness to speak for the veterans of all wars, including the Indian campaigns, as he was in his conviction that he was going to live to be 140, Springer was good-naturedly applauded by the assembled delegates.[9]
At the other extreme were the young crusaders like the “ Yipsils,” the members of the Young People’s Socialist League, ready to remould this sorry scheme of things. They came from New York by hitch-hike, arriving tired but content in the thought that the railroad companies had made no profits on their trip. Soon there were facetious remarks about the large number of walking delegates at the CPPA convention.[10]
Still there was a poignancy about the faith of these reformers at Cleveland. Back of all their grumbling and denunciation was a solid allegiance to the American system of government. Their grudge was not against America; it was against those who held America in bondage. Quixotic they might have been; but never cynical. Again and again during the proceedings the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address were read. Portraits of American heroes were prominently displayed. Their awareness of American history was doubtless far more acute than that of the delegates who had heard the Republican speakers conjure up visions of Washington and Lincoln.
To be sure, the meeting had its quota of the lunatic fringe. Some of the delegates were hardened convention-trotters, inexorably attracted by the roar of a crowd or the expostulations of a political harangue. There were people there with all kinds of panaceas. The procurers of nostrums naturally gravitate to a place that offers such promise of a receptive hearing. “Men and women with every conceivable prescription for the relief of suffering humanity are in Cleveland, but nine-tenths of them will cool their heels outside this convention.”[11]
Typical of the light touch of ridicule employed by the conservative press to discredit both the CPPA convention and Senator LaFollette is the following account in the St. Paul Pioneer-Press of the arrival of a delegate from New York :[12]
Miss Elizabeth Goldstein, who says she lives in Greenwich Village, and looks as if she did, walked in all alone. She started last Saturday morning and arrived Tuesday afternoon. ‘I’m like LaFollette, I don’t need a party’; she remarked when asked why she didn’t come with the rest of the crowd.
It was one member of this noisy and irrepressible minority who caused the greatest disturbance of the two-day session. James Francis Murphy, claiming to represent “The Migratory Workers of America,” tried to work his way to the platform, obsessed with a plan to nominate himself for the Presidency. A husky delegate from one of the railroad unions interfered with his dreams of greatness by planting him securely in a chair with a force and directness audible throughout the convention hall. There, under the watchful eye of the union delegate, he was held incommunicado. His self-appointed custodian would not even allow him to receive the gentlemen of the press. In order to learn his story, the newspapermen had to write to him as he spent the rest of the session in his peculiar kind of solitary confinement.[13]
Some of those who did manage to get inside the doors were perhaps not so far over on the lunatic fringe as their contemporaries thought. There was a delegate, from Boston, bearing credentials from the Committee of Forty Eight, who offered a plank to the resolutions committee compelling Klansmen to wear their hoods and sheets twenty-four hours daily. This delegate, affectionately known to his friends as Old Sock Joe, also offered a resolution providing for a national referendum on the question of whether the Volstead law should be suspended for ten days each year.
"That,” said the delegate, “would give the Drys plenty of fresh arguments for abstinence every year and the Wets a chance to express their true sentiments.”[14]
Throughout the proceedings, the strong humanitarian instincts of these reformers assembled to tilt against the enormous odds of Coolidge Prosperity and the callous materialism of the ’Twenties, gave rise to spontaneous cheers and applause for leaders of causes, some lost and some yet to be won.
Reddened by his fluency and vigorous in his gestures, the patriarchal Edwin Markham evoked applause from the crowd by reading his long laudation “Lincoln, the Man of the People.” It was to be a convention where the man with the hoe would not only be heard, but listened to. Edwin Markham was followed by Representative Fiorello H. LaGuardia, who, after enthusiastically prophesying LaFollette’s election, explained that he had come “to let you know there are other streets and other attitudes in New York besides Wall Street. I speak for Avenue A and 116th Street, instead of Broad and Wall.”[15]
The contrast between the Republican and Progressive conventions extended beyond the political views of the speakers. Although Villard noticed less of the revivalist sentiment than at the Bull Moose gathering of 1912, “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and special “LaFollette Hymns,” written for the occasion, remained popular and evoked lusty, full-throated singing.[16] On the stage, fifty men and women—called the “choir"—led the singing. The convention could be stirred with a spontaneity that must have been the envy of the managers of the Republican show. Peter Witt—one of old Tom Johnson’s protegés from Cleveland—brought the Progressives to their feet with a pungent denunciation of the Republican Babbitts. Aroused to a fighting pitch, the crowd implored Witt to go on at the conclusion of his speech. The social conscience of the convention was aroused again when William Pickens, a Negro graduate of Yale, arose to read a message from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.[17]
Above all, it was a refreshingly enthusiastic assemblage, long on spirit if short on cash. The zealous crusading fervor, so patently contrived in major party conventions, was here in abundance. No band had been hired but an impromptu fife and drum corps was organised within a few hours. With no state standards—there was economic rather than geographic representation—the audience seemed to mingle more and more in a friendly, uninhibited atmosphere. During lulls in the Democratic balloting at Madison Square Garden, the CPPA preceedings were broadcast locally by Station WJAX. For the first time in their lives, many of the speakers faced a microphone. Some of them, like Edward Keating, jokingly confessed their fright.[18] Young girls, passing the contribution plate, collected more than $3,000 to help defray expenses.
A consideration of the heterogeneous nature of the people who came to Cleveland for the meeting of the Progressives would lead one to think that its sessions were aimless and unguided. This was far from true. Left to their own devices, the delegates would doubtless have arrived at an endorsement of LaFollette; but the National Committee was taking no chances. The leaders of the labor unions, with McAdoo unavailable because of his connections with Doheny, had long since decided that LaFollette would be the only possible third party leader with any reasonable chance of success. They were going to endorse him, but neither the labor leaders nor LaFollette wanted to burden themselves with the organization of a third party before the election. That—the birth of a new party—could wait upon the developments of the election.
Hence it was apparent, even before the convention opened, that experienced leaders had worked out a scheme of political strategy. Clinton Gilbert, on the scene, sensed it right away. “There is little organization and no machine, but there is a sort of self-imposed discipline.”[19] Although Gilbert noted that “there is none of the slavish loyalty to LaFollette here that there was to Colonel Roosevelt in Chicago,” anyone who had planned to come to Cleveland to prevent or obstruct the LaFollette candidacy was soon disillusioned. Robert Pointer, candidate for President of the old Ford organization in Michigan, was refused a seat on the rather ironical grounds that his organization already had a presidential candidate. The real test of the strength of the LaFollette-labor union leadership came when William Mahoney, member of the national committee and Chairman of the St. Paul convention, was denied his seat by the credentials committee. It was evident that the leaders of the convention were not even going to flirt with the Communists. Unable to voice their protests in person, the Communists had to content themselves in the distribution of pamphlets which denounced the convention as “the most reactionary” held this year.[20] They found that, in contrast to the meeting at St. Paul, they had been left out in the cold. The blunt, forthright disposal of Mahoney left no doubts as to the Progressive policy toward the Communists and fellow travelers. Mahoney’s misfortune in becoming enmeshed in the Communist web at St. Paul was to cost him a place in the Cleveland convention. Not a Communist himself, he had been sacrificed by the strategy of the directors of the Workers party. He was a victim of forces which were probably unintelligible to him and his friends.[21]
The convention was organised and directed with a deft hand. The three well-knit elements in the convention were the railroad labor unions, the LaFollette machine from Wisconsin and the Non-Partisan and farm-labor people of Minnesota and the Dakotas. They co-operated with no evidence of friction. What disagreements were to arise would come between these groups, reluctant to commit themselves to third party organization, and the Socialists and other relatively unorganised groups impatient to get along to the construction of a new party.
The first indication of the extent to which LaFollette would dominate the proceedings came with the announcement, on the eve of the gathering, that the National Committee had asked the Senator to run for the Presidency. William H. Johnston, Chairman of the National Committee, was authorised to send a telegram to LaFollette to accept the Presidential nomination from those assembled. The following is the text of the telegram as sent to LaFollette :[22]
Hon. Robert M. LaFollette, United States Senate, Washington, D.C.The national committee of the Conference for Progressive Political Action have met and carefully considered the national political situation. They are convinced that the time is ripe for decisive action. The Democratic and Republican parties have both forfeited all claims to public confidence. Under the recent administrations of both of them, there have been grave scandals and flagrant betrayals of the public trust.
At their recent conventions both parties have shown no disposition to meet the public demand for fundamental reform. The Republican party has nominated reactionary candidates upon a platform that is repugnant to every progressive mind. In our opinion, it is unnecessary to await the outcome of the apparently endless battle now being waged by the Democratic bosses over the nomination of candidates. No genuine progressive could or would run on the meaningless, hypocritical platform that has been adopted in New York.
We have inferred from your public addresses that if the Democratic and Republican parties failed to purge themselves of the evil influences that now dominate them, and unless they offered the people sound hopes for substantial relief, you would consent to become a candidate for President and thus give the people an opportunity to express their deep desires for clean progressive government.
Recognising you as the outstanding leader of the progressive forces in the United States, we ask, therefore, whether you will, under present conditions, become a candidate for President of the United States. We should also appreciate a message from you setting forth your view of the present political situation.
This request is presented by the unanimous action of the national committee.
William H. Johnston, Chairman.
This unusual procedure of picking the candidate before the convening of the delegates sheds some light on the strategy of the labor leaders and the LaFollette advisers. Anticipating the endorsement of Senator LaFollette this way was a clever strategem to avoid a formal nomination from the floor with its implications of third party organization.
Socialists and Farmer-Labor groups had come to the convention fully prepared to organise a new party. The battle—perhaps the most important issue at the Cleveland convention—was largely restricted to committee. Overt conflict between the party organisers and the labor union men was signaled by the LaFollette letter of acceptance on the afternoon of July 4th—first day of the convention. Immediately after the declaration that LaFollette would run, H.E. Wills, grand chief of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, obviously deeply moved by the letter, rushed to the platform and moved that the delegates endorse Mr. LaFollette’s candidacy. This motion was immediately challenged by Morris Hillquit, leader of the Socialists, who called attention to the fact that the committees on credentials and resolutions had not as yet reported and that no real binding action could be taken until the delegates duly authorized to attend the convention had been selected.[23]
Here the issue was joined. The Socialists would not tolerate any precipitate action. The sharpest acrimony of the entire proceedings followed before the Socialists won their temporary point.
Other Socialists, opponents of LaFollette because of his antipathy to a third party campaign, sought the floor. Delegates were arising in all sections to propose new motions and amendments. A half-dozen crowded the passage-way between their section and the press seats. It appeared for a moment that forceful ‘Bill’ Johnston, the chairman, might find himself with a maverick convention on his hands.
But seizing his gavel, he pounded down the disorder with biceps made mighty in a machine shop.
"The delegates,” ordered Mr. Johnston, “will all take their seats.”
The delegates did. Mr. Johnston obviously meant what he said and 100 sergeants-at-arms were on hand to carry out the will of the chairman.
"Is this a steam roller ?” inquired one little delegate with a fiercely bristling moustache as he resumed his seat. Mr. Johnston looked at him calmly but meaningly and the little man hurried his retreat.
When quiet was restored, Chairman Johnston recognised Municipal Judge Jacob Panken, of New York. Judge Panken arose to a point of order.[24]
Mr. Johnston adjudged the point well taken and ruled the motion to endorse LaFollette out of order. Throughout the demonstration, the Socialists sat silently, not because of any lack of enthusiasm for LaFollette, but because they were anxious to proceed with the organization work which seemed to them as important as the selection of a presidential candidate.
The second and final day of the CPPA convention completed the business of the occasion. While the Democrats in New York wearily moved through a seventy-seventh ballot, with Smith and McAdoo still hopelessly deadlocked, the Progressives rapidly and pointedly concluded their gathering. At the afternoon session, LaFollette was endorsed for President of the United States and a platform, embodying the recommendations in the LaFollette speech delivered the previous day by Bob, junior, was adopted.[25] Both the endorsement and the platform were made by acclamation. The National Committee was authorized to select a candidate for the Vice-Presidency. There was some slight opposition to the proposition vesting this authority in the National Committee, but it was feeble and unimportant. A correspondent for the New York Times estimated that perhaps only a dozen voices were raised in opposition to it.[26]
The LaFollette endorsement was proposed to the convention by Chairman Manion of the Organization Committee. The resolution recommended “that this convention endorse the candidacy of Senator Robert M. LaFollette for President of the United States upon the platform submitted by him.”[27] Short seconding speeches were made by Morris Hillquit, speaking for the Socialists; George W. Lefkowitz, on behalf of the Farmer-Labor party; Mrs. Harriet Stanton Blatch, speaking for the women progressives; and William Pickens, one of the Negro delegates.
With Senator LaFollette endorsed, and the platform agreed upon, the final hour was used to dispose of various resolutions.[28] The convention went on record in favor of immediate and complete independence for the Philippines. It also favored a pay increase for postal employees. The CPPA assured the Irish people of its sympathy “for the aspirations of the Irish people for freedom and independence.” It opposed exploitation in Haiti, Santo Domingo and Nicaragua. A resolution favoring recognition of Soviet Russia was tabled.
Various speeches, delivered by all kinds of personalities, punctuated the routine business of the last day’s session. Senator Lynn Frazier denounced the return to “abnormalcy” which had caused the farmer to endure so much suffering since 1920. W.T. Rawleigh, who was to be LaFollette’s chief financial supporter, explained the need for a free and truly competitive market. Herman Ekern, LaFollette’s close friend and adviser in Wisconsin, to whom LaFollette had written the letter intimating his willingness to run as an independent, sounded the keynote of the LaFollette campaign with the charge that the great issue before the American people was control of industry by private monopoly. The Progressives were to repeat it many times during the subsequent months.
When the delegates prepared to return home, there was much they could rightfully feel had been accomplished. In two days a candidate and a platform had been adopted. The disparate liberal and progressive groups, so hopelessly confused a few years earlier, had been able to agree upon a program without apparent friction or the dissensions and withdrawals which characterised the attempt at a third party in 1920. Concealed by their common devotion to LaFollette and a common cause against the old parties, the basic differences of the CPPA groups hardly came to light at Cleveland. But the bitter fight in the Organization Committee of the CPPA, not settled until young Bob LaFollette told the recalcitrant members that his father would run only as an independent and not as a candidate of a third party, presaged the difficulties ahead.[29] The Socialists, reluctantly in private committee meetings, but loyally on the floor of the convention, had agreed to go along with LaFollette and wait upon the later formation of a third party.
As they departed, many of the delegates were convinced that they had witnessed the birth of a great movement; that they had been present at a significant occasion in American life. They cared little if the conservative press remarked that the free railroad passes of the members of the Brotherhood accounted for the good attendance, or if others sneered at “the lunatic fringe.”[30] Even the local diversions could not distract them. Down the street a boisterous convention of Rotarians was dutifully proving its good fellowship. Clevelanders less interested in seeing history made in their midst than in listening to the brawl at Madison Square Garden gathered about loudspeakers to hear Alabama, again and again, cast twenty-four votes for Underwood. But the Progressives were aroused. They had their candidate now, and their platform. Soon, perhaps, they would even have a party ! With more flair for hyperbole than regard for historical perspective, one ebullient delegate flamboyantly described the most dramatic moments of the gathering in the following words :[31]
There are moments in human history which shape the destiny of nations and of mankind. Columbus pleading for the support of Queen Isabella, Caesar plunging across the Rubicon, Constantine crossing the Milvian bridge, Luther facing the prelates at Worms, Cromwell picking up the mace of power from the Speaker’s table, and Hancock placing his signature upon the Declaration of Independence—the men who witnessed these epochal events gained fame and honor from the occasion. And so with us as we listened to Robert M. LaFollette, junior, read the great document in which his father pledged his fidelity to the people’s cause and consented to take the leadership in a political crusade to regain the “freedom and prosperity and happiness of the American people.” Privileged and fortunate were we who heard the thrilling message, which historians of the future may record as the turning point in American democracy.
That the convention was no turning point in history was certainly not the fault of these earnest folk at Cleveland who stood, with St. George, ready to slay the Dragon.
The choice of this convention to lead its good fight against the forces of evil and reaction had remained in Washington, far from the tumultuous applause which greeted every mention of his name. Far removed from the scene as Senator LaFollette was, the persuasive forcefulness of his personality dominated the convention from start to ending. The entire proceedings had been a series of tributes to the man who, during the generation he had occupied a seat in the United States Senate, had emerged as the chieftain of the progressive forces in America. The cohesive nature of their common faith in LaFollette’s integrity of character and strength of leadership enabled the Progressives assembled at Cleveland to overlook many a minor difference of opinion in their greater devotion to the captain of their cause. LaFollette’s personality was so dynamic that often the movement or idea with which he was associated seemed pallid by contrast. Whether it pleased him or not, the Progressive campaign in 1924, under the impact of LaFollette’s powerful personality, became more and more “LaFollette’s campaign” and the Progressive movement was increasingly (and mistakenly) referred to as “LaFollette’s party.”
Any attempt to portray LaFollette is fraught with all kinds of difficulties. His was the kind of character whose manifold traits refuse to be reduced to simple terms of black and white. In evaluating his achievement another difficulty lies in the mass of prejudice and opinionated thinking which distorts almost any word picture his contemporaries drew. One was either “for” LaFollette or “agin” him. With the possible exceptions of Teddy Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryan, Robert LaFollette provoked more emotional thinking and irrational attacks than any American statesman of his time. There is no one today, unless it be Franklin D. Roosevelt, who has this fine faculty for being simultaneously hated and loved.
The coloring, consequently, in a picture of Robert Marion LaFollette has to be intense. He hated and, in turn, was hated. He enjoyed a fight and there were many willing to fight him. He was as convinced of the righteousness of his cause as his critics were of his folly. To his supporters he was a crusader; to his enemies he was demagogue.
Watching and hearing LaFollette in action on the Senate floor must have been one of the privileges of the last generation. Whenever he spoke, one could depend upon a good show. His brand of oratory is fast disappearing in these days of radio broadcasting. One of the paradoxes about the man is that, for all the novel ideas he proposed, he represented something that was essentially of America’s past. His fear of “big business,” his political methods, his oratory belonged to an America which had not yet turned the corner into the complexities of the twentieth century.
Robert Marion LaFollette was a son of that Middle Border which had nurtured so many righteous causes and ardent crusaders. His background and early training belonged, as John Chamberlain has noted, to a “pre-technological” age, while “his roots went back into that agricultural America which was dear to the heart of Jefferson.”[32] John LaFollette had established the family in this country about the middle of the eighteenth century when, faced by the choice of so many French Huguenots had to make, he decided to leave his own country whose reckless and sadistic persecutions were making life unbearable for so many Protestants.[33] Jesse LaFollette, grandfather of Senator LaFollette, owned a farm in Hardin County, Kentucky, adjacent to that of Thomas Lincoln, father of the Civil War President. It is interesting to record that Jesse LaFollette and Thomas Lincoln were joint defendants in an ejectment suit which resulted from some of the faulty surveying so prevalent at the time.[34] The suit was probably the principal reason for both LaFollette’s and Lincoln’s leaving Kentucky. Another reason was doubtless their antipathy—as strong in one family as in the other—to slavery.[35]
Of Huguenot pioneer stock, of a family so close to the grass roots of America, with family associations linking his name and fortune with that of Lincoln and the hardy adventurers who conquered the prairies, LaFollette, appraised in terms of political availability, had many of the attributes so necessary to a prospective presidential candidate. To make the picture almost perfect, LaFollette was born in a log cabin—a log cabin in the small township of Primrose (whose name so belied the turbulent course of life LaFollette would lead!) in Dane County, Wisconsin, on June 14, 1855.
Forced to endure the hardships of poverty as a youth, LaFollette learned to be resourceful and to compensate for his lack of money by an abundance of intelligence and diligence. Working his way through college, he embraced—never to renounce them—the two great affections of his life.[36] One was the University of Wisconsin, which inspired in the young LaFollette an unquenchable intellectual curiosity and respect for the truth, a debt which in turn was repaid by Senator LaFollette through his untiring and eminently successful efforts to make the institution one of the great centers of learning in America. No alumnus ever served his college more faithfully, more abundantly. The other great affection of Robert LaFollette’s life was, of course, his wife, Belle Case, classmate at the University. His inseparable companion during a life of mutual devotion and respect, his constant and vigilant nurse during so many days of physical tribulation, she fully deserved the frequent references, the numerous recognitions of her services, which the Senator included in his autobiography. Highly intelligent and endowed with an appreciation of political realities, Mrs. LaFollette joined veteran campaigners as a member of the select group whose counsel her husband valued.[37] “My wisest and best counsellor” Senator LaFollette called her.[38] Undoubtedly his tender and felicitous relations with the women in his life—his mother, sister, wife and daughters—their priceless influence in shaping his career, all help to explain his life-long, consistent espousal of women’s rights.[39]
After being admitted to the bar in 1880, the young LaFollette announced his candidacy for the office of District Attorney of Dane County in opposition to the ticket proposed by Boss Keyes. After a spectacular campaign during which his college friends rendered invaluable aid, LaFollette was elected by a narrow margin and his political career had begun. Four years later, in 1884, he was elected to the House of Representatives, youngest member of the 49th Congress.[40] In the fall of 1890, after serving three terms in Congress, LaFollette was defeated for re-election as the Democrats swept Wisconsin as the result of state issues, the “Bennett Law” in particular. Back in Madison, Wisconsin, resuming his private practice, LaFollette broke completely with the Republican bosses like Senator Sawyer and Senator Spooner. Launching a program of reform directed against boss-controlled politics and the domination of the “vested interests,” LaFollette in the years from 1893-1900 rallied the latent forces of Populism and liberalism. LaFollette captured the nomination as Republican candidate for Governor in 1900 and subsequently won the election. With the “Stalwarts"—or conservatives—in control of the State Senate and “Battling Bob” in the Executive Mansion, the fight was on.
In formulating a broad program of reform, Governor LaFollette not only carried the fight to his enemies; he became a national figure as prominent writers and political authorities haled his “Wisconsin Idea.”[41]
Simply expressed, LaFollette’s program was as follows :[42]
(a) a system of direct-primary nominations protected by law
(b) an equalization of taxation on 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
(d) the erection of commissions of experts for the regulation of railroads and for other public interests
The Old Guard was no match for LaFollette. Sustained by his “mystic faith” in the people, he called upon the voters to endorse his program of reform. These were the people he understood : the people he had met at county fairs and talked to at Chautauqua gatherings. LaFollette was re-elected twice and his program was almost wholly adopted. The progressive legislation did not stop there. The state insurance laws were recodified; the state banking laws were overhauled; civil service was extended; a long-range program of conservation was instituted.
In 1905, LaFollette resigned as Governor to take a seat in the United States Senate. Three times he was to be re-elected to that body. His career in the Senate has become an American saga. It is not necessary to retell the entire tale here. He brought from Wisconsin with him his strong convictions about railroad control and valuation, his devotion to the cause of conservation, his deep-seated suspicion of party bosses and party regulars although, paradoxically, in doing so, he often appeared to his contemporaries to be as tyrannical and ruthless as his enemies. Often morose, usually serious, undoubtedly egotistical, he baffled his friends perhaps as much as he confused his enemies.[43] Chamberlain, with his masterly ability to sketch the meaningful elements of a character, has described LaFollette this way :[44]
His personality was not one of easy winsomeness; he didn’t appeal to voters in any baby-kissing, glad-hand way. After the World War, with most of the Progressive program lying about in shattered debris, he showed his disappointment; he was at times bitter. But bitterness is sometimes an index of the original faith of a man. This was certainly true in the case of LaFollette; he had given a great deal, and had seen it all swept away. It is silly to call a man egotistical in a tone of reproof; what person who believes in himself and is willing to fight for the prevalence of his beliefs is not self-centered ?
With what might be called “obvious subtlety” Chamberlain touches upon the ubiquitous LaFollette-Roosevelt comparison. “The business of dismissing LaFollette as a demagogue has persisted, even as the habit of regarding Roosevelt as an effective President still persists.”[45]
LaFollette had discovered, in his early days in Wisconsin politics, that sincerity and crusading zeal were powerful weapons against bosses. As candidate for prosecuting attorney, representative, governor and senator, he had amply demonstrated that the old-line machine could be challenged by some one with fight and energy and conviction.[46]
But the reasons for the lasting impression LaFollette had made upon the American political stage lay in more than just his aggressive and forceful personality. His political and economic views had become a bête noire to the reactionaries from Maine to California. They looked with concern upon this “agitator” beside whom “Bryan, in his palmiest days, was a cooing dove.”[47] LaFollette had come out of the West with a well-formulated program of Populism. He was for the direct primary; he was for woman suffrage; he was for rigid trust legislation and regulation. He was against Republican-Wall-Street tariffs; he was against the railroad companies. To LaFollette there was always a conflict going on between the People and the Special Interests. Unconsciously, he looked upon himself—as Bruce Bliven has put it—as a St. George slaying the dragon of Special Privilege.[48] He felt that the corporations and the trusts, through their very bigness, had secured positions of influence out of all keeping with the welfare of the country. LaFollette looked back, with a nostalgic longing, to the days of little business and individual responsibility. In this respect, LaFollette was an agrarian rather than a radical. As Paxson so well says, “He was no Socialist, but feared for democracy if it did not develop agencies to overcome the selfish power of wealth.”[49] LaFollette had an abiding faith in the inherent goodness of the “People.”
Never deviating from his conviction that the unholy alliance of greedy monopolists and corrupt politicians threatened the welfare of the nation, he looked upon himself as spokesman for the voiceless multitude. One paragraph of his autobiography summarises the creed to which LaFollette remained steadfastly loyal :[50]
Within the changing phases of a twenty-five year contest, I have been more and more impressed with the deep, underlying singleness of the issue. It is not railroad regulations. It is not the tariff, or conservation, or the currency. It is not the trusts. These and other questions are but manifestations of one great struggle. The supreme issue, involving all the others, is THE ENCROACHMENT OF THE POWERFUL FEW UPON THE RIGHTS OF THE MANY. This mighty power has come between the people and their government. Can we free ourselves from this control ? Can representative government be restored ? Shall we, with statesmanlike and constructive legislation, meet these problems or shall we pass them on, with all the possibilities of conflict and chaos, to future generations ?
As champion of the cause of the Plain Man, LaFollette had become a presidential possibility long before 1924. In 1908 he had received a score of votes at the Republican convention. Much happened during his first term as Senator to make him a prospect for the Presidency. Before Roosevelt returned from his travels to throw his hat in the ring, LaFollette had been the first choice of the 1912 Progressives. The story of the estrangement of Roosevelt and LaFollette needs no repeating here—suffice it to say that “Roosevelt reaped where the tireless LaFollette had sown” after the ex-President had been induced to run again for office, thereby checking the LaFollette candidacy just as it had gathered momentum.[51] LaFollette, by 1912, was already a famous progressive. The enthusiasm of reporters like Steffens for “the Wisconsin idea” had brought LaFollette favorable comment from the nation’s liberals and reformers.[52] LaFollette’s fight in the Senate for equitable railroad rate legislation, his last-ditch opposition to the Aldrich Currency Bill (which he and many others saw as a sell-out to the financial interests) and his stand against protectionism had made him a recognised leader of the people opposed to domination by Wall Street, the industrial bosses and the reactionary leaders of the Republican party. His opposition to American involvement in the World War endeared LaFollette both to those Americans suspicious of imperialism and to those who, because of blood-ties or sentimental attachments or pacifistic beliefs, had no approved our entry into the Great War.
As the black reaction of Harding’s normalcy settled upon the land, LaFollette, indefatigable and dauntless, stood like a beacon of liberalism in the Senate. Steadily his stock, among the Progressives, climbed. In 1922 he was the only prominent American politician invited to address the American Federation of Labor. The exposures of corruption in the Republican Administration provided him with an unprecedented opportunity to lash out, with all his old-time leonine ferocity, against the mischievous forces within the government. As the oil exposures widened to engulf William G. McAdoo, LaFollette’s preeminent position among the Progressives was assured. In January, 1924, a group of prominent liberals asked LaFollette to lead a third party.[53] When the Committe of Forty Eight, in the spring of 1924, conducted a poll of the nation’s liberals to determine their choice for an independent candidate, LaFollette was an overwhelming choice.[54] Most progressives would probably agree, as the perspective of the passing years established dimensions for the American political leaders of the first quarter of the twentieth century, that LaFollette had been “the ablest of all the progressive Senators; a tireless worker, bold and fearless and reckless as a fighter, giving nor asking favor or ‘quarter’.”[55]
LaFollette’s death within the year after the 1924 election gave rise to the belief in some quarters that he had run for the presidency that year because it was a case of “now or never.” In his Farewell to Reform, John Chamberlain subscribes to this theory. “LaFollette’s last phase,” Chamberlain says, “was rather pitiful. ... in 1924 LaFollette was getting old; his time was growing short. He had seen the dying Penrose, a flabby thing of skin and bones, come back to power with the accession of Harding. Perhaps the time had arrived—at last !—for a third party movement. ... So LaFollette swallowed the bait of the Conference for Progressive Political Action and headed a third party ticket.”[56] Ickes feels the same way. Referring to 1924, he says “that was the year that Senator Bob LaFollette of Wisconsin decided that it was then or never for him.”[57] Donald Richberg speaks of LaFollette’s “betting in shape for one last battle.”[58] The implication is hardly fair to LaFollette. If anything, LaFollette’s health might have dissuaded him from making the attempt in 1924.[59]
The “now or never” explanation implies that an inordinate degree of self-interest motivated LaFollette’s decision to run for the presidency in 1924. Moreover, such a theory is based on the assumption that LaFollette seriously expected to win the election and to move into the White House next March. It is difficult to find any evidence—outside the extravagant claims made in campaign speeches and press releases—that LaFollette, or the other responsible CPPA leaders, anticipated outright victory at the polls. Most of them looked upon the campaign of 1924 as an opportunity to establish a basis for future farmer-labor political action; some planned, no doubt, to deadlock the Electoral College; but few were so sanguine as to entertain any hopes that LaFollette would become President of the United States.
With the realization that the sands of his time were running out, LaFollette may have looked upon the 1924 campaign as a fitting climax to his long and consistent career as a champion of progressive causes. It is even more likely that the battle-scarred warhorse, recovering from a siege of sickness, once again smelled gunpowder and—restless and impatient—welcomed the call to combat.
Conjectures about LaFollette’s running mate began even before the Cleveland delegates decided to place the authority to select a vice-presidential candidate in the hands of the Executive Committee. In the days following LaFollette’s endorsement at the CPPA convention, rumors came thick and fast. It was reported variously that Representative Huddleston of Alabama, William H. Johnston of the Machinists, and George Berry of the Pressmen would be the second-place choice of the Progressives. Persistently appeared the report that justice Brandeis had been asked to run as LaFollette’s partner.[60] It is impossible to determine whether some effort was made to secure the liberal spokesman on the Supreme Court. It was obviously to the advantage of the old parties represented by the press to suggest that some great leader like Brandeis had been asked to accept if events later proved that the third party men would have to content themselves with a lesser light. Three days before the Executive Committee met in Washington to decide upon its candidate, the news of Burton K. Wheeler’s bolt from the Democratic Party made the headlines. Wheeler was the first Democratic congressman—and first prominent Democrat, one could say—to announce publicly his support of LaFollette. In declaring his support of the Progressives and his desertion of Davis, Wheeler emphasized his distaste for his party’s connections with Wall Street. The punch line in the announcement of his bolt was the vigorous “I can not support any candidate representing the house of Morgan.”[61] Wheeler was making it sufficiently clear that he was not going to vote for Davis. At the same time he carefully explained that he would diligently campaign for the Democratic ticket in Montana (because there, he believed, it was truly progressive), especially for the re-election of Tom Walsh to the United States Senate.
By Friday, July 18, the day of the Executive Committee meeting to choose a vice-presidential candidate, it was a foregone conclusion that Wheeler would be invited to accept the position as running mate to LaFollette. The only question was whether he would accept. The Committee did not disappoint, and neither did Wheeler. At the meeting of the Committee, with John Nelson and Gilbert Roe representing the LaFollettes, the CPPA endorsed Wheeler and sent a committee consisting of Johnston, Nelson, Mrs. Costigan, Manly and Hillquit to call upon Wheeler and ask him to accept the honor. The next day this select committee performed its function and Wheeler, accepting, had cast in his lot with the CPPA.
The offer of the nomination had come as no surprise to Senator Wheeler. Earlier in the week, LaFollette, accompanied by his son, Bob, and son-in-law, Ralph Sucher, had visited Wheeler and, speaking frankly, had discussed the prospects of the campaign and proffered the second-place nomination to the young Montanan. Although, in his own words, he was “frightened” as he envisaged the almost insuperable problems of such a campaign, Senator Wheeler decided to get into the fight alongside his friend and counselor from Wisconsin. Wheeler having thus assured LaFollette privately, the visit of the nominating committee was just a formality.[62]
In accepting the nomination the new candidate left no doubt of his opinion of Davis Democrats :[63]
In this situation I find myself unable to support either the Republican candidates, who frankly admit their reactionary standpat policies, or the Democratic candidate who may claim in well-chosen phrases that he is a progressive but whose training and constant association belie any such pretension. Between Davis and Coolidge there is only a choice for conservatives to make.
Later on—and this is important insofar as it shows a reluctance, even in the midst of such a strong excoriation of Davis, to make a final break with his party :
In accepting this call, I do not abandon my faith in the democracy of Thomas Jefferson; I am a Democrat but not a Wall Street Democrat. I shall give my support and whatever influence I may possess to those candidates for office who have proven their fidelity to the interest of the people, whereever they may be found, but I shall oppose every man on whatever ticket he may appear who bears the brand of the dollar sign.
Wheeler’s break with his party was never so complete and definite as LaFollette’s. When the campaign was over, Wheeler—to the chagrin of some Progressives—resumed business immediately at the old party stand.
What kind of a man was this candidate for the vice-presidency, who, less than a year before, had had to be lectured on the etiquette of not smoking in the Senate Chamber; who in the first third of his first tenure as junior Senator from a frontier state would receive five million votes for the office of Vice-President ?
Years later, newspaper men would talk of the “paradox” of Burton Wheeler; his opinions and loyalties would defy analytical dissection; arguments would rage over whether the Senator from Montana was fascist or liberal.[64] Whatever judgment one might render here in the 1940s, one must admit that, in more than a number of respects, Wheeler’s career has been singular and spectacular. Wheeler was the first Senator to come out for Franklin Roosevelt. Wheeler is believed to have been the model for the popular motion picture, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”[65] Certainly the adventures of the junior Senator from Montana during his first term of office have a quality about them hard for even Hollywood to reproduce. But his whole career leading up to the Senate had been as stormy and vigorous. He was an unpredictable combination of New England heredity and Montana environment, born in Hudson, Massachusetts, not far from Boston, in 1882, of a long line of New Englanders. There was nothing to indicate his subsequent attachment to the West, not, at least, until he was graduated from high school and decided to complete his education at the University of Michigan. Not from choice, but from necessity, he followed the prescribed American political formula and worked his way through the law school washing dishes and selling books. But his doctors advised him, by the time he had finished his course, to go West. He suffered from asthma and was threatened with tuberculosis. Quite by accident, he decided to settle down in Butte, Montana, where life was “red and dripping"—in the words of one of Wheeler’s biographers—and soon was well enough established to return to Illinois to marry the farmer’s daughter he had met while selling that household companion, Dr. Price’s Recipes.[66]
The town where Wheeler had settled was, of course, one of the greatest mining towns in the world, rough, uncouth, still retaining most of the evidences of frontier existence. The place was dominated by the great Anaconda Copper Company. Wheeler, fresh from the genteel environment of a New England village and a college campus, was shocked by some of the policies of the copper bosses. When the county attorney began to give him assignments in defense of offenders—often miners who had no counsel of their own—he came in closer contact with conditions which appeared to be even more disturbing. By 1910, he was in the State Legislature, put there by the Democrats and the votes of men he had befriended and to whom he had given legal advice. “When, in the legislature, he proposed bills to abolish the ‘fellow-servant’ and 'contributory negligence laws’, through which such companies customarily escaped damages sought by injured employees, he became a radical in corporate eyes.”[67] Wheeler carried on the challenge by a last-ditch fight to send Tom Walsh, long-time enemy of Anaconda, to the United States Senate. Montana, at this time, was still employing the legislative method in choosing United States Senators. Walsh, two years later chosen by the people in Montana in a direct election to the Senate, remembered Wheeler’s loyalty and, through his recommendation, President Wilson appointed Burton K. Wheeler as United States Attorney for the District of Montana.
In his new position, Wheeler was able to strike at the widespread corruption which had long been part of the Montana political picture. Wheeler displayed more enthusiasm and vigor for the extermination of graft in high places than for the prosecution of workers who were allegedly pro-German and seditous because they insisted on striking in war-time. This was annoying to the corporations which “had always looked to the Federal law enforcement agencies as valiant and ready accessories in putting down strikes and other threats to their feudal sovereignty.”[68] In 1918 they sent word, through the Democratic machine, to Washington that Wheeler’s resignation would be the price of Walsh’s reelection. To save his old friend, Wheeler resigned. He stayed in Montana to carry on the fight.
His term as federal attorney was marked by a spate of prosecution for all the kinds of corruption that flourish in a frontier society dominated by powerful absentee industrialists. It was a period of germination for the causes and antipathies that were to govern his future political life. He started out by smashing the practice of using decoys to catch saloonkeepers in the act of selling fire-water to the Indians and ended up fighting against the manner in which the war-time espionage laws were being applied. He repeatedly refused to indict Wobblies as such and spoke out boldly against the persecution of German-Americans. He made no secret of his opposition to American entry into the war and was rash enough to advocate, in a mining state, government ownership of natural resources and the railroads. Small wonder that his bid for the governorship in 1920 was greeted with the show of bloody hands.[69]
In 1920, endorsed by the rapidly-growing Non-Partisan League, Wheeler won the Democratic nomination for Governor. There ensued one of the stormiest state campaigns in American political history. War-time passions were aroused; the old shibboleths were dusted off and trotted out; the press whipped up the feeling until violence and terrorism swept the state. All but one of the Democratic papers supported the Republicans. “Wheeler himself, the candidate for governor of the state, was refused the right to speak in the city of Dillon and was later surrounded in a way-station by a mob which was kept at bay by a veteran of the World War with a rifle, who declared he would shoot the first man who attempted to cross the railroad track. After a four-hour siege, the mob retired.”[70] Wheeler was defeated by about 33,000.
Two years later, Wheeler was again a candidate, this time for the United States Senate. The war hysteria had subsided. The progressive tide of 1922 carried him into office with a comfortable margin. So it was that, in 1923, at the age of forty-one, this singularly dynamic figure, who had been plummeted from the serene atmosphere of the New England countryside into the hurly-burly of frontier-town politics; the young man who had accepted a position as a stenographer with a Boston firm after graduation from high school, found himself in the midst of a mining country thousands of miles away, “sprawling, brawling Butte,” with its card sharps, Saturday night sports and dance-hall girls. But, most of all, with its crowd of poor, perhaps ignorant miners, dominated by great Anaconda.
When Wheeler ran for the Senate in 1922, it was difficult for the Republicans to find an issue. Two years before, they had insisted that the mines would close if Wheeler were elected; Wheeler lost, but the mines closed anyway.
In the Senate it did not take Wheeler long to establish the same kind of a reputation for what his biographers like to call “brash pugnacity.” On his third day in the Senate—when, most certainly, Senators should be seen rather than heard—Wheeler challenged the party whips successfully on the reappointment of the conservative Cummins as Chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission.[71]
Three months later, Wheeler embarked upon what was to result in one of the most dazzling and incredible exposures in American history—the investigation of the Department of justice under Attorney General Harry Daugherty.[72] Acting as prosecutor for a congressional investigating committee, Wheeler savagely revealed the sordid tale of Administration corruption. The story was not completed until some of the men Wheeler was investigating had gone to a federal penitentiary and others had committed suicide, “and the easy going President of the United States had died in an odor that could hardly be called one of sanctity.”[73]
“ The Little Green House on K Street ” became familiar to most Americans. Sensation followed sensation. Relentlessly Wheeler pinned the evidence on the men about the Attorney General. The drama of the investigation was heightened by the mysterious death of Jess Smith, Daugherty’s intimate associate and alleged go-between. This was the Jess who, Wheeler would recall, had been offered the post of Comptroller of the Currency. “But he patriotically preferred to work for the Government for nothing—there was more money in it.”[74]
To strike back at their tormentor, the Ohio Gang, using the good offices of the Department of Justice and the Secret Service, scrutinised the Wheeler record back in Montana to get something—anything—which would discredit him. Finally the charge was made that Wheeler had accepted a fee to use his influence as a Senator to secure government oil concessions for a client. The Government obtained an indictment against Wheeler in Montana in April, 1924. The case was not decided until the trial a year later when the jury took two ballots—"one to go out to lunch and one, after thirteen minutes’ deliberation, to acquit Wheeler.”[75]
Their apparent willingness to resort to crude devices in order to discredit Wheeler is a fair indication of the effect of the Wheeler prosecution on the Administration’s corrupt elements. It is difficult, especially now, to understand how the honest men within the Administration could condone such obvious persecution tactics. Still the records indicate that Harlan Stone, whom Coolidge had appointed as Attorney-General, implacably continued the case. In August, 1924, in private correspondence, a prominent American newspaperman, Mr. Gilson Gardner of Scripps-Howard, was expressing himself as “shocked” by Mr. Stone’s desire to see Wheeler convicted.[76]
The hard feelings between Wheeler and Stone engendered by this case gave way to friendship years later as both gentlemen came to appreciate the extent of distortion and misunderstanding manipulated by less scrupulous persons eager to persecute the Senator and willing to misinform the Attorney-General.[77]
The selection of Burton K. Wheeler was indubitably a logical choice for the Progressives. In the pragmatic terms of practical politics, he could “balance” the ticket. LaFollette had the advantage of age and long experience. Wheeler could complement LaFollette’s contributions with his own youthful vigor and aggressive ideas. Both physically and temperamentally, Wheeler was equipped to swing around the circuit; and the news accounts of the savage prosecution of Daugherty had already provided advance notices of his ability as a public speaker. Through his singular accomplishments as a freshman Senator and his meteoric rise within a few months to a position of recognised leadership among the Western Democrats, Wheeler was newly established as a kind of LaFollette of the Democrats, a bold, crusading liberal whose forceful, withering offensives against the intrenched interests provided a common ground for action on the part of the Progressives against the old-line politicians. Upon two spectacular occasions—the revolt against Cummins and the forced resignation of Daugherty—Wheeler’s tactics had already paid off in rich political dividends.
1 Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 5, 1924. About 1000 persons attended but not all were delegates. See Proceedings, CPPA Convention held at Cleveland, Ohio, July 4-5, 1924 (M.G. Johnston papers), for roster of delegates. See also Locomotive Engineers Journal, 58:8, August 1924, p. 571.
2 Proceedings, CPPA Convention, Vol. II, pp. 168-169.
3 New York Herald Tribune, July 4, 1924.
4 John M. Baer, Non-Partisan League delegate and former Congressman from North Dakota, recalls the bouyant atmosphere of the convention and the enthusiastic nature of those in attendance. Mr. Baer assisted in broadcasting some of the sessions. John M. Baer to the author, Nov. 15, 1943.
5 New York Herald Tribune, July 4, 1924.
6 Ibid.
7 Proceedings, CPPA Convention, Vol. II, pp. 768 ff.
8 New York Times, July 5, 1924.
9 Proceedings, CPPA Convention, Vol. II, p. 226.
10 New York Herald Tribune, July 5, 1924.
11 Ibid.
12 St. Paul Pioneer-Press, July 4, 1924.
13 Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 6, 1924.
14 New York Herald Tribute, July 5, 1924.
15 Ibid. It is interesting to note that a few days after this speech was made by Mr. LaGuardia, the Democrats nominated for President a lawyer whose office was located at Broad and Wall Streets, in New York City.
16 Nation 119:3078, July 16, 1924, p. 63. The New York Public Library, in its Scrapbook of the 1924 Presidential Campaign, possesses a collection of these campaign songs written expressly for the 1924 campaign.
17 Proceedings, CPPA Convention, Vol. II, p. 228 ff.
18 Ibid. Vol. I, p. 40.
19 New York Post, July 5, 1924.
20 New York Herald Tribune, July 6, 1924.
21 See above, pp. 85-89. See also Gitlow, B., I Confess, p. 209.
22 New York Times, July 4. 1924.
23 Ibid.
24 New York Herald Tribune, July 5, 1924.
25 See Appendix # 4.
26 New York Times, July 6, 1924.
27 Proceedings, CPPA Convention, Vol. II, p. 263.
28 See Proceedings, CPPA Convention, Vol. II, pp. 281-304.
29 New York Times, July 6, 1924.
30 St. Paul Pioneer-Press, July 5, 1924, remarked upon the free railroad passes.
31 Albert F. Coyle, Editor, writing in the Locomotive Engineers Journal, 58:8, Aug. 1924, p. 572.
32 Chamberlain, J., A Farewell to Reform, p. 246. By permission of Reynal and Hitchcock, publishers.
33 Warren, L.A., “The Lincoln and LaFollette Families in Pioneer Drama,” Wisconsin Magazine of History, 12:4, June 1929, p. 362.
34 Ibid., p. 368.
35 Ibid.
36 See LaFotlette, R., LaFollette’s Autobiography, pp. 6-32.
37 Ibid., p. 180.
38 Ibid., p. 314.
39 See LaFollette’s views on women’s rights, LaFollette, op. cit., pp. 311-318.
40 LaFollette, R., op. cit., p. 49. Unless otherwise noted, the facts in LaFollette’s political career are taken from his autobiography.
41 See McCarthy, C., The Wisconsin Idea.
42 Paxson, F., “Robert M. LaFollette,” Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. X, p. 542.
43 See Stoddard, H.L., As I Knew Them, ch. LXVIII.
44 Chamberlain, J., op. cit., p. 243. By permission of Reynal and Hitchcock, publishers.
45 Ibid., p. 241.
46 Paxson, F., op. cit., p. 542.
47 The Literary Digest, 44:2, Jan. 13, 1912, p. 12.
48 Bliven, B., “LaFollette’s Place in Our History,” Current History Magazine, 22:5, Aug., 1925, p. 716.
49 Paxson, F., op. cit., p. 544.
50 LaFollette, R., op. cit., p. 760.
51 Binkley, W.E., American Political Parties, p. 345.
52 See Steffens, L., Autobiography, ch. XIV.
53 New York Times, Jan. 14, 1924.
54 See correspondence between J.A.H. Hopkins and M. Hillquit (Hillquit papers). See also New York Times, Feb. 23, 1924.
55 Joseph L. Bristow to C.B. Kirtland, Mar. 20, 1909, quoted in Hechler, K., Insurgency, p. 84.
56 Chamberlain, J., op. cit., p. 261.
57 Ickes, H.L., Autobiography of a Curmudgeon, p. 252.
58 Richberg, D., Tents of the Mighty, p. 132.
59 Raney, W.F., Wisconsin, A Story of Progress, p. 303.
60 New York World, July 17, 1924.
61 New York Times, July 17, 1924.
62 Burton K. Wheeler to the author, Mar. 27, 1944.
63 New York Times, July 20, 1924.
64 Cf. “Potomacus,” “Wheeler of Montana,” New Republic, 108:13, Sept. 20, 1943, pp. 390-392.
65 Ibid., p. 391.
66 Tucker, R., and Barkley, F., Sons of the Wild Jackass, p. 278. This biographical material on Sen. Wheeler is in large part derived from Tucker and Barkley, op. cit., Wheeler’s biography in the LaFollette-Wheeler Campaign Text Book, and various newspaper and periodical accounts, in addition to information supplied by Senator Wheeler himself.
67 Tucker and Barkley, op. cit., p. 279.
68 Ibid, p. 282.
69 Bendiner, R., “Burton K. Wheeler,” Nation, 150:17, Apr. 27, 1940, p. 533.
70 LaFollette-Wheeler Text Book, p. 22.
71 New York Times, Dec. 11, 1923, and Jan. 10, 1924.
72 New York Times, Mar. 1, 1924.
73 Bendiner, R., op. cit.
74 Quoted in Tucker, R., and Barkley, F., op. cit., p. 257.
75 Bendiner, R., op. cit.
76 American Civil Liberties Union, “Departments of Justice, Labor and State,” Cases, 1924-1925, No. 27, p. 142 (American Civil Liberties Union papers).
77 Burton K. Wheeler to the author, Mar. 27, 1944.