June 14 is the 164th birthday of “Fighting Bob” La Follette, an event being commemorated the following day, June 15, at La Follette Day in Argyle, Wisconsin. As publisher of The Progessive, the magazine La Follette founded, I appeared at the event, and presented the following remarks:
Greetings, and thank you for inviting me to speak today at the boyhood home of our magazine’s founder, Senator Robert M. “Fighting Bob” La Follette.
John Nichols, of Madison’s Capital Times, writing in January 1999 in our magazine, The Progressive, called La Follette “the most courageous political leader this nation has ever produced.”
He was born Robert Marion La Follette on June 14, 1855, in Primrose, Wisconsin. His father died when he was only eight months old, and in 1862, his mother remarried and moved with her new husband, John Saxton, to this house in Argyle. As a young teen, La Follette once told Saxton he might like to become a statesman someday. His stepfather suggested he go to law school. He took that advice, graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1879 and being admitted to the State Bar in 1880.
That same year, at the age of twenty-five, La Follette was elected as district attorney for Dane County, beginning a string of political offices that led through the House of Representatives, the governor’s mansion, and the U.S. Senate. He also ran for President twice, and in 1924 received one out of every six votes cast in the election as a third-party candidate of his own Progressive Party.
La Follette’s political philosophy really had its beginnings in those early days at the University of Wisconsin, where he heard then-chief justice of the state supreme court Edward Ryan address graduating seniors with the words: “For the first time in our politics, money is taking the field of organized power. The question will arise, and arise in your day . . . which shall rule—wealth or man?”
Library of Congress, Prints and Photos Division.
Senator Robert M. La Follette founded ‘The Progressive’ in 1909. June 14 is his 164th birthday.
It was these words that would shape La Follette’s understanding of politics and his fierce advocacy for direct democracy by the everyday working people of this country.
Writing in his 1912 autobiography, La Follette says he learned during his years in the House of Representatives, the real question was: “Shall government be for the benefit of private interests . . . . Or shall government be for the benefit of public interest? This is the simple issue involved in the present conflict in our nation.”
One hundred ten years ago, in January 1909, La Follette, together with his wife, women’s and civil rights activist Belle Case La Follette, launched a new national political magazine, La Follette’s Weekly, to call out abuses of power and give voice to the struggles and victories of everyday people. As La Follette proudly proclaimed on the banner of this magazine, today called The Progressive, “Ye Shall Know the Truth, and the Truth Make You Free.”
As governor, and then U.S. Senator, La Follette sought to represent the interests of the people, and oppose the consolidation of power of the large corporations, especially railroads and other large monopolies and trusts. He fought for the rights of workers to organize unions, for the preservation of the environment, and to regulate lobbyists and end patronage politics.
It is a part of La Follette’s legacy that today we have open political primaries, the direct election of Senators, and the right to hold recall elections when our officials are not fulfilling their duties.
It is a part of La Follette’s legacy that today we have open political primaries, the direct election of Senators (through the Seventeenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution), and, thanks to his son Robert M. La Follette Jr., the right to hold recall elections when our officials are not fulfilling their duties.
In the Senate, La Follette opposed U.S. imperial expansionism in Mexico and Latin America. He also loudly opposed the entry of the United States into World War I, seeing it as a war for the wealthy that would be fought by everyday working people. In an April 1917 speech on the floor of the Senate, he spoke out for “the poor . . . who are always the ones called upon to rot in the trenches.”
For his opposition to the war, La Follette was vilified in the press, burned in effigy on the UW campus, branded by many as a traitor, and threatened with expulsion from the U.S. Senate. But a century later, history has proven that his stance against the war, and his analysis of its causes were absolutely correct.
In the introduction to his 1947 book, The La Follettes and the Wisconsin Idea, Edward Doan writes, “In the religious field they are called Seekers . . . . In politics they are called radicals, insurgents, destroyers of society, and subversive elements. They call themselves Progressives. They seek in the political field to develop a direct, responsive government in which each citizen is accorded the full dignity of sovereignty.” They were united, he said, in their “unshakable belief in the democratic principle of self-government.”
It is this belief that led Robert M. La Follette to say, in 1911 in the pages of La Follette’s Weekly, that the “composite judgment” of the people “is always safer and wiser and stronger and more unselfish than the judgment of any one individual mind. The people,” he said, “have never failed in any great crisis in our history.”
Today, we are again faced with a great political crisis. With economic inequality rivaling the days of the “robber barons,” redistricting and voter ID laws impeding the ability of citizens to vote, and corporate influence skewing our electoral system with volumes of cash unimaginable in La Follette’s time, once again, people are calling for a return to a truly democratic system of governance “by and for the people.”
It is these struggles that we chronicle in our magazine today, these voices that we lift up—voices that are otherwise unrepresented in the media. As Fighting Bob said when he was elected overwhelmingly to the U.S. Senate for a second term in 1911, “Tyranny and oppression are just as possible under democratic forms as under any other. We are slow to realize that democracy is a life; and involves continual struggle. It is only as those of every generation who love democracy resist with all their might the encroachments of its enemies that the ideals of representative government can even be nearly approximated.”
Thank you.