Four years after the 1924 presidential campaign, the historian Charles Austin Beard published a short book titled The American Party Battle. He was then at the peak of his fame and influence. Since the publication in 1913 of his seminal book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, he had been the country’s leading historian. Holding true to his trademark approach to the study of politics, Beard in The American Party Battle emphasized the commanding role played by economics.
In a chapter called “The Upheaval,” Beard commented extensively on the Progressive movement. An archetypal progressive of the period, he criticized the capitalist status quo and called for the rational reform of the United States’ political and economic system. He found a kindred spirit in Robert M. La Follette. Beard and the Senator conducted a spirited correspondence on the eve of World War I. They differed sharply, however, over the United States’ intervention in that conflict, with Beard fervently supporting President Woodrow Wilson’s interventionist policy, whereas La Follette, with equal fervor, opposed it.
Following the Paris Peace Conference of 1919—and particularly after reading John Maynard Keynes’s scalding critique of that gathering in The Economic Consequences of the Peace—Beard conceded that he had been completely wrong about the war, whereas La Follette had been completely right about it. In 1927, when Beard and his wife, Mary Ritter Beard, wrote their classic survey, The Rise of American Civilization, La Follette appeared in the book as one of the country’s paramount heroes, largely because of his magnificent speech in the Senate rebutting Wilson’s war message. La Follette had understood what truly had been at stake when the United States entered World War I. It was not a war to make the world safe for democracy, but, at its core, a war to answer history’s oldest question. All the other issues, mainly self-deluding themes of national virtue, stood in a subaltern relationship to economics. As Beard would write in 1934 in The Idea of National Interest: An Analytical Study in American Foreign Policy, profits for the investing class always figured as a crucial factor in the United States’ wars. La Follette had understood this point before Beard had.
Library of Congress
Historian Charles Austin Beard in 1917.
In view of Beard’s unreserved endorsement in 1927 of La Follette’s credentials as a statesman, it is surprising to find in The American Party Battle of the next year only a few scattered mentions of the Senator. His 1924 presidential campaign comes up in the book primarily as an example of the predestined failure of third parties in national politics. La Follette did receive nearly five million votes, the largest number ever given to a third-party candidate up until that time. Nevertheless, he finished a distant third behind the Republican and Democratic candidates, Calvin Coolidge and John W. Davis.
In The Progressive Movement of 1924, the most thoroughly researched monograph on La Follette’s presidential run, published in 1947, Kenneth Campbell MacKay comes to the same conclusion. Like Beard, MacKay esteemed La Follette and his progressive politics. His presidential campaign was historically important for its impact in the following decade on the New Deal. Yet in and of itself, the campaign came to nothing, according to MacKay: “After 1925, the whole [progressive] conglomeration of agrarians, Socialists, liberals, and labor men fell apart and disappeared.”
Both historians contend that in the United States, insuperable obstacles confront third-party campaigns. MacKay provides abundant detail to illustrate this point, noting the daunting financial, organizational, staffing, and signature-gathering problems that serve to shield the Democrats and the Republicans from effective competition. A bewildering array of diverse state election laws adds to the difficulties burdening third-party candidates. All American political history proclaims that such parties have literally no chance to win.
Early in 1924, it seemed as if a Progressive candidate might break the iron law of duopoly in American presidential politics. Both major parties suffered from severe liabilities. Davis, the Democratic candidate, was a Wall Street lawyer tarnished by his evident fealty to the status quo. With the Harding-Coolidge Administration, the Republicans had passed through a storm of political scandals, which La Follette thought would cause the American people to hunger for clean and honest government. The voters, however, would show much more enthusiasm for Jazz Age economics. After some postwar economic doldrums, the 1920s began to roar as the presidential campaign got underway. According to MacKay, the economic upturn mattered the most in Coolidge’s sweeping victory.
Third-party politics followed their usual pattern in 1924. The election outcome illustrated the argument of Beard and MacKay about the invincibility of the two-party system. There is some understandable confusion about the precise character of La Follette’s third-party candidacy. He ran as an independent progressive, but an actual Progressive Party at that time did not exist. His name appeared on state ballots under various labels: Progressive, Socialist, Farm-Labor, and Independent. At a convention in Cleveland, Ohio, progressive leaders had hoped that the La Follette campaign would lead to the creation of a new party. The election outcome, however, discouraged them. The death of La Follette seven months later ended all hope for that generation of bringing a new Progressive party into existence. No other leader of that period could replace him as a unifying agent for the diverse progressive movement.
What are the main conclusions to be drawn from the La Follette campaign of 1924 for our current political landscape? The first one concerns the necessity of realizing that third-party movements can serve magnificently in focusing national attention on needed reforms and on questions of moral urgency. La Follette brought attention to the injustices of income inequality, worker insecurity, imperialism, and racism. No political leader, before or since, has surpassed him in passion, eloquence, and lucidity on the interconnectedness of these four issues in American politics. La Follette’s unique legacy is still a precious political inheritance for the American people.
Yet, for the reasons documented by Beard and MacKay, hope for the political triumph of progressive ideals today lies in a strengthened movement, not in a new party. Progressives now have an opening which will only grow as the bills for wars of empire come due and cause ever-worsening social and economic decline. Adversaries of the progressive cause, in the La Follette sense of that term, include Donald Trump, obviously, but not only him. Also to be defeated are the regnant elements in the Democratic Party, at peace with the lobbies controlling the country and at one with them in fomenting the United States’ wars for empire.
La Follette’s foreign policy proposals merit close attention today. He understood the connections between domestic and foreign policies. One does not have to be a Marxist to understand that our wars have an economic substructure in the corporate capitalist system. La Follette had come to this conclusion just by keeping his eyes open and looking around the nation’s capital to see how intimately involved the bankers and the financiers had been in the lead-up to the United States’ intervention in World War I.
Wisconsin Historical Society
Ku Klux Klan members, wearing white conical hoods and white robes, march through downtown Madison, Wisconsin, in December 1924.
La Follette’s radicalism in 1924 far outstripped in vehemence anything that we hear from progressives these days. In campaign speeches and interviews, the Senator bluntly declared that just as the Soviet Union had a dictatorship of the proletariat, the United States had a Wall Street dictatorship. It was as if instead of campaigning for the presidency of the United States in the 1920s, La Follette were seeking a position in the history department at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s and trying to make a favorable impression on Professors William Appleman Williams and Harvey Goldberg, two of the electrifying radicals of the day. Believing that the country faced life-and-death choices, La Follette did not want to waste time with allusive language.
Imperialism and its adjunct, militarism, threatened the country’s very existence in the long term, La Follette proclaimed. Even before the beginning of the campaign, he declared that its two leading issues would be imperialism and corruption. He promised that if elected, his first target would be the military budget as the primary way of changing the foreign policy of the United States. In the March 1924 issue of La Follette’s Magazine (precursor of The Progressive), he wrote that a sweeping reduction of expenditures for the U.S. Army and Navy would signal “the repudiation of the imperialism practiced by our government in Mexico, Haiti, San Domingo, Nicaragua, and elsewhere.” He wanted a country at peace with the world, and so should progressives today.
The 1924 election also gives us a window into the crucial problem of race in the United States. With the Ku Klux Klan surging during the 1920s as a nativist response to Roman Catholic and Jewish immigrants, La Follette took a public stand against this powerful racist organization. Republicans and Democrats, fearing the loss of white votes in crucial states, kept their silence. The Klan endorsed the candidates of both these parties while actively opposing La Follette. After La Follette’s denunciations, Davis also spoke out against the Klan. La Follette’s pioneering anti-Klan moral example in presidential politics remains one of his chief claims to our admiration today. He published a letter in his magazine in August 1924 condemning the Klan as a stain on American society, adding, “Anyone familiar with my record, especially in my state, knows that I have always stood without reservation against any discrimination between races, classes, and creeds.” As he had written in his autobiography more than a dozen years earlier, “Equality under the law was our guiding star.”
In the age of Donald Trump, the issue of equality has assumed a historically novel form. Trumpism, which is an international phenomenon, battens on the anger and resentment of white society, and particularly white male society. Political astuteness by progressives in dealing with this alienated demographic of Trump supporters has been lacking thus far. A tactical correction in the spirit of La Follette’s guiding star is the only way for progressives to reestablish their credibility with the alienated white working-class voters now turning to Trump.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton and his wife, Anne Case, revealed in a 2015 paper dealing with mortality and morbidity rates in the United States that the white working-class demographic fares the worst in a comparative study of health and longevity. Deteriorating economic and social well-being have figured prominently as causes of white working-class “deaths of despair.” In a larger study published in 2017, “Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century,” the two Princeton University economists showed how worsening labor market opportunities and an inability to work, among other factors, continued to seal this group’s fate in American society. In presentations that they gave in 2017 at the University of Montana, Case pointed out the connections between the resentments of white working-class voters and the groundswell of support in 2016 for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. With Sanders no longer a candidate in 2024, the groundswell will be for Trump.
William Appleman Williams, Charles Beard’s son and heir intellectually speaking, sensed even in the 1960s that a politics based on identity would threaten the left. Williams thought that such ideas served as a prime reinforcement device for the corporate capitalist status quo by promoting women, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color to what he called “positions of command in the empire.” A better goal, he thought, would involve all of us on the left, whatever might be our accidental qualities, working for the dissolution of the empire before it gets us all killed. Toward that larger end, La Follette’s idea of maintaining a strict equality for everybody in law, in policy, and in practice might be worth another look by today’s progressives.