Fighting Bob La Follette
Near Madison, Wisconsin
Robert Marion La Follette was born in Primrose Township, a few miles south of Madison, in eighteen fifty-five. He enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in eighteen seventy-five, where he studied under John Bascom and argued his way to a state oratory championship. He graduated in eighteen seventy-nine, read law, and by the time he was twenty-five was Dane County's district attorney.
The story of La Follette's conversion from conventional Republican politician to progressive crusader has a specific moment. In eighteen ninety-one, he announced publicly that the state's Republican boss, United States Senator Philetus Sawyer, had approached him to fix a legal case and implied a cash payment if he complied. La Follette refused, said so publicly, and became, overnight, an enemy of the machine that had run Wisconsin for a generation.
He spent the next decade building an alternative. When he took office as governor in nineteen-oh-one, the agenda was ready. Wisconsin enacted the direct primary in nineteen-oh-three, making it the first state to let voters rather than party bosses select candidates. Railroads were taxed on the actual value of their property. A railroad regulatory commission was created. A civil service system based on merit replaced patronage. The first direct election of United States senators, before the seventeenth amendment made it national, was implemented in Wisconsin.
La Follette called what he was doing the laboratory of democracy: try something here, if it works, the nation will follow.
He went to Washington as a senator in nineteen-oh-six and stayed until his death in nineteen twenty-five, running for president in nineteen twenty-four as the Progressive Party candidate and winning nearly five million popular votes, carrying Wisconsin's thirteen electoral votes.
His nickname was Fighting Bob. His face is on a statue outside the State Capitol here. He is the only Wisconsin governor also to appear on a list, published by the Senate in nineteen eighty-two, of the five greatest United States senators in the nation's history.
