Robert La Follette and the Wisconsin Idea, The State as Laboratory

Robert Marion La Follette was born in eighteen fifty-five in a log farmhouse in Primrose Township, Dane County. He was not born to power. He made himself a politician the hard way, reading law in Madison, serving in Congress, losing a governor's race and running again, and finally arriving in the statehouse in nineteen oh one with a program that the railroad and timber interests who controlled Wisconsin politics had been fighting for a decade.

The program had a name that stuck: the Wisconsin Idea. Its core was simple: the University of Wisconsin should not just educate students but should serve the entire state. Professors should write legislation. Scientists should inspect the food supply. Economists should design railroad rate structures. The distinction between the campus and the state government was, as the university's president Charles Van Hise put it in his nineteen oh four inaugural address, an artificial one.

Under La Follette and his allies, Wisconsin became the first state to establish a direct primary election, letting voters rather than party bosses choose nominees. It created a railroad rate commission with real power. It passed a state income tax, the first in the nation, in nineteen eleven. It established a workers' compensation system. A legislative reference library staffed by researchers was available to any lawmaker who needed it. The result was a state government that was, by the standards of the Gilded Age, genuinely functional and genuinely responsive.

La Follette went to the United States Senate in nineteen oh six and took the Wisconsin Idea with him. He ran for president as a progressive independent in nineteen twenty-four and received nearly five million votes, seventeen percent of the total, the strongest third-party presidential showing since Theodore Roosevelt in nineteen twelve. He died in nineteen twenty-five, in Washington, still in office.

The Wisconsin Idea did not die with him. It is still invoked in Madison as a standard against which the state's public institutions are measured. Whether they meet it is a separate argument, debated in every legislative session.