LaFollette's Fight
Hesseltine, William B.
LaFollette's Fight LaFollette's Autobiography: A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences, by Robert M. LaFol-lette. With a foreword by Allan Nevins. University of Wisconsin Press. 349 pp....
...We have long rested comfortably in this country upon the assumption that because our form of government was democratic, it was therefore automatically producing democratic results," said LaFollette in his introduction...
...Paper...
...He began his political career by attacking the bosses of Wisconsin, won the governorship of the state, put through a body of reform legislation, and moved on to the U.S...
...For the next two years, he sought to marshal his Progressive followers in a movement to capture the Republican Party and the White House...
...The essence of the Progressive movement, he said, lay "in its purpose of upholding the fundamental principles of representative government...
...Three-sevenths of his book was concerned with the preliminaries of the campaign of 1912...
...1.95...
...That year, Senator LaFollette wrote the story of his long political struggle...
...Senate...
...In 1912, Roosevelt won the support of half-hearted and of phony Progres-s'ves, led them out of the Republican Party, and launched a new party with himself at its head...
...The book should be put on the required reading list of each new officeholder...
...It is well, indeed, that the LaFollette story, long out of print, should be reissued in 1960...
...His Autobiography had two purposes: first, to recount the development of Wisconsin Progressivism and its spread into other states and into the national government and, second, to expose the hollowness of Roosevelt's progressivism...
...At the close of an election year, in which both the leading parties have sworn undying love for the voters, there is much purpose in remembering the LaFollette struggle...
...Opposing his efforts, and eventually perverting the Progressive movement into an agency for his personal ends, stood Theodore Roosevelt...
...Reviewed by William B. Hesseltine For twenty years, from 1891 until he wrote his Autobiography in 1912, Robert M. LaFollette was at the center of the Progressive movement...
...Throughout, by didactic precept and practical example, LaFollette expounded his philosophy of a government which would protect the rights of the many from the depredations of the powerful few...
...In Washington he was, at first, a lonely figure, but one by one the other Congressmen joined him in supporting tariff reforms, anti-trust laws, railroad legislation, and in ferreting out and exposing the corrupting influence of great corporations on the government...
...By 1910, LaFollette was both the political organizer and the intellectual leader of the reform forces of the country...
Vol. 24 • December 1960 • No. 12
