Fighting Bob La Follette

The Righteous Reformer

Nancy C. Unger

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780807825457
• eBook ISBN: 9780807861028
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette (1855–1925) was one of the most significant leaders of American progressivism. Nancy Unger integrates previously unknown details from La Follette’s personal life with important events from his storied political career, revealing a complex man who was a compelling mixture of failure and accomplishment, tragedy and triumph.

Serving as U.S. representative from 1885 to 1891, governor of Wisconsin from 1901 to 1906, and senator from Wisconsin from 1906 to his death in 1925, La Follette earned the nickname “Fighting Bob” through his uncompromising efforts to reform both politics and society, especially by championing the rights of the poor, workers, women, and minorities.

Based on La Follette family letters, diaries, and other papers, this biography covers the personal events that shaped the public man. In particular, Unger explores La Follette’s relationship with his remarkable wife, feminist Belle Case La Follette, and with his sons, both of whom succeeded him in politics. The La Follette who emerges from this retelling is an imperfect yet appealing man who deserves to be remembered as one of the United States' most devoted and effective politicians.

1: Beginnings

OH, MY IDOLIZED FATHER

For a man who would be strongly associated with the dawning of modern, industrialized, urbanized America, Robert La Follette was born in 1855 into an astonishingly different time. Although La Follette would come to witness firsthand the rise of the Soviet Union, in the year of his birth Alexander II became czar of Russia. The glories of antebellum America were celebrated that same year in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, an anonymously published new collection of poems including “Song of Myself.” Precursors of the modern age, events that would more directly impact the life of Bob La Follette (and that he would impact in return) included the creation of America’s first oil refinery, in Pittsburgh. The public’s attention, however, was riveted on the brutal armed conflict over slavery in the newly formed Kansas territory, a series of incidents so violent they came to be known as “Bleeding Kansas.” These dramatic incidents presaged the Civil War that would tear the nation apart and ultimately aid in the transformation of a predominantly rural, agricultural nation into an international industrial giant.

Robert La Follette lived out the ancient Chinese blessing (or is it a curse?), “May you live in interesting times,” beginning with his birth, on 14 June 1855, in the township of Primrose, Wisconsin, a state which only seven years before had graduated from territorial status. No real understanding of La Follette or his life’s work can come without an appreciation of his diverse and complex home state. Not yet “America’s Dairyland,” as proclaimed by its current license plates, Wisconsin could nevertheless already boast a long and unique history. Although much of its geography (and almost all of its 8,500 lakes) was the result of glacial movements during the last Ice Age, roughly a quarter of the state’s 35 million acres was protected from glaciers. The result is a unique variety of landscapes that, prior to the coming of French explorers, were home to an estimated 20,000 Native Americans, most notably the Menominee and the Winnebago. Following encroachment by white trappers, traders, and farmers and the climactic defeat at the Battle of Wisconsin Heights in 1832, the relocation of the territory’s tribes west of the Mississippi River proceeded with relatively few disturbances. Wisconsin, bereft of much of its native population, was awash with succeeding waves of new immigrants. By midcentury, the entire country was on the move (with one American in four moving across state lines), and a disproportionate number of its migrants were moving to Wisconsin. Migratory patterns were rarely simple, and instead involved a series of moves, as farms and homesteads were established only to be abandoned in a restless search for greener pastures.¹

Robert La Follette took great pride in his pioneer beginnings. Living in an era filled with big business and big corruption in big cities, he stressed his humble birth—in a log cabin, no less—as proof of his inherent sturdiness, plainness, and integrity. His heritage was solidly American in the romantic tradition, the trail of his ancestors into Wisconsin long and complex. His maternal great-grandfather, a Scottish farmhand named John Fergeson, settled in North Carolina after crop failures and political oppression forced him to leave northern Ireland. Joseph Le Follet, La Follette’s paternal great-grandfather, was a prosperous silk manufacturer who migrated to the Isle of Jersey after the massacre of St. Bartholomew in the sixteenth century. Le Follet’s first wife, whose name remains unknown, was a Catholic who had escaped a convent school in France and was secreted out of the country in the traveling carriage of an English couple, customers of Jean Le Follet, Joseph’s father. Despite her parents’ opposition, she and Le Follet married around 1765. The couple emigrated to a French Huguenot colony near Newark, New Jersey, where in 1767 they produced one child, Isaac, before the young woman’s death.²

Both Joseph Le Follet and John Fergeson fought against the British in the American Revolution. During the war the Le Follet family name underwent the transformation to its current spelling. (According to family legend, an ancestor named Usual was surnamed Le Follet, “the Reckless,” near the end of the twelfth century because of personal bravery in the local provincial wars, and the name, as a family cognomen, was retained permanently.) “Le Follet” became “La Follette” following the arrival of Joseph’s three brothers in America in 1776. The brothers were part of a French crew financed by the Marquis de La Fayette to bring supplies from his estate and help fight the British. All four brothers participated in the battles of Brandywine and Yorktown, and all but Joseph agreed to demonstrate their loyalty to La Fayette by changing the spelling of their name from the masculine to the feminine form. Joseph resisted this change, listing his first four children in the family Bible as “Le Follet,” but eventually came to conform with his brothers, listing his five subsequent children as “La Follette.” It is not known whether the brothers Americanized the pronunciation of their name when they altered the spelling, but their descendent, Robert La Follette, would “have none of the French pronunciation,” insisting that the accent be placed on the penult [lah-FALL-it].³

John Fergeson returned to North Carolina after his Revolutionary War service. His son, also named John Fergeson, left in 1807 to farm in Indiana with his wife, Mary Green, a native of Maryland. There, on 22 November 1818, Robert La Follette’s mother, Mary Fergeson, was born. Joseph La Follette moved from New Jersey to Virginia, but later he and his brothers traveled to Hardin County, Kentucky, where they settled permanently. Joseph’s son Jesse, born in 1781, married there and fathered eleven children, including Josiah, Robert La Follette’s father. Neighbors of the La Follettes included Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, parents of Abraham Lincoln. Thomas Lincoln and Joseph La Follette were appointed, among others, to appraise the estate of a deceased neighbor. In 1828, when Josiah was eleven, Jesse’s family moved to a farm in Putnam County, Indiana, where Joseph’s brother Usual had moved years before.⁴

In Putnam County, La Follette’s parents, Josiah La Follette and Mary Fergeson, began their courtship and became engaged. They made a striking couple, for Josiah was a robust, swarthy man who stood about six feet tall, towering over his four-foot ten-inch fiancée, an attractive blue-eyed, light-haired woman with fair skin.⁵ At some point Mary’s brother married one of Josiah’s older sisters. Mary nevertheless broke off her engagement to Josiah following a “lovers’ quarrel,” and he returned to his boyhood home in Kentucky where he engaged in agricultural work. In 1840 Mary, then twenty-three, wed Alexander Buchanan, a farmer. Their daughter Ellen had not yet been born when Buchanan was killed at a barn raising. Mother and daughter remained on the farm. According to family legend, someone coming from Indiana brought a paper with a notice of a party attended by the widow Buchanan. This social note was communicated to Josiah La Follette, a fine carpenter, as he was working on a roof: “He came down off the house, took off his apron, hung it on the ladder and said, ‘I am going back to Indiana and marry the widow Buchanan.’” Return he did. Mary and Josiah married in 1845 and remained on the Buchanan farm until 1849, when Josiah’s five unmarried brothers bought or preempted (gained right to purchase a public tract of land) 840 acres within an area three miles square in the township of Primrose, in southern Wisconsin, and sent favorable reports back to Indiana. Thus, Josiah and Mary, together with their two small sons William and Marion, and Mary’s daughter Ellen Buchanan, came to settle, via two covered wagons and a covered buggy, in Wisconsin.⁶

The pioneer experience in Wisconsin has been popularized for modern audiences, especially children, by Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. Set in the sparsely populated, central eastern portion of Wisconsin territory, the Ingalls family bravely endured the elements and eked out a living trapping, fishing, and hunting amidst the Big Woods (Wisconsin’s woodlands then covered roughly three-fifths of its northern area). Southern Wisconsin, new home of the La Follette family, offered a very different kind of pioneer experience. Although generally classed as rolling and fertile, the lands of southern Wisconsin offered a challenging range of soils, streams, thinly covered rocks, and elevations that made farming far less lucrative in some areas than in others. But natural lottery schemes such as these were nothing new to the La Follette clan, nor to most of their neighbors. More than two-thirds of Wisconsin’s 1840 territorial population was under thirty, and these youthful seekers of a better life seemed resigned to early trials and setbacks.

Despite the leadership of an American-born minority, Wisconsin during its territorial period was a vast mosaic of loosely associated ethnic communities. Irish immigrants began arriving in the 1830s. They were joined by many of their fellow citizens as the toll of the potato famine accelerated, beginning in 1845. Protestant Scotch-Irish, some of them of Huguenot origin, also came to Wisconsin, as did Cornish miners (drawn by its rich lead fields), but the prevailing nationalities in territorial Wisconsin were British, German, Irish, Norwegian, and Swiss. By 1845, a reported quarter-million acres of farmland had been sold to the Germans alone. Following statehood in 1852, official efforts were successfully made to attract other immigrant groups, including Armenians, Belgians, Bohemians, Danes, Finns, Greeks, Hungarians, Icelanders, Italians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, and Swedes. These additional nationalities made more intricate the existing multi-ethnic mosaic. One of the tiniest minority groups in Wisconsin was composed of African Americans, totaling only 1,171 by 1860, less than one-fifth of 1 percent of the state’s population. While they were denied a number of rights and privileges, including the franchise, they were allowed to marry whites, own property, attend public schools, and serve on juries. This mosaic of ethnic and religious heritages produced a unique and complex political character, a character Robert La Follette would grow up with and understand perhaps better than any politician before or since.⁷

Due to his relatively late arrival in Dane County, a Norwegian stronghold since 1846, Josiah La Follette was forced to buy or preempt his 360 acres in three unadjoined lots. Josiah, like his brothers, was hardworking and quickly became a successful farmer. He owned and read a great number of books and, not content with mere financial success was also, like his brothers, politically active. The La Follettes were a well-educated clan as well. (The Indiana branch boasted seven lawyers, five physicians, and several ministers.) All were ardent abolitionists and members of the newly formed Republican party, an antislavery coalition of Northern Whigs, independent Democrats, and Free Soilers. Josiah added to his responsibilities in 1852 when, less than two years after his arrival in Primrose, he was elected town clerk, receiving all thirty-six votes cast. Tragedy struck Josiah and Mary that same year with the death of their three-year-old son, Marion, an event not uncommon in these pioneer times of crude conditions and frequent epidemics. The following year marked Josiah’s reelection to office and the birth of a daughter, Josephine. In 1854, Josiah was elected assessor and on 14 June 1855 was presented with a son, Robert Marion La Follette, called Bob.

If this image from a La Follette family photo album is indeed of Josiah La Follette (so identified “with some reasonable assuredness” by visual archivists of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin), it remained, tragically, undiscovered or unrecognized by his son Robert. However, in view of Belle La Follette’s assertion that the fact that her husband “had no early memory, not even a picture of his father, was a source of much grief and heartache in his childhood, and of deep regret all his life,” this may instead be a portrait of one of Josiah’s five brothers. (State Historical Society of Wisconsin WHi[X3]11506)

At the time of Bob’s birth, both parents were thirty-eight years old. Ellen Buchanan was fourteen, William was eight, and Josephine was two. Josiah had for ten years been married to the woman who had been the sole object of his desire and who had for so long eluded him. Although Mary La Follette later told Bob that his father had been an agnostic, a neighbor remembered the entire La Follette family attending services at the Free Baptist Church in Postville. Whatever Josiah La Follette’s religious beliefs, his neighbors respected him, and he had advanced rapidly up the political ladder, having been recently elected town chairman. Financially prudent, he was said to have been an intelligent, determined man of integrity and strong will.⁸

Josiah La Follette’s death, despite the ministrations of family physician William Fox, came in February 1856, brought on by a complication of pneumonia and diabetes. His dying words: “I am not afraid to die, but I don’t like to be forgotten.” Bob was only eight months old. Josiah’s widow wanted her husband buried with Marion, the toddler who had died three years before. Marion’s coffin was removed from a hillside on the farm, brought into the house and opened. Family legend has it that the child’s face was perfectly preserved, only to fall to ashes. Father and son were then buried in a single grave, the son under the father, in the nearby Postville cemetery on Green’s prairie. This dramatic story was to be recounted to Robert La Follette, who would attempt to reenact it nearly forty years later.⁹

Mary and the children were bequeathed one of the best farms in the county, and the surviving La Follette brothers provided what aid they could. One brother, William, undertook the building of the frame house planned by Josiah. Another brother, Harvey, carried out the balance of Josiah’s unfinished term as town chairman. During the first three years of her second widowhood, Mary La Follette was uncertain about staying in Primrose. In 1858, she and Bob visited relatives in Indiana, where she might have resettled her family had a neighbor, Dean Eastman, not provided a solution to her problems. Eastman married Ellen Buchanan, bought some of the La Follette land, and agreed to run the farm for half the profits. Diligent and ambitious, by 1860 Eastman had made the La Follette farm the second most valuable in all of Primrose. This new sense of security allowed Mary to remain in Wisconsin to raise her family.

Inaccurate accounts of Robert La Follette’s early childhood abound. One sketch reports that at the death of his father, “the care of the whole family of several younger children fell upon Robert as the eldest son. For several years he supported the entire family.” La Follette’s own accounts are dramatic but vague. He begins his autobiography with his experiences in 1880, when he was already twenty-five years old, mentioning only that he had never known his father and that he had his mother and sister to support, contributing to the impression that he had taken sole responsibility for the family at an early age.¹⁰ In truth, the farm under Josiah La Follette had been more prosperous than most, and Dean Eastman compounded the profits by producing butter for sale. The extended family lived under one roof, and Eastman, an energetic and popular man, treated his young brother-in-law with affection. Although Bob’s half sister Ellen was a living reminder of his mother’s rejection of his father in favor of another man, young Bob displayed no resentment toward her. Despite the large difference in their ages and the physical distances that later separated them, the two corresponded infrequently but regularly throughout their lives and freely expressed care and concern for one another, their spouses, and their families. Neighbors, too, paid enough attention to Bob to remain vividly in his memory.

After Josiah La Follette’s death, his family remained sufficiently prosperous to commission a portrait in 1858. Three-year-old Bob nestles in his mother Mary’s lap. His half sister Ellen stands behind sister Josephine, with brother William at right. (State Historical Society of Wisconsin WHi[X3]35771)

Bob did not lack for male attention, but the people to whom he was closest throughout his childhood, indeed his lifetime, were women. “He was a tremendous favorite with ladies,” a neighbor remembered of the youthful La Follette, “despite the fact that he was very mischievous. . . . They adored the handsome little bunch of energy that seemed all springs and fire.” La Follette spoke openly of his depend...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Fighting Bob La Follette
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Beginnings
• 2 Civil Wars
• 3 The University Years
• 4 Belle Case La Follette
• 5 La Follette and the Law
• 6 Congressman La Follette
• 7 Citizen La Follette
• 8 Governor La Follette and the Wisconsin Idea
• 9 Senator La Follette
• 10 The Burdens of a Great Name
• 11 No Longer the Lonely Man of the Senate
• 12 Incident in Philadelphia
• 13 No Surrender
• 14 World War I
• 15 Resurrection
• 16 Final Battles
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index