Insurgent's Way

The way of the conscientious insurgent is never easy. He must have strength and fire to attract followers; he must be tough and crafty and fearless to make headway against convention. At the turn of the century, old "Fighting Bob" La Follette of Wisconsin was such a man. Millions listened to his rebel yell and to his attacks on the railroad and lumber interests as he fought his way into the governor's mansion in Wisconsin. But the fierce old reformer sensed that his progressive movement would not be fulfilled in his own time, so he bequeathed his fame and following to his sons. From the moment of his birth, Robert Marion La Follette Jr. was wrapped in an insurgent's mantle.

As he grew up, Bob Jr. was sickly. Illness hurt his career at the University of Wisconsin (where he displayed a wistful hankering for journalism) but nothing could disrupt his political education. Old Fighting Bob went to the Senate in 1906, and in Washington "Young Bob" learned politics with his table manners. By the time his father died, in 1925, and Young Bob succeeded to his Senate seat, he knew all the rules. Then at 30, he was the third youngest Senator in U.S. history.* He affected pearl grey spats, plastered-down hair and cake-eater sideburns. He was cherubic in countenance, shy and courteous in manner, and he lacked his father's oratorical fire and flourish. He was, his senatorial elders decided, a mere shadow of Fighting Bob.

In Opposition. They soon discovered the error of their judgment. Young Bob measured up to the La Follette tradition, but in his own way. He baited Cal Coolidge for not doing enough to aid the farmers. He attacked Herbert Hoover's Treasury Secretary Andy Mellon for cutting taxes. In 1931, alarmed by mounting unemployment, he warned: "Congress should devote its energies ... to the enactment of a relief program . . . The time has come for Congress to assert its leadership." Young Bob soon took his place in the G.O.P. opposition with such towering progressives as Hiram Johnson and George Norris.

After the coming of the New Deal, Bob La Follette and his younger brother Philip formally organized the insurgent Progressive Party.* Father La Follette had kept it--barely--within the GOP, as a billowing reform movement. And though they swept Wisconsin in 1936, the progressives never really got off the ground. The New Deal appropriated many pet La Follette dreams, e.g., collective bargaining, unemployment compensation, and took credit for them to boot. But through the '30s, Young Bob worked faithfully in alliance with the New Deal on its domes tic program (exception: he wanted a pay-as-you-go tax system). His Civil Liberties Committee barnstormed across the U.S., exposing a sordid underside of U.S. big business in the days when business was dead set against organized labor. He probed the bloody Memorial Day riot at Chicago's Republic Steel plant (10 dead), and laid the blame on Chicago's goonlike police force. He reported that some 2,500 companies (a "bluebook of American industry") had sent hireling spies into unions to infiltrate and disrupt organized labor. And, inadvertently, he provided Communist pamphleteers with source material which they still drag out to this day.

Saved at Lunch. By 1940, as war raged in Europe, La Follette's star was waning. Like his father, he was an isolationist, and when he inveighed against lend-lease and the neutrality act, he lost votes. Franklin Roosevelt saved him from defeat in the 1940 senatorial campaign. In 1934 Roosevelt publicly called him "old friend," and then invited him to a well-publicized White House luncheon as a campaign boost. After Pearl Harbor, Young Bob supported the bipartisan foreign policy, but late in the war he put on his old isolationist hat again. The United Nations, he said, was "a gilded fac,ade for the old-style military alliance built exclusively on force."

In 1946 the Progressive Party disintegrated, and La Follette returned to a hostile Republican fold. A few months later, after 21 years, he was unseated by an upstart named Joe McCarthy. He had been too absorbed in his work on the Congressional Reorganization Act to go home and campaign until ten days before the primary. "I didn't go back to talk to the voters," he said ruefully. "My father did just what Joe McCarthy did [to win], and I guess I made a mistake." After that, Young Bob never again answered the call of politics or insurgency. He stayed in Washington, made a good living as an economic adviser to private industry. Ill health haunted him. Last week, tired and depressed at 58, he called his wife at a Red Cross meeting and asked her to come home at once. She found him dead on the floor of the bathroom, a bullet hole through the roof of his mouth, the pistol still clutched in his hand.

*The others: Kentucky's Henry Clay (29) and Virginia's Armistead T. Mason (28). *No kin to Henry Wallace's 1948 party of the same name.

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