By Fred Gaboury

People's Weekly World

MILWAUKEE, Wisc. - When it comes to electing U.S. senators, Wisconsin is a study in paradoxes. In 1906 their choice was Robert LaFollette. Forty years later it was Joseph McCarthy.

Many readers of the People's Weekly World are familiar with the damage done the nation by "Tail Gunner Joe," Joseph McCarthy, whose arrogant disregard for the Bill of Rights would give rise to the term "McCarthyism" as the short-hand definition for the anti-Communist hysteria of the times, was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1946.

However, they may not be familiar with the contributions of "Fighting Bob" during his years-long battle against the growing power of corporate monopoly at home and military intervention abroad.

Hopefully, this brief article, based on one written by John Nichols for The Progressive magazine, will serve to fill that gap.

By the time LaFollette became a senator, he had already served in the House of Representatives and been elected governor of Wisconsin.

He was last elected to the Senate in 1922, winning 70 percent of the popular vote despite his lonely refusal to join the hysteria surrounding U.S. involvement in World War I and despite his passionate defense of Eugene Debs and others who were jailed in the post-war "Red Scare."

Throughout his career, LaFollette as guided by a belief that working people would, if given the truth, opt for fundamental solutions to the problems facing the country.

It was this belief in the good sense of the American people that guided LaFollette's 1924 campaign for president as the candidate of the Progressive Party.

In that campaign, in which he had the support of the Socialist Party, organized labor, farmers, African Americans and women, LaFollette ran on a platform calling for government takeover of the railroads, elimination of private utilities, outlawing child labor, the right of workers to organize unions, increased protection for civil liberties and an end to U.S. intervention in Latin America.

LaFollette campaigned on the pledge to "break the combined power of the private monopoly system over the political and economic life of the American people."

In a campaign that took place during the heyday of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, he spoke out against "any discrimination between races, classes and creeds." He told his supporters, "Free men of every generation must combat renewed efforts of organized force and greed to destroy liberty."

LaFollette won nearly five million votes - more than five times the previous high for a candidate endorsed by the Socialists. It was not until the 1992 campaign of Ross Perot that a third party candidate exceeded LaFollette's 1924 showing, in which he carried Wisconsin, ran second in 11 western states and swept working-class Jewish and Italian wards in New York and other major cities.

LaFollette's campaign laid the groundwork for the resurgence of left-wing populist movements across the country in the 1920s and 1930s - the Non-Partisan League of North Dakota, the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota and the Progressive Party of Wisconsin.

It spurred support for the American Labor Party of New York, Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California of 1934 and the Washington Commonwealth Federation, under whose banner several Communists were elected to the Washington State Legislature.

The list of prominent politicians who were associated with LaFollette's 1924 presidential bid included Harold Ickes, FDR's secretary of the interior. It was he who invited Marian Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial when she was denied the right to sing in Constitution Hall because she was Black. The list also included Fiorello La Guardia, the future mayor of New York City, who nominated the senator for president. "I speak for Avenue A and 116th Street," La Guardia said, "instead of Broad and Wall," the location of the New York Stock Exchange.

Some 40 years after LaFollette's death, Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, a Wisconsin native, and Alaska Sen. Ernest Gruening, a spokesperson for LaFollette's 1924 presidential campaign, cast the only Senate votes against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which committed the U.S. to all-out war in Vietnam.

La Follette developed his revulsion of corporate capital as a young man who had taken the message of Edward Ryan, the Irish populist who became chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, as his guiding principle throughout his political career. "For the first time in our politics, money is taking the field of organized power," Ryan warned in an 1873 speech before a college audience.

"The question will arise: Which shall be the rule - wealth or man? Which shall lead - money or intellect? Who shall fill public stations - educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate wealth?"