Nader and La Follette: History Repeats Itself

As an increasingly crude 2000 election campaign clawed its way toward what could well be a dispiriting conclusion, I buoyed my spirits with a visit to the political graveyard. There, I sat for a bit with the last presidential candidate to take so sustained a political battering from the powers that be as the one now being administered to Ralph Nader.

Robert M. La Follette is buried in Madison, Wisconsin's Forest Hill Cemetery, beneath a simple marker that pokes out above the fallen leaves. This has been his resting place since 1925. La Follette died in June of that year, just four days after his 70th birthday. Friends and family identified the cause as exhaustion from his 1924 campaign for the presidency,

The Wisconsin senator's 1924 campaign as an independent Progressive challenged a conservative Republican and an only marginally less conservative Democrat. La Follette's purpose in making that race was starkly similar to the 66-year-old Nader's rationale for mounting this year's challenge to Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore.

"Senator La Follette did not expect to win," recalls historian Roger T. Johnson. "He made the race as a matter of principle, and as a matter of practical politics, hoping that a strong showing would generate the popular support necessary to the formation of a new political party." As La Follette said upon launching his campaign, "I stand for an honest realignment in American politics, confident that the people in November will insure the creation of a new party in which all Progressives may unite."

****

Like Nader, who today seeks to build a progressive force in the form of the Green Party, La Follette had soured on a two-party system that he saw as having fallen entirely under the influence of Wall Street. A maverick throughout his career, he broke ranks with his own Republican Party to mount that 1924 challenge, which was backed by progressive unions, prominent African-American intellectuals, social reformers and other freethinkers in a time of stark repression against those who dared challenge political orthodoxies. (Just four years earlier, the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party, Eugene Victor Debs, had been forced to campaign from the jail cell where he was imprisoned for having spoken out against the profiteering of defense contractors during World War I.)

La Follette was able to campaign in 1924 as a free man. But that does not mean that he was given a free or fair shot at winning the presidency. Running on an anti-corporate platform quite similar to the one on which Nader campaigns this year, and pledging himself to restore democracy by banishing powerful special interests from positions of political influence, La Follette offered a radical alternative to the rule of the robber barons. The barons and their minions promptly set out to destroy not just the candidacy, but the man.

As Philip La Follette recalled in his wonderful book, "Adventure in Politics," when efforts to prevent his father from gaining ballot status failed, his opponents attempted to ignore "Fighting Bob." But then the elder La Follette began to draw larger crowds than his foes -- just as Nader has with his "super rallies" -- and the knives came out. "These great meetings gave our supporters tremendous encouragement," wrote Phil La Follette. "But they likewise roused the enemy -- especially the Republicans. The checkbooks came out, and the heat was turned on labor and farmers. By the end of October one could feel the vast, spreading tentacles of organized economic power beginning its squeeze to drive people -- especially labor -- by fear into voting for (President Calvin) Coolidge."

****

La Follette was condemned as everything from a radical to a bitter old man on an ego trip. He was dismissed as inept and even insane. And, at every turn, his supporters were warned that a vote for the man they wanted as president would be "wasted" or, worse yet, would tip the race to the eviler of two lessers.