Robert Marion La Follette Sr.

senator, the force behind direct primaries, railroad taxes, and the Wisconsin Idea of professors writing the laws. Madison was not his birthplace; it was the adult political stage, the Maple Bluff house, and the Forest Hill grave.

He was born on a Primrose farm in Dane County on June 14, 1855, lost his father before he could remember him, and arrived in Madison as a teenager with a gift for talking. At the University of Wisconsin he was a mediocre student, a vegetarian, the owner of the campus paper, and the winner of a statewide oratory contest with a speech on Iago. He financed college in part by buying and running the student newspaper, the University Press. The conversion came in 1891, when lumber-and-railroad boss Philetus Sawyer allegedly offered him money to lean on a judge who happened to be his brother-in-law. He said no, told the state, and spent a decade as a Republican heretic.

He served as Dane County district attorney, then governor, then senator. In 1905 he moved to a then-sixty-acre Maple Bluff farm at 733 Lakewood Boulevard—the same year the legislature sent him to the Senate; he delayed taking the seat to finish the governorship. In 1924 he ran for president as a Progressive, took Wisconsin, and pulled nearly five million votes. He died in Washington the next June and came home to Forest Hill. The Maple Bluff house is a National Historic Landmark. In 1957 the U.S. Senate voted him one of its five most outstanding members; Wisconsin’s statue in the National Statuary Hall is his.