Profile · Madison, Wisconsin
Robert Marion La Follette Sr.
Fighting Bob, Wisconsin Progressive governor and senator; born Primrose, Dane County (not Madison); father of Robert M. La Follette Jr.
$7,500
Robert Marion La Follette Sr.—Fighting Bob—was Wisconsin’s Progressive governor and U.S. 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.