Progressives at Madison
In 1854, in Ripon, Wis., a group composed of abolitionists and nationalists met to form the Republican Party, which, though it has elected 13 Presidents, is the only U. S. third party which ever elected even one.
Last week, University of Wisconsin's tanbark-floored livestock pavilion at Madison was the scene of a mass meeting which may or may not become retrospectively as important to U. S. history as the convention in Ripon. Into the pavilion swarmed some 5,000 invited guests, for whose benefit its interior had been deodorized, its gallery strung with U. S. and Wisconsin flags and with banners bearing the strange device of a cross within a circle, a new American shibboleth. Ushers were Wisconsin football players wearing red sweaters with huge white Ws. Originator, organizer and chief speaker at the meeting was Wisconsin's bespectacled 41-year-old Governor Philip Fox La Follette, whose supporters last spring ousted from the University's presidency Mr. Glenn Frank, the man who is now engaged in preparing a new charter for the Republican Party. Governor La Follette's purpose was to launch a national political organization with the definite political objective of electing a bloc of Congressmen this fall, with the probable objective of electing himself President in 1940. His means were: 1) a two-hour speech broadcast all over the U. S., and 2) a manifesto of the new National Progressive Party of America's principles.
Father & Sons. In the brief and not particularly glorious record of U. S. third parties since the War, the La Follette family has played a big part. Wisconsin's famed, white-maned Senator Robert Marion La Follette Sr. ran for President on an independent Progressive ticket in 1924, polled nearly 5,000,000 votes. Since his death in 1925, La Follette Progressivism has been ably carried on by his two sons— conscientious dapper "Young Bob," 43, who went to the U. S. Senate in 1925 to fill the unexpired term of his father, and Philip, who has been elected Wisconsin's Governor in 1930, 1934 and 1938.