For the next nine years La Follette went up and down the rural byways of the state, rallying the people to join him in breaking the unholy alliance between greedy corporations and political bosses, to take back their government. He did not simply harangue listeners. He held them spellbound for hours with avalanches of facts. He told them in precise detail and hard numbers how they were being overtaxed, overcharged, and sold out, how nominating conventions were rigged, how judges were fixed and legislators bribed. He began with most of the money and respectability in the state against him, but in 1900 he won the first of three two-year terms as governor.

He gave Wisconsin a model administration, according to his lights. He pushed bills through the legislature that provided for open primary elections and fair taxation safeguarded natural resources from land-grabbers and exploiters, and created commissions to regulate banks, insurance companies, utilities, and railroads. To these he appointed independent experts, many of them professors at the state university. He believed they would set competitive rules and rates that would bring the benefits of economic growth to the whole public instead of selected stockholders and insiders.

He did not invent all of these ideas, or realize them without other people’s help. They were part of the culture of reform that forward-looking, educated, “modern” men and women were beginning to share in every big city. But the fires he kindled were visible to national progressive journalists a long way of They called his state “a laboratory of democracy.” They popularized the term “the Wisconsin Idea” to describe his mixture of government by popular will and trained, disinterested intelligence.

La Follette became a national figure. Wisconsin sent him to the Senate in 1905, where he had less power but a bigger stage, and he went on battling, usually in the minority, against the monopolists and their allies in Congress to the end of his days. He made no deals and gave no quarter.

La Follette was already known as “Fighting Bob” when he threw himself in the path of the stampede to war. Only someone of absolute political fearlessness could have done it, and it cost him dearly for a time. But he came back for that last 1924 crusade as the presidential candidate of workers, farmers, and consumers who chose not to vote for Calvin Coolidge, corporate America’s front man, or the Democrat John W. Davis, a conservative lawyer whose economic views were indistinguishable from Coolidge’s.

The next year, weary and aged far beyond his seventy years, Old Bob died of heart failure. “Young Bob,” barely thirty, was chosen to fill his vacant seat. In 1930 Phil, just thirty-two, captured

The boys carried on the tradition in their fashion. During the thirties Robert, Jr., became best known in the Senate for his chairmanship of an investigating committee that revealed how employers planted thugs and spies in the workplace to break unions. Phil, as a Depression-era governor, was largely preoccupied with public works and relief measures, but he also fought hard for conservation, public power, and tight control of banks and holding companies. Both were first elected as Republicans but in political reality became supporters of the New Deal. Still, they had no love for the Democrats or for Franklin D. Roosevelt, so in 1934 they bolted and ran on the ticket of a newly created Progressive Party of Wisconsin.

But the “reign” of the second La Follette generation in the state was not to be long. In 1938 Phil tried to expand the third party into a nationwide organization, the National Progressives of America, to challenge Roosevelt. The effort was an unqualified flop, and he was badly beaten in his run for a third term. His elective career was ended at forty-one. In 1940 Bob barely won reelection to the Senate. In 1946 the Wisconsin Progressives disbanded, and Bob returned to the Republican fold, only to be beaten in the primary by Joseph R. McCarthy. He, too, still only middle-aged, was finished as a political form.