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La Follette Decides to Run for the Presidency On 27 May, Bobbie informed Rawleigh that his father would be back in the Senate the following Monday: “the effect should be very good in countering the stories which the reactionary newspapers have been spreading with regard to his physical condition.”1 La Follette wrote to William Jennings Bryan on 6 June about the national political situation. The two old warriors agreed about the disaster awaiting any progressives planning to go to the St. Paul convention. La Follette at this point had no hope for the Democratic or the Republican National Conventions either. He thought that reactionaries would control both of these meetings. He did tell Bryan that Wisconsin delegates would present a minority platform, as they had done at every Republican convention since 1904.2 To Governor John J. Blaine, the chairman of the Wisconsin delegation to the Republican National Convention, La Follette wrote the next day about his low expectations for any change in how his platform would be treated this time, but he did not yield to cynicism or despair: “You must remember, however, that regardless of the numbers arrayed against you, the membership of the Republican party in a majority of the states is progressive and that you will be the spokesman in this convention of millions of Progressive Republicans throughout the nation, who have had no voice in the election of convention delegates.”3 La Follette continued to believe in the coming triumph of the progressive cause, which he identified as that of the common people in the country: “Those principles are in thorough harmony with the traditions of the Republican party and with the institutions of representative government.” 427 19  The Final Challenge Calvin Coolidge The Republican convention began in Cleveland on 10 June and culminated in the expected nomination of Calvin Coolidge on a conservative probusiness platform. He picked Charles G. Dawes, a Chicago banker, as his running mate. Less than a month later, his sixteen-year-old son, Calvin Jr., died of pathogenic blood poisoning from an infected toe. On 8 July, La Follette wrote to the president: “In the great and abiding sorrow which has come upon you and Mrs. Coolidge you have our deepest sympathy.”4 La Follette made some exceptions to his general rule about responding nobly and in public to the tragedies of his political adversaries. Roosevelt he cut off completely , and the historical record is silent about La Follette’s reaction to his death or to those of his family members. For Wilson, La Follette had to struggle to find words of solace, even in a private document. Figures like Harding and Coolidge, he placed in a different category of humanity. They were decent adversaries and worthy of respect at the human level, despite, in his view, their benighted politics. La Follette puzzled no more about President Coolidge than he had his predecessor in the White House. Both presidents seemed to be prepared for only one task: to serve the interests that had paid for their campaigns. His editorials in La Follette’s Magazine after August 1923 seldom omitted detailed references to the shortcomings of Coolidge’s policies. La Follette described Coolidge’s first message to Congress as “an able, frank presentation of the stand-pat reactionary theory of government.”5 He had built his political career as a champion of corporate interests and, in effect, had told the Congress that “more monopoly will cure the evils of existing monopoly.” Nothing that he said to the assembled lawmakers indicated any change in his reactionary Republican convictions about promoting special interests. Soon after President Coolidge had taken the oath of office following Harding ’s death, a long-simmering oil scandal at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, erupted into the newspaper headlines on 3 August 1923. La Follette had expressed shock over the ensuing flood of revelations about corruption and graft in Washington. Then in February 1924, he wrote a blistering editorial about Teapot Dome. Although the plundering of the people and their government had been a bipartisan affair for years, reaching a never-before-surpassed peak under the Democrats during the war, the Teapot Dome scandal revealed how pervasive and institutionalized the corruption had become. Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall received most of the bad publicity for this scandal, but La Follette insisted, “It is the system—the system of organized monopoly controlling the government—which demands the condemnation of the people.”6 428 The Final Challenge In the following month...

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