georgeob1 wrote:Wallace never had much political support here and was quickly forgotten. LaFollette played well only in eastern Wisconsin.
The bolded part of your sentence is a positively wild statement, George. Is this a question of selective or repressed memory? ;-)
In actuality, LaFollette got
16,6% of the vote in 1924 -
nationally - with the support of a broad Farm/Labor coalition that ranged from former Teddy Roosevelt partisans to the Socialist Party. Thats comparable with what Ross Perot got in '92 (18,9%) - hardly just a local factor.
I realise that the quasi-socialist Farm/Labor tradition is a part of American political heritage that conservatives would rather erase from collective consciousness - all the more since its support was not at all centred in what now is called yer typical blue states. And judging by this thread, the effort's been pretty succesful. But I'd say that
one-out-of-six of all US voters is a little more significant than "playing well only in eastern Wisconsin".
LaFollette actually ended up in first place across a large swath of the Rockies and plains, as the map below shows. Not just in Wisconsin but also through much of Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Nevada and California did this leftist presidential candidate beat both the Democrat and the Republican. These are states that are now considered hopelessly conservative, but that has as much to do with the way the Democrats went after FDR as with any innate characteristics.
Now the map above might still suggest a geographically isolated base. It doesnt show that LaFollette did pretty well further afield still as well. This list does: the states where LaFollette got over 15% of the vote.
54,0% Wisconsin
45,2% North-Dakota
41,3% Minnesota
37,9% Montana
37,0% South-Dakota
36,5% Idaho
36,3% Nevada
35,8% Washington
33,1% California
31,5% Wyoming
27,9% Iowa
24,5% Oregon
23,3% Arizona
23,0% Nebraska
20,8% Utah
20,4% Colorado
17,8% Ohio
17,5% Illinois
14,9% Kansas
14,6% New York
14,3% Pennsylvania
Almost half the vote in North-Dakota, a third of the vote in California, over a qarter of the vote in Iowa, and significant support all the way out to New York and Pennsylvania - to say that "LaFollette played well only in eastern Wisconsin" is sheer rewriting of history.
And this is important, IMO. I think that if liberal and progresive Americans had worked hard to cultivate this tradition, this all-American leftist tradition that had roots in the "red-state" Rockies as much as in New York's immigrant communities - if they hadnt let themselved be played into this blue-state ghetto through the culture wars - well. We would never have had Bush. There wouldnt be talk of fly-over states.
Of course I'm not a complete naif. I realise that the bulk of historical development is due to socio-economic change. The landless Okies in California became prosperous middle-class citizens in the 50s, for example.
But I do think also that traditions live and die by the effort of those who respect it. The Democrats, post-FDR, have left the Progressive farm/labor roots of a once-influential Left orphaned. And now this tradition has been all but forgotten, with people like Georgeob1 trying to shovel it deeper into its historical grave by pretending it never existed, beyond some obscure local base, in the first place.
A stronger resistance against this rewriting of history would have resulted in a stronger leftwing movement now, and would not have left the Democratic Party at the mercy of the minority and liberal middle-class voting blocks exclusively.
