Fighting Bob vs. Silent Cal: The Conservative Tradition from La Follette to Taft and Beyond

JEFF TAYLOR is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Jacksonville State University. He is the author of Where Did the Party Go?: William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jefferson Legacy (University of Missouri Press, 2006).

Soon after becoming president in 1981,
Ronald Reagan surprised the press by
removing the hallowed portrait of Harry
Truman from the wall of the White House
Cabinet Room and replacing it with one of
Calvin Coolidge. The Great Communicator’s
speaking skills and personal charisma far
outstripped the attributes of Silent Cal, but he
shared with his presidential predecessor a
reputation for being a very conservative
Republican coupled with a laid-back executive
style. Coolidge’s conservatism was cited
by Reagan as a role model for his own
administration. But the alleged line of descent
from Coolidge to Reagan is doubtful in
several ways.

From where did the Reagan Revolution
and its contemporary conservative heirs
spring? Analyses from scholars, pundits, and
activists alike usually begin somewhere in the
1940s. Emphasis is placed on opposition to
the bureaucratic regimentation of the New
and Fair Deals and on the anti-communism
that provided the grassroots backbone supporting
the Cold War. For the most part, it
is a post-World War II survey that assumes a
philosophical jump from Edmund Burke to
Robert Taft. But what happened in between?
One might ask what was going on during the
first four decades of the twentieth century. It
would be profitable to discover how Cold
War conservatism related to earlier American
political movements and ideological conflicts
within the Republican Party.

Conservatism did not simply spring forth
from the wit of William F. Buckley Jr. or the
dossiers of Joe McCarthy or the scholarly
works of Russell Kirk. While Barry Goldwater
was a political forerunner to Reagan in the
1960s, Reagan also had conservative predecessors
as far back as 1920. If we examine
their ideas, in several important ways, Calvin
Coolidge was less an antecedent to Ronald
Reagan than were Robert La Follette and
Robert Taft. The link to Taft can be discerned
with ease. The influence of the La
Follette tradition on Reagan’s conservatism
is more surprising.

The fact that Reagan had Coolidge’s picture
on the wall instead of La Follette’s is just
a sign that Reagan did not scratch below the
surface of the “conservative” label attached
to Coolidge. Unfortunately, Reagan was not
deeply familiar with the history of ideas or
movements—even his own. The McKinley-
Root-Coolidge tradition was conservatism
of a very different sort from the modern
conservatism of Taft and Goldwater. The
McKinley-Coolidge tradition was one that
went back through Daniel Webster and
Henry Clay to Alexander Hamilton. In
contrast, the Taft-Goldwater tradition was
quite Jeffersonian.

Labels can be deceiving. The conservative,
standpat, reactionary, Old Guard Republicans
of the 1890s and 1920s became the
liberal, progressive, modern, Middle Way
Republicans of the 1940s and 1970s. The
labels changed—in fact they did a 180 degree
turn—but the ideas stayed constant: big
government and monopoly capitalism at
home; empire and military bellicosity abroad.
And the seat of this sort of Republicanism
stayed the same: the metropolitan centers of
the East Coast.

The personification of the Eastern Establishment
in La Follette’s day was Elihu Root.
Root was a prominent Wall Street attorney
who became McKinley’s Secretary of War,
TR’s Secretary of State, a Republican senator
from New York, and a presidential
contender in 1916. The “foxy Mr. Root”
was recognized as a leading conservative by
the populist Republican senator Hiram
Johnson of California in the 1910s and was
recognized as a conservative by historian
Richard Leopold in the 1950s. These observers
were using “conservative” in its pre-
1936, Hamiltonian sense, not in its post-
1936, Taftian sense. Root’s role as a founder
and honorary chairman of the Council on
Foreign Relations, and as one who pushed
for the League of Nations, the World Court,
and other forms of empire and entangling
internationalism should make that clear.¹
The conservatives in La Follette’s day were
not advocates of laissez-faire economics,
despite what they may have said. They did
not want a wall of separation between government
and business. Yes, they loved capitalism.
No, they did not love free enterprise.
Government and business were to be partners.
Regulation was eventually accepted at
the federal level because it could be coopted
by the biggest corporations to drive out
smaller competitors and to lend them a helping
hand courtesy of the taxpayers. Historian
Gabriel Kolko details the institutionalization
of the big business-big government alliance
in The Triumph of Conservatism. He is using
the c-word in its original Hobbesian and
Hamiltonian sense. Calvin Coolidge practiced
state capitalism, which was arguably a
mild (non-dictatorial) form of fascism, not
laissez-faire.²

In terms of foreign policy, Coolidge was
an internationalist. This is not surprising
given his dependence on the international
banking firm of J.P. Morgan & Co. Coolidge
was a protégé of Morgan partner Dwight
Morrow. Following the lead of Morrow,
Coolidge was willing to accept the League
without any reservations. Welcoming
Woodrow Wilson back to American soil
upon the occasion of the president’s return
from Versailles, Governor Coolidge told a
Boston crowd, “We welcome him as the
representative of a great people, as a great
statesman, as one to whom we have entrusted
our destinies, and one whom we are sure we
will support in the future in the working out
of that destiny.” President Coolidge desired
to join the World Court. La Follette’s senatorial
ally, Hiram Johnson, who campaigned
on the slogan “America First” when running
for president in 1920, challenged Coolidge
for the nomination in 1924. Johnson was a
true ancestor of the Taft-Goldwater movement,
and echoes of his campaigns could be
heard from Pat Buchanan in the 1990s.³

The link between La Follette-Johnson and
Taft-Goldwater can be discerned when thinking
of the transitional figures in the late ’30s/
early ’40s when internationalists and the
mainstream press were confusing people by
adopting the then-popular “liberal” and “pro
gressive” labels. Consider the fact that new
“conservatives” attorney Amos Pinchot,
publisher Frank Gannett, publisher Robert
McCormick, businessman Robert Wood,
socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth, aviator
Charles Lindbergh, and Congressman
Hamilton Fish all came out of the Bull

Moose-La Follette-Borah tradition of liberal
Jeffersonianism within the party. They represented
the Republican side of the Committee
to Uphold the Constitution and the
America First Committee.⁴ Most supported
Taft or MacArthur for president during the
1940-1952 period. Colonel McCormick of
the Chicago Tribune favored Hiram Johnson
over Hoover in 1932 and Robert Taft over
Eisenhower in 1952.

The La Follette liberalism of the 1910s was
converted into the Taft conservatism of the
1940s. The conversion was not total and
modern conservatism included other elements
in addition to agrarian-based,
Jeffersonian liberalism, but Robert Taft was
much closer to Robert La Follette than to
Elihu Root or Calvin Coolidge.⁵ American
Conservatism: An Encylcopedia includes both
Jefferson and Hamilton, both William Jennings
Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt. Much depends
on how you define the word “conservative.”
Conservatives of the twenty-first
century who are closest to the Taft-
Goldwater-Reagan ideal pay homage to the
Jeffersonian tradition, with its commitment
to political and economic decentralization,
constitutional fidelity, social morality, and
avoidance of foreign entanglements.⁶

Robert M. La Follette was a Republican
congressman from Wisconsin from 1885 to
1891, governor of Wisconsin from 1901 to
1906, and a U.S. senator from 1906 to 1925.
“Fighting Bob” La Follette was a serious
candidate for the Republican presidential
nomination in 1908 and 1912 and a favoriteson
candidate for his state in subsequent
years. In 1924, La Follette ran against fellow
Republican Calvin Coolidge as the Progressive
Party nominee for president. He received
4.8 million popular votes (17 percent)
and received 13 electoral votes from Wisconsin.
He came in second, ahead of the
elitist Democratic nominee, in eleven states.

Robert A. Taft was a Republican U.S.
senator for Ohio from 1939 to 1953. During
the last year of his life, he served as Senate
Majority Leader. Bob Taft, eventually known
as “Mr. Republican,” was a favorite-son
candidate for the Republican presidential
nomination in 1936, and a serious candidate
in 1940, 1948, and 1952. In 1952, Taft
received 2.8 million votes in the Republican
primaries, which made him the top votegetter.

There were some obvious differences between
Senator La Follette and Senator Taft.
At first glance, they seem an implausible pair
to put together as political compatriots. In his
two national bids for the Republican presidential
nomination, La Follette ran against
Taft’s father, President William Howard
Taft. He voted against confirming the elder
Taft as Chief Justice in 1921. La Follette was
a preeminent “liberal” and “progressive”
while Robert Taft was described as a “conservative”
and “reactionary” by the press of
his day. La Follette ran for president in 1924
with Socialist Party support while Taft condemned
the New Deal and Fair Deal for
being socialistic. La Follette was a leader of
the Progressive Era and named his party after
the movement that wanted to use government
on behalf of the common people, while
Taft rejected centralized, bureaucratic government.
La Follette’s senatorial ally, Republican
William Borah of Idaho, was defeated
by favorite-son candidate Taft in the
1936 Ohio presidential primary.

Each of these objections to La Follette-
Taft compatibility can be easily answered
when we move beyond superficial analysis
and, in the process, less-obvious similarities
will be found. La Follette’s opposition to his
father may not have endeared the reformer
to the younger Taft on a personal level, but
this says nothing about commonality of principle.
Objectively, Robert Taft was closer in
political philosophy to La Follette than to his
own father. Even on a personal level, Taft did
not hold a grudge. Senators Robert La Follette
Jr. (R-WI) and Burton Wheeler (D-MT)
were friends of Taft. La Follette Jr. was La
Follette’s son, and Wheeler was La Follette’s
1924 running mate. According to historian
James T. Patterson, La Follette Jr. and Wheeler
resembled Taft “in having the courage of
their convictions, in fighting [Franklin]
Roosevelt’s foreign policy, and in denouncing
the power of Wall Street and eastern
monopolists.”⁷

Differing labels over time indicate a substantive
difference only if the meaning of a
label has not changed. This was not the case
for La Follette and Taft. A liberal in 1920 was
often a conservative in 1950, albeit with
some differences in emphasis from one era to
another. Senator Wheeler later recalled,
“During World War II, the practice of
pasting on political labels became ridiculous.
. . . Some of the most conservative senators
embraced FDR’s policies—and immediately
were called liberals. . . . On the other hand,
when lifelong progressives like myself opposed
intervention [in foreign wars], as we
always had previously, we were denounced
for having deserted liberalism.” In 1946,
Oswald Garrison Villard, La Follette
fundraiser in 1924 and former owner of the
Nation, wrote to a libertarian, “Undoubtedly
there is something in what you say about
a basic kinship between my liberal ideas and
those upheld by certain honest and fearless
conservatives.”⁸

La Follette was not a socialist himself, and
he was anti-communist in the aftermath of
the Bolshevik Revolution. The Communist
Party USA hated the Socialist Party and
denounced the “bourgeois” La Follette ’24
campaign. It should be noted, too, that not all
forms of socialism are state socialism involving
coercion and centralization. As for linking
oneself with the Socialist Party, we
should remember that no less a conservative
than Russell Kirk cast a ballot for party leader
Norman Thomas in 1944.⁹ Fittingly enough,
Thomas had been a La Follette supporter
twenty years earlier.

When historians describe the Progressive
Era, they are usually referring to the urban,
elitist leaders of the Republican and Democratic
parties: Theodore Roosevelt and
Woodrow Wilson, respectively. The agrarian,
populist leaders in the two major parties—
La Follette and Bryan—lost out in the
battle for political power as bureaucratic big
government and acceptance of corporate
monopoly triumphed over state-level reform
and federal anti-trust enforcement.

Yes, the young scion of Ohio defeated the
old Lion of Idaho in 1936, but the contest was
more about intrastate rivalry than national
politics. It should be noted that each of Taft’s
subsequent, full-fledged presidential campaigns
received support from Borah’s admirers.
For example, Alice Roosevelt
Longworth supported Taft in 1940, Oswald
Garrison Villard in 1948, and Frank Gannett
in 1952.

Robert La Follette and Robert Taft shared
hostility toward statism, plutocracy, and
imperialism. Although La Follette did not
earn his fame as an exponent of literal interpretation
of the Constitution, during his
years in the Senate he was a strict constructionist
who repeatedly challenged actions on
constitutional grounds. A man whose speeches
were full of facts and figures, La Follette had
a literal mind. In March 1917, he opposed
the Armed Ship Bill partly because it was
“contrary to the letter and spirit of the
constitution, which expressly vests the war
power in congress—without which provision
the constitution would not have been
adopted.” Later in the year, he denounced
conscription and a number of other wartime
measures as unconstitutional. During the
Treaty of Versailles debate in 1919, he wished
for a Senate “that stood for its rights under
the Constitution, that was willing to go back
to the people of the country on the issue of
whether it was abiding by the Constitution
or whether the President was violating the
Constitution.”¹⁰

According to historian Gabriel Kolko, La
Follette “spoke for the small businessman and
for true, unfettered competition.” An opponent
of private monopoly, he usually advocated
trust-busting rather than government
ownership. He supported regulation of corporations
but was critical of the Wilson
administration’s use of regulation as a substitute
for enforcement of anti-trust laws. His
1924 platform endorsed government ownership
of railroads, but also recognized the
danger of bureaucratic control. In the 1920s,
La Follette believed that emergency measures
to help farmers were justified on the
basis of “the general welfare” because their
plight had been created by unjust laws and
administration. He was not normally a supporter
of what he called “class legislation” for
any group—rich, middle, or poor.¹¹

Robert La Follette was an arch-enemy of
trusts that stifled competition (monopoly)
and an uncompromising opponent of rule by
the wealthy (plutocracy). He was a staunch
friend of farmers and laborers. His pioneering
efforts in Wisconsin on behalf of political
democracy and economic justice were emulated
by liberals throughout the nation. Senator
La Follette opposed the Mellon Tax Plan
of the 1920s not because it cut taxes but
because it raised taxes on the many to pay for
tax cuts for the few.

Robert Taft’s father, William Howard
Taft, was a Rockefeller man who was also on
friendly terms with the Mellon-Frick and du
Pont corporate empires. Although he was
born into a pro-Establishment family, Robert
Taft became an anti-Establishment politician.
James Patterson points out that unlike
Hamiltonian conservatives, Taft did not
possess a “yearning for a hierarchical society
and an elitist politics[. . . .] He regarded some
social gradations as inevitable. But he refused
to be complacent about these gradations
or welcome the existence of distinct
social classes[. . . .] Like most Americans, he
wished to disperse political power, not to
place it in the hands of some kind of elite.”
Patterson also notes that Taft “did not perceive
himself as a spokesman for privilege.
On the contrary, he reflected a pervasive
Midwestern suspicion of idle speculators and
Eastern financial interests, and he was almost
as critical of monopoly as were Borah and
some of the older American progressives.”¹²

In their analysis of Taft’s principles, Russell
Kirk and James McClellan observe that while
his Democratic opponents “endeavored to
persuade the electorate that Taft was ‘a tool
of big business’—or, at best, a politician
indifferent to the welfare of the poor and of
organized labor because insulated against
privation by his affluence,” in fact Taft “had
no vast resources, nor did he ever receive
massive financial support, during his campaigns,
from ‘Wall Street’ or any other part
of the business community.” They go on to
add that Taft’s “successive rivals for the
Republican presidential nomination, and
the Democratic occupants of the White
House, were all better buoyed up by millionaire
political backers, and were more strongly
supported by corporate favor.”¹³

A 1944 CIO pamphlet claimed that Senator
Taft supported “a systematic campaign
to force America back into the ‘Robber
Baron’ days when a few big business kings
ran both the economy and the government
of the country from a few offices in Wall
Street.” Historian Patterson comments,
“Those critics who wrote him off as a spokesman
for privilege slighted his welfare policies,
ignored his defense of the right to strike,
and distorted his sincere belief that excessive
taxation of business ultimately harmed all
classes. They also neglected to stress his unconcealed
animus against monopolists, idle
speculators, the Eastern bankers.”¹⁴

In late 1941, historian and Hamiltonian
Democrat Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote an
essay about Wendell Willkie and the future of
the Republican Party for the Nation. The
essay exhibited Schlesinger’s warm feelings
for the “internationalism” of Willkie and
other pro-Establishment Republicans. Robert
Taft wrote these words in response to the
article: “Nor is Mr. Schlesinger correct in
attributing the [anti-war] position of the
majority of Republicans to their conservatism.
The more conservative members of the
party—the Wall Street bankers, the society
group, nine-tenths of the plutocratic newspapers,
and most of the party’s financial
contributors—are the ones who favor intervention
in Europe.”¹⁵

It is interesting that Taft considered the
Wall Street crowd to be more conservative—
in the Hamiltonian sense—than himself,
which means that he considered himself
to be more progressive in the La Follette sense
of that word. It is also interesting that Taft
freely used the word plutocratic, a term used
by liberal populists such as La Follette in their
criticism of monopoly capitalists who sought
to capture the government. Throughout the
1940s, Taft viewed himself as more genuinely
liberal than either Wendell Willkie or
Harold Stassen. He suspected that Stassen was
“a complete opportunist” and complained
that he was “a New Dealer and an internationalist”
who wrapped “himself in a mantle
of liberalism” but who possessed principles
that were not that different from the Old
Guard he liked to criticize.¹⁶

In 1952, the kingmakers of the Republican
Party recruited General Dwight
Eisenhower to stop the presidential nomination
of Senator Taft. Taft was preferred by
“lower-middle-class groups” while
Eisenhower was backed by “the Eastern
Establishment of old Wall Street, Ivy League,
semiaristocratic Anglophiles whose real
strength rested in their control of eastern
financial endowments, operating from foundations,
academic halls, and other tax-exempt
refuges.” Taft did not approve of most
of President-elect Eisenhower’s cabinet
choices (e.g., Charles Wilson of General
Motors for Secretary of Defense). Taft wrote
in December 1952, “I don’t like the fact that
we have so many big businessmen in the
Cabinet.”¹⁷

While La Follette Republicans were generally
less decentralist than Bryan Democrats
in domestic policy during the period from
1900 to1925, they were more decentralist in
foreign policy. Most were “Irreconcilables”
who opposed joining the League of Nations
with or without reservations, partly on national
sovereignty grounds. Decades later,
many were suspicious of the United Nations
for the same reason. The “little group of
willful men,” as Wilson described his Senate
opponents, included anti-League champions
La Follette, William Borah, Hiram Johnson,
and George Norris.

La Follette told the Senate, “The little
group of men who sat in secret conclave for
months at Versailles were not peacemakers.
They were war makers[. . . .] They betrayed
China. They locked the chains on the subject
peoples of Ireland, Egypt, and India[. . . .] I
do not covet for this country a position in the
world which history has shown would make
us the object of endless jealousies and hatreds,
involve us in perpetual war, and lead to the
extinction of our domestic liberty[. . . .] Mr.
President, we cannot, without sacrificing
this Republic, maintain world dominion for
ourselves. And, sir, we should not pledge
ourselves to maintain it for another [i.e., the
British Empire].”¹⁸ La Follette was still widely
discredited by his public opposition to World
War I even after it had been declared by
Congress, so he kept a relatively low profile
while his ideological allies took the lead in
trying to stop ratification of the Treaty of
Versailles. Republicans such as Lodge, Root,
Stimson, W. H. Taft, Hughes, Harding,
Coolidge, and Hoover all supported League
entry, sometimes with the addition of superficial
amendments to the Treaty.

Hiram Johnson expected Wilson to accept
the reservations, thereby allowing Establishment
politicians of both parties to claim
credit for entrance into the League. He had
not counted on Wilson’s stubborn—even
messianic—insistence on adoption of the
Treaty of Versailles as written. A combination
of Wilson’s self-righteousness and the La
Follette bloc’s stubborn insistence on national
sovereignty and resistance to imperial entanglements
killed the Treaty, thus thwarting
the machinations of the GOP reservationists.
The last vote Johnson cast as a senator was in
the Foreign Relations Committee against the
United Nations Charter in 1945. The old
Irreconcilable died before casting a floor
vote against joining the UN.¹⁹

Just as La Follette opposed American involvement
in World War I, Taft opposed
entry into World War II. Both senators were
leading opponents of imperialistic foreign
policy. In his 1996 endorsement of Bob
Dole’s internationalism in opposition to Pat
Buchanan’s “isolationism,” Foreign Affairs
managing editor Fareed Zakaria correctly—
if rudely—lumped Robert Taft in with William
Borah and Gerald Nye as examples of
Republican “paranoid nativism.” Zakaria
thus identified Taft as part of the La Follette
tradition within the GOP. Although he was
consistently anti-communist, Taft recognized
the imperial designs of the Truman-Dewey
crowd in promoting the Cold War in the late
1940s. He also held to a Jeffersonian foreign
policy that was suspicious of entangling alliances.
For these reasons, Taft voted against
creation of NATO. He opposed U.S. involvement
in French Indo-China, which
earned him the distinction of being a protoopponent
of the Vietnam War.²⁰

As a result of similar values, the two
presidential contenders gained the support of
some of the same populist-minded people.
They also earned the enmity of the same
opposition: the Establishment, the Vital Center,
the Power Elite. In the late 1930s, Yale
University trustee Robert Taft recommended
that the school give liberal Senator Hiram
Johnson an honorary degree. Governor
Johnson had been an early booster of La
Follette for the 1912 GOP nomination until
he jumped ship for the Roosevelt ocean liner
(eventually becoming TR’s running mate on
the Bull Moose ticket). Although he was not
personally close to La Follette, Johnson had an
almost identical voting record during the
years from 1917 to 1925. Taft was personally
close to Herbert Hoover after working for
him during the First World War, but he was
willing to overlook Johnson’s anti-Hoover
sentiment. Taft was even willing to overlook
Johnson’s opposition to his father’s Supreme
Court nomination. Johnson had publicly
declared the elder Taft “unfit to be the Chief
Justice” and privately wrote, “I think he was
a traitor to his country in the League of
Nations’ fight.”²¹ Senator Taft joined almost
all of the La Follette Republicans in voting
against the nomination of Henry Stimson to
be Secretary of War in July 1940. Once
again, Taft proved that for him principle
trumped both party loyalty and personal ties:
Stimson had been Secretary of War under his
father and Secretary of State under Hoover.

Like many of the “isolationist,” America-
First populists within the Republican Party,
the La Follette sons—Senator Robert Jr. and
Governor Philip—supported General Douglas
MacArthur’s presidential ambitions in
1944 and 1948. As someone who disliked
George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower,
MacArthur was allied with Taft by the early
1950s. Ironically, Taft was both a friend of
La Follette Jr. and an ally of the man who
defeated him in the 1946 primary: Joseph
McCarthy. Despite obvious personal rivalries,
there were ideological similarities between
the La Follettes and McCarthy which
serve to explain why Taft had links to both
camps.

In the 1950s, historian Peter Viereck
compared the Wisconsin-based populism of
McCarthy and the “Radical Right” to that
of La Follette and the “Old Progressives.” He
saw six “potentially dangerous characteristics”
that they had in common: “direct
democracy, conspiracy-hunting, Anglophobia,
Germanophilia, nationalistic isolationism,
anti-elitist status-resentment.” Viereck
disliked both streams of populism, but he
correctly recognized the similiarities between
the Old Progressives of the Midwest
and their Taft-MacArthur-McCarthy cousins.
Republican senator Gerald Nye of North
Dakota—famed for his Merchants of Death
investigation in the mid-1930s—had twice
supported La Follette for president against
Coolidge in 1924, first in the Republican
primary and then as the Progressive nominee.
By the early 1960s, former Senator Nye
was a Goldwater Republican. Like Taft,
Goldwater shared with La Follette a
Jeffersonian foundation.²²

Just as similarities of principle produced
La Follette bloc-Taft bloc crossover support
from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, the
two groups of Republican populists drew fire
from the same enemies. For two generations,
liberal populists opposed Wall Street domination
of their party. The same group of
New York-based kingmakers were behind
the men who defeated Taft for the presidential
nomination—Willkie (1940), Dewey
(1948), and Eisenhower (1952). Six years
after Taft’s death, the New York Times reported
the contents of his confidential analysis
of why he lost to Eisenhower: “First, it was
the power of the New York financial interest
and a large number of businessmen subject to
New York influence . . . Second, four-fifths
of the influential newspapers in the country
were opposed to me continuously and vociferously,
and many turned themselves into
propaganda sheets for my opponent.” The
subheadline of the article was “Eisenhower’s
Selection Laid to Wall Street and Press.” It
was an analysis La Follette could have penned
in 1912 or Johnson in 1920.²³

La Follette the progressive, the radical, was
a forerunner of the modern conservative because
these terms are equivocal. In the 1910s,
La Follette, Norris, Johnson, and Borah were
known as “progressives,” but they did not
believe in the perfectability of man or in the
wisdom of a bureaucratic nanny state or in
the attraction of a global empire based on
force and greed. They did not depend upon
J. P. Morgan or J. D. Rockefeller. They
were progressive in the sense that they wanted
to change the status quo. In a deeply unconservative
world where the current was
going against traditional values, to be “conservative”
in their day was to support the
status quo of corporate monopoly and dishonest
war instead of free enterprise, small
farms, local power, and a virtuous republic.
So perhaps the Midwestern rabble-rousers,
and their East-Coast allies, needed to be
reactionary radicals. There have been manifestations
of this radical strain in the conservative
movement ever since.²⁴

Even if common descent from Jefferson is
acknowledged in the cases of La Follette and
Taft, some might argue that the conservative
movement need not be Jeffersonian because
there is an alternate conservative tradition
that leans toward monarchy and aristocracy,
and sometimes even toward authoritarianism.
It is a conservatism of government power
and material wealth, of self-aggrandizing
pragmatism and elitism, threading its way
from Machiavelli and Hobbes to Hamilton,
Webster, Clay, and Lincoln. This was the
tradition of McKinley, Root, Lodge, and
Theodore Roosevelt. It continued into the
mid-twentieth century under the new “progressive”
or “liberal” label through the instrumentality
of Willkie and Dewey, Stassen
and Warren. Eisenhower, Lodge Jr., and
Rockefeller were its chief political champions
during the 1950s and 1960s, with Richard
Nixon serving as its handmaiden partly
out of conviction and partly out of ambition.

Ronald Reagan never claimed to be a
conservative in the older Hobbesian-Hamiltonian
sense. After leaving New Deal liberalism
he proudly identified himself with the
Taft-Goldwater tradition of limited government,
fiscal responsibility, and social morality
and of popular control of government,
within the confines of adherence to the
republican Constitution. Such is the modern
conservative mix: libertarianism, moralism,
and populism, with anti-communism resting
on these primary concerns. Within the Republican
Party, Reagan advocated bold colors
which would contrast with liberal Democrats
instead of using the usual me-too pastels.
In 1964, he embraced the very unrespectable
Goldwater candidacy. In the closing days of
a campaign obviously headed for defeat, he
gave his self-penned “A Time for Choosing”
televised speech to the nation.

Reagan chose a very inconvenient time—
and place, when you consider that California
Republicans were outnumbered by Democrats
and had just lost two consecutive gubernatorial
elections—to become a conservative
Republican. He did so out of principle. He
was squarely in the same tradition as Taft and
Goldwater, which is why in 1976 he earned
the support of movement conservatives associated
with the earlier Taft, Goldwater, and
Ashbrook campaigns (e.g., Russell Kirk,
William Loeb, Phyllis Schlafly, H. R. Gross).
It is also why millions of conservative populists
who had voted for George Wallace
switched parties for presidential voting and
became known as “Reagan Democrats.”

To the extent that President Reagan was
faithful in following the conservative principles
of Senator Taft, to that extent he was
in a Republican tradition exemplified by
Senator La Follette from 1900 to 1925. It
was a tradition congenial to Jeffersonian
thought, with roots in agrarianism, localism,
libertarianism, moralism, and populism.
Reagan’s two terms might have been closer
to what a Taft or Goldwater presidency
could have been had he hung a picture of La
Follette on the wall rather than the picture of
Coolidge. The former was a champion of the
common people; the latter was a servant of
the monied elite. Had his principles compelled
a preference for La Follette’s example
over that of Coolidge, Reagan might have
spared the nation the entreé of the Bush
dynasty in his wake and spared the GOP the
continued burden of being known as the
party of the rich.

Ronald Reagan’s symbolic embrace of
the Wall Streetism of Coolidge should not
have been a total surprise to conservative
populists. When Reagan announced his 1980
candidacy in a televised broadcast, he had a
picture of Dwight Eisenhower—not Robert
Taft—sitting on a table behind him, and he
was touting the important issue of statehood
for Puerto Rico! If he had paid more attention
to the deeply conservative values of La
Follette and Taft, he might not have staffed
his administration with Nixon retreads and
Rockefeller allies while snubbing real
Reaganites like Phyllis Schlafly, John
Ashbrook, and Jesse Helms. He might have
groomed a more genuine conservative as his
successor. The difference between La Follette
and Coolidge is the difference between family
farmers and agribusiness conglomerates,
between Peoria and Georgetown, between
Main Street and Wall Street. Each time Reagan
and his successors emulated Coolidge and his
patrons, they moved away from popular
favor and betrayed their base of Old Right
traditionalists, New Right activists, and socially-
conservative Reagan Democrats.

The Bush family and its circle of eliteminded
and empire-oriented attendants inherited
power within the Republican Party
as Ronald Reagan left the scene in 1988.
Throughout the 1990s, Patrick Buchanan
represented an older (paleo) version of conservatism,
with roots far deeper than the
Reagan years. Buchanan established himself
as the champion of Taft-Goldwater-Reagan
conservatism, as indicated by the support he
received during the decade from prominent
veterans of the earlier campaigns, including
Kirk, Loeb, and Schlafly. His “America
First” slogan was reminiscent of both the Taft
’40 and Johnson ’20 campaigns. In his three
presidential bids and various journalistic endeavors,
Buchanan embodied a label-transcending
American populism. This modern
tendency recalled the 1940s cross-pollination
of La Follette liberalism and Taft conservatism.
The 2008 presidential campaign of
Ron Paul, an original Reagan ’76 backer,
tapped into the same phenomenon. With his
Taft foreign policy and Goldwater domestic
policy, Congressman Paul appealed to traditional
conservatives tied to populism and
morality, libertarians opposed to a burdensome
welfare state, and modern liberals interested
in peace and individual rights.

If, in the face of a hostile Establishment,
Reagan had possessed more of the spirit of
Fighting Bob and less of the acquiescence of
Silent Cal, and if Reagan had been more
familiar with the history of the conservative
movement, he might have prevented his
administration from being coopted by the
very people who opposed him so vehemently
in 1976—the statists, plutocrats, and imperialists
who had always been anathema to the
Jeffersonian tradition. Despite some notable
failings and compromises, Reagan nonetheless
set a standard that has inspired many
sincere conservatives for the past 40 years.
Even when President Reagan did not live up
to the promise and rhetoric of Governor
Reagan, the principles and aspirations he so
eloquently set forth served as a benchmark to
set the conservative movement apart from
the bipartisan welfare statism and internationalism
of the Truman-Rockefeller political
power consensus. And, like Robert Taft,
Ronald Reagan had more in common with
Robert La Follette than Calvin Coolidge in
his best actions and finest moments.

NOTES

1. Richard W. Leopold, Elihu Root and the Conservative
   Tradition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954); Hiram W. Johnson,
   The Diary Letters of Hiram Johnson, 1917-1945 (New
   York: Garland, 1983), 3:6-22-19, 5:2-15-30.

2. Gabriel
   Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of
   American History, 1900-1916 (New York: Free Press,
   1977); R. Jeffrey Lustig, Corporate Liberalism: The Origins
   of Modern American Political Theory, 1890-1920 (Berkeley:
   University of California Press, 1986); Antony C.
   Sutton, Wall Street and FDR (New Rochelle, N.Y.:
   Arlington House, 1975).

3. Donald R. McCoy, Calvin
   Coolidge: The Quiet President (New York:
   Macmillan, 1967), 107.

4. Amos R.E. Pinchot, History of
   the Progressive Party, 1912-1916 (New York: New York
   University Press, 1958); Bill Kauffman, America First!: Its
   History, Culture, and Politics (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus,
   1995).

5. For scholarly studies detailing how the senatorial
   allies of La Follette responded to the FDR administration,
   see: Otis L. Graham Jr., An Encore for Reform: The Old
   Progressives and the New Deal (New York: Oxford University
   Press, 1967); James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism
   and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative
   Coalition in Congress, 1933-1939 (Lexington: University
   of Kentucky Press, 1967); Ronald A. Mulder, The
   Insurgent Progressives in the United States Senate and the New
   Deal, 1933-1939 (New York: Garland, 1979); Ronald
   L. Feinman, Twilight of Progressivism: The Western Republican
   Senators and the New Deal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
   University Press, 1981); Wayne S. Cole, Roosevelt and the
   Isolationists, 1932-45 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
   Press, 1983).

6. Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeffrey
   O. Nelson, eds. American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia
   (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2006); Robert M. La Follette,
   La Follette’s Autobiography: A Personal Narrative of Political
   Experiences (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
   1960), 146-48, 160; Belle Case La Follette and Fola La
   Follette, Robert M. La Follette (New York: Macmillan,
   1953), 1:426.

7. James T. Patterson, Mr. Republican: A
   Biography of Robert A. Taft (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
   1972), 232, 253.

8. Burton K. Wheeler, Yankee from the
   West (New York: Octagon Books, 1977), 389; Ronald
   Radosh, Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics
   of American Globalism (New York: Free Life Editions,
   1978), 116.

9. George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual
   Movement in America since 1945 (New York: Basic Books,
   1976), 71.

10. Robert M. La Follette, The Political
    Philosophy of Robert M. La Follette as Revealed in His Speeches
    and Writings (Madison: La Follette, 1920), 208; Robert S.
    Maxwell, ed., La Follette (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-
    Hall, 1969), 69.

11. Kolko, Triumph, 213; Carl R.
    Burgchardt, Robert M. La Follette Sr.: The Voice of Conscience
    (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), 212-13;
    Fred Greenbaum, Robert Marion La Follette (Boston:
    Twayne, 1975), 219; La Follette and La Follette, Robert,
    2:1156.

12. Patterson, Mr. Republican, 331, 158; Kenneth
    Crawford, “Taft the Presidential Candidate,” The American
    Mercury, June 1948, 647-53.

13. Russell Kirk and James
    McClellan, The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft (New
    York: Fleet Press, 1967), 112-13.

14. Patterson, Mr.
    Republican, 275, 330.

15. Robert A. Taft, “The Future of
    the Republican Party,” The Nation, December 13, 1941,
    611-12.

16. Patterson, Mr. Republican, 377; “Taft Hits
    Stassen on ‘Liberal’ Issue,” New York Times, April 22, 1948,
    14.

17. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the
    World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 1244;
    Patterson, Mr. Republican, 583.

18. La Follette, Political,
    251, 263.

19. Johnson, Diary, 3:6-22-19, 7-24-19, 11-8-19,
    1:70; Richard Coke Lower, A Bloc of One: The Political
    Career of Hiram W. Johnson (Stanford: Stanford University
    Press, 1993), 334-35.

20. Fareed Zakaria, “The Vision
    Thing,” New York Times (August 21, 1996), A17; Radosh,
    Prophets, 192-93; Justus D. Doenecke, Not to the Swift: The
    Old Isolationists in the Cold War Era (Lewisburg, Pa.:
    Bucknell University Press, 1979); Murray Rothbard,
    “The Foreign Policy of the Old Right,” Journal of
    Libertarian Studies 2 (1978): 85-96; Michael W. Miles, The
    Odyssey of the American Right (New York: Oxford
    University Press, 1980), 80-120, 164, 196, 208.

21. Johnson,
    Diary, 3:7-2-21.

22. Peter, Viereck, The Unadjusted Man:
    A New Hero for Americans (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956);
    Wayne S. Cole, Senator Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign
    Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
    1962), 222-23; Gerald P. Nye, “Interventionist Madness,”
    The American Mercury (Fall 1966), 26-29; Lee Edwards,
    Goldwater: The Man Who Made a Revolution (Washington,
    D.C.: Regnery, 1997), 9-10, 53; Barry M. Goldwater,
    “Barry Goldwater Talks About ‘Liberals’ and ‘Liberalism,'”
    U.S. News & World Report (July 8, 1963), 44-45.

23. La Follette, La Follette’s; Johnson, Diary, 3:2-6-20, 2-22-
    20, 4-2-20, 4:1-6-24, 6-9-24, 7-10-24, 1-13-25, 4-14-26, 2-
    25-28, 3-17-28; Usher Burdick, “The Republican Party
    and the City of Philadelphia,” Congressional Record (June
    19, 1940), 8641; William Langer, “Proposed Investigation
    of Republican National Convention of 1940,” Congressional
    Record (January 17, 1944), 287; Robert Griffith,
    “Old Progressives and the Cold War,” Journal of American
    History 66 (September 1979), 347; Phyllis Schlafly, A
    Choice, Not an Echo (Alton, Ill.: Pere Marquette Press,
    1964); “Taft’s Appraisal of ’52 Loss Bared,” New York Times
    (November 25, 1959), 1, 14.

24. Thomas Fleming, “From
    Bryan to Buchanan,” Chronicles (March 1996), 8-11;
    Samuel Francis, Revolution from the Middle (Raleigh,
    N.C.: Middle American Press, 1997); Bill Kauffman, Look
    Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and
    Front-Porch Anarchists (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2006).