POPULISM TO INSURGENCY 37 



Meantime, La Follette had discovered in the direct primary an instru- 

 ment through which the reforms he envisaged could best be accomplished. 

 The direct primary idea, like so many others that the western agrarians 

 found useful, was by no means new, although La Follette professed never 

 to have heard of it until 1896. But whereas earlier efforts to apply this 

 principle had been mainly abortive, La Follette, with the help of the 

 recently adopted Australian ballot, hoped to make popular nominations 

 a living force. The caucus and convention, he maintained, had been 

 "prostituted to the service of corrupt organization." For these outmoded 

 methods he would substitute "a primary election held under all the 

 sanctions of law which prevail at the general election where the citizen 

 may cast his vote directly to nominate the candidate of the party with 

 which he affiliates, and have it canvassed and returned just as he cast it." 1 

 In season and out, during campaigns and between campaigns, he carried 

 this program to the people of the state, and finally in 1900, with the direct 

 primary as a principal issue, he was nominated and elected to the gover- 

 norship. The completeness of his victory is evident from the fact that he 

 had the unprecedented plurality of 100,000 votes. Beyond a doubt, it was 

 the support of the farmers that had made this signal triumph possible. 20 



But the battle was not yet won. During his first term in office La Follette 

 failed completely to carry a satisfactory primary law through the legisla- 

 ture and was obliged to bring the issue to the people again in his cam- 

 paign for re-election in 1902. Once more the popular mandate was clear, 

 and this time the legislature yielded, although the bill it finally passed 

 contained a referendum clause designed by opponents of the primary to 

 accomplish its defeat. But the thoroughness with which La Follette's 

 propaganda had done its work was revealed in the election of 1904, when 

 nearly 62 per cent of those who voted on the referendum gave the direct 

 primary their support. At this same election La Follette won a third term. 21 



The first actual use of the primary system in Wisconsin came with the 

 municipal elections of 1905; not until September, 1906, were primary 

 nominations made for state and congressional tickets. Under the Wis- 



19. Allen Fraser Lovejoy, La Follette and the Establishment of the Direct Primary 

 in Wisconsin, 18^0-1^04 (New Haven, Conn., 1941), p. 36. 



20. Ibid., p. 53; A. P. Wilder, "Governor La Follette and What He Stands For," 

 Outloo\, LXX (March 8, 1902), p. 631. 



21. Lovejoy, Direct Primary in Wisconsin, pp. 78-79, 83, 90-91. 



