Suzanne Clara La Follette (June 24, 1893 – April 23, 1983) was an American journalist and author who advocatedlibertarian feminism in the first half of the 20th century.[1] As an editor she helped found several magazines. She was an early and ardent feminist and a vocalanticommunist.[2]
She was born inWashington state into thepolitically prominentLa Follette family. Her father was U.S. CongressmanWilliam La Follette; her brothers were politicianWilliam Leroy LaFollette Jr. andChester La Follette, a painter.[3] AuthorMimi LaFollette Summerskill was her niece. While living inWashington, D.C., with her family, Suzanne worked in her father'sCapitol Hill office as well as that of his cousin SenatorRobert M. La Follette. As a young woman still in college, she observed many of the great political and intellectual debates of the time at the home shared by the two LaFollette families.[4]
Her full-length book,Concerning Women, published in 1926, broke ground in the 1920s, but went out of print for a second time after a 1972 reprint in the Arno PressAmerican Women series. In 1973, an excerpt entitled "Beware the State" was included in "The Feminist Papers," an anthology edited by Alice Rossi.[3] A short biography of La Follette, based on interviews with her grandniece Maryly Rosner, her brotherChester La Follette, and her colleaguesJohn Chamberlain, Priscilla Buckley (sister to conservative editorWilliam F. Buckley Jr.) and Helen Tremaine, can be found in the article "Suzanne La Follette: The Freewomen" bySharon Presley.[5]
La Follette was active in the League of Equal Opportunity, a feminist organization that, unlike the largerNational Woman's Party, opposed not just sex-based minimum wage legislation, but all such legislation. She explained her opposition to such laws inConcerning Women. Her economic views, like those of her mentorAlbert Jay Nock, were libertarian but influenced byHenry George.[3]
She had been interested in Russia since the revolution of 1917 and had been in contact with many exiles, including former presidentAlexander Kerensky. In the 1930s, La Follette served on the Committee for the Defense ofLeon Trotsky, also known as the "Dewey Commission" as secretary to its chairman, philosopherJohn Dewey. La Follette wrote the summary of the committee's findings after holding an investigative meeting inMexico where Trotsky was in exile (and later murdered by an agent ofJoseph Stalin). Many of the committee's members, like La Follette,Carlo Tresca and Dewey, were notTrotskyists, but consisted of anti-Stalinistsocialists,progressives andliberals.[3]
She worked on the journalThe Freeman both as a contributor and as assistant to the editor,Albert Jay Nock, and she later founded a revival of the magazine, calledThe New Freeman, in 1932. (It lasted only 15 months.) In the early 1950s, she served as amanaging editor of yet another revival of Nock's journal, thelibertarian periodicalThe Freeman, withJohn Chamberlain andHenry Hazlitt serving as executive editors. In that role, she came into periodic conflict with Hazlitt due to her "sometimes strident way of expressing herself" on behalf of SenatorJoseph McCarthy.[6] It is this magazine which is widely considered to be an important forerunner to theconservativeNational Review, founded byWilliam F. Buckley Jr., another journal for which she was also an early contributor and managing editor.[3]
But La Follette was not a traditional conservative. In the 1950s, there was no outlet for libertarian thought, so she joined forces with conservatives, who at that time were closer to libertarians than liberal Democrats were[citation needed]. In the interview conducted by Presley in 1980, her colleagueJohn Chamberlain stated that she was a libertarian, not a conservative.[5] Her feminist views in fact often clashed with the conservative point of view. Based on an interview with Buckley, as reported in the"Freewoman" profile, Presley states, for example, that "in 1964, when theNew York Conservative Party, of which she was a co-founder, came out in favor of anti-abortion laws, she demanded that her name be dropped from the Party's letterhead—and it was."[5]
La Follette was born on a ranch in easternWashington state, the fourth of seven children of a pioneer family that owned large wheat and fruit farms in the rolling hills of thePalouse and along theSnake River. She grew up in the wide open spaces of the American West. Her grandfather,John Tabor, was a49er, having crossed the plains toCalifornia after service in theMexican–American War.
Her father,William La Follette, had first come to theWashington Territory as a 16-year-old fromIndiana. By the turn of the 20th century, he was one of the largest growers and shippers of fruit in theInland Empire.[7]
Along with her older siblings, La Follette began her formal studies atWashington State University inPullman, Washington where her family had moved into a large house her father had built near the college. When William La Follette was elected to Congress in 1910, Suzanne moved with her family to the nation's capital and finished her studies there, graduating from Trinity College (Trinity Washington University) in 1915.[8]
While completing her college education, La Follette was involved with many of the great events of the day. She worked in her father's congressional office as well as the office of their cousin, SenatorRobert M. La Follette. For much of that period the two LaFollette families lived together in a large home thatWilliam La Follette had purchased inMount Pleasant, Washington, D.C. Debate and conversation were encouraged at the dinner table and a steady stream politicians, writers, labor leaders, professors and other opinion makers engaged in policy and political arguments late into the evening.[9]
After her father left Congress. she moved to New York City where she lived and worked for fifty years. She lived for most of this period in theChelsea Hotel. Her brotherChester La Follette's art studio was upstairs from her apartment on the tenth floor. During the 1920s she spent four years as an editor for theFreeman working as a deputy toAlbert Jay Nock editing and writing. When the magazine folded, she turned her talents to writing, producing award-winning poetry[10] as well as two books on very different subjects. InConcerning Women, she broke new ground as she analyzed feminism from the perspective of economic equality. Her former mentor, Nock, found the book to be brilliant and original. InArt in America she produced a monumental survey of American art from colonial times to the 20th century. The art historian,Walter Pach wrote the introduction.In the 1930s she organized a new version of theFreeman, won aGuggenheim Fellowship for study of the fine arts,[11] lectured at theArt Students League of New York,[12] and traveled toMexico as a member of theDewey Commission.[13] La Follette served as secretary to its chairman, the philosopherJohn Dewey and wrote the summary of the commission's findings after conducting investigations in Mexico whereTrotsky was in exile (soon after he was murdered by a Russian agent). In the 1940s and duringWorld War II La Follette worked as director of foreign relief programs for theAmerican Federation of Labor, focusing her efforts on keeping communists out of the American labor movement. She maintained her close relationship withAlexander Kerensky and other Russians she had befriended through the years.
La Follette returned to editing in the 1950s when she and a number of old colleagues, includingJohn Chamberlain andHenry Hazlitt produced a new version ofThe Freeman.[14] In her final editorial effort she became the founding managing editor of the magazine William F. Buckley Jr. founded in 1955,The National Review. She retired from this post in 1959 at the age of sixty-six.
Still politically active in the 1960s, she was one of the founders of theNew York Conservative Party. She ran for Congress in 1964 and lost.In her 2004 book,Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary: Completing the Twentieth Century, Susan Ware described the many intellectual gifts that made La Follette such a force among the New York intelligencia for so many decades.[15] La Follette was "a rigorous opponent of government intervention. She was a very beautiful woman, with a hilarious sense of humor, a grammatical stickler ... a feminist ... generous and warm-hearted, recalledWilliam F. Buckley Jr., who knew her in later years."[16][17]
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In the 1970s, La Follette sold herBucks County farm and left theChelsea Hotel and New York City. She returned to the West Coast, settling inPalo Alto, not far from theStanford University campus. She is interred inColfax, Washington with other family members.
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