National Politics: The Progressive Party, 1924

A Third-Party Challenge.

While Sen. Robert La Follette of Wisconsin lacked the political support to keep the Republican Party from nominating Coolidge, he had the support to challenge Coolidge and Davis in the general election as a third-party candidate. La Follette bolted the Republican Party and ran as the Progressive Party candidate with Sen. Burton K. Wheeler, a Democrat from Montana, as his running mate. Different from Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party of 1912, La Follette's Progressive Party, founded in 1924, was the out-growth of the progressive activism of the Committee of Forty-Eight, a political action group formed in 1919, and the Conference for Progressive Political Action. The new Progressive Party was a coalition of organized labor, farm groups, Socialists, and independent radicals, all of whom were dissatisfied with the two mainstream parties, which had both nominated conservative candidates. La Follette and the...

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