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Sen. Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette (Left) of Wisconsin, pioneer of the Progressive movement. Roy O. Woodruff (Right), Bay City mayor and Progressive Republican Member of Congress.

Bay City Mayor Woodruff Rode the Bull Moose to Congress for 34 Years

Republicans of a Century Ago Were Exact Opposites in Philosophies

March 9, 2011       Leave a Comment
By: Dave Rogers

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(EDITOR'S NOTE: In the wake of political strife in Wisconsin, writers are recalling the Progressive Republican Movement that was spawned nearly 100 years ago in Bay City with Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose activists as well as in Wisconsin under Robert M. La Follette.)

Bay City Mayor Roy O. Woodruff, a dentist, called out the entire police department when the Republican state convention split into rival factions in April 1912.

The police and local National Guard soldiers had to control the throng of about 1,800 trying to enter the armory at 301 Washington Avenue, a solid brick assembly building built the previous year. It was one of the largest arched indoor arenas in the state at the time.

Two national Republican movements clashed here. Teddy Roosevelt's Progressives under W. Frank Knox were pitted against the conservatives of William Howard Taft with Paul King as leader.

The Roosevelt Progressive faction soon became known as the Bull Moose Party, coined by newsmen after he declared his fitness for office after being shot in an attempted assassination. "I'm as strong as a Bull Moose!" said TR.

Who can forget that Roosevelt and Taft split the GOP vote, allowing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win the Presidency in 1912.

Woodruff, then a popular 36-year-old local government reformer who had served in the Spanish American War of 1898, went on to become a long-serving Progressive Republican Member of Congress from the 10th District.

Both Woodruff and Wisconsin Gov. La Follette were cut from very different cloth than today's Wisconsin governor Scott Walker: La Follette stood with the workers while Walker is with corporate interests -- both governors called themselves Republicans but had exactly opposite philosophies.

In 1912, La Follette defined his position in a speech:

"The great issue before the American people today is the control of their own government. In the midst of political struggle, it is not easy to see the historical relations of the present Progressive movement. But it represents a conflict as old as the history of man -- the fight to maintain human liberty, the rights of all people."

Although La Follette initially sounded the call against corporate power, Bay City's Woodruff was marching right behind him playing the same notes. La Follette embraced such progressive initiatives adopted during Roosevelt's Presidency (1901-1908) as workers compensation and the minimum wage.

La Follette was a leading reformer with an impressive record of achievements in Wisconsin, among them pure food acts, child labor and compulsory education laws, and workmen's compensation insurance.

In the 1912 election, Progressives were concerned with labor issues to natural resource conservation measures that eventually would be addressed through legislation. The 16th and 17th Amendments to the Constitution passed during Taft's administration were ratified early in Woodrow Wilson's first term. Congress gained the power to collect income taxes, and U. S. Senators would be elected by the people instead of by legislatures. In addition, women gained voting privileges when the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920.

In 1922, Woodruff was described by the Locomotive Engineers Journal as "outspoken champion of workers and farmers."

We are indebted to Marv Kusmierz of Bay-Journal.com for the biographical information on Roy Orchard Woodruff (March 14, 1876 --February 12, 1953), a politician, soldier, printer and dentist.

Woodruff was born of English and Scottish ancestry to Charles Woodruff and Electa (Wallace) Woodruff in Eaton Rapids, Michigan. He attended the common schools and the high school of Eaton Rapids, and apprenticed to the printing business from 1891 to 1899. He also worked as a railroad fireman and brakeman.

He enlisted as a corporal in Company G, Thirty-third Regiment, Michigan Volunteer Infantry, during the Spanish-American War.

Woodruff graduated from the dental department of the Detroit College of Medicine in 1902 and practiced dentistry in Bay City from 1902 to 1911. In 1906 he married Vera May Hall, the daughter of Michigan Republican State Central Committee member De Vere Hall. He was mayor of Bay City from 1911 to 1913.


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In 1912, Woodruff as the candidate of the Progressive Party defeated incumbent Republican U.S. Representative George A. Loud of Oscoda from Michigan's 10th congressional district. Woodruff served in the 63rd Congress from March 4 1913 to March 3, 1915.

Woodruff and William J. MacDonald (12th district, Upper Peninsula) were the only two Michiganders elected to the U.S. House from the Progressive Party. The Bay Cityan was not a candidate for re-nomination in 1914 and served for two years in the First World War as an infantry major in France.

In 1920, Woodruff returned to Congress, elected as a Republican from the same district to the 67th Congress. He was subsequently re-elected to the fifteen succeeding Congresses, serving from March 4, 1921 to January 3, 1953. On June 11, 1921, just three months after returning to office, he married his second wife Daisy E. Fish. He was re-elected unopposed in 1922 and 1926 and was alternate delegate to the Republic National Convention from Michigan in 1940. He was not a candidate for re-nomination in 1952 to the 83rd Congress.

Woodruff was a Baptist, later a Presbyterian, and was a member of the American Dental Association, American Legion, United Spanish War Veterans, Freemasons, Elks and Odd Fellows. He died in Washington, D. C. a little over a month after leaving office and a month before his seventy-seventh birthday. He is buried in Elm Lawn Cemetery of Bay City.

La Follette saw unrestrained corporate power as the great threat to representative government.

When corporations are allowed to engage in political competition, using their vast resources to warp our electoral processes, La Follette warned that certain results would be guaranteed by a government no longer representative of the people but instead beholden to paymasters in distant boardrooms.

"When legislatures will boldly repudiate their constituents and violate the pledges of their platforms, then indeed have the servants become the masters, and the people ceased to be sovereign --gone the government of equal rights and equal responsibilities, lost the jewel of constitutional liberty. Do not look to such lawmakers to restrain corporations within proper limits. Do not look to such lawmakers to equalize the burden of taxation," warned La Follette.

The Wisconsin Capital Times recently commented: "The power struggle now going on in Wisconsin, between Walker and his billionaire donors on one side and public workers, teachers, private workers, farmers and students on the other, is not a new one. Nor is the response to it.

"It has been a good long time since we have seen this sort of exercise of our rights to assemble and petition for the redress of grievances, this sort of mass mobilization of working people, this sort of uprising against corporate power and corrupt politicians.

"But the struggle has roots, in this state's history and its present.

"La Follette died in 1925. But the progressive flame has been kept burning since by institutions and individuals. The Madison-based Progressive magazine, which Robert and Belle La Follette began with a circle of allies in 1909, has been the steady champion of its founding faith, often working in conjunction with this newspaper in Wisconsin but also providing a national and international platform for progressive ideals and struggles.

"Over the past decade, Ed Garvey and a community of volunteers from across the state built the 'Fighting Bob' projects -- Fighting Bob Fest, www.fightingbob.com, the Peoples' Legislature -- which renewed an interest in the La Follette legacy and renewed the tradition of mass gatherings.

"Along with unions and farm groups that have maintained progressive traditions, as well as individuals who have remembered what made Wisconsin great, these institutions kept a consciousness that underpins and strengthens our state's remarkable response to the assault on worker rights and representative government that Walker has launched.

"La Follette and the progressives of another century fought the rail barons and their stalwart Republican pawns. The progressives of this day fight the Koch brothers and their Walker spawn. The conflict is nothing new. And it remains as it has ever been: 'the fight to maintain human liberty, the rights of all people.'"

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Dave Rogers

Dave Rogers is a former editorial writer for the Bay City Times and a widely read,
respected journalist/writer in and around Bay City.
(Contact Dave Via Email at carraroe@aol.com)

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