Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 61, number 1, autumn, 1977

              Irvine L. Lenroot and the Republican Vice-Presidential Nomination of 1920
By Herbert F. Margulies
HE game of "might have been" or "what if" gives to history some of its joy and usefulness. Most might-have- beens, of course, are not bona fide; but some meet the two essential tests: plausibility and significance. A legitimate might-have-been is an event that could very easily have happened; it does not depend upon a chain of premises one or more of which is itself unlikely to have occurred. And to be worthy of consideration, the plausible might-have-been must be of the sort that, had it in fact occurred, could con¬ ceivably have altered the course of history in some important way. (What if George Wash¬ ington had been slain at Braddock's Defeat? What if Lee had won the battle of Gettys¬ burg?)
One of the more interesting might-have beens in American political history occurred at the Republican convention in 1920, when, as historians have told us, the delegates ig¬ nored the advice of the supposed party lead¬ ers, took matters into their own hands, and nominated for Vice-President Catvin Coo¬ lidge, the governor of Massachusetts, instead of Senator Irvine L. Lenroot of Wisconsin. Coolidge, of course, went on to the Presiden¬ cy when Warren G. Harding died in 1923, and won election in his own right in 1924. Yet things might have turned out quite differently.
Irvine Lenroot was born in 1869 in Superior, Wisconsin, the son of pioneer Swedish-Ameri¬ can parents. He became a leading figure in the state's progressive  movement  during the
governorship of Robert M. La Follette, in the period 1901 through 1905. Despite his rela¬ tive youth and inexperience, Lenroot quick¬ ly displayed energy, ability, and integrity dur¬ ing the legislative session of 1901, gained La Follette's confidence, and became Speaker of the Assembly in 1903 and 1905. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1908, Lenroot soon emerged as a leader among the Republican insurgents while continuing to serve as political lieutenant to La Follette. But in 1912 a serious breach occurred between the two: Lenroot tried to promote co-opera¬ tion between La Follette and Theodore Roose¬ velt in the quest for the Republican presiden¬ tial nomination, while La Follette came to regard Roosevelt as a betrayer of himself and the progressive movement.
Lenroot and La Follette patched up their quarrel, but their relations were never again close. The two broke decisively in 1917 over the war and such war measures as the draft. In a special election in the spring of 1918, with both stalwart and progressive support, Lenroot won nomination for the Senate on the theme of "loyalty" against a La Follette- backed candidate and went on to win the elec¬ tion. The new alignment in Wisconsin poli¬ tics  persisted   into   the   future.^
Through his ten years in the House and in his first years in the Senate, Lenroot man-
' Herbert F. Margulies, The Decline of the Progres¬ sive Movement in Wisconsin, 1890-1920 (Madison, 1968),  193-282.
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