Suzanne La Follette - New York City

New York City

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 the Chelsea Hotel. Her brother, Chester 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 the Freeman working as a deputy to Albert Jay Nock editing and writing. When the magazine folded, she turned her talents to writing, producing award winning poetry as well as two books on very different subjects. In Concerning 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. In Art 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 the Freeman, won a Guggenheim Fellowship for study of the fine arts, lectured at the Art Students League of New York, and traveled to Mexico as a member of the Dewey Commission. La Follette served as secretary to its chairman, the philosopher John Dewey and wrote the summary of the Commission's findings after conducting investigations in Mexico where Trotsky was in exile (soon after he was murdered by a Russian agent). In the 1940s and during World War II La Follette worked as director of foreign relief programs for the American Federation of Labor, focusing her efforts on keeping communists out of the American labor movement. She maintained her close relationship with Alexander 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, including John Chamberlain and Henry Hazlitt produced a new version of The Freeman. In her final editorial effort she became the founding managing editor of the magazine William Buckley 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 the New 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. 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, recalled William F. Buckley Jr., who knew her in later years."