Burton K. Wheeler - Political Career

Political Career

He became a Montana state legislator in 1910 where he gained a reputation as a champion of labor against the Anaconda Copper Mining Company which dominated the state. He then served as a United States Attorney, most famously refusing to hand down a single sedition indictment during World War I, especially significant as Montana was a large stronghold of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). In 1920 he ran for Governor of Montana as a candidate of the Non-Partisan League. The ticket included a multi-racial set of candidates, unusual for 1920, including an African-American and a Blackfoot Indian. Wheeler was defeated by Republican former U.S. Senator Joseph M. Dixon, but ran for U.S. Senator two years later.

Wheeler won election to the United States Senate from Montana in 1922 with 55% of the vote over Republican Congressman Carl W. Riddick and served four terms, being reelected in the 1928, 1934 and 1940 elections. He broke with the Democratic Party in 1924 to run for Vice President of the United States on the Progressive Party ticket led by Robert La Follette, Sr. He returned to the Democratic Party after the election, which was not successful for the Progressives or the Democrats. Wheeler supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt's election, and many of his New Deal policies, but broke with him over his opposition to the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, and also opposed much of Roosevelt's foreign policy before World War II.

In 1930, Wheeler gained national attention when he successfully campaigned for the reelection to the US Senate of his friend and Democratic colleague Thomas Gore, the colorful "Blind Cowboy" of Oklahoma. Wheeler is often credited for steering public opinion in Gore's favor with a series of speeches in which, with characteristic hyperbole, he repeatedly implied that he would personally play the part of the Blind Cowboy's horse on his ride to Washington.

In the 1940 presidential election, there was a large movement to "Draft Wheeler" into the presidential race, possibly as a third party candidate, led primarily by John L. Lewis.