Suzanne Clara La Follette (June 24, 1893 – April 23, 1983) was an American journalist and author who advocated for libertarian feminism in the first half of the 20th century.
While living in Washington, D.C., with her family, Suzanne worked in her father's Capitol Hill office as well as that of his cousin Senator Robert M. La Follette.
As a young woman still in college, she observed many of the great political and intellectual debates of the time at the home shared by the two LaFollette families.
La Follette wrote the summary of the committee's findings after holding an investigative meeting in Mexico where Trotsky was in exile (and later murdered by an agent of Joseph Stalin).
Many of the committee's members, like La Follette, Carlo Tresca and Dewey, were not Trotskyists, but consisted of anti-Stalinist socialists, progressives and liberals.
[6] It is this magazine which is widely considered to be an important forerunner to the conservative National Review, founded by William F. Buckley Jr., another journal for which she was also an early contributor and managing editor.
"[5] La Follette was born on a ranch in eastern Washington state, the fourth of seven children of a pioneer family that owned large wheat and fruit farms in the rolling hills of the Palouse and along the Snake River.
For much of that period the two LaFollette families lived together in a large home that William La Follette had purchased in Mount Pleasant, Washington, D.C.
Debate and conversation were encouraged at the dinner table and a steady stream politicians, writers, labor leaders, professors and other opinion makers engaged in policy and political arguments late into the evening.
[13] 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).
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 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.
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.