Burton K. Wheeler: From a Butte Poker Loss to Blocking FDR's Court Plan

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Burton K. Wheeler, a Massachusetts born lawyer fresh from the University of Michigan, was bound for Seattle in 1905 when he lost everything in a poker game in Butte, Montana, and stayed. Elected to the state legislature in 1910, he took on the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which owned the state's major newspapers. As U.S. attorney for Montana during World War I he refused to use the Sedition Act of 1918 against labor organizers and defended socialist editor William F. Dunn, and pressure forced his resignation in October 1918. He lost the 1920 governor's race, won a U.S. Senate seat as a Democrat in 1922 and led the investigation that forced out Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty. The Justice Department then had Wheeler indicted on fabricated charges, and a Montana jury acquitted him in 10 minutes.

In 1924 he ran for vice president on Robert La Follette's Progressive ticket, drawing nearly five million votes, and that year he also voted for the Immigration Act of 1924. He backed early New Deal relief but led the Senate fight that killed Franklin Roosevelt's 1937 court packing plan. Before Pearl Harbor he was a leading noninterventionist who spoke for the America First Committee, launched a probe of Hollywood studios criticized for antisemitic undertones, and leaked the classified Victory Program. After December 7, 1941 he backed the war, while protesting Japanese American internment and the 1944 sedition trials. He lost the 1946 Democratic primary and argued in his 1962 autobiography, Yankee from the West, that he had never changed.

• His 1920 ticket for governor included an African American candidate and a Blackfoot candidate.
• His 1938 resolution capping AM stations at 50,000 watts is still enforced by the FCC.
• He said Lend-Lease would "plow under every fourth American boy," and Roosevelt called it the most dastardly unpatriotic thing said in public life in his generation.
• Wendell Willkie, representing the studios, likened the Hollywood probe to censorship in Nazi Germany.
• In 1950 he represented Max Lowenthal before the House Un-American Activities Committee.