Just 36 days after winning the governorship, this week in 1942 death cruelly intervened and denied the Wisconsin Progressive Party one of its greatest electoral achievements in the party’s twelve-year history.

While Minnesota’s neighboring Farmer-Labor Party went out with barely a whimper and most of the country’s other minor parties fared poorly at the ballot box that autumn, the most spectacular — and ultimately tragic — achievement by a third-party candidate in the 1942 mid-term elections occurred in Wisconsin’s three-way gubernatorial campaign where 49-year-old former attorney general Orland S.… Read more ...