Butte, America’s Story Episode 273 - Burton K. Wheeler

Welcome to Butte, America’s Story. I’m your host, Dick Gibson.

Burton K. Wheeler came to Butte in 1905, looking for a job as a lawyer. But he got only one offer, at $50 a month, which he turned down, and was waiting to head out on the next train west when he got into a crooked card game in a saloon near the railway station. He regained $30 of his money but missed the train to Spokane, forcing him to stay in Butte. He went back to the lawyer who had offered him $50 a month and took the job.

That’s the popular story, and since Wheeler himself confirmed it in his autobiography entitled Yankee From The West, we’ll take it as gospel.

Wheeler was certainly a Yankee, born in Massachusetts and educated as a lawyer at the University of Michigan. In Butte, that low-paying job and other private work made him successful enough to marry Lulu White in 1907, and they bought a modest home in a working-class neighborhood, on second street in the area that was originally South Butte.

He was elected to the Montana legislature in 1910 and quickly earned a reputation for supporting labor against the mighty Anaconda Copper Mining Company. As United States District Attorney for Montana, he refused to prosecute crimes under Montana’s onerous sedition act, and he resisted the Anaconda Company’s demands to have Frank Little arrested the week before Little, an activist for the radical Industrial Workers of the World, was murdered in Butte in 1917.

He split his time as District Attorney from 1913 to 1918 with his private practice. His federal office was in the Federal Building on north Main street, but his private office was two blocks south in the Hirbour Tower at Main and Broadway.

Wheeler had a failed run for Montana governor in 1920, but in the US Senate election of 1922, he won. He was re-elected to the Senate three more times, serving 24 years and becoming a dominant force for Democrats in the senate. But Wheeler was an isolationist in pre-World War II America until Pearl Harbor, definitely an independent breed of Democrat. He broke with his friend Franklin Roosevelt over the President’s plan to expand and pack the US Supreme Court with his supporters. Some historians speculate that the division created by that disagreement was such that it eliminated Wheeler from consideration as Roosevelt’s running mate in 1944, and therefore from the Presidency on Roosevelt’s death.

Wheeler’s home on Second Street in Butte is one of only 2,500 sites that are independently listed as National Historic Landmarks, out of more than 90,000 listed on the National Register of Historic Places. After his defeat in the Senatorial contest of 1946, Wheeler continued his law practice in Washington D.C. where he died in 1975 at age 92.

As writer Edwin Dobb has said, "Like Concord, Gettysburg, and Wounded Knee, Butte is one of the places America came from." Join us next time for more of Butte, America’s Story.