Burton K. Wheeler:

Montana’s Maverick — A Life in Law, Labor, and Lone-Ranger Politics

There are lives that fit neatly into the ledger of statecraft, their margins ruled and their lines orderly; and then there is the life of Burton Kendall Wheeler — Yankee-born, Montana-made — a man whose public career read like a frontier novel: episodic, combustible, and stubbornly independent. Wheeler strode into Montana politics in the era when the copper barons and the railroads wrote more of the state’s story than the legislators in Helena, and he spent a long career trying to redraw those margins. His story is essential to any telling of twentieth-century Montana because it intersects with labor struggle, progressive reform, anticompetitive power, and the long American reckoning over intervention abroad. (For a concise official summary of his life and service in the Senate, see the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.) 

Wheeler arrived in Montana in the first decade of the 1900s after a youthful misadventure turned him inland rather than west to Seattle. He settled in Butte, the raw, anxious mining city that burned with union energy and shaped his political sensibility. There, as a lawyer and later as the U.S. Attorney for Montana (1913–1918), he found himself on the side of labor and civil liberties at a moment when those positions invited suspicion. Wheeler’s refusal to zealously enforce the Sedition Act during World War I — and his later defense of socialist journalist William F. Dunne — marked him as a defender of speech and a foe of heavy-handed prosecution; it also cost him political capital amid wartime fervor. This Arkansas-born, New England-bred attorney adapted a rugged Montana posture toward concentrated wealth and political machine power, and that posture would define his public work. 

The young senator’s national prominence coalesced in the drama of the 1920s: the Harding administration scandals. As a freshman senator elected in 1922, Wheeler helped spearhead investigations that exposed the corruption swirling around the Teapot Dome leases and the Justice Department more broadly. In a Washington often amused by the theater of scandal, Wheeler pressed a prosecutorial seriousness that won him admirers and enemies in equal measure. The Senate’s investigations of 1923–1924 were not mere partisan theater; they helped define the modern public expectation that government should be accountable for malfeasance. Wheeler’s role in bringing the scandal into the light — even as the Senate’s procedural battles tested constitutional boundaries — fixed his reputation as a fighter who would take on what he saw as entrenched, often private, power. (For the Senate’s institutional recounting of the Teapot Dome era and the related investigations, consult the Senate Historical Office.) 

And yet Wheeler was no doctrinaire partisan. In 1924 he cast a daring vote with his feet, abandoning the Democratic ticket to run as Robert M. La Follette’s vice-presidential running mate on the Progressive ticket. That year’s Progressive campaign — a high-water mark of farm, labor, and populist ferment — moved beyond party loyalty and onto the terrain of principle. Wheeler’s alliance with La Follette reflected a more Atlantic, prairie-populist strain of reform: skeptical of corporate power, enthusiastic about union rights, and impatient with the conservatism of the national parties. The La Follette-Wheeler ticket carried the spirit — if not the electoral success — of a western radicalism that sought to correct national policies from the vantage of the region’s miners and farmers. 

Wheeler’s train of thought was never easily categorized. In the early New Deal he was a fervent supporter of economic relief and regulatory effort; his votes and his rhetoric in the early 1930s reflect a senator who believed government could and should be a tool for social justice. But by the later 1930s a constitutional conservatism crept into his thinking: he opposed FDR’s court-packing plan in 1937, fearing institutional overreach even as he had embraced other New Deal measures. That shift, from activist to cautious guardian of constitutional balance, illustrates the complexity of a politician whose guiding principle was less ideology than a rough-hewn sense of institutional propriety and of Montana’s material interests. His chairmanship of the Senate subcommittee that investigated railroads and holding companies in the late 1930s and early 1940s — work that scrutinized monopolistic practices that hurt western shippers and consumers — shows how consistently he pursued economic checks on concentrated corporate power. 

By temperament and conviction, Wheeler also became a leading voice of non-interventionism in the fraught years before the United States entered World War II. From 1938 through 1941 he aligned with a broad isolationist impulse — one grounded, in part, in the memories of the Great War’s costs and in a Midwestern and Western skepticism toward entanglements grown in the eastern foreign-policy establishment. Wheeler’s rhetoric and committee work attracted both supporters who admired his restraint and scorn from those who believed opposition to intervention smacked of appeasement. After Pearl Harbor, of course, the logic of national survival erased many debates, and Wheeler’s posture toward isolationism receded into the portrait of a principled but controversial senator. His wartime and prewar activity remains among the most contested aspects of his legacy. 

All through his Senate career — twenty-four years, from 1923 to 1947 — Wheeler kept returning to Montana’s specific needs. He was a tireless advocate for western resource interests, railroad regulation favorable to small shippers and rural communities, and policies that protected Montana’s miners and farmers from predatory corporate practices. The Wheeler Resolution of 1938 (Senate Resolution 294), which advocated limits on AM radio station power to preserve fair competition, is a curious but telling example: it reveals a senator attentive to technological and economic shifts and to the ways these shifts could centralize influence and drown out smaller voices. Such pieces of legislation and inquiry mattered less for ideological purity than for safeguarding the modest political space within which Montana communities had a voice. 

Wheeler’s personal character — stubborn, sardonic, warmly nostalgic for the rough justice of his Montana years — emerges with unusual clarity in his own memoir, Yankee from the West (1962). Read alongside archival holdings of his speeches and correspondence (collected in the Burton K. Wheeler Papers), the autobiography helps us hear the man himself: the cadence of his humor, the sharpness of his critiques, and the sorrow he sometimes expressed at political compromise. These papers — now indexed and available through several university archives — remain indispensable to anyone seeking the contours of Wheeler’s thought: they contain drafts, campaign material, and a living record of a senator who both loved his state and loved to pick fights for causes he believed right. 

If Wheeler’s career reads like a romantic western at times, his fall from political office was starkly mundane. In the 1946 Democratic primary he was defeated — a casualty not merely of age or the changing political winds but of a party and an electorate reshaped by war and by mounting criticism of his prewar positions. Scholars have probed why a senator once so secure in his corner of the world should be unseated; the results are nuanced: they point to shifting party coalitions, the national unpopularity of some of his stances, and the inexorable generational turnover in politics. The University of Montana’s theses and later biographies, especially Marc C. Johnson’s modern scholarly biography Political Hell-Raiser, provide deep archival and interpretive treatments of Wheeler’s strengths and contradictions. Johnson’s work, in particular, argues that Wheeler’s life cannot be read as a simple narrative of betrayal or failure: rather, it is the story of a politician who sought to marry populist defense of labor with an abiding suspicion of imperial and corporate overreach. 

What, then, is Wheeler’s contribution to Montana history? In the simplest terms, he insisted that Montana mattered — not merely as a resource hinterland but as a political community with rights, memory, and dignity. He used the instruments of law and the podiums of the Senate to contest the extraordinary influence of the Anaconda Copper Company and other regional monopolies. He lent voice and legal muscle to labor, to small producers, and to the principle that government must sometimes check private power. In doing so, he helped create the political vocabulary that later Montana reformers would use: independence, suspicion of concentrated capital, and a devotion to civil liberties even in anxious times. The Wheeler Center for Public Policy and the preservation of his Butte home as a landmark are civic signals that Montana continues to reckon with and honor that legacy. 

Historians will argue about Wheeler’s isolationism, his occasional flirtations with reactionary policy (his record includes votes that modern readers find troubling), and the limits of his reformism. But to reduce him to caricature is to miss how he captures a transitional era in American politics — when progressive energies from the frontier pressed against the consolidation of corporate America, when the once-clear lines between national and regional interest blurred, and when the politics of the West offered an alternative language to the coasts. Wheeler’s life is, in short, a useful mirror: it shows both the democratic instincts and the perils of a democracy buffeted by wealth, war, and technological change. 

To walk the arc of Burton K. Wheeler’s career is to follow a man who loved Montana with a fierce, sometimes quarrelsome devotion. It is to read a public servant who prized civil liberties, who loved the rough commons of the West more than the gilded salons of the East, and who believed — even when the world disagreed — that modest communities should stand equal before power. For historians of Montana and of the American West, Wheeler remains both a subject and a challenge: how to reconcile a life of principled opposition with moments of error, and how to use that life to illuminate the political and moral questions that still haunt the region. His was not a quiet legacy. It was, like Montana itself, large, raw, and unforgettable. 

Works Cited

Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. Wheeler, Burton Kendall. Biographical Directory Online, United States Congress, https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/w000330. Accessed 8 Dec. 2025. 

Johnson, Marc C. Political Hell-Raiser: The Life and Times of Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana. University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. (See University of Oklahoma Press page.) 

Senate Historical Office. “One Hundred Years Since Teapot Dome.” Senate Stories, U.S. Senate, 1 July 2024, https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/senate-stories/one-hundred-years-since-teapot-dome.htm. Accessed 8 Dec. 2025. 

“Burton Kendall Wheeler Papers, 1910–1972.” Archives West, Orbis Cascade Alliance, https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv96449. Accessed 8 Dec. 2025. 

Wheeler Center for Public Policy. “About the Burton K. Wheeler Center for Public Policy.” WheelerCenter.org, https://www.wheelercenter.org/who-we-are/about-the-center/. Accessed 8 Dec. 2025. 

Wheeler, Burton K., and Paul F. Healy. Yankee from the West: The Candid, Turbulent Life Story of the Yankee-born U.S. Senator from Montana. Doubleday & Co., 1962. (Full text available online.) 

Washington Post. “The Indictment and Trial of Sen. Wheeler.” Opinion, 23 Apr. 1993, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1993/04/23/the-indictment-and-trial-of-sen-wheeler/0291e2af-9aa7-4914-a279-8956a8743542/. Accessed 8 Dec. 2025.