Robert Marion La Follette, a son of farmers, was born on June 14, 1855, in Primrose, Wisconsin. At age twenty he entered the University of Wisconsin, graduating in 1879. In 1880, after briefly attending law school, he was elected district attorney of Dane County, where Madison, the capital of Wisconsin, is located. In 1884 he was elected as the youngest member of U.S. House of Representatives, where he was so orthodox in his Republicanism that he ardently supported the high rates of the McKinley Tariff. The victim of a Democratic landslide in 1890, he resumed his law practice in Madison. An attempted bribe by the Wisconsin senator Philetus Sawyer, who asked La Follette to intervene in a case in which his brother-in-law was judge, radicalized the young attorney, who henceforth became a strong foe of entrenched interests.