Harvey L. Dueholm, one of the most colorful, forward Wisconsin legislators from 1958-1978, was born in the town of Bone Lake, Polk County, Wisconsin, on January 29, 1910. He was educated at the Bone Lake elementary school and at Luck high school before starting to work full-time on a farm operated by his father, Marius. After his father's death in 1936, Harvey Dueholm began to operate the farm, added another eighty acres in 1937, and made additional purchases up to 1963, by which time the farm's acreage totaled 525. During 1964-74, he disposed of his dairy cattle; by the time of the interview session in 1978 he had given to his four sons all but eighty acres of the land.
Harvey Dueholm grew up in an almost exclusively Danish rural neighborhood. His father, a staunch backer of Robert M. La Follette, Sr. and his sons, himself ran successfully for the Wisconsin Assembly in 1930 and 1932 as a Progressive Republican and in 1934 as a Progressive. Meanwhile, Harvey Dueholm joined the Young Progressives and Progressive Party, where he first became acquainted with such Progressives as Dr. Antoine Nelson, father of Gaylord Nelson. Elected to several local posts beginning in the mid-1940's, Harvey Dueholm while agreeing with Robert M. La Follette's decision to return to the Republican party found himself in the Democratic party by 1954. Running unsuccessfully for the state assembly as a Democrat in 1956, Dueholm reversed the result in 1958 and for the next twenty years was one of the assembly's most consistent liberals. At a time when rural representation in both houses of the legislature had begun to shrink, Dueholm's voice represented his largely rural constituents and carried on a long tradition in that northwestern Wisconsin area of supporting the ideology of La Follette Progressivism.
