John K. (Jack) Kyle was born on September 9, 1903, in the town of Lima, Rock County, Wisconsin, and spent his boyhood on a farm located about four miles from Whitewater. After attending elementary and secondary schools, he enrolled at the Whitewater Normal School and the University of Wisconsin in Madison. While Kyle's father was a staunch Stalwart Republican, young Jack, influenced by several liberal professors who taught at the normal school, became a dedicated supporter of Robert M. La Follette, Sr. and a fervent backer and worker in behalf of the Progressive wing of the Republican party, later the Wisconsin Progressive Party. At Madison he joined, and was an officer in, the Madison chapter of the Young Men's Progressive Association from 1924-28, participated actively in the 1924 presidential campaign of the senior La Follette, and managed the 1928 senatorial campaign of Robert M. La Follette, Jr. On the staff of the junior La Follette in both Madison and Washington, D.C. from 1928-1930, Kyle also managed Philip F. La Follette's successful gubernatorial campaign in 1930 and was named one of two secretaries in the governor's office.
Kyle returned to Washington, D.C. to join the staff of Congressman Thomas R. Amlie, elected in a special campaign in 1931; both Senator F. Ryan Duffy and Congressman George Schneider hired Kyle as an aide in the years that followed. Attending law school in Washington, D.C. simultaneously, Kyle passed the Wisconsin bar examination in 1935, after which Governor La Follette appointed him planning counsel. Following passage of Wisconsin's “little Wagner act” in 1937, Kyle held the position of executive secretary of the Wisconsin Labor Relations Board until labor legislation enacted in 1939 by a conservative Republican-Democrat coalition established a new board to investigate labor disputes.
State chairman of the Wisconsin Progressive Party (created in 1934) at various times from the early- to mid-1940's, Jack Kyle remained a La Follette Progressive until the party dissolved at the Portage Convention in 1946.
Engaged in private law practice in Whitewater where he also served as assistant city attorney during the 1940's, Jack Kyle became executive secretary of the Wisconsin Association of Cooperatives in 1948. He held that position for nearly fifteen years, during which he was active in numerous local and national cooperative groups. In 1961, Governor Gaylord Nelson appointed Kyle to a five-year term as regent of what was then the state college system; a year later he was appointed to direct the Wisconsin Department of Securities. Well after retirement, Kyle continued his activity in behalf of cooperative and consumer affairs both in Wisconsin as a director of International Cooperative Training, Inc., and as a consumer watchdog in his retirement community of St. Petersburg, Florida.
