Lawrence C. Whittet was born on June 16, 1871, in Albion, Wisconsin of Scottish and English parentage. He was educated in Edgerton, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1893. Successful in his family's lumber, coal and grain business in Edgerton, Whittet began his long public career by serving on the Rock County Board of Supervisors from 1897 to 1901. For the next five years he was postmaster of Edgerton. Elected, as a Republican, to the State Assembly in 1908, he was defeated in 1911, and reelected in 1914. From 1915 to 1917 he served as speaker of the Assembly.
Whittet served as Governor Philipp's executive secretary from 1915 to 1921 and was considered to be Philipp's closest friend. He was executive secretary of the Milwaukee Association of Commerce from 1923 to 1925, while Philipp was president. In Milwaukee, he was president of the Mi Lola Cigar Company and assistant to the president of the Union Refrigerator Transit Company, both controlled by the family of Emanuel Philipp; and after the Governor's death in 1925 he managed the estate.
In the 1930s, Lawrence C. Whittet was administrator of the Wisconsin Recovery Act, and was then administrator for the National Recovery Act in Wisconsin. He was made administrator of the Fair Trade Practices Commission in 1933, and commissioner in 1935. Through the nineteen forties he served as supervisor of the Oil Inspection Division.
A member of the Masonic Order, the Knights of Pythias, and Delta Upsilon (UW), Whittet died on June 15, 1954. He was married to Katherine Hain in 1895 and had one son, James Lowell Whittet, born in 1896.
