University Place

Stories from the Capitol: People and Politics

– Today we are pleased to introduce Michael Edmonds as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum’s History Sandwiched In lecture series. Michael Edmonds is the Director of Programs and Outreach at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and the author two award winning books from the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, “Out of the North Woods: The Many Lives of Paul Bunyan,” and “Risking Everything: A Freedom Summer Reader.” Between 2006 and 2015 he wrote more than 500 Odd Wisconsin sketches for a syndicated weekly newspaper column and he co-wrote “Warriors, Saints, and Scoundrels: Brief Portraits of Real People Who Shaped Wisconsin,” based on those sketches. He’s also written articles for the Wisconsin Magazine of History and other journals. Here today to discuss a century of people and politics at the Wisconsin State Capitol, please join me in welcoming Michael Edmonds. (applause)

– Thank you Katie. How many of you were here two weeks ago for the other Capitol talk? Okay good, I was hoping it would be a lot of new people. What I’ll do today is pick up where I left off there but talk about the last century, and not about the building. A lot’s known about the building. More about the people who work in it and the ideas that passed through it. I’ll read from time to time from the book. And the book you should know is published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. But the Historical Society is much more than a press. It’s much more than a museum. We have historic sites. We have one of the largest archives in the country. Archeologists including Underwater Archeologists. Our library is pictured over there. We put traveling exhibits and other programs like today’s, so all around the state over 400 of them every year. We work with teachers and local historical societies. We try to be everywhere around the state, enriching people’s lives. We do this because we think the past matters.

Our mission is to enrich and transform people by sharing a knowledge of the past. And we think history can do that several ways. First of all it shows us who we are. A sentiment that I find really well expressed in The Grapes of Wrath when the family can’t pack everything in their Oklahoma farm and bring it to California. And they have to leave heirlooms behind. And one of the characters says how will we know it’s us without our past. Well how would you know it was you without your memories of your grandparents, and their memories that they passed down. Second reason it’s important is because it helps us understand others. We live in bubbles, we all do it. How many people do you know who aren’t educated like you are, who don’t live in a neighborhood like your neighborhood. Well history opens those doors and punctures those bubbles so we can learn about people different from ourselves. And finally we do it ’cause history inspires us.

A fact that was driven home a couple years ago when a middle school student who had been looking at one of our traveling civil rights exhibits turned to her teacher and said, I never knew my grandmother had to be so brave. When I heard that I thought, “Yes, yes this is what it is about.” Because she knows more about her grandmother and she knows she can be brave, too. Well enough stage setting. We are here today to talk about the Capitol. This is the architect’s elevation view of the Capitol. The one that’s across the street. Can anybody pick out something that’s not there? What’s wrong with this image?
– (someone speaking off mic)
– The what?
– (someone speaking off mic)

– These guys, yeah, yeah those did not make it into the final version of the Capitol. And that’s by George Post, the architect of the Capitol. The Capitol that was on the grounds there prior to this burned down in 1904. An this drawing was made in 1906. It took another decade for the Capitol to be built, for that building to be erected on the spot. And during that decade, during most of those years, there was a great battle going on, under the dome, even though the dome wasn’t there yet. There was a great battle going on in Wisconsin politics between people who were calling themselves progressives and people who were calling themselves stalwarts. And I wanna start out by talking a little bit about that today. The name most associated with progressives is of course La Follette, held up there like some kind of an icon in this bit of his own campaign literature. I think from 1901. From the Civil War until the 1890’s Wisconsin was run almost like a one party state, like the Soviet Union. There were Republicans, and there were a few little democrats. But the democrats had been the party of the South during the Civil War and no one could advance in Wisconsin life in the second half of the century without being a Republican.

And the channel that funneled people into the party was the veteran’s organization, the Grand Army of the Republic. As happens over the decades that establishment became very, very corrupt. I’ll give you just two examples. And be one of La Follette’s reforms here. One was that bribery just outright buying of votes was rampant and taken as a fact of life. Like today you might think in a third world country where there is no democracy. And the second was that, although people went to elections and voted, the names on the ballot were chosen privately by the people at the tops of the parties. There were no primary elections. So La Follette felt that both those things and many others contradicted the spirit of the state constitution and the federal constitution. And he set about fighting back against the wing of the Republican party that called itself stalwarts. You can see his supporters in here are the wage earners, I’m too close to read it. The young men, there were farmers, good democrats, progressive Republicans.

Wisconsin voters had technically never chosen their top elected officials. They simply sanctioned whomever the party bosses put on the ballot. “Whenever there was a close contest in a nominating convention we called one senator. Those who were willing to bribe delegates seldom failed to find some who were willing to be bribed. Wisconsin was a one-party state where candidates were named in secret by a handful of men who controlled the government, the economy and the media. In 1897 La Follette called for direct primary elections to replace this corrupt system. For years he was thwarted by others who opposed it. Fearing that the old guard would undermine the proposal at the next state republican convention he hired UW football players to work security and they made sure that no one get into the nominating convention without proper credentials. Reform carried the day. And in the 1904 November referendum voters endorsed the change from secret caucuses to direct primaries. But when the first one was held two years later in 1906. La Follette got a surprise. He had hand-picked Senator Irvine Lenroot to succeed him as governor. And he had aligned the progressive leaders behind him. But the voters chose incumbent governor James Davidson to be the republican instead.”

So the system worked and even La Follette couldn’t control it. Now we associate the name La Follette with progressivism because he’s best known. But in fact many of the reforms that were carried out during the progressive era were actually enacted when Francis McGovern was governor slightly later. I’ll give you a quick summary of those. The classic progressive laws provided for direct primaries, safer factories, worker’s compensation, regulation of big corporations. They limited the working hours for women and children, set up state parks, and set up environmental conservation. They funded public libraries, public health services, and formed the University of Wisconsin-Extension. And these were all bills, and he would have done much more if he could’ve got them through the Capitol, that McGovern championed and pushed through. So you can think of the progressive movement as really two phases in Wisconsin. There’s La Follette who’s sort of anti-corruption and turned the system upside down. And then the people who came after him as governors who pushed through that progressive agenda. Behind it all was this guy here, Charles McCarthy. The progressive Republicans thought that one way to make government serve the people was to have professionals draft the legislation.

Up until then lobbyists or legislators themselves, who were not necessarily well-informed, or well-educated would draft bills and vote on them. But the progressive idea was that there should be something called the Legislative Reference Bureau. How many of you have interacted with them over the years? There still here. Just a few, most of you, alright good. And they hired this fellow Charles McCarthy to run it. McCarthy’s idea was that the ill equipped lawmakers should have ready access to reliable facts and university-trained experts. He intended that the people of Wisconsin should be governed by laws drafted in their interest through a well-informed, carefully reasoned and nonpartisan process. This became known as the Wisconsin Idea after McCarthy published a book with that title in 1912. Not everyone agreed with these ideas, of course. Some people thought they went too far in restricting the freedom of business owners, or making government too big. In 1915 Conservative Governor Emanuel Philipp introduced legislation to shut down the LRB which he considered a progressive bill factory.

With tongue firmly planted in cheek, McCarthy testified at the bills committee hearing the bills for the many from his office, “as drawn was defective, but that his drafting bureau would gladly put it into proper shape.” (laughter) He also offered to resign saying he would, “Enjoy being outside the Capitol throwing bricks through the windows by becoming a lobbyist.” The bill went nowhere. And the Legislative Reference Bureau not only exists today as a central part of our government, but there’s one in every state. Well during the great battle between the stalwart Republicans and the progressive Republicans the building was going up. Here’s the statue on top forward going up in 1914. Here’s the grounds. The plans for the grounds laid out. And the building was finally finished in the summer of 1917. This view I think is from what is now Martin Luther King Drive, anybody know downtown history better than I do? This is the old post office. So I think we’re looking south to north at the building as it’s done. But no grand opening celebration was held.

No ceremonial observance was conducted. Largely because the nation had just entered world war one and people were very concerned about sending their sons and husbands off to die in trenches in France. These are volunteers from Madison. This is just at the foot of the Capitol. You recognize the buildings there on Blair Street, Blount Street, I’m so bad at this. Anyway 3,000 volunteers heading off to France in May of 1918. The Society has just published a new book about it which came from the printer last week, and I see Katie you guys have got copies out there already, only three or four. “The Great War Comes to Wisconsin,” by Rick Pifer. Now the Great War was controversial in Wisconsin. And the controversy was frightening to some people. The night before the US declared war on the Germans President Wilson told a friend, “Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. He warned that under such circumstances, conformity would be the only virtue. And every man who refused to conform would have to pay the penalty.”

And that certainly happened in Wisconsin. And think about it, Wisconsin had hundreds of thousands of German immigrants. Or people whose parents had been German immigrants. They had no desire to make war against their cousins back home. And some of them objected to the war for other reasons like La Follette who was such a popular hero up to this time thought that the only reason there was war was because capitalist arms manufacturers were going to profit from it. And he was censured under the state house and in Washington for making that statement. Everything German became suspect. In Wausau– Sorry one more slide here. In Wausau the National German American Bank changed its name to the American National Bank. La Crosse banned the teaching of German in its schools. Restaurants renames sauerkraut liberty cabbage. And wieners became hot dogs. La Follette’s political career was nearly ruined by attacks from his pro war rivals. It was so bad that federal officials called Wisconsin the traitor state. And this map, sedition map, of where all of these Germans, German descendants, who might be suspect were living was issued at that time. So until the US entered the war in 1917, Wisconsin was split. But within a very short time, just a few months anti-German, super-patriot fever was rampant across the state. So much so that people who were thought to lean to the other side were tarred and feathered, or tortured.

In fact more than in the end, more than 122,000 soldiers from all around Wisconsin joined up, and nearly 4,000 lost their lives fighting for their country. But Wilson was right, at least in Wisconsin. Now during the war, women leaped into action by planting war gardens, knitting socks, raising money, selling liberty bonds, and becoming nurses. Here’s two Wisconsin nurses on the left. More than 400 Wisconsin nurses served overseas. And as soon as the war ended, they mobilized against a bigger enemy, the Spanish flu which killed many more Americans than the war did. Thanks in part to women’s successful patriotic and medical work in 1917, 1918 the Senate, the US Senate approved a women’s suffrage amendment on June 4th, 1919. It had been a long time coming. Women in Wisconsin had been arguing for the vote since 1855. And at times they were given limited suffrage. They could vote in local school board elections and so forth. But every time that the issue of female suffrage came onto the ballot or in referendum before the public, it was defeated again, and again, and again.

And only women’s organizing efforts and contributions during World War One tipped the scales so that male politicians took them seriously. Those organizing efforts on the home front had also given women the skills to marshal thousands of people in support of a cause. And so they were in support of the right to vote. Soon after the 19th amendment passed in 1920 Wisconsin went even further. Here’s progressive republican governor John James Blaine. Was that his first name? Sorry, the governor Blaine. Being congratulated by women’s rights activists because the state had just passed the nation’s first equal rights law. John Blaine. His wife, first lady Anna Blaine was a good friend of Belle La Follette and presumably both women encouraged its inclusion in the Republican Party Platform.

This bill called for equal pay for equal service regardless of sex, and demanded that the legislature should revise our laws to the end that in all matters men and women should be on a basis of equality. The bill was introduced in 1921 and its text said, “The same rights and privileges under the law as men, women should have the same rights and privileges under the law as men in the exercise of suffrage, freedom of contract, choice of residence, jury service, holding office, holding in conveying property, care and custody of children, and in all other respects.” And we take all of this for granted today. But less than 100 years ago it was– You could not take it for granted. Even this frightened some legislators. One assemblyman argued “this bill will result in coarsening the fiber of woman. It will take her out of her proper sphere.” Another complained, “Why, a woman could establish her residence separate and apart from her husband, and continue to live away from her forever.” (laughter) Well, those objections carried no weight in the end. Wisconsin became the only state, the first state to pass an equal rights amendment, and it remains today the only state to have, to guarantee women equal rights with men. Soon after it passed women began running for state office.

The first female legislators at the Capitol were these three women all from rural Wisconsin. No Madison, nor Milwaukee liberals here. Mildred Barber of Marathon County, Helen Brooks of Waushara County, and Helen Thompson of Price County. Two of the three were school teachers. Barbara recalled later, “The men didn’t resent us too much.” Although at that time when Wisconsin was trying to avoid complying with Prohibition, some of the men disapproved of their support for the Women’s Christian Temperancy. Since that time there have always been women under the Capitol dome as lawmakers. Most of the time there was one, or two. It’s only after the 1970’s that we begin to get anything like proportional representation by gender, which of course, we’re not even close to, yet. St. Peter, who’s actually a man named William Henwood, who was the first Capitol policeman so to speak. He was the keeper of the keys at the Capitol. By the 1920’s when that picture of the women legislators was taken, 600 people worked in the Capitol every day, and most of them were not lawmakers. Legislators came to Madison for only a few months out of each year to sit in official sessions.

The rest of the time civil servants hurried around the immense building trying to meet the needs of constituents. Custodian William Henwood literally held the key to their success or failure. The article here says, “The Wisconsin Capitol is said to have the finest and at the same time the most intricate set of locks of any public building in America. Each wing, office, desk, and mailbox had its own unique lock. At first he kept his keys on a series of rings but he later said, I drew some plans and showed the governor how I could do the job much better and he let me have a vault. This was a six foot square safe, and he had the only key to it. He told the press in 1923, that while most Capitol workers appreciated how hard his job was, one group was particularly difficult to get along with. ‘I have more trouble with the state senators than with anyone else when it comes lost keys’, he said. ‘I’m always making a new set of keys for some senator to replace one that he has lost.'”

There are many people working at the Capitol during those years besides legislators and names that you know. This is one of my favorites, and one of the best loved during his time. This is Sam Pierce. Have any of you run into Sam Pierce before? One or two, nobody went… (trails off) His parents were slaves, then after the Civil War went to Louisiana where they lived until the 1870’s when Jim Crow legislation shut down freedom again for most African American residents. As a teenager Sam became a Pullman Porter. Who knows what Pullman Porters were, does everybody? All right you know, a lot of people. I talk to young people too, and it’s a lot of things like that they don’t get. He became a Pullman Porter, and eventually landed a job on the Chicago to Twin Cities run which took him through Minneapolis and Madison. And so he got to know a lot of the political leaders and business leaders in Wisconsin.

He moved to Madison in 1905 with his mother. They lived on Willie Street. Or that neighborhood. And the governor asked him if he would be his appointment secretary, if he would be sort of the visible front of the governor. So here he is in the governor’s, outside the governor’s office in the 1920’s. 1922 Governor John Blaine asked if Pierce would serve as a receptionist. He was remembered by one acquaintance as, “Definitely an optimist, and a philosopher who made the best of things. His smile was contagious. His courtesy and diplomacy unfailing.” Standing more than six feet tall, and always dressed impeccably in a blue suit Pierce gently defended the executive office from intruders. His main job was to keep lobbyists, and reporters, and other people away from the governor. One visitor wrote that “Sam greeted every caller with a warm, cheery smile, and never failing observation that it was a nice day. It mattered not one bit that it might be a dreary day, cloudy, and slushy, for to Sam it was always a nice day. He had a genius for avoiding offense,” a visiting US official remarked. “I called there three times, went in the front door, Sam and I talked, and as we were talking we moved about. Sooner or later I found myself going out the entrance. He wasn’t trying to get me into the governor’s office. He was quietly oozing me out of the place.” (laughter)

Pierce fulfilled the expectations of white dignitaries about how a black servant should behave. In his flawless etiquette and his Southern charm always reassured them. “A gentle pat,” recalled a Capitol reporter, “a whisk of his hand at an imaginary fleck of dust, sent many of them away in a congenial mode even if they had failed to see the governor.” A few blocks away, on the east side, just east of the Capitol in Madison’s African American neighborhood, Pierce, “was really a power to himself in his community. He was unofficially a judge and arbiter for his people and worked ceaselessly to prevent disputes.” He fought against the defacto segregation in public accommodations and housing. And he lobbied for a community center to be built for adult education classes. When he died in 1936, five governors and press, all over the state, wrote tributes to him. Because for most of two decades he had been the public face of the governor.

Well at the end of the ’20s of course the stock market crashed and the Depression came to Wisconsin. This picture is of a Madison family forced to live in a garage. They were not eligible for any kind of help however. Any kind of relief. Factories closed, wages dropped, banks failed, farm values shrank, and unemployment swelled. So many Wisconsin banks failed that in March 1933 the governor closed them all for two weeks to calm the volatile atmosphere. That same spring, dairy farmers in the Fox River valley went on strike withholding their milk closing down cheese factories and barricading roads in a vain attempt to raise market prices. Everybody thought they knew who was at fault and what should be done. In Milwaukee strikes increased seven fold. Violence broke out in rural areas as farmers sought to halt the delivery of milk. People lost their jobs all over the state. And without any temporary help from the government the unemployed were forced to fend for themselves.

That is until Wisconsin officials crafted the country’s first unemployment compensation law. It had been proposed by progressives back in the time of the first world war, but no one had wanted to pay for it. When things became so bad during the 1930’s however, the governor, Phil La Follette, while fighting for his fund, forged a compromise. Communist agitators and corporate bankers, Milwaukee socialists and Fox Valley mill owners, rural farmers, and urban unions, progressives, and Republicans all gradually lined up behind the same proposal. And Wisconsin’s Unemployment Compensation Act was passed at the end of January 1932. This is the first check, somebody living at 824 East Dayton Street. Anybody live in that neighborhood? 824 East Dayton? What, just eight blocks east of here. And the check was for $15.00. Which of course, went further in 1932 than it does today, but nevertheless. This was not, it’s not a handout. It was enough to keep you from dying. During those years, the 20s and 30s, the most popular politician in this country, I mean in this state, was Solomon Levitan. Does anybody know Stu Levitan? Some of you do probably. I don’t know what his relationship is. What’s this mean?
(someone speaking off mic)
Yeah, okay, it’s gotta be at least great grandfather.
(someone speaking off mic)

Great grandfather, or maybe more distantly related. He was born into a poor Jewish family in east Prussia in 1862. And when he rescued his employer’s family from an anti-semitic mob in 1880 his boss offered to either pay for a university education or a ticket to America and he took the ticket. He became an intenerate peddler carrying kitchen goods on his back and walked most of the way to Wisconsin where for years he found loyal customers in the German and Swiss areas of Dane and Gree Into 1905 when he moved to Madison to take over the Commercial National Bank, it’s directors were reluctant to name a Jew as president of the bank. Levitan showed him his stock certificates and pointed out, I own the bank. And that settled it. (laughter)

Despite the hostile environment, Wisconsin in the 1920s contained very few and very small Jewish communities. And the racist, anti immigrant Ku Klux Klan had as many as 75,000 members in the state. Despite the hostile environment, Levitan threw himself into electoral politics. “When I moved to Madison,” he said later, “La Follette and I were neighbors. He always said that people were not getting fair play and something should be done to change things.” Levitan discovered that his foreign accent, his broken English, and his stereotypical manners could be an asset if he played them to his advantage. At one debate an opponent for state treasurer made a clearly anti-semitic speech, stressing the stinginess of Jews. Levitan responded that he tended to agree. “Elect me, a stingy man as your state treasurer, and I won’t squander your money.”

He won and served as state treasurer for nearly all of the 1920s and 30s. Sometimes garnering more votes than the governor. When we think of the 1930s as a period when government expanded in size. And one of the thing officials under the Capitol dome decided they should do was control what happened to confiscated fish and game when counties in the countryside violated conservation laws. Up until that time local officials had been able to dispose of it on their own. And during the Depression, you know, they were eating it, or they were selling it, and there was great potential for abuse. So in 1932, a rule was passed at the Capitol that held wardens accountable for the proper disposal of confiscated game. And a provision was inserted that said, “All fish and game confiscated had to be sent to the Capitol.”

A sturgeon was soon deposited unpreserved in a basement storage room, (laughter) next to an elevator shaft that rose up beside the Supreme Court. A large piece of venison soon joined it. As bacteria began to work their magic unintended consequences of the new regulation began to waft into powerful noses. Ever dignified, members of the Supreme Court initially tried to ignore the stench. But as odors intensified the Justices decided that laws about abating a public nuisance trumped those about confiscated game. Elevator operators were less judicial. “If it had been a private institution,” one of them told the press, “there would have been 96 inspectors in here.” But Capitol custodian Tony Pickards was instructed to remove the nuisance. This was a risky decision because state government had almost shut down two years before when he tried to skin a skunk on the Capitol grounds. “I want it distinctly understood,” he argued, “that I was not to blame then. The skunk had been run over by an automobile. I merely stuck a knife into it.” He had better luck with the rotting sturgeon ad did get the smell and the source of it out of the Capitol.

On April Fool’s Day 1933 citizens around the state, reading the State Journal, woke up to find this headline on their doorstep. (laughter) Explosions blows dome off state Capitol. Their shock quickly turned to laughter as they read on, officials say legislature generated too much hot air. The article, which is not in the picture here, “Wisconsin’s beautiful eight-million-dollar Capitol building was in ruins today following a series of mysterious explosions which blasted the majestic dome from its base and sent it crashing through the roof of the east wing. At 7:30 the first mighty explosion occurred rocking the dome and shattering windows throughout the city. This was followed immediately by two lessor blasts. Authorities were considering the possibility that large amounts of gas generated through many weeks of verbose debate in the senate and assembly had in some way been ignited causing the blast.” It just shows that even during the depths of the depression people maintained a sense of humor. Well as the Second World War broke out in the fall of 1941, throughout 1942 the next election caused a crisis. The governor at the time, the incumbent governor was a Milwaukee businessman with the unfortunate surname Heil. He was not going to get elected in 1942.

He ran against Loomis up there at the upper left, Spike Loomis, a young man in his 40s from central Wisconsin who was very popular with voters ’cause he had been Attorney General in the 1920s and refused to enforce the federal Prohibition laws. In the 1930s he’d been put in charge of the state agency that extended electricity to farms. And he won the election in November. And four weeks later he died of a heart attack. And nobody knew what to do, ’cause the state constitution said if the governor dies the lieutenant governor takes over. But which lieutenant governor. The one who had been elected at the same time as Loomis wasn’t even from his same party. And voters hadn’t elected him to be governor. The incumbent lieutenant governor had been thrown out along with Heil. So the Supreme Court finally decided after looking at lots of evidence to go with the newly-elected, the one who won the lieutenant governor office, Walter Goodland.

Who as you can see was no young man like Loomis. In fact he was governor all through the 1940s, a republican. And became sort of a grandfather figure that everyone looked up to during the 1940s, the trials of the war, and the nuclear age that followed. Veterans came home after the war. And this Milwaukee resident as you can see brought a monkey with him. His name is David Mackin. He had won the monkey gambling in North Africa. And when his unit broke up he agreed to bring it home to Wisconsin. This is sort of like Old Abe during the Civil War. When he got back to Milwaukee Joe behaved as curious monkeys will and terrorized the neighborhood. When residents complained Maken blamed the humans insisting they teased and baited him. They tried to take him to court but there was no law that said you couldn’t own a monkey. And so they took their cause to the state legislature to get a bill passed saying monkeys could not be owned. Mackin brought the monkey to give testimony. (laughter) Mackin concluded his testimony saying, “It’s all right if you treat my monkey like other pets, but I don’t want anyone coming into my yard and killing him, because the text of the law would have allowed anyone to kill a primate.”

Got the text of the law here, yeah. The draft bill revised the statute intended to curb rabid dogs, replacing the dog with animals. Any person may kill any animal that may suddenly assault him. An attorney in the room emphasized that the neighbors already had the right to sue for damages, and a reporter cautioned, that the law was so broad that one man might be able to chase another man into his own yard and shoot him, on the grounds that he was a vicious animal. After the hearing everybody went back to Milwaukee and the legislature dropped the bill like a hot potato saying it was a matter for local governments not for state government. I’m not aware of any other time when a non-human was brought in for testimony at the Capitol. Also among the veterans coming back were a number of young people who started the Democratic Party, restarted the Democratic Party in Wisconsin.

As I said before, after the Civil War the Democrats really fell into marginal, a marginal role and held office only rarely. By the 1930s there were Republicans, and there were Progressives who were more liberal that the democrats, and there were Socialists in Milwaukee, but there was no Democratic Party. So after the war, a number of young veterans decided that they would try to fill the vacuum by starting up a Democratic Party. Among them William Proxmire, you see with his wife Ellen there, in the large photo on the left. And they were at the center with a number of other people of the party that we know today as democrats. Ellen Proxmire recalled, “It was like cell almost because these were all people who were interested in the cause but there was no office, there was no organization, certainly no money. We all loved it, we all knew each other, we knew each other’s children. Eventually there was a small office on the square, on Mifflin Street. We had this crummy office over a bakery I think. And she and I,” another friend, “were the two paid employees of the Democratic organizing committee.” Well it grew from that start right after the war to dominate state politics during the 1950s and 60s. And some of the governors during that time all got their starts right after World War Two.

The most famous of them today of course is Gaylord Nelson who besides being the founder of Earth Day, when he was in the US Senate later, was Wisconsin’s first environmentalist governor during the early 60s. Almost all the people up through Tony Earl and Jim Doyle can trace their lineage to this group. In 1961 seeing the success of civil rights sit-ins in the South, African Americans in Wisconsin decided that segregated housing and segregated schools should be stopped here as well. It was perfectly legal in 1961 to deny to rent to someone based on the color of their skin. And that was the law they wished to have changed. Democratic legislators introduced it again and again in the late 50s early 60s and it failed every time under the Capitol dome. So this man, Lloyd Barbee, who was the head of the state NAACP and went on to be a legislator organized a sit in in the rotunda where for two weeks, 24 hours a day NAACP volunteers lobbied for a change in the law. Of course nothing happened. It didn’t change until 1968 with the federal housing law. In 1978 politics in Wisconsin was turned upside down.

How many of you remember this guy? Lee Dreyfus, okay. He was Chancellor at UW-Stevens Point and was disgusted with how out of touch Madison was with the rest of the state. Though he’d never held elected office before, he called himself a Republicrat, joined the Republican Party and launched an independent campaign for governor. He always wore that red vest. Was known for his optimism. And was thought to be a little unbalanced by the principles of the republican party of the time. His eccentric campaigning style attracted media attention but he had no money and so he couldn’t buy advertising. To everyone’s surprise he beat the handpicked party candidate in the primary election and then he went on to defeat incumbent Democrat Marty Schreiber for governor. No one was more surprised by the election results than Dreyfus himself. “Just nine short months ago the odds against this were astronomical,” he told the press. “This could only happen in this nation.” When his wife was asked if she was surprised she said, “I expected exactly what’s happening, total chaos.”

He made his staff work in a large open room that was open to reporters and citizens all the time. And focused on cutting taxes and making government transparent. After four years of that, he decided he’d had enough of politics and retired, back to the private sector. And at the end of the 70s, 87, Governor Tommy Thompson was elected and nobody knew it including him, but he would go on to be both the longest-serving governor in Wisconsin history and sort of icon of the turn that the Republicans made, Republican Party made during the Reagan years. And we’re pretty much out of time so I don’t want to say more about him, cause I wanna say more about this. You know we live in very polarized times today. I don’t need to tell you that, particularly if you live downtown. But Wisconsin politics have always been polarized. The progressives and the stalwarts in the first slide I had about La Follette had nothing good to say about each other.

During the Vietnam era pro- and anti-war lawmakers opposed each other in the aisles. McCarthy, anti-communist crusaders in the early 50s had their opponents across the aisle. As far back as the gilded age, labor activists and captains of industry fought it out under the Capitol dome. But even at that, what puts today separate, what sets today apart, even at the height of the McCarthy era, Republicans and Democrats worked amicably to solve Wisconsin’s problems. Democratic governor Gaylord Nelson recalled in 2005 that, “fraternizing between Republicans and Democrats in those days was not seen as a treasonable offense.” Speaking of his Republican opponent Mel Laird, who went on to be in Richard Nixon’s cabinet and Secretary of Defense, “He would contest things vigorously but he was always civil. He had strong convictions and great integrity, decency, compassion. We would debate all day long, and argue on the floor. And then at sundown, sensibly move to the nearest pub, to continue our friendly disputes into the night. Everything was more civilized in those days.” The Capitol dome has always been big enough to shelter a broad spectrum of conflicting opinions. It can surely continue to accommodate a civilized sifting and winnowing of solutions to problems from both sides of very divide for years to come. There you go. That’s where I’d like to end today. (applause)