University Place

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Norman Gilliland

Welcome to University Place. I'm Norman Gilliland, Wisconsin Public Broadcasting. The story of any city is largely a story of opportunities lost or taken, of hard work, of luck, and of values. And in many ways, Wisconsin and its capital city of Madison is much the same. But at the same time, there were some special opportunities afforded by those ridges and lakes and forests and swamps that were to become Madison, Wisconsin. A person who knows a good deal about how Madison came to be is our guest today, Stuart Levitan, a mainstay of Madison media and government since 1975. He's also the author of "Madison: The Sesquicentennial History, Volume One." Stuart, how did you know where to begin? >>

Stuart Levitan

Well, as the song says, you begin at the very beginning. And in terms of defining the city of Madison, the most important place to begin is with the University of Wisconsin, located here pursuant to the constitution. And this slide that came up now showing a view of downtown from the campus on the right to the capitol on the left, taken from Picnic Point in about 1950, perfectly illustrates the respective importance of the university and state government for the future of Madison. In terms of our early economic health, we needed the state government. But in terms of every other quality of life, intellectual, social, cultural, artistic, athletic, and even economic, it is the University of Wisconsin that defines the city of Madison. Without the University of Wisconsin, Madison would simply not be Madison. It would be Rockford with lakes. Nothing wrong with Rockford with lakes, but it is the university that really gives the definition to the city of Madison. >> Now, I know we'll be seeing images of some of those founding fathers as we go through this conversation, but is the advent of the university to Madison really the work of one person more than any others? >> Well, the location of it is pursuant to the constitution, but the greatness of it, as we'll see, and the significance for Madison really turns on the first great leader, John Bascom. We'll see his picture in a little bit. Here's the first great leader of the most important institution in the city, and he's the person I describe as the pivotal person in our future, in our history. The man who, if he hadn't come here, our entire future would have been changed. And we know now that the university's impact on the built environment is great, and it even predates the incorporation of the city in 1856. The map that's up now is the university addition of 1850, August 28, 1850. This is a land use deal that we live with even today. And it caused a major public controversy as late as 1920. If you've ever wondered why Regent Street got to where it is, or about the bend from Gorham to University, or why Bedford and Bassett Streets angle so sharply, this is why. Now, the land that we just saw, going from Marion to Mills Street was originally owned by a congressman from New York named Aaron Vander Poole. And he sold it to the university in 1848, 157 acres at $15 an acre. The regents thought that they had more than enough land than they'd ever need, but they needed some cash because state government was not good to them, so they plotted this development and sold it for residential use. Now, that bend at University and Gorham was so sharp back in those days, after the advent of automobiles, University Avenue went both ways, not that there's anything wrong with that, as they say. But there was so much traffic jam caused by that bend that the elite planners and the government elites said they needed to extend University Avenue all the way to West Washington Avenue. It was a major public controversy for years. All the professional planners and the downtown elite supported it. It went to referendum in 1926 and the people who thought they would live with traffic jams and save the Bassett neighborhood for housing and economic development turned it down two to one. And as a planner, this is very important for me to realize that very often, the people who live in the neighborhood are right and the elite planners are wrong. It's a very important message to take to heart. >> And, of course, it's a situation that comes up time and time again. >> And we'll see it again a little later. This is an illustration of the city in about the late 1850s. We see North, South, and Main Hall in the background on the campus, the first three buildings of the campus, and the still unfinished Grace Episcopal Church in the foreground, giving you a sense of how much more developed the campus was than the rest of the city in those early days. >> It's certainly a fascinating study in planning. >> Very important. Here's perhaps the only photo of Camp Randall during the Civil War. Of course, the Civil War had a tremendously dislocative impact on the city of Madison with the boys in blue doing a lot of roughhousing, a lot of drinking. During the early days of the war when it was mainly volunteers, things were okay, but when the draft started and people were no longer all that enamored about being - >> Not all that altruistic. >> Not all that altruistic, there were some great disturbances. We see in the background behind the troops the trees of what will become Breese Terrace. Those trees were almost all torn down, cut down for fuel during the Civil War for the encampment at Camp Randall. And we'll see how Camp Randall figures in the city's development a little later on. This is a nice illustration, taken from Main Hall. A beautiful etching, lithograph, showing, we see Monroe Street going out on the left, Randall Avenue in the foreground. Camp Randall in the immediate middle of the illustration, and then behind those trees, Breese Stevens Farm, which will become developed as University Heights, and we'll see that in a little bit, as well. >> What you tend not to see in these pictures, though, is all those swamps that Madison had to somehow cope with. >> There were tremendous swamps and they weren't really dredged until the early 1900s. Brittingham Park is built out of swampland. A lot of Vilas Park is built out of swampland. The dredge was a very important engineering development that reclaimed a lot of land. Now, something that we lost during the time that we were reclaiming land, we lost tremendous numbers of Indian mounds. There were Indian mounds on State Street, where St. Mary's is on South Park Street. There was a dividing ridge eight stories high that was just honeycombed with Indian graves and artifacts, and those were all torn down for gravel for road construction. And one of the early street superintendents, named Horace Tenney, reflecting on this in about 1890 said, as street superintendent, I thought this was the greatest thing in the world to have this ready made gravel. But when I found out what I had done, I felt like a vandal. This is somebody writing in the 1890s about his desecration of the historic Indian mounds and the Indian graves. A very interesting document that Horace Tenney wrote. >> That one dividing ridge that you mentioned went from Monona Bay all the way to the Vilas Zoo? >> Right, it was a tremendous thing. I actually found a photograph from geological surveys showing what it was, and it's just a remarkable geological formation and again, it was torn down for gravel and road building. >> I think we have something like 20% of the original mounds left? >> The original mounds, there are some in the Vilas area, there's some out in the far side around the old Fair Oaks neighborhood along Lakeland, where the developer recognized the importance and actually built the road around the effigy mounds and preserved them. >> And also, of course, in the cemetery along Speedway. >> Absolutely, yeah. This was Levi Vilas, the fourth mayor of the city of Madison. He came out here from the east. He was one of the early venture capitalists, one of the early moneyed interests who came out here, railroad, logging, and moneyed interests. Interestingly, his father's name was Moses and he was Levi. There's no indication of any Hebraic blood, but apparently they liked our names. Now, more important than Levi Vilas was his son William Freeman Vilas. This is the greatest philanthropist in Madison's history at age 18, 1850, as the university valedictorian, in a class of three, but still, it is quite an accomplishment. He is unsurpassed among all Madisonians for the range of his talents and accomplishments, as a soldier, an orator, a statesman, a businessman, and again, as a philanthropist. >> He looks a little rough-edged there, doesn't he? >> Well, you know, he's 18, he's a teenager. Most important for Madisonians, he was the one who bought and donated the land for Madison's best park, Henry Vilas Park, named after his son, who had died of adult diabetes at age 27 in 1899. During his life, his favorite charity was the Madison Park and Pleasure Drive Association, but upon the full prorating of his estate in the early 1960s, the bulk of his estate, about $120 million in 1960 dollars, went to University of Wisconsin for, among other things, affirmative action scholarships. >> Well, from his time - >> Fitting for a man whose middle name was Freeman, and for our purposes here, this very building in which we are taping today. We would not have the Vilas Communication Hall without William Freeman Vilas and his tremendous legacy to both the city and the state of Wisconsin. Here he is later on in his career after he'd served as cabinet secretary, two-time cabinet secretary, United States senator. It was to visit William Vilas that President Grover Cleveland spent a couple days in Madison in 1877. The only known time that a sitting president has vacationed in the capital city. Here is a shot up State Street from campus in about 1860 when Levi Vilas was mayor, and his son William Freeman Vilas was just starting his legal career and to organize a volunteer battalion for the Civil War. You can see, if you think back to North, South, and Main Halls, you'll realize how much larger the university buildings were than most of the other buildings in the city of Madison. >> They stand out and, of course, they're higher up, too. >> They're higher up and they're a lot more substantial buildings. Again, the significance of the university for the built environment. And in the next slide, which is the same view, November 1898, we'll see one of the most important early buildings on campus, the State Historical Society building. It's gone through a different name, but this is a remarkable, world class research institution. For the city of Madison to have a facility like the University of Wisconsin Historical Society archives and library in the heart of downtown, is just a remarkable research and reference opportunity. I could not have written my book without it, and we could not be doing the slide show today without those archives and library. It is a tremendous resource that all Madisonians should really be very proud to have in their community. >> And to have it back so early on in the history of the city, too. To have actually a 19th century establishment of that historical facility. >> Just showing that the university's impact on research and development and scientific inquiry goes - we're used to having, we think now of Steenbock and Bascom and Jamie Thompson, all the great researchers who have dominated the modern era, but thinking back, the role of the university in intellectual investigation and research and reference activities, just unparalleled. And to have it in the heart of our city is just, again, a blessing that we really should acknowledge and appreciate. You can date photos of Madison from what's happening on campus. And this illustration up now, the fact that Ladies' Hall is on campus means that it's after 1871. The fact that Assembly Hall is not on campus yet means that it's before 1880, so it's very easy to date photos of Madison based on what's going on on campus. Again, we can see where the main buildings, North, South, and Main Hall have now been joined by Ladies' Hall. >> And where would this picture have been taken from? >> This is from the capitol at the head of State Street looking down towards the campus. We'll see a series. Here's another photo. This is very easily dated to the summer of 1895. We see that there's building activity in University Heights in the upper left-hand corner, which means it's after 1894-95. We see that the Red Gym Armory has opened, which means it's after 1894. The Red Gym Armory was for the time the most important building on campus. It was so important that when it opened in 1894 they canceled classes, the railroads gave reduced rates, there was a regatta, there was a gala ball. They performed Handel's "Messiah." It was a big deal, as the vice president would say. But the fact that there's still a thicket of trees at the base of State Street shows that they have not yet started construction on the Historical Society building, which began in 1896. So we know exactly when this photo was taken. >> I think we'll see an interior of that armory, too. >> Yes, we will, in less auspicious, less happy times. And here's a photo from about 1915. You can barely make out the campus through the haze, through the soft coal. Madison had a penchant for burning soft coal in those days and it created terrible, terrible haze. And you can just through the distance make out the dome of Main Hall. It was not "Bascom Hall" until 1920. The fact that the dome is still up means this is before October 1916 when the fire caused it to collapse. So I date this photo as about 1915. >> You know, reading your book and walking the streets of Madison occasionally, I wonder what it would have been like to come into Madison, say, by train, late 19th century. Let's say it's a spring morning. What would the sensations have been? >> The sensations would have been a great deal of fragrance. If you're in the spring or summer, everything would have been verdant. It would have been so green and the flowers would have been so plentiful. If you'd come in the mid-1850s, though, there would have been pigs and goats and cows grazing on the capitol lawn. Not quite as picturesque a scene. It's always been a remarkable place that, I think, from the earliest settlers, they realized what a remarkable location we had. Here's a stylized view of the campus around 1882. We see the addition of Assembly Hall and the library in about the center of the lithograph. This is the most important building as built during John Bascom's time. John Bascom gave regular Sunday talks in the Assembly and Library Hall. Bob La Follette, Charles Van Hise, were among the students who were tremendously inspired by John Bascom. This shows what they liked to think the university looked like at the time. This next slide shows what it actually looked like at the time. You can see the landscaping and the groundskeeping, not quite as manicured, but through the trees, the very dense trees, you can see Assembly Hall and the library. To the right, Science Hall, which opened in 1877 and tragically burned in 1884. It was a magnificent building for its time, and the fact that it burned created a whole 'nother public policy issue that would happen a few years later. But this is the campus that John Bascom was president over. This is the campus at the time of the first great leader of the most important institution, and the pivotal person in our history. >> What would the lakes have been like at this time? >> Well, the lakes had raw sewage being pumped into them. When Frank Lloyd Wright went to the schoolhouse out on the east side, they had the first indoor plumbing. It consisted of a pipe that went out from the building, out about 50 yards into the lake and just sort of kerplunked stuff there. There was raw sewage being pumped into the lake for 100 years. So we didn't have the tremendous industrial development, but the lakes, even as early as back then still needed some work. And the whole development of the sewage system and the sanitary district in Madison is a story in and of itself. >> It was a long, ongoing scientific debate, wasn't it? >> Long ongoing scientific debate, and it was in part shaped by members of the university community. Professors like Charles Summer Slichter and Professor Turnarow, who brought the Wisconsin Idea to the local level. It wasn't just on the state level, but they actually had professors and administrators working in local government and trying to help the city solve some of its problems as well. Given the university's overwhelming importance in our history, it is fitting that the single most pivotal person in our history, the person without whom our entire course would have been different, was John Bascom. The first great leader of the institution. Now, most of the world regards his importance as inspiring Bob La Follette and Charles Van Hise, and being a proponent of the social gospel. But for Madison, his real importance is, he's the man who brought John Olin to Madison. John Olin was the founder of the Madison Park and Pleasure Drive Association. He's also the man who hired John Nolen, who was our great planner. He wrote "Madison, the Model City," the real civic guidebook to Madison. If John Olin hadn't transferred from Oberlin to William's College, and one day in 1871 walked into John Bascom's rhetoric class, and if John Bascom hadn't become president of the Wisconsin university, and if the Ohio school district where John Olin was under contract hadn't let him out in order to accept John Bascom's offer to become the first member of the faculty who Bascom hired when he became president in 1874, our entire history is different. We're not sitting here. If John Olin doesn't walk into that classroom at William's College, Norman, you and I are not sitting here. The city of Madison is a completely different city, and this is the fascinating thing to me is, when you talk about nations and global things, there are world forces. There's industrialization. There's globalization. There's all those big epical things. But when you talk about municipal governments and lives of cities, it turns on individuals. And little things. >> Day to day choices. >> Choices made. That John Olin transferred to William's College, impressed John Bascom, came here, and history was changed. It's just one of the things I love about doing municipal histories. >> Now, Olin, as I understand it, was one of those people who had a certain kind of charisma in that he was good at getting other people to sign onto causes and support them financially. >> Well, he certainly was successful in getting all the lumber baron philanthropists to support the Park and Pleasure Drive Association. Vilas, Brittingham, Dan Tenney, who was a lawyer philanthropist. And then to recruit, here we see John Olin, my nominee, and I will debate anybody on this, for the single greatest private citizen in Madison's history. Without John Olin, we're someplace else, we're somebody else. John Olin at the Park and Pleasure Drive Association and with John Nolen really created modern Madison. >> Ran for governor on the Temperance ticket. >> He ran for governor, and this is a very important point. Because in addition to their work on campus and Olin's work with the Park and Pleasure Drive Association, John Bascom was a devout Prohibitionist. And as you say, John Olin ran for governor on the Prohibitionist party ticket. And one of the things that occupied Bascom and Olin very heavily was alcohol abuse. Now, we know how big a deal alcohol abuse is on campus today. It was a huge deal in the 1880s. >> I gather State Street was kind of a gauntlet that the student had to get through to avoid falling into the gutter. >> There was a lot of alcohol abuse on campus and it became known around the state. And Bascom and Olin went on this aggressive campaign to shut - there's a law that said saloons had to be shut on - we'll get to him in a second. The saloons had to be shut on Sundays. And with Olin as his legal lieutenant, Bascom went on an absolute tear trying to get saloons shut on Sundays. We'll pick up the Bascom-Olin Prohibition story, but here is one of the young men who John Bascom inspired when he was a college student. This is Robert M La Follette as a college senior. >> Barely recognizable, isn't he? >> Barely, but you would have known him at the time because, as a college senior, he won national renown by becoming the champion of the Interstate Collegiate Oratory Contest. >> That's fitting. >> And he won with his oration on Iago, and when he came back to Madison, 500 people met him at the train station, paraded him up to Campus Hill and they had a gala ball in his honor. Now, think about that. A student won an oratory contest and the city celebrated. ( both laugh ) >> A different time. >> What a wonderful, remarkable thing. As I say, we know about people like Steenbock and Jamie Thompson and the history of professors and faculty working in scientific research. The first great Wisconsin scientist/inventor was a college student. This is Magnus Swenson. There's a street on the west side named after him. This is him as a senior in 1880. Magnus Swenson as a senior developed the water purity tests that convinced Madison that they had so much typhus and diphtheria in the water that they needed to have a municipal water system. He became city chemist, he helped found the College of Agriculture, he perfected a means of extracting sugar from sorghum and developed the United States Sugar Company on the east side. He built power dams with the president of the board of regents, was food administrator during World War I, and as head of the local committee on defense, in 1917, led the successful fight to expel his former classmate Bob La Follette from the Madison Club for disloyalty during World War I. >> Another controversy, I'm not sure we'll have time for that one today. >> No, but just think of what this one college senior, he started with this water purity test and so it's important for us today, when we look at the students on this campus today, to think that there are students, undergraduates, not just graduate students, there are undergraduates who are going to bring the same brilliance and inventiveness to their generation as Magnus Swenson brought to his. Here's John Bascom, as you can tell, near the end of his tenure, if you remember what he looked like earlier on, he's obviously suffered a bit for wear. As I say, everyone knows how bad alcohol issues can be on campus. As we speak in 2010, the university and city are still trying various strategies. Back in the 1880s, John Bascom denounced the city of Madison "for creating a most evil and disgraceful result," declared, "Madison is not as safe a city as it might be for young men." As I say, tried to shut down all the city saloons on Sundays. We had this experience when Chancellor John Wiley left a few years ago, he issued a blistering attack on some business interests in the state for not supporting the university and being sort of penurious in their support for the university. When John Bascom was forced out in 1887, he issued a 5,000-word farewell in the Wisconsin Prohibitionist, in which he denounced the regents, the regents, mind you, for their "slovenly, self-seeking political ways," declared, "the ignorance of the board is very great," and warned that "because of the regents' gross mismanagement, Wisconsinites were in danger of paying for a first-class university and securing a second-class one." So the tradition of Wisconsin chancellors and presidents being outspoken on their way out the door is a noble and cherished one. Here's the regent who John Bascom unwisely tangled with. This is Elijah W. Kise, chairman of the executive board of regents, a three-time mayor of the city of Madison, state assemblyman, and get this, federal postmaster for the administration of Abraham Lincoln to that of Theodore Roosevelt. >> Talking about a good 40, 45 years. >> 45 years, no wonder they called Elijah Kise "Boss Kise." He's the one who, when he tangled with John Bascom, Elijah Kise won. John Bascom lost. Science Hall, 1892. This building's important for three reasons. First, this is what was built after the original Science Hall burned in 1884. This is the oldest existing structural steel building on an American university campus. It went so far over budget that the legislature investigated and among the construction crew was a college sophomore named Frank Lloyd Wright. Frank Lloyd Wright was apprenticing with Allen Darst Conover, who was the construction superintendent and the only architect Frank Lloyd Wright ever respected. And one December day in, I want to say, about 1886, Frank Lloyd Wright was dispatched to go up on the roof, this icy latticework, and unhook some hooks from the gabled roof. And just think what would have happened if Frank Lloyd Wright had lost his footing. The entire course of local and world architecture would have been changed. It was the cost overruns from this building that convinced Frank, who was about to be fired, that's when he stole his father's books, pawned them, and hopped the train for Chicago. >> Was that a slate roof? There was one on campus that just recently had to be replaced. >> Because the original Science Hall had burned, they made this Science Hall as fireproof as could be for the era, and that's why it had that structural steel, and it was built to last. >> A slippery place for Frank Lloyd Wright to be. >> But Frank would come back, and you see here what happens when the world's greatest architect designs a fraternity house. >> A little different, isn't it? >> This is Frank Lloyd Wright's idea of the Phi Gamma Delta house at 16 Langdon Street. Frank's cousin Richard Lloyd Jones, who had been the former editor/publisher of the Wisconsin State Journal, was president of the alumni association at the FIJI house. He thought Frank was the world's greatest architect, as did Frank. He got Frank the contract to build this and it's a very innovative thing, even though it looks a little like a concrete Mayan temple. >> Looks a little like a tomb, too. >> It's got a very innovative separation of functions. It uses the topography to go down by the lake. Unfortunately, tragedy struck while it was in development. Lightning hit Taliesen, caused half a million dollars of uninsured damage. Frank was on the run from Olgivanna's husband. He was actually arrested at one point. Olgivanna had a child during this time. But the thing that really killed the deal for Frank was John Findorff, the contractor, explaining to the FIJIs that he was woefully over budget. I'm sure this comes as a shock to you, devotees of Frank Lloyd Wright. And that's why the FIJIs canceled the contract. Now, as it turns out, the FIJIs didn't mind the scandal that Frank Lloyd Wright had lived through because the FIJIs were the ones responsible, and we'll see in the next slide, for the Interfraternity Honorary Junior Society of the Ku Klux Klan. >> A little-known chapter in Madison history. >> A little-known chapter in UW-Madison history, and these were the big men on campus. From 1920 to 1925, four of five senior class presidents were members of the Honorary Junior Ku Klux Klan. >> What did they actually do as members of the honorary Klan? >> They didn't wear sheets and hoods. But they proudly espoused Protestantism, patriotism, and the racial superiority of northern Europeans. Among the people in the Honorary Junior Ku Klux Klan, Walter Frautschi, Porter Butts, the actor later known as Frederick March. A city school superintendent, Phillip Falk. The members of the Honorary Junior Ku Klux Klan were very active in Americanization efforts, and Daniel Greenbush. They tried to get the Italians to act more like Americans, and they also spied for the police on the stills that the Italians had in the Greenbush. >> UW-Madison at this point, they're admitting people of various ethnic backgrounds and races? >> They are, but there are also minstrel shows on campus and there are programs, official university programs for minstrel shows, which used words which I think we'd probably get in trouble if we used. As they say in today's society, they freely used the "N" word. "Come laugh at the - " They had characters named Rastas and Snowball. The Capital Times, the liberal, sanctified Capital Times broadcast minstrel shows on WIBA. The engineers' ball was a minstrel show. There was a tremendous degree of anti-Semitism, tremendous degree of racism. And eventually the actual, invisible knights of the empire, the Ku Klux Klan, did start organizing and that's when the Honorary Junior Ku Klux Klan said, "Okay, we named ourselves after the guys with sheets and white hoods, but we don't want to associate with the guys," because there were some class issues involved. >> It was a fairly brief flirtation, was it not? >> Well, the Honorary Junior Ku Klux Klan Society was 1920 to 1925. >> Pretty short-lived. >> It's hard to imagine the city of Madison with a 50-acre subdivision between Randall Avenue and Breese Terrace, but that is the future that faced Madison in 1893, when housing developments started moving westward. University Heights was about to be developed. There was a residential plat drawn for the area we now know as Camp Randall. President Charles Kendall Adams strongly wanted the area for athletic fields. The veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic strongly supported it, but a legislative committee twice voted to kill the bill funding the purchase. Finally, Civil War hero and three-time governor Lucius Fairchild, who was the son of our first mayor, Jairus Fairchild, said, "Look, if you don't buy the land and give it to the university, I will." So being cowed or awed, we're not sure which, the legislature authorized the money and on April 29, 1893, the university regents purchased Camp Randall for the development of athletic facilities and here we see the first football field on that site. It's located about at the extension of Dayton Street. You can see University Heights in the background. University Heights where a number of university faculty and administrators lived, built on the old Breese Stevens farm. It was Charles Kendall Adams who was the one who proposed putting a fence around Camp Randall, because that way it would be easier to charge admission and raise money. >> Hasn't that proved true. ( both laugh ) >> But that's, Camp Randall, one of the most important locations in the city of Madison. >> Those outlying neighborhoods, such as University Heights and some of the others, really wouldn't have been possible unless there had been some kind of public transportation. >> There was a streetcar that really caused the great growth of both Wingra Park and University Heights. 1892, 1896, both on the east side helping develop Fair Oaks neighborhood, and on the west side going out to the cemetery, developing the Vilas neighborhood and University Heights. Here's the diagram for the new athletic fields in 1914, drawn by state architect Arthur Peabody. There are two important things here. The first is the relocation of the stadium to its current location. At the time it was 25 feet under the hills of Breese Terrace to sort of protect it from the neighborhood. More importantly, you see just to the right of the football field stands where the field house is going to go. They're going to put the men's field house right on Breese Terrace until the neighborhood, which had a lot of powerful, important people, drew up a petition drive to say, "No, we don't want the field house across the street from us." And once again, the planners were wrong and the neighbors were right. Think what would happen without the field house on Regent Street. Think how it would have stymied, if it had been in the location where Arthur Peabody wanted to put it, it would have stymied development of that site for the university. It would have short-circuited economic development down Regent Street. Again, the people were right, the planners were wrong. This is an important message. Here is President Charles Kendall Adams, president first of Cornell University and then Wisconsin. And good feeling pervaded his term, which tragically was too short. He was sworn in in 1893, had to resign because of ill health in 1902. He built the Historical Society building, got the funds for Camp Randall. He had one minor crisis, which would be very familiar to people in modern Madison, and that was a Halloween scandal in October 1899. About 400 university toughs, egged on by some city toughs, broke into Ladies' Hall, looted through the women's unmentionables, broke up their annual ball, and the women's self-government association, taking a page from Aristophanes, showing that we did used to have classical liberal arts education in our colleges, vowed to have no social relations with the men until they were properly punished. A modern-day Lysistrata was on campus. Adams declared, "No man has any right to call himself a gentleman who will hold a piece of women's laundry as a trophy." He offered to personally pay for the laundry of them. Severe discipline was imposed. The women eventually relented. Tragically, not the last time that Halloween would become a disruption to the city of Madison. >> A long tradition, for better or worse. >> I think mainly for worse. Here we see Bob La Follette's old classmate, Charles Van Hise, the first great leader of the modern era. 1904, tragically, he was also cut short. He died after a minor surgery in 1918. He'd been to Milwaukee, had a sinus worked on, infection set in and he died. Of course, we know Van Hise as the man behind the Wisconsin Idea, that the beneficent influence of the university was sent to all families in the state. As I mentioned, that Wisconsin Idea also had an impact on the local level with university professors, students, and administrators being active in city government, on the common council, on city committees. Of course, Van Hise was president during wartime. Here we see a shot. >> This is the armory again. >> This is the armory. And we can see from this shot just why the Spanish flu was so deadly in 1917-1918. When you've got so many young men who were engaged in so much physical exertion, living in such close quarters, it's going to become a deadly pandemic. And indeed it was. We've known that in the '60s we had tremendous -- of antiwar activism on campus. Half a century earlier it was even more intense. These are the cadets of the student Army training corps, marching in the rain on the first anniversary of America's entry into the war, on April 6, 1918. By the time they got back to the stock pavilion, they were soaked wet, they were tired. A speaker from the National Security League didn't like their attitude while they were listening to his speech. He called them traitors in an article in the New York Tribune. Van Hise wrote an angry letter. The students burned the speaker and the kaiser in effigy, which they'd also done to Senator La Follette and William Evjue. They burned William Evjue and Senator La Follette in effigy, and then they burned the kaiser, yes. Now, one more thing to say about Van Hise. Van Hise also had a tremendous alcohol problem to deal with in the early 1900s. And the student population had actually stabilized. Parents around the state were so fearful of attitudes and behavior in the city of Madison, they just stopped sending their sons and daughters to school here, because Madison had such a terrible reputation. >> It was actually harder to recruit students, you're saying. >> It was terribly hard. The student enrollment stabilized, it did not grow. And in order to address this, because this had serious long-term implications for the university, the university and most of the really powerful people just relentlessly pressured the city council to create an expanded dry zone for a half mile around campus. For a half mile around the university campus, you could not legally buy a drink after Charles Van Hise got done. And some of this dry zone continued until the 1960s. They were still dealing with the dry zone on Monroe Street when Paul Soglin was on the city council. That's the longevity that some of these issues had. Here we see a beautiful shot of the Lake Mendota skyline from the middle of Van Hise's tenure. Beautiful campus. >> That's the nice thing about winter, you get all those different perspectives from the lake. >> And some day we may even be able to take a view from the expanded Edgewater pier. But that's a discussion for another day. ( both laugh ) >> A discussion or an editorial, I'm not sure. >> An aerial photo, this is a kite photo of the lower campus in about 1908. Again, it's just a beautiful campus, but we see how much more pronounced, how much more significant the campus buildings are than the buildings immediately around them. >> And Picnic Point, of course, in the distance. >> Yeah. Here's architect Arthur Peabody's idea for a lower campus development plan. This is about 1908. You'll see it's very ambitious, with a breakwater and a lighthouse and just tremendous neoclassical, Greek revival buildings. One of these buildings, of course, did get built, in the upper right hand corner, about the center of the picture. We see what would become the Memorial Union, which was the legacy of Charles Van Hise and we'll see how that developed in just a bit. >> Sort of an unusual building. >> This is an aerial photo of lower campus, 1925. And you can see, the building immediately next to the Red Gym Armory is the campus YMCA. The reason why we only see a vacant surface parking lot there today is because part of the deed restriction when it was torn down was that nothing would ever be built there. That location, to the immediate south of the armory, will always be a surface parking lot. >> Why, we don't know? >> I can't explain it. You decide. But you can see that from there to Park Street, we still see residences. We saw the private home of the university president. That's where John Olin lived, that's where E. A. Birge from the university lived. And newspaper publisher George Ramer. Here we see one of the most important, and perhaps the most beloved building on the university campus, the Memorial Union, a legacy of Charles Van Hise. This is something that he proposed in his jubilee investiture in 1904. It was dedicated to the memory of the men and women of the University of Wisconsin who served in our country's wars. It was dedicated on Armistice Day in 1920. Here's what President Glen Frank said in his dedicatory prayer. Remember, this is dedicated to the men and women who fought in the wars. Here's what President Glen Frank said. "May this building stand as a challenge to the statesmen of the future, to bring to the prevention of war as holy a consecration of spirit as these young men and women brought to the prosecution of war." The Memorial Union survived bad planning. Arthur Peabody didn't even put a backdoor out to the lake in the building until his daughter said, "You know, Dad, you're on the lake, I think people might want to go and hang out by the water." >> Imagine that. >> There was job site violence between striking union workers and some out-of-state scabs. Women weren't allowed in at the beginning, and women couldn't even use the Rathskellar until 1937. >> They had to use the Paul Bunyan Room, is that right? >> And then only in the summer. Arthur Peabody said, "It speaks Italian." He thought he was designing, like, a northern Italian Renaissance palazzo. He said, "It speaks Italian." Frank Lloyd Wright said, "It speaks Italian, very bad Italian." >> With a German accent. >> Yes, yes. ( both laugh ) There was job site violence on the day in 1927 when a college dropout from the class of 1924, Charles Lindbergh, was on his way to Paris. Here we see Charles Lindbergh, back on campus, he's part of a barn storming tour, speaking at Camp Randall in the summer of 1928. He was going around the country saying, you ought to build municipal airports. Ten weeks after Charles Lindbergh gave that talk on the university campus, the city of Madison had already bought the acreage in the town of Burke for a municipal airport. So don't say the city of Madison can't act quickly when it is practical to do so. >> When there's some celebrity and charisma involved. >> Now, Charles Lindbergh said that coming back and having a pancake breakfast with Walter Frautschi was the most fun he had had in a year. And when you consider Walter Frautschi's role, in the Honorary Junior Ku Klux Klan, and Charles Lindbergh's activities with the American Isolationists, it sort of puts that degree of "fun" in some perspective. ( laughs ) The single greatest natural resource of the city of Madison is, of course, the lakes. But the lakes only needed to be protected. They were already here. The second greatest natural resource is the University of Wisconsin arboretum. And the arboretum had to be created. And here we just saw the program from the dedication, and you can see little bunnies and frogs and animals and butterflies around it. The University of Wisconsin arboretum would not have happened without Michael Olbrich, who was a university regent, who we see here. Without the regents themselves, who allocated significant funds to begin the process. And a couple of other -- activists like Joe Jackson and Paul Stark. Here we see the arboretum in its earliest development days. This is the summer of 1935 and in the center of the photo you can see the barracks of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Madison was the only CCC camp on a university campus in the country. >> That is a little different, isn't it? >> It's very different. And there's some wonderful literature written about the activities of the CCC camp in Madison. We see Odana Road and Nakoma Road in the distance. Again, the spectacular resource that is the University of Wisconsin arboretum is one of the things that defines the city of Madison along with the lakes and again, it would not have happened without the University of Wisconsin, Michael Olbrich, and the regents. When people go in the Michael Olbrich entrance off Seminole Highway, I hope they give kind thought to a man who was one of our greatest citizens. Here's an aerial photo, showing the relationship of the arboretum to the city of Madison. The first survey of the city of Madison was from 1834. This is from 1934 and again, it shows the relationship of the university to the city and how this image shows, again, how the city of Madison has lived in the very benevolent shadow of not just the state capitol, but most importantly, most significantly, the University of Wisconsin. Again, it's the University of Wisconsin that defines the city of Madison. Without it, we would not be who we are, and I'm very happy - >> Just another state capital. >> We'd be just another state capital, with nice lakes, but again, it's the university that really makes Madison Madison. >> Well, so let's review some of these formative figures. John Olin. >> Well, it goes back to John Bascom. Without John Bascom, our entire future is changed. >> Is he the one who actually named Campus Hill? >> I think, no, Campus Hill would have existed from the earliest mapping in 1848, 1850. >> So in fact it was a done deal, it was an assumption that the university would be here before there was much in Madison. >> In the constitution, it provides for a university, a seat of higher learning, at the seat of government. >> That's the way it was set. >> So if Madison was going to be the capital of what was originally a territorial government and eventually became a state government, if Madison was going to be the state government, the university was going to be here. And the earliest maps from 1848, 1850, show the campus at this location. And even some of them identify it as Campus Hill. It's a pretty generic term. >> And what made Madison a prime place, I mean, the place for the capital, the place, therefore, for the university? >> James Dwayne Doty. It all goes back to our frontier founder, James Dwayne Doty, an absolute force of nature. He was a tremendous entrepreneur, developer, great public servant as well, held a number of public offices, both in Michigan and here. A man of tremendous stamina and physical courage, and real greatness, with some shady business practices thrown in just to enliven the biography. >> It was the 19th century, after all. >> And there's an illustration in the book of the plaque that he took out to Belmont when the territorial legislators were voting on where to put the territorial capital. And you can see the names of legislators written in on various prime parcels. So yeah, he freely dispensed some buffalo robes and some prime parcels, but if you look at the isthmus of Madison, is there any place in the state of Wisconsin, other than here, to have as your state capital? >> It does seem like a natural, doesn't it? That capitol dome being on the isthmus, surrounded by the lakes and on elevated land around hills, it keeps popping up in all kinds of unexpected places, doesn't it? >> Think what it was like for those first commissioners of the public land survey to come out here in 1836 and come over the crest and see amidst these shimmering, wintry lakes, this isthmus with so much forestry and animals and the Native Americans and the agriculture. It would have been like Eden. The same way that the early settlers coming from Europe would talk about when they'd get within 100 miles of the North American coast, they could smell the fragrance of the forests, wafting out into the ocean. When you came over the crest of the hill and saw Madison, saw this verdant wonderland, my goodness! How could you locate your capital any place else? Now, unfortunately, Doty was a better entrepreneur and developer than he was a planner, and there's a lot wrong with the plot that he actually drew. He did not devote enough land to public spaces. He did not preserve enough vistas on the lakes. So as a city planner, I give him very low marks. That's why the Park and Pleasure Drive of John Olin was so important. >> Trying to fix it all. >> And the planning work of John Nolen was so important to fix those things. But as an entrepreneur to found this city, develop it and get it named the territorial capital, he is first among all in our history. After him, it's John Bascom and then John Olin. >> And with us has been Stuart Levitan. He's he historian and author of "Madison, the sesq-" >> "Madison, the Illustrated Sesquicentennial." >> I'm glad you can write it more easily than I can say it. "Madison, the Illustrated Sesquicentennial History." Volume one, I should add. And it's been a great pleasure having him with us today. I hope you can join me, Norman Gilliland, for the next edition of University Place.