National
Journal Group
Learn more about our publications and sign up for a free trial.
E-Mail Alerts
Get notified the moment your favorite features are updated.
Need A Reprint?
Click here for details on reprints, permissions and back issues.
Advertise With Us
Details on advertising with National Journal Group -- both online and in print -- can be found in our online media kit.
Go Wireless
Get daily political updates on your handheld computer.
 State Of Wisconsin As of June 1, 1997
Wisconsin, tucked off north of the main east-west routes across the country and squeezed between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River, almost a century ago was one of America's premier "laboratories of reform," in Justice Louis Brandeis's phrase -- and is again today: a state originating new public policies, seeing how they work, serving as an example for others. Wisconsin's first fame as a laboratory came during the Progressive era that began around 1900, and its primacy was due to an extraordinary governor, Robert LaFollette, Sr., and to the state's unique history and German heritage. For Wisconsin is the first state of the Old Northwest, that vast stretch of the United States reaching all the way to the Pacific, settled first by New England Yankees but even more by immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. The German language is seldom heard now, the once plainly German beer brands now seem quintessentially American and few ties remained with the old country after two world wars. But in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, Germans were among America's most numerous immigrants and until the 1890s probably the most distinctive. They established, on the rolling dairyland of Wisconsin and the orderly streets of Milwaukee, their separate religions, often keeping their language and maintaining old customs, from country weddings to drinking beer -- a source of friction in temperance-minded America -- to eating bratwurst. Politically, the Germans were not monolithic. Their origins were diverse and they were spread too widely across the nation. But where they were concentrated, there was a distinctive politics, basically American, but with echoes of progressive ideas current in German-speaking countries in Europe. Nowhere was the politics of German-Americans more apparent than in Wisconsin. This is one of the two states that gave birth to the Republican Party in 1854 (the other is Michigan), and Germans, then arriving in America in vast numbers, heavily favored it. They abhorred slavery and welcomed the free lands Republicans advocated in the Homestead Act, the free education promised by setting up land grant colleges and the transportation routes constructed by subsidizing railroad builders. Then came the Progressive movement of Robert LaFollette, elected governor of Wisconsin in 1900. Up to that time a conventional Republican politician, LaFollette completely revamped the state government before going to the Senate in 1906. At a time when Germany was Europe's leader in graduate education and the application of science to government, LaFollette had professors from the University of Wisconsin, just across town in Madison, help develop the state workmen's compensation system and income tax. The Progressive movement favored rational use of government to improve the lot of the ordinary citizen -- an idea borrowed partly from German liberals and adopted by the New Dealers a generation later. All these programs were an attempt to bring bureaucratic rationality -- Germanic systematization -- to the seemingly disordered America of free markets and multiple cultures, gigantic fortunes and vast open spaces. LaFollette became a national figure. He tried to run for president in 1912 as a Progressive, but was shoved aside by Theodore Roosevelt. He did run in 1924 on his Progressive ticket and won 18% of the votes, the best third-candidate showing between 1912 and 1992. He was strongest in the northern tier of states from Wisconsin west and along the West Coast -- the same area of strength of later liberals George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. After LaFollette died in 1925, his sons carried on his tradition, progressive at home and isolationist abroad: Robert LaFollette, Jr., for 22 years in the Senate; Philip, elected governor in 1930, 1934 and 1936. Philip created his own Progressive Party in 1934, with ominous overtones: with a "Cross in Circle" symbol his critics called a circumcised swastika, huge rally-like parades reminiscent of some in Europe at the time and a call for the governor to propose all legislation. But Philip lost in 1938 and did not run again, and Robert, Jr., decided to run for reelection in 1946 as a Republican but lost the primary to Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy's charges that Communists were influencing American foreign policy fed on the inarticulate convictions of many in Wisconsin and elsewhere that the U.S. should have been fighting Russia as well as Germany in World War II. McCarthy's national prominence made Wisconsin seem like a Republican state. But he won by narrow margins and the LaFollette Progressive tradition was taken up by liberal Democrats like Senators William Proxmire and Gaylord Nelson and Governor Patrick Lucey. Like most liberals of their era, these progressives saw Washington rather than Madison as the main site of their laboratory of reform. Wisconsin, a mostly Republican state in the mostly Democratic years from 1944-64, became a mostly Democratic state in the mostly Republican years from 1968-88. It was one of the most dovish states, as if many Wisconsin voters were hit by the same impulse that led so many West German voters in the early 1980s to fear the presence of nuclear weapons and to favor disarmament. In the 1990s Wisconsin has moved in another direction, and has been a laboratory for different reforms. Providing a favorable environment is the state's economy. Wisconsin's high-skill, precision manufacturing economy -- its biggest companies include Johnson Controls, Harnischfeger, Briggs & Stratton, Harley-Davidson -- jumped into gear in the late 1980s, and led the nation's export boom of the 1990s. The labor force is highly skilled and famously productive, with fewer hours lost to health, weather or strikes than average; Wisconsin's major economic problem in the mid-1990s is a shortage of workers. The motivating force for reform in the 1990s has been, as in the early 1900s, a Republican governor, in this case Tommy Thompson, who beat a liberal Democrat in 1986 and has had some of the nation's highest job approval ratings. He has cut taxes, sponsored a school choice program championed by Milwaukee black activist Polly Williams, and passed a series of welfare reforms -- the nation's most thoroughgoing welfare reform -- which have cut caseloads by more than half. Thompson has not carried all before him. Wisconsin has two Democratic U.S. senators. It voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 and in the latter year elected two new Democratic congressmen. Democrats seized control of the state Senate in June 1996, after the recall of a Republican who had voted for a tax increase that Thompson sought to finance a new Milwaukee stadium. The courts have cooperated with teachers' unions to try to stymie school choice programs. But Thompson remains overwhelmingly popular. And Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist, a Democrat, echoes some though not all of Thompson's themes. He prides himself on lowering taxes while providing better services, and argues that central cities should see themselves not as hovels full of victims but as shining examples of excellence. Across the nation other governors and leaders of the Republican Congress have looked to learn from Wisconsin's experiments: it's a fair question whether the 1996 federal Welfare Reform Act would have passed without Wisconsin's example to give its backers confidence. Thompson and Wisconsin seem to have decided that the bureaucratic, supposedly rational state which the LaFollettes championed is now dysfunctional, and that individuals making their own choices, in the framework of a fair and orderly society, can achieve more than planners can ever conceive. Presidential politics. For all the distinctiveness of its history, Wisconsin has come pretty close to voting the national average for president in the last two elections, a little light for Clinton in 1992 and a little light for Dole in 1996. It has been seriously contested in five of the last six elections, and may well be again. There are not huge regional differences in Wisconsin. Bob Dole, who never targeted Wisconsin, carried only one of the state's nine congressional districts, and Bill Clinton carried only two with more than 50%; the other six voted pretty much all alike. Wisconsin once had one of the nation's most influential presidential primaries. It knocked Wendell Willkie out of the race in 1944, helped John Kennedy establish his lead over Hubert Humphrey in 1960, and prompted Lyndon Johnson to withdraw as Eugene McCarthy was about to beat him here in 1968. But now Wisconsin's primary, even moved from April to March 19 for 1996, tends to get lost. The national Democrats, incidentally, have allowed Wisconsin to continue its open primary (that is, there is no party registration), one of Bob LaFollette's reforms. Congressional districting. Wisconsin did not lose a congressional district in the 1990 Census, and its population grew evenly enough that no major changes were needed in the current district lines to meet the equal-population standard. The Democratic legislature's plan, signed by Thompson, shifted a few dozen townships between districts. The People: Est. Pop. 1996: 5,160,000; Pop. 1990: 4,891,769, up 5.5% 1990-1996. 1.9% of U.S. total, 18th largest; 34% rural. Median age: 35.1 years. 13% 65 years and over. 91.3% White, 4.9% Black, 1.1% Asian, 1% Amer. Indian, 1.9% Hispanic origin. Households: 57.5% married couple families; 28% married couple fams. w. children; 42% college educ.; median household income: $29,442; per capita income: $13,276; 66.7% owner occupied housing; median house value: $62,500; median monthly rent: $331. 3.5% Unemployment. 1996 Voting age pop.: 3,824,000. 1996 Turnout: 2,196,169; 57% of VAP. No state voter registration. Political Lineup: Governor, Tommy G. Thompson (R); Lt. Gov., Scott McCallum (R); Secy. of State, Douglas LaFollette (D); Atty. Gen., James E. Doyle (D); Treasurer, Jack C. Voight (R). State Senate, 33 (17 D, and 16 R); Senate President, Fred Risser (D). State Assembly, 99 (47 D and 52 R); Assembly Speaker, Ben Brancell (R). Senators, Herb Kohl (D) and Russell D. Feingold (D). Representatives, 9 (5 D and 4 R). Board of Elections: 608-266-8005. Filing Deadline for U.S. Congress: July 7, 1998.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Back To Top
National Journal Group offers both print and electronic reprint services, as well as permissions for academic use, photocopying and republication. Click here to order, or call us at 877-394-7350.
