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Leon Fink: A Hard Break with Wisconsin's Past

[Leon Fink, who formerly taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, is distinguished professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of the recently published "Sweatshops at Sea."]

CHICAGO -- Picture the state of Wisconsin trying to clean up after a devastating economic slump. Foreclosed farms and homesteads, high unemployment. Schools overcrowded and streets badly in need of repair. The gap between rich and poor more gaping than ever before. With rising property taxes (due in part to discounts for favored corporations), some people called for more budget cuts, but that had been practiced until whole counties had been driven into effective bankruptcy. The Republican Party, with a lock on state government, was forced to make difficult choices. How would it respond?

The picture above approximates today's Wisconsin, but it also describes the state of the state circa 1900. Conditions in the earlier period hatched the "Wisconsin Idea," a forward-looking set of policies developed under four Republican governors (most notably Robert M. La Follette and Francis McGovern) that proved a blueprint for a nationwide Progressive Era.

The Wisconsin Idea, as first popularized by state legislative librarian Charles McCarthy in 1912, helped lift Wisconsinites from the doldrums of the great depression of the 1890s into a prosperous "mixed" economy combining the resources of farm and factory with science, engineering and human welfare expertise rooted in a state university system centered in Madison.

Wisconsin's Progressive Republicans were not utopians. They proposed no wholesale rejection nor systemic reformulation of the industrial capitalist system they inherited. Yet, in attacking "monopoly" and "predatory wealth," they were determined to fashion a future in which workers and business people, farmers and students could all find respect and a bright future. And they adopted a favorite institution and characteristic principle for resolving deep social conflicts. It was the independent state commission as governed by "tri-partism."

In the case of the industrial commission, for example, appointed, university-trained "experts" representing the "public" huddled directly with representatives of organized labor and leading employers in overseeing relevant planning and regulatory processes.

It was a formula that soon made Wisconsin the envy of the nation on questions ranging from taxation to industrial relations to land use policy. All told, the Wisconsin Idea suggested that through a close working relationship among major stakeholders, as pioneer labor economist John R. Commons put it, "order, intelligence, care, and thought could be exercised by the state."...
Read entire article at Charlotte News-Observer