Stephen Jones: My Wisconsin

This is a post by contributing writer, Stephen Jones, of Las Cruces.

As we have watched the largest public protests in decades unfold in the streets of Madison over the past few days, I've been reflecting on my own values, old family ties, and the many hard working families that still live in that Midwestern state. I know a little about Wisconsin and its people. I was born there.

As a Wisconsin native I feel it necessary to comment on the working people of the state, on their collective bargaining rights, and on the fake budget crisis contrived by the newly elected Governor, Scott Walker, and his corporate masters the Koch Brothers; a fake crisis echoed here in New Mexico and on the national stage. As we probably all know by now, Walker came to office this year with a budget surplus, a rare occurrence in this economic downturn, and used his good fortune to launch a Union-busting scheme in the heart of one of the nation's most progressive states; in fact, the state that gave progressivism its name.

My own progressive values were shaped at the dinner table in my grandparents' Milwaukee kitchen where I spent many of my summer days when I was growing up. My grandfather, Stephen, for whom I was named, was a streetcar motorman. My grandmother's given name was Sophia, though she preferred being addressed by the more familiar "Sophie." She may have been the best cook in her northwest side Milwaukee neighborhood. She baked her own bread, made her own noodles, spent hours creating baked goods that few so-called professionals could match, and canned everything that didn't sprout flowers from her garden -- skills carried over to city life from a rural ancestry. It was State Fair award-winning stuff. Cooking wasn't her sole obsession. She used a manual-wringer washing machine and wash board decades after the world had adopted automatics. The automatic contraptions "didn't really get the cloths clean," she said.

My grandparents, some 10-12-years before I was born

They were stout Union people and proud of it. Like most Wisconsinites and Milwaukeeans, they were proud of their state and proud of their city. They were proud of what their generation of working people had accomplished there; namely, a place with the best schools, the best parks, the best libraries, and the best cultural institutions in the region, if not the nation. The high standard of living of Wisconsin residents came largely through collective bargaining. It was a stalwart Labor state.

It was a pleasant enough life to come from. Wisconsin was known for its respect for natural areas and its high-ranking universities. Milwaukee was known for its honest, clean government, parks and great schools. While other cities were reeling in the Rust Belt, Milwaukee was still prosperous. The state's workers were among the best paid in the nation, and had some of the best benefits. Milwaukee had the highest rate of home ownership in the nation. Many of those homes were collected in wide bands of housing called "Milwaukee flats," two-story craftsman homes that had begun as simple one-story buildings that were quickly converted into large lot-filling two-story buildings, as Milwaukee's skilled Union workforce invested their savings into becoming entrepreneurial landlords.

In those summers in that kitchen, my grandparents, Stephen and Sophie, repeatedly tried to impress on me that none of Wisconsin's life advantages were ever to be taken for granted. Before he was a Union streetcar motorman, my grandfather had worked twelve-hour days in a mill where the men who had been crushed, burned or perished in the unsafe machinery during the night shift, then had their hats lined up at the plant gate to greet the incoming day shift as a kind of macabre memorial or warning to the incoming workers. In the old mills, before the Unions, life had been cheap.

Before she took to cooking and washing and making a home for her children, my grandmother worked in a sweatshop stitching linings for steamer trunks, then helping her mother cook and clean at the family boarding house that lodged the laborers that faced the unsafe mills at night. She met my grandfather when he was a workman-boarder at her mother's house.

Labor Wars and LaFollette
They were veterans of the labor wars that rocked Milwaukee at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th, and of the progressive movement that wrested democratic control of the state from corrupt party machines tied to corporate power, which ran the place over a century ago. 19th-century Wisconsin, like most states, was closely associated with the raw power of the economic trusts. Farmers faced off against legislatures bought on Wall Street, workers faced off against physical attacks from the bosses. In 1886, then-Governor Jeremiah Rusk sent the State Militia to Milwaukee with orders to fire on protesting workers demanding an eight-hour day at the Bay View Rolling Mill. Seven people, including a twelve year old boy, were killed. The event helped to spur the reform movements in Wisconsin that overturned the trusts and led to a national movement of reform we know as progressivism.

Combining traditional, authentically conservative family and community values with sweeping economic and political reform, the organization of voters in Wisconsin led to key reforms nationally. In Wisconsin the movement was led by Robert LaFollette (above right), a Madison Congressman who coined the term "progressivism" at the end of the 1890s. He was elected Governor in 1900, then U.S. Senator in 1908, where he would eventually lead a bloc of progressive voices in the Congress.

LaFollette's reforms include many innovations that progressives still champion, and that many of us take for granted today. State-elected regulatory agencies, publicly elected school boards, workmen's compensation, unemployment insurance, municipal home rule, the minimum wage, the primary election system, voter initiatives, referendum and recall, direct election of U.S. Senators, women's suffrage, the abolition of child labor, and progressive taxation, among others.

Milwaukee's municipal reformers established he first government-run water and sanitation systems, created the nation's first community college, and passed the first mandatory public-education ordinance. The reforms were sweeping. The public library launched the first publicly funded telephone reference system, and Lutie Stearns, the system's Children's Librarian and a friend of the LaFollette family, used her personal savings to launch the world's first bookmobile service and took a lending library on wagon-top to rural communities in Wisconsin. Stearns was just one of the many public servants, including many of our public schoolteachers, who have put innovation and sacrifice ahead of personal gain.

Every Generation Better Than the Last
My grandparents were proud of the accomplishments of their generation, but feared that the clock might one day be turned back. My parents were never very happy when my grandparents talked about the past. To my father, a World War II veteran, and my mother, who had a successful career as a Veterans Administration nurse, my grandparents' bleak stories and warnings about the past were not proper topics of discussion for the ears of their five-year-old son. At best they were ancient history, best forgotten. To my parents, Wisconsin and its local communities were places where everyone could safely look forward, not back. After all, America was a country where every generation had it better than the last.

Like my parents, most of Wisconsin's people took hard work, responsive institutions, shared sacrifice, fair play, and the resulting shared affluence for granted. The state pioneered the progressive income tax, and its state income tax has always been among the nation's highest, yet businesses have always eagerly headquartered there to gain access to the state's extensive education facilities and highly educated workforce. Wisconsin's citizens are traditionally among the most educated in the nation.

Wisconsin's people believed in targeted government investment and spending, particularly in education, but were infamously frugal and valued conservation as well. The largest cathedral in the state was hand-built by Milwaukee workmen who hand-carried salvaged brick, wood, and stone north from Chicago's demolished former Federal Office Building, and refashioned the salvage into the cathedral. It is the only church in the world whose door knobs sport the U.S. Federal shield logo.

Muir, Nelson and the Packers
Wisconsin's John Muir and Gaylord Nelson were national leaders of the conservation movement. Muir left his Portage, Wisconsin home and took his naturalist vision west late in the 19th century to "Save the American soul from total surrender to materialism." Muir was a leading proponent of the National Parks movement, and Nelson founded the Wilderness Society in the 20th century. Environmentalist and forester Aldo Leopold, another Wisconsin native, is well-known to most New Mexicans as the naturalist who developed our own state's natural resource management systems.

The so-called "Wisconsin idea" we learned about in the Dairy State as children provided a pretty good life for all. Even the champion Green Bay Packers are a product of that "Wisconsin idea." The Packers are the only community-owned professional sports franchise in the nation; the team and its facilities are owned co-operatively by Green Bay's citizens rather than a multi-million-dollar corporate entity.

No Room for Complacency
In 1912, at the height of his political career, Senator Robert M. LaFollette of Wisconsin wrote in his autobiography that "We have long rested comfortably in this country upon the assumption that because our form of government is democratic, it was therefore automatically producing democratic results." We were wrong to be so complacent, Senator LaFollette went on to warn us. "Tyranny and oppression," he wrote, "are just as possible under democratic forms as under any other. We are slow to realize that democracy is a life; and involves continual struggle. It is only as those of every generation who love democracy resist with all their might the encroachments of its enemies that the ideals of representative government can even be nearly approximated."

Senator LaFollette and my grandparents were right to worry. As the people of Wisconsin learned last week, corrupt corporate-driven voices are never every truly at bay. While Wisconsin entered 2011 with a budget surplus, state workers -- whose average wage is a mere $24,000 annually -- found their lives and livelihoods under attack within months of Scott Walker's inauguration. Wisconsin's new masters sought to strip them of their health care and pensions, as well as their collective bargaining rights.

Stand With Wisconsin's Working People
The rest of us need to join Wisconsin's working people and stand up to this attack on hard-won middle class lives. The challenge may seem daunting, but hardly more daunting than it was for the laborers who demanded an eight-hour day at the Bay View Rolling Mill in 1886, or the recalcitrant and corrupt political establishment that Robert M. "Fighting Bob" LaFollette took on and defeated at the beginning of the 20th century. This, at a time when progressive reform was an untried idea rather than the successful and long-proven ideology that brought America to prosperity in the decades that followed his leadership.

"The essence of the Progressive movement, as I see it," Robert M. LaFollette wrote, "lies in its purpose to uphold the fundamental principles of representative government. It expresses the hopes and desires of millions of common men and women who are willing to fight for their ideals, to take defeat if necessary, and still go on fighting."

Wise words for any generation.

To see more posts by Stephen, visit our archive.