Thursday, March 03, 2011

The Time Of The Wisconsin Idea Has Come (Again)

This blogger has had a soft spot in his heart (as well as his head) for Wisconsin: the UW history department which — in this blogger's time — was the Mount Olympus of the profession, Robert M. (Fighting Bob) La Follette, and "The Wisconsin Idea." During the latter stages of his graduate work, this blogger studied at the knee (and other low joints) of a UW-PhD who had studied at the knee (and other low joints) of one of UW's Olympians: Merle Curti. During a U.S. social and cultural history seminar, this blogger learned about "The Wisconsin Idea." As you read today's post about "The Wisconsin Idea," play "On Wisconsin!" to get into the proper spirit. If this is (fair & balanced) progressivism, so be it.


[x YouTube/Excelsior27 Channel
"On Wisconsin!"
By The UW Marching Band

[x Cronk Review]
The Wisconsin Idea
By Christopher Phelps

Tag Cloud of the following article

created at TagCrowd.com

They have filled Madison's Capitol Square and spilled down State Street, a sea of Wisconsin Badger red.

They have jammed the Capitol rotunda, remaining around the clock, dozing on hard marble floors in sleeping bags, testifying before the Assembly, and transforming the beautiful Capitol building into a house of the people.

They have let it be known that they consider the right to a union essential to democracy and that they reject Republican Governor Scott Walker's plan to end collective bargaining for local, county, and state public employees on all issues apart from wages—including pensions, health insurance, and working conditions.

They are still at it, numbering in the tens of thousands, with 70,000 participating in the largest two demonstrations to date. Sons, daughters, husbands, wives, friends, neighbors, students: Wisconsin's public has turned out en masse on behalf of the state's public workers.

What significance do these Wisconsin developments hold?

First, as the largest American labor action in the new century, the activity in Wisconsin is setting an example for a rebirth of labor sentiment after decades of setbacks. A spontaneous outpouring of community opinion, the Wisconsin upsurge recalls the epoch when unions were not stigmatized as special interests but widely understood to express the interests of ordinary people.

Second, this is the first time in the Great Recession that a nationwide protest movement has materialized that does not reflect the agenda of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Not only has the Wisconsin movement emerged spontaneously, from below, in contrast to Fox News's relentless touting of the Tea Parties, but it also represents a rebellion directly opposed to the agenda that tipped the national conversation far to the right in the early years of the Obama administration. This is another kind of populism.

What accounts for so stunning a development? A unique confluence: the crystalline clarity with which the issue of labor rights has been posed in Wisconsin, the stirring international context of democratic revolution, and a strong sense that the proposed change would eviscerate Wisconsin tradition.

In a shrewd move, the two leading Wisconsin public employees' unions, in deference to a climate of fiscal discipline, pledged to accept every pay and benefit cut the governor proposed. That left one disputed point and one only: the right to bargain collectively.

To strip most public workers of bargaining rights, as Walker desires, would constitute the most significant rollback of labor protection in the United States in decades. One might think such a prospect would create a sour mood. But the Wisconsin throngs have exhibited only buoyant Midwestern conviction in the pleasant surprise of finding one's instincts confirmed by a sudden torrent of humanity. They have politely picked up their own trash. They have laughed and chatted with the police.

It is no accident that the democratic uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were the immediate backdrop to the immense show of support for workers' rights in Madison. This international example recalls 1848, the year Wisconsin's first state constitution was adopted, when Europe's republican-democratic "springtime of peoples" inspired the first women's-rights convention at Seneca Falls, N.Y. The Mideast's balm to Midwestern spirits has been a source of sustenance and humor. "Mubarak for Governor," read one euphoric sign.

The crowds in red, as in the old Bangles song, are walking like an Egyptian. But they are also engaging in something we haven't seen on this scale in a very long time: a dignified outpouring of a whole American community on behalf of labor. The events of late February are a striking example of what the English labor historian E.P. Thompson called "customs in common," the web of shared traditions whose violation can propel people into the streets.

Custom in this case is the Wisconsin Idea, a notion that sometimes refers to the relationship between university and state but has a richer and more resonant history tracing to the state's pioneering Progressive tradition. Its personification was the Republican Robert M. La Follette, who served as congressman, governor, and senator between the 1880s and 1920s. Through direct primaries, voter recall, civil-service standards, corporate taxation, regulation, and expert policy counsel from university scholars (rather than, say, corporate lobbyists)—a set of reforms together known as the Wisconsin Idea—La Follette sought to deal with what he called "the problems of vast financial power in private hands" on behalf of "the common man­—the worker, the farmer."

It has been a very long time since a Republican senator from Wisconsin has said, as did La Follette, "The only salvation for the Republican Party lies in purging itself wholly from the influence of financial interests." But Madison is a capital city filled with public employees who take pride in the knowledge that Wisconsin was, in 1959, the first state to recognize public workers' collective-bargaining rights. The Wisconsin Idea—a classroom staple of the very schoolteachers whose labor rights are now threatened—has been given new life by the multitudes chanting, "This is what democracy looks like."

Those who have been peopling ("occupying" is not quite the right word) the Wisconsin Capitol represent a remarkable diversity of professions and callings: corrections officers, graduate teaching assistants, letter carriers, carpenters, steelworkers, and students. This array cuts against the teaching of Selig Perlman, an eminent labor scholar who taught at the University of Wisconsin in the 1920s, who held that American workers were only capable of "job consciousness," not class consciousness. Perlman would be surprised to see the firefighters marching in uniform, bagpipes playing—even though Walker exempted them, along with most police officers, from the bill's worst provisions.

In an equally arresting development, many school-board and county officials, although they might have been expected to welcome the prospect of weakened unions, have warned that the governor's proposed dismantling of labor rights might mean a return to the disruption of basic services from strikes, as happened often in the era before collective bargaining.

The recent weeks of action haven't seen strikes, exactly, but they have been propelled by a mass exodus from work. When Madison teachers called a "sick out," a judge declined to issue an injunction against them on the basis that they were not violating their contractual obligation not to strike because they made no demands upon the school district and were instead protesting before the state government. Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, promised when visiting Madison that on whatever day the measure is signed into law, "We will be in the streets."

Whether the bill can be stopped remains to be seen. It has already passed the GOP-controlled Assembly. Meanwhile, all of Wisconsin's 14 Democratic state senators have fled across state lines to Illinois, preventing a quorum and halting legislative action to bide time so as to persuade three out of the 19 Republican state senators to vote against the measure.

Wisconsin's GOP, however, is no longer La Follette's. The Progressive temper, once stiffened by competition with Milwaukee's Socialists, was interrupted by the ascendance of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and, much later, the New Right. Moderate Republicans still exist in Wisconsin, but independent-minded legislators will be threatened with hard-right primary opposition if they strike a compromise.

Quite apart from the legislation's fate, it remains to be seen whether the GOP will have overreached in its aggressive push against labor rights.

Wisconsin is a red state only in the Badger sense. The state went Democratic in the last three presidential elections. Its governor, Senate, and Assembly were Democratic-controlled until 2010, when all three branches of state government shifted to Republican in the context of hard times and heavy spending. In the same election, the maverick liberal Senator Russ Feingold was unseated by ultraconservative Ron Johnson. But the 2010 results in Wisconsin, as elsewhere, were not an endorsement of Republican ideology so much as a referendum on the economy. Governor Walker, who promised hundreds of thousands of new jobs, made no mention of any attack on collective-bargaining rights, often valued by conservative white working-class voters.

Conservative commentators like Amity Shlaes suggest that long-term advantages accrue to politicians who confront public workers, as proved by Calvin Coolidge, who took on Boston's striking police as Massachusetts governor in 1919, and Ronald Reagan, who destroyed the federal air-traffic controllers' union in 1981.

But this is a story line very different from Coolidge's or Reagan's. Polls indicate that Wisconsin's governor is increasingly unpopular in the wake of the legislative standoff and demonstrations. It was Walker's provocative bill, not a strike, that initiated the crisis. Will the right's claim to populism continue to persuade Midwestern working-class voters after the present spate of proposals to dismantle public workers' collective-bargaining rights?

Already there are signs that in some states, such as Ohio, the GOP has felt it necessary to backpedal from the most severe elements of its offensive against public workers. Meanwhile, Wisconsin protesters have retained their Midwestern whimsy, resolve, and optimism. "Walker is a Weasel, not a Badger," read one sign. Another: "I skipped school today so I can learn about tomorrow."

Wisconsin's public workers and their allies are advancing a reconfigured Wisconsin Idea: that the already precarious middle class should not be destroyed and that labor rights are essential to democracy.

Will the nation reciprocate, as it once did in the Progressive Era? Ω

[Christopher Phelps is associate professor of American studies in the School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. Previously, Phelps was an associate professor of history at the Ohio State University-Mansfield. He is the author of Young Sidney Hook (1997, 2005). Phelps is a graduate of the University of Rochester.]

Copyright © 2011 The Chronicle of Higher Education

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

Creative Commons License
Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves by Neil Sapper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at sapper.blogspot.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.



Copyright © 2011 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Did The Butcher Cut Off His Nose To Spite His Face?

As the shill for Nike footwear —, Lee Corso — is wont to say from his perch on football Saturdays on ESPN's "Gameday": "Not so fast, my friend." So, The Butcher's move from the Gray Lady to the glossy pages of New York has set the scribblers to scribble feverishly on what all of this means. Additional Slate snark about Frank Rich can be found here. If this is a (fair & balanced) tempest in a teapot, so be it.

[x Slate]
The Frank Rich Switch
By Jack Shafer

Tag Cloud of the following article

created at TagCrowd.com

Let me see if I've got this straight: Frank Rich is leaving a weekly column at the nation's most important daily newspaper for a monthly column at the second best weekly in the country.

If Rich's move is about wanting to spend more time with his family, gain greater distance from Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal, free himself to pursue his HBO projects more aggressively, or to work once again with New York Editor Adam Moss, with whom he has a mind-meld, I understand. But unless the deal came with Bloombergian bags of cash, it makes no sense.

I'm not suggesting that Frank Rich will disappear when he departs the Times for New York magazine, but the switch will transform him from the fat man in the biggest room in the oversized mansion of newspaper journalism to just another high-profile scribbler at a magazine. Oh, the New York press release says Rich will be editing a special "section anchored by his essay," and be commenting on the magazine's Web site, but it's a step down. Today, Rich's column appears in supersized format in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, which has a print circulation of 1.35 million, and more than 34.5 million unique monthly visitors to its Web site, compared to New York magazine's 405,000 circulation and 8.5 million uniques.

One of the charms of working weekly—or daily, for that matter—is that your readers know where and when to find you. But with Rich going monthly for a much less prominent publication, he'll get lost. In this new venue, there will be no obvious cues—Sunday morning bagels and coffee, for example—that it's Rich time. He'll just be floating out there in the journalistic ether.

He won't be the only one. Howard Kurtz, one of the iron men of journalism, has been floating in the ether ever since leaving the Washington Post for the Daily Beast last fall. He's writing prolifically about the media and other topics for the Beast, as he did for decades at the Post. But Kurtz's copy used to be hand-delivered to my front door step. Now, even though I've got Kurtz's RSS feed in my Google Reader, he's sorta vanished on me.

It's not my fault that I don't read Kurtz as much anymore, and it won't be my fault if I start missing Rich's copy, either, even though I read every copy of New York that another Slate staffer doesn't steal from my mailbox. I just won't read him with the same frequency I did in the Times. But let's say that New York magazine pays somebody to put Rich's column in front of my face every month—something I encourage them to do. Will his monthly pieces about politics and culture be as timely as his weekly pieces, or will they puddle out like old Lewis H. Lapham essays in Harper's without that discipline?

The problem with leaving the Times is that nobody is bigger than the paper. Oh, journalists have left it for other big things—books of their own and The New Yorker, for example. But only a few of them—Seymour M. Hersh, Gay Talese, David Halberstam, for instance—become as big a deal outside the newspaper as they were inside it. That's not because the talents inside the paper aren't great; they are. It's just that there is no better real estate in all of journalism, nor is there a brand name in the biz that makes sources pay greater attention. You could quadruple the journalistic skill of, say, the Chicago Tribune's best reporter, by letting him begin all of his cold calls to potential sources, "I'm a reporter with the New York Times."

Rich is so far beyond having to lean on the Times nameplate to 1) do good work and 2) get noticed for it that I feel a little stupid even having to say it. But is he prepared to learn how much he relies on the Times platform, its continuity, and its audience to be Frank Rich? I hope he doesn't get lost on the cab ride from the Times to New York.

***

I've always admired Rich for how generous he has been in giving credit to other journalists, not a particularly Timesian trait. Give me credit for giving him credit with an e-mail to slate.pressbox@gmail.com or just follow me on Twitter, goddamnit, so I feel as though I've fulfilled my social media obligation for the day. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.) Ω

[Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large. He edited two city weeklies, Washington City Paper and SF Weekly, before joining Slate prior to its 1996 launch. Shafer has written on new media, the press, and drug policy for publications big (New York Times Magazine) and small (Inquiry). His "Press Box" column appears several times a week in Slate.]

Copyright © 2011 Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive Co.

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

Creative Commons License
Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves by Neil Sapper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at sapper.blogspot.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.



Copyright © 2011 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves