MCCARTHY AND THE WISCONSIN IDEA

...McCarthy's first and greatest contribution to the goal was the creation of the Legislative Reference Library...

...He understood, too, that no glib political formula, no politician's panacea, would reach these problems...

...If the Man from Mars stayed a while to study the situation, he might understand how a people infused with the Wisconsin Idea could reject the plausible platitudes and the glib panaceas of a visiting politician...

...His study of history had furnished him a broad background and an integrated social philosophy...

...He received his Ph.D...

...The roots of Wisconsin's progressivism lay deep in the agrarian discontent which swept the Middle West in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century...

...in Wisconsin, by combining soil with seminar, it produced the Progressive movement...

...He understood the task before the democratic forces of the state—"the development of the efficiency of the individual and the safeguarding of his opportunity, the jealous guarding of the governmental machinery from the invasion of the corrupting force and might of concentrated wealth, the shackling of monopoly, and the regulating of contract conditions by special administrative agencies of the people...

...This "bill factory," often under fire, gave expert, technical assistance to the representatives of the people...

...was humble enough on paper, McCarthy brought to it energy, imagination, and a devotion to democracy...

...OLD Bob La Follette worked with these masters of the new research, translated their findings into the language of the political stump, and taught them to the people of Wisconsin...

...Reactionaries, too, have drawn occasional hope from some political accident, only to sink back in dismay when the wheel of fortune turned again...

...Other states imitated the Wisconsin practice, and McCarthy sent young men he had trained to organize and preside over other legislative libraries...

...It freed the amateur lawmaker from the domination of the executive and the influence of the lobbyist, and it insured laws, free from loopholes, that could stand the scrutiny of the courts...

...The second ingredient in Wisconsin's political progressivism was the research work of the social scientists in the University of Wisconsin...

...Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, E. A. Ross, and Frederick Jackson Turner—some of them refugees from Johns Hopkins, which had turned conservative —began the seminar method in the University, and their students unearthed facts and formulated programs of social, economic, and political reform...

...Fighting Bob and the blunt, dynamic Irishman did not loaf or play together...

...Only by "patient research and care," by trial and error, by constructive experimentation could the goal be reached...

...At times, the state's social and economic legislation has drawn the outraged fire of the Chicago Tribune, and at times its skepticism about imperialistic programs has aroused the hysterical ire of Anglophiles and interventionists...

...True it is that the Yankees, Germans, and Scandinavians who settled the state were socially mature, possessed of a relatively high degree of culture, and brought with them political opinions which were slightly "left of center...

...It was based, too, on a belief that administrative agencies, created to deal with the problems, must be responsible to an intelligent and informed electorate...

...they only worked together to perfect the governmental institutions of a democracy...

...There, the Populist virus infected the Republican Party, only to break out again in the progressive movement and the "Wisconsin Idea...

...For half a century Wisconsin's progressivism has been in the national limelight...

...More important than good stock and good leadership in accounting for the Wisconsin phenomena is the strange mixture of soil and seminar that has entered into the state's politics...

...But American observers—though many of them were angry—were not amazed...

...in history in 1901 (his doctoral dissertation on the Anti-Masonic Party won the Justin Windsor Prize of the American Historical Association) and took a job as "document clerk" with the Free Library Commission...

...Incidentally, McCarthy and La Follette were not intimate...

...Which may, also incidentally, help further to refute the oft-repeated distortion that the Progressive movement was merely a personal possession of the La Follettes...

...In other states, discontent had furnished food for demagogues...

...In those years railroads, mortgage companies, grain elevators, and lumber corporations exploited the western farmers, driving them to seek remedy first in the Granger movement and Granger laws and then in Populism...

...McCarthy's interests were always those of an educator...

...At times, liberals have found Wisconsin a shrine of ? inspiration, and, at other times, when the state did not follow them in some starry-eyed pursuit of the will-o'-the-wisp, they have turned their backs in confused despair...

...The Peoples Party channeled and directed the boiling discontent for a few short years, then spent its substance in following William Jennings Bryan and disappeared into the Democratic Party...

...He was, moreover, one of the originators of the state system of vocational education...

...Oar even how such a people might hesitate to sign an undated blank check on the Bank of International Settlements...

...But the population was not sufficiently different from that of other neighboring states to account for the difference between Wisconsin and the rest of the Middle West...

...Probably, in the beginning, the University was actuated only by a desire to obtain cheap teachers, but it offered haven and a pittance to scholars whose heresies were anathema to more conservative institutions...

...They had learned to expect Wisconsin to be different...

...Charles McCarthy, Massachusetts-born son of Irish immigrants, came to Wisconsin in 1898 to study history under Frederick Jackson Turner...

...He might understand, too, how such a people might be skeptical about the patch-work "fix-and-freeze-prices" experimentation of the New Deal...

...Born of a union of soil and seminar, the Wisconsin Idea was dedicated to the theory that society's problems can be solved by careful study and patient experimentation...

...Actually, the politician and the professors stimulated each other: The professors studied the problems of the state, and La Follette gave them assurance that their conclusions could be TSuilt into political institutions...

...It is not due, as is frequently claimed, to any peculiar character of the Wisconsin population or to the political persistence of the La Follette family...

...Bob La Follette, McCarthy drafted a civil service bill, a public utility bill, the railroad commission act, the income tax law, a water power bill...

...TRUE, too, the La Follettes—Fighting Bob and his two sons—have furnished a half century of brilliant and aggressive leadership...

...For Gov...

...The correlation of politics and scholarship in Wisconsin is illustrated in the recent book, McCarthy of Wisconsin, by Colonel Edward A. Fitzpatrick...

...He believed, too, that the University should extend its teaching facilities beyond the campus...

...He began the correspondence work of the University, and was practically the founder of the University's Extension Division...

...From 1901 until his death in 1921, McCarthy's career illustrated the workings of the Wisconsin Idea...

...Wisconsin's progressivism cannot be dismissed as a mere personal reflection of the La Follettes...

...But other states have had political families of patriotism, acumen, and belligerency, and of even greater longevity, without their leaving indelible marks on state or national politics...

...For the more than four decades of the 20th Century, Wisconsin's government and politics have been in the nation's headlines...

...the Man from Mars —political pundits often like to picture the perplexities of a mythical Martian visitor—it might seem passing strange that a man who had so lately discovered the unity of the globe should have permitted the disapprobation of so small a portion of the earth's surface to wreak his undoing...

...Although the job...

...He believed that the University and the state government should pool their energies in serving the people...

...McGovern, McCarthy served on the State Board of Public Affairs, and helped organize the National Conference on Marketing and Farm Credits and an American Agricultural Organization Society...

...This institution was designed to furnish information, documents, clippings, etc., to members of the legislature, but McCarthy soon added a drafting department to aid legislators in framing their bills...

...Under Progressive Gov...

...Beyond Wisconsin, he helped establish, and served with, the Federal Commission on Industrial Relations and the War Food Administration...

...MCCARTHY'S hand was in almost every piece of Progressive legislation from the turn of the century to the World War...

...Only in Wisconsin did the discontented farmers remain politically articulate...

...The phenomena has an explanation...

...Reviewed by William B. Hesseltine THE recent, and in some circles much lamented, retreat of Wendell Willkie before a set of election statistics has served to bring Wisconsin once again into-the nation's consciousness...