A View of Wisconsin

SPRING comes late to Wisconsin, and northern farmers often wait well into April for the first robin, which heralds the start of the planting season.

A new brand of Presidential politicking has brought another harbinger of spring to the state. Long before the first robin will blow in from the South, farmers have begun to notice flocks of students moving in from Eastern colleges. They are part of Sen. Eugene McCarthy's "kiddie corps" canvassing voters for the April 2 Presidential primary.

The students offer Wisconsinites a refreshing relief from the hardened politicos who pass through the state every four years, their heads swimming with thoughts of 72 counties, ten Congressional districts, X number of delegates to the national convention. Most students descend on Wisconsin with only Rand McNally memories of the state as a cheese-colored mitten, its thumb thrust into a pale blueness labeled "Lake Michigan."

This idyllic if incomplete image is soon shattered by the realities of Wisconsin politics. "Of all fifty states of the Union," writes Theodore White in Making of the President 1960, "Wisconsin is probably that state in which professional politicians most hate to tempt a primary." It is a vast and rugged land, and in political terms, unorganized and totally unpredictable.

In 1960, pollsters predicted that John Kennedy would win nine of the state's ten Congressional districts from Hubert Humphrey. The Massachusetts Senator carried only six districts, however, with a scant 56 per cent of the popular vote.

Specters of past Presidential aspirants haunt the history of Wisconsin primaries--Sen. Arthur Vandenburg in 1940, Wendell L. Wilkie in 1944, Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1948.

McCarthy must also realize that candidates who do manage to survive Wisconsin often die at the national conventions. This "Wisconsin whammy" has twice befallen Estes Kefauver, the choice of state Democrats in 1952 and '56, who lost the nomination both years to Adlai Stevenson.

As a political weather vane for the national election, the Wisconsin primary--pioneered by Gov. Robert La-Follette in 1903 as the first in the nation--has failed to bend even to popular hurricanes. In 1932, Wisconsin Democrats went for Al Smith, the rest of the nation for Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1952, state Republicans chose Robert A. Taft, while everyone else liked Gen. Dwight Eisenhower.

Throughout its 120-year history as a state, Wisconsin has held an improbable rendezvous with the bizarre. It has given the world Thorsten Veblen and the Ringling brothers, Jack Lemmon and Joe McCarthy, Billy Mitchell and Frank Lloyd Wright, Edna Ferber and Harry Houdini. The state's contributions to American education include the first kindergarten and the first panty raid. It is the birthplace of the Gideon Society and the Republican Party.

The land itself is bizarre. Five times glaciers have moved down into Wisconsin, grinding and scraping and reshaping the countryside. In the north, the glaciers left behind jagged red granite cliffs and tickly-wooded hills. In the south, these hills break down into gentle kettles and morraines, the pock-mark measures of the glaciers' farthest reach.

The north is the land of Paul Bunyan, the giant lumberjack whose footprints remain as tiny wooded lakes. Wisconsinites brag that they have more lakes than Minnesota, which supposedly has ten thousand. The north is hunting and fishing country that has attracted such outdoorsmen as Pres. Eisenhower and Al Capone, and which each year draws thousands of tourists from the Chicago suburbs.

The south is dairy country--the most productive in the world. Wisconsin supplies one-seventh of America's milk, more than any other state. It also leads in the production of cheese and milk cow and heifer herds. The rich dark prairie land of the southwest corner--the "driftless area" missed by the glaciers--yields wheat, corn and hogs.

TO get an idea of the political geography of the state, it is helpful to draw a line from Chicago northward 200 miles to Green Bay, home of football's world champion Packers. Bring the line southwest 125 miles to Madison, the clean capital and university center, and then back southeast 125 miles to Chicago again.

Within this rough isosceles triangle, 80-miles in maximum width between Milwaukee and Madison, the two largest cities, 55 per cent of the state's population lives on 15 per cent of the land.

The Milwaukee-West Allis greater metropolitan area, with one-and-a-quarter million people, produces farm machinery and tractors, automobile parts and, of course, the beer that has made it famous. South of Milwaukee, in a 50-mile megopolis reaching into Illinois, are the heavy manufacturing centers of Racine and Kenosha--Wisconsin's third and fourth largest cities with close to 100,000 people each.

The triangle contains not only most of Wisconsin's urban and industrial development, but also the finest farmland. In addition to its proximity to metropolitan markets, the triangle offers better soil--plus the longer growing seasons afforded by Lake Michigan.

One-third of Wisconsin voters live in the Chicago-Milwaukee megopolis, in which the Democrats' traditional big-city machines still reign. This fact dictates state-wide strategy. "When I plan a campaign for Wisconsin," says Pat Lucey, long-time state Democratic leader, "I plan two campaigns--one for Milwaukee and one for the rest of the state."

Only one-sixth of "the rest of the state" lives on farms, contrary to Wisconsin's reputation as "America's Dairyland." The remainder -- just about half of the total population--lives in small cities and towns scattered throughout the state.

Although urbanization has become the marked feature of Wisconsin's population, as of growing areas everywhere, the state remains 36 per cent rural compared to 30 per cent for the United States. This rural population is not synonymous with farm population, since over half of it is found in towns with under 2,500 people.

Here is the distinctive feature of Wisconsin's urbanization: much less of the population concentrates in a few large urban centers than is true of the rest of America. In other words, Wisconsin is urban but not highly metropolitan. Wisconsin-born Thornton Wilder captured the flavor of the state in Our Town, although he indelicately set the play in New Hampshire.

MANY small towns are made up of recent emigrants who still identify with their former farms and rural homesteads. Most Wisconsinites, in fact, consider their state a "farm state," though the ranks of actual farmers have been diminishing, particularly in marginal agricultural areas in the north and west. In 1967, the state lost about 2,000 farms. One- fifth of the remaining 116,000 fall into poverty levels as defined by OEO. About 5,000 farmers in the lowest ranges hold part-time jobs to supplement their incomes. With this changing trend of recent years, Democrats have made inroads into the traditionally Republican farm vote.

Historically, the political dialogue in Wisconsin has been between LaFollette Progressives and conservative Republicans. As Theodore White put it, "Progressives were the first party, Republicans the second and the Democrats a poor third."

With the collapse of the Progressives after World War II, this pattern was destroyed. Sen. Robert LaFollette Jr. rejoined the GOP, which his father had dominated a generation earlier, only to lose to Joseph McCarthy in the 1946 Republican primary. Since then, the Republicans have captured ever increasing control from the Progressives, who have shifted--along with the state as a whole--toward the Democratic Party.

UNTIL recent years, Democrats did not win state office in Wisconsin. As late as 1938, they could claim only eight per cent of the general vote. In 1957, William Proxmire became Wisconsin's second Democratic Senator in the century by capturing the seat left vacant by the death of Joseph McCarthy. The next year, Gaylord Nelson--now also a U.S. Senator--became the second Democratic Governor in the century.

This gradual shift of Wisconsin voters to the Democratic ranks may be seen in the composition of the two state bodies, the Senate and the Assembly. The 100-man lower house had one to six Democrats during the '20's. FDR swept in an all-time high of 50 in 1932, and there were 11 to 26 in the '40's and 24 to 55 in the '50's. Today Democrats hold 47 Assembly seats.

In the 33-man Senate, there were zero to two Democrats in the '20's, a high of 14 in 1935, three to six in the '40's, and seven to 15 in the '50's. Twelve Democrats currently hold Senate seats. In addition, both of Wisconsin's U.S. Senators and three of its ten Congressmen are Democrats.

In political terms, the most significant fact about Wisconsin is its ethnic structure and background. Unlike most other Western states, Wisconsin was settled by immigrants who came directly from continental Europe. Despite some emigration from New England in the Jacksonian era, most of the first settlers were refugees of the political upheavals of Europe in 1948 and thereafter. Wisconsin's population grew from 30,000 in 1840 to 305,000 in 1850 to 776,000 in 1860.

European immigration has left Wisconsin with a distinct state culture rather than a microcosm of the national culture. Early settlers brought native European culture with them--their food, dress, dances and community customs.

In Wisconsin, these Old World cultures never submerged in the great American melting pot as they have elsewhere. The state's culture is a pot of mulligan stew, with each ingredient clearly distinguishable: the Norwegians near Mount Horeb, the Swiss in New Glarus, the Icelanders on Washington Island. German can be heard on the streets of most cities and towns.

The University of Wisconsin's Department of Rural Sociology has isolated 23 different ethnic stocks as dominating various sections of the state. German, Polish and Norwegian are the leading foreign stocks, with German dominating 51 counties, Norwegian 11 and Polish two.

The predominant German population holds authority in high regard, particularly on the family level, and this could mean support for the authority of President Johnson. On the other hand, Germans also have great respect for Wisconsin universities and colleges, which are among the best in the nation. Even Joe McCarthy, who searched Harvard and other Eastern universities for Reds, carefully refrained from implicating the University of Wisconsin--despite its long liberal and socialist traditions.

THE fact the Eugene McCarthy has mobilized Wisconsin colleges -- both students and faculties -- will mean additional votes for him. Harvard students may be of more marginal value, since voters are often uneasy about what they consider "super-sophisticated" Easterners. Harvard volunteers must be prepared to talk politics over beer and bratwurst in cross-roads taverns.

A more imponderable factor in Sen. McCarthy's campaign is the traditional isolationism of German and Scandinavian groups, which has somewhat dissipated since the late '30's. As a result of Catholic and Protestant missionary work in China and Japan, many Wisconsin congregations identify with Asia. The state's stand on the war, however, has never been put to the test.

Probably the biggest plus that McCarthy carries into Wisconsin is his religion. The state is one-third Catholic, and more than 40 per cent of the primary vote will be cast in Catholic Democratic cities in the east. In the 1960 Kennedy-Humphrey contest, it was estimated that up to three-fourths of Wisconsin Catholics voted Catholic.

The Protestant majority consists of several large Lutheran denominations (about one-fourth of the state), as to be expected of a heavily German and Scandinavian ethnic population. The Jewish population is about two per cent and concentrated largely in Milwaukee County.

White "backlash" is an important new force in Wisconsin politics. The 1960 census listed 2.4 per cent of the state's population as "non-white." Over 80 per cent of this group is Negro, with 15 per cent Menomonie Indian. Non-whites make up 3.2 per cent of urban areas and 6.7 per cent of central cities. Since 70,000 of the state's Negroes live in such cities, and only 5,000 in the rest of the state, the race issue has not yet confronted many Wisconsinites. One-tenth of the counties have no significant Negro population.

Racial prejudice nevertheless runs high in rural Wisconsin. Despite liberal state legislation, many small