Wisconsin

WISCONSIN

WISCONSIN. Wisconsin's people have been molded by their diverse immigrant heritage, honest government born of midwestern progressivism, and glacial gifts of rich soils, scenic rivers, and about 9,000 freshwater lakes. Cradled between Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, and the Mississippi River, Wisconsin's population in 2000 was 5,363,675.

Exploration and Fur Trade

Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the Winnebago, Menominee, Chippewa, Potawatomi, Fox, and Sauk peoples lived in harmony with the rolling hills, grassland prairies, pine forests, and scattered marshlands that became the state of Wisconsin. Deer, wolves, bald eagles, trumpeter swans, sand hill cranes, geese, and other wildlife populated the land. Native Americans grew corn and potatoes, harvested wild rice, speared fish, and built over 90 percent of North America's effigy mounds.

Jean Nicoletin 1634 and subsequent French explorers recognized that the cold climate of the Lake Superior basin produced the richest fur-bearing animals in French North America. In 1673, the Jesuit Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet discovered the Fox River–Wisconsin River all-water route from Green Bay, via a one-mile land portage, to the Mississippi River. The Fox-Wisconsin river route connecting Forts Howard (Green Bay), Winnebago (Portage), and Crawford (Prairie du Chien) became the key to the Wisconsin fur trade for 150 years. Marquette named the area Wisconsin, which he spelled Meskousing, roughly translated as "a gathering of waters." French voyageurs (licensed traders) and coureurs de bois (woods rangers) lived among and intermarried with Native Americans. Wisconsin beaver pelts and other furs were shipped to France via Fort Mackinac and Montreal. The 1763 British victory in the French and Indian War resulted in Scottish fur merchants replacing the French in Montreal. British Canadians traded in Wisconsin even after the American Revolution, until the American John Jacob Astor gained control in the early 1800s.

Wisconsin Territory and Early Settlement

In 1832, the Sauk chief Black Hawk returned from Iowa with 1,000 Native American men, women, and children to farm the southwestern Wisconsin homelands from which they had recently been expelled by settlers. Unplanned conflict erupted between the U.S. Army and the Sauk, who retreated up the Rock River and westward to the Wisconsin River. Following a rejected surrender attempt at Wisconsin Heights, Black Hawk withdrew down the Wisconsin River toward Iowa. He was trapped near the Mississippi–Wisconsin River confluence in a massacre at Bad Axe that left 150 survivors. The Black Hawk War resulted in Native American cession of most Wisconsin land to the United States in 1832–1848, opening the way for rapid population growth, from 3,245 in 1830 to 305,391 in 1850.

The lead mine region of southwestern Wisconsin experienced an influx of migrants from the southern frontier of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri in the 1830s. They worked the mines, and gave the "Badgers" nickname to Wisconsin, because they burrowed into the earth like badgers. Family wheat farmers and shopkeepers from Yankee New England and upstate New York migrated to southeastern Wisconsin via the Erie Canal and Great Lakes in even larger numbers. As the majority, their territorial representatives passed an 1839 law prohibiting "business or work, dancing … entertainment … or sport" on Sunday. European immigrants would later ignore those restrictions.

Previously a part of Michigan Territory, Wisconsin Territory was established in 1836. It encompassed present-day Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and the eastern Dakotas. The territorial legislature selected the pristine and unpopulated Four Lakes wilderness (which would become Madison) to be the permanent state capital location over numerous other contenders, because it was both scenic and centrally located between the two population centers of the wheat-farming southeast and lead-mining southwest. Additionally, the Whig politician and land speculator James Doty owned much Four Lakes property, some of which he generously shared with legislators.

Statehood and Civil War

Wisconsin became the thirtieth state in 1848, establishing a 15–15 balance between free and slave states. The Wisconsin constitution and ensuing laws implemented the frontier concepts of elected judges, voting rights for immigrant noncitizens, and property ownership rights

for married women. Transplanted New Englanders, descended from the Puritans and carrying the religious conviction that slavery was a moral evil, meant that Wisconsin would become a flash point of abolitionism in the 1850s.

Underground railroad activity flourished in Wisconsin following the passage of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Wisconsin church colleges (Beloit and Milton) established by New Englanders regularly helped runaway slaves. When the abolitionist newsman Sherman Booth was arrested for inciting a Milwaukee mob that freed the runaway Joshua Glover from jail, the Wisconsin Supreme Court nullified the Fugitive Slave Act. A group met in Ripon, Wisconsin, in response to the Booth arrest and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and established the Republican Party. Despite competing claims, the Republican National Committee has historically recognized Ripon as the GOP birthplace.

About 75,000 Wisconsinites (10 percent of the 1860 population) served in uniform during the Civil War. Most of them trained at Madison's Camp Randall, where the University of Wisconsin football stadium of the same name now stands. The war stimulated prosperity for wheat farmers and lead miners. Wisconsin women who were active in the Sanitary Commission provided medical and food supplies to soldiers. They were instrumental in building convalescent hospitals for Union soldiers and Confederate prisoners in Wisconsin. Although most residents supported the war effort, antidraft sentiments were strong in some immigrant communities.

European Immigrants Populate Wisconsin

Wisconsin's population grew from 305,391 in 1850 to 1,315,497 in 1880, of which 72 percent were foreign born or of foreign parentage. Additional European immigrants helped double the population to 2,632,067 by 1920. More than one hundred foreign-language newspapers were printed in Wisconsin in 1900. Most European immigrants were poor farm laborers who were drawn to America's farm frontier, which included Wisconsin. Not only could they find familiar work, but over time could own farms that dwarfed the largest old-country estates.

Due to their diverse backgrounds, Wisconsin's immigrants usually settled in communities and neighborhoods with their own countrymen. Consequently, for example, Koshkonong developed a Norwegian identity, Berlin a German identity, Monroe a Swiss identity, and Milwaukee neighborhoods were clearly Polish or Irish or German. The Fourth of July was celebrated exuberantly in immigrant communities as a statement of loyalty to the United States.

Wisconsin was populated most heavily by immigrants from Norway and the Germanies, but large numbers of Irish, Poles, English, Danes, Swedes, Swiss, Dutch, Belgians, and others also came. Most Hispanics, Greeks, Italians, southeast Asians, and African Americans from the South arrived later. Norwegian farmers formed the power base of twentieth-century La Follette progressivism. Germans from Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and elsewhere organized the turnverein (gymnastics) and liederkranz (singing) societies. Many Finnish dockworkers in Ashland and Superior embraced International Workers of the World union radicalism. Racine's J. I. Case and Mitchell Wagon Works had "Danes only" employment policies for decades. Wisconsin's rich and varied immigrant heritage is still celebrated in annual community events such as Stoughton's Syttende Mai (17 May, Norwegian Independence Day), New Glarus' Heidi Festival and William Tell Pageant, Jefferson's Gemuetlichkeit Days, and Milwaukee's International Folk Fair.

Pine Lumbering: Paul Bunyan's Footprints

Pine lumbering dominated northern Wisconsin from 1865 to 1920. Lumber barons such as Governor Cadwallader Washburn and Senator Philetus Sawyer controlled state politics. Lumber operations determined rail routes in the region, and the depots became the hubs around which Wisconsin small towns developed. With the exception of iron mining communities (Hurley) and shipping centers, most northern Wisconsin communities began as lumber or sawmill towns.

Lumberjacks cut trees from dawn to dusk during harsh Wisconsin winters. They lived in barracks, and their enormous appetites became legendary. As melting ice cleared, lumberjacks conducted huge river drives and faced the constant dangers of logjams up to fifteen miles long. After logs were processed by downstream sawmills, Wisconsin lumber was used by Milwaukee, Chicago, Great Lakes ships, and Mississippi River steamboats for construction and fuel. Iron and copper mines in northern Wisconsin and upper Michigan consumed lumber for mine shafts and smelting. When the process to manufacture paper from wood pulp was developed, the once separate paper and lumber industries were linked. Dairy farms used lumber for barns, fences, and fuel.

Northern Wisconsin's economy rose and fell with lumbering. When only the pine barrens remained, land values and population of northern Wisconsin counties declined from 1920 to 1970. Tax-delinquent land and abandoned farms were all too common until after World War II. Remaining woodlands were located primarily in national and state forests and on reservations.

Red Barn Country: America's Dairyland

A sign over the barn door of the dairy farmer W. D. Hoard (who served as governor from 1889 to 1891) carried the reverent reminder that "This is the Home of Mothers. Treat each cow as a Mother should be treated." Dairying became Wisconsin's agricultural giant as the wheat belt shifted to Kansas in the post–Civil War decades. Norwegian, Dutch, and German immigrants were familiar with dairying. Hoard founded Hoard's Dairyman magazine (1885) and the Wisconsin Dairyman's Association, and successfully promoted mandatory annual tuberculin testing for cows. Refrigeration added extensive milk and butter sales to an already profitable international cheese market. The University of Wisconsin College of Agriculture provided inventions (cream separator and butterfat tester) and improved breeding, feeding, and sanitary techniques to all Wisconsin farmers. By 1930, there were 2 million cows and 2,939,006 people in Wisconsin, and in rural counties the cows were in the majority. After the 1930s, Rural Electrification Administration power lines allowed farmers to milk by machine instead of by hand.

Although Wisconsin became "America's Dairyland," some farmers concentrated on hogs, corn, vegetables, hay, and other grains. The Door County peninsula became a leading cherry producer. Potato and soybean expansion came later. Almost all farmers raised chickens and joined their area farm cooperative.

Wisconsin family farms became a basic social unit as well as an efficient food producer. Neighbors collectively "exchanged works" during planting and harvesting seasons, and helped "raise" each other's barns. Their children attended one-room country schools from first through eighth grade. Farm social life centered around barn square dances, church socials, the county fair, and the country school. Until the advent of the automobile and tractor, workhorses pulled the plough, and livery stables and hitching posts dotted village business streets.

Industry and Transportation

Wisconsin's early industry was related to agriculture. Farm implement manufacturing (J. I. Case and Allis-Chalmers), meatpacking (Oscar Mayer and Patrick Cudahy), and leather tanning created jobs. Flour milling was the leading industry in 1880, and was surpassed only by lumber products (Kimberly-Clark paper) in 1900. The dairy industry was number one by the 1920s. Wisconsin's numerous breweries (Miller, Pabst, Schlitz, and Huber among them) were established by German immigrants. Ice harvesting provided refrigeration for the early dairy, meat, and brewery industries.

In the twentieth century, automobile (General Motors and Nash) and motorcycle (Harley-Davidson) manufacturing grew along with small-engine (Evinrude and Briggs Stratton) production. Oshkosh-b-Gosh jeans, Kohler plumbing ware, Ray-o-Vac batteries, and Johnson's Wax became familiar names worldwide. Machine tools and missile-control systems were less familiar but equally important components of Wisconsin's economy.

Wisconsin transportation evolved with the state's industrial growth. Inefficient plank roads and the old Military Road gave way to Milwaukee-based railroads that linked the rest of the state to Great Lakes shipping. Madison and Milwaukee city streetcars, mule driven and then electric powered, were replaced by buses. Paved-road construction steadily accelerated in the twentieth century, spurred initially by pressure from bicyclists. By the late twentieth century, Wisconsin's Midwest Express had become a major airline.

Progressivism and Politics

Wisconsin became a twentieth-century laboratory for progressive reform under the leadership of Robert La Follette (governor, 1901–1906; U.S. senator, 1906–1925) and his successors. Progressives democratized state politics by establishing the open primary election system, and democratized economic opportunity by creating state regulatory commissions. Wisconsin passed the first workers' compensation (1911) and unemployment compensation (1932) laws in the nation. Legislation required the creation of adult technical schools statewide. Public utilities were regulated. La Follette's sons "Young Bob" (U.S. senator, 1925–1947) and Philip (governor, 1931–1933, 1935–1939) continued the progressive tradition. Progressivism in Milwaukee translated into Socialist Party control of city government from the 1890s to 1960. The Socialists stayed in power by being good-government moderates who created neighborhood parks, improved city services, and won votes from the German ethnic population.

Conservation of natural resources has been a hallmark of twentieth-century Wisconsin progressivism. The Forest Crop Law (1927) encourages reforestation. The U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison conducts wood, pulp, and paper research with a goal of more efficient usage. The state buyout and restoration of the Horicon Marsh began in 1940. Governors Gaylord Nelson (1959–1963) and Warren Knowles (1965–1971) signed Outdoor Recreation Act programs that became international conservation models. U.S. Senator Nelson (1963– 1981) sponsored the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and founded Earth Day.

Wisconsin had been a one-party Republican state since the Civil War. In 1934, the La Follette brothers left the Republican Party and formed the Wisconsin Progressive Party. Following a decade of Progressive versus Republican rivalry, the Progressives disintegrated. Youthful ex-Progressives joined the moribund Democratic Party and built it into a political equal of the Republicans by the 1960s.

Wisconsin during Two World Wars

During World War I, tensions ran high in Wisconsin. Many first-generation German Americans bought German war bonds prior to the U.S. entry into the war and were sympathetic to the old country throughout. Most Wisconsin families contributed their sons or home-front efforts to the war, even though the neutralist senator Robert La Follette and nine of the state's eleven congressional representatives voted against the declaration of war.

A generation later, Wisconsin was loyally in the World War II home-front lines with the rest of the nation. About 330,000 Wisconsin citizens served in uniform during the war, and more than 8,000 of them were killed in action. State industry rapidly converted to World War II production. The Badger Ordnance Works sprouted from farm fields near Baraboo to produce ammunition. General Motors and Nash Rambler plants assembled military vehicles. Ray-o-Vac developed leakproof batteries and manufactured shell casings and field radios. Allis-Chalmers made bomber electrical systems. Oscar Mayer packaged K rations. Manitowoc's Lake Michigan shipyard built 28 submarines, which would sink 130 Japanese and German warships. The University of Wisconsin developed the U.S. Armed Forces Institute to provide correspondence courses for soldiers recuperating in military and veterans' hospitals, many of whom enrolled at the University of Wisconsin on the GI Bill after the war.

Wisconsin Life in the Twenty-first Century

Cultural, educational, and recreational opportunities provide a high quality of life in modern Wisconsin. Free public education, the State Historical Society (1846), the Wisconsin School for the Visually Handicapped (1849), and America's first kindergarten (1856) established a state educational tradition. The University of Wisconsin (Madison) opened its classrooms in 1848 and was recognized worldwide as a leading research and teaching institution by 1900. The university's WHA Radio is America's oldest operating station. Alumni Research Foundation support has led to breakthroughs in cancer treatment. The Madison and Milwaukee Symphony Orchestras are nationally acclaimed. Two medical schools, at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and the Medical College of Wisconsin (Milwaukee), result in high-quality health care throughout the state.

Wisconsin Badger football transcends the events on the field. Friday fish fries, Lutheran church lutefisk suppers, and Door County fish boils became beloved institutions. The Green Bay Packers, community-owned since the Great Depression, are so-named because the team founder, Curly Lambeau, a meatpacking-house worker, convinced his employer to buy the first uniforms. The annual Circus Train from Baraboo's Circus World Museum culminates in the Milwaukee Circus Parade. Northern Wisconsin holds the cross-country Birkebeiner ski race. Prior to the Milwaukee Brewers, baseball's Braves counted more than 300 booster clubs statewide during their Milwaukee years (1953–1965). Oshkosh hosts the annual Experimental Aircraft Association Fly-in. Wisconsin Dells' amphibious "ducks" (converted World War II landing craft) show river-and-woods scenery to tourists. Wisconsin's natural outdoor beauty invites people to fish, camp, hike, hunt, and boat.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gard, Robert E. The Romance of Wisconsin Place Names. Minocqua, Wis.: Heartland Press, 1988.

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Ballantine, 1970.

Logan, Ben. The Land Remembers: The Story of a Farm and Its People. Minnetonka, Minn.: Northword Press, 1999.

Thompson, William Fletcher, ed. The History of Wisconsin. 6 vols. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin Press, 1973–1998.

Wisconsin Blue Book. Madison: Wisconsin Legislative Reference Library, 1931–. Various publishers before 1931. Biennial since 1879.

Wisconsin Cartographers' Guild. Wisconsin's Past and Present: A Historical Atlas. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.

Wisconsin Magazine of History. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin Press, 1917–.

Richard Carlton Haney

See also Black Hawk War ; Dairy Industry ; French Frontier Forts ; Fur Trade and Trapping ; Lumber Industry ; Milwaukee ; Progressive Party, 1924 ; Sauk ; University of Wisconsin ; Wisconsin Idea .