The Real History of the Recall in Wisconsin
There is a coordinated right-wing effort to rewrite Wisconsin history to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the recall of Governor Walker. The stakes of this revisionist history could not be higher. The transparent objective is to persuade a small but decisive group of voters that they should not recall Governor Walker even if they disapprove of his conduct in office. One of the right’s propaganda mills is disseminating the myth that the original framers of Wisconsin’s recall amendment, the progressive movement led by “Fighting Bob” La Follette, would have opposed its use against Scott Walker. This is a stunning assertion.
Given the high stakes of getting the history right before voters participate in this historic election, Citizen Action of Wisconsin asked one of the leading historians of the Progressive Era in Wisconsin, Professor John Buenker, to analyze the right-wing history of the recall. Buenker finds that the Wisconsin progressives who framed the recall amendment were seeking to create a democratic check against corporate corruption and control of Wisconsin government, and the politicians who do the bidding of wealthy special interests. The recall is being used in 2012 as it was intended by the La Follette era progressives. The progressives of his era who put the recall in the Wisconsin Constitution would have thrilled to see people over 80 years later holding a Governor accountable for misleading the public during his campaign at the behest of billionaires and corporate interests, and once elected perpetrating a sneak attack on rights and the livelihoods of working people.
It is critically important that as many as possible know the true history of the recall, and the true intentions of the progressives who placed it in our Constitution, before June 5th.
The REAL HISTORY OF RECALL IN WISCONSIN [May 15, 2012]
Introduction by Robert Kraig, Ph.D.
Executive Director Citizen Action of Wisconsin
In today’s Wisconsin, even history is no longer safe from right-wing spin. Hoping to peel off a small but potentially decisive slice of voters, Governor Scott Walker and his well-funded conservative backers have sought to rewrite history to discredit the concept of recall itself. They even have the audacity to cite “Fighting Bob” La Follette, the father of the progressive movement in Wisconsin, as an authority against the recall of Scott Walker. This is the “say anything” school of public relations taken to a shocking extreme.
The Wisconsin Public Policy Research Institute (WPRI), the Bradley Foundation funded right-wing advocacy group, is seeking to give intellectual legitimacy to this counterfactual position, dedicating an entire edition of its monthly magazine to a history of the recall in Wisconsin, and placing an OPED in leading newspapers. In the introduction to the magazine issue the organization’s president, George Lightbourn, explains that WPRI decided to send “our resident history buff,” Christian Schneider, to spend a few “days digging through the archives.”
As a trained scholar myself who spent 5 years in a cubicle at the Wisconsin State Historical Society Library researching my own book on the Progressive Era, I am stunned that WPRI thinks that one can deeply understand the historical context of anything by spending a couple of days in the library. In many ways, this is the difference between conservatives and progressives. Conservative “think tanks” grab anything they can use to promote their preconceived ideology, where progressives believe that the acquisition of knowledge can deepen our understanding of a complex world.
Given the high stakes of getting the history right before voters participate in the historic recall of Governor Walker, I asked one of the leading historians of Progressive Era Wisconsin, Professor John Buenker, to analyze the WPRI’s supposed history of the recall. Buenker is the author of a definitive history of the period, The History of Wisconsin: The Progressive Era, 1893-1914 and the 1911-1912 Wisconsin Blue Book feature article “Progressivism Triumphant: The 1911 Wisconsin Legislature.” Professor Buenker spent 15 years researching his book on the Wisconsin Progressive Era, and therefore has a deep understanding of the historical context which produced the recall amendment.
In his essay Professor Buenker explains that the recall was one of a series of reforms Wisconsin progressives proposed to break the stranglehold of corporate special interests on state government and to establish direct power for average people.
Buenker debunks the WPRI history of the recall, concluding that it suffers from the historical fallacy of “presentism,” working backwards from one’s own biases and using historical documents to reconfirm a predetermined worldview. What emerges in the WPRI documents is a tortured Alice in Wonderland history where La Follette era progressives have a view of elections and government compatible with the conservative supporters of Scott Walker.
One major distortion of the historical record in the WPRI history of the recall is what Buenker calls “a strange appeal to authority,” the claim the La Follette era progressives would have opposed the way the recall is being used in 2012. The key to the argument is a complete misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of what the La Follette progressive meant by “special interests” and “moneyed interests.” It is true that progressives saw the recall as a way to reduce the grip of special interests and big money. The WPRI argues, from its own worldview, that as organized labor is spending significant resources on the recalls, the recall of Scott Walker is strengthening the special interests that the La Follette progressives were attempting to dethrone.
This is absurd, and as Professor Buenker concludes “a historical.” The term “special interests” in the political lexicon of the La Follette progressives meant large corporate interests and the robber barons of the era which had a stranglehold on state government, and certainly not organized labor. The recall was specifically designed to provided a popular check on the domination of the early 20th Century predecessors of Walker’s wealthiest supporters, the Koch Brothers, the Texas billionaire behind the swift boat ads, the Beloit billionaire to who he revealed his “divide and conquer” strategy, ALEC, and the WMC.
Another major distortion identified by Professor Buenker exemplifies just how atrociously bad the WPRI history really is. The WPRI argues that modern communication technology, especially social media, has frustrated the original intentions of the recall, which was to be an unusual mechanism used only in exceptional circumstances, by making it as easy as “pressing a button.” In the La Follette era, the WPRI contends, “few people would likely even know a recall effort was underway unless they heard about it from a neighbor.”
As Professor Buenker points out in his essay, this interpretation betrays a shocking ignorance of (or willingness to distort) the progressive era and the way the La Follette era progressives wrested governing power from entrenched corporate interests. As any serious student of the era knows, the early 20th Century saw the highest development of the advanced print age which featured hundreds of daily and weekly newspapers which kept the electorate arguably better informed than modern electronic communications. In addition, the La Follette progressives were masters of new communications and organizing techniques, mobilizing average Wisconsinites on a scale that was not seen again until the Madison uprising of 2011. While social media offers a new and important way to “by pass the power structure,” as Buenker puts it, this capacity was also at the heart of the progressive insurgency 100 years ago which did so much to shape modern Wisconsin and inspire a national movement that led to the major reforms of the century.
As Professor Buenker’s essay makes clear, despite the WPRI’s attempt to distort and torture the historical record, the recall was created by its original framers for the kind of situation we face in 2012. In fact, Walker’s support by large corporate interests and his open conspiracy with a handful of billionaires to undermine the rights and livelihoods of working people is exactly the kind of abuse that La Follette and his allies crusaded against so effectively. There is little doubt that “Fighting Bob” La Follette himself, where he alive today, would have been an outspoken advocate for recalling Scott Walker.
Because we are progressive reformers who challenged the status quo, Citizen Action of Wisconsin does not have the money and access to the power structure that the WPRI has to propagate their distortions of history. We need concerned citizens to get the word out. Please circulate Professor Buenker’s essay as widely as you can. Although social media is not as all-powerful as the WPRI claims, it is a great 21st Century tool to go around the moneyed interests and take control of our own democracy. We need to make the most of it. READ/DOWNLOAD COMPLETE ARTICLE
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