Political Science Term

THE FALL OF

WISCONSIN

THE CONSERVATIVE CONQUEST OF A PROGRESSIVE

BASTION AND THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN POLITICS

DAN KAUFMAN

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

Independent Publishers Since 1923

New York   |   London

For Juliette and Luca

And to the memory of my parents, Jerry and Judy

The question will arise and arise in your day, though

perhaps not fully in mine, which shall rule—wealth or

man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill

public stations—educated and patriotic freemen, or the

feudal serfs of corporate capital?

—EDWARD G. RYAN, CHIEF JUSTICE OF WISCONSIN, 1873

CONTENTS

Prologue

1. THE PEOPLE’S HOME

2. DIVIDE AND CONQUER

3. THE LAST DEER ON EARTH

4. THE MODEL FOR THE COUNTRY

5. WORKER AGAINST WORKER

6. THE SEVENTH FIRE

7. WHICH SHALL RULE, WEALTH OR MAN?

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

THE FALL OF

WISCONSIN

PROLOGUE

Hillary Clinton was confident about winning Wisconsin. Throughout the lead-up to the 2016 election, she had never

trailed Donald Trump in a single poll, and Wisconsin had

not gone for a Republican presidential candidate since

1984, when Ronald Reagan swept every state except

Minnesota. Her confidence was reflected by not going there

—even once—during the campaign. Pundits echoed

Clinton’s surety. “Wisconsin looks like a blue wall there for

Hillary Clinton?” a Milwaukee news anchor asked NBC’s

Chuck Todd three days before the vote. “It does,” Todd

replied. Or as Rachel Maddow said a few months earlier on

MSNBC: “The Republican Party really, really, really wants

Wisconsin to be a swing state—not true.” She went on:

“Even as Republican presidential candidates lose there

year after year after year—I mean even Michael Dukakis

won Wisconsin, right?—Republicans still have kept their

hopes alive that Wisconsin could be theirs.” If you looked at

recent presidential elections, there was little reason to

doubt the end result. In 2008, Barack Obama trounced John

McCain in Wisconsin by fourteen points; four years later, he

beat Mitt Romney comfortably by seven.

Some of Clinton’s supporters were planning to gather on

election night at a Marriott in Middleton, a Madison

suburb, for a joint victory party with the Democratic Senate

candidate Russ Feingold. Feingold had held one of the

state’s Senate seats for three terms before losing in 2010

to the Republican Ron Johnson, a wealthy political novice,

in a shocking upset. In 2016, Feingold was heavily favored

to win the rematch. His race tightened the week before the

election, but he still led in every poll save one.

Feingold’s campaign had asked Chris Taylor, a

Democratic assemblywoman from Madison, to help with his

press that evening. Taylor was not confident of the

outcome. She had canvassed for Democrats in rural Iowa

County the summer before the election and remembered

the indifference, and sometimes hostility, she was greeted

with. A few people slammed the door in her face. “These

should have been easy doors for us: A lot of them were

Democrats,” she said. “It was worrisome.”

Early on Election Day, Taylor, who was also on the ballot,

took her two boys, Sam and Ben, to a busy intersection on

Madison’s Near East Side. The three of them wore “Chris

Taylor for Assembly” T-shirts and held signs, waving at the

cars honking their support. It was a clear and bright

autumn day with a brisk wind blowing off Lake Monona a

block away. Dozens of people had shown up to join Taylor

and her kids. Someone brought doughnuts and hot

chocolate for the volunteers, and the gathering turned

festive. Taylor, though nervous, believed Clinton would pull

it out.

In the afternoon, Taylor drove to the hotel for her press

shift. Around seven, an hour before the polls closed,

Feingold’s staff began receiving unsettling reports of low

turnout in Milwaukee, a Democratic stronghold. By nine

o’clock, Feingold’s prospects looked grim, and Clinton’s

chances in Florida and Pennsylvania were slipping away.

“People were looking to me for reassurance,” Taylor said.

“They came up to me, crying: ‘Oh my God, Chris. What are

we going to do?’ ” Outwardly, Taylor maintained her calm,

but she too started to worry that Clinton would lose

Wisconsin.

Taylor tried to comfort people, telling them not to give

up hope, that returns from heavily Democratic Dane

County, which includes Madison, were still coming in. But

the state’s rural areas, including some of the towns and

villages Taylor had canvassed, delivered strongly for

Trump. Soon Taylor began panicking. Around ten, Feingold

emerged into a large ballroom ashen-faced and visibly

shaken. “Something is happening in this country tonight,”

he told his supporters in a brief concession speech. “I don’t

understand it completely. I don’t think anybody does.”

People in the room started breaking down, crying.

Taylor left after Feingold’s speech. She could no longer

face the press. “I had been spinning Feingold was going to

win,” she said. “I just couldn’t deal with it anymore. I ran to

my car and called my husband. He and I just cried on the

phone together.” Taylor drove home and watched the

returns in her living room. She saw Trump win

Pennsylvania and Republicans make gains in both houses of

the Wisconsin State Legislature. Democrats held on to a

mere thirty-five of ninety-nine state assembly seats; in

2009, after Obama’s election, they had fifty-two.

Around one in the morning, Taylor straggled to bed

knowing Trump would win Wisconsin. A half hour later, the

networks called it, awarding Trump Wisconsin’s ten

electoral college votes, which pushed him past the 270-vote

threshold needed to win the White House. Wisconsin had

just made Donald Trump president. “Wisconsin! Wisconsin.

Wisconsin was barely in play!” Megyn Kelly said on Fox

News. On CNN, Jake Tapper called the result “stunning.”

Before she fell asleep, Taylor recalled a meeting she had

with Democratic colleagues in the assembly months before

the election. One of them assured Taylor that with Trump

on the ticket, it would be a wave year for the state’s

Democrats. “I remember thinking to myself: ‘You idiot!

Republicans have a network, they have an infrastructure.’

We don’t. We might pick up a seat or two here and there,

but until we have an infrastructure as strong as theirs,

we’re going to lose,” she said. “Few people in the country

are aware of the mightiness of their network, but he should

have known.”

DONALD TRUMP’S VICTORY may have shocked the Clinton

campaign and media pundits, but the result merely

heralded the final stage of Wisconsin’s dramatic

transformation from a pioneering beacon of progressive,

democratic politics to the embodiment of that legacy’s

national unraveling. Powerful conservative donors and

organizations across the country had Wisconsin in their

sights years before the 2016 presidential election, helping

Governor Scott Walker and his allies systematically change

the state’s political culture.

Wisconsin’s history made it an especially attractive and

important target. In the early twentieth century, native

icons like the populist senator and governor Robert La

Follette, who was known as Fighting Bob, and movements

like Milwaukee’s pragmatic “sewer socialism” forged a

progressive tradition that withstood the most calamitous

events of the twentieth century. La Follette instituted

numerous reforms—direct primaries, a ban on corporate

donations to political candidates, civil-service protections—

to encourage citizen participation in government and help

establish Wisconsin as a bastion of democratic ideals.

“Democracy is a life, and involves continual struggle,” he

wrote in his autobiography. “It is only as those of every

generation who love democracy resist with all their might

encroachments of its enemies that the ideals of

representative government can even be nearly

approximated.”

Throughout the twentieth century, Wisconsin led the

country in devising pioneering legislation that aided the

vast majority of its citizens. In 1911, the state legislature

established the nation’s first workers’ compensation

program, a progressive state income tax, and more

stringent child-labor laws. The following year, President

Theodore Roosevelt described Wisconsin as a “laboratory

for wise, experimental legislation aiming to secure the

social and political betterment of the people as a whole.”

The state’s progressive spirit continued for generations,

influencing the entire country: Wisconsin created the first

unemployment-insurance program, and it was the first

state to recognize collective bargaining rights for public

employees. Indeed, much of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New

Deal, including the Social Security Act, was drafted by

Wisconsinites loyal to the Wisconsin Idea, an ethos that

placed a moral obligation on the University of Wisconsin to

serve the citizens of the state. More broadly, the Wisconsin

Idea encouraged legislation, informed by the expertise of

the university’s faculty, aimed at creating a more equitable

society. Its humanistic reach extended to Great Society

programs like Medicare, designed by another Wisconsinite

under its sway decades later. More than any other state,

Wisconsin embodied Supreme Court Justice Louis

Brandeis’s hope that states might become “laboratories of

democracy.”

THE FALL OF WISCONSIN is the story of how the state went from

a widely admired “laboratory of democracy” to a testing

ground for national conservatives bent on remaking

American politics. It traces the ways Wisconsin’s century-

old progressive legacy has been dismantled in virtually

every area: labor rights, environmental protection, voting

rights, government transparency. Those efforts have been

wildly successful, culminating in Wisconsin’s startling

deliverance of the White House to Donald Trump.

By the time Speaker of the House Paul Ryan declared he

would be returning home to Janesville rather than running

for reelection, Wisconsin had seen one of the largest

declines of the middle class of any state in the country. Its

poverty rate had climbed to a thirty-year high; the state’s

roads were the second worst in the country; the University

of Wisconsin–Madison had fallen, for the first time, out of

the rankings of the country’s top five research schools. A

study estimated that 11 percent of the state’s population

was deterred from voting in the 2016 presidential election

by Wisconsin’s new voter ID law, one of the strictest in the

nation.

How could this have happened?

To tell this story, I’ve relied on citizens who bore the

brunt of the assault on long-cherished ideals and policies.

They chose to fight back—and continue to do so in the face

of enormous odds, a testament to their perseverance and a

shared conviction that they might one day reclaim

Wisconsin’s progressive heritage.

But The Fall of Wisconsin is also a story about the

direction of America as a whole. It explores whether the

state’s democratic ideals can persist in an era of increasing

division and inequality. Wisconsin, after all, once had what

any pragmatic citizen might admire, even covet: clean air

and water, transparent government, good public schools, a

world-class state university, and a strong tradition of

supporting labor rights for its workers. Precisely because

of those attributes, the state became a target for national

conservatives. As Scott Walker boasted in his memoir, if he

could change Wisconsin, he and his allies could “do it

anywhere.”

In the end, this is a story that addresses a concern

central to every American: If conservatives cannot tolerate

a state that offers what Wisconsin once did, what kind of

future is there for the American citizen?

1

THE PEOPLE’S HOME

On April 8, 1837, Ole Knudsen Nattestad, his younger brother Ansten, and a mutual friend set out on skis from

their home in Numedal, a valley in southeastern Norway,

determined to immigrate to America. They took only the

clothes they wore, knapsacks, and the equivalent of 800

dollars between them. “People looked at us with wonder

and intimated that we must have lost our senses,” Ole later

wrote of his journey. “They suggested that we had better

hang ourselves in the first tree in order to avoid a worse

fate.”

Ole had always dreamed of becoming a farmer, but while

managing his family’s property, he quickly discovered how

difficult it was to survive by farming in Norway, where only

3 percent of the land is arable. “I entered upon my task

cheerfully, worked with all my might and kept a careful

account of income and disbursements,” he later wrote. “To

my great surprise, I soon found that in spite of all my toil

and prudence, I did not make much headway. When the

year was ended, I had little or nothing left as a reward for

my labor.” Ole abandoned the idea of farming to become a

traveling merchant, but the practice was illegal at the time,

and he feared being arrested by local sheriffs. He tried to

become a blacksmith, but here too he came into conflict

with the law, which did not permit him to practice his trade

in his hometown.

Over Christmas, a friend described to Ole an article he

had read in a German newspaper, stating that no country

gave citizens greater freedom than the United States. “This

information had a magic effect on me as I looked upon it as

an injustice that the laws of Norway should forbid me to

trade and not allow me to get my living by honest work,”

Ole wrote. “Gradually I got to thinking of emigration and

while considering the matter on my way home, the idea

matured into a resolution. My brother Ansten did not have

to be asked a second time.”

When they left that April morning, the brothers and their

friend traveled from Numedal across the Blefjell mountains

to an adjacent valley, the site of a village called Tinn. Then

they skied over hills and through forests to the port town of

Stavanger, where they hoped to catch a boat to the United

States. The travelers began telling everyone in Stavanger

about their plans, but their excitement nearly cost them

their journey. Local officials heard of their intention to

emigrate and approached the men, asking for their papers.

After inspecting the documents, the officials said the

travelers’ passports, which included a certificate from a

pastor vouching for their “good habits and Christian

conduct,” would allow them only to stay in Stavanger.

Soon afterward, a stranger approached the migrants and

told them he had heard that authorities planned to arrest

them the following day and return them to their native

valley. “The government here,” the stranger told them,

“was in a bitter rage against all emigrants and we could not

count on any mercy.” He encouraged them to leave

Stavanger at once. They departed in darkness to avoid

being discovered and made their way to a nearby fishing

village, where they persuaded a local skipper headed to

Gothenburg, Sweden, to let them come along. There they

paid the equivalent of fifty dollars apiece for passage

aboard a ship. Thirty-two days later, they arrived in Fall

River, Massachusetts.

From Fall River they journeyed to Detroit, and then

Chicago, where they met up with other Norwegians,

including Ole Rynning, the leader of a group who had

immigrated to the United States earlier that year. Rynning

and a few others, including Ole, inspected a piece of land

for sale eighty miles south of Chicago, near a place called

Beaver Creek. The group decided to purchase it and build a

settlement there. Ole and another man stayed behind to

construct a log house, while the others returned to Chicago

to fetch their countrymen. About fifty people arrived, each

of them picking a plot. The Norwegians managed to build

enough housing to spend a comfortable winter, but in

spring the settlement flooded, and a malaria outbreak

devastated the community soon after. At least fourteen

people died, including Ole Rynning. Most of the survivors

fled to another Norwegian settlement elsewhere in Illinois.

Before he died, Rynning had written a comprehensive

book that detailed his new country’s government, soil,

religious tolerance, and immigration opportunities. Ansten

decided to journey back to Norway to try to publish it while

Ole struck out on his own and headed north. On July 1,

1838, he arrived about five miles past the Illinois border,

near a new hamlet called Clinton, in the Wisconsin

Territory.

“No other Norwegian had planted his feet on Wisconsin

soil before me,” Ole wrote. “For a whole year I saw no

countryman but lived alone without friend, family, or

companion. Eight Americans had settled in the town before

me but they lived about as isolated as I did. I found the soil

very fertile and the monotony of the prairie was relieved by

small bunches of trees. Deer and other game were

abundant. The horrid howl of the prairie wolf disturbed my

sleep until habit armed my ears against annoyances of this

sort.” In September 1839, Ansten returned to America,

joining his brother in Wisconsin. He brought several

Norwegian immigrants with him, and soon they established

a colony they called Jefferson Prairie, the fourth Norwegian

settlement in the United States.

Other Scandinavians began leaving in great numbers

too, for similar reasons—a lack of social mobility, a desire

for religious freedom—but above all to escape economic

hardship. Until the 1920s, waves of Scandinavian

immigrants fled devastating crop failures and famines: One

famine that swept Sweden and Finland in the 1860s caused

tens of thousands of deaths and forced many people to

survive on birchbark bread. The largest population of

Scandinavians to settle in Wisconsin were Norwegians,

whose migration rate soared in the 1840s, when the Irish

potato famine spread to Norway and caused the deaths of

some fifty thousand people. Many also fled for political

reasons—Norway emerged from four hundred years of

Danish rule in 1814, only to be taken over by Sweden later

that year. While class divisions persisted in Scandinavia,

the struggles of the region’s people to survive their harsh

environment helped forge a communitarian ethos many

immigrants brought to the United States.

The Norwegians were particularly grateful for the

freedom they found in their new homeland. In the 1840s,

Norwegian migrants founded a community in Muskego,

Wisconsin, southwest of Milwaukee, and in 1845, they sent

an open letter to the Morgenbladet, a newspaper in Oslo,

proclaiming the greatest gifts of their new home. “We have

no expectation of gaining riches,” the letter read. “But we

live under a liberal government in a fruitful land, where

freedom and equality are the rule in religious as in civil

matters, and where each one of us is at liberty to earn his

living practically as he chooses. Such opportunities are

more to be desired than riches.”

Wisconsin would not become a state for another few

years, but Ole and Ansten’s settlement there would play a

fateful role in the state’s character, both demographic and

political. Ansten had succeeded in getting Ole Rynning’s

book published in Norway. Called A Truthful Account of

America for the Instruction and Help of the Peasant and

Commoner, it captivated a desperate population, fueling a

wave of Norwegian immigration to the United States.

Ultimately, 800,000 Norwegians, 25 percent of Norway’s

entire population, emigrated to the United States between

1825 and 1925. Their top destinations were Minnesota,

North Dakota, and Wisconsin.

AS SCANDINAVIAN IMMIGRANTS began to transform Wisconsin,

the state began to transform American politics. On the

evening of March 20, 1854, fifty-three abolitionist

Democrats, Whigs, and Free Soilers (a short-lived party

opposed to the Western expansion of slavery) gathered in a

one-room schoolhouse in the little town of Ripon, seventy-

five miles northeast of Madison, and declared themselves

Republicans. It was a cold night, and people huddled

around the stove at the center of the little white

schoolhouse, debating for hours whether to form a new

party. Party allegiance, even to a party that no longer

represents one’s views, can die hard, and despite

antislavery fervor, some opposed the idea. But eventually

the faction supporting it prevailed, and the Republican

Party was born.

The events that drove those citizens together went back

six decades earlier, to 1793, when Congress passed the

Fugitive Slave Act, one of the first of many untenable

compromises that held the early United States together.

The law provided a slave owner or a bounty hunter the

right to capture a runaway slave in a free state and, with

only a slaveholder’s affidavit or oral testimony given to a

local judge, return the fugitive to bondage. As antislavery

sentiment grew in the North, so did defiance. Several

states passed “personal liberty laws,” which granted

fugitives the right to a trial by jury and offered protection

to free blacks, who were sometimes kidnapped by bounty

hunters. In certain states, these laws forbade police to

assist in the rendition of runaway slaves and even

prohibited the use of local jail cells.

Half a century later, fissures over slavery had grown into

a movement for Southern secession. Congress tried to

appease the slaveholding states with an updated Fugitive

Slave Act. The revised law imposed harsh penalties on

citizens and police who refused to comply, fining law

enforcement officials $1,000 for not cooperating and

punishing a person caught aiding a fugitive with up to six

months in jail. Abolitionists called it the “Bloodhound Law,”

for the dogs the slave catchers used to track down

runaways. The law gave rise to a wave of political violence

and one of the most fractious decades in American history,

which culminated in John Brown’s failed raid on Harpers

Ferry.

The new Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1850. By then,

Wisconsin had been a state for two years. Abolitionist

sentiment, already strong, grew with an influx of

immigrants known as ’48ers, liberal revolutionaries who

fled Germany after their 1848 rebellion failed at home. The

Germans settled mostly in Milwaukee, but antislavery

fervor ran throughout Wisconsin, including in Ripon.

Founded in 1849 by David Mapes, a former steamboat

captain from New York, Ripon’s political temperament

came from proximity to Ceresco, an 1,800-acre utopian

farming commune that had been established five years

earlier. Named for Ceres, the ancient Roman goddess of

agriculture, the community operated under the pre-Marxist

socialist principles of the French philosopher Charles

Fourier, whose ideology was briefly in vogue. Fourier

abhorred modern civilization and advocated sexual

freedom, women’s liberation—he coined the word

feminisme—and collective ownership. He envisioned a

society made up of “phalanxes,” self-sustaining agricultural

communities like Ceresco, which was also known as

Wisconsin Phalanx.

Wisconsin Phalanx closed in 1850, and Ripon drew many

former residents, as well as curious liberal reformers

attracted by its legacy from the East Coast. Among them

was a math professor and lawyer from upstate New York

named Alvan Bovay, who arrived that year with his wife and

their two-year-old son. Ripon had just thirteen houses then,

but it grew quickly after Ripon College was established, in

1851, with Bovay’s help. He would also prove instrumental

in the rise of the Republican Party. Bovay had left New York

a disaffected Whig angry at his party for not confronting

slavery, the central issue of the day. The Whigs disbanded

after failing to win the presidency, in 1852, and Bovay

began dreaming of a new political party that could unite

abolitionist Democrats, Free Soilers, and former Whigs to

defeat the ruling, pro-slavery Democrats. Bovay wanted to

call his new party “Republican,” after res publica, Latin for

“the common good.” Initially, Bovay received little support

for his idea, both in Ripon and from his close friend Horace

Greeley, the influential editor of the New-York Tribune.

But two major events intensified the furor over slavery in

Wisconsin. In January 1854, the Illinois senator Stephen

Douglas proposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, another

attempt at a compromise on slavery, allowing settlers in

new territories to determine whether they wanted to

become a slave state or a free one. The next month, Bovay

wrote to Greeley, urging him again to endorse a new party

in his paper that would “advocate calling together in every

church and schoolhouse in the free States all the opponents

of the Kansas-Nebraska bill.”

As he awaited Greeley’s reply, Bovay called a community

meeting on February 28 at Ripon’s Congregational Church

to agitate for his idea. The high-spirited gathering

concluded with the passage of a resolution threatening to

“throw old party organizations to the winds and organize a

new party on the sole issue of the non-extension of slavery”

if the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed the Senate. Four days

later, it did. Bovay quickly began organizing another

meeting with the intention of forming his new party. Among

those he pressed to come were former members of

Wisconsin Phalanx.

Eight days before Bovay’s planned meeting, furor over

the Fugitive Slave Act erupted nationwide when an

abolitionist mob liberated a runaway slave named Joshua

Glover from a Milwaukee courthouse jail. Glover had

escaped from slavery on a Missouri farm and made his way

to Racine, where he found work and built friendships in the

city’s small African American community. After two years,

his former owner, Benammi Garland, tracked him down

and, accompanied by federal marshals, knocked on Glover’s

cabin door. Glover did not open the door immediately—

rumors of a slave catcher in town had been circulating—but

a friend inside did. After a brief, violent struggle, during

which a marshal beat Glover in the head with the butt of a

whip, Glover was thrown, barely conscious and bloody, into

the back of a wagon. Fearing that the small jail in Racine

might be overrun by abolitionists, Garland and the

marshals rode twenty-five miles north to the Milwaukee

courthouse. Garland planned to transport Glover back to

slavery the next day under the legal rights granted to slave

owners by the Fugitive Slave Act.

A prominent abolitionist named Sherman Booth, who

owned a Milwaukee newspaper, heard about Glover’s

capture. Riding his horse through the streets of Milwaukee,

Booth shouted: “Free citizens who do not wish to be made

slaves or slave catchers, meet at Courthouse Square at two

o’clock!” Thousands of people answered Booth’s call and

assembled outside the courthouse. As the crowd swelled in

size, it grew angrier. The protesters demanded Glover be

given a fair trial and, after a tense standoff with a guard,

stormed the building, breaking down Glover’s cell door

with a wooden plank. They quickly put Glover in a wagon

that carried him to a safe house in Waukesha, a short ride

away. From there, Glover spent more than a month

traveling on the Underground Railroad, finally arriving

safely in Canada. Sherman Booth was tried and imprisoned

for violating the Fugitive Slave Act.

By the time of Bovay’s second meeting, the Glover affair

had enraged Ripon’s abolitionists, and despite initial

resistance, Bovay’s idea prevailed. “We went into the little

meeting held in a school house Whigs, Free Soilers, and

Democrats,” Bovay wrote afterward. “We came out of it

Republicans.” They were, Bovay noted, “the first

Republicans in the Union.”

MANY OF WISCONSIN’S Scandinavian immigrants quickly

gravitated to the new Republican Party, identifying with its

abolitionist founding principles. Egalitarian values led

Scandinavian settlers to form agricultural cooperatives and

disproportionately support the trade union movement.

Finnish migrants, for example, were instrumental in

organizing unions in northern Wisconsin’s dangerous

mines.

The Scandinavian political worldview, characterized by

pragmatism and social modesty, was captured in Thorstein

Veblen’s landmark critique of American capitalism, The

Theory of the Leisure Class. Published in 1899, Veblen’s

socioeconomic treatise introduced the idea of “conspicuous

consumption,” which defined American consumerism as

morally corrosive and class-stratifying. Veblen was born to

immigrant parents in Cato, Wisconsin, a Norwegian

farming enclave near Lake Michigan. He did not speak

English until he entered school, and his community in Cato,

and later in Minnesota, emphasized modesty for the

cohesion of the collective. Those same norms were

expressed in a more negative light in the Law of Jante, a

series of dictates articulated in a novel by the Danish writer

Aksel Sandemose that, while fictional, are widely accepted

in Scandinavia as accurate descriptions of its mores. Two of

Sandemose’s most revealing edicts: “You’re not to think

you are anything special” and “You’re not to convince

yourself that you are better than we are.”

This communitarian mind-set would foster an openness

to the welfare state, which is viewed differently in

Scandinavia. That difference is captured in the Swedish

word folkhemmet, “the people’s home,” a nickname for the

welfare state. “It implies that all people should feel safe,

protected here,” Julie Allen, a professor of Scandinavian

studies at Brigham Young University, told me. “It’s so

different than how we view welfare, which is as handouts.”

The people’s home, Allen said, is about “lifting everyone

up.”

Soon after the Republican Party’s founding in 1854,

Alvan Bovay again wrote to Horace Greeley, sharing the

news, and this time Greeley embraced the new party,

endorsing it with an editorial in the pages of the Tribune.

“We should not much care whether those thus united

[against slavery] were designated ‘Whig,’ ‘Free

Democratic’ or something else,” Greeley wrote. “Though

we think some simple name like ‘Republican’ would more

fitly designate those who had united to restore our Union to

its true mission of champion and promulgator of Liberty

rather than propagandist of Slavery.” Word fanned out

quickly, and within months the party had established itself

as an important political outlet for abolitionists across the

country.

On July 6, 1854, the Republican Party had its first state

convention, in Jackson, Michigan. A week later, Madison

hosted the second. The following year, the Wisconsin

Supreme Court ruled the Fugitive Slave Act

unconstitutional, making Wisconsin the first and only state

in the nation to defy the federal law. Sherman Booth, the

Milwaukee abolitionist, was freed from jail. In 1856, the

Republican Party ran its first presidential candidate, John

Fremont, who lost to the Democrat, James Buchanan, but

won Wisconsin’s five electoral college votes. Four years

later, the state delivered them again to the Republican

ticket and its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, who captured

the presidency and then won the Civil War.

The commitment of Wisconsin’s Scandinavian settlers to

the Republican Party translated into the only non-English-

speaking regiment in the Union Army. A year after the

party’s founding, a fervently antislavery immigrant named

Hans Christian Heg joined the Republican Party, and two

years later, he went to the state convention as a delegate.

After the Civil War broke out, Heg organized a Norwegian

regiment that included 115 men whose first name was Ole.

Heg rose to the rank of colonel before Confederate soldiers

killed him in 1863, during the Battle of Chickamauga, in

Georgia. Wisconsin had become a Republican state,

enamored with the party’s dedication to the common good.

IN THE DECADE AFTER the Civil War, farmers in Wisconsin

coalesced around the Grange, an agrarian populist

movement that swept the Midwest. The Grangers battled

monopolistic railroads that gouged them on the costs of

shipping their crops. The railroad companies also

demanded that municipalities pay for much of the capital

costs needed to lay down new railroad lines. If farmers

organized resistance, the companies often threatened to

move the line elsewhere. At the same time, the Republican

Party, which controlled the Wisconsin legislature, had

become dominated by timber and railroad companies.

Candidates did not run without the tacit approval of those

interests. The corrupted process was made easier because

candidates were chosen by party delegates at state

conventions, not by voters in primary elections.

In 1873, however, the Grangers managed to elect a

reform-minded Democrat named William Taylor as

governor. The following year, Taylor mustered through a

bill called the Potter Law, which established a commission

overseeing the state’s railroads. Most important, the

commission had the power to regulate the rates railroads

charged. Two months after the law passed, two railroad

company presidents told Taylor they would not abide by it.

They considered the law unconstitutional. Wisconsin’s

attorney general brought a suit against the railroads which

was heard by the state supreme court, and decided in the

state’s favor. The chief justice of Wisconsin, Edward Ryan,

a Taylor appointee, issued the majority opinion. Ryan noted

that the companies had called the railroad commission an

“act of communism,” hyperbole that drew his outrage.

“These wild terms are as applicable to a statute limiting the

rates of toll on railroads, as the term murder is to the

surgeon’s wholesome use of the knife, to save life, not to

take it,” Ryan wrote.

In response, the railroads began a pressure campaign.

They offered free travel to legislators, halted construction

of new lines, and discontinued service to various towns. It

worked. Taylor was defeated in 1875, and the Potter Law

was repealed the following year. The Grange movement

soon vanished, too.

But the Grangers and Chief Justice Ryan made a lasting

impact on a young Robert La Follette, who was born on his

family’s farm twenty miles south of Madison, in 1855. “As a

boy on the farm in Primrose Township I heard and felt this

movement of the Grangers swirling about me,” La Follette

wrote in his autobiography. “I felt the indignation which it

expressed in such a way that I suppose I have never fully

lost the effect of that early impression.” In 1873, La

Follette, then eighteen, heard Ryan give a commencement

speech to the graduating class of the University of

Wisconsin Law School. “There is looming up a new and

dark power,” Ryan told them. “The accumulation of

individual wealth seems to be greater than it ever has been

since the downfall of the Roman Empire. The enterprises of

the country are aggregating vast corporate combinations of

unexampled capital, boldly marching, not for economic

conquests only, but for political power.” His talk issued a

chilling warning that marked La Follette forever. “The

question will arise and arise in your day, though perhaps

not fully in mine,” Ryan said. “Which shall rule—wealth or

man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill

public stations—educated and patriotic freemen, or the

feudal serfs of corporate capital?”

La Follette matriculated at the University of Wisconsin in

the fall of 1875. Five years later, after passing the

Wisconsin bar, he ran for Dane County district attorney,

challenging the party machine’s incumbent. At the Dane

County Republican convention, Eli Pederson, a Norwegian

farmer La Follette had known since childhood, gave a

passionate speech endorsing La Follette as “our boy.” The

Norwegians tended to vote as a block, and Pederson’s

speech delivered their votes to La Follette, who won a

surprising victory and the enduring hostility of the party

bosses. In 1884, the same rural voters helped propel La

Follette to the House of Representatives, where he served

three terms.

In the ensuing years, La Follette would become the most

influential political figure in Wisconsin’s history. Fighting

Bob would go on to serve the citizens of Wisconsin as a

Republican district attorney, congressman, governor, and

senator—a tempestuous conduit and catalyst for the

Progressive era.

Throughout his thirty-four years in office, La Follette was

driven by an uncompromising moral vision: The purpose of

government, he believed, was to alleviate economic

suffering, foster equality, and encourage active citizenship

to preserve American democracy. As he put it in an address

to a group of citizens in the small mining town of Mineral

Point, opening one of his campaigns for governor, “The

basic principle of this government is the will of the people.”

And he recognized the emerging threat from corporate

wealth and power:

Since the birth of the Republic, indeed almost within

the last generation, a new and powerful factor has

taken its place in our business, financial and political

world and is there exercising a tremendous influence.

The existence of the corporation, as we have it with us

today, was never dreamed of by the [founding] fathers.

The corporation of today has invaded every

department of business, and its powerful but invisible

hand is felt in almost all activities of life.

La Follette closed by imploring the audience not to give

up. “Think of the heroes who died to make this country

free,” he said. “Shall we, their children, basely surrender

our birthright and say: ‘Representative government is a

failure?’ No, never, until Bunker Hill and Little Round Top

sink into the very earth. Let us here, today, under this flag

we all love, hallowed by the memory of all that has been

sacrificed for it and for us, dedicate ourselves to winning

back the independence of this country, to emancipating this

generation and throwing off from the neck of the freemen

of America, the yoke of the political machine.”

La Follette’s class-based message forged an impregnable

political coalition; in his 1910 reelection to the United

States Senate, he won an astonishing 78 percent of the

statewide vote and all but one of Wisconsin’s then seventy-

one counties. The apotheosis of Wisconsin progressivism

was the 1911 legislature chronicled memorably by Frederic

Howe, an Ohio politician, in his book Wisconsin: An

Experiment in Democracy. Howe described how

Progressives had transformed the state into “an experiment

station in politics, in social and industrial legislation, in the

democratization of science and higher education” in which

“popular government is being tested in its reaction on

people, on the distribution of wealth, on social well-being.”

La Follette ran for president in 1924 on his own

Progressive Party ticket, capturing his home state and 17

percent of the national vote. A measure of his influence can

be seen in the fifty thousand people who came to pay their

respects after his death one year later, when his body lay in

rest at the state capitol, and in the condolences to his

family from President Calvin Coolidge, Eugene Debs,

William Randolph Hearst, and William Jennings Bryan.

In 1929, the sculptor Jo Davidson created a life-size

statue of La Follette for the National Statuary Hall in the

United States Capitol, one of only two Wisconsinites

honored there. Davidson also completed a bust of La

Follette, a copy of which was purchased in 1977 by the

state of Wisconsin and sits in the east wing of the state

capitol. It became a tradition for every Wisconsin governor,

Republican and Democrat alike, to be sworn in next to La

Follette’s bust.

SCANDINAVIAN-AMERICAN VOTERS and legislators helped win

passage of the reforms first championed by La Follette and

his fellow Progressives, and Wisconsin’s pioneering

workers’ compensation law and unemployment insurance

program both became models for New Deal initiatives.

Franklin Roosevelt himself praised Sweden: The Middle

Way, by the journalist Marquis Childs, at a news conference

in 1936, singling out the country’s cooperatives that

flourished within a capitalist system. Childs’s book made

the case for Swedish social democracy as a workable,

humanistic compromise between laissez-faire economics

and Stalinist state planning.

With Roosevelt in the White House, Wisconsinites began

migrating into Washington, and brought their political

legacy, particularly their affinity for social insurance, to

bear on the New Deal. Edwin Witte, an economics

professor who studied under the political economist John

Commons, left his Madison professorship in 1934 to lead

Roosevelt’s Committee on Economic Security in

Washington. Roosevelt tasked the committee with drafting

a program that would create security “against several of

the great disturbing factors in life—especially those which

relate to unemployment and old age.”

Witte invited several other Wisconsinites to join the

committee, notably Wilbur Cohen, who went on to design

the Medicare program in the 1960s, and Arthur Altmeyer,

later the commissioner for social security. Witte’s

committee studied Scandinavian, English, and German

models and eventually drafted the Social Security Act. The

law, which Roosevelt signed in 1935, included a framework

for national unemployment insurance, based on Wisconsin’s

1932 law. The New Deal demonstrated the Wisconsin Idea

on a national scale, introducing the first real social welfare

system in the United States.

Wisconsin’s embrace of a social safety net was made

possible, in part, by the region’s hundreds of thousands of

Scandinavian immigrants and their descendants, who

tended to be receptive to it. La Follette’s progressives

forged a durable rural-urban coalition in Wisconsin, while

Minnesota created the first Farmer-Labor Party, in 1918.

Scandinavian immigrants in the United States followed

progressive reforms in their home countries closely. When

Norwegian women won a series of legislative victories in

the early twentieth century, culminating in the right to

vote, Norwegian-American women began agitating for

suffrage in the United States. The interconnectedness went

both ways; Scandinavian governments built welfare states

that dissuaded many people from immigrating. That

migration cut off abruptly in 1924, when the Immigration

Act established a national-origins quota based on the 1890

census. “America must be kept American,” President

Coolidge said in his State of the Union address the previous

year, ending the great wave of Scandinavian migration that

had helped build a “people’s home,” both in the Upper

Midwest and in Scandinavia.

Despite this, Wisconsin’s progressive ethos was

entrenched and often bipartisan. In 1967, Governor Warren

Knowles and the Republican-controlled senate and

assembly enacted legislation granting collective bargaining

rights for all state employees. Even Governor Tommy

Thompson, a conservative Republican, crafted a new state

program in 1999 to provide subsidized health insurance for

low-income families with children. But after the 1976

Supreme Court case Buckley v. Valeo outlawed limits on

campaign spending, Wisconsin’s politics, increasingly

shaped by money, started becoming more like the politics

of other states, a similarity that would be exploited by

powerful national interests aligned with a new kind of

politician.

WHEN SCOTT WALKER was two years old, his father, Llewellyn,

moved the family from Colorado Springs to the little town

of Plainfield, Iowa, to take a pastor’s job at a small Baptist

church. In Plainfield, Scott, Llewellyn’s eldest son, started

a “Jesus USA” club in elementary school, and once went

door to door with an empty mayonnaise jar to collect

money to buy an Iowa flag for the city hall. In 1977, when

Walker was in third grade, Llewellyn got a new pulpit, at

First Baptist Church in Delavan, a town of about six

thousand in southeastern Wisconsin, and his family moved

again. When his father was sick, Scott sometimes delivered

the Sunday sermon to the church’s eighty-odd congregants.

During high school, Walker became an Eagle Scout and

was selected for a trip to Washington, DC, through the

American Legion’s Boys Nation program. After graduating,

he entered Marquette University, where he told Glen Barry,

a fellow student, “God has told me I’m chosen to cut taxes

and stop killing babies.” His political ambitions became

clearer when, as a freshman member of the student senate,

he led an investigation into whether student senate leaders

had billed their expensive homecoming dinner at

Milwaukee’s Pfister Hotel, as well as flowers and a

limousine, to student government accounts. Walker

endorsed impeachment for the accused, and was a

dramatic presence at the trial before the student senate.

“Did you know where these flowers for your corsage came

from?” he asked one of the defendants. As a sophomore,

Walker ran for student government president, though he

lost badly. In the spring of 1990, he dropped out of school

mysteriously to take a marketing job with the American

Red Cross. Though he never released his transcript from

Marquette, his staff has told reporters he left Marquette

voluntarily, with a 2.59 GPA.

Later that year, Walker ran for state assembly against

Gwen Moore, an African American congresswoman. It was

the only race for elected office he has ever lost. Walker won

a seat in the Wisconsin State Assembly in 1992,

representing Wauwatosa, a conservative suburban enclave

in Milwaukee County. He married his wife, Tonette, the

following year, on February 6, a date he chose because it

was Ronald Reagan’s birthday. (The couple celebrate their

anniversary by eating macaroni-and-cheese casserole and

red, white, and blue jelly beans, two of Reagan’s favorite

foods.) As a freshman state representative, Walker

cosponsored a “right-to-work” bill, which would forbid

unions from requiring the workers they represent to pay

dues. He joined the American Legislative Exchange

Council, better known as ALEC, a national organization

that pairs corporate lobbyists and conservative think tank

fellows with state legislators to craft and disseminate

model bills. But Walker attracted little notice during his

time in the state assembly.

In late 2001, a pension scandal in Milwaukee County

provided him with a political opportunity. County Executive

Tom Ament, a Democrat, had cut a deal with the American

Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees

(AFSCME), the public employee union representing

Milwaukee County workers, that gave tens of millions of

dollars in pension bonuses to county workers, most of it

going to those with at least twenty years of seniority. The

plan, which Ament helped create and then approved,

included an enormous payout for Ament himself: a lump

sum of $1.2 million when he retired, in addition to a

$37,000 increase in his annual pension, a jump of 25

percent. Anger over the scandal led to a recall effort

against Ament, who wound up forgoing the payout and

retiring rather than facing the voters. In 2002, Walker ran

for county executive in the Democratic-leaning county as

an unabashed conservative, and won.

IN JANUARY 2010, the Supreme Court issued the Citizens

United decision, allowing corporations and labor unions as

well as other advocacy groups to spend unlimited sums on

political advertising from their general treasuries as long

as they did not coordinate that spending directly with a

candidate. Despite an equal right to spend, the annual

revenue of the companies in the Fortune 500 alone is

hundreds of times larger than that of the entire union

movement. Citizens United also struck down part of the

2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law, which had

prohibited corporations and unions from running campaign

ads thirty days before a primary and sixty days before a

general election.

The ruling emboldened conservative donors and

advocacy groups. Americans for Prosperity, a political

advocacy group founded and funded by the billionaire

industrialists Charles and David Koch, vowed to spend $45

million on the 2010 elections. David Koch, who helped

bankroll the Tea Party, personally donated $1 million to the

Republican Governors Association. While the Republicans

were well funded and energized, Wisconsin’s Democrats

were demoralized. In August 2009, a scandal engulfed

Governor Jim Doyle, a two-term Democrat, when a reporter

discovered that Doyle’s chief legal counsel did not have a

license to practice law in Wisconsin. Doyle’s prospects

were already doubtful. Wisconsin had lost 140,000 jobs

since the beginning of the financial-crisis recession, forcing

the governor to raise taxes and furlough state workers in

the face of a $6.6 billion budget deficit. Confronting poll

numbers below 40 percent, Doyle announced shortly after

the scandal broke that he would not seek a third term. The

day he dropped out, his lieutenant governor, Barbara

Lawton, announced she was running. Lawton, a

progressive, had some statewide appeal, particularly

among women, but in late October she quit the race

abruptly, citing only “very personal reasons.”

In early November, a week after Lawton dropped out,

Patrick Gaspard, Obama’s political director, met with

Milwaukee’s mayor, Tom Barrett. That summer, Barrett had

become something of a folk hero after intervening on

behalf of a woman at the Wisconsin State Fair who called

for help when she and her one-year-old granddaughter

were being threatened by the baby’s drunk, violent father.

When Barrett came over to assist and began calling the

police with his mobile phone, the man attacked Barrett

with a lead pipe. One blow hit Barrett in the head and

broke several teeth, while another permanently damaged

his hand. Barrett was rushed to the hospital in an

ambulance and required multiple surgeries: when

President Obama and Vice President Biden heard about the

incident, they called to commend him on his bravery. After

Lawton dropped out, the White House reportedly pushed

for Barrett to run, and shortly after meeting Gaspard, he

announced his candidacy.

Meanwhile, Scott Walker had been courting working-

class voters. As county executive, he embarked on an

annual Harley-Davidson tour across the state. Ostensibly

meant to promote tourism in Milwaukee County, the

weeklong trip was seen by critics as little more than a

taxpayer-funded junket for Walker’s gubernatorial

ambitions and an effort to cultivate his image as a blue-

collar politician. But he also cultivated the support of

national conservatives. In 2004, Walker held two

fundraisers in Chicago, one of them attended by Karl Rove.

Four years later, he spoke at the Milwaukee stop of the

“Hot Air Tour,” a rally opposing government efforts to

mitigate climate change sponsored by Americans for

Prosperity.

In April 2009, Walker announced his candidacy for

governor. The Republican Governors Association spent $5

million on the Wisconsin election, and Walker also received

more than $40,000—his second-largest donation—from

KochPAC, the political action committee of Koch Industries.

In September, he was given a prominent speaking role at a

large AFP rally against the Affordable Care Act in

Milwaukee. “I’ve never been so proud in my lifetime to be

part of this angry mob,” the conservative provocateur

Michelle Malkin said during the rally’s keynote address.

Walker’s election strategy aimed at making inroads into

the Democratic Party’s labor base, and he scored an

important union endorsement from one of the building

trades, Operating Engineers Local 139, which had more

than 9,000 members statewide and built many of the

state’s roads. “I sat down and I talked to Mayor Barrett,

who was running for governor, and Walker,” Terry

McGowan, the union’s president, told me, explaining the

endorsement. “Mayor Barrett said we’re good with the

highway system we got, we just got to patch it, repair it.

Walker said no, we got to get the highway fund back up, we

got to build roads, continue to expand the infrastructure.”

Local 139 was the only statewide union to endorse Walker,

but he also received contributions from the pipefitters’ and

carpenters’ unions, and endorsements from unions

representing the Milwaukee police and firefighters.

Barrett’s campaign seemed to take labor for granted.

Dave Poklinkoski, the president of IBEW Local 2304, a

Madison electricians’ union, didn’t believe Barrett’s heart

was in the race. A few weeks before the election, the Utility

Workers Coalition, a group of utility locals that includes

Poklinkoski’s, held a conference and invited Barrett to

speak. The unions in the coalition represent 10,000

workers, but Barrett declined. “Here you are as an

organized labor person trying to get out the vote,”

Poklinkoski said. “But he wouldn’t come. It’s October: How

bad do you not want to be governor?” Poklinkoski

described how unmotivated many of his members were to

vote because of the Democrats’ indifference to labor. “I call

Walker ‘son of Doyle,’ ” Poklinkoski said, noting that during

Doyle’s first campaign for governor, in 2002, he promised

to cut 10,000 state workers.

The Tea Party wave put Walker over the top. He beat

Barrett by six points, his victory propelled by capturing

more than a third of union households. Democratic

disaffection contributed strongly to Barrett’s defeat; he

received 12 percent fewer votes than Doyle in 2006. For

the first time since 1998, the Republicans would control all

branches of state government.

Walker chose to stage his January swearing-in ceremony

in the capitol’s north wing, a deliberate break with

Wisconsin tradition. In the north wing, a reporter noted,

many of the attendees would have to turn their backs to the

bust of Fighting Bob.

2

DIVIDE AND CONQUER

Randy Bryce has been an ironworker for more than twenty years, but he wasn’t always a labor activist. He

grew up in Milwaukee’s “policeman’s ghetto,” a working-

class neighborhood on the city’s southwestern edge. His

stepfather, Richard, was a beat cop, and his mother, Nancy,

a doctor’s secretary. Nancy’s grandparents were

immigrants from Poland, and Bryce attended Mass with his

mother and his grandmother, Molly, at St. John Kanty, a

Polish church on the South Side. Molly would reward him

with a piece of candy if he spoke a Polish word for one of

her friends. He still remembers the pungent smell of

Molly’s czarnina, duck blood soup, and how it made him

flee the house and run out into the street.

Bryce’s only memory of his birth father, a Mexican

immigrant, is a box of crayons marked with “Enriquez,” his

father’s last name. Richard adopted Bryce and, along with

Nancy, raised him. A proud patrolman who never sought a

promotion, Richard could be forgiving, like the time he

pulled over a group of Bryce’s teenage friends for speeding

and let them go without a ticket. But he could also be

severe. When Bryce was eleven, Richard took him into his

precinct house, put him in a cell, and closed the door. “It

was a warning to follow the right path,” Bryce says.

Bryce attended Rufus King International High School, a

magnet school on Milwaukee’s north side, where he played

trombone in the school orchestra alongside the violinist

Gordon Gano, the future singer and guitarist of Violent

Femmes. Bryce was a mediocre student, and a few months

after graduating he enlisted in the army so he could pay for

college. It was the early 1980s, and the Cold War was

raging in Central America. Bryce trained to be a military

policeman at Fort McClellan, in Alabama, and then became

part of a rapid deployment force based at Fort Bragg,

North Carolina. For several months, he was stationed at the

Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras, then a launching point for

American covert operations in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

“My dad was conservative,” Bryce told me. “When I was

in the army, I was, too. I was into Reagan, but it was more

‘America first, USA, USA.’ The Russians were the devil was

the way I looked at it.” His job in Honduras was to guard

the air base’s “secret square,” where army officers

reviewed intelligence collected by surveillance planes

flying over the Nicaraguan border. The airplanes’

microphones were sensitive enough to hear a whisper on

the ground.

A few times a month, Bryce and the other soldiers got a

pass to leave the base. They would go to Comayagua, the

nearest town, where a group of impoverished children

would be waiting when the soldiers’ bus pulled up. They

hoped to shine the Americans’ shoes or show them the

village and earn a bit of money for something to eat. Bryce

picked out a boy named George, who stood out from the

crowd. Bryce felt bad for George because he saw the other

kids pick on him for having big ears. George would take

Bryce through the village, and Bryce would buy them a

meal. Before he had to return to Soto Cano, Bryce would

press a few dollars into George’s hand.

For decades, Fort McClellan, the base where Bryce

trained, had been used as a training site for chemical,

biological, and radiological warfare. Mustard gas, Agent

Orange, DDT, and other toxic materials had leached into its

soil and water. Additionally, the base was adjacent to the

town of Anniston, where, until the 1970s, a Monsanto plant

poured millions of pounds of cancer-causing PCBs into the

town landfill and creek. The company paid a settlement of

$700 million to 20,000 residents of Anniston, which was

once described in a 60 Minutes report as “America’s most

toxic town.” But the settlement did not include the soldiers

who trained at Fort McClellan, a disproportionate number

of whom were stricken with cancer at an early age. The

army has maintained there were no adverse health effects

from training there, but in 1999, the Environmental

Protection Agency ordered the base to close. After his

discharge, Bryce enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–

Milwaukee, but he dropped out after one semester when he

too was diagnosed with cancer.

Bryce lucked into an experimental trial at a medical

college, which cured him, and eventually landed a job

helping homeless veterans find shelter and medical care.

One day a veteran who had been exposed to atomic testing

during the Cold War showed Bryce his back. “It looked like

someone had poured acid on it,” Bryce said. Despite the

soldier’s wounds, the government wouldn’t help because he

couldn’t prove the injury was caused by exposure to a

nuclear test. Like many homeless vets, the man

disappeared. “You don’t know if you’ll see them again,”

Bryce said. “When I saw that the government wouldn’t help

the brother, or even acknowledge that he suffered, I almost

lost it.” That encounter marked the beginning of a shift in

Bryce’s politics. “It couldn’t have been made more clear to

me that vets were disposable resources,” he said.

When a federal grant funding his work with the vets ran

out, Bryce moved on to a series of odd jobs. He was

bartending and working security at a hospital when he

heard about the apprenticeship program of Milwaukee Iron

Workers Local 8. “I knew how to read a tape measure, that

was about it,” he remembers. The local’s apprenticeship

requires thousands of hours of on-site work and classroom

training. Apprentices earn 60 percent of full pay at the

start, with their wages increasing as they gain experience.

After four years of training, Local 8 apprentices take a

state certification test in welding and then a journeyman’s

test to become full-fledged union ironworkers. Work could

be spotty—it depended on the season and the economy—

and some years Bryce made as little as $30,000. But when

work was plentiful he could make double that, and unlike

non-union ironworkers, who learn the trade at a technical

college, Bryce had no student loans to pay back.

Over the years, Bryce worked on many of Milwaukee’s

landmarks. He helped repair the elegant tied-arch Hoan

Bridge, named for Daniel Hoan, a Socialist mayor and

pragmatic visionary who ran Milwaukee from 1916 to 1940.

From the bridge, you can see the Harley-Davidson

Museum, another touchstone for Bryce. He worked on that

too. When he drives by, he often remembers the Harley he

owned for many years, which he loved riding on the county

roads that crisscross Wisconsin’s rolling farmland. “It was a

way to reset myself,” he said.

Gradually, Bryce became more involved in the union. He

was grateful for what Local 8 had done for him—giving him

direction, a real career. When there was a job action, a call

to hold a banner outside a non-union job site or pass out

union literature to non-union workers, he would be there.

He also began to worry about Scott Walker, whose battles

with the public-employee unions as Milwaukee county

executive alarmed him. “I knew it was going to be bad,” he

said. “I just didn’t know how bad.”

In 2010, the year Walker ran for governor, Bryce stepped

up his involvement, going to meetings of the Milwaukee

Area Labor Council, an umbrella group of the Milwaukee-

area AFL-CIO locals. Since the late 1960s, the building

trades, which remain predominately white, had been

partially cleaved off from the rest of the labor movement.

But Bryce became one of the labor council’s most active

participants. “He came on his Harley with his mustache,

and I thought, ‘Oh my,’ ” Sheila Cochran, the longtime

secretary-treasurer of the Labor Council, told me. Bryce’s

passion immediately won Cochran’s respect, and she

endorsed him when he ran for the council’s executive

board.

Bryce’s work with the labor movement led to his showing

up at rallies for immigrants’ rights, Black Lives Matter, and

a fifteen-dollar minimum wage. A few years ago, Bryce lent

his hand to a unionization effort at Palermo’s Pizza, one of

the largest frozen-pizza makers in the country. Around the

same time as the union drive, Palermo’s terminated eighty-

four workers who could not produce documents confirming

their residency status. The company claimed the firings

were unrelated to the union campaign, but the workers

didn’t see it that way. About a hundred of them went on

strike, and Bryce, who was then the political coordinator

for Local 8, joined them. He was the only member of the

building trades to walk the picket line. “Whatever’s been

going on, I’ve usually been involved with,” he said. “Just

showing up and holding a sign and talking to people. It’s a

way of saying, ‘I’m an ironworker, and I am with your

cause.’ It’s something that keeps me going.”

AS BRYCE BECAME more active in the labor movement, union

membership in Wisconsin was withering, the economy was

in steep decline in the wake of the Great Recession, and

factories were closing throughout the state. In 2008, as

Bryce was trying to organize non-union job sites, the

General Motors plant in Janesville, one of the largest auto

plants in the state, was closing. It was built in 1919, and

when it closed, it was GM’s oldest. In the late 1970s, seven

thousand people worked there; by the end, there were

fewer than twenty-five hundred. The standard wage then

was $28 an hour, but many skilled tradespeople earned as

much as $45 an hour.

“This is private property,” a security guard told Tim

Cullen outside a side entrance to the abandoned plant

when we visited one summer day. Cullen briefly protested,

explaining that he was the area’s state senator for many

years, that he had once gone to Detroit to try and save the

factory. A Democrat, he had in fact served as cochair of the

GM Retention Task Force, which included Paul Ryan,

Janesville’s congressman and native son. The group

mustered $200 million in state and local money to entice

GM to keep the plant open, but the company declined.

The guard was firm: We had to leave. Cullen backed his

Buick out and pulled it around the corner to the front gate.

The two-minute drive revealed the factory’s mammoth

scale, nearly five million square feet. Cullen parked by the

front lot, which was empty, save for the weeds bursting

through disintegrating pavement.

“Now the manufacturing jobs that are left in Janesville

are almost all non-union,” Cullen said. “They pay between

twelve and seventeen dollars an hour with hardly any

benefits.”

Cullen’s father worked at the plant from 1948 until his

death, of a heart attack, in 1971. Cullen put himself

through college, at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater,

by working summers here. GM had a special program for

the sons of automakers, allowing Cullen to graduate with

no student debt. “No one ever thought about it then,”

Cullen wondered as he pulled his car out of the

entranceway. “Nor had I: What about the daughters?” We

cruised along, Cullen admiring Janesville’s egalitarian

housing, where autoworkers owned homes that looked

identical to those of local bankers and businessmen.

There were exceptions, however. “This is one of the few

rich streets in Janesville,” Cullen said, as he turned his

sedan onto a quiet, pastoral block. We were on Paul Ryan’s

street, his house given away by the black SUV and a

security agent posted in the driveway. The agent watched

Cullen’s car intently as we slowed down to take in Ryan’s

stately 1929 Georgian Revival mansion.

Ryan may have joined Cullen on the GM Retention Task

Force, but his home embodied his distance from the people

he represented. It has six bedrooms and eight baths,

befitting the previous owner, a scion of the Parker Pen

family. Parker Pen was founded in Janesville in 1888. Until

1986, when new owners moved the headquarters to

England, it was the second-largest employer in town, but

after that buyout, jobs began migrating overseas. In 2009,

Parker Pen closed its Janesville plant, ending the company’s

121-year relationship with the town. The last 153

manufacturing jobs in Janesville were transferred to

Mexicali, Mexico, a border town that boomed briefly after

NAFTA passed, before fading as jobs moved to locations in

Asia that promised even cheaper labor.

With the town stripped of these opportunities, Ryan

would go on to wage war on Obamacare, the welfare state,

and other critical pieces of the community’s safety net. It

hadn’t always been that way, Cullen told me. “At the

beginning,” he said, “almost everyone thought Paul Ryan

was this really good local guy.”

Cullen has known the Ryan clan since before Ryan was

born. One of his closest friends is Don Ryan, Paul’s elderly

uncle and a member of the road-building wing of the family.

(Paul’s father, who died when he was sixteen, was a

lawyer.) “Paul was a very likable guy—he has great

interpersonal skills,” Cullen told me. “He was bright and

young and wanted to represent Janesville, even though he

left here when he was eighteen.”

Later, running as Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential

candidate in 2012, Ryan would work to cast his upbringing

as a working-class, up-by-the-bootstraps experience. “When

I was growing up, when I was flipping burgers at

McDonald’s, when I was standing in front of that big

Hobart machine washing dishes, or waiting tables, I never

thought of myself as stuck in some station in life,” Ryan

said at a campaign stop at a suburban Denver high school.

Even after his father died in 1986, there was little reason

Ryan would ever be “stuck”: His family inherited a sizable

estate from his father, a share of an Aspen ski condo, and

an investment partnership from his maternal grandmother

worth as much as half a milion dollars. When he needed

work, he was able to get a job at his cousins’ road-building

company. He also received Social Security survivor benefits

from his father’s death, which he used to help pay for

college.

“Paul grew up wealthy,” Tuan Raphael, a friend of Ryan’s

from when they worked together at Camp Manito-wish, a

YMCA camp in northern Wisconsin, told me. For half a

summer, after Ryan’s freshman year at Miami University in

Ohio, Raphael and Ryan were roommates. After camp

ended, Raphael went to Janesville to hang out with Ryan for

a few days. “Nobody else was there,” Raphael recalled. “We

fired shotguns, drank beer, and went to his land. Their

house was nice, old nice. There was a sauna.” Ryan didn’t

discuss politics with him—“he was a frat boy”—but “he

already seemed like a politician. You know, shake hands,

kiss babies, kind of friendly networking.” Raphael, the child

of an African American serviceman and a Vietnamese

mother, left Vietnam in 1975, on the last flight of

Vietnamese orphans out of the country, and was adopted by

a Jewish family in Oak Park, Illinois. “Janesville is a redneck

town,” Raphael said. “But Paul never came off as a

redneck. His dad was a big name in that town, and Paul

was willing to take a black Vietnamese Jew to his house.”

After college, Ryan worked in Washington as a legislative

aide in the office of Wisconsin Republican senator Bob

Kasten. At night, Ryan waited tables at a Tex-Mex

restaurant. After Kasten lost to Russ Feingold in 1992,

Ryan took a speechwriting job with Empower America, a

conservative think tank cofounded by former congressman

Jack Kemp. When the congressional representative from

Ryan’s district, Mark Neumann, ran for senate in 1998, he

encouraged Ryan to run for the seat. Ryan, then twenty-

eight, won, largely because of his family’s prominence.

“He said he was going to answer all constituent needs,”

Cullen told me over a BLT and lemonade at an old-school

bar near Ryan’s house. “Nobody saw the true conservative

philosophy that he had.” After the 2004 elections, Ryan

began asserting that philosophy more aggressively, chiefly

by pursuing a long-sought goal of the libertarian right:

privatizing Social Security. The following year, Ryan

authored a plan that would allow individuals to invest half

of their payroll taxes in private accounts. Not only would it

drain the Social Security Trust Fund, it would leave

retirees’ savings vulnerable to a market crash. The Bush

administration pushed for a slimmed-down version of

Ryan’s proposal, one of the main reasons Republicans lost

control of the House of Representatives in 2006.

Despite his party’s wipeout, Ryan persisted with his

attack on the welfare state. In 2008, he unveiled his

“Roadmap for America’s Future.” The plan would replace

Medicare with cash payments to seniors so they could, in

theory, buy private insurance. Medicaid would be dissolved,

and in its place lump sums would be given to states for

them to spend however they wished. The “roadmap” also

contained a scaled-down version of Ryan’s Social Security

privatization scheme. “Ryan became more vocal about his

views, especially after Obama won,” Cullen said. “When he

was on the Romney ticket, he had a bigger national

platform.”

Projecting his narrative of hardworking, burger-flipping

upward mobility, Ryan channeled his self-made mythology

into an ethos of moral virtue and hatred of the welfare

state, a philosophy rooted in the work of Ayn Rand, who

had become his intellectual hero. “We don’t want to turn

the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people

into lives of dependency and complacency,” he said during

a press conference in 2012, “that drains them of their will

and their incentive to make the most of their lives.”

Paul Ryan never pretended to appreciate Wisconsin’s

political past. “What I’ve been trying to do is indict the

entire vision of progressivism,” he told Glenn Beck in 2010,

when he was ranking minority member of the House

Budget Committee. Ryan called progressivism a “cancer,”

as well as “the intellectual source for the big government

problems that are plaguing us today.” His upbringing in

Wisconsin, he told Beck, had given him an intimate

knowledge of this disease. “This stuff came from these

German intellectuals to Madison, University of Wisconsin,”

he said. The first progressives detached “people from the

Constitution and founding principles to pave the way for

the centralized bureaucratic welfare state.” To Ryan this

created “a culture of dependency on the government, not

on oneself.” Ryan described Wisconsin progressivism

almost as an enemy within. “I grew up in the orbit of

Madison, Wisconsin,” he told Beck. “I know who these

people are. I know what they think. I know what they

believe.”

IN 2011, with the economy showing signs of recovery, Bryce

got a job building an addition at a Nestlé factory. “The iron

we were working with was covered in ice,” he told me. “It

was the slipperiest stuff I ever dealt with. You had to take

your gloves off constantly to feel where the bolt hole was.”

Despite the difficulty, Bryce was grateful for the work. Jobs

had been scarce since the 2008 financial crash, especially

in the winter, and Bryce was barely scraping by. He had

been on and off unemployment, at one point relying on it

for close to four months.

On the afternoon of February 11, as he pulled into his

driveway after an eight-hour shift, he got a call from Colin

Millard, the ironworkers’ district business manager for

Wisconsin and Michigan. Agitated, Millard told Bryce that

Governor Scott Walker had just announced an assault on

the labor movement unlike any other. Millard was planning

to stage a protest in Horicon that Sunday afternoon,

outside the home of Jeff Fitzgerald, the speaker of the state

assembly. He asked Bryce if he could come. Bryce didn’t

hesitate. “I’ll be there,” he said.

A few hours earlier, Walker had held a press conference

in an ornate room of the Wisconsin state capitol, where he

announced his “budget repair bill,” which would become

known as Act 10. He began by praising the “good and

decent people” who work in state and local government.

But Wisconsin, he said, was in the throes of an economic

and fiscal crisis. Sacrifice was needed. To avoid layoffs,

furloughs, and children forced from the Medicaid rolls, he

said, public workers would be required to contribute one

half of the amount of their pensions and double the amount

they had been paying toward their health care premiums.

This drop in take-home pay would soon be estimated to

approach $1 billion a year.

Walker eventually arrived at Act 10’s distinguishing

feature: the gutting of collective bargaining. Collective

bargaining, which allows workers to have a unified voice in

the conditions of their employment, would now be

permitted only for wages, and then only for pay raises

capped by the rate of inflation. No longer would public-

sector unions have the right to address workplace safety,

grievances, health care, or benefits. Union dues would be

voluntary. The law required that union members vote to

recertify their unions every year, and to win recertification

they would need a majority of the entire bargaining unit,

not just the workers voting. Walker exempted local fire and

police departments, as well as the state patrol, owing to

“longstanding tradition” of those services being treated

differently. Critics noted that the Milwaukee police and

firefighter unions, as well as the Wisconsin Troopers

Association, had endorsed him.

Despite his hostility to unions, Walker had not

campaigned on making radical changes to labor relations.

During an interview with the editorial board of the Oshkosh

Northwestern a week before the election, a board member

asked him if collective bargaining would be used to

negotiate the increase in pension contributions he was

seeking from state workers. “Yep,” Walker replied, nodding

his head. “You still have to negotiate it. I did that at the

county as well.”

But eliminating collective bargaining rights may have

always been central to his plans. Two weeks after he was

sworn in, in a private exchange captured by a documentary

filmmaker, a billionaire donor to Walker’s campaign named

Diane Hendricks asked the governor if there was “any

chance we’ll ever get to be a completely red state, and

work on these unions.” Walker assured her that Wisconsin

would change. Hendricks then asked if Wisconsin would

ever become a “right-to-work” state. Walker responded

enthusiastically. “The first step is, we’re going to deal with

collective bargaining for all public-employee unions,” he

said, “because you use divide-and-conquer.”

At certain points during the press conference, Walker

adopted an authoritative tone. “This is what we have to

offer,” he said. “We are broke in this state. We have been

broke for years. People have ignored that for years, and it’s

about time somebody stood up and told the truth.”

Officially called the “Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill,” Act 10

was supposed to fix persistent budget shortfalls by making

public employees pay more for benefits and all but

eliminating collective bargaining rights. He described the

bill’s impact on the unions as “modest” eight times during

the twenty-five-minute event.

Privately, Walker saw it differently. In a widely publicized

prank phone call with a blogger impersonating David Koch,

Walker described the dinner he held for his cabinet at his

executive residence the night before his announcement. “It

was kind of the last hurrah, before we dropped the bomb,”

he said to the faux Koch. At the dinner, Walker had held up

a photograph of Ronald Reagan and told his cabinet that

what they were about to do recalled Reagan’s historic

breaking of the air traffic controllers’ union strike in 1981.

He singled out the firing of the controllers as “one of the

most defining moments” of Reagan’s political career—a

moment, he said, that “was the first crack in the Berlin

Wall.” Walker saw Act 10 in a similar light. “This is our time

to change the course of history,” he said.

BY THE TIME Walker announced Act 10, the first protest

against it—the one Colin Millard had called Bryce about—

was already being planned. Union leaders around the state

had been tipped off early: The day before the

announcement, Graeme Zielinski, the communications

director of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, received a

distressing phone call from a lobbyist for Wisconsin Energy,

the state’s largest utility company. He called to warn

Zielinski and Mike Tate, the state Democratic Party

chairman, that Walker planned an unspecified attack on

unions. “This was the first strike we knew was coming,”

Zielinski said. “We just didn’t know how radical it would

be.” After the lobbyist’s call, Zielinski immediately alerted a

list of activist union leaders and rank-and-file members.

“Graeme was the Paul Revere of Act 10,” Bryce told me.

One of the first union leaders to hear from Zielinski was

Millard. The pair had been outraged by Walker’s fights with

the public employee unions during his tenure as Milwaukee

county executive. Zielinski and Millard had followed Walker

along his final Harley-Davidson tour “across Wisconsin”—a

tour that also took in parts of Iowa, the host of the first

presidential caucus. The image Walker promoted, as a

champion of the working class, offended them. At many of

the stops, Millard would be waiting, holding an enormous

banner for hours. Don’t let Walker do to Wisconsin what he

did to Milwaukee County, it warned.

They planned a protest that would take place just two

days after Walker’s announcement, in Horicon, a town an

hour northwest of Milwaukee that is home to a unionized

John Deere plant. Horicon sits in Dodge County, where

three state prisons are staffed by unionized corrections

officers. Millard, who lived in the town, estimates that close

to 30 percent of the county’s work force was unionized,

twice the statewide rate. He deliberately scheduled the

protest for Sunday, when people wouldn’t have to miss

work, and contacted all the local unions in the area and

several others from farther afield. But both he and Zielinski

encountered intense pressure from their superiors in the

Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO to call the protest off.

On the Friday before the protest, just after he talked to

Bryce, Millard got a call from Phil Neuenfeldt, the head of

the Wisconsin AFL-CIO, telling him to cancel it. “They were

going to phone-bank instead, and try to convince a couple

of Republican legislators,” Millard said, laughing. “It was

obvious calling these guys was not going to change their

minds; they wouldn’t have announced it if they didn’t have

the votes.” Millard told his supervisor he would hold the

protest with or without his approval.

Mike Tate, Zielinski’s boss, ordered him to call it off too.

“The big boys were saying they were going to ride this

out,” Zielinski said. “I had a discussion and I was told no.”

Zielinski worried he might be fired, but he took inspiration

from Millard. “Colin said, ‘Fuck it—this is an emergency.

It’s time to break the glass.’ ” Zielinski had been committed

to labor since he was a child, growing up in a union

household on the South Side of Milwaukee. His father,

mother, and both sets of grandparents all had worked for

Ladish, a tool-and-die manufacturer nearby. He can still

recall the tremors that shook the area around the plant

when the 375,000-pound forging rams of Ladish’s five-story

counterblow hammer, the largest in the world, were

dropped. He also remembers his father’s union hall, a

community center for the working-class, largely Polish

neighborhood, and the social-justice sermons of labor-

friendly Catholic priests.

Zielinski visited the picket lines during a Ladish strike in

the late 1970s and those of the bitter, twenty-eight-month

strike at the Patrick Cudahy meatpacking plant a decade

later. The company brought in minority workers as

strikebreakers to try and break the union, and when the

Cudahy strike finally ended, the union had to accept

significant wage and benefit concessions. That outcome

further diminished the willingness of the state’s workers to

go out and strike. “We had no conception of what kind of

muscle memory there was in Wisconsin—or anywhere—for

any kind of labor action,” Zielinski said. “I didn’t think

there would be a lot of people at the protest on Sunday. I

was expecting twenty or thirty, and there were several

hundred. It caused our jaws to drop.”

The protesters gathered at the hall of the machinists’

Local 873, the home of the John Deere workers. From there

they marched through the snow-covered town carrying

American flags and placards with messages like “Scott

Walker = Too Extreme” and “Don’t Let Politicians Take

Away Your Union,” written below a drawing of two hands,

one black and one white, clasped together over a map of

Wisconsin. After the march, they gathered on the driveway

of a union member’s home, across the street from

Fitzgerald’s house. Fitzgerald had been warned about the

protest and wasn’t home, but the protesters remained for

more than an hour. They ended with a chant of “Unity.”

Millard stood in the middle of the street, with a bullhorn

attached to his belt, gazing at the spirited crowd. “This is

what we got to do,” he told them. “We’ve got to stand

together.”

Millard saw the attack on labor as inevitable. “In 1983,

during a strike at Kohler plumbing, two guys were literally

run over on the picket line with a car,” he said. “The labor

peace we got lasted for a generation. Look at my grandma,

who retired from Oscar Mayer in the early eighties. My

cousin’s husband worked there as a maintenance mechanic

in 2001, but Grandma made more on the assembly line than

he did because they destroyed the meatpackers’ union.

Now they say it’s a job no American wants. Well, that’s

because they destroyed the wages. When my grandma

retired, it was still owned by the Oscar Mayer family. She

had health insurance until she died. You have to make your

own deal when it gets to your generation’s turn.”

On Monday, the day after the protest in Horicon, a

thousand protesters, led by the University of Wisconsin’s

teaching assistants’ union, marched on the state capitol. It

was Valentine’s Day, and they delivered Valentine cards for

Walker with a plea that read: “We ♥ UW: Governor Walker,

Don’t Break My ♥.” On Tuesday morning, eight hundred

students from Madison’s East High walked out of school

and marched down East Washington Avenue to the capitol

to show support for their teachers. They were soon joined

by thousands of citizens, union and non-union alike, who

began flooding the rotunda. A troop of firefighters marched

through the capitol, playing bagpipes in a dramatic show of

solidarity, and a contingent of police officers held “Cops for

Labor” signs. It seemed that Walker’s effort to divide the

unions had backfired.

Protesters inside the capitol began their unplanned

occupation of the building with a campaign to stall the bill

by getting as many people as they could to deliver two-

minute testimonies—as much time as the rules allowed—to

the Joint Finance Committee, trying to delay passage until

the public could be mobilized to bring pressure on

Republican senators. The occupation, on the heels of the

Arab Spring, prompted the New York Times to wonder if

Madison was “the Tunisia of collective bargaining rights.”

Pizzas for the protesters arrived from a nearby restaurant,

ordered by supporters in all fifty states and sixty-eight

countries. Paul Ryan, then the Republican chairman of the

House Budget Committee, characterized the Madison

protests as “riots.”

THE PROTESTS IN MADISON were the first significant resistance

to the ascendant Tea Party and helped set the stage for

Occupy Wall Street. For many of the participants, it was a

hopeful moment. That first week, Bryce began taking off

from work to go to the capitol, driving early in the morning

to Madison and then returning at night. “I was very

optimistic just seeing how many people were there,” he

said. “The community in the capitol grew organically, there

were stations set up for medical needs, food. People were

cleaning. I remember all the Post-its on the walls, little

messages of encouragement: ‘Don’t do this.’ ‘Kill the Bill.’ ”

The first Tuesday of the capitol occupation, hundreds of

people waited through the night to testify before the Joint

Finance Committee and register their opposition to Act 10.

One Republican senator on the committee, Randy Hopper,

had won his last election by only 163 votes, but he seemed

unconcerned about his support for the bill. He was seen

texting or speaking to an aide almost constantly through

the endless stream of outraged testimony. But after

midnight, a woman began her testimony by saying, “My

parents live in Senator Hopper’s district, my family goes

back over 100 years in his district, and my father voted for

him.” Hopper stopped texting, looked up, and began to

listen.

Each day brought ever-larger crowds to the capitol to

protest Act 10. The senate had a rule requiring a quorum of

twenty members to vote on fiscal measures, and

Republicans then had nineteen senators. On Wednesday,

February 16, the fourteen Democratic state senators fled to

Illinois to deny the chamber a quorum, allowing more time

for public opposition to build. Inspired by the walkout of

the high school students and their own anger over Walker’s

attack on the unions, Madison Teachers, the local

representing the three thousand teachers and professional

staff who worked in Madison’s public schools, staged a

“sickout” that Wednesday. Many of the city’s teachers

continued the action through the rest of the week. Teachers

in Milwaukee and Racine began following suit, but despite

the teachers’ demonstrated willingness to defy the law,

which forbids public employees from striking, statewide

union leaders and the leadership of the state’s Democratic

Party firmly opposed any kind of work stoppage.

Other union officials across the state issued similar

messages. The day after Walker announced Act 10, AFL-

CIO officials and Wisconsin union attorneys held an

emergency meeting at the Teamsters building in West

Milwaukee, where Paul Secunda, a professor of labor law at

Marquette University, urged them to call a general strike.

Secunda was told that it was not an option, because it was

illegal. “It was technically illegal for the Selma marchers,”

Secunda later told me, venting his frustration. He believed

history showed such strikes could work. Though Reagan’s

firing of the air traffic controllers in 1981 loomed

frighteningly large, during the 1960s and ’70s, many

public-sector unions had staged successful, illegal strikes,

including a wildcat strike of US postal workers in 1970 that

involved more than 200,000 people. Besides, Secunda

wondered, at this point, what was the alternative?

“Collective bargaining will become collective begging,” he

said.

The protests at the capitol continued for nearly three

weeks. Walker took to entering the building through a

secret tunnel, as did most of the Republican legislators. In

early March, Walker tried to order the Dane County police

to stand in front of the capitol doors to bar protesters from

entering. (They would be permitted to leave.) The Dane

County sheriff, Dave Mahoney, declined to do so. “I refused

to put deputy sheriffs in a position to be palace guards,”

Mahoney told reporters.

With the Democratic senators still in Illinois, senate

Republicans decided to separate the collective bargaining

measure from the budget bill and vote on it immediately.

Within a couple of hours, the senate majority leader, Scott

Fitzgerald, called a meeting of the senate and assembly

leadership to move the bill forward. During the meeting, a

heated argument erupted between Fitzgerald and Peter

Barca, the assembly’s minority leader. Barca had been

handed a thirty-seven-page summary of the bill, not the bill

itself.

“I said I wanted an explanation of what’s in this

document, so I can at least know what I’m voting on,”

Barca told me. Fitzgerald ignored his request. Barca then

began reading a 2010 memo from the attorney general

outlining Wisconsin’s open meetings law, which generally

requires a government body to give twenty-four hours’

notice to the public before it meets; Fitzgerald had called

the meeting with less than two hours’ notice.

“Clerk, call roll,” Fitzgerald interrupted.

“No! Excuse me!” Barca shouted. “This is clearly a

violation of the open meetings law, you have been shutting

people down . . .” As Barca spoke, the Republicans

murmured “aye,” and, by a 4–0 vote, the committee

separated the collective bargaining measure from the

budget bill. Barca’s exchange was captured on

WisconsinEye, a local version of C-Span, and went viral,

further enraging the protesters, many of whom were as

upset about the unprecedented process as the bill itself. “I

felt like I was flying by the seat of my pants,” Fitzgerald

told me when I asked if he had regrets. “Sometimes it was

a spot decision that was made, so I don’t want to second-

guess a lot of what we did.”

The new collective bargaining bill passed both houses

within hours.

AFTER SIGNING ACT 10, Governor Walker told a reporter for

The Associated Press that the bill was “progressive,” a

word with special resonance in Wisconsin. Wisconsin’s

Progressive movement, a coalition of workers, farmers, and

academics, flourished in the early twentieth century. It

emphasized a democratization of politics, economic

equality, labor rights, improving public education, and the

protection of natural resources. More broadly, Wisconsin’s

Progressives championed the public sector against

encroachment by the private one. Though the political

movement itself eventually faded, it established a set of

traditions that persisted in the state’s institutions and the

public’s imagination.

Walker’s description marked a fealty to this tradition, a

recognition of its importance to voters, and a perversion of

its meaning. Some of Walker’s opponents noted the irony of

enacting Act 10 during the centenary of Wisconsin’s 1911

legislature, arguably the most progressive legislative

session in American history. The primary inspiration for the

1911 legislature was the Wisconsin Idea, whose moniker

came from the title of a book about that legislative session.

But the origins of the Wisconsin Idea go back decades

earlier, to the work of John Bascom, the University of

Wisconsin’s president from 1874 to 1887.

Bascom saw society as a living thing, a type of organism.

To maintain its health, the state needed to foster social,

moral, and economic harmony. If the rich grew too rich, if

workers became impoverished, if women were subjugated,

society fell out of balance, and the whole of it suffered.

Bascom believed in activist government to foster balance—

levying taxes on corporations and the rich, accepting the

right of workers to form unions and to strike, and

supporting women’s suffrage and the right to a university

education, to prevent their subservience to men.

“Protection is admitted by all to be the first duty of

government,” he wrote. “But this protection is not that of

the productive classes against the depredative classes

simply, is not of society against criminals merely, but is also

the protection of the weak, universally and broadly, against

the strong.”

The year Bascom arrived in Madison, 1874, was the year

before his most renowned pupil would enroll: Fighting Bob

La Follette. An indifferent student but even then a brilliant

orator, La Follette owed his graduation to Bascom’s tie-

breaking vote on the faculty committee deciding his fate.

Bascom’s strong support for women’s rights, labor unions,

and the idea of service to the citizens of the state made a

deep impression on La Follette. “During my terms as

governor I did my best to build up and encourage the spirit

which John Bascom in his time had expressed,” La Follette

wrote in his autobiography. For La Follette, Wisconsin’s

entire Progressive legacy would not have been possible

without the mentoring of his former teacher to so many of

the animating protagonists of the Wisconsin Idea. “The

guiding spirit of my time,” La Follette said of Bascom. “The

man to whom Wisconsin owes a debt greater than it can

ever pay.”

Though Bascom disliked socialism, he was more

contemptuous of laissez-faire capitalism and the corrosive

effect he felt it had on the common good. “Wealth means

power, and power and wealth combined mean the relative

subjection of the many,” he wrote. “The let-alone policy in

America is little more than an irrational conviction that

public interests will take care of themselves with no

watchfulness on the part of the people; that public

prosperity is necessarily included in private gains.”

Bascom’s belief in the need to restrain corporate wealth

and power left the strongest mark on La Follette.

The bond between the university and state government,

the core tenet of the Wisconsin Idea, began in 1901, when

La Follette, the state’s newly elected governor, established

what would become the Legislative Reference Bureau, a

small agency providing nonpartisan technical assistance to

legislators. The bureau would also facilitate the

involvement of university experts, whose work would help

shape the drafting of legislation. La Follette chose Charles

McCarthy, a political scientist and Wisconsin alum, to lead

the agency, which was located in an attic room in the state

capitol. McCarthy energetically expanded its scope and

reach, scouring the world for legislation to inform his

research. He and his staff began drafting bills themselves,

reforming an ad hoc process that had been corrupted by

lobbyist-lawyers. McCarthy wanted legislation well

wrought enough to withstand the kinds of court challenges

that had stymied progressive efforts in other states.

His skill was apparent in Wisconsin’s income-tax bill.

Since the seventeenth century, sixteen attempts had been

made in colonies and states to try and institute a successful

income tax. All of these efforts failed. Most of them

managed to collect only a few thousand dollars, because

people would lie about their earnings and politicians were

too fearful of voter backlash to enforce the law. In 1908,

however, Wisconsin voters overwhelmingly approved a

referendum to implement a state income tax on both

individuals and corporations. A senate committee began a

long drafting process, producing a bill that finally came up

for hearings in 1911. Delos Kinsman, a professor from a

nearby teachers’ college, came to testify before the

legislative committee; he had written his dissertation on

the failures of previous income-tax efforts. Kinsman

delivered a withering critique of Wisconsin’s bill,

prompting McCarthy to try and persuade Kinsman to

rewrite it.

“The long story of failure beginning with the

Massachusetts Colony in 1643 caused me to hesitate,”

Kinsman recalled in an interview decades later. “But Dr.

McCarthy declared that a measure would be passed

anyway and it ought to be the best possible.” Kinsman

agreed to try. His college gave him three months’ leave to

rewrite the bill and persuade legislators of its merits. His

version included appointed, rather than elected, tax

commissioners and a progressive tax rate that placed the

largest burden on the wealthy, and it returned most of the

collected revenue to local governments. The tax was widely

accepted, popular even, because of its fairness and the

improvement of services that the revenue provided. The tax

also mitigated the rampant economic inequality that

pervaded Wisconsin at the time, and by 1920, eleven states

had followed suit.

Even more influential was the 1911 legislature’s

workers’ compensation law. Drafted by John Commons, the

University of Wisconsin economist, the bill offered workers

and their families redress for injury or death on the job. In

1900 alone, more than 2,500 railroad workers in the United

States were killed while working. (A century later, there

were fewer than twenty.) Companies barely considered

worker safety, in part because, for them, workers’ lives

were cheap. Before the law, the only option a worker or his

family had after an injury or death was to sue the company,

an almost insurmountable expense. Over time, the law

prompted Wisconsin’s owners and bosses to make working

conditions safer. The Wisconsin workers’ compensation

program became a model for other states too. Nine

additional states passed similar laws that year; thirty-six

more did by the end of the decade.

John Commons’s most important mentor was Richard

Ely, a progressive political economist who taught Commons

at Johns Hopkins University. In 1892, the University of

Wisconsin wooed Ely to Madison to become the director of

its new School of Economics, Political Science, and History,

but just two years later, Ely was put on trial by the Board of

Regents—with his job on the line—after the state

superintendent of education accused Ely of supporting

labor strikes, boycotts, and socialism. The regents

ultimately acquitted Ely, and their report exonerating him

came to be called the “Magna Carta of Academic

Freedom.” A quote from the report is engraved on an iconic

plaque at the top of the university’s Bascom Hill

quadrangle. Known as the “sifting and winnowing” plaque

because of its inscription, it reads: “Whatever may be the

limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe

that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever

encourage that continual and fearless sifting and

winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”

Ely’s verdict established the University of Wisconsin as a

haven for progressive economists, many of whom Ely

brought to Madison. Commons, for example, came to the

university in 1904, at Ely’s invitation, after his dismissal by

administrators at Syracuse University, which accused him

of harboring radical economic views and scaring off donors.

(Some of Ely’s and Commons’s other views, on race, for

example, were abhorrent: like many progressive and

conservative elites, they supported eugenics.) Ely was an

economic advisor to Bob La Follette when he was governor,

and his ideas influenced Woodrow Wilson (a student of

Ely’s at Johns Hopkins), Teddy Roosevelt, and Franklin

Roosevelt. A driving force in the social gospel movement,

Ely believed capitalism could produce great wealth, but

that government intervention and strong labor unions were

needed to counterbalance its power and alleviate suffering.

Ely and Commons helped transform the University of

Wisconsin’s multidisciplinary economics department, which

Ely directed until 1925, into a center for “institutional”

economics. Institutionalists challenged the previously

dominant neoclassical theory of laissez-faire capitalism

associated with Adam Smith, which they saw as irrelevant

in an era when large corporations, not small farmers and

entrepreneurs, dominated the economy and exploited

workers. To remedy this power imbalance, Commons

advocated for the workers’ compensation law, a minimum

wage, unemployment insurance, and child-labor laws. He

was also a proponent of a “living wage,” a term that was

codified in a Wisconsin state statute Commons drafted,

which passed in 1913. The minimum wage, the law read,

“shall be not less than a living wage,” sufficient to permit

an employee to maintain herself or himself “in reasonable

comfort, reasonable physical well-being, decency, and

moral well-being.” (Scott Walker’s 2015 budget struck the

“living wage” language from Wisconsin’s books.)

Like the other Progressive milestones of the 1911

legislature, the passage of workers’ compensation was

aided by the twelve assemblymen and two state senators

who were members of the Milwaukee Socialist Party. In

1910, after a corruption scandal in Milwaukee had tarred

both Republicans and Democrats, the Socialists swept into

power, winning the state legislative offices, the mayoralty

(which they would hold, off and on, until 1960), and a

congressional seat. The party’s electoral victories in 1910

pushed the progressive Republicans to the left, prompting

them to make bolder reforms to compete for voters. “The

only way to beat the Socialists is ‘to beat them to it,’ ”

Charles McCarthy wrote.

Milwaukee’s Socialist Party grew out of the enormous

number of German immigrants who began pouring into the

city in the late 1840s. Many of those migrants were fleeing

the failed 1848 revolution in Germany and had been

members of the Turnverein, or Turners, a physical-fitness

movement focused on gymnastics that also encouraged

intellectual development and liberal, sometimes

revolutionary, politics. The Turners established strongholds

across the Midwest and were especially active in

Milwaukee. Like many of Wisconsin’s Scandinavian

farmers, they held strong antislavery views, and the

movement passionately supported Abraham Lincoln’s 1860

presidential campaign. Prominent Milwaukee Turners

included Carl Schurz, a ’48er who went on to become a

Union Army general, a United States senator, and the

secretary of the interior, and Mathilde Franziska Anneke, a

journalist, socialist, and friend of Karl Marx who settled in

the city in 1849 and three years later started Deutsche

Frauen-Zeitung, the first feminist journal founded by a

woman in America.

The Turners built several centers in Milwaukee that

offered gymnastics equipment as well as beer halls,

meeting rooms, and auditoriums for social and cultural

events. The facilities also became incubators of radical

politics. In 1897, the Social-Democratic Party, the precursor

to Milwaukee’s Socialist Party, was cofounded by a

Romanian Jewish immigrant named Victor Berger, a

brilliant tactician and organizer who developed what

became called the “bundle brigade.” An army of volunteers

that swelled to a thousand members, it could print flyers

and pamphlets in twelve languages and deliver literature in

the appropriate language to every home in Milwaukee

within forty-eight hours.

In 1895, Berger, who would later become a United States

congressman, visited the labor organizer Eugene Debs in

an Illinois prison, where Debs was serving a sentence for

leading a railroad strike. Berger brought Debs a copy of

Marx’s Capital, introducing Debs to socialism. In 1901,

Berger, Debs, and another comrade founded the Socialist

Party of America; Debs would go on to become the party’s

presidential candidate in four elections, winning 6 percent

of the vote in 1912. But even as Berger shaped the broader

movement, his strand of socialism was democratic and

reformist, focused not on revolution but on achieving

concrete gains for Milwaukee’s working class through the

electoral process. “In America for the first time in history,

we find an oppressed class with the same fundamental

rights as the ruling class—the right of universal suffrage,”

Berger wrote in the Social Democratic Herald, a Socialist

weekly. “It is then nonsense to talk of sudden bloody

revolutions here, until the power of the ballot has been at

least tried.”

A woodcarver named Emil Seidel captured Milwaukee’s

mayor’s office in 1910, becoming the first Socialist mayor

of a major American city, while the party also won

majorities on the city council and the county board. The

party’s victories that year were owed largely to its

reputation for being incorruptible. (“They never were

approached by the lobbyists, because the lobbyists knew it

was not possible to influence these men,” William Evjue, a

progressive Republican legislator, once said of the

Milwaukee Socialists.) Two years after Seidel’s victory,

Democrats and Republicans conspired to defeat him, but in

1916 another Socialist, Daniel Hoan, won the mayor’s office

and held it for the next twenty-four years. Hoan fashioned a

transparent city government and won a higher minimum

wage for city workers, while investing in “public

enterprise”—libraries, schools, and one of the country’s

most extensive park systems. While the party’s strength

would never match its 1910 peak, its influence on

Milwaukee, and the state as a whole, persisted. In 1924,

despite a sometimes fractious alliance with La Follette’s

progressives, the Milwaukee Socialist Party endorsed La

Follette’s presidential bid, helping make Wisconsin the only

state his Progressive Party would win.

While Victor Berger is credited as the architect of

Milwaukee socialism, it was Emil Seidel who captured the

spirit of its idealistic pragmatism. “Some eastern smarties

called ours a Sewer Socialism,” Seidel wrote in his

memoirs. He went on:

Yes, we wanted sewers in the workers’ homes; but we

wanted much, oh, so very much more than sewers. We

wanted our workers to have pure air; we wanted them

to have sunshine; we wanted planned homes; we

wanted living wages; we wanted recreation for young

and old; we wanted vocational education; we wanted a

chance for every human being to be strong and live a

life of happiness. And, we wanted everything that was

necessary to give them that: playgrounds, parks, lakes,

beaches, clean creeks and rivers, swimming and

wading pools, social centers, reading rooms, clean fun,

music, dance, song and joy for all. That was our

Milwaukee Social Democratic movement.

JESSE BARNES, a wiry, bearded, sixty-four-year-old retired

autoworker, was an enthusiastic participant in the

demonstrations against Act 10. He considers himself a

socialist—partly, he said, from the legacy of Milwaukee

socialism. When I visited him at his house six years after

the Act 10 demonstrations, the first things he wanted to

show me were two posters, which he had mounted on a

storage cabinet in the entranceway. One was a

reproduction of an iconic photograph of black sanitation

workers on strike in Memphis in 1968, holding picket signs

that read “I Am a Man.” The other carried an image of his

state capitol’s rotunda overflowing with protesters fighting

Act 10. It read: “From Memphis to Madison.”

The two signs traced the arc of public-employee unions

from their apex to their death throes. But they also

embodied something else: the collaborative strength of the

labor and civil rights movements, an alliance that the

Memphis strike stood for more than any other in American

history. The indifference of Memphis officials to the deaths

of two black sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert

Walker, who had been crushed by a malfunctioning

garbage-truck compactor, had sparked the strike, but its

origins lay in decades of mistreatment. Two weeks after

their deaths, 1,100 Memphis sanitation workers refused to

go to work. They sought an end to poverty wages—40

percent of the workforce qualified for welfare—and

recognition for their union, which the city refused to

accept. The sanitation workers’ union, Local 1733, was an

affiliate of AFSCME, which had been founded more than

three decades earlier in Madison, out of fear that Roosevelt

Democrats might turn Wisconsin’s nonpartisan civil service

system into a patronage one. Having succeeded in

safeguarding the civil service rules, AFSCME had grown as

the Wisconsin legislature recognized its right to represent

municipal workers and later state workers, and it added

new locals across the country. Its support of Local 1733—

hesitant at first, then full-throated—was crucial to

sustaining the Memphis strike. Nonetheless, by mid-March

of 1968, the strike was faltering.

It was then that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. revived the

strike with his support. The Memphis walkout became

central to King’s Poor People’s Campaign, which he

launched a year earlier in the hope of uniting impoverished

Americans of all races to address poverty throughout the

country. King believed that racial and economic injustice

were inseparable. He outlined that view to striking workers

and their supporters in his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”

sermon, which he delivered at a Memphis church. “You

know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of

slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for

doing it,” King said. “What was that? He kept the slaves

fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get

together, something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he

cannot hold the slaves in slavery.”

The labor and civil rights movements had been a united

force in American politics at least since the Montgomery

bus boycott began in 1955; the United Auto Workers

(UAW), which supported the boycott, paid the defendants’

bail and court costs, and its president, Walter Reuther,

grew to be one of King’s most loyal and devoted

supporters. (The law “prohibiting conspiracies” that was

used to charge Rosa Parks, King, and eighty-seven other

African Americans who voluntarily turned themselves in to

the authorities had been originally written to break

Alabama’s trade unions.) In the years that followed, King

became a central figure in the alliance, arguing that the

fates of the civil rights and labor movements were deeply

connected.

“The coalition that can have the greatest impact in the

struggle for human dignity here in America,” King wrote in

a 1962 letter to the Amalgamated Laundry Workers, a New

York union, “is that of the Negro and the forces of labor.”

But King warned against the dangers of narrow self-

interest. Three years later, in a speech to a New York

public-employees’ union, he said that “the strength of labor

will fail if it does not become a social force pressing for

greater dimensions of wealth for all those who labor.”

King was assassinated in Memphis the day after

delivering his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” sermon. Four

days later, more than forty thousand people, including

Coretta Scott King, Reuther, and AFSCME’s national

president, Jerry Wurf, marched through the Memphis

streets and demanded that the city negotiate with the

striking workers and recognize Local 1733.

Wurf declared that the strike would last “until we have

justice,” but Henry Loeb, the segregationist mayor of

Memphis, continued to refuse even to meet with the

union’s local leaders, arguing that their strike was illegal.

President Lyndon Johnson demanded that his

undersecretary of labor step in as a mediator, and on April

16 Loeb finally caved to national pressure. Union

negotiators settled the strike with the city, paving the way

for recognition of the sanitation workers’ union, and with it

a new contract that offered better wages, a pension, and a

grievance procedure. That victory, in the virulently anti-

union South, was the most prominent example of a great

wave of public-sector militancy that swept across the

country, with people staging strikes that won better wages,

working conditions, and benefits for millions of public

workers.

Ultimately, despite lingering racism in many trade

unions, the alliance between labor and civil rights would

have another impact: It is likely that no group has benefited

more from the labor movement than African Americans.

Between 1948 and 1979, the period with the greatest union

density in the United States, hourly compensation for the

average American worker rose by 93 percent, which

contributed to a decreasing wage gap between African

American and white workers. In 1935, the year the Wagner

Act was signed, less than 1 percent of all union members

were black; by the 1970s, 40 percent of African American

men and a quarter of African American women were union

members. In the heavily industrialized Midwest, as many as

60 percent of black men in the private sector were in a

union. (Later, as unionization rates began collapsing, the

racial wealth gap spiked. Jake Rosenfeld, a sociologist at

Washington University, estimates that if unionization rates

had remained at 1970s levels, black men would be earning

roughly $2,600, or nearly 10 percent, more a year.)

Barnes is grateful for what the union did for him. On his

front lawn, he displays a “Proud Union Home” sign, and he

told me his immaculate beige 1976 Corvette in the

driveway was bought with his first union wages. He owes

his yellow two-story corner house with trimmed hedges and

an attached garage to those wages too. But Barnes also

expressed gratitude for the nonmaterial benefits the union

brought him. “If you have a good, strong union, race

doesn’t matter,” he said. “I had white friends that I worked

with every day. Some I disagreed with, some I got along

with.”

Barnes joked that his job was nothing like Upton

Sinclair’s The Jungle, but it wasn’t easy either. Barnes

worked the third shift, 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., inspecting

catalytic converters on an assembly line at a Delphi

Automotive plant outside Milwaukee. His job, as he put it,

was “unskilled labor”—picking up the converters from a

conveyor belt, inspecting a weld, and then flipping them

back over, all within six seconds. He did that five days a

week for thirty years. “I never tried to get overtime,” he

said. “This was a marathon.” Ten years into the job, he

started experiencing carpal tunnel syndrome, and

eventually he had to wear braces at work and at home.

“The worst time is when you go home trying to sleep,” he

said. “When you’re relaxing, that’s when it’s really intense

throbbing pain. It wouldn’t go away.” Barnes’s plant closed

in 2008, a casualty of NAFTA, four years after his

retirement.

As I was leaving, Barnes wanted to show me a memento.

It was a picture of his son, Mandela, taken in the summer

of 1990, when Mandela was three and Barnes won a family

scholarship to attend Walter Reuther’s UAW camp in Black

Lake, Michigan. Reuther had founded the camp as an

educational and recreation retreat for the UAW’s members

and leadership. The picture of Mandela showed the small

boy surrounded by other three-year-old children of

autoworkers—black, white, Latino—a tangible relic of

King’s dream for unity among Pharaoh’s “slaves.” “We were

all working basically for the same thing,” Barnes said. “A

safe workplace, being treated humanely, adequate wages,

the opportunity for growth and development through

apprenticeships.”

When I asked what his family did at the camp, Barnes

told me they swam in the clean lake, enjoyed leisure time

together, and were given a history of labor. “They showed

us how labor’s role in politics—especially local politics—

makes a difference,” he said. “They talked to us about

solidarity, and the 1937 sit-down strike in Flint that made

the UAW what it was. They wanted us to know that the

company doesn’t just give us these benefits: They’re won.”

THE PASSAGE OF ACT 10 did not stop the protest movement that

arose to defeat it. The day after Walker signed Act 10 into

law, the crowd at the capitol swelled to more than a

hundred thousand people. Speakers addressing the

protesters emphasized that the battle would turn, focusing

on overturning Act 10 by removing Governor Walker and

several Republican senators through a recall process—

another Progressive reform introduced by the 1911

legislature. If enough signatures were gathered, a new

election would be triggered.

Some union leaders, though, felt uneasy about the

strategy. “The AFL-CIO leadership is scared of the masses,”

Dave Poklinkoski, the electricians’ union president, told me.

“They had more than 100,000 people out there, and then

they tell people to go home.”

At the Act 10 signing ceremony at the capitol, a reporter

asked Walker if he had any comment on the protests raging

at that moment in the rotunda. “Governor, we can hear

thousands of people in the hall screaming ‘shame, shame,

shame,’ ” the reporter said.

“I think we’ve had a good civil discussion,” Walker

replied. “They have a right to be heard, but the countless

numbers of taxpayers, the millions and millions of people

who live in this state, the middle-class taxpayers of this

state also have a right to be heard, and there is no point

should their voices be drowned out by the protesters here

and around the capitol. Because in the end they are the

ones that have had to pay the higher taxes and the higher

burden of excessive government.”

A month later, Walker testified in Congress before a

special panel of the House Committee on Oversight and

Government Reform. Called “State and Municipal Debt:

Tough Choices Ahead,” the panel included the president of

the anti-union National Right to Work Legal Defense

Foundation, two “resident scholars” of the conservative

American Enterprise Institute, and an economist from the

University of Rochester School of Business. “We are going

to give local governments the tools they need to balance

their budgets for many years to come,” Walker told the

committee. “In Wisconsin, we are going to pursue a truly

progressive option.” Representative Dennis Kucinich

challenged the premise that restricting collective

bargaining saved money. He noted that Act 10 required

unions to hold annual votes to continue representing their

own members. “How much money does this save your state

budget?” Kucinich asked. “It doesn’t save any,” Walker

acknowledged.

After Act 10 passed, the decimation of labor came

quickly. In 2010, Wisconsin’s union density was 14 percent;

six years later, it was 8 percent. WEAC, the teachers’

umbrella union, plummeted from 98,000 members to

36,000 in the same period. “Act 10 was a political attack,”

Tim Cullen, the former state senator from Janesville, told

me. Cullen, the most moderate member of the Democratic

caucus, had been a member of Republican governor Tommy

Thompson’s cabinet. While hiding out in Illinois, Cullen and

Bob Jauch, another moderate Democrat, were secretly

negotiating with Walker’s aides at a McDonald’s in Kenosha

and at a Beloit motel, both just inside the Wisconsin border.

Cullen and Jauch tried to win concessions, including an

allowance for collective bargaining on workplace safety.

“Walker’s chief of staff said to us, ‘There is only one item in

the bill which is nonnegotiable, and that is getting rid of

the automatic dues check-off,’ ” Cullen said. “That was the

funnel of money from public employees to their unions.

That was the core issue; that was what Walker wanted

more than anything.”

“It’s illegal for the public employees to strike,” Colin

Millard said, taking stock of the aftermath of Act 10. “But if

they’re going to repeal the law, and take away your right to

bargain, don’t you think at that point you should think

about collective action? Writing postcards isn’t going to do

it. If correctional guards would have just sat down on the

job, not even gone out on strike, this thing would have been

over and Walker would have lost. But he made the correct

calculation that they wouldn’t do that.”

Millard noted how far union density had fallen in

Wisconsin since 2010, but it didn’t seem to ever be enough

for Walker and the state Republicans, who continued to try

to drive it down further. “At eight percent of the population,

or even fifteen, what makes us such an enemy? I’ll tell you:

Labor is the enemy of capital. They really won’t be happy

until we’re starving on the street.”

For Randy Bryce, the most painful memory of the battle

of Act 10 was watching Walker’s success in dividing labor

against itself. “It’s hard when you don’t have people

showing up regularly to the union meetings,” he said.

“What happened with the public-sector unions is a lot of

people showed up and made a point. It took a while for it to

get out to the rest of the country, but after it was all said

and done, everybody went back home. Nothing really

happened.”

He saw the division even among his fellow ironworkers

in Local 8. “We had guys in our local supporting Act 10,” he

told me in disbelief. “Not all unions are the same, they’d

tell me—it’s a good thing. They see themselves as separate.

All these years I’ve been telling them: But they’re going to

come after you, too. You’re going to have a turn, and the

longer you wait, the fewer people are going to be able to

stand up for you.”

3

THE LAST DEER ON EARTH

Eighteen thousand years ago, the Laurentide Ice Sheet, covering much of what is now Wisconsin, began melting.

Water accumulated in an enormous lake, encompassing

more than eighteen hundred square miles, which was

enclosed by an ice dam. As the glacier retreated, the sand

in its meltwaters added to the vast sand deposits already in

the lake. Temperatures continued warming until the dam

burst, suddenly and violently. The waters carved out the

unique rock formations and tributary canyons of the

Wisconsin Dells, a five-mile-long scenic gorge along the

Wisconsin River. The flooding fused the upper and lower

parts of that river and drained the lake, exposing a vast

sand-laden lake bed that spanned ten present-day

Wisconsin counties. Today, these are known as the sand

counties.

Ten miles south of the Dells, in Sauk County, one of the

sand counties, there is a particularly lush patch of land: an

eighty-acre farm that Aldo Leopold, then a professor of

game management at the University of Wisconsin, bought

in 1935 for the bargain price of eight dollars an acre. At the

time, it was completely deforested, except for a few sickly

trees lining the side of a gravel road. The sandy soil,

already poor and thin for agriculture, had become further

eroded by drought and overfarming, and after years of

unpaid taxes by a delinquent owner, the farm had been

abandoned and taken over by the county. The farm’s

decimated condition thrilled Leopold, who saw his

acquisition as a laboratory for land restoration.

Rural life always appealed to Leopold. He grew up in the

small Mississippi River town of Burlington, Iowa, where his

father taught him to love hunting and the outdoors. When

Leopold was a teenager, President Theodore Roosevelt

named Gifford Pinchot to be the first director of what later

became the United States Forest Service, launching a

national conservation movement. Pinchot had helped found

the Yale Forest School, the first graduate school of forestry

in the nation, from which Leopold graduated in 1909. He

then began a career at the Forest Service, working as a

ranger and administrator in Arizona and New Mexico,

where he led the effort to designate the Gila National

Forest as the country’s first wilderness area. He was

transferred to Wisconsin in 1924, the year Bob La Follette

ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket, and the

peak of the La Follette family’s influence on the state.

In 1933, when Leopold started his game-management

position at the University of Wisconsin, FDR’s new Soil

Erosion Service also recruited him for a large-scale

restoration effort in Coon Valley, a farming community in

west-central Wisconsin. Some eight hundred farmers, most

of them Norwegian immigrants, had watched their

livelihoods vanish after erosion, caused by overgrazing,

excessive logging, and poor agricultural practices, ruined

the soil. Chunks of steep hillside might break off and

crumble into the creek below after a single bad storm. The

fallen earth would fill in streams, which became too shallow

and warm for the trout that once thrived in them. “Great

gashing gullies are torn out of the hillside,” Leo pold wrote

in “Coon Valley: An Adventure in Cooperative

Conservation,” an essay about the project. He saw the

problems of Coon Valley as endemic to American

agriculture: “Coon Valley, in short, is one of the thousand

farm communities which, through the abuse of its originally

rich soil, has not only filled the national dinner pail, but has

created the Mississippi flood problem, the navigation

problem, the overproduction problem, and the problem of

its own future continuity.”

Leopold and the other University of Wisconsin faculty

had been recruited by Hugh Hammond Bennett, the Soil

Erosion Service’s first director. Coon Valley was the first

watershed restoration project in the United States, a

demonstration meant to show private landowners the need

for conservation and the value of the federal government’s

assistance. The Coon Valley project offered farmers free

labor (provided by the Civilian Conservation Corps, another

New Deal program), seeds, and planting stock if they

agreed to commit to the full length of the five-year trial,

which included planting trees by the hillsides, relocating

crops and cows to flat areas, and repairing gullies and

stream banks. A slim majority of the valley’s eight hundred

farmers signed on to the plan. Within a year, the number of

quail spotted in Coon Valley doubled. Today it is one of

Wisconsin’s most bucolic locations, with a premier trout

stream.

As he worked on Coon Valley, Leopold also began

transforming his barren sand farm, though with only his

family’s help. Leopold began by planting pine trees, and

with his wife, Estella, and their five children, he eventually

planted forty thousand trees on the property. The family

spent weekends and summers on the farm, whose only

building was a 350-square-foot dilapidated chicken coop

that Leopold refashioned into rustic living quarters—bunk

beds, a fireplace, a makeshift kitchen.

The land, and the effort to restore it, became an

inspiration for A Sand County Almanac, a collection of

Leopold’s essays published a year after his death. The book

received critical acclaim at the time of publication and later

took a place alongside Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and

Henry David Thoreau’s Walden as a touchstone for the

environmental movement. One of the reasons for its

endurance is a biographical essay called “Thinking Like a

Mountain.” In it, Leopold describes his passion for killing

wolves while he was working as a Forest Service ranger on

public lands in Arizona. One day, he was eating lunch with

fellow rangers on the edge of a plateau. They spied what

looked like a deer below, fording a white-water river. They

soon realized the deer was in fact a wolf, and they watched

it greet a half-dozen grown pups. The wolves writhed

playfully beneath them. “In those days we had never heard

of passing up a chance to kill a wolf,” Leopold wrote.

In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but

with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a

steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our

rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup

was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks. We

reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green

fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known

ever since, that there was something new to me in

those eyes, something known only to her and to the

mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I

thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer,

that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But

after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither

the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

Today the gravel road to Leopold’s farm is lined with

towering white and red pines that he and his family planted

in the 1930s. In the autumn of 2017, Curt Meine, a

conservation biologist and a biographer of Leopold, met me

at the Aldo Leopold Foundation, an environmental nonprofit

headquartered there. Meine, a trim, gray-haired expatriate

from the Chicago suburbs, led me to a pair of wooden

benches in front of the center’s low stone-and-wood

meeting hall.

“Leopold appreciated the Wisconsin Idea,” Meine said.

“He understood it and became a living example of it. He

saw himself as an academic serving the public.” Leopold

took his first appointment at the University of Wisconsin in

the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, a

role that led him to speak out about the dangers facing

rural economies. He believed that conservation had to

include the entire landscape, Meine explained: “You can’t

treat the human community as something separate from

the soils, waters, plants, and animals.” In a 1945 article

called “The Outlook for Farm Wildlife,” Leopold warned

that the industrialization of agriculture was “generating

new insecurities, economic and ecological, in place of those

it was meant to abolish.” He saw two possible paths for

farmers: the farm as a place to live, in which wildlife could

be accommodated, or the farm as food-factory, which

demanded ever-increasing yields. The latter, he said, was

“humanly desolate and economically unstable.”

After the Second World War, the federal government

began promoting a “cheap-food” policy that pushed, above

all, for higher yields. In 1948, for example, the US

Department of Agriculture partnered with A&P, then the

country’s largest supermarket chain, to sponsor the

“Chicken of Tomorrow” contest, whose goal was to breed a

bigger bird that had a “superior meat-type.” Large

agricultural corporations began swallowing up family

farms, which could no longer generate enough revenue to

survive. When Leopold issued his warning, there were

roughly 150,000 dairy farms in Wisconsin; today there are

fewer than 9,000.

“We’re producing even more than we did then,” Meine

said. “But we’re doing it with fewer people, and so the

depletion of small-town rural life and community has been

enormous. There’s bitterness in the rural communities,

especially young people. These places are unsustainable.

The economic trends in America over the past eighty-year

period have created this chasm between urban people and

rural people.”

Meine gestured toward the west, where the Driftless

Area, the anomalous hill-and-valley country untouched by

glacier, begins. Unique in the Midwest, it covers twenty-

two Wisconsin counties as well as parts of Iowa, Minnesota,

and Illinois. It is also unusual politically; besides Vermont,

the Driftless Area is one of only a few rural regions in the

entire country that tends to vote Democratic. In 2008 and

2012, a majority of the Driftless counties voted for Barack

Obama. Meine believes that is because the unusual

topography has allowed agriculture to remain smaller-

scale, helping rural life maintain cohesion. “It has relatively

few thousand-acre corn or soybean fields,” Meine said. “It

doesn’t have four-thousand-herd dairies. Quite the

opposite. It’s home to one of the greatest concentrations of

certified organic growers in the country.”

Meine noted that historically the state has alternated

politically. “You have these deep channels of Wisconsin

political culture that weave back and forth,” he said.

“There’s a tension, which has often been a healthy tension,

between social responsibility and individual responsibility,

government action and individual action. We’ve been able

to use that tension in Wisconsin in a positive way for

generations.” Efforts like Coon Valley’s restoration, whose

success depended on collaboration between the

government and private landowners, influenced Leopold.

“He was a tireless defender of public lands and the role of

government agencies,” Meine said. “But he understood the

limits of what government can do, especially in

conservation. He was a pragmatist, not an ideologue. Is

there such a thing as a progressive conservative?” Meine

wondered. “It’s someone like Leopold who understood rural

culture and life.”

Leopold’s work incorporated ecological concerns into

economic analysis, an idea that maintained currency in

Wisconsin’s government until Governor Walker. “Walker is

representative of a cohort of politicians who are unaware of

this tradition and its nuances,” Meine said. “It’s now been

undermined, and done away with in many cases.” Nowhere

had this been more apparent than in the Republican effort,

on behalf of Chris Cline, a billionaire coal magnate in

Florida, to facilitate the construction of an enormous iron-

ore mine in a pristine section of northern Wisconsin called

the Penokee Hills. “The proposal seemed to wrap up in one

package all that was going south,” Meine said. “The

influence of corporate money and political corruption,

narrow, short-term thinking about economic value, and an

active disinterest in science and a fair and transparent

public process.”

Since Walker introduced the mining proposal in 2011,

the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, whose

reservation sits a few miles from the site, have led a

fiercely determined opposition to it. In their response

Meine saw hope that Wisconsin’s legacy of environmental

stewardship might yet be revived. “Just at the time when

political authorities in Wisconsin no longer espoused or

defended the land ethic, the Native communities and voices

were there,” he said. “They were the ones who spoke for

the land and water, for the plants and animals, for future

generations. They were the true conservatives.”

MIKE WIGGINS JR., the chairman of the Bad River Band, has a

stocky build and short black hair, and often wears a colorful

beaded medallion with a starlike design his mother gave

him. A former game warden, he grew up on the Bad River

Reservation, where like other Chippewa—or Ojibwe, as

they are also known—he learned to fish, hunt, and gather

wild rice from the Chequamegon Bay sloughs, which are

sacred to the Ojibwe. One afternoon when Wiggins was ten,

he wandered into the reservation’s social-services building

to get a drink of water. Inside he saw Walt Bresette, a

member of the Red Cliff Band and a celebrated

environmental activist. Bresette wore a vest and hat over

long black braids, and he turned to Wiggins and smiled at

him. Bresette said nothing, but to Wiggins he seemed to be

glowing.

In the 1980s, Bresette led the fight to affirm the Ojibwe’s

treaty rights in federal court. After that victory, Ojibwe

began spearfishing off-reservation, in the “ceded

territories,” a large portion of northern Wisconsin

designated by the treaties. Spearers were often confronted

by angry—and sometimes violent—mobs at boat landings.

In response, Bresette cofounded Witness for Nonviolence, a

coalition of Native and non-Native treaty rights supporters.

Members from the group would gather at the landings to

support the Ojibwe fisher men and to document some of the

racism directed at them, which included an effigy of an

Indian head with a three-pronged spear rammed through it

and signs urging protesters to “Save a Walleye, Spear an

Indian.” Wiggins, who has drawn inspiration from Bresette,

has recalled that brief childhood encounter often since he

began leading the fight against the proposed mine in the

Penokees.

I first met Wiggins in March 2012, in the parking lot of a

Shell station in Mellen, Wisconsin, a town close to the

mining site. He told me about a series of dark and

premonitory dreams he had two years earlier. “One of them

was a very vivid trip around the North Woods and seeing

forests bleeding and sludge from a creek emptying into the

Bad River,” Wiggins said. “I ended up at a dilapidated

northern log home with rotten snowshoes falling off the

wall. I stepped out of the lodge, walked through some pine,

and I was in a pipeline. There was a big pipe coming in and

out of the ground as far as I could see.

“I had no idea what the hell that was all about,” Wiggins

continued. But he said the dream became clearer when a

stranger named Matt Fifield came into his office several

months later and handed Wiggins his card. Fifield was the

managing director of Gogebic Taconite (GTac), a division of

Cline’s Florida-based mining company. He had come to

Wiggins’s office to discuss GTac’s desire to build a $1.5-

billion open-pit iron-ore mine in the Penokee Hills, about

seven miles south of the Bad River Reservation. The

proposed mine would be several hundred feet deep,

roughly four miles long, and a half mile wide; the company

estimated it would bring 700 long-term jobs to the area.

Fearing contamination of the local groundwater and rivers,

Wiggins told Fifield he planned to oppose the mine. He

didn’t know at the time that the company’s lawyers were

working hand-in-hand with Republican legislators to draft a

bill that would gut Wisconsin environmental law to expedite

the permitting process.

Over the following year, the mining bill that Wiggins was

intent on stopping became increasingly significant to the

Walker administration. During his campaign for governor,

in 2010, Walker had promised to create 250,000 private-

sector jobs. In 2011, Wisconsin lost more than 12,000 jobs,

more than any other state in the nation. After Walker

rejected $810 million in federal stimulus money for a high-

speed rail link between Madison and Milwaukee, anger

grew over the loss of potential jobs. (The state Department

of Transportation estimated that the construction of the

link would have created nearly five thousand jobs.) Aligning

himself with the Tea Party’s categorical opposition to

stimulus spending, Walker balked at the $7 million

Wisconsin would need to contribute annually for the train’s

maintenance. During the opening months of 2012, as the

economic situation in the state continued to deteriorate,

the mining bill became a top priority for Walker’s jobs

program. It also managed to create a rare split in his

broad-based opposition.

After GTac promised that most of the mining equipment

would be built in Milwaukee with union labor, many of the

large private trade unions backed the bill. Even Randy

Bryce, then political coordinator of Milwaukee Iron

Workers Local 8 and already one of Walker’s most

tenacious opponents, reluctantly supported the legislation.

“They’re trying to divide us,” he told me, “but my members

need work.” (Bryce later recanted his support.) In March

2012, the capitol was flooded with hard hat–wearing union

workers from the building trades lobbying for the mining

bill at the behest of Walker and Republican legislators. Just

a year earlier, some of them had been protesting the same

politicians, who were in the process of demolishing

collective bargaining rights for public employees.

To Wiggins, a large open-pit mine in the Penokee Hills

was a life-or-death matter for his tribe. The headwaters

that feed the Bad River would be in the footprint of the

mine, and his tribe’s reservation lay downstream. Wiggins

also worried about the tribe’s sensitive wild-rice beds,

which lie on the coast of Lake Superior. Cyrus Hester, a

scientist working for the tribe’s Natural Resources

Department, told me that sulfuric acid might contaminate

the groundwater and ravage fish populations in the area’s

rivers and streams.

Wiggins and his allies organized educational trips to the

mining site for journalists and state legislators. The only

Republican to participate, however, was Dale Schultz, the

moderate state senator from southwestern Wisconsin, who

had voted against Act 10. Schultz also held two listening

sessions with Democratic colleagues in towns near the

mining site and visited some of the natural sites in their

footprint, such as Caroline Lake, the source that feeds the

Bad River. Two questions posed by a high school student

named Tyler Jaeger made a lasting impression on Schultz.

“What are we going to gain from the mine?” Jaeger asked.

“What are the impacts that we are going to be left with?”

“There’s a very good reason this area has never been

mined,” George Meyer, the director of the Wisconsin

Wildlife Federation and former head of the Wisconsin

Department of Natural Resources (DNR), told me. “A lot of

mining companies looked at it and walked away.” One of

the biggest problems with the site is that the ore there sits

at an angle, a position that generates a larger-than-usual

amount of “overburden”—waste rock—that needs to be

discarded. The low-grade ore and expensive process for

removal led many observers to wonder what was

motivating GTac, especially given that the company was

formed in 2010 and had no previous taconite mining

experience.

Wiggins told me about several meetings he had with

Walker in which he tried to convey how dire the mine

would be for his reservation and the surrounding

environment. One meeting, in September 2011, turned

particularly acrimonious. Beforehand, Wiggins held a news

conference inside the capitol outlining his opposition to the

mining legislation. The assembly bill would allow the

company to fill in streams and ponds with mine waste. It

imposed a 360-day deadline for the permitting process,

where before there had been none, and it would eliminate

hearings in which citizens or organizations could question

mining or government officials under oath about the safety

of the mine. Many of the key provisions in the assembly bill

were drafted by lawyers working for GTac.

“Walker saw the news conference as disingenuous,”

Wiggins said. “When we got to the meeting, he was fixated

on his anger with me.” Leaders from all eleven Wisconsin

tribes also attended that meeting. After some heated back

and forth, Walker told Wiggins he didn’t see the need for

the meeting to continue, because he had a copy of the Bad

River Band’s news release. “So the Bad River had a press

conference,” Tom Maulson, the chairman of the Lac du

Flambeau Band, told Walker and his aides. “We have to quit

this crying and get down to business.” Wiggins got angry.

“You know, governor,” he said, “some of the things that are

proposed in the mining initiative represent a catastrophic

destruction for my reservation, health impacts to my

people, and you think everything that you and I have to talk

about is contained on one piece of paper right there?”

Marvin DeFoe, a tribal elder from the Red Cliff Band,

then told a story that momentarily broke the tension.

DeFoe explained to Walker and his aides that he had

recently taught a young boy how to skin a deer,

demonstrating on an animal that would be used to feed

several families. “The boy asked me,” DeFoe said, “ ‘What if

that deer was the last deer that ever lived? What would you

do?’ ” DeFoe looked at the boy and thought for a moment.

“If this was the last deer on Earth? And there would be no

more? Well, I’d go right with that deer.”

DeFoe was trying to convey how inseparable the Ojibwe

are from the land, water, and wildlife that sustain them, but

he also wanted Walker to understand the different way they

see the world. “One of my responsibilities is stewardship of

the land, air, and water,” DeFoe told me later. “If you have a

Western set of values, those values say: jobs. Our challenge

is how do you—or can you—do both.” In the Ojibwe

tradition, a decision is made based on how it will affect

people seven generations forward. By contrast, the

company’s optimistic estimate for the lifespan of the first

phase of the mine is thirty-five years. “This wasn’t just

about stopping a mine in northern Wisconsin,” DeFoe said.

“This was looking through the eyes of our children.”

After DeFoe told his story, Wiggins noticed a change in

Walker’s aides. “I could see some of his staffers break,”

Wiggins said. But Walker remained impassive and would

not budge.

IN SEPTEMBER 1963, President John F. Kennedy flew in a

Marine helicopter over Madeline Island, the largest of a

twenty-one-island archipelago in Lake Superior called the

Apostle Islands. Martin Hanson, a prominent Wisconsin

conservationist who was part of an effort to win federal

protection for these primeval islands, rode a couple of seats

behind Kennedy. He had asked everyone he knew with a

sailboat to bring it out that day, at the hour the sailboat-

loving Kennedy was scheduled to fly over. There was a

storm looming, and bald eagles soared above the islands.

The wind was blowing in just the right direction for

unfurling brightly colored spinnakers. When Kennedy

initially failed to notice, Hanson got up from his seat,

tapped Kennedy on the shoulder, then pointed down.

Kennedy saw the Apostles surrounded by the sailboats and

a surprised and joyful look came over his face.

The helicopter landed in Ashland, a coastal town where

Kennedy was to give a speech as part of a nationwide tour

he had undertaken to promote conservation. “This section

of Wisconsin,” Kennedy said, “which in the past depended

upon a few natural resources, has known what economic

distress can do when those resources are exhausted or

when indifference lays them waste.” He described the area,

a vast water-rich ecosystem that includes the Penokee

Hills, as “a central and significant part of the freshwater

assets of this country.”

The idea for the conservation tour belonged to Gaylord

Nelson, Wisconsin’s senator and former governor, who

prodded Kennedy to undertake it. Nelson was born in Clear

Lake, Wisconsin, in 1916 to Anton Nelson, a country doctor,

and Mary, a nurse who taught her son about the area’s rich

wildlife. His parents were deeply involved in Wisconsin’s

Progressive movement; as medical students in Milwaukee,

they stood rapt through a five-hour speech given by Bob La

Follette that concluded at 1 a.m. Anton would later serve as

county chair and delegate to the 1946 state convention of

the Wisconsin Progressive Party, spearheaded by the sons

of Fighting Bob, who opposed the increasingly conservative

Republican Party.

In 1958, Nelson had paid homage to La Follette’s

progressive legacy in his campaign for governor, promising

voters he would revive “the philosophy and the purpose of

the Wisconsin Idea as old Bob La Follette envisioned it.”

Nelson was the person largely responsible for Wisconsin’s

outsized role in the modern environmental movement. As

governor, he launched a program to buy private land for

conservation and recreation, financed by a tax on

cigarettes, a penny per pack. Over its twenty-year lifespan,

Nelson’s initiative delivered 450,000 acres of formerly

private land to the citizens of Wisconsin, much of it

wetlands and wildlife habitat threatened by development.

(The effort also included funding for youth conservation

camps and for cities to expand parkland, which fostered

bipartisan, urban-rural support, easing the initiative’s

passage despite Republican control of Wisconsin’s

legislature.) Other states began copying the idea, earning

Nelson national renown, but he took the most pride in how

the public land-buying effort elevated the environment from

its second-class status in American politics.

After Kennedy’s conservation tour, Nelson spearheaded

legislation in the US Senate that saved the Appalachian

Trail and created a vast new network of national trails.

Over the objections of several Midwestern governors, he

secured funding for an extensive cleanup of the Great

Lakes, which were heavily polluted by industrial waste. For

his home state, Nelson, along with Senator Walter Mondale

of Minnesota, created the St. Croix National Scenic

Riverway, which preserved 250 miles of wild rivers and

streams in upper Wisconsin and Minnesota. After a decade-

long campaign, Nelson also won protective National

Lakeshore status for the Apostle Islands and twelve miles

of Lake Superior coastline.

Nelson didn’t, however, merely champion legislation

behind the scenes: he kept searching for a way to galvanize

the public. In 1969, he visited Santa Barbara to witness

what was then the largest oil spill in American history,

which dumped three million gallons of crude oil into the

ocean, created a six-inch-thick, thirty-five-mile-long oil slick

along the coast, and devastated fish and wildlife

populations.

On the flight to Berkeley, where he was giving a speech,

he read an article in Ramparts, a counterculture magazine,

about the campus teach-in movement’s success in

mobilizing opposition to the Vietnam War. Nelson thought

the general idea could be transferred to environmental

causes, and he decided to stage a national teach-in. His

determination grew in June, when Cleveland’s Cuyahoga

River caught on fire after decades of local steel mills and

chemical plants dumping their waste in it. On April 22,

1970, Nelson’s teach-in came to fruition in the form of

Earth Day, which boasted twenty million participants, the

largest secular event in American history.

Nelson’s view of the “environment” was comprehensive.

“Earth Day can—and it must—lend a new urgency to

solving the problems that still threaten to tear the fabric of

this society, the problems of race, of war, of poverty,” he

said in a speech in Denver on the first Earth Day.

“Environment is all of America and its problems. It is rats

in the ghetto. It is a hungry child in a land of affluence. It is

housing that is not worthy of the name; neighborhoods not

fit to inhabit. . . . Our goal is not just an environment of

clean air and water and scenic beauty. The objective is an

environment of decency, quality, and mutual respect for all

other human beings and all other living creatures.”

Nelson’s daughter, Tia, was only seven years old when

her father flew with Kennedy over the Apostle Islands. She

stayed behind in suburban Washington with her mother,

and doesn’t recall her father speaking of the trip, which

was overshadowed by Kennedy’s assassination two months

later. But when Tia turned eighteen, she took a job

waitressing at a ski lodge coffee shop in Cable, Wisconsin,

an hour south of the Apostles, and visited the archipelago

for the first time. “I found it to be the most magical of

places,” she told me. “It’s when I first understood the

significance of my father’s effort to protect it.”

Tia lives in a small ranch house in Maple Bluff, a

Madison suburb, which is also the location of the

governor’s mansion, where she lived from 1959 until 1962,

when her father was elected to the United States Senate.

Her home office doubles as a shrine to her father. The walls

in the small room are covered with portraits of a lost era of

American politics: Harry Truman laughing heartily with

Nelson and his wife, Carrie Lee; Bobby Kennedy wearing a

pinstriped suit, his eyes frozen in a penetrating gaze; a

head shot of Eugene McCarthy, which McCarthy

autographed twice for ten-year-old Tia. She put on black

reading glasses and picked up a framed letter Bobby

Kennedy wrote to her. “I had this big crush on Bobby

Kennedy,” she explained, before reading the letter aloud.

“For Tia,” Kennedy had written. “I enjoy working with your

father on the labor and education committee. He is the

senator who is closest to me in seniority and that is not

good.”

She moved on to another cherished image, a portrait of

her family standing on the rear platform of a train in 1968

during a campaign stop for her father’s reelection. It was

taken in Amery, a town of less than three thousand in

northern Wisconsin, ten miles from Clear Lake, the even

smaller community where Nelson grew up. The train photo

was part of a reenactment of Robert La Follette Jr.’s

whistle-stop tour of 1926, which included a stop in Amery.

Nelson’s father, Anton, took Nelson to hear “Young Bob,”

the eldest son of Fighting Bob La Follette, on that tour. La

Follette Jr. had recently been elected to fill the vacant

Senate seat of his father, who had died the year before.

“Driving home after the speech, my grandfather asked my

father what he thought,” Tia said. “My father went so far as

to say there in the car, when he was ten years old, that

when he grew up he wanted to be a US senator and help

people like Bob La Follette was helping people. But he had

one fear: La Follette would have solved all the problems by

the time he was grown up.”

EARLY ONE MORNING, not long after I met Mike Wiggins, I

picked him up at his small house. It was still dark outside,

but dawn was just beginning to break. We drove to a

nearby Lake Superior beach. Wiggins brought along a jar of

maple sugar and tobacco to make an offering to the Great

Spirit. When we parked, Wiggins asked me to leave my

recorder and notebook behind. He wanted to sit in silence,

separate from each other, as he made his offering at the

lake, which the Ojibwe call Gichi -gami, “the Great Sea.”

The interconnectedness of human beings with the

natural world is the cornerstone of Ojibwe belief, and it

demands of them humility toward that world. In the 1940s,

Aldo Leopold posited a similar idea. “A land ethic changes

the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land

community to plain member and citizen of it,” Leopold

wrote. “It implies respect for his fellow members, and also

respect for the community as such.” As I looked out into

Superior, my thoughts drifted to an inscription from a

psalm above the altar in my parents’ synagogue. “Know

Before Whom You Stand,” the words read in Hebrew. Those

words had terrified and fascinated me as a child, but when

I thought of them here, before Lake Superior, the psalmist’s

demand seemed less severe, more fitting.

More than five hundred years ago, before Columbus

sailed from Spain to the Caribbean, the Wisconsin Ojibwe

arrived at the Great Lakes from their home on the Atlantic

Coast. According to their prophecy, they were returning

home. The Great Spirit, Gichi-manidoo, had placed them in

the Great Lakes originally, but after fighting among

themselves and forgetting the teachings the Great Spirit

had given them, they were told to leave. They settled near

the “Great Salt Water,” but their prophecies foretold that

they would one day return.

Their migration would include seven stops, and their

path would be guided by a vision of a sacred cowrie shell.

That led them to their first stop, a turtle-shaped island near

present-day Montreal, where they stayed for a time. They

continued down the Saint Lawrence River, past Niagara

Falls, the Detroit River, and eventually to the Great Lakes

Basin. Many of them stayed along the way. The prophecy

had told the Ojibwe to seek “the place where food grows on

water,” and those who continued on finally arrived at the

wild-rice beds of Chequamegon Bay in Lake Superior. They

settled on a nearby island they called Moningwunakawning

—“The Home of the Golden-Breasted Woodpecker”—later

known as Madeline Island. I could see it in the distance.

The Ojibwe consider it the center of the world.

After about forty-five minutes on the beach, I wandered

over to Wiggins. He picked up a nearby stick and ushered

me close. He used the stick to draw a series of animal

shapes in the sand. The animals were lined up in a row,

each connected to the next by thin lines at the heart and

head levels. Wiggins sketched a thick line underneath the

animals and then four small ovals beneath that line. He

drew another line connecting the first animal to the four

ovals. Wiggins told me his sand drawing was a re-creation

of a nineteenth-century Ojibwe pictograph. The first animal

represented Chief Buffalo, the leader of all the Ojibwe clans

at the time. The animals behind him were the leaders of the

individual clans. The thick line represented Lake Superior,

while the ovals were the wild-rice beds the Ojibwe

depended on for food. The lines connecting the clans were

meant to show they were all of one mind and one heart.

The lines to the ovals were the inland trails that led to the

wild-rice beds. The drawing signified the inseparability of

the Ojibwe from their home.

The original pictograph was an Ojibwe petition, drawn in

1849, to the United States government, in which they

pleaded not to be forcibly removed from their land. The

treaties of 1837 and 1842 affirmed the Ojibwe’s right to

hunt, fish, and gather wild rice in the territory they ceded

to the United States. As long as they did not make war on

the settlers, they had the right to occupy the land.

Nevertheless, by 1848, as logging and mining activity in

the area increased, rumors had begun circulating among

the tribes that they were to be relocated. In 1850,

President Zachary Taylor signed a removal order for the

Ojibwe to be resettled in the Minnesota Territory. To coerce

them, the government moved the Indian agency that made

annuity payments the Ojibwe depended on from Madeline

Island to Sandy Lake, Minnesota, 150 miles away.

Nonetheless, in the fall of 1850, nearly three thousand men

from nineteen bands made the perilous journey as the

north-country cold set in.

When they arrived at Sandy Lake that October, the

agency had been burned down. Some suspected it was an

act of treachery. Snow and cold had settled in already, and

the only food that survived the fire were barrels of pork,

government rations that had become tainted. Starving, the

weary Ojibwe ate the pork. At least 150 Ojibwe died—some

from food poisoning, others succumbing to hunger,

measles, and exposure. Many of the survivors chose to

return home, despite the winter conditions. On that journey

back, 250 more Ojibwe perished. The following year, Chief

Buffalo wrote to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs,

pleading to rescind the removal order. “We wish to . . . be

permitted to remain here where we were promised we

might live, as long as we were not in the way of the

Whites,” he wrote. That plea and others were ignored, and

many of the young Ojibwe warriors began talking of

making war on the United States. Instead, Chief Buffalo

called the other chiefs together. They decided to journey to

Washington to appeal to the president in person.

In the spring of 1852, Chief Buffalo, then ninety-three

years old, led an entourage that included his deputy, O-sha-

ga, four braves, and a white translator named Benjamin

Armstrong. They set out for Washington in a twenty-four-

foot birchbark canoe, and later traveled by steamboat and

railroad. In Michigan, they were stopped by an Indian

agent accompanied by American soldiers. The agent asked

if they had permission for their trip. They didn’t. Armstrong

attempted to persuade the agent to let them pass. They

were trying to avoid a war, Armstrong told them as he

presented documents from a local mining company, which

affirmed the Ojibwe were peaceful neighbors. “To give up

this trip would be to abandon the last hope of keeping that

turbulent spirit of the young warriors in bounds,”

Armstrong wrote in his memoirs.

When the group finally arrived in Washington, eleven

weeks after leaving northern Wisconsin, they were rebuffed

by staff at the Office of Indian Affairs and the White House.

As despair began to set in, Armstrong befriended

Congressman George Briggs, who happened to be eating

with several members of President Millard Fillmore’s

cabinet in the hotel dining room. (Zachary Taylor had died

in office two years before.) Intrigued and impressed by the

delegation, Briggs offered to get them an audience with the

president. When Chief Buffalo met President Fillmore, he

brought out a new pipe, filled and lit it, and then passed it

to Fillmore. Fillmore took a few puffs, smiled, and,

according to Armstrong, asked: “Who is the next?” The

pipe was passed around the room and smoked by all, from

the secretary of the interior to the young braves

accompanying Chief Buffalo.

After a subsequent meeting, Fillmore agreed to rescind

the order and made provisions for their journey home. But

he told the Ojibwe chiefs that they had one more treaty to

negotiate. That treaty, signed in 1854, established the small

reservations Wisconsin’s Ojibwe live on now. Where they

had once held millions of acres, their combined

reservations would shrink to 300,000 acres. But the treaty

did include a provision, ignored for generations, until Walt

Bresette and others fought for it to be honored, that the

Ojibwe “shall have the right to hunt and fish” in the

territory ceded.

“After they smoked the pipe, and Fillmore lifted the

removal order, the story is that Chief Buffalo broke the

pipe,” Wiggins told me. “He said it was to honor what was

done here today.” Chief Buffalo died a year after the treaty

was signed, at the age of ninety-six, and the pieces of his

pipe are now held by one of his descendants, Marvin

DeFoe, the Red Cliff tribal elder who had once challenged

Scott Walker to imagine a world without deer.

DALE SCHULTZ FELT tremendous pressure to vote for the

assembly’s mining bill. Walker and the Republican

leadership knew Schultz believed it gave GTac too much,

and Schultz’s concerns only deepened after he visited the

mining site and heard the fears of Mike Wiggins and other

local citizens. The state senate held a one-vote Republican

majority—if Schultz defected, the bill would die. “All kinds

of people tried to exert pressure on me,” Schultz said,

without disclosing names. “They would say this is a terrible

blow to the governor’s economic program and we need this

mine for political purposes.”

The pressure had an ugliness that felt unfamiliar to the

courteous Schultz, and foreign to his thirty years in

Wisconsin politics. It disturbed him. “We have this whole

industry in politics that is there to—” He paused. “It’s like

thuggery. No, that’s too strong a word. Political thuggery,

where they’ll do robocalls across the whole district and

leave misinformation. Or they’ll gin it up on talk radio so

you get fifty phone calls from heaven knows who, which are

unbelievably abusive.” Schultz sighed. “The world has

changed now, politically. We now hear everybody talk about

the base all the time. What that means is we want fifty

percent plus one of the electorate and we’re going to do

whatever we can to hang onto that, and the hell with

everyone else. The idea now is let’s obliterate all these

people in the middle.”

We were sitting in the kitchen of his farm about sixty

miles west of Madison. The land has been in Schultz’s

family for six generations. His father grew up on the farm,

and Schultz, as a boy, spent his summers there. Schultz is

an avid hunter, and he poured me coffee and described

some of the animals—grouse, wild turkey, even a bear—that

he has hunted throughout Wisconsin. A few days earlier, he

gave a reading at an event honoring Aldo Leopold. “I’m a

guy who believes that the Leopold land ethic makes sense,”

Schultz said. “It’s about stewardship, but using resources

wisely is OK.”

Leopold’s land ethic, which is included in A Sand County

Almanac, has proven its durability to a wide range of

environmentalists including those, like Schultz, who are

more open to development. “A thing is right when it tends

to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic

community,” the ethic asserts. “It is wrong when it tends

otherwise.” The organizers of the event had asked Schultz

to read from “Sky Dance,” Leopold’s appreciation of the

springtime rites of woodcocks. “The woodcock is a living

refutation of the theory that the utility of a game bird is to

serve as a target, or to pose gracefully on a slice of toast,”

Leopold wrote. “No one would rather hunt woodcock in

October than I, but since learning of the sky dance I find

myself calling one or two birds enough. I must be sure that,

come April, there be no dearth of dancers in the sunset

sky.”

Wisconsin’s largest deposit of iron ore is the GTac site.

The second-largest deposit is in the Baraboo Hills, which lie

in Schultz’s district. “As I’m making these decisions about

the mining bill, I know that these changes could directly

affect my constituents,” he said. “A few years ago, there

was a big amount of anger in the country that legislators

didn’t read bills. Now it’s ‘I don’t care if you read the bill,

you got to vote for this.’ Either you’re on the team, and on

the team one hundred percent, or I’m just going to be

angry with you. In terms of the mining bill, I would say to

people: ‘Do you realize that this allows for the filling of

navigable rivers and streams and lake beds?’ They’d say: ‘I

didn’t see that in there.’ ”

Unemployment around Mellen, where the GTac mine

would be located, was significantly higher than the

statewide average. Despite this, during Schultz’s town-hall

meeting there with state senator Bob Jauch, who

represented the area, a majority of the attendees

registered their opposition to the assembly bill. “We want

the mine; we fear the mine,” Mellen’s mayor, Joseph

Barabe, said at the meeting. “We have the most to lose.”

Schultz believed that a mine in the area would be feasible,

but that radically changing long-established environmental

law would be unwise and contrary to the state’s ethos. He

and Jauch developed a compromise bill that sought to

strike a balance between the state’s conservationist

traditions and the accommodations GTac sought. Notably, it

preserved the hearings that allowed citizens and

organizations to question mining officials under oath. But it

was described by Scott Fitzgerald, the senate majority

leader, as a “nonstarter” and never brought up for a vote.

In March 2012, the senate narrowly voted to reject the

assembly’s mining bill, 17–16. Schultz joined the sixteen

Democrats in voting against the bill. After the vote, GTac

issued a brief statement to say it was abandoning its

interest in the Wisconsin mine. Before he took the vote,

Fitzgerald thought he had one Milwaukee Democrat lined

up to support the bill, and he still hoped he could persuade

one. “I would not rule out calling an extraordinary session,”

Fitzgerald said, “if we could get a signal from the

corporation and a seventeenth senator. I just need one

more vote.”

TIA NELSON HAD encouraged me to see Clear Lake, where her

father grew up and which forged his politics and ecological

awareness. When I arrived in late September, the ferocious

heat felt unnerving. Despite Clear Lake’s location in

Wisconsin’s North Woods, the temperature that day

reached a high of eighty-eight degrees. The fall heat wave

would have alarmed Nelson, who warned of the dangers of

global warming as far back as the 1980s. But the

surroundings—red barns adorned with cupolas, grassy hills

that hinted at the Great Plains to the west—seemed

timeless.

When Norwegian and German farmers first arrived in

Clear Lake in the 1860s, the land was dense wilderness,

with no roads, so the settlers carried food and supplies on

their backs. Before settlement, white-pine forests blanketed

the region, but by the end of the nineteenth century the

forests were decimated—“cut-over” country, as the timber

companies called it. Along with the railroad interests, the

big timber companies controlled the Wisconsin State

Legislature. But their power waned after deforestation was

complete, and in 1910, Wisconsin voters approved a

constitutional amendment promoting forest and water

conservation.

Parked outside the high school, I left a message with

Charles Clark, an old family friend of the Nelsons. After

getting his answering machine, I mumbled where I was

parked, adding that I would be leaving town momentarily.

Two minutes later, a Buick roared up the quiet street and

screeched to a halt next to my car. “Hop in,” a voice said. It

was Clark, eighty-three years old and eager to take me on a

whirlwind tour of Nelson’s Clear Lake.

Nelson died in 2005. Like La Follette’s funeral, eighty

years earlier, Nelson’s was held at the state capitol. But he

was buried in Clear Lake, and Clark’s first stop was the

graveyard, where Nelson’s stone is engraved with the

Presidential Medal of Freedom, which Bill Clinton awarded

to him in 1995. “The stone was all done,” Clark explained.

“Then when he got the Presidential Medal of Freedom, I

called him up and I said ‘Gaylord, there’s room for that

right on the bottom.’ It looks like it belongs there. The

monument guy took it back and redid it.” (Clark also

wanted me to see the gravesite of Clear Lake’s other

famous son, Burleigh Grimes, the last legal spitball pitcher

in major-league baseball.)

Next Clark showed me the ninety-five-foot-deep lake the

town is named for, forged during the Ice Age. As a kid,

Nelson grew fascinated by the three-day migration of

turtles from Clear Lake across town—and over a highway—

to Mud Lake, where they hibernate for the winter. Nelson

would pick them off the middle of the road and carry them

the rest of the way. Sometimes he and a friend would spin

them half a dozen times and point them back in the

direction of Clear Lake. The turtles would stick their heads

out of their shells and immediately turn around and head

for Mud Lake, even when Nelson put them behind a tree or

in tall grass so they couldn’t see. The turtle migration

sparked his boundless love of nature.

Before I left Clear Lake, Clark made sure I saw the

Nelsons’ modest two-story house, which had a wraparound

porch and a spacious lawn that Clark used to mow for fifty

cents. Parked in front of the house, Clark recalled the

generosity of Nelson’s father, who viewed his medical

practice more as a service mission than a career. “As a

doctor in hard times, he’d go out and deliver babies, and

they’d give him a chicken or something,” Clark said.

“Gaylord’s father didn’t have any money, and he didn’t care

about money. That wasn’t what he was interested in.”

After saying goodbye to Clark, I passed over the

Namekagon River. I recalled a film I had seen of Nelson’s

last battle, which took place on this river. In 2003, the Lac

Courte Oreilles Chippewa asked Nelson to help them fight

a utility company that wanted to put a power line over the

river. In the 1960s, Nelson had saved the Namekagon when

he passed legislation to preserve the St. Croix and its

tributaries.

He could barely walk, and he could barely speak then,

but he went. Tribal members put Nelson in a canoe on the

Namekagon, and he made a declaration that he would fight

with them until his last breath to prevent the river from

being diminished. After they led him out of the canoe, he

sat down and they had a pipe ceremony, and he began

breaking down, weeping. A blanket was wrapped around

him, and though he was struggling for breath, he began

quoting a passage from Moby-Dick. “The moot point is,

whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so

remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be

exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the

last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in

the final puff.”

AFTER DALE SCHULTZ sank the mining bill in March 2012,

Scott Fitzgerald admitted that perhaps the mining

company, whose operations were mostly in West Virginia

and Illinois, had pushed too far for Wisconsin. “I think the

corporation and their attorneys drafted a bill that may have

been acceptable in other states,” he told me.

But Schultz believed GTac’s announcement that the

company would leave was a feint. “I know they’ve said

they’re pulling out,” he told me. “That’s designed to

increase pressure.” Schultz’s vote had given opponents a

one-vote majority. The company needed to flip just a single

senator to win passage, and the 2012 elections were only

seven months away. The state Democratic Party focused its

efforts on two goals: keeping Wisconsin in Barack Obama’s

column and electing Representative Tammy Baldwin to the

Senate. In that regard, the outcome was a stunning

success. Obama beat Mitt Romney by seven percentage

points, despite Paul Ryan’s presence on the ticket, and

Baldwin defeated former Wisconsin governor Tommy

Thompson by a slightly smaller margin. But that focus also

had a cost: in the state legislature, Democrats lost three

senate seats and made no gains in the assembly. The

results highlighted the party’s fundamental weakness, but

also the strength of the Republican grip on power.

GTac’s role in those senate losses was pivotal—and

revealing. Walker had met with GTac lobbyists to discuss

the mine shortly after his inauguration in 2011. The

company’s owner, Chris Cline, had donated to his

campaign, and GTac increased its financial support during

Walker’s recall election the following year, three months

after Schultz’s vote had defeated the bill. According to the

Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan campaign-

finance watchdog, within a span of two years, GTac

executives and other supporters of the mine had donated a

total of $15 million to Walker and his Republican allies in

the legislature, outspending the mine’s opponents by more

than six hundred to one.

One of the primary targets was Jessica King, a Democrat

from Oshkosh, who had narrowly defeated a Republican

incumbent in a senate recall election held in August 2011.

When King sought a full term in the election the following

year, mine proponents funneled nearly a million dollars in

donations to both Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce,

the state’s most powerful business lobby, and the Wisconsin

Club for Growth, an arm of the libertarian-leaning national

group. In the last three weeks of the campaign, those

organizations ran close to two million dollars in attack ads

against King. King lost to the newcomer Rick Gudex, a

production manager at a manufacturing plant, by fewer

than six hundred votes.

In January 2013, a new mining bill, even more industry-

friendly than the first, was introduced. It included all the

changes to Wisconsin environmental law proposed in the

earlier bill, such as allowing GTac to pay taxes solely on

profit, not on the amount of ore removed, raising the

possibility that the communities affected by the mine’s

impact on the area’s roads and schools would receive only

token compensation.

Marcia Bjornerud, a geology professor at Lawrence

University in Appleton, testified to the legislature that

samples she had taken from the mine site revealed the

presence of sulfides both in the target iron formation and in

the overlying rock that would have to be removed to get to

the iron-bearing rocks. (When exposed to air and water,

sulfides oxidize and turn water acidic, which can be

devastating to rivers and streams, along with their fish

populations.) Sulfide minerals, Bjornerud said, would be an

unavoidable by-product of mining, but the bill only

addressed “ferrous” iron mining and did not mandate a

process for preventing the harm from the sulfides that

mining would unleash. “The legislation was scientifically

nonsensical,” Bjornerud told me. “You can’t distinguish

between ferrous and non-ferrous mining.” Equally

troubling was the discovery by Tom Fitz, a geology

professor at Northland College, in Ashland, of a highly

carcinogenic asbestos-form mineral at one of GTac’s

sampling sites. The fibers of the mineral, which would be

dispersed in blasting, are like tiny, breathable needles.

Nonetheless, the new mining bill passed 17–16. “They

made it even worse than the earlier bill in terms of

wetlands protection,” Schultz said. “It was particularly

disappointing how they went after legislators when they

didn’t produce a bill the industry wanted.” With the

exception of Schultz, all the senate Republicans, including

the three new members, voted in favor.

ON A SUNNY AFTERNOON in September 2013, several hundred

people gathered on the grass outside the John F. Kennedy

Memorial Airport, in Ashland, to commemorate the speech

Kennedy had given there fifty years earlier. The event

included a preamble by the Ashland High School Band,

reminiscences by elderly observers like former House

appropriations chairman David Obey, and the replaying of

Kennedy’s address over loudspeakers. “Lake Superior, the

Apostle Islands, the Bad River area are all unique . . . and

we must act to preserve these assets,” Kennedy’s voice

boomed out over the crowd. It took seven years after

Kennedy’s assassination, until Gaylord Nelson finally won

protective status for the Apostle Islands.

While the speakers celebrated that victory, and other

achievements of the past—the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act,

the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered

Species Act—there was an undercurrent of anxiety. “I have

a suspicion that we’re also here yearning for the kind of

politics than we had in those days,” Obey said. Though

Obey did not mention GTac directly, the company had

recently begun bulk sampling iron ore at the site.

Still, the mine faced many hurdles before it could be

permitted. The company had filed incomplete sampling

applications with the state’s Department of Natural

Resources. GTac’s president, Bill Williams, was facing a

criminal inquiry in Spain. The charges stated that runoff

from an open-pit mine where he once worked as an

executive had contaminated local groundwater. (Williams

was eventually convicted, fined, and given a one-year

suspended prison sentence.) Most important, the Bad River

could challenge the mine in federal court.

One of the event’s last speakers was Mike Wiggins. The

previous summer, Wiggins had played Governor Walker a

recording of Kennedy’s Ashland speech. Wiggins told me

that the governor appeared indifferent to Kennedy’s words;

Walker has never wavered in his support of the mine. A

month before the Ashland event, Wiggins and five other

Ojibwe tribal leaders had begun seeking redress from the

federal government. They sent President Obama a letter

asking him to direct the Interior Department to prevent the

construction of GTac’s mine, citing their claims that the

mine would infringe on their treaty rights. Though the

letter did not mention it, in 2009 Obama told nearly four

hundred Native American tribal leaders, “We have a lot to

learn from your nations in order to create the kind of

sustainability in our environment that we so desperately

need.” The president said that the tribes “deserve to have a

voice” and “will not be forgotten as long as I’m in this

White House.” Wiggins never received an answer from the

president.

That evening, after the airport speeches, Wiggins drove

me to a dinner in Ashland celebrating JFK’s speech. In

2011, Wiggins had delivered the State of the Tribes

address, an annual speech given by the head of one of

Wisconsin’s eleven tribes to the governor and state

legislature. That day, on his way to Madison, he was about

to listen to Bresette’s speeches in his truck when suddenly

a giant bald eagle, an animal sacred to the Ojibwe,

swooped in front of his windshield. He thought it was a

powerful sign. As we drove to Ashland, Wiggins, who calls

Bresette by his Ojibwe name, Makoons (“Little Bear”), put

on the same CD. We listened in silence as a thin, searing

voice unspooled the Chippewa philosophy of the Seventh

Generation. I watched Wiggins lean forward over the

wheel, clinging to every word. Bresette began by

describing the Great Spirit’s creation of the earth, waters,

vegetation, and animals.

“And the world was complete,” Bresette said. “But the

creator didn’t stop,” Bresette continued:

He said, we’ll create one more, one more people we

will create. The Anishinaabe [Ojibwe]—the people—

you. We are dependent on all of those first three

creations. If we lose the vegetation, we will die. If we

lose the animals who give us our spirit, who give us

our name, who come to us in the sweat lodge and say

‘you will be Makoons,’ we will lose our identity, we will

lose our spirit. . . . We are in a crisis situation. Not

because the earth will die. The earth will be happy.

Because some day, some day our children are going to

rise up and they’re going to say ‘Where were you?!

Where were you when you poisoned my river?! Where

were you when I can’t eat the fish no more?!’ . . . They

will remember who sat idly by. They will remember

that. And as we poison their bodies, and as we poison

their minds, they will turn on us. And we will not have

a happy old age. The Seventh Generation is something

of a good philosophy. But we must not forget this

generation. It is that close.”

As we drove, Wiggins mentioned an earlier mining fight

against Exxon, which wanted to mine precious metals in

Crandon, Wisconsin, near the Mole Lake Chippewa

Reservation. Bresette had won that battle by forging an

alliance between the Ojibwe and white fishermen, an

alliance that helped win the passage of a mining

moratorium law in 1998. The law mandated that companies

seeking to mine sulfide ores such as copper, zinc, and gold

need to prove that similar mines had operated for ten

years, and been closed for ten years, without causing

pollution. (The Mole Lake and Potawatomi were later able

to buy the Crandon site, and vowed never to allow mining

there.)

The victory highlighted the value of alliances, which

Bresette tried to cultivate. “Even as the Chippewa spearers

and white anglers were in conflict over treaty rights, Walt

understood that they really had more in common than they

had differences,” Zoltan Grossman, a friend of Bresette’s,

once said. “He felt the people of northern Wisconsin had to

defend their clean environment and their mom-and-pop

businesses together, or both would be lost to outside

corporations.”

Wiggins has followed that strategy, forging a wide

coalition with non-Native mining opponents across the

state. As corporations like GTac exerted greater control

over the Wisconsin State Legislature, the tribes,

Wisconsin’s first conservationists, became the last hope,

the only group with any power to stop the dismantling of

the state’s environmental heritage.

BEFORE I LEFT Aldo Leopold’s old farm, Curt Meine wanted to

show me “the shack” where Leopold and his family lived.

On our walk over, he mentioned a new law Governor

Walker had signed a few days earlier to give Foxconn, a

Taiwanese company, $3 billion in taxpayer subsidies to

build an LCD-screen factory in Racine. Meine noted that

the law gave Foxconn unprecedented court privileges.

Unlike other litigants, the company would receive multiple

appeals of unfavorable trial court rulings in a single case.

In addition, Foxconn was granted the right to appeal an

unfavorable ruling directly to the conservative-controlled

Wisconsin Supreme Court. To Meine, it showed how

corporations such as GTac and Foxconn may be

engineering a more permanent shift in Wisconsin politics

than previous watershed events like Joe McCarthy’s defeat

of Bob La Follette Jr. in the Republican primary for the

United States Senate in 1946.

“That shows us how far down we’ve gone,” Meine said.

“And we haven’t apparently hit bottom yet. Can we reclaim

our culture of conservation and civic value in Wisconsin?

Sure, anytime we want to. Anytime we resist those who

prefer to divide and conquer. But it takes something we

have not yet tried to do before, because we haven’t had to.”

As we approached Leopold’s shack, Meine pointed out

some of the wildlife surrounding it. In front of us were

prairie dropseed, a musky-smelling native grass, gray-

headed coneflower, and big bluestem. The building was

locked, but I peeked inside a window to catch a glimpse of

a rustic, cozy room, with pots hanging on the wall, a big

table for writing, and a fireplace. On the walk back to our

cars, Meine began telling me how Leo pold died.

“It was springtime, so it was the time for brush burning

and burning trash piles if you’re a farmer,” Meine said. A

neighbor was burning a trash fire that got out of control.

“Aldo Leopold is a forester, he sees smoke, he does what

every forester does, he goes into action,” Meine said. “He’s

sixty-one years old. He gets a can full of water. He tells his

wife and daughter: ‘I’m going out to check out the fire and

suppress it.’ And he has a heart attack and dies while

fighting the fire.

“He was kneeling down on the grass. The fire burned

over the grass, so he died symbolically. He was helping a

neighbor and also protecting his own landscape, his young

trees, maybe even his own family. That balance of self-

interest and community interest. That’s what rural life is

about, or has been about. It doesn’t mean it’s been perfect,

but it means that rural communities, or maybe every

community, can only survive that way.”

4

THE MODEL FOR THE COUNTRY

Since 1926, Wisconsin law has allowed for the recall of elected officials who have served at least one year in office.

If petitioners can gather signatures equaling one-quarter of

the votes cast in the previous election, a new election is

triggered, typically within a few months. Until 2011, there

had been only four recalls of state officials in Wisconsin.

But that fall, anger over Governor Walker’s attacks on labor

unions, environmental regulations, public education, the

university system, and voting rights forced the recall

elections of nine state senators—six Republicans, and, after

a Republican counteroffensive, three Democrats. Two of the

state senators (both Republicans) lost, while seven others

(three Democrats and four Republicans) held on. The

following June, four more Republican senators faced recall

elections.

That June would also include the recall election against

Walker himself. Petitioners gathered nearly a million

signatures, almost twice what was needed to trigger the

election. Their effort fixed the national spotlight on

Wisconsin, demonstrating continuing resistance to the

growing strength of the Tea Party. If Walker lost, he would

be only the third governor in American history to be

recalled. More important, while he was campaigning to

hold on to the governor’s mansion, his recall was a national

proxy for his battle with the unions, whose defeat would be

secured only if he won. For Walker’s wealthy donors, his

victory was paramount. “What Scott Walker is doing with

the public unions in Wisconsin is critically important,”

David Koch told the Palm Beach Post in February 2012,

three months before the recall election. “If the unions win

the recall, there will be no stopping union power.” Koch

added: “We’re helping him, as we should. We’ve gotten

pretty good at this over the years. We’ve spent a lot of

money in Wisconsin. We’re going to spend more.”

Nearly $140 million dollars would ultimately be spent on

the 2011 and 2012 recall races, including $81 million for

the governor’s race alone. That was more than double the

total for the 2010 governor’s race, which was the first

contest after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision

and, until the recall, the most expensive in Wisconsin

history. Citizens United allowed corporations and labor

unions to spend unlimited sums on political advertising and

other “issue advocacy,” as long as they did not coordinate

their spending directly with a candidate. An unprecedented

$10 million was spent during the recall race of Alberta

Darling, a Republican state senator. Darling, whose district

covers parts of Milwaukee and its wealthiest suburbs,

raised $1.4 million in direct contributions, more than

double what her opponent raised. The job itself pays

$49,000 a year.

Darling’s trajectory suggests the rising influence of

conservative donors and organizations on the Wisconsin

GOP. She received support for her recall campaign from

Wisconsin Right to Life as well as Tea Party groups

including the Wisconsin Club for Growth and Americans for

Prosperity. Earlier in her career, she had been a moderate

on reproductive rights, even serving on the board of the

Wisconsin chapter of Planned Parenthood from 1986 to

1995. But in 2011, she voted to defund the organization.

Three years earlier, Darling had received an 85 percent

rating from the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters.

In March 2011, five months before her recall election,

Americans for Prosperity sent out a press release praising

Darling for signing the group’s No Climate Tax Pledge, a

promise to oppose any legislation to combat climate change

that includes a net increase in tax revenue. Darling held

her seat.

Walker’s recall did not provoke a similar urgency from

national Democrats, many of whom saw it as an unwelcome

distraction from the upcoming presidential race. The week

before the June election, President Obama made fund ‐

raising trips to nearby Minneapolis and Chicago, but he

declined to make even a brief stop in Wisconsin to

campaign for Walker’s opponent, Tom Barrett, despite

Barrett’s plea for help. “This is a gubernatorial race with a

guy who was recalled and a challenger trying to get him

out of office,” Stephanie Cutter, the deputy campaign

spokeswoman for Obama’s 2012 campaign, told NBC

News. “It has nothing to do with President Obama.” Walker

gloated over Obama’s absence, spinning it as a smart

political calculation. “He knew a significant number of his

supporters were also backing me in the recall,” Walker

wrote in his memoir, Unintimidated.

But Obama’s decision was also rooted in an earlier, more

fundamental political calculation, made by the Democratic

Party a generation earlier, to move rightward and support

Republican priorities such as welfare reform and school

vouchers. Bill Clinton had pushed for charter schools “run

by private corporations,” whose teachers would be non-

union, in an early State of the Union address, two years

before signing a welfare reform bill based on the model

advanced by Governor Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin.

Clinton embraced the Republicans’ framing of the measure,

which stated that welfare recipients lacked “personal

responsibility” and would be required to work within two

years of receiving any assistance, while ignoring the

precipitous decline in good-paying jobs for people without a

college degree. Obama allowed states to loosen the work

requirements under welfare reform, but he never

repudiated the concept. More important, he and his

education secretary, Arne Duncan, promoted linking

standardized test scores to teacher pay and teacher tenure,

and expanding charter schools, all of which were anathema

to many of the same unions spearheading the recall effort.

A few months after Act 10, Duncan appeared at an event at

a Milwaukee school with Scott Walker. “You’ve done some

things we agree with, and you’ve done some things that we

don’t agree with,” he said. He gave Walker only a tepid

rebuke, telling the governor that stripping collective

bargaining rights was “not the right way to go.”

A few days before the first wave of recalls, in 2011, I

visited the state capitol in Madison to witness a “solidarity

sing-along.” The daily noontime gathering featured some of

the activist elements of the Democratic base—teachers,

firefighters, students, and other union sympathizers—

singing labor songs and standards with revamped lyrics to

reflect Wisconsin’s union fight. Toward the end of this

gathering, the singers delivered their version of “My

Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.” (“Though we may be ‘God’s

frozen people’ / We bask in the warmth of our plea / Don’t

bury my rights in a snowbank / Oh, bring back Wisconsin to

me.”) After the song, one of the members announced that it

was President Obama’s birthday. A few boos erupted, but

mostly there was silence. There were no cheers.

But if an erosion of support for Obama and the

Democratic Party reflected neglect of the party’s base, it

was also tied to the failure of progressives to build the vast

infrastructure conservatives had created over the past

forty-five years. Conservative institutions such as the

Wisconsin Club for Growth; Americans for Prosperity, the

Koch brothers’ political advocacy arm; and the Bradley

Foundation, a Milwaukee-based organization focused on a

state-based strategy to move the country to the right,

played a crucial role in attacking Wisconsin’s progressive

legacy and supporting Walker and his allies in the recall

elections.

The Bradley Foundation, headquartered in an antebellum

mansion known as the Lion House (for the two enormous

carved lions that gaze east into Lake Michigan from the

building’s portico), is a tax-exempt charitable organization

with assets now worth nearly $850 million. It specializes in

what the New Yorker writer Jane Mayer has called

“weaponized philanthropy.” Each year the foundation

distributes tens of millions of dollars in grants to think

tanks, litigation centers, opposition research firms, and

other organizations promoting a spectrum of conservative

causes including voter ID laws, school vouchers, the

curtailing or elimination of safety-net programs, and anti-

union measures like right-to-work laws.

The foundation was created in 1942 by a Milwaukee

industrialist named Harry Bradley, and owes its existence

to the fortune Harry and his brother Lynde made from the

Allen-Bradley Company, an electronic-controls

manufacturer Lynde started under a different name in

1903. The company’s first product was based on a toy

rheostat Lynde designed when he was only fourteen. A

high-school dropout, Lynde devoted his working hours to

improving his inventions as well as crafting new ones. He

claimed fifteen patents before he turned forty—six of which

he shared with Harry, also a high-school dropout, who

worked as a draftsman, electrician, mechanic, designer,

and company manager. Allen-Bradley floundered until the

First World War, when demand for ships, planes, and

weapons fueled the need for electronic controls to run

mass-production machinery. The company grew quickly,

buying a factory on South 2nd Street in Milwaukee, which

the brothers expanded over several decades until it

encompassed four city blocks and 1.8 million square feet of

manufacturing space.

Harry Bradley lavished perks like marble bathrooms, a

rooftop sundeck, and Tuesday-afternoon jazz concerts on

his employees. But his generosity came with a paternalism

that grew to rankle the company’s workers. The largesse

was also meant to keep unions out, and Allen-Bradley

employed a consultant to break up any unionization drive

and pledged loyalty to “the open-shop principle.”

Organizing was made easier, however, by the passage of

the Wagner Act, and even Allen-Bradley could not resist the

tide. In 1937, a majority of the company’s employees voted

to form Local 1111, a chapter of the United Electrical,

Radio, and Machine Workers. Two years later, punch-press

operators initiated a company-wide strike over the

presence of non-union employees in their department.

More than 90 percent of the workforce went out on a

twelve-week strike, which included violent skirmishes with

strikebreakers and the arrests of twenty-four people.

According to Allen-Bradley’s official corporate history,

written by the Milwaukee historian John Gurda, Lynde

Bradley looked out the window at the picket line and said:

“What do they want?” What the strikers wanted was a

union shop, and though their strike ultimately failed to

achieve it, Harry was booed by workers on the picket line,

fueling his animus toward unions and the New Deal.

World War II, and the enormous expansion it brought for

Allen-Bradley, temporarily ended some of the acrimony. The

war also brought the brothers great wealth, and Lynde

began to explore the idea of a foundation to lower his

inheritance tax. Lynde died in 1942, before he managed to

create one, but a few months after his death, Harry

established the Lynde Bradley Foundation, a charity

focused on helping needy families in Milwaukee and

supporting local colleges and hospitals. The foundation’s

politics would soon become clear when it began

distributing grants to conservative groups like the

Christian Anti-Communist Crusade and the Committee for

Constitutional Government.

In 1965, when Harry Bradley died, his foundation

remained small by national standards. Twenty years later,

Allen-Bradley was sold to Rockwell International, a defense

contractor, for an astounding $1.65 billion. Proceeds from

the sale swelled the Bradley Foundation’s budget from $14

million to nearly $300 million. Wanting to make a national

impact, the board recruited Michael Joyce, a fiery

neoconservative activist who had grown a similar

organization, the John M. Olin Foundation, into a

powerhouse. At the Olin Foundation, Joyce had helped fund

the creation of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal

group, and beachhead centers for conservative economics

at prestigious universities like Yale and Harvard. When

Joyce came to the Bradley Foundation, in 1985, the vast

majority of its funding still went to traditional institutions

like Marquette University, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and

the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. By 1990, 60 percent of

the foundation’s grants went toward public policy.

Joyce’s advocacy and the Bradley Foundation’s funding

of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute helped launch

the school-voucher program in Milwaukee, in 1990, which

was the first in the country. “Perhaps more than any other

person, he was responsible for the voucher legislation

under which Wisconsin became the first state providing

public dollars for private schools,” a prominent Milwaukee-

based education writer named Barbara Miner would write

of Joyce. Wisconsin’s voucher program has been replicated

by thirteen states and Washington, DC; in doing so, they

weakened countless public-school systems, as well as

teachers’ unions, by draining public-school budgets. Joyce

funded other efforts with national impact, too—under him,

the Bradley Foundation directed $1 million in grants to

Charles Murray to coauthor The Bell Curve, the 1994

polemic attributing the intelligence of African Americans

and other minorities partly to a genetic inferiority to

whites.

When Joyce retired in 2001, the foundation’s board

selected a Milwaukee corporate attorney named Michael

Grebe, a Republican Party activist, as its new president.

Grebe would become Scott Walker’s most important

adviser, opening the door to a network of national

conservative donors. Grebe had known Walker since the

1980s, when Walker was a student at Marquette and they

both volunteered at events for President Ronald Reagan.

Grebe donated to Walker’s first campaign for state

assembly in 1993 and when Walker was elected county

executive, Grebe was a member of Walker’s transition

team. And in 2010, Grebe signed on to lead Walker’s

gubernatorial campaign. Walker was not the only powerful

Wisconsin Republican Grebe would mentor. At a 2009

Bradley Foundation dinner in Washington, Paul Ryan called

Grebe “virtually my political godfather.”

THERE WAS ANOTHER key institution, almost unheard of before

Walker’s election, that was essential to the effort to remake

Wisconsin, and states across the country, in a conservative

mold: the American Legislative Exchange Council, also

known as ALEC.

On a clear June evening, five months before the 2016

presidential election, Chris Taylor, a Democratic

assemblywoman, drove to New Glarus, a former Swiss

settlement forty miles southwest of Madison. A reddish sun

set over bucolic farmland and prairie as Taylor wended her

way along county roads. She was on her way to give a talk

to a group of citizens about how ALEC brings together

corporations, conservative think tanks, and state legislators

to draft and distribute model bills. Versions of these bills

are then passed in state legislatures across the country.

ALEC is a nonprofit public charity whose major donors

include ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and PhRMA, the

pharmaceutical trade organization. The group describes

itself modestly as a “forum for experts to discuss business

and economic issues facing the states,” but to its critics,

ALEC is one of America’s most powerful corporate lobbies.

It was part of that same infrastructure that Taylor had

lamented on election night, and as an unlikely ALEC

member herself, she knew its intricacies better than any of

its critics.

Taylor had joined ALEC to learn what was coming next

for Wisconsin. She became ALEC’s most intimate foe,

slogging through countless hours at the group’s task force

meetings, workshops, and panels, which are open only to

ALEC members. She writes about the group’s initiatives for

left-leaning outlets like The Progressivemagazine,

Madison’s Capital Times newspaper, and the website of the

Center for Media and Democracy, a Wisconsin-based

watchdog dedicated to tracking corporate influence on

government. “I see my role as exposing what they do,”

Taylor said.

Since 2010, when Republicans gained more than seven

hundred seats in state legislatures across the country and

control of all branches of government in twenty-six states,

ALEC has been extraordinarily successful. Dozens of states

have passed versions of ALEC model laws that diverted

public-school budgets to private education, restricted

voting rights, and decimated labor unions and

environmental regulations. ALEC claims nearly one-fourth

of all the state legislators in the country are now members;

the group boasted of passing two hundred bills based on its

models in a single year. ALEC has also spearheaded

campaigns for states to obstruct the EPA’s Clean Power

Plan and to reject Medicaid expansion under Obama care,

which paved the way for President Trump’s destruction of

those programs.

Since 2010, Wisconsin has enacted a statewide school

voucher program, a right-to-work law, and one of the

country’s strictest voter ID laws. An ALEC member

introduced each of these bills in the legislature. Many of

the provisions were inspired by models ALEC devised, and

some were word-for-word copies. ALEC’s model right-to-

work bill, for example, reads: “No person shall be required,

as a condition of employment or continuation of

employment . . . to become or remain a member of a labor

organization.” The Wisconsin version: “No person may

require, as a condition of obtaining or continuing

employment, an individual to . . . become or remain a

member of a labor organization.”

“ALEC defines the parameters of what’s possible,” Taylor

said. She outlined a “three-legged stool” that, in addition to

ALEC, includes the State Policy Network, a constellation of

conservative state-based think tanks that amplify ALEC’s

work by supplying slanted research and talking points to

state legislators. The third part of the stool—and the junior

partner in Taylor’s view—are the state legislators, who

return from ALEC’s conferences armed with bills they

dutifully introduce, often without much regard, or

sometimes even a basic understanding, of what they are

and what their effect on their constituents will be.

When the state’s right-to-work bill was introduced, in

2015, Scott Fitzgerald, the senate majority leader and the

bill’s sponsor, denied that “outside groups” were involved.

“All of that scuttlebutt about other groups—no, we did it

right here,” he told me the day before the bill was voted on.

I then asked if Wisconsin’s bill was modeled on Michigan’s,

and he answered without hesitation that it was. He failed to

mention that Michigan’s law was based on ALEC’s model,

or that in 2013, the year after Michigan passed right-to-

work, ALEC published a State Policy Network “toolkit”

titled You Can Too! It included an article offering advice on

how a state could replicate Michigan’s success. Fitzgerald’s

bill was a copy of a copy.

Taylor grew up in Van Nuys, California, forty-five

minutes north of downtown Los Angeles, and was raised by

moderate Republicans who voted for Ronald Reagan. Her

mother, Pat, taught elementary school and when she

became pregnant with her first child, Taylor’s older sister,

she tried to conceal it out of fear of losing her job. It was

eventually discovered, and Pat was fired, a common

practice at the time. “That sent such a strong signal to me

as a young girl,” Taylor said. “I really resented that she had

to choose between being a teacher and being a mother.”

Taylor’s father, Jack, cleaned swimming pools. “My dad

barely graduated with a GED,” Taylor said. “He was always

outside working. If you look at his hands, you can tell how

hard he worked. His skin is like tissue paper from all the

sun and chlorine.” Pat, who returned to teaching when

Taylor was in sixth grade, became active in her union.

When Reagan broke the air traffic controllers’ union, in

1981, she and Jack left the Republican Party.

When Governor Walker signed Act 10, inspired by

Reagan’s action, Taylor was on maternity leave from her

job as a public policy director of Planned Parenthood. Like

tens of thousands of others, she protested at the state

capitol. After the protests failed, she agonized over what to

do, ultimately running for office out of anger at Walker’s

attack, as well as gratitude for the role unions had played

in lifting her family into the middle class. “I had a four-

month-old and a four-year-old,” Taylor said. “I had never

contemplated running for office, but my family survived

because my grandma and mom were in unions.” Taylor’s

grandmother, a single mother to three children, managed

to get a union job as an administrative assistant to the lead

colorist at Technicolor after years of selling purses on

commission at a department store. “She finally made a

decent wage and could send her kids, who all became

teachers, to college,” Taylor said.

Equally motivating was Governor Walker’s budget that

year, which cut funding for public schools by $850 million—

the largest such reduction in the history of Wisconsin. “I

remember going to register my son for kindergarten at his

little school,” Taylor said. “My heart sank looking at these

kids. That school is the heart of our community.” During the

six-way primary, Taylor emphasized her work for Planned

Parenthood, the need for living wages, and the fact that she

was the only mother of schoolchildren in the race. She won

with 30 percent of the vote. “I was not prepared to win,”

she said. “I was in the shower when the AP called me to tell

me. My hair was dripping wet. I was in shock. I had just

been so focused on knocking on doors.”

Shortly after she won, Republicans moved her district’s

lines, requiring Taylor to run against a legislator she

admired, Mark Pocan. But Pocan wanted to run for

Congress and abandoned his seat. During a meeting they

held before Taylor took office, Pocan encouraged her to

assume his role and join ALEC. Pocan had become a

member in 2003, after an assembly hearing about a bill to

overturn a statewide ban on bail bondsmen and bounty

hunters. The state’s for-profit bail companies had been

barred because the bipartisan legal community—judges,

district attorneys, defense lawyers—was almost

unanimously opposed to them, arguing the practice led to

corruption. The same bipartisan legal coalition came out

against the new bill, which was based on an ALEC model,

introduced by an ALEC member, and supported by

testimony from an industry lobbyist from California, who

was also an ALEC member. The presence of the out-of-state

lobbyist piqued Pocan’s curiosity, prompting him to join the

organization, which cost state legislators like him the same

as it costs Taylor now—$100 for a two-year membership.

(Corporate members pay a minimum of $7,000.) “That bill

was the first connection for me, because it was something

no one in Wisconsin was asking for,” Pocan, now a

congressman, said.

At the time, Pocan could access ALEC’s model legislation

with a password through the group’s website: “I thought it

would give me the road map of what they were going to

work on.” Pocan gave his password to other liberal

organizations, and he began filing dispatches from ALEC

meetings for The Progressive, pioneering the undercover

legislator-reporter role that Taylor later took on.

At the 2011 ALEC conference, in New Orleans, Pocan

learned about the Special Needs Scholarship Program Act,

a bill that provided children with disabilities taxpayer-

funded scholarships to attend private schools. It was

introduced in Wisconsin’s first legislative session after the

conference by Michelle Litjens, an ALEC member, and of its

thirty-six sponsors, twenty-five were ALEC members.

Before the legislature voted, Pocan delivered a floor speech

detailing how he first learned of the bill in New Orleans. “I

remember going to a workshop and hearing a little bit

about a bill they did in Florida and some other states . . . to

dismantle public education,” Pocan said. “There was a

proposal to provide special-needs scholarships. Lo and

behold, all of a sudden I come back to Wisconsin, and what

gets introduced?” he asked. “A bill to do just that.” He

started reading something at random from ALEC’s model

bill. “ ‘Section 6, accountability standards for participating

schools.’ ” He then switched to the Litjens bill. “What’s

here? ‘Section 6, accountability standards for participating

schools.’ ” The bill passed.

The next day, Pocan outlined for me a strategy ALEC

advises its members to use: “You have to introduce a

fourteen-point platform,” he said, “so that you can make it

harder for them to focus and for the press to cover fourteen

different planks.” He pointed to several bills introduced in

the past two sessions, including one that would allow more

children to enroll in virtual charter schools. “It sounds

good,” Pocan said. “Kids could access virtual schools for

homeschooling. But again,” he emphasized, the real

purpose is “taking apart public schools. You do it drip by

drip, and this is one of those bills that will do just that.”

Like many of ALEC’s bills, this one shared two

distinguishing features: draining public budgets and taking

an attritional approach. In 1984, ALEC released its first

model bill promoting school vouchers. Its stated purpose

was to “introduce normal market forces” into education.

Six years later, Governor Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, a

former ALEC member, established the first voucher

program in the country that allowed public-school funding

to be given to private schools. The program was initially

limited to three hundred low-income Milwaukee students.

But soon similar programs aimed at struggling school

districts were replicated across the country. While

Thompson has denied that ALEC had anything to do with

the Milwaukee voucher program, a speech he delivered at

ALEC’s 2002 annual conference is suggestive. “I always

loved going to [ALEC] meetings because I always found

new ideas,” he said. “Then I’d take them back to Wisconsin,

disguise them a little bit, and declare that ‘That’s mine.’ ”

ALEC’S MOTTO, “Limited Government, Free Markets, and

Federalism,” is rooted in the long backlash to the New

Deal, whose prolabor stance and social welfare programs

were seen by many wealthy industrialists as an unwelcome

disruption of American capitalism. Some of them began

organizing against it. As early as 1934, Irénée du Pont, an

heir and former president of the DuPont company, warned

that the country was losing the “freedom granted by the

Constitution.” Two years later, Roosevelt himself warned

his supporters of his adversaries in an address at Madison

Square Garden, three days before his second election.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—

business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless

banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war

profiteering. They had begun to consider the

government of the United States as a mere appendage

to their own affairs. We know now that government by

organized money is just as dangerous as government

by organized mob. Never before in all our history have

these forces been so united against one candidate as

they stand today.

On November 8, 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower

wrote a letter to his brother asserting the New Deal was

indestructible. “Should any political party attempt to

abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and

eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not

hear of that party again in our political history,” he said.

Eisenhower was responding to the ongoing effort of

prominent conservative businessmen like Lemuel

Boulware, a virulently anti-union vice-president of General

Electric, to unravel Roosevelt’s legacy. As part of his

campaign, Boulware gave every GE plant supervisor a copy

of John Flynn’s The Road Ahead, a national bestseller that

argued New Deal programs were turning citizens into serfs

and that America was in the first stage of totalitarianism.

Even more hostile was William Grede, a Milwaukee

foundry owner and the president of the virulently anti-

union National Association of Manufacturers. (Grede later

became a founding member of the John Birch Society.) As

early as 1933, Grede had railed against the New Deal, and

he had succeeded in keeping his foundries free of unions,

even during the Depression. He used his supervisors as

strikebreakers and called the police both for protection and

with a threat that they would be held liable for any

damages. When Grede eventually instituted shorter

working hours at his foundries, he insisted that it was not

“out of consideration for the men or for humanitarian

reasons,” but only because “it was the most efficient way to

operate.”

But perhaps no company and its leadership epitomized

the backlash to the New Deal more than Milwaukee’s own

Allen-Bradley Company, which by the end of World War II

was taking in $200 million in annual revenue in current

dollars. With the onset of the Cold War, Harry Bradley

became increasingly active in far-right politics. In January

1959, he attended the second recruitment meeting of the

John Birch Society, a two-day event in Milwaukee that

Bradley called “the most rewarding experience of my life.”

Afterward, Bradley began inviting the society’s founder,

Robert Welch, for regular speaking appearances at Allen-

Bradley sales meetings. The company’s equally

conservative president, Fred Loock, distributed John Birch

Society literature to employees. Loock also wrote a memo

to company staff equating social spending with

totalitarianism, a common linkage among many of the

industrialists who never accepted the New Deal. “At the

rate our government is spending—and we are paying—it

won’t be long before all money in excess of bare living will

be taken away from us in Taxes,” he wrote. “Except for the

bureaucrats, you and I and everyone else will have become

‘slaves of the state’—a title no one should be proud of. It

will be the end of ‘Free Americans.’ Fact is that we in this

country are much further along on the road to complete

socialism than most of us are aware of.”

Harry Bradley shared Loock’s view. One of the

conservatives Bradley admired was Clarence Manion, a

former Notre Dame Law School dean. The Manion Forum

of Opinion, Manion’s weekly radio and television program,

was an early recipient of Bradley Foundation funding. One

episode attacked “the murderously oppressive Marxist

Federal Income Tax; gigantic and unnecessary subsidies of

tax money for fantastic highway and housing projects;

Federal aid to education which would inevitably be

followed by Federal Socialist control; tyrannical control of

American workers by politically and ruthlessly ambitious

union czars; appeasing and fraternizing with Communist

mass murderers, thugs, and slave masters.”

Shared prosperity and high union density marginalized

the strength of the New Deal’s postwar opponents, but by

the early 1970s, anger in corporate America reached a

boiling point, galvanized by the unlikely figure of future

Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. Until his

nomination to the court in October 1971, Powell worked as

a corporate attorney in Richmond, Virginia. He sat on the

boards of eleven companies, including Philip Morris, and

represented the Tobacco Institute, the industry’s trade

group. Over lunch one day in the spring of 1971, Powell

discussed his fears for the future of corporate America with

a friend and neighbor, Eugene Sydnor, the chairman of the

education committee of the United States Chamber of

Commerce. Sydnor asked Powell if he would draft a memo

for the chamber outlining his views and recommendations.

On August 23, 1971, Powell mailed Sydnor a manifesto

titled “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.” In

it, Powell blamed the media, clergy, academia, and

government for trying to destroy American capitalism

through “bureaucratic regulation of individual freedom.”

But just as troubling was the business community’s

passivity. “One of the bewildering paradoxes of our time is

the extent to which the enterprise system tolerates, if not

participates in, its own destruction,” Powell wrote. He

implored corporate America to conduct “guerrilla warfare

with those who propagandize against the system” and

called for funding a counterrevolution in every forum—

courts, universities, think tanks, government, the press.

“The time has come—indeed, it is long overdue —for the

wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to

be marshaled against those who would destroy it,” Powell

wrote. “Political power is necessary . . . it must be used

aggressively and with determination.”

The confidential memo was never mentioned in Powell’s

confirmation hearings; it circulated only to a few of his

friends and a small number of people at the chamber.

Sydnor told Powell his committee received it “like a lead

balloon,” for fear it might require an increase in members’

dues. But in September 1972, a Chamber of Commerce

employee leaked the memo to the Washington Post

columnist Jack Anderson, who wrote two columns

criticizing it. Many corporate executives responded by

writing Powell fawning letters, detailing their plans to fulfill

his call to arms.

“The Powell memo was never as simple as: ‘Let’s

implement this directly,’ ” Jason Stahl, a historian at the

University of Minnesota, told me. “But it got people

thinking in new ways about what they could do with their

own position.” Stahl’s book, Right Moves, details the

evolution of William J. Baroody Sr., the president of the

American Enterprise Institute during the 1960s and ’70s,

who transformed AEI from a technocratic institution into an

unabashedly partisan one.

Powell’s memo also inspired conservative activists to

begin creating new organizations aligned with its

combative spirit. The most dynamic builder of the new

infrastructure was Paul Weyrich, press secretary to the

Colorado senator Gordon Allott. Weyrich grew up in a

working-class neighborhood in Racine. His father, Ignatius,

immigrated from Germany in the 1920s and tended the

boilers at Racine’s St. Mary’s Catholic Hospital, where his

mother, Virginia, worked as a nurse. Ignatius imparted to

his son a religious fervor that Weyrich would fuse with his

conservative political activism, which began in college

when he joined the Racine County Young Republicans. In

1964, he volunteered for Barry Goldwater’s campaign, and

after dropping out of college, he found work as a city hall

reporter for the Milwaukee Sentinel and a political reporter

for local radio and TV stations. In 1966, he moved to

Denver to take a job as a radio station news director, and

the following year he moved to Washington to work for

Allott.

“All of a sudden lobbyists were telling me how smart and

wonderful I was,” Weyrich told the New Republic. “No one

had ever been very nice to me before. Back home [in

Wisconsin] they’d cross the street before they’d talk to

me.” In 1969, Weyrich attended a meeting of congressional

Democratic aides, lobbyists, lawyers, and Brookings

Institution fellows to orchestrate a pressure campaign to

get President Nixon to sign fair housing legislation. “All I

did was sit there with my mouth open, watching the system

being orchestrated,” he said in an interview with the

Washington Post. These included “getting outside

demonstrators, when to get the op-ed piece in the

newspaper so it would coincide with the demonstrations,

when to have personal lobbying, who was going to speed

up the timetable at Brookings to get their study out. It was

magnificent. I said, ‘Thank you, Lord, I have needed this

insight.’ ”

After Allott lost his seat in 1972, Weyrich began

fashioning the conservative infrastructure outlined in

Powell’s memo. In 1973, Weyrich persuaded Joseph Coors,

the anti-union beer magnate, to fund the creation of the

Heritage Foundation. Around the same time, at the

direction of the Illinois state representative Donald Totten,

a Republican activist named Juanita Bartnett started ALEC

as a low-key educational forum for conservative state

legislators. An early funding solicitation from Bartnett

reached Weyrich, who organized a large donation from the

foundation of Richard Mellon Scaife, the principal heir to

the Mellon fortune. That contribution gave Weyrich de

facto control of the group. Weyrich moved it from Chicago

to Washington, and Bartnett was fired soon after. She was

told a man had to run the organization. (Bartnett sued for

sex discrimination and settled out of court.)

“The original idea was low-budget or no-budget,” said

Nick Surgey, the former director of research at the Center

for Media and Democracy, who interviewed Bartnett in

2013. “Share a few bills and then go out and get drunk. It

was a noble concept at the beginning, trying to get state

representatives to share good ideas in a way that undercut

the lobbyists. But after Weyrich seized control, ALEC got

taken over by corporations.”

Weyrich helped create much of the infrastructure of

what was then called the New Right. Besides ALEC and the

Heritage Foundation, he helped found the Moral Majority,

in 1979, with the Reverend Jerry Falwell. They hoped it

would sway evangelicals to back Ronald Reagan’s

presidential bid. In 1980, Weyrich gave a speech to a

convention of Christian conservatives in Dallas, which

revealed his approach to politics. “So many of our

Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome: good

government,” he said. “They want everybody to vote. I

don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a

majority of people. They never have been from the

beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter

of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up

as the voting populace goes down.” The Moral Majority, a

name Weyrich coined, succeeded in delivering the

evangelical vote to Reagan, a decisive factor in his 1980

victory.

In his first inaugural address, Reagan affirmed his

support for federalism, the means by which ALEC planned

to transform the states. “All of us need to be reminded that

the federal government did not create the states; the states

created the federal government,” he said. In 1986, Reagan

gave a private briefing to ALEC at the White House. “I want

to congratulate you on your outstanding program of

drafting model legislation covering everything from tort

reform to juvenile justice and to balanced budgets and to

drugs,” he told the legislators. “Power has stopped flowing

to Washington and begun to flow back where it belongs—to

the states.”

That same year, Reagan urged a wealthy South Carolina

businessman and Heritage Foundation trustee named

Thomas Roe to push for conservative policy at the state

level. Roe started by founding the South Carolina Policy

Council, envisioning his tax-exempt group as a mini–

Heritage Foundation for his state. Soon after, Roe linked

his new organization with other like-minded state-based

think tanks to form an association called the Madison

Group. In 1992, he launched the State Policy Network, a

more ambitious umbrella group, which now boasts sixty-

five think tanks, at least one in every state (except North

Dakota) and Puerto Rico. (Wisconsin has three: the MacIver

Institute, Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, and the

Badger Institute.) Many of these organizations, as well as

the SPN itself, are members of ALEC.

The scope of Roe’s ambition was revealed in an

exchange with Robert Krieble, a fellow Heritage trustee, in

the 1980s. “The evil empire can be dissolved—I’m going to

go out and help do it,” Krieble told Roe. “You capture the

Soviet Union,” Roe replied. “I’m going to capture the

states.”

THE RECALL EFFORT against Walker and the Republican

senators officially launched at midnight on November 15,

2011, when groups organizing the effort filed an electronic

petition, beginning the sixty-day countdown. They had until

January 14 to collect at least 540,208 signatures, a quarter

of the total vote in the last gubernatorial election. Walker

had already responded by purchasing a $300,000 ad that

began airing that night during a big Monday Night Football

game pitting Wisconsin’s beloved Green Bay Packers

against the Minnesota Vikings. Running in the Green Bay,

La Crosse, Madison, and Wausau markets for the entire

week, the ad proclaimed the benefits of Act 10. “We were

worried when the state budget meant there was going to be

less money for our school district, and we have twenty-five

schools,” the Waukesha School Board member Karin Sue

Rajnicek said in the ad. “But Governor Walker—he gave us

options that reduced our biggest costs so that we could put

more money back into our classrooms.”

Wisconsin election law allowed individual donors to

make contributions up to $10,000, but a quirk in the law

permitted an elected official to collect unlimited sums from

the time a recall petition was filed until the election was

authorized. Diane Hendricks, the billionaire donor whom

Walker confided his “divide-and-conquer” strategy to,

quickly wrote him a check for $500,000. But documents

leaked to the Guardian, which came from a secret criminal

investigation into alleged campaign-finance violations by

the Walker campaign, showed that Walker’s advisers had

already begun pursuing less conventional fund-raising

strategies. The materials, which came from a grand jury–

like “John Doe” investigation launched by the Milwaukee

County district attorney’s office, contained an email dated

September 7, 2011: A fund-raising consultant named Kate

Doner had sent Walker and some of his senior aides an

urgent message. It dispensed a series of bullet points

distinguished only by their venality. “Corporations,” she

wrote. “Go heavy after them to give.” Other suggestions

include: “Take Koch’s money” and “Get on a plane to Vegas

and sit down with Sheldon Adelson. Ask for $1 million

now.”

“The governor is encouraging all to invest in the

Wisconsin Club for Growth,” Doner wrote in a note to R. J.

Johnson, Walker’s top campaign adviser, in another of the

leaked emails. “Wisconsin Club for Growth can accept

corporate and personal donations without limitations and

no donors disclosure.” The governor, she said, wanted all of

his advertisements “run thru one group to ensure correct

messaging.”

Early one spring morning, I drove west from Madison to

the village of Spring Green to meet with Eric O’Keefe, one

of Wisconsin Club for Growth’s directors. O’Keefe had

suggested we meet at the Taliesin Visitor Center, which

was built by Frank Lloyd Wright. The land, covered in

radiant greenery, is at turns gentle and roughhewn. It

marks the eastern edge of the Driftless Area, whose craggy

hills inspired Wright. Born in nearby Richland Center,

Wright built his home and studio, Taliesin, in Spring Green,

as well as the visitor center, a low, beguiling building that

spans two hills and houses a restaurant overlooking the

Wisconsin River. Wright was a model for the architect

Howard Roark, the protolibertarian hero of Ayn Rand’s The

Fountainhead. It’s a curious choice given that Wright’s

work pays tribute to nature, while Roark had little use for

natural beauty, a view Rand shared. (“I would give the

greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s

skyline,” Roark announces.) But the landscape of

southwestern Wisconsin managed to touch even Rand, who

described it fondly in Atlas Shrugged.

O’Keefe, a trim sixty-two-year-old, greeted me with

guarded warmth. He grew up in a wealthy suburb of

Detroit, where his father was an anti-Communist

stockbroker; his mother raised O’Keefe and his six brothers

and sisters. Politics was a favorite dinnertime topic, and his

older brother subscribed to Human Events and National

Review, which O’Keefe devoured as a teenager. He joined a

conservative book club and, under the spell of the Austrian

neoclassical economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von

Mises, became a libertarian.

O’Keefe was a committed autodidact. “I just wanted to

get out of high school,” he told me, picking at his salad. “I

hated school.” In June 1973, he skipped the graduation

ceremony to head for Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in a

Chrysler he bought for $270. He wanted to try and survive

in the woods eating fish and blueberries. He lived in a

canvas tent, but ultimately could not survive on his own. “I

had to buy things,” he said. “I did go to bars,” he added,

“but only on weekends.”

O’Keefe lasted until Thanksgiving in the wild. He moved

back home and took a job running a drill press in a machine

shop in Detroit. In 1974, United Steelworkers, his union,

rejected their contract. O’Keefe reluctantly went on strike,

even walked the picket line. After the strike ended, he

poured his wages, which he had saved assiduously, into a

stock that took off in 1975. He then quit his job, moved to

Detroit, and devoted himself to reading, becoming a self-

described “radical libertarian.” In the run-up to the 1980

election, O’Keefe headed to Los Angeles for the Libertarian

Party convention that nominated David Koch for vice-

president. (“A great guy—likes politics, Charles doesn’t.”)

O’Keefe volunteered in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and West

Virginia to collect signatures to put the Libertarian Party

on the ballot in those states.

O’Keefe believes that any campaign-finance law violates

the first amendment. “Limits on campaign contributions

are not constitutional,” he said. During the 2011 and 2012

recall elections, O’Keefe’s Wisconsin Club for Growth, a

nonprofit whose primary purpose, according to the IRS, is

“social welfare,” spent more than $21 million on different

races. The money bought late advertising blitzes, which

usually came a week or two before the election, often

overwhelming the intended target.

O’Keefe has defended the flood of dark money into

Wisconsin politics, disputing the idea that it crowds out the

voices of ordinary citizens. “We don’t spend nearly enough

on politics,” he told me, comparing the amount with the

much larger figures Americans spend on sports and

marijuana. O’Keefe spoke proudly of his role as an

equalizer, “countering” familiar shibboleths of the right—

George Soros, unions—as though they were an equivalent

force. “Wisconsin politics did become nationalized,” he said

unapologetically. “And I helped nationalize them.”

LAMPPOSTS IN DOWNTOWN New Glarus are adorned with Swiss

and American flags. There are street signs written in both

English and German, in an elaborate Gothic script. The

small town (population 2,172) is a regional tourist

attraction whose residents remain proud of its founding, in

1845, by 131 immigrants from Canton Glarus, Switzerland.

The odyssey of the colonists, driven to emigrate by

economic desperation, was recorded in a two-volume diary

by a tinsmith named Mathias Dürst. Dürst’s journal traces

an arduous 124-day voyage that cost the lives of eight

migrants, including a six-month-old girl and an unnamed

baby, who was born at sea and died the next day. The party

had collectively purchased land in advance of their arrival,

intending to settle and farm even though only four had

been farmers in Switzerland. On August 8, Dürst finally laid

eyes on the 1,200 acres the group had bought, describing it

as “beautiful beyond expectation.”

Taylor pulled her car into a parking spot on Rüti Strasse.

Tall and thin, she wore an orange sleeveless dress and fixed

her long, beige-blond hair in the rearview mirror before

entering Tofflers Pub and Grill, the site of the meeting. She

ordered a Spotted Cow, a prize-winning local beer, then

headed upstairs, welcomed by a burst of applause from

fifteen or so elderly Wisconsinites. “They all know about

ALEC,” Debbie Fairbanks, who works at Lands’ End and

organized the gathering, told me. “My big question of the

night is: How do you know if your local representative is

joining?” Another participant, Jeanette Kelty, learned about

ALEC after Act 10. “I started doing some research about

ALEC and saw they were part of this very long effort to

take away rights from working-class folks,” she said. Kelty

had retired early from her job as a nurse at the University

of Wisconsin hospital, part of a wave of veteran state

workers who chose to get out rather than accept the

draconian pay and benefit cuts levied by Walker’s law.

The attendees settled in around long folding tables, most

nursing pints of beer and a few eating plates of meatloaf

topped with bacon. Many knew something about ALEC, but

they grew rapt listening to Taylor describe infiltrating it. “It

costs me a hundred dollars per legislative session to be a

member of ALEC,” Taylor told them. “We don’t have to pay

much because we’re really the foot soldiers, we’re the ones

that go to the conferences, hear about the policies that

we’re supposed to push out in our states.” Taylor described

how isolated she felt as the only progressive among a sea of

conservatives. “It’s a very strange circumstance, to go into

an organization you fundamentally disagree with,” she said.

For Republicans with national aspirations, like Scott

Walker, who had been an ALEC member when he was in

the Wisconsin State Assembly, the conferences can be

pivotal networking opportunities. “The rumor is Walker met

the Koch brothers at an ALEC conference,” Taylor said.

“But I don’t know if that’s true or not.” In the summer of

2015, during Walker’s short-lived presidential campaign, he

gave a keynote address at ALEC’s conference in San Diego.

“He was the belle of the ball,” Taylor said.

ALEC’s role in Wisconsin first gained notoriety on March

15, 2011, a few weeks after Walker announced Act 10. At

the time, few people inside the state, or out of it, had heard

of the group. But William Cronon, a world-renowned

professor of environmental history at the University of

Wisconsin, speculated in the first post of his new personal

blog, Scholar as Citizen, that ALEC might have played a

role in writing Act 10, along with other new measures like

the voter-ID bill, which Wisconsin Republicans had also just

introduced. Cronon’s entry included a brief history of ALEC

and encouraged citizens to pay attention to it. Within two

days, the post had attracted a half-million views and

enraged Wisconsin’s Republican leaders. The party’s state

director, Stephan Thompson, sent a letter to the

university’s legal office, demanding that the university

release all of Cronon’s emails on his school account, since

the beginning of the year, that contained words such as

“Republican,” “Scott Walker,” and “rally.” Thompson

argued that a UW professor is a state employee, and thus

subject to Wisconsin’s expansive open records laws. A

national outcry over academic freedom erupted, and

despite the opposition of the chancellor, the university was

forced to turn over a portion of Cronon’s emails. A

pervasive chill has settled over the University of Wisconsin

ever since. “I don’t know if I want to be quoted by name,”

one University of Wisconsin employee told me while we

were discussing the origins of the Wisconsin Idea.

Taylor emphasized ALEC’s success with preemption

laws, now on the books in forty-three states. These laws bar

local governments—cities, counties, villages—from setting

their own ordinances, such as taxing plastic bags or

requiring employers to give their workers paid sick leave,

both of which are addressed in ALEC model bills. Wisconsin

has enacted 162 of these laws since 2011, according to the

Legislative Fiscal Bureau. They include versions of the

ALEC model bills outlawing plastic-bag taxes and voiding

requirements for paid sick leave; paid sick leave had

passed in 2008 in Milwaukee, by voter referendum, and

was upheld in the state court of appeals. Taylor told the

crowd that a few months earlier, Koch Industries had

registered to lobby in Wisconsin to support a bill to prohibit

local communities from banning plastic bags. “It subverts

our democratic tradition,” she said. “The ability of people

like you to influence policy.”

After nearly two hours, Taylor wrapped up her talk to

another round of applause. She gave Fairbanks a hug and

headed outside. Toward the end of the New Glarus

gathering, Taylor had gotten into a polite back-and-forth

with a citizen angry at the Democratic Party, and some of

its donors, for their support of charter schools, one of

ALEC’s priorities. Taylor and the rest of the audience

admonished the man, urging him to stop complaining and

work to elect the kind of people he would like to see in

office. In the privacy of our drive back to Madison, Taylor

shared some of the same misgivings about her party’s

failings and lethargy. “Democrats are not a very

courageous bunch,” she told me.

Despite her disappointment in her party, what burned in

her, what kept her traveling all over the state to speak to

small groups like the one we had just left, was a memory.

She recalled the citizens who had woken at 4 a.m. to drive

five hours from Hayward, in the state’s far north, to speak

to the powerful Joint Finance Committee, of which she was

a member, about Walker’s devastating cuts to their rural

schools. Their two-minute testimonies, which they had

waited hours to deliver, were ignored, barely tolerated by

many of her Republican colleagues. For Taylor, they were a

testament to the faith Wisconsin’s citizens still held that

their government might listen to them. “That’s the saddest

thing to me,” she said. “This legislature is doing everything

in its power to shut them out.”

Part of her dreaded the upcoming ALEC conference the

following month in Indianapolis. At her office earlier that

day, I had seen her shudder when she described being

chased through the Adler Planetarium by a drunk

Republican legislator during ALEC’s Chicago conference in

2013. But no matter how exhausting, draining, and

occasionally frightening the ALEC conferences could be for

her, Taylor knew she could never abandon the people of

Hayward, or Debbie Fairbanks and the neighbors she

gathered together at Tofflers. Taylor felt obligated to try

and restore the frayed bond, once so strong in Wisconsin,

between citizen and representative.

WHILE WALKER’S RECALL drew the most passion and media

attention, the transformation of Wisconsin’s politics could

be seen more clearly in the recall effort started by Lori

Compas, a wedding photographer and mother of two. With

no assistance from the state Democratic Party, Compas led

an unlikely drive to recall the senate majority leader, Scott

Fitzgerald, Walker’s most essential and visible ally. The

following year, after no one stepped forward to challenge

Fitzgerald in the election itself, she became his improbable

opponent. Compas had never run for office before. “What

struck me was that Scott Fitzgerald was using his power to

shut people out of the process,” she told me.

I met Compas for lunch a few months before the election

at Cafe Carpe, a sunny restaurant and folk club in Fort

Atkinson that doubles as an informal community center.

Compas, who has dark blond hair and a raspy laugh, grew

up on a small farm in southwestern Missouri. She majored

in agricultural journalism in college, drifted to Montana for

a spell, and then, in 2007, came to Fort Atkinson with her

husband, a geography professor at a small state university

nearby. “I had never paid attention to state politics until

about a year ago,” she said. “I started paying attention, and

I got really upset at what I saw our senator doing.”

For Compas, the pivotal moment came on the evening

that Act 10 passed. She was walking from her house to the

Main Street Bridge in Fort Atkinson to attend a late-

afternoon rally for the teachers. “I was checking my phone

on the way and looking at Twitter, and all of a sudden it just

blew up,” she said. “People were saying they’re holding a

meeting in the capitol tonight. They were saying get to the

capitol now, but I couldn’t get there, so I went to our little

rally.”

That was the evening of the heated argument between

Fitzgerald and Peter Barca, the assembly minority leader,

which was captured on WisconsinEye. “Barca’s standing

there yelling, ‘This is a violation of the law!’ ” Compas said.

“I just sat there, and I cried. I’ve never felt so powerless

and so frustrated. Regardless of where you stood on this

issue, the complete contempt that Fitzgerald was showing

for his legislators was unacceptable. That night I think I

tweeted: ‘I will recall Scott Fitzgerald if I have to crawl on

my hands and knees through the snow to every house in his

district.’ ”

Despite Fitzgerald’s prominent role in shepherding

Walker’s agenda through the senate, the Wisconsin

Democratic Party chose not to pursue a recall campaign

against him. Fitzgerald’s district is solidly Republican, and

he won his 2010 election with two-thirds of the vote. A

secretive Republican gerrymandering of the state the

following year, which was spearheaded by Fitzgerald,

added more Republican voters to his district. It also drew

out of the district his two most formidable potential rivals.

The gerrymandering plans were drawn up across the

street from the capitol, at the law office of Michael Best &

Friedrich, by Tad Ottman, an aide to Scott Fitzgerald, and

Adam Foltz, an aide to Jeff Fitzgerald, the speaker of the

assembly and Scott’s brother. Working with a mapping

expert they hired, the two aides created several different

maps and performed a regression analysis—what happens

if there is a six percent Democratic victory margin, for

example—on each one. Republican leaders settled on the

most partisan version. During the spring of 2011, nearly all

of the state’s seventy-nine Republican senators and

representatives walked across the street to the law firm,

signed a nondisclosure agreement, and were then shown a

map of their new district. No Democrats and no member of

the public saw the maps until they were unveiled in the

state legislature in July 2011 and rushed through before

the first wave of recall elections that August. Michael Best

& Friedrich and another law firm were paid $400,000 in

taxpayer money for their work on redistricting.

“Republicans have been keeping our promises and getting

the job done since day one,” Scott Fitzgerald said in a joint

statement with Jeff Fitzgerald when the new districts were

unveiled. “Now we’re fulfilling our constitutional

requirement to properly reapportion the state’s legislative

and congressional districts.”

Compas was sure that Democrats would target

Fitzgerald for recall. But as the deadline for filing a recall

petition approached, Compas hadn’t heard anything. “I

started asking: ‘What about Fitzgerald?’ ” she remembered.

“Nobody seemed to know anything, and then I began

seeing in the newspaper that the Democrats were going to

recall these three state senators who I never heard of. Low-

hanging fruit, I guess you could say. The Democrats

thought they’d be easy pickings, but I just thought:

Fitzgerald is the obvious one. He’s the one that needs to go

—even more than Walker, in my opinion.”

A petition to recall Fitzgerald would require collecting at

least 16,000 signatures from voters in his district, which

most political observers saw as a waste of resources. “My

husband takes the kids to school on Friday, and that’s my

day to just be home and focus on my business,” Compas

said. “They all left, and the house got quiet.” She decided

to call the Government Accountability Board. “I asked,

‘What does a person need to file recall papers? Do they

need a team of attorneys and accountants and all that?’ ”

Any citizen could file for a recall, she learned, and that

afternoon Compas designed her petition and set up a

website, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account. When her

husband came home, he was startled to find the change in

her. “He was actually a little upset,” she said. “He was

saying, ‘I left for work and it was a normal Friday, and I

come home and you’re recalling the senate majority leader.’

”

The overwhelming and immediate response told her she

had a chance. “There was a group in Columbus, Wisconsin,

that called themselves the Grass Roots Office,” she said.

“Republicans, Independents, and Democrats who had come

together and set up in an old abandoned auto body shop.

They called right away and asked if they can get a petition.

I told them where it was online, and they printed them,

copied them, and distributed them. Same thing in Horicon

and Oconomowoc. All these little towns at the beginning. I

couldn’t be everywhere that Monday night, since it was so

rushed. They just printed them out themselves and took

them out, and then from there it grew to where I would

drive around, and I would pick up signed petitions and

cheerlead everybody.”

Compas wound up submitting more than 18,000 valid

signatures in a district Fitzgerald routinely won with more

than 60 percent of the vote. At a small press conference

after they had been submitted, a reporter asked if she

would run. “I physically recoiled from the podium when the

question was asked,” she said. “I just stepped back and

said absolutely not. That’s not why I did this, that’s not in

my future. If you had told me a few months ago that I

would be doing this I would have just laughed in your face.”

But her preferred candidate, Andy Jorgensen, a former

radio announcer, dairy farmer, and GM worker who had

been gerrymandered out of Fitzgerald’s district in 2011,

did not want to move. People began clamoring for Compas

to run, and in late February she announced her candidacy.

More than anything, she did not want Fitzgerald to walk

away unchallenged.

EARLY ONE MORNING, a month after the New Glarus meeting,

Chris Taylor tiptoed around her house in Madison

preparing to resume her double life. It was not yet 5 a.m.,

and her youngest son, Ben, had had a sleepless night, so

she moved extra quietly, gathering her things for the drive

to Indianapolis to attend ALEC’s biggest conference of the

year. After she’d loaded her car, she went back inside to

pack an emergency stash of Luna Bars. (“They serve so

much red meat,” she said.) The sky was shifting from black

to a pale, thin blue. Taylor’s pastoral East Side

neighborhood was quiet except for an eruption of crickets.

We piled into her car and began driving southeast on the

interstate through the fog-covered Wisconsin prairie. I

asked Taylor if she considered herself a spy. “No, I’m not,”

she said. “I’m totally open about it.”

But as we drew closer to Indianapolis, Taylor grew more

tense. “I’m not super anxious to hang out with my

Republican colleagues,” she said. “I try to steer clear of

them because they out me.” One strategy was trying to

avoid ALEC’s subcommittees. “They’re smaller, and they

make you introduce yourself,” she said. “If I go to one, I

won’t give my party affiliation. I just say, ‘I’m Chris Taylor

from Wisconsin.’ ”

Taylor’s efforts to go unnoticed have not always been

successful. In 2015, she was nearly thrown out of an

education task force meeting at ALEC’s conference in San

Diego, when a Wisconsin legislator told an ALEC staffer

that she was “a lefty,” not one of them. (ALEC’s eight task

forces, which cover different policy areas, are where model

bills are introduced, amended, and voted on.) Baffled, the

staffer initially said nothing. But before the meeting began,

he angrily confronted Taylor and asked her to leave,

arguing she wasn’t a member of the task force. Taylor

protested, pointing to several other legislators in the room

who weren’t members.

“I don’t think he had the stomach to kick me out,” she

said. “I’m not disruptive. I just sit there and take notes. The

hardest thing really is not engaging. It’s just not natural for

me.” Taylor laughed. “Besides, ALEC is supposed to be

nonpartisan: How can they kick me out?” The staffer finally

relented.

A few miles into Indiana, Taylor chuckled at a sign that

said, “Hell is Real.” We decided to stop for gas and a cup of

coffee before we went our separate ways at the conference.

Taylor told me she only realized the extent of ALEC’s reach

after the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, an African

American teenager, in Florida. Local prosecutors did not

initially charge George Zimmerman, Martin’s killer, citing

the wide latitude for self-defense claims in the state’s 2005

stand-your-ground law. An NRA lobbyist, Marion Hammer,

helped draft that law, and it was introduced into the state

legislature by Representative Dennis Baxley and Senator

Durell Peaden, both ALEC members. A few months after it

passed, Hammer presented it to a task force at ALEC’s

annual conference, which unanimously adopted it. The bill

soon began appearing, sometimes in almost identical form,

in state legislatures across the country. By the time of the

shooting, twenty-six more states, including Wisconsin, had

passed a version of it.

Outrage over Trayvon Martin’s death prompted rare

scrutiny of ALEC’s influence and secretive process. A

pressure campaign persuaded dozens of large corporations,

including Coca-Cola, Kraft, and Walmart, to drop their

ALEC memberships. In April 2012, ALEC shut down the

Public Safety and Elections Task Force responsible for the

bill. Two years later, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yelp

announced that they too would quit ALEC, this time over

the organization’s hostility to renewable energy and

climate-change science.

Some observers believed ALEC’s power was waning, but

Taylor wasn’t among them, and she continued to write

dispatches detailing the group’s initiatives. In 2014, Taylor

drew attention to ALEC’s role in pushing preemption laws

in a widely cited article she wrote for the Capital

Times,which quoted a Utah state senator, Howard

Stephenson, at ALEC’s annual conference. “We need to

stomp out local control,” Stephenson told a subcommittee

of the education task force.

Taylor’s drive to expose ALEC correlates with her party’s

helpless position in Wisconsin. Since Republicans passed

their redistricting plan in 2011, the state assembly’s

Democrats have never held more than thirty-nine of ninety-

nine seats, even in 2012, when they won 175,000 more

aggregate votes than Republicans. “There was a three-

prong attack on elections: gerrymandering, voter ID, and

Citizens United,” Taylor said. She was most upset about a

recent law that gutted Wisconsin’s once rigorous

campaign-finance regulations. “It was probably the worst

bill of the entire legislative session, but it got almost no

scrutiny, because it was complicated.

“We don’t have any power and we have few options to

expose ALEC,” she continued. “Honestly, it’s a pain in the

ass for me to go to the conference. I have to raise the

money myself to go, and I’m totally shunned there. But I

have to keep watching.” Lisa Graves, codirector of

Documented, an organization that tracks corporate

influence on American democracy, calls her “the eyes and

ears to the state—and the country—about the operations

ALEC puts together.”

When we arrived in Indianapolis, Taylor rushed into the

hotel hosting the conference, an upscale Marriott

downtown, and made a beeline for the check-in booth to

get her ID badge and find a conference agenda. She pored

over it, trying to parse the anodyne-sounding events (“A

Balanced Discussion About Energy Policy in the Next

Administration”) to decide what to attend. She focused on

energy and education, two of the most powerful ALEC task

forces. She also planned to take in Kelly anne Conway’s

workshop on conservative policy for women (“All Issues Are

Women’s Issues”) and ALEC’s media training for state

legislators.

Downstairs, the Heritage Foundation, Heartland

Institute, National Right to Work Legal Defense

Foundation, and other ALEC sponsors staffed trade-show

booths piled with offerings like “Stranglehold: How Union

Bosses Have Hijacked Our Government” and “Why

Scientists Disagree About Global Warming.” Despite

ALEC’s professed avoidance of social issues, there were

several booths devoted to them. Groups like the Susan B.

Anthony List offered literature on “Advancing Pro-Life

Leadership to End Abortion in America,” while the

evangelical Family Research Council distributed an issue

brief titled “ ‘Sexual Orientation’ and ‘Gender Identity’

Laws: A Threat to Free Markets and Freedom of

Conscience and Religion.”

There were plenty of regular lobbyists, like a genial

representative for the National Fireworks Association I met

at a cocktail hour who had come to persuade state

legislators to ease restrictions on his product. But the

conference’s animating spirits were ambitious libertarians

like Nick Dranias, a research fellow and policy adviser at

the Heartland Institute who led an “educational

foundation” called Compact for America. I heard Dranias

present a dense, legalistic workshop marketing “Prosperity

Zones,” nearly government- and tax-free areas of at least

one square mile, which he said he modeled on aspects of

Disney World, Singapore, and Dubai. He said they would

“bring back the American dream.”

Throughout the conference, attendees could pick up a

free copy of the 2016 edition of Rich States, Poor States,

ALEC’s influential guide ranking economic competitiveness

among states with a foreword by Scott Walker. The three

authors, Arthur Laffer, one of the originators of supply-side

economics, Stephen Moore, the first president of the Club

for Growth, and Jonathan Williams, ALEC’s chief

economist, gauge a state’s economic outlook by weighing

variables such as the compensation costs for an average

worker or whether a state’s minimum wage is higher than

the federal floor of $7.25 an hour. The lower the wages, the

higher a state’s ranking. Lower corporate and personal

income taxes also boost a state’s ranking, just as higher

ones diminish it. The authors’ choice of criteria led to some

bizarre results. Minnesota was ranked forty-fifth, though it

had the country’s fourteenth-highest median household

income and a projected budget surplus of $1.4 billion.

Wisconsin, ranked ninth, had the twenty-fifth-highest

median income and faced a budget deficit of $700 million.

Unemployment rates in the two states were virtually

identical.

Taylor’s media training was canceled without

explanation. She focused instead on the education task

force. In the past decade, ALEC has created dozens of

model bills increasing school voucher eligibility. Its most

sweeping, the “Education Savings Account Act,” provides

for universal vouchers, regardless of income or location. So

far, a version of the bill has passed in six states; the most

extreme was in Nevada. In 2016, the Nevada Supreme

Court declared its funding mechanism unconstitutional, but

a modified bill was subsequently introduced. “In the

Nevada bill, the money goes to the parents, and they can

spend it almost however they want,” Taylor said. “That

means you no longer have consistent funding for

infrastructure, and the public schools won’t be able to

maintain their buildings: It’s the death of public education.”

A FEW DAYS AFTER we met, I watched Lori Compas speak

before a large rally at the state capitol in Madison marking

the one-year anniversary of the passage of Act 10. It was

early in her campaign in the new election she had forced

against Scott Fitzgerald. Organizers estimated that more

than sixty thousand people attended. Standing halfway up

the building’s steps, I could see the surrounding streets

filled with protesters and signs. The most ubiquitous was a

clenched blue fist in the shape of the state map, the

unofficial symbol of the movement that rose up to oppose

Act 10. One of Compas’s friends had written a speech for

her, but the day before, she decided to start from scratch.

She told the crowd that Fitzgerald’s recall election had just

been certified. Then she talked about how she had seen the

first sandhill cranes of spring. “Every year their return tells

me that even after the most difficult winters, new life is

stirring,” she said.

A few days later, Compas appeared at the public library

in Fort Atkinson. She had held eight public meetings over a

two-week period, and one of them, in Lake Mills, grew

fairly contentious. “I’m not used to hatred being directed at

me,” she said. “There were ten people in that room who

hated me, and they never met me.” She was relieved to be

back home, and with the exception of some polite but

pointed questions from several College Republicans, the

library event seemed almost sedate.

Afterward, Compas and a few of her supporters

wandered over to Cafe Carpe. A community meeting was

finishing up in the back, and one of the people leaving was

Barbara Lorman, the district’s former Republican state

senator. In 1994, Lorman lost in a Republican primary to

Scott Fitzgerald. “There’s always partisanship,” Lorman

said, as Compas and her entourage gathered around her.

“When I was first elected in 1980, I thought: It’s them

against us. These Democrats are the enemy, so I need to

stay cool about them. Then you see them all going out for

dinner together and drinking together and sitting in each

other’s office, and I thought, What’s the deal here? It was

quite collegial. You go to the floor, you have your issues,

you have your rhetoric and your disagreements, but at the

end of the day you leave it behind. Things are not like that

now.”

Lorman was surprised at the introduction of the

collective bargaining measure. “It was like being

blindsided,” she said. “Walker’s agenda, which was always

there but nobody knew it, really came from somewhere

else, like the Koch brothers, the national party, and ALEC. I

don’t think it was a local agenda, frankly.” Before running

for office, Lorman had owned a scrap-iron plant, and had

fought an effort by the Teamsters to unionize her small

group of drivers. “I might not be a union lover. There’s a lot

wrong with unions—a lot. But I do believe in a right to

bargain collectively. In a lot of cases it’s what you need, it’s

what works.” Lorman said she felt that Walker should have

accepted the unions’ financial givebacks in exchange for

keeping their bargaining rights. “He had everything he

wanted,” she said. “They were making the concessions that

everybody was asking for. Pay more for your retirement,

pay more for your benefits.” Lorman told me she would be

supporting Compas in the coming election.

When I visited Fitzgerald in his office that week, he told

me he wasn’t taking Compas’s challenge lightly. He quickly

raised more than $700,000 to defend his heavily

Republican seat. That included funds from a $1,000-per-

head fundraiser in Washington. Though he always led

comfortably in the polls, a few weeks before the election he

grew a bit flustered, telling the Wisconsin State Journal

that he believed Compas’s husband and the unions were

behind her effort. “I don’t for one minute believe she is the

organizing force behind this whole thing,” he said. In

response, Compas posted an irreverent, sepia-toned video

featuring herself as an obedient 1950s housewife asking

her husband, “What’s a senator?”

When District 13 cast its votes for state senate that June,

Compas lost, but she had become the only Democrat to

break 40 percent since Fitzgerald was first elected, in

1994. “You hear about money in politics, and you hear

about how we just can’t get good candidates,” she said.

“Well, you can’t get good candidates if there is no way for

them to win. People ask me if I would run again, and I say

not in this district. The night that I lost the election, I called

Scott Fitzgerald to concede. We had a brief but cordial

conversation, and at the end of it, he said, ‘Boy, Lori, you

ran one heck of a campaign. I would hate to run against

you in a fifty-fifty district.’ I wanted to say, ‘Well, you and

your staffers have ensured that you will never run against

anyone in a fifty-fifty district.’ But I bit my tongue. ”

AT THE ALEC conference in Indianapolis, a phalanx of armed

private security guards stood outside the Marriott watching

over a couple of hundred teachers, postal workers, and

UAW and Sierra Club members who held signs denouncing

ALEC. Several conference-goers stared through the glass

walls of the lobby bar at a protester holding an enormous

papier-mâché effigy of Mike Pence, at the time the

governor of Indiana, who had just been chosen by Donald

Trump as his running mate and was the conference’s

marquee speaker.

Pence is a former ALEC member and a longtime friend of

the organization. As governor, he wrote the foreword to the

19th Report Card on American Education, the 2013 edition

of ALEC’s annual publication promoting school vouchers,

and signed into law versions of several ALEC model bills

including the repeal of prevailing wage, a Depression-era

law that required public works projects to pay the going

wage in a local area. When Pence arrived on the stage for

his ALEC address, he was greeted by a rapturous crowd,

some still leery of Trump’s apostasies, like his campaign

pledges to leave Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid

untouched. “I know who you are, I know the example you

set,” Pence reassured them. “I was not going to miss the

chance to welcome the premier gathering of state

legislators in the United States of America.”

Pence thanked ALEC’s leadership, singling out the

national chair, state senator Leah Vukmir, from the “great

state of Wisconsin.” Taylor clapped politely, murmuring,

“Yay, Wisconsin.” Pence then launched into a tribute to

federalism. “I want to speak to you about the centrality of

the states today,” he said. He described a 1982 visit Ronald

Reagan made to the Indiana General Assembly during a

nationwide tour promoting federalism. “The federal

government has taken too much tax money from the

people, too much authority from the states, and too much

liberty with the Constitution,” Reagan told the legislators.

At the time, Reagan was trying to transfer dozens of federal

programs, including food stamps and Aid to Families with

Dependent Children, to the states, and advocating a

balanced-budget amendment. Pence praised Reagan’s

attempt to devolve power from the federal government to

the states as visionary but premature. “It just wasn’t

something people were ready for,” Pence said. “We are

now.”

IN EARLY MAY, a month before the recall election for

governor, Marquette University, the state’s top polling

organization, released a poll that showed Tom Barrett with

an ever-so-slight lead over Scott Walker: 47–46. A couple of

weeks later, ads began filling the state’s airwaves. They

featured iconic images of Wisconsin life—farms, fishing

piers—and a new poll-tested message attacking the process

itself. “There’s a right way, there’s a wrong way, and I think

this is the wrong way,” a woman identified as a teacher

said. “Recall isn’t the Wisconsin way,” a restaurant owner

said in another ad. The ad closed with a man fishing. “I

didn’t vote for Scott Walker,” he said. “But I’m definitely

against this recall.”

The ads ran until the June 5 election itself, and as the

Center for Media and Democracy reported, all the funding

for them—$400,000, which bought a lot of time in

Wisconsin’s small, cheap market—came from an out-of-

state group linked to the Koch brothers. (It was a curious

message, describing an eighty-five-year-old process as not

being the Wisconsin way; Walker himself was first elected

to county executive, in 2002, after his predecessor resigned

instead of facing a recall.) In the final days of the

campaign, the drama continued to build. Tim Phillips, the

president of Americans for Prosperity, staged a rally in

Madison the Friday before the recall vote. “The rest of the

country is watching you,” he told a couple of dozen Tea

Party activists. “When I was a young man in the late 1980s,

the early 1990s, I remember that out of Wisconsin began

the very first state-based welfare reform. Remember that?

That was you!”

Phillips went on: “Welfare reform that swept this

country. We passed welfare reform in Virginia, my state, in

1995, and we called it the Wisconsin plan.” Phillips then

extolled the passage of Wisconsin’s private-school voucher

program, also the first in the nation, imploring the small

crowd to reclaim the state’s role as the nation’s

conservative laboratory. “Today, every other governor in the

country and every state legislator in the country is

watching Wisconsin,” he said. “You are the model for the

country!”

On June 5, Walker beat Barrett, 53–46, almost the exact

margin of his previous victory less than two years earlier.

Walker raised $30 million to Barrett’s $4 million and had

the support of his entire party and its funders. With the

exception of President Obama, who issued a single election-

eve tweet urging voters to support Barrett, no national

Democrat lent a hand. Most effective, perhaps, was the

last-minute flood of recall ads, whose message seemed to

resonate. When polls were taken in November 2011, as the

recall process began, 58 percent of voters supported

recalling Walker. But after the barrage of ads, exit polls

showed that 60 percent of voters thought recalls were

appropriate only for cases of official misconduct.

In his election-night victory speech, Walker promised to

put division behind the state. “Tomorrow we are no longer

opponents,” he said. “Tomorrow, we are one as

Wisconsinites.”

5

WORKER AGAINST WORKER

At the vast, hulking Kohler plant near Sheboygan, an hour north of Milwaukee, workers are greeted by a large copper

medallion whose inscription reads: “He who toils here hath

set his mark.” The company was founded during the

depression of 1873, by an Austrian immigrant named John

Michael Kohler. Kohler’s company started out making farm

implements and ornaments like urns and cemetery crosses,

but his breakthrough came a decade later, when he had the

idea to heat enamel powder to 1,700 degrees and sprinkle

it on a large cast-iron basin. He featured the item in his

one-page catalogue with a caption that read: “Horse

Trough/Hog Scalder—when furnished with four legs will

serve as a bathtub.” In the end, the demand for bathtubs

turned out to be larger than for horse troughs and hog

scalders—a demand that spurred fantastic growth for

Kohler’s company.

Kohler built a factory, and his son Walter built a

picturesque town, Kohler Village, to go with it. The elegant

planned community, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted,

would later include a beautiful Tudor mansion with a

resort, spa, and temporary lodging for European immigrant

workers. (A decade later, Walter was elected governor of

Wisconsin.) At its dedication in 1918, Walter declared: “A

worker deserves not only wages, but roses as well.”

By then the company’s labor troubles had already

erupted. On March 13, 1897, seventy-five molders walked

off their jobs, protesting a 50 percent cut in wages. Labor

relations were calm for a time; Walter Kohler tried to keep

his workers happy by offering perks like a goose, or a gold

watch after twenty-five years of service. But in 1933

accumulated grievances—declining wages and hours, an

unfair system of layoffs that favored workers with houses

mortgaged to the company, dangerous working conditions

—led to the establishment of the company’s first union,

chartered by the American Federation of Labor. Kohler had

recently completed his single term as governor and

steadfastly opposed unions. In response to the formation of

the AFL-affiliated local, he formed a company union, Kohler

Workers Association. In the spring of 1934, he forced the

AFL union’s officers, who all worked at the company, to

attend a meeting. Kohler had gathered his handpicked

officials for his company union and put them on a platform.

He pointed to the men. “Here is your union,” he said.

Kohler refused to meet with the independent union, and

tensions continued to mount until, on July 16, 1934,

workers called a strike. Less than two weeks later, the

company’s armed guards escorted a coal car through the

picket lines, and a riot ensued. Guards shot two strikers in

the back, killing them and wounding forty-seven others,

many of them also shot in the back. The strike lasted seven

years, until the United States entered World War II. In

1954, workers at Kohler had gone out on strike again, only

returning to work eleven years later, when the strike finally

ended. It was one of the most rancorous, and longest,

strikes in American history.

The violence of the Kohler strike recalled an earlier

Wisconsin labor battle, which built to a climax on May 5,

1886, when some 1,500 workers, most of them Polish

immigrants, marched on the Rolling Mills iron plant. The

Milwaukee Iron Company had built the plant and the

neighborhood where its employees lived, and it demanded

in return that they work as many as sixteen hours a day, six

days a week. A citywide strike for an eight-hour day and

better working conditions had shut down every large

factory in Milwaukee except Rolling Mills, and as the

marchers began climbing the hill toward this last holdout,

members of the Wisconsin National Guard fired down on

them. They killed seven people, including a thirteen-year-

old boy. Jeremiah Rusk, the governor of Wisconsin, had

given the order. “I seen my duty, and I done it,” he later

said. At the time, he thought he might become president,

but in the end he never ran. The event, largely forgotten

until 1986, when the Wisconsin Labor History Society

began holding an annual commemoration, became known

as the Bay View Massacre.

Many of the great labor battles that followed the Bay

View Massacre—Pittsburgh’s Homestead Strike of 1892;

Colorado’s Ludlow Massacre of 1914—also ended in violent

defeat for the workers. Yet the defeats, in their very

brutality, also forged a sense of solidarity that eventually

produced great labor victories, including the eight-hour

workday, enshrined into federal law during the Depression,

and the passage of the 1935 Wagner Act, which guaranteed

the right of workers—like those at Kohler—to strike, and

remains labor’s greatest means of leverage. From 1935 to

1947, union membership in the United States quadrupled,

from 3.5 million workers to nearly 15 million workers,

fueled by the pro-union policies of the New Deal and a

labor shortage during World War II. In the mid-1950s, more

than one out of every three American workers belonged to

a union.

By 2017, the percentage of private-sector workers who

belonged to a union had fallen to 6.5 percent. Union

membership shrank for many reasons—some union bosses

turned corrupt, manufacturers pursued cheaper labor

overseas, automated systems replaced skilled workers in

industry after industry. And some politicians saw a chance

to show that they were not beholden to “special interests.”

But the passage of “right-to-work” laws, which began in

Arkansas and Florida in 1944, has proved able to corrode

labor’s strength from the inside. Right-to-work laws

eliminate the requirement for workers in a unionized

workplace to pay dues, but not the union’s obligation to

provide services to non-dues-paying employees. The more

workers “opt out,” the thinner a union has to stretch its

funds. Limited funds and fewer members diminish a union’s

capacity to negotiate for better wages and benefits, which

in turn fuels the desire of more and more members to stop

paying dues.

By 1964, twenty states were right-to-work. Over the next

four decades only three more—Louisiana, Idaho, and

Oklahoma—joined them. But in 2010, as Republicans swept

statehouses across the country, conservative organizations

such as ALEC and the Bradley Foundation intensified their

efforts to pass right-to-work laws. They devoted special

attention to transforming the industrial Midwest, the

symbolic heart of the American labor movement. In 2012,

Indiana became the first state to become right-to-work in

more than a decade, and the following year, Michigan, the

birthplace of the UAW, the most powerful trade union in

American history and the union that stood by the striking

Kohler workers for eleven years, followed.

Senate Majority Leader Fitzgerald began floating a right-

to-work law for Wisconsin in 2010. “I just attended an

American Legislative Exchange Council meeting,” he told a

reporter, who asked about making Wisconsin a right-to-

work state. “And I was surprised about how much

momentum there was in and around that discussion,

nothing like I have ever seen before.” But in Scott Walker’s

first term, the governor and his allies focused on the

passage of Act 10. After Walker coasted to reelection in

2014, with Republicans retaining control of the state

senate and assembly, Fitzgerald began speaking of it again.

And in early December he announced he was intent on

passing a right-to-work bill. “There’s no way we avoid this

issue,” Fitzgerald told Charlie Sykes, the conservative talk-

radio host. “We have to deal with this issue right now.”

IN 1941, when the labor movement was still ascending,

William Ruggles, a forty-year-old editorial writer for the

Dallas Morning News, coined the slogan “right to work.”

Ruggles was alarmed by labor’s growing strength, which in

his view was intent on forcing all workers into unions. He

proposed a constitutional amendment that would prohibit

workers from having to pay dues to a union in order to hold

a job in a “union shop.” “If the country does not want it, let

us say so,” he wrote. “If we do want it, adopt it and

maintain forever the right to work of every American.”

The day after the paper printed the editorial, a Houston

political activist named Vance Muse called Ruggles to ask

permission for his organization, the Christian American

Association, to pursue the proposal. Ruggles agreed and

suggested to Muse that he call it a “Right to Work

Amendment.” Muse, an avowed racist—he told a United

States Senate committee in 1936, “I am a Southerner and

for white supremacy”—held a special animus toward

unions, which he believed fostered race-mixing. In

Southern Exposure, a 1946 book about racism in the South,

the muckraking journalist Stetson Kennedy quoted Muse’s

pitch on the need for right-to-work, in which he said:

“White women and white men will be forced into

organizations with black African apes, whom they will have

to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.”

But Muse was also an effective fundraiser—he received

support from General Motors and the du Pont family,

among others—and lobbyist. In 1944, the Christian

American Association sponsored the amendment that made

Arkansas one of the country’s first right-to-work states. By

1947, ten more states, most of them in the South, had

become right-to-work, embodying the growing national

backlash against labor brought on by the Red Scare. That

same year, over President Harry Truman’s veto, Congress

passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which undercut the Wagner

Act by placing numerous restrictions on unions, among

them a clause granting states the power to become right-

to-work. Muse died in 1950, but his campaign had already

been taken over by more mainstream proponents. In 1955,

Fred Hartley, the former congressman from New Jersey

who helped draft Taft-Hartley, founded the National Right

to Work Committee. Three years later, Kansas legislators,

with the enthusiastic support of the oil magnate Fred Koch,

David and Charles Koch’s father, adopted a right-to-work

amendment in their state.

Though Walker had long supported right-to-work, he did

not push the measure after he was elected governor in

2010. Even when he was attacking public unions for

robbing the taxpayers of Wisconsin, Walker had

consistently praised private-sector unions, particularly

those in the construction trades, calling them “my partners

in economic development.” During his first term, many of

those unions, including Local 8, had backed Walker’s effort

to rewrite the state’s environmental law so that GTac’s

enormous iron-ore mine could be built in the Penokee Hills.

The mining company promised to deliver hundreds of union

jobs, creating a split in Walker’s broad-based opposition.

Walker continued to publicly oppose right-to-work. “I

have no interest in a right-to-work law in this state,” he

said in 2012. “We’re not going to pursue that in the

remainder of our term, and we’re not going to pursue it in

the future.” As late as December 2014, he dismissed right-

to-work as a “distraction.” But Fitzgerald kept pressing the

idea, and in February 2015, Walker agreed he would sign a

right-to-work bill “if it came” to his desk.

Many Wisconsin business owners—and Walker

supporters —who might be expected to cheer the demise of

unions, and welcome cheaper labor costs, did not support

the right-to-work bill. Contractors rely on the unions to

certify and drug-test workers and keep their workers

current on new technologies and job skills. Collectively,

Wisconsin’s trade unions contributed more than $30 million

in 2014 to training programs.

Ironwork, for example, is a dangerous job. It has the

fifth-highest fatality rate in the country, according to a

Bloomberg News analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics

data. A 2011 University of Michigan study concluded that

the fatality rate in construction trades was 40 percent

higher in right-to-work states. Local 8 offers a four-year

training program that requires more than 7,000 hours of

combined classroom and on-the-job study. Even many right-

to-work proponents single out the building trades’ training

programs, like Local 8’s, as exemplary.

Bill Kennedy, the president of Rock Road Companies, a

family-owned asphalt-paving operation with headquarters

in Janesville, flew back early from a Florida business trip to

testify against the right-to-work bill at the senate hearing

for the bill. Kennedy also helps run the Wisconsin

Contractor Coalition, an organization of business owners

whose positions on labor issues counter those of Wisconsin

Manufacturers & Commerce, the most powerful statewide

business lobby, which has pushed hard for right-to-work.

Within a few months of its founding in 2014, Kennedy’s

coalition attracted nearly 450 like-minded businesses that

collectively employ some 120,000 people. Like many of the

group’s members, Kennedy voted for Walker and

contributed to each of his campaigns.

“There’s this misguided myth that unions and

management don’t get along,” Kennedy told me the day

after the hearing. Rock Road was founded in 1913 by

Kennedy’s grandfather. It was a hauling business until the

Depression, when it began bidding on government-funded

projects like railroad beds and town roads. At its

summertime peak, Kennedy’s company employs about 150

workers. His opposition to right-to-work is rooted in

pragmatism. “It’s a business bottom-line issue,” he said.

“Right-to-work is going to compromise my quality, my

competitiveness. The unions are my partner. They’re almost

like a screening agency.” Kennedy’s greatest fear was that

right-to-work would undermine the unions’ contribution to

training programs, and eventually the quality and skills of

his employees. “This is a working system,” he said. “I have

never understood this right-to-work agenda.”

Also testifying against the right-to-work effort was Terry

McGowan, the president of Local 139, the statewide union

of heavy-machinery operators. McGowan had endorsed

Walker in 2010, because Walker had promised to increase

highway funding and build more roads, and he supported

Walker again in 2014. But speaking at a March 2015

assembly hearing, McGowan’s voice cracked as he

described the death, three days earlier, of Ryan Calkins, a

thirty-three-year-old union operating engineer who got

caught in a drilling rig while working on a highway

interchange in Milwaukee. “Remember that name—Ryan

Calkins—because he will just be a little blurb in the

newspaper,” McGowan told the legislators. Five hours after

Calkins was killed, McGowan said, he received a call from a

lawyer for Calkins’s employer; it needed someone who

knew how to operate the specialized drill to help remove

the mutilated body. McGowan sent one of his union

members, who had trained at Local 139’s facility in central

Wisconsin. “Now we’re talking about possibly taking

training and safety away from our industry?” McGowan

asked in disbelief.

A few days later, I went to see McGowan at Local 139’s

impressive new glass-and-steel union hall in wealthy

suburban Waukesha County, a stronghold of support for

Walker. McGowan greeted me warmly, but I could see he

was still shaken by Calkins’s death. “I gained a lot of

respect for the guy that I called, because he made it very

obvious he didn’t want to do it,” McGowan said. “But he

said he was not going to allow a fellow operating engineer

to sit wrapped around that drill bit in that weather and

freeze solid. You could hear his family in the background.

I’m sure he was looking at his wife and kids while I was

talking to him.”

In his testimony, McGowan described his members as

“beer-drinking, gun-toting, pickup-driving rednecks” and

reminded legislators that many of his workers are

politically conservative and usually vote Republican. Local

139’s special relationship to Republican politicians was

made clear when Fitzgerald floated the idea of exempting

McGowan’s union, along with a few others.

“One side of the aisle likes the work we do, but not our

organization, while the other side likes our organization,

but not what we do,” McGowan told me. He had lobbied

heavily on behalf of the iron-ore mine. “I was surprised that

the United Steelworkers fought the mine so hard, when the

mine would have used their equipment. The mine became

political, and a lot of the unions that opposed it, they did it

so that Walker couldn’t get a victory out of it. My thinking

was: jobs.”

Fidgeting behind his desk, McGowan rubbed his bald

scalp and half-smiled. “I sort of trusted the guy,” he said,

recalling his 2010 endorsement of Walker. “I took some

bullets at the time from the other unions.” When Walker’s

“divide and conquer” video was released in 2012, the

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked McGowan about the

governor’s remarks. McGowan told the paper that the

phrase “divide and conquer” troubled him. “It means

turning worker against worker,” he said.

RANDY BRYCE RESPONDED to Walker’s push for a right-to-work

bill characteristically: by organizing. Since Walker’s

election in 2010, he had worried about Wisconsin becoming

a right-to-work state, and after the 2014 election, his fears

intensified. As soon as Fitzgerald raised the idea on talk

radio, Bryce began traveling to job sites across

southeastern Wisconsin to warn his fellow union members

about what he believed was coming. It was an old-

fashioned organizing effort, talking to workers one on one,

made more difficult by a bitterly cold Wisconsin winter. The

men respected Bryce’s passion, even if they didn’t share it,

and they would shinny down the skeletal building frames in

subzero temperatures to take some of the flyers he’d

prepared. Bryce would tell them what right-to-work meant,

and that he might ask them to join him at the capitol one

day soon.

In February, that day came. Bryce went to the state

capitol in Madison to testify against the right-to-work bill

Fitzgerald had just introduced. Bryce had finally picked up

some work after months of unemployment. He was

unloading truckloads of steel beams to build a warehouse

near Kenosha, and he needed the job. His son, Ben, was

eight years old, his debts were piling up, and a ten-hour

shift paid more than $300. But the legislation, which

Republicans were rushing through the state senate,

angered him enough to sacrifice the hours.

Early that morning, Bryce drove his gray Mustang to the

capitol. Dozens of state troopers (who kept their bargaining

rights) and capitol police officers (who lost theirs) were

now patrolling the rotunda to prevent it from being

occupied as it was during the fight over Act 10. The senate

hearing room was already packed, so Bryce watched the

hearing on monitors outside while he waited for his turn to

speak. First came the expert witnesses. James Sherk, an

economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said

that unions operate as cartels: “They try to control the

supply of labor in an industry so as to drive up its price,

namely wages. But like all cartels, these gains come at the

cost of greater losses to the rest of society.” Greg Mourad,

a spokesman for the National Right to Work Committee,

which has received significant funding from the Koch

brothers, compared the experience of being made to pay

union dues to being kidnapped and extorted. Gordon Lafer,

a political scientist at the University of Oregon, noted that,

on the other hand, while right-to-work laws in other states

had generated no identifiable economic gains, they did

drive down wages for union and non-union workers alike.

Ordinary citizens got their chance to speak in the

afternoon. Nearly all of them opposed the bill. A crane

operator cited statistics showing that workers in right-to-

work states are killed on the job more frequently. “Are you

prepared to be accountable for the deaths that being a

right-to-work state can create?” he asked. Anthony

Anastasi, the president of Iron Workers Local 383, broke

down in tears as he pleaded to the legislators, “Please think

about the families that will be impacted by this.”

At 6 p.m., Bryce’s name finally appeared on the list of

coming speakers. He paced the hallway outside the hearing

room in anticipation. But twenty minutes later, Stephen

Nass, the Republican senator who is the chairman of the

Labor and Government Reform Committee, announced that

there was a “credible threat of disruption” and that the

hearing would be adjourned so the committee could vote to

move the bill forward. A labor organizer, it turned out, had

told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that some people

planned to stand up in protest at 7 p.m., when testimony

was to be cut off. (“I went through Act 10—it was ugly,”

Nass said earlier in the hearing, referring to the difficulty

some senators experienced reaching various parts of the

capitol after the rotunda was occupied. “We had to go

through a tunnel like rats. We don’t want to go through that

again.”) About a hundred people were still in line to testify.

A chant of “Let us speak” erupted. But Nass quickly took

the committee members’ votes—the bill passed—and was

then escorted out, with his two Republican colleagues, by a

phalanx of state troopers.

Bryce still wanted to speak. He had lost a day’s wages,

and the committee’s two Democratic senators had

remained to hear more testimony. State troopers were now

blocking the door to the hearing room, though, so he

decided to address a group of protesters in the hallway

outside instead.

“My name is Randy Bryce,” he began in a loud voice.

“I’ve been a member of Iron Workers Local 8 since 1997.

I’ve had the privilege in that time to work on many of

Wisconsin’s landmarks, private businesses, and numerous

other parts of our infrastructure.” As Bryce spoke, the

protesters began to quiet. He described how he had

wandered from job to job after he left the army, how Local

8’s apprenticeship program had turned his life around.

Finally, he presented the case against what he called “a

blatant political attack” on his union. “All of our

representatives are elected,” he said. “All of the decisions

that we make are voted on. The general membership is

given monthly reports on how every dime is spent. Every

dime spent is voted on. Unlike what is taking place this

week, Iron Workers Local 8 is pure democracy. I am

disappointed beyond words at not just what this bill

contains, but how it is being passed.”

The following day, the full senate took up the bill. Bryce,

who had asked for another day off, took a seat in the

gallery. Fitzgerald stood up and said that the bill

established “true workplace freedom” for the first time.

“Such freedom,” he added, “has been available to most

public-sector workers since the passage of Act 10 in 2011.”

Fitzgerald continued to praise the measure until Bryce rose

up from his seat.

“This bill is turning Wisconsin into a banana republic,”

he shouted as the senators and media on the ground floor

gazed upward. “We were not given the chance to speak our

minds.” Mary Lazich, the president of the senate, tried to

quiet Bryce, but he continued talking until two Wisconsin

state troopers approached him, placed their hands on his

shoulders, and asked him to leave. Bryce did not resist, but

as the troopers led him out, he kept on denouncing the bill,

especially the way it was being sped through the

legislature. The last words listeners could make out from

the chamber, before his voice faded into the distance, were:

“This bill is an attack on democracy.”

HOURS AFTER THE state troopers pulled Bryce out of the

gallery, the full senate passed the bill that would make

Wisconsin the twenty-fifth right-to-work state. Two days

later, Scott Walker went to Maryland to speak at the

Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual

showcase for conservative activists and Republican

presidential hopefuls. At a question-and-answer session,

one attendee asked Walker how he, as president, would

confront the threat from radical Islamist groups like ISIS.

Walker’s answer was simple, and defined his worldview. “If

I can take on 100,000 protesters,” he said, “I can do the

same across the world.”

The right-to-work bill passed the assembly in early

March, and Walker’s signature came a few days later. He

signed the bill at Badger Meter, a manufacturer of water-

flow measurement devices. He sat at a desk on the

manufacturing floor affixed with a placard that proclaimed

“Freedom to Work.” (Paradoxically, that freedom did not

extend to the employees of Badger Meter, who were not

allowed to be on the floor during the signing.) Four months

later, Walker announced his candidacy for president. He

was widely seen, along with Governor Jeb Bush and

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, as one of the frontrunners

for the GOP nomination.

Walker’s presidential run lasted less than two months,

and it ended with a press conference announcing that he

was dropping out to stop Trump, whose campaign was

gathering momentum and frightening the GOP

establishment. “Today, I believe that I am being called to

lead by helping to clear the field in this race so that a

positive conservative message can rise to the top,” Walker

said. (A poll had shown Walker with less than 1 percent

support among the Republican electorate.) To the shock of

his rivals and the media, Trump was proving unstoppable,

and by the time of the Wisconsin primary, in April, the only

remaining Republicans in the race were Senator Ted Cruz

of Texas and Governor John Kasich of Ohio.

For the Never Trump forces of the GOP, the Wisconsin

primary was their last chance to derail Trump’s

nomination. In late March, Wisconsin anti-Trump

Republicans began coalescing around Cruz, his most

significant rival. Walker endorsed Cruz a week before the

primary, and the radio host Charlie Sykes relentlessly

attacked Trump on his three-and-a-half-hour daily show.

“You can’t parachute in here from Manhattan and crap on

everything we’ve been doing for the last twenty years,”

Sykes said a few days before the primary. The Never Trump

supporters hoped for a Cruz victory in Wisconsin that

would provide enough momentum to prevent Trump from

winning an outright majority of the delegates, bringing the

Republican convention to a second ballot, where another

candidate besides Trump could win.

Trump responded by staging ten rallies in Wisconsin in

the week before the primary, and using them to attack the

state’s Republican leadership—especially Walker and Paul

Ryan. “He came up to my office about a year ago,” Trump

said of Walker at a town hall in Janesville. “I supported him,

I gave him $50,000 or $100,000,” he continued. “He

certainly can’t endorse me after what I did to him in the

race, right?” Trump also appealed to the working class, or

at least a segment of it. He went after Walker’s record in

Wisconsin: the state’s high debt, the decline in labor-force

participation, and the ballooning number of food-stamp

recipients. “Middle class hit very, very hard due to loss of

manufacturing jobs,” Trump said. “Wisconsin has lost

15,000 net jobs to Mexico since NAFTA. . . . But you have a

governor that has you convinced that [Wisconsin] doesn’t

have problems.”

Amid the vitriol directed at immigrants and the common

violence at his rallies—a teenager in Janesville was pepper-

sprayed after she punched someone who allegedly groped

her—significant portions of Trump’s speech defended the

welfare state, an especially appealing message to the aging

voters in the crowd. “I’m going to save Social Security, Ted

Cruz is going to cut the hell out of Social Security,” he said

at a rally in Racine. “They’re going to cut the hell out of

Medicare. I’m going to save your Medicare.”

It wasn’t the first time right-wing populism made inroads

with Wisconsin’s white working class. In 1964, on a

speaking trip to Madison, George Wallace, the

segregationist Alabama governor, learned he needed only

sixty Wisconsin residents to act as delegates to get on the

state’s ballot in a run for president. He quickly found them,

filed his candidacy, and started his presidential campaign,

focusing on Wisconsin and a few other states. Though he

ran as a Democrat, Wallace’s hastily conceived presidential

bid was meant to rebuke Lyndon Johnson for his support of

civil rights legislation, and to push conservative economic

policies—especially cutting the federal government, taxes,

and business regulations. By the end of March, Wallace’s

stops in Wisconsin had become more frequent, drawing

enormous crowds—supporters and protesters alike. Bomb

scares were common, and Wallace always traveled with

armed guards.

In April 1964, Wallace’s Wisconsin campaign crested

with an appearance at American Serb Memorial Hall, a

community center on Milwaukee’s heavily Polish South

Side. Milwaukee had been in the throes of a growing racial

backlash for eight years, since a race-baiting whisper

campaign suggested that Frank Zeidler, the city’s last

Socialist mayor and an unapologetic advocate for civil

rights, had paid for billboards across the South

encouraging African Americans to move to Milwaukee. The

smears led to death threats against Zeidler and his family

and contributed to his decision not to seek reelection in

1960. Milwaukee’s next mayor, a machine politician named

Henry Maier, stayed silent about Wallace’s visit. Despite

Wallace’s fears about his reception in this urban ethnic

enclave, hundreds of people waited outside the hall that

night after the room had been filled to capacity.

As the event began, a riot nearly broke out when the

organizer, a former Marine named Bronco Gruber, singled

out two black civil rights advocates who, in protest of

Wallace’s appearance, had refused to stand during the

national anthem. “Your countrymen or whatever you want

to call them, they beat up old ladies, eighty-three years old,

rape our women folk,” Gruber raged at the seated activists.

“They mug people. They won’t work. They are on relief.

How long can we tolerate this? Did I go to Guadalcanal to

come back to something like this?” Several men stood up

and glared threateningly at the protesters. “Send them

back to Africa,” someone shouted. But the two men

managed to slip out of the hall without violence breaking

out.

Before Wallace went onstage, a polka band played

“Dixie,” with the crowd singing along in Polish. Wallace

played to the working-class crowd’s fears. Johnson’s civil

rights laws “would destroy the union seniority system and

impose racial quotas”; open housing bills would diminish

the value of their homes. He was met by rapturous

adulation. “If I ever had to leave Alabama, I’d want to live

on the South Side of Milwaukee,” he told a reporter.

A week later, he would shock political pundits, who

didn’t believe his racist style could appeal to voters outside

the South, by winning 25 percent of the statewide vote and

31 percent in Milwaukee. His success paved the way for his

next campaign, in 1968. An internal AFL-CIO poll before

the 1968 election suggested that one in three union

members supported him. Running that year as an

independent, Wallace won 13 percent of the national vote.

His success among Northern blue-collar voters, like those

who came to hear him at Serb Memorial Hall, almost

certainly cost the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey,

the presidency.

Yet the Milwaukee vote was more complex than the

narrative of white working-class racial resentment that

predominated. Wallace also received a great deal of

support from voters in the affluent Republican counties

surrounding Milwaukee. Moreover, the results showed the

power of labor to push back against racist appeal. The AFL-

CIO started a concerted campaign to highlight Wallace’s

hostile record to unions in Alabama, which likely shrank his

vote totals in Milwaukee’s blue-collar wards. A post-vote

analysis comparing eight primarily working-class wards

and eight wards with greater percentages of white-collar

residents revealed higher vote totals for Wallace in the

latter.

The trend seems to have continued to this day. Recent

studies in Europe and the United States have shown that

union membership exerts a significant impact on its

members’ political views and diminishes the appeal of far-

right, authoritarian parties. As recently as 2008, labor

played a pivotal role in electing a Democratic president.

That year, the AFL-CIO dedicated $250 million, its largest

election effort ever, to helping Barack Obama win. A

significant portion of that money was devoted to educating

white union members, who, exit polls showed, were much

more likely to support Obama than whites who were not in

a union.

ON THE DEMOCRATIC SIDE, Bernie Sanders was surging in

Wisconsin as the state’s 2016 presidential primary

approached. Working-class voters had rallied to Sanders’s

campaign, saving it from an almost certain end by

delivering Sanders an upset primary victory in Michigan.

Polls had shown Sanders trailing Clinton there by as much

as twenty points, but anger over NAFTA and growing

support from African American voters propelled Sanders’s

unexpected win. Exit polls showed that Clinton narrowly

lost Michigan’s union households to Sanders. She also lost,

by a larger margin, the Democratic voters who thought

free-trade agreements caused job losses. Clinton’s

weakness in the industrial Midwest was exposed.

A week before the Wisconsin primary, the Sanders

campaign invited Randy Bryce to speak at a rally at the

Wisconsin State Fair, in West Allis. Sanders had drawn

8,000 people in Madison a few days earlier, and his

grassroots politics were a natural fit for the state’s

progressive voters, many of whom were steeped in the La

Follette tradition. A year and a half before the Iowa

caucuses, he had drawn an astonishing 10,000 people for a

rally in Madison. “Wisconsin is my second favorite state,”

Sanders once said.

But pundits and the Clinton campaign discounted the

importance of crowds, and Clinton continued to run a

traditional race, racking up endorsements from Democratic

power brokers and trying to avoid gaffes. Clinton’s

campaign efforts in Wisconsin were limited to small,

exclusive gatherings. On the day before Bryce spoke to

thousands in West Allis, she hosted an invitation-only talk

for 250 people at Gordon Commons, a dining hall and event

center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

When a Sanders staffer called Bryce to ask if he would

speak, Bryce didn’t hesitate. He admired Sanders’s

unequivocal opposition to free-trade deals like NAFTA and

the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, and how he had

recently walked a picket line at an industrial food plant in

Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Bryce also remembered the visit

Sanders made to Wisconsin in 2011, a few months after the

passage of Act 10, to speak at Fighting Bob Fest, an annual

event celebrating progressive politics, where Sanders paid

tribute to the grassroots resistance still battling Walker’s

attacks on public-employee unions. “There are a lot of

reasons as to why the middle class is collapsing,” Sanders

said. “Certainly the anti-union efforts on the part of

corporate America have been significant, because if we do

not have workers—public and private—engaged in

collective bargaining, fighting for a living wage, not only do

those workers suffer, but every worker in America suffers

as we engage in a race to the bottom.”

Bryce came dressed in a gray suit jacket and black tie,

though a few hours earlier he had been installing windows

from a hanging platform thirty stories high for a new office

tower in downtown Milwaukee. He stepped onto the

podium and began by reminding the crowd of Sanders’

show of support in 2011. “After Scott Walker dropped the

bomb five years ago, Senator Sanders was the first to show

up at Fighting Bob Fest and help us dust off from our

union-built bomb shelters,” Bryce told the crowd, estimated

at more than five thousand. He cited the contract won by

striking workers at the Kohler plant in Sheboygan the

previous winter. “Even in the state of Wisconsin, under a

bomb that has been dropped on us, we can still win if we

stand united,” he said. Bryce had joined the Kohler workers

on the picket line. He believed workers might finally be

grasping Walker’s divide-and-conquer strategy, which had

cleaved the labor movement in Wisconsin. “I’ve had union

brothers come up to me and say, ‘I’m sorry for voting for

Scott Walker, I apologize,’ ” Bryce told the crowd. “Coming

from a construction worker to apologize to another one—

that meant something to me.

“Too often we hear during a campaign about what

someone will do for us. I’m done hearing words. I’m done,”

Bryce said. “We hear things like, ‘I love collective

bargaining,’ we hear things like, ‘I have a comfortable pair

of shoes that I’m going to put on and wear wherever

collective bargaining is under attack.’ ” Bryce was referring

to a comment made by Barack Obama in a South Carolina

speech during his 2008 presidential campaign: “If

American workers are being denied their right to organize

and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll

put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself,” Obama said.

“I’ll walk on that picket line with you as president of the

United States of America.” The remark became notorious in

the protests against Act 10, because Obama had failed to

show up; in his memoir, Scott Walker taunted his opponents

with Obama’s absence. When Bryce traveled to Washington

for a union conference in 2011, he brought a pair of

sneakers and tied them to the White House gate, a

reminder of Obama’s abandoned promise to labor.

AS SHE GRAPPLED WITH the rising appeal of the Bernie Sanders

campaign, Hillary Clinton was in no position to galvanize

rank-and-file union member support. Her own troubles with

labor were decades old, having started before she arrived

in Washington. From 1986 to 1992, as a corporate lawyer

in Arkansas, she served on the board of Walmart. By then,

Sam Walton, the company’s founder, was notorious for his

anti-union fervor; an attorney named John Tate, who was

also on the board and drove Walmart’s labor strategy for

decades, told a meeting of Walmart managers in 2004 that

“labor unions are nothing but blood-sucking parasites living

off the productive labor of people who work for a living.”

During Clinton’s first presidential run, a former Walmart

board member told ABC News that he could not recall her

ever defending unions during more than twenty private

board meetings. “She was not a dissenter,” Donald

Soderquist, the vice chairman of the board during Clinton’s

tenure, told the Los Angeles Times in 2007. “She was a

part of those decisions.”

“I’m always proud of Walmart and what we do and the

way we do it better than anybody else,” Clinton said at a

1990 shareholders’ meeting in Fayetteville, Arkansas, when

Bill Clinton was governor. But over the years, as Walmart’s

reputation was sullied by allegations of unsafe working

conditions, overtime-wage theft, and sex discrimination,

Clinton distanced herself from the company. Still, the

Walton family’s fondness for her endured; Alice Walton,

Sam Walton’s daughter, donated more than $350,000 to the

Hillary Victory Fund in 2015.

It was Clinton’s past support for free-trade agreements,

though, that most antagonized labor. In 1996, she said that

the two-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement

was “proving its worth,” a position she reaffirmed years

later as a senator. In 2000, while running for her Senate

seat, Clinton supported China’s entry into the World Trade

Organization and granting the country permanent normal

trade relations. More recently, as secretary of state, Clinton

praised the twelve-country Trans-Pacific Partnership

dozens of times—at one point she called it the “gold

standard” of free-trade deals—and lobbied foreign

governments for its adoption. But in October 2015, as a

presidential candidate, Clinton announced that she

opposed the agreement.

During her 2008 presidential campaign, Clinton also

publicly opposed free-trade agreements with Panama,

South Korea, and Colombia, the last of which was also

opposed by human rights groups as well as organized labor

in Colombia and the United States. “I will do everything I

can to urge the Congress to reject the Colombia Free Trade

Agreement,” she said at a gathering of the Communications

Workers of America in Washington. But emails released

from Clinton’s private server show that as secretary of

state she lobbied Congress to support the agreement with

Colombia, which passed in 2011. Describing her effort to

sway Representative Sander Levin, a Michigan Democrat,

Clinton wrote to a State Department official: “I told him

that at the rate we were going, Columbian [sic] workers

were going to end up [with] the same or better rights than

workers in Wisconsin and Indiana and, maybe even,

Michigan.” According to Escuela Nacional Sindical, a

Colombian labor rights group, as of March 2018, 143 union

activists have been assassinated since the agreement

passed.

Robert Scott, a senior economist at the Economic Policy

Institute, estimates that NAFTA was responsible for the net

loss of roughly 700,000 American jobs to Mexico in its first

fifteen years, while China’s admittance to the WTO cost the

United States more than three million jobs. Roughly three-

quarters of those losses were in the more highly unionized

manufacturing sector, contributing to the steep decline in

private-sector union membership, which went from 15.7

percent in 1993, when NAFTA was passed, to a nadir of 6.4

percent in 2016, the lowest figure in a century.

Since 1960, no Democrat has won the general election

without winning the Wisconsin primary. After Clinton’s

Michigan loss, another Midwestern defeat by Sanders

would foreshadow trouble against Donald Trump, whose

opposition to free trade also helped propel him to victory in

Michigan. Exit polls there showed that a majority of

Republican voters also believed that free trade takes away

American jobs. Trump decisively won that group. “You

know, Michigan has been stripped,” Trump told CNN’s

Anderson Cooper the day after his victory. “You look at

those empty factories all over the place. And nobody hits

that message better than me.”

At a Democratic primary debate in Milwaukee, Clinton

told the audience, “We’ve got to stand up for unions.” The

line generated passionate applause, but many of

Wisconsin’s labor activists remained skeptical. “A lot of our

job problems stem from NAFTA, and the TPP will kill us,”

Gerry Miller, a United Steelworkers welder then working at

a Caterpillar plant in South Milwaukee, told me. “We can’t

compete with people being paid two dollars a day in

Vietnam. The thing that we’re most upset about is the

pandering. Democrats like Clinton speak labor out of one

side of their mouth, but the corporate interests pull the

strings.” (Scott, of the Economic Policy Institute, estimates

that adoption of the TPP would result in the net loss of

roughly 40,000 jobs in Wisconsin, 215,000 in Michigan, and

113,000 in Ohio.)

While Clinton received the endorsement of many of the

large national unions, many union locals chose to back

Sanders. David Poklinkoski, the president of IBEW Local

2304, said his local had never endorsed anyone for any

office before, but had passed a unanimous resolution

endorsing Sanders. Poklinkoski praised the senator’s

consistent opposition to free-trade agreements. After the

Milwaukee debate, he told me that two of his members who

watched it came away as Sanders supporters. But

Poklinkoski was alarmed to hear that the men’s second

choice was Trump. Nine months before the general

election, Poklinkoski told me Clinton was vulnerable in

Wisconsin.

“I’m worried about Trump versus Hillary,” Poklinkoski

said. He noted that at home, Walker had successfully

portrayed himself as an anti-tax, blue-collar politician, an

image that helped him divide Wisconsin’s workers during

the state’s labor battles. “If you have a right-wing populist,

you can beat a corporate Democrat,” Poklinkoski said.

“Scott Walker did it three times here.”

TWO WEEKS AFTER Walker signed the right-to-work bill, Local

8 held its monthly meeting in its union hall just outside

Milwaukee. On the way there, I drove past Miller Park, the

Milwaukee Brewers’ stadium, which Bryce worked on in

2000, during the final phase of its construction. It was the

project he was most proud of. From the interstate, I could

see the elaborate arched ironwork crowning the stadium’s

top. It reminded me of a photograph I had glimpsed on the

wall of Bryce’s home showing him and two other

ironworkers decking the top of the stadium. They looked

tiny in the far distance, but you could tell how strong the

wind was from the way a tarp was blowing.

Bryce’s grandfather, Eugene, had taken the photo. He

used to drive by the stadium several times a week, because

he loved watching Bryce work. It was difficult to see Bryce

and his coworkers, 350 feet in the air and bracing against

the wind, as members of a cartel, as James Sherk, the

Heritage Foundation economist, had described unions in

his senate testimony. Miller Park had claimed the lives of

three Local 8 ironworkers, who fell 300 feet to their deaths

when a giant crane collapsed into the stadium on a fiercely

windy day.

Bryce arrived at the Local 8 meeting straight from work,

wearing mud-caked overalls. He walked into the office to

pay his $53 in monthly dues and then chatted with a few

other ironworkers before wandering into the meeting hall.

After the men recited the Pledge of Allegiance and the

recording secretary read the minutes from the previous

month’s meeting, the executive board began a series of

briefings: the prospects for building a new arena for the

Milwaukee Bucks, the restructuring of the local’s dental

plans, what happened at the annual conference of the

international union in Las Vegas.

Last on the agenda was Bryce’s political report. He stood

up and started talking. He told the union workers about

being locked out of the senate hearing. He told them about

the next day, when he went back to protest and was thrown

out of the senate debate for shouting, “This bill is turning

Wisconsin into a banana republic.” He talked about his

organizing trips in anticipation of right-to-work and the

dispiritingly small crowds at the rallies. He implored Local

8’s members to become more active and not to think of

themselves as elite tradesmen whose concerns were

distinct from those of other workers and other movements.

“Unions are not separate from the community,” he said.

“We build the community. Yet you’re seen as the enemy, the

reason people are broke. We have to stop this union-versus-

non-union mentality.”

After the meeting, Bryce headed out to the parking lot.

There had been some defeats, he acknowledged, but he still

saw the attacks on unions as an opportunity to build

solidarity. “At last month’s meeting, I talked about how the

only way to fight back is to stage a massive general strike,”

he said. “It doesn’t need to be that, but we do need to build

ourselves up to a strength where they fear that. Now

they’re not afraid of anything, because we haven’t done

anything to fight back.”

Bryce blamed the timidity of both union leaders and the

rank-and-file, as much as the Republicans, for allowing Act

10 and right-to-work to become law. “People think that

unions are useless today, that we’re dinosaurs,” he said.

“Well, how did that happen? We let it happen. The labor

movement has become lazy, because it’s something that’s

been handed to us.” He leaned against his Mustang and

stared out into the industrial landscape surrounding the

parking lot.

“A lot of guys in our local didn’t see Act 10 as being

important for ironworkers,” Bryce said, because it targeted

public employees. “I would ask them, how can you say

there are good unions and bad unions? It’s an idea that

they’re trying to kill—it’s not the union itself. This is the

strategy they’re using to do it. They’re splitting everything

up. They’re going after them first, then it’s going to be

somebody else. Then they’re going to get to us too.”

SANDERS CRUSHED CLINTON by thirteen points in the Wisconsin

primary, and like La Follette in 1910, he won every county

except one. Dale Schultz, the Republican state senator from

western Wisconsin, told me his message of strengthening

the welfare state and railing against economic elites

resonated with his rural voters. “Whether you agree with

the guy or no—and there are substantial things that I didn’t

agree with—you couldn’t deny that he was authentic, that

he hadn’t said the same things for years,” Schultz said.

“Bernie Sanders was putting people on fire with ideas. All

the Democrats were on fire out by us. I have never seen

anything like that.” That energy dissipated three and a half

months later, when Clinton won the Democratic

nomination. “Once he was out and it was just Hillary and

Donald Trump,” Schultz told me, “the anger shifted over

and got behind Trump because they didn’t care. They just

wanted to crush the establishment.”

After her primary loss in April, Hillary Clinton did not

return to Wisconsin until November 2017, when she came

for an appearance at the Riverside Theater in Milwaukee to

promote her new book, What Happened. “We now know

that Russian agents used Facebook, Twitter, Google,

YouTube, even Pinterest to place targeted attack ads and

negative stories intended not only to hurt me, but to fan the

flames of division within our society,” she told the crowd.

But she didn’t tell them why she was the first

presidential candidate of either party to skip Wisconsin

since Richard Nixon, in 1972, or how she found time for a

last-minute campaign stop in Arizona, which had gone for a

Democrat just once in the past twelve presidential

elections. She didn’t explain why her campaign did not run

ads in Wisconsin until a week before the election. Or why,

during the final weeks of the campaign, she spent more on

advertising in Omaha, for its single Electoral College vote,

than in Wisconsin and Michigan combined. Nor did she tell

them why she believed sending surrogates like Chelsea

Clinton and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker to Wisconsin

would inspire the state’s beleaguered progressives to vote

for her. Her negligence of Wisconsin almost certainly

contributed to her loss, which was by only 22,000 votes,

and along with narrow defeats in Michigan and

Pennsylvania cost her the presidency.

According to Chris Taylor, even Clinton’s vaunted data-

gathering operation turned out to be deficient. “The Hillary

campaign’s lists sucked,” Taylor, who canvassed for Clinton

and supported her in the primary, told me. “I used my own

lists in my district, because I was walking by doors of

people that I knew were Democrats, but they were not on

her lists.”

Although Trump lost the Wisconsin primary by as large a

margin as Clinton, he went on to campaign heavily in the

state for the general election, staging five large rallies.

Many pundits wondered what he was doing there, since

Wisconsin was supposed to be a “blue wall,” but he saw an

opening, twinning his message of racial resentment with a

defense of Social Security and Medicare that resonated

with many older, white, working-class voters. That was

clear in Kenosha County, the former home of the American

Motors Corporation and many other manufacturing plants.

Trump won the county narrowly, while four years earlier

Obama prevailed there by twelve points.

Anti-union laws like Act 10 and the right-to-work bill may

have played the biggest role in Trump’s victory. Wisconsin’s

union density has declined by nearly 40 percent since the

passage of Act 10, a decline accelerated by the right-to-

work law. Now Wisconsin, once a cradle of the labor

movement, has just 8 percent of its workforce unionized.

Unions have historically been a central pillar of civil

society, and in Wisconsin they provided the essential

financial support for the Democratic Party, as well as

supplying the ground troops and organization muscle to

generate turnout on Election Day. The decline of union

membership in America correlates almost perfectly with

the exponential rise of income inequality. More than that,

the diminishment of Wisconsin’s unions erased a context

for workers to share ideas about policy—and to organize;

they were the only real counterweight to the right’s

infrastructure. That was clear by the massive protests

against Act 10.

Since Trump’s victory, Missouri, West Virginia, and

Kentucky have become right-to-work, bringing the total to

twenty-eight states, as conservatives continue to

aggressively convert even more of them. And for good

reason. A 2018 study published by the National Bureau of

Economic Research suggests that right-to-work laws

decrease the Democratic presidential vote share by 3.5

percent, a decline that far exceeds the amount Clinton lost

by in both Michigan and Wisconsin. The authors noted that

right-to-work laws also affect Senate, House, governor, and

state legislative races. The study underscored the

importance of the anti-union strategy that began in

Wisconsin with Act 10, which functioned as a right-to-work

law for public-sector employees, going so far as to bar them

from even choosing to have the union automatically collect

dues. (They could, however, elect to have automatic

donations for organizations like the United Way.) When the

attacks on unions began in Wisconsin, many of the

protesters noted that the first step the Nazi Party took to

cement its hold on power was banning independent trade

unions. The analogy seemed like gross hyperbole at the

time, but with the rise of white nationalism since Trump’s

election, the parallel has become more disturbing.

After the 2016 election, an underlying goal of attacking

Wisconsin’s union movement—transforming the electorate

—was articulated by Grover Norquist, the conservative

anti-tax activist. “Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in

2016 did not lay the groundwork for Republican political

dominance,” Norquist wrote. “But the March 2011 signing

of Act 10, a dramatic reform of public-sector labor laws, by

Wisconsin’s Scott Walker certainly did. To understate it: If

Act 10 is enacted in a dozen more states, the modern

Democratic Party will cease to be a competitive power in

American politics. It’s that big a deal.”

NOT LONG AFTER Trump’s victory, I went to a basement

conference room in Emil Mazey Hall, in Sheboygan, to

meet with three retired Kohler workers—Charles Conrardy,

Kenneth Holzer, and Larry Meyer, all in their late eighties.

The men had gone out on strike in 1954 and returned to

work eleven years later, when the strike finally ended. They

recalled it vividly, especially the solidarity among the

strikers. In the early 1950s, the Kohler workers had

succeeded in bringing the UAW in to represent them, but

Herbert Kohler Sr., then the company president, made it

clear he would negotiate with only the company union. “It

was a union, but not a union because we had our contract

proposals, they had theirs, and we ended up with theirs,”

Conrardy said. “You talked, but you got nothing. That was

the way he wanted it run. He didn’t believe in unions.”

The Kohler family was ideologically committed to

defeating the union, even though their refusal to negotiate

was devastating their profits. The company’s

uncompromising stance made them heroes to some

activists and groups on the far right, including the John

Birch Society. The most important grievance was the

working conditions. When the workers would shake the

sand off their molds, tiny particles of silicon could enter

their lungs, scarring them and eventually impairing their

ability to breathe. Many employees, particularly those

working with porcelain, developed this condition, known as

silicosis, and had to be sent to Rocky Knoll, a tuberculosis

sanitarium in nearby Plymouth. The workers called it

“Kohler disease.” Holzer’s father had been a patient at

Rocky Knoll. “My father-in-law died out there,” Meyer said.

“He had six kids. I found papers rummaging around my

wife’s basement that showed Kohler was giving six kids and

a widow eight dollars a month.”

In 1954, the men met at the Sheboygan Armory and

voted to strike. “The first day of the strike, I remember I

was at the front gate, and all the fellows that wanted to

break the union wanted to come in,” Holzer said. “They

were across the street and there was at least a hundred,

something like that. But they never got through. We were

fifteen deep. There were over two thousand people on that

picket line.” The men on the line were met with solidarity

from workers around the country—Chicago plumbers, New

York hotel employees—who refused to install Kohler

products. Conrardy estimates that production at the plant

fell to less than half its former capacity.

The strike split the community in two. “It was family

against family, because of the scabs,” Conrardy said. “My

dad had to go in. He came to me with tears in his eyes.

‘Gotta go in.’ I said: ‘You gotta go, I guess that’s the way it

is. You’re my father, what am I going to do?’ ” Conrardy

said there were still brothers who won’t speak to each

other, because one of them crossed the picket line.

Sometimes the tension turned violent. “Down at the harbor,

they would try and bring in new ships with pig iron and

clay,” Cal Potter, who had joined us because his father had

been a striker, said. “We would show up and try to prevent

the cranes from getting to the dock. I remember one time I

was down there with my dad and a scab tried to drive his

car through there. Somebody spotted this guy, and they

tipped the car over.” During the strike years, most of the

workers found other jobs—at lumber companies,

Milwaukee breweries—but continued to walk the picket

line in shifts. The Kohler company lost a series of court

cases and eventually, after the US Supreme Court refused

to hear its last appeal, was forced to reinstate the striking

workers and pay them $3 million in back wages.

“After the strike, we had as many as nine UAW locals in

this community,” Potter, a Democrat who represented

Sheboygan for twenty-three years in the state legislature,

said. Sheboygan had been very Republican, just like much

of the region, “but this strike changed that. People saw

where their bread was buttered. They became Democrats,

and it helped me when I eventually got in.”

Today, the area is Republican again and growing more

so. In 2008, Obama lost Sheboygan County to John McCain

by a few hundred votes, while Trump defeated Clinton by

10,000. “What we did just doesn’t pass on from one

generation to the next; they don’t understand it,” Conrardy

said. “It doesn’t seem like you can teach it anymore. I don’t

think you can have a class in school about unions, whether

that would make a difference. Here were people who lost

jobs because of NAFTA and other free-trade deals. Their

jobs moved to China—everything you pick up is made in

China, because it’s cheap labor. They’d have to go through

the same thing we did in order to really understand what’s

going on. That’s why I keep saying it hasn’t hit hard

enough yet, that these people that think they don’t need a

union, they gotta lose everything again. Go through the

same thing we did.”

Near the end of the meeting, Tim Tayloe, Local 833’s

current president, came in to say hello to the old-timers.

Tayloe led the last Kohler strike, in 2015, which lasted five

weeks. His union fought the introduction of a two-tiered

system for wages and benefits that amounted to pay cuts of

up to 40 percent for newer employees, resulting in

positions starting at as little as eleven dollars an hour.

Tayloe won modest increases in wages, but the two-tiered

system came with them, conceding the core demand of the

union. Three and a half weeks into the strike, he met with

Dave Kohler, the current president of the company, in a

Town & Country golf course parking lot. Tayloe told Kohler

they needed to get back to the negotiating table. The

company was already talking about bringing in

replacement workers, and Tayloe worried that he couldn’t

hold the strikers’ solidarity beyond Christmas.

When I asked how his workers voted, Tayloe told me he

had sensed that Clinton would lose. “You could tell the

swing in this factory,” he said. Tayloe had tried to push his

members to get out the vote as they had in 2008, for

Obama. “That was motivated,” he said. “I think I put up 120

four-by-eight signs that we painted ourselves. This election,

there weren’t any four-by-eights anywhere. We didn’t have

any to put up. Even the yard signs were tough to get.”

Some of the people he cajoled into helping him do

campaign literature drops for Clinton he knew would be

voting for Trump. “When you look at the future, and you

look at the Democratic Party, what do they have? They

better get their heads out of their ass, ’cause they are

going to get eaten up.”

IN APRIL 2017, I met Randy Bryce outside the Hilton Hotel on

Connecticut Avenue in Washington, DC. Trump was due to

give a speech to the National Conference of the Building

and Construction Trades, the same organization of building

trades unions that President Reagan had addressed on

March 30, 1981, the day he was shot by John Hinckley.

Reagan had begun by boasting of his lifetime membership

in the AFL-CIO, negotiating contracts for the Screen Actors

Guild, the union he led for seven years, and his admiration

for the AFL’s founder, Samuel Gompers. Then he moved on

to promoting his agenda: tax cuts, deregulation, and

cutting government spending. He described a letter he

received from an unemployed factory worker in Illinois,

who urged Reagan to push ahead with his proposed budget

cuts despite the harm it might do to people like him. “He

wrote to say that if spending cuts in government affect his

benefits, it’ll be hard for his family, but they’ll make it,”

Reagan told the crowd. Reagan owed his 1980 presidential

victory to the shifting allegiances of union members,

especially in the industrial Midwest. He won 45 percent of

union households, only three points less than Jimmy Carter.

The election had spawned the term “Reagan Democrat”—

perhaps the only genuine swing group in modern America,

and one that helped propel Trump to the presidency.

Trump had done nearly as well as Reagan with union

households—Hillary Clinton won only 8 percent more union

households than Trump, compared with Barack Obama’s 18

percent margin over Mitt Romney. And with the nationwide

propagation of anti-union laws spurred in part by Act 10

and right-to-work laws in Michigan, Indiana, and

Wisconsin, there were far fewer union households in key

battleground states.

Press passes to Trump’s speech at the Hilton were

reserved for the White House press corps, but a vendor

Bryce knew lent me his ID tag. Inside, a collection of

bricklayers, ironworkers, electricians, laborers, and other

assorted construction workers had gathered from across

the country, and would end their visit with a day of

congressional lobbying. The room held a smattering of

women and a slightly larger number of African Americans

and Latinos, especially among the laborers’ and painters’

unions. In January, Trump had a meeting about

infrastructure with Sean McGarvey, the head of the

Building Trades Unions, in the White House, and McGarvey

urged conference-goers to be civil and polite. The elected

officials who spoke before Trump, almost all of them

Democrats, offered mea culpas for their abandonment of

the working class. A few East Coast Republicans—Staten

Island’s congressman, Dan Donovan; Long Island’s Peter

King—pledged loyalty to organized labor, invoking their

patriotic efforts on 9/11. There were warnings, too. Without

mentioning any names, the Louisiana Democratic

congressman Cedric Richmond implored the crowd to ask

the courting politicians, “Whose side are you on?”

Trump entered the room to “Hail to the Chief,” and was

met by a mixture of boos and cheers. From the audience,

Bryce stood up, held his phone toward the podium, and

paused—there was a big commotion. A half-dozen

protesters had gathered in the middle of the huge hall and

unveiled white paper signs that said “#RESIST.” They were

escorted out quickly by the Secret Service, and Trump’s

speech began. “You’re very talented people,” he said. “It’s

time we give you the level playing field you deserve.” Bryce

began to inch past me, and under his breath, to himself,

said, “Suckers.” He weaved his way through the aisle

toward the exit.

“One of my first acts as president was to stop one of the

great sellouts of the American worker,” Trump continued.

“I immediately withdrew the United States from the

disaster—this would have been a disaster—this would have

been another NAFTA, which, by the way, is a disaster. I

took you out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.” The crowd

applauded loudly. Trump said he would approve the

Keystone XL pipeline, which was met with bigger applause.

He said he would “use American steel” and then said it

would be “American steel made in America,” which

received a standing ovation. Then he said: “And from now

on, it’s going to be America First.” Huge applause. Then, as

had become his habit at any public appearance, he crowed

about his election results. “But wasn’t that an exciting

one?” Trump said. “Places that nobody entered—Donald

Trump has won the state of Michigan. They go, what?

Donald Trump has won the state of Wisconsin.” Trump did

not say the word “union” once in his entire speech.

I exited onto Connecticut Avenue and wandered over to a

coffee shop. The phrase “America First,” and the response

it received, lingered. The America First Committee of the

1940s advocated for staying out of World War II and

included prominent Nazi sympathizers like Charles

Lindbergh. Just then I saw Bryce walking past the window.

“It felt good to walk out,” he told me. “I wanted to make

sure I walked through and not just out the back door.” After

he left, he said he had run into a Democratic attorney

general, who told him how Trump had used undocumented

Polish workers when building Trump Tower. One New York

bricklayer had walked out of the hall and said, “That was

nothing but bullshit, that’s all it was: bullshit.” Bryce

laughed recounting it.

That evening, Bryce told me that his mother’s multiple

sclerosis was worsening, and his father, who suffers from

Alzheimer’s disease, was in hospice, because he had

stopped eating. Bryce detailed the anger he felt toward his

union for passing him over for an organizing job he badly

wanted, and for reprimanding him for speaking at the

Sanders rally before the Wisconsin primary—the

international had backed Clinton. More enraging to Bryce

was the way a new assistant who worked for the union had

scolded him. “I don’t know about you, but I never take off

my ironworker’s hat,” she said. Bryce went on: “I’ve been

doing this job for twenty years, and she’s giving me book? I

just wanted to support a guy who walked the picket line.”

As we sat outside, Trump’s motorcade drove by,

reminding Bryce of what he had just walked out of: Trump

successfully dividing the labor movement. “I can’t believe

that guys actually think he’s going to do something for us,”

he said. “Even if he would, just the cost of all the people

he’s going after. Even if I had a job working on

infrastructure, if I was driving home from work, going

through my neighborhood and knowing there are people

afraid to go outside because the same person that helped

me get a job wants to break up their family and send them

across the border. That’s not worth it.” It was all too

familiar to Bryce. “We’re the in-kids,” Bryce said. “He’s

trying to get our group, but these other people,” he said,

gesturing with a sweep of his hand: “They’re not worthy.”

But Bryce wasn’t giving up. He told me he was thinking

of running for office again, despite losing badly in previous

bids for the state assembly and state senate. His heavily

gerrymandered district is almost impossible for a Democrat

to win, but Senator Bob Wirch had asked him to run for the

senate seat as a kind of sacrificial lamb, to have someone in

place in case of a Republican scandal or a Democratic

wave. “You have ninety days to get all your signatures,”

Bryce said. “I’m not worried about that part, it’s just what

I’m going to run for.”

As improbable as it seemed for a construction worker a

couple of paychecks away from homelessness, Bryce was

mulling over a challenge to his own congressman, one of

the most powerful men in the country and Trump’s most

essential ally. “I want to run against Paul Ryan,” Bryce told

me. “People have been asking me to run against Ryan,

people who could do a lot to help from within the district. It

seems so insurmountable with all of the huge money he

has. A state senate race with decent maps would be a lot

safer, but if Trump keeps being Trump, it’s time to go after

Ryan.”

6

THE SEVENTH FIRE

Scott Walker has ignored Earth Day and its founder, Gaylord Nelson, every year he has been governor, with the

exception of 2012, when Walker issued a proclamation

announcing the restoration of a small patch of shoreline in

front of the governor’s mansion, in Madison. During a 2014

reception hosted by Terry Kohler, a wealthy conservative

donor, Walker chatted with Tia Nelson, Gaylord’s daughter,

managing to slight her father’s legacy while maintaining

impeccable manners. “Governor Walker couldn’t bring

himself to say anything nice about my father,” Tia told me.

“But he went to the effort of telling me the story of

someone that he liked who spoke well of my father, which I

thought was very clever.” Walker spent the following year’s

Earth Day at a groundbreaking ceremony in Appleton for

the new corporate headquarters of Wisconsin’s largest

electrical supply distributor. That same week, fifty-seven

employees of the state’s Department of Natural Resources,

including twenty-seven members of its scientific staff,

received notices they faced layoffs owing to Walker’s

budget cuts.

For Donald Trump, offering words of praise for Nelson’s

achievement has been easier. “We celebrate our beautiful

forests, lakes and land,” Trump tweeted on Earth Day in

2017, his first as president. “We stand committed to

preserving the natural beauty of our nation.” That same

morning, Mike Wiggins and Joe Rose, a Bad River tribal

elder, met me at a restaurant near Ashland, on the coast of

Lake Superior. Rose arrived ahead of Wiggins. Tall, burly,

and eighty-one years old, he wore a flannel shirt and

extended a large, weathered hand. Rose is an emeritus

professor at Northland College, in Ashland, where he

directed the Native American studies program and taught

courses in ethnobiology, tribal history, and traditional craft

making, which included fabricating Ojibwe artifacts such as

a ceremonial lodge, birchbark canoe, and black ash basket.

Like many other Bad River children of his generation,

Rose attended St. Mary’s, a Catholic mission and boarding

school in Odanah, the reservation’s administrative center.

Rose’s mother, Dolly, who sent Joe to the school as a day

student, was also a St. Mary’s graduate. “She had tried to

go to the public schools in Ashland, but there was no bus

transportation between the reservation and Ashland then,”

Rose said. “She tried riding the train, but she was late for

school every day. They raised hell with her for being late.

Finally, she and her cousin signed away to go to boarding

school.”

St. Mary’s was founded in 1883, part of a wave of Native

American boarding schools whose assimilationist goals

were enforced with corporal punishment and other cruel

means. In an 1892 speech at George Mason University,

Richard Henry Pratt, an army officer and Civil War veteran

who founded one of the most influential of these, the

Carlisle Indian Industrial School, outlined his vision for

Native American education. “A great general has said that

the only good Indian is a dead one,” Pratt told the

audience. “In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only

in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be

dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

St. Mary’s exerted a great influence on the tribe. By the

time Rose attended, it had become less repressive. “We did

do powwows and dances,” Rose said. “They saw that as

social instead of spiritual.” But the school discouraged

Native languages, ceremonies, and religion. Rose is still

scarred from the school’s suppression of his Native identity.

“They used to tell us only humans had an immortal soul,”

Rose said. “Nothing else in the natural world had a spirit.

My mother would take my brother and me out to these

ceremonies back in the woods. We’d learn from the elders

that everything in the creation had a spirit. That was one of

the first conflicts as a grade-school kid that I had trouble

understanding.” The wolf, whom the elders taught Rose

was a blood brother to the Ojibwe, was soulless in Catholic

theology. Rose sees a reason for that. “The wolf is always

vilified in the Western tradition,” Rose said. “In European

literature, you can go all the way back to children’s fairy

tales—‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ ‘Three Little Pigs.’ Then

you get into some of the adult tales, like the werewolves of

Transylvania. The wolf is one of the most powerful symbols

of wilderness, and that’s what they want to exploit as a

resource. They can do that in good biblical conscience.”

Rose recalls his youth with great fondness, partly

because he lived with his traditionalist grandparents. “I

grew up in the time of kerosene lamps, outhouses, and

wood heat,” Rose said. The water from the reservation’s

shallow wells was clean enough to drink then, as was water

from Lake Superior itself. Most important to Rose was

spending time outside with his grandfather, Dan Jackson

Sr., a master hunter who taught Rose how to set traps for

wild game, gather medicinal plants, and harvest wild rice.

Rose’s grandfather didn’t become a US citizen until

1924, when the Indian Citizenship Act was passed. Jackson

was forty years old. “They were politically impotent to fight

against all of this corruption that was happening,” Rose

said of his grandfather’s generation. That made an

impression on Rose, who would become one of Mike

Wiggins’s mentors in the fight against the mine. Rose’s age,

stentorian voice, and scientific and traditional knowledge

made him a persuasive opponent of the mine.

When Wiggins arrived, we headed with our coffees to the

empty second floor, which overlooked a fog-drenched Lake

Superior.

Wiggins and Rose believe the battle to retain Wisconsin’s

natural heritage is being waged on two planes: a temporal

one of power politics and scientific argument, and a

metaphysical one, where events, like the passage of GTac’s

mining bill, can be interpreted as part of Ojibwe mythology.

During the mining fight, Rose sometimes drew an analogy

between an Ojibwe monster called a windigo and GTac, a

comparison Wiggins has occasionally echoed in public

speeches. Windigos are giant, cannibalistic beasts, the

ghosts of lost hunters forced by hunger to eat human flesh.

“Windigos are the spirit of greed and excess,” Rose said.

Wiggins added: “The more they eat the hungrier they get.”

Wiggins and Rose ran through a litany of the

environmental changes Walker has supported. One was

promoting the spread of frac sand mining, which has gone

from just a few sites to more than a hundred, removing

many of the hilltops of western Wisconsin in the process. A

2013 study by Crispin Pierce, a professor of environmental

public health at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire,

showed that areas surrounding active frac sand mining

sites contained levels of tiny particulates, some of it

carcinogenic silica, far exceeding the EPA’s safe threshold.

Another worry is a proposed 26,000-pig factory farm an

Iowa company is trying to build near the shore of Lake

Superior. The farm would generate millions of gallons of

untreated liquid manure runoff, threatening two pristine

watersheds that feed Lake Superior, which holds 10

percent of the world’s fresh surface water. Just as

distressing to Rose and Wiggins had been the

reintroduction, for the first time in a half century, of a wolf

hunt in Wisconsin. For decades, the wolf was listed as a

state endangered species until a Department of Natural

Resources management program fostered a rebound.

Walker’s hunt allowed for a target wolf population

significantly below what most wildlife biologists say is

necessary to sustain the animal’s long-term stability.

Wiggins and Rose are well versed in the scientific cases

against these policies—Rose has a degree in biology—but

they also see the dangers allegorically. “In prophecy, they

tell us we’re living in the age of the seven fires,” Rose said.

He began telling the Ojibwe version of creation.

“The world was created by the Great Spirit, according to

the greatest vision of all time,” he said. “First the physical

world, then the plant world, the animal world, and last of

all the human world. Let’s skip part of that—it takes a long

time to tell that. Let’s go to the human world, where the

Great Spirit came down to the earth and took particles and

dust from mother earth, placed it in the sacred shell, the

one we call the megis, and breathed life into it. The Great

Spirit then lowered Anishinaabe from the sky world down

to meet his mother.” Rose took my pen and spelled

“Anishinaabe,” which means “original people” in Ojibwe, in

my notebook. “His mother was Mother Earth, and so the

first steps that he took on Mother Earth”—Rose abruptly

put his coffee down, stood up, and briefly demonstrated

that dance—“were those dances. When we bring the

shakers and percussion instruments into our ceremonial

lodges, we commemorate the sound that was heard out of

the darkness of the void even before the creation.” Rose

paused as the waitress refilled our coffees. “Oh, thank you,

Melinda,” he said.

“The Great Spirit looked out into the darkness of the

void,” Rose continued. “The only thing that filled the

emptiness of the void was a sound. The Great Spirit

decided to send thought waves out all over the darkness of

the void, all over the universe. In doing so, the Great Spirit

expended a great deal of energy. After sending those

thought waves out all over the universe, the Great Spirit

lapsed into a deep sleep. While in that deep sleep, he was

to experience the greatest vision that the universe has ever

known. In that vision, the Great Spirit saw the four orders

of creation. He also felt all of these human emotions that

went along with it. When the Great Spirit woke up, he

decided to create everything that had been experienced in

the vision. At the onset of the creation, everything was pure

energy. Or we might say: pure spirit. For everything to take

on a materialistic form, a corporeal form, the Great Spirit

remembered that sound that had been heard even before

the creation.”

Rose tapped a loud beat on the table. “And the sound had

a rhythm,” he said, smiling. “The Great Spirit created all of

these natural rhythms: we have day and night; at this

latitude, we have four seasons; the tide flows and the heart

beats.” He tapped a single beat. (The word for “heartbeat”

and “drum”—deweyigan—is the same, he noted.) “When we

use these shakers, these percussion instruments, we are

commemorating that sound that was heard even before the

creation. Then the Great Spirit lowers Anishinaabe down to

meet his mother and asks Anishinaabe—original man—to

go out and to walk the earth—bimosewin aki—and name all

things in the garden that was created.

“Anishinaabe expressed a loneliness, he didn’t have a

companion, so the Great Spirit sent ma’iingan, that’s a

wolf, to be his companion. And they walked the earth

together. They were companions and in time became blood

brothers. And the Great Spirit spoke to them again, so both

ma’iingan—the wolf—and Anishinaabe—original man—

stood in the presence of the Great Spirit. The Great Spirit

spoke to them. ‘In many ways, the two of you are alike.

When you take a mate, it will be for life, your social order

will be very complex.’ And so Anishinaabe was given the

totemic system, the clan system; ma’iingan, the wolf, was

given the wolf pack. ‘Both of you will make a living by the

chase. Both of you will be excellent hunters.’ And there

were prophecies then. The Great Spirit spoke to them:

‘From this day forward, I am going to put you on separate

paths.’ And this leads up to our prophecy.

“I talked about these different ages. We’ve recently

entered into the age of the seventh fire, maybe just prior to

when the Berlin Wall came down.” Rose laughed. “I don’t

know exactly when it happened. But the Great Spirit spoke

of a fork in the road. And right now, all humankind is

standing at that fork in the road. And we’ll be confronted

with a choice. One fork in the road was said to be a hard

surface. Today we see that as the fast lane, as that highway

that pollutes and upsets the natural balance. The other lane

is the more natural path. And it depends on which choice

that humankind makes as to what will happen when the

next new age is ushered in.

“This is where the wolf comes in. Whenever human

beings encroach on a wolf’s territory, the wolf retreats into

what we know as the wilderness today. The wolf is a very

powerful symbol of what little wilderness we have left. The

Great Spirit said the time might come when you, ma’iingan,

the wolf, you may no longer have a place to retreat. If that

happens, you’ll soon pass out of existence: You’ll become

extinct. And you, Anishinaabe, if your brother passes out of

existence, you’ll soon follow. You’ll die of a great loneliness

of spirit. And you, Anishinaabe, if you pass out of existence,

all other humans will soon follow. The fate of ma’iingan, the

wolf, as well as the fate of Anishinaabe and the human

race, will be the same.”

CROSSING UNDER THE Namekagon, the free-flowing river in

northern Wisconsin that Gaylord Nelson vowed to defend

before he died, is Line 61, a pipeline carrying tar-sands

crude. Like GTac’s mining bill, it is another emblem

heralding the end of local control over Wisconsin

environmental law. The pipeline, which cuts a diagonal

swath across the length of the state, is owned by Enbridge,

a $40-billion Canadian company that has been responsible

for several hundred spills in the past decade. One of them—

in 2010 near Marshall, Michigan—was the largest and most

expensive inland oil spill in American history.

Line 61 is part of Enbridge’s vast Lakehead System, a

pipeline network running through Wisconsin, Minnesota,

and Michigan that carries 13 percent of all US petroleum

imports. The fight over the more well-known Keystone XL

involved millions of dollars in advertising, dozens of

activists arrested outside the White House, the rejection of

the pipeline by President Obama, and the rescinding of that

action by President Trump. Enbridge’s plans, however,

received little national attention. “Enbridge was very

clever,” Anthony Swift, a staff attorney for the National

Resources Defense Council deeply involved in the Keystone

fight, told me. “Keystone is one pipeline; what Enbridge did

is break up its pipeline into half a dozen pieces.” Unlike

Keystone, Line 61 does not cross a border, so it did not

require a presidential permit.

Over the opposition of a group of Wisconsin

environmentalists, Enbridge mustered an increase of Line

61’s capacity, making it a third larger than the projected

capacity of Keystone. Before the expansion, Line 61, which

was built in 2007, moved 400,000 barrels of tar sands and

lighter conventional crude oil a day from Superior, in the

state’s far northern corner, to refineries in metropolitan

Chicago or, through a network of connecting pipelines, to

the Gulf Coast. In 2014, Enbridge sought to increase that,

in stages, to 1.2 million barrels per day. Nonetheless,

Wisconsin’s DNR mandated just a single public hearing—

for an air-quality permit related to storage tanks that would

be built in Superior. The DNR maintained that a 2006

environmental assessment addressed all relevant safety

concerns.

That 2006 DNR analysis took place four years before

Enbridge’s largest spill, in July 2010, which flooded

Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, near Marshall, with more than

840,000 gallons of tar-sands crude and cost the company

$1.2 billion to clean up. The cost exceeded the cap on

Enbridge’s liability insurance by nearly $600 million. (The

company paid the difference.) The Marshall spill

demonstrated how much more destructive spills of tar

sands crude are compared with spills of lighter crude. To

move through a pipeline, tar-sands oil needs to be mixed

with chemical solvents. When the spilled mixture was

exposed to air, the chemical components, including

carcinogenic benzene, separated and released toxic gases,

which forced many people to evacuate their homes.

Meanwhile, the heavier tar sands sank, which required a

destructive dredging of the Kalamazoo River.

Although Enbridge completed the cleanup effort, the

Environmental Protection Agency asserts that oil remains

in the Kalamazoo River. In a scathing 2012 assessment of

Enbridge’s response, the National Transportation Safety

Board likened the company’s employees to “Keystone

Kops,” detailing their unconscionable lapses in the spill’s

aftermath. Since the Marshall spill, the company has built a

new command center in Edmonton and invested $4 billion

in maintenance, emergency response, and other safety

improvements. Despite all this, 4,000 gallons of tar-sands

crude spilled in January 2014 from the Alberta Clipper, the

pipeline feeding Line 61.

The lack of oversight is unsurprising, given Governor

Walker’s industry-friendly vision for the DNR. In December

2010, when Walker announced his first nominee to lead the

agency, he said he wanted someone with a “Chamber of

Commerce mentality.” Walker’s choice, Cathy Stepp, fit the

bill. A former state senator who quit politics to run her

family’s construction business, Stepp was already a fierce

critic of the agency she had been chosen to lead. In 2009,

on a conservative blog, she railed against the DNR, calling

its biologists “unelected bureaucrats” who “tend to be anti-

development, anti-transportation, and pro-garter snakes.”

In 2015, she recounted in a speech how a DNR employee

told her that the agency’s “customers” were “clean air and

clean water.” Stepp countered: “Well, the last time I

checked, they don’t pay taxes and they don’t sign our

paychecks.” Besides scrubbing references to climate

change from the agency’s website, she oversaw a dramatic

decline in fines for pollution violations and issued no

objection to Walker slashing more than half of the agency’s

scientists. (In 2017, Stepp left Wisconsin to take a job with

the Trump administration as an administrator for the EPA.)

Line 61’s opponents focused on Enbridge’s need for new

pump stations, which required a conditional-use permit

from many of the counties in which they are built. Enbridge

quickly secured these permits from each county except

Dane, the state’s second most populous. At an April 2015

meeting of Dane County’s five-member Zoning and Land

Regulation Committee, the committee voted to require

Enbridge to carry a more comprehensive—and expensive—

kind of liability insurance than it had during the Marshall

spill. While county governments cannot override federal or

state law, there is some precedent for attaching financial

requirements to permits. Opponents believed that if

Enbridge was forced to buy insurance to cover a Marshall-

size spill, the price of expansion could become too onerous.

Several months before that vote, however, three lawyers

representing Enbridge had met privately with a few county

officials, including Patrick Miles, the chairman of Dane

County’s zoning committee, and presented a white paper

outlining the company’s position: The county, it said, did

not have the legal right to attach insurance requirements

to its permit. Miles told me the implication was clear: The

company would sue if need be. Despite the pressure, Miles

and the rest of the committee voted, 5–0, to mandate the

insurance requirements. “My hands are tied, but I’m doing

what I can to raise public awareness,” Miles told me. “If

that means we go to court and lose, then that’s we do.”

Instead, Enbridge and its supporters appear to have

employed a more reliable tactic: legislating their

prerogatives. In July 2015, an anonymous state legislator

inserted a last-minute clause into the state budget

prohibiting any town or county from imposing insurance

requirements “on an operator of an interstate hazardous

liquid pipeline.” The action nullified Dane County’s zoning

committee. Though Enbridge denied it was involved with

drafting the measure, and the legislator who authored it

remains unknown, another last-minute budget addition

benefiting the company is suggestive. Drafting documents

obtained through an open-records request by Wisconsin

Public Radio revealed that Enbridge’s lawyers supplied the

precise language for a clause to grant the company the

right to seize private property, if necessary, so an adjacent

pipeline can be built alongside Line 61 to deliver even more

tar-sands crude.

REPUBLICAN LEGISLATORS HAD little to fear electorally, even

after companies like Enbridge and GTac were exposed

drafting legislation that benefited the firms at the public’s

expense. Their hold on power was supported by a robust

conservative infrastructure that could help shape public

opinion, enormous amounts of dark money to buttress their

campaigns, and a weak opposition party. Another tool they

would have was Wisconsin’s restrictive voter-ID law, which

was passed in 2011 and, after surviving many court

challenges, put into effect for the 2016 election. The extent

of the law’s impact is still being measured, but its intent

was made clear by Todd Allbaugh, a former aide to

Republican state senator Dale Schultz, in testimony he

delivered at a 2016 trial brought by plaintiffs arguing the

law violated the federal Voting Rights Act. Allbaugh

described a closed-door Republican caucus meeting he

attended, observing that Republican senators were “giddy”

about the law’s ability to cement their power. One of them,

he said, Mary Lazich, argued on behalf of the bill because it

would diminish voter turnout in Democratic strongholds.

Another senator, Leah Vukmir, the former ALEC national

state chairwoman, was “frothing at the mouth,” he said,

over the voter-ID law’s potential to maintain Republican

political domination.

While the law did not go into effect immediately because

it was challenged in court, the extreme Republican

gerrymandering hatched in secret at the office of Michael

Best & Friedrich had a far more immediate and deleterious

impact on Wisconsin’s democracy. Walker signed the bill

privately on August 9, 2011, the day of the first wave of

recall elections. The gerrymandering would soon play a

decisive role in the state’s politics: In November 2012,

Republicans entered the election with 58 state assembly

seats, received a total of 175,000 fewer votes for their state

assembly candidates, and still gained two seats, giving

them a 60–39 majority.

One Democrat who managed to hang on was Fred

Kessler, a seventy-eight-year-old assemblyman and former

Milwaukee circuit judge. But it wasn’t easy for him. “They

literally moved a ward of about 2,500 people out of my

district out of the 57,000 people that belonged in it,”

Kessler, who has a Dutch beard, oval glasses, and an

easygoing laugh, told me over coffee on Milwaukee’s East

Side. The boundaries for Kessler’s new district included

portions of Waukesha County and Milwaukee’s wealthiest

suburbs, two of the most Republican areas of the state. “I

said, my God, why would they do this?” Kessler told me.

“Why would they target me?” The assault on Kessler also

involved a more personal, symbolic insult: “They took my

house out of my district,” he said. A few years earlier,

Kessler and his wife, Joan, an appellate-court judge, had

fulfilled a long-held dream to build their own house, which

was solidly within Kessler’s district until Republicans

carved out a portion of his subdivision. Winning in his new

district would be impossible, but Kessler realized that he

was only a few blocks from the edge of another district,

which contained eighty percent of his old constituents. He

decided to move. “My wife was not happy,” he said. “But I

said I’m not going to let those SOBs get away with that.”

After the Republican gerrymandering plan was unveiled

in July 2011, Kessler gave a floor speech denouncing it. “In

a landslide, we could win fifty seats,” Kessler predicted for

the Democrats in his speech. “In a normal year, we’re going

to get forty.” Kessler knew the intricacies of redistricting

better than anyone else in the legislature, and probably the

entire state. He began working on the issue in 1964, when

the Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered reapportionment of

legislative districts, because rural areas had been

overrepresented. Later that year, the Supreme Court issued

its decision in Reynolds v. Sims, which ruled that every

state legislative district must be as equal in population as

possible. Reynolds v. Sims also mandated that states across

the country periodically update the reapportionment of

their districts. Kessler was then serving his second term in

the assembly and was chairman of its elections committee.

In 1972, he was the principal Democrat on the governor’s

Reapportionment Commission, established for that year’s

redistricting. Kessler went on to work as a judge until the

late 1980s, when he began working as a labor arbitrator

and a redistricting consultant.

Nevada’s Democrats hired Kessler in 1991, when the

party briefly held control of all branches of state

government. “I’m going to draw a partisan map, but it’s not

going to be really excessively partisan,” Kessler told me,

explaining his philosophy. “And when I’m done with the

partisan stuff that I think is reasonable, then what I will do

is I will go around to the Republicans and I will say, ‘Did I

screw you by accident? Did I take your base of support out

of your district? Did I put your primary opponent in your

district? Can I make some corrections that would make you

at least feel this was a little bit more fair?’ And I always did

that.” In Nevada, Kessler’s success can be judged by the

fact that only four Republicans voted against his map.

“You’re never going to raise a court case, if the majority of

the Republicans voted for it,” he said. “I understood that,

and I thought anybody who is smart doing redistricting

would do that. Why do you want to anger your opponents

so badly that they’re going to go into court?”

Wisconsin’s law, in contrast, was immediately challenged

in federal court and by lawsuits against the state over

diluting Latino voter power and disenfranchising 300,000

voters who were suddenly moved out of their districts,

depriving them of their right to vote in the 2012 state

senate elections. Kessler soon began thinking of bringing

his own case against Wisconsin’s redistricting. He knew

that Justice Anthony Kennedy had expressed reservations

about partisan gerrymandering in a 2004 case.

In 2013, Kessler began recruiting like-minded, equally

prominent opponents from Wisconsin’s legal community,

including his old friend from college, a University of

Wisconsin law professor named Bill Whitford. No partisan

gerrymandering case in the past three decades had ever

gone beyond a motion to dismiss, but Kessler believed

Wisconsin’s law went far beyond normal partisan

gerrymandering. In 2014, Kessler came across an article by

Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a University of Chicago law

professor, and Eric McGhee, a research fellow at a

California think tank, that created a new metric they called

the “efficiency gap” to determine the amount of wasted

votes in a given year, and by extension the degree of

partisanship. If the number of wasted votes was extremely

high in one party’s districts, it meant those voters were

being packed in to dilute their strength. After analyzing

every district in the United States, Stephanopoulos

determined that Wisconsin’s state assembly was among the

most gerrymandered of the last four decades in the

country.

Bill Whitford became the named plaintiff in the case,

which was filed in federal court in the western Wisconsin

district in July 2015. Two weeks after Trump’s victory, the

three-judge federal panel ruled that the maps enacted by

Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature in 2011 were

an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander that violated

both the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth

Amendment and the First Amendment’s protection of

freedom of association. The ruling was the first time in over

three decades that a federal court invalidated a

redistricting plan for partisan bias, and it was almost

immediately appealed to the Supreme Court, which heard

oral arguments in the case in October 2017. Justice

Kennedy asked Wisconsin’s solicitor general the first

question. “Suppose the Court . . . decided that this is a

First Amendment issue?” His query seemed to suggest that

he might find favor with the Democrats’ argument that

gerrymandering violates the First Amendment’s right to

freedom of association.

While the effect of gerrymandering on the 2012

Wisconsin election was most obvious and defining, it

lingered in subtler ways in the two subsequent elections, in

which Democrats lost even more seats. “In 2014, we didn’t

have enough candidates,” Kessler said. “It was very hard to

get candidates once you got clobbered in a landslide year.

The same in 2016: We just had a hard time getting

candidates. You look at the result, and you see that the last

time we had a candidate who was well financed, they got

clobbered. It’s demoralizing. And then you have Democrats

like myself in these seventy-plus-percent districts.”

As we were leaving, Kessler told me about the

documents in the case from Michael Best & Friedrich. After

a lengthy battle with both senate Democrats and the

federal courts, Republicans, who argued the documents

were protected by attorney-client privilege, were forced to

turn them over. One of the computers that were also

supposed to be turned over had likely been tampered with,

and a hard drive of a second computer had been wiped

clean. In 2016, however, the plaintiffs in Gill v. Whitford

were able to hire a former Secret Service computer

forensics analyst, who retrieved the contents of a hard

drive on a third computer. One document was a note

between Tad Ottman, Scott Fitzgerald’s aide, and Adam

Foltz, Jeff Fitzgerald’s aide, discussing Kessler’s opposition

to the bill. “The day after I made my speech on the floor,

when I said that the Democrats will not win more than forty

seats under this map, they sent an email,” Kessler told me.

“It said: ‘Kessler was wrong, they’ll only win thirty-nine.’ ”

THE CONSERVATIVE EFFORT to influence Wisconsin politics goes

much deeper than the governorship and state legislature.

In March 2014, for example, Americans for Prosperity,

began a campaign to sway the outcome of elections for the

Iron County board of supervisors; its members are

volunteers, and their candidacies normally go

unchallenged. The home of GTac’s mine site, Iron County

has a population of less than 6,000 people. Winning county

board candidates typically receive between 100 and 150

votes.

Despite the passage of GTac’s bill, the county board has

some regulatory authority, a fact that rankled AFP. The

organization sent out two rounds of mailers, one of which

featured a picture of a bearded, apparently homeless man

holding a cardboard sign that read: “Please Help Need a

Job.” The flyer noted that Iron County was being targeted

by “wealthy environmental groups from outside of

Wisconsin” who don’t care if “our families go on welfare.”

At the bottom were the names and home phone numbers of

seven “radical environmentalists” whom AFP claimed

opposed GTac’s mine. One of those names was Karl Krall, a

member of Operating Engineers Local 139 and a strong

supporter of the mine. Krall had even been one of the union

members Governor Walker used as a prop during a 2013

speech when he was trying to sell the bill by promising that

the company would use union labor.

But AFP’s interference in the Iron County board races

backfired; four of the nine candidates it supported lost,

including three incumbents, a rarity in such races.

Ultimately, in fact, even after GTac’s reshaping of state

legislation and its multiyear battle against

environmentalists and activists, the mining company pulled

out of Iron County, withdrawing its plan for the

controversial open-pit mine in February 2015.

Still, similar efforts by AFP to penetrate Wisconsin’s

political substrata followed. Around the same time, AFP

tried to sway the outcome of elections for the Kenosha

School Board. But the pettiest and most revealing

campaign was directed at Gaylord Nelson’s daughter, Tia,

who headed an obscure state agency called the Board of

Commissioners of Public Lands—until a conservative effort

to oust her pushed Nelson to resign in 2015.

BCPL, as it is known, is one of the state’s smallest and

oldest agencies. It was authorized by the state’s

constitution in 1848, when Wisconsin was admitted to the

Union. The agency manages close to 80,000 acres of land,

most of it in the northern part of the state—the remnant of

a larger gift from the federal government, a common

practice for new states in the nineteenth century, when the

federal government had little money but a great deal of

land. Wisconsin sold most of this donated land, but the

state had been unable to sell these acres, so they were

managed, with the profits from forestry used to benefit

public school libraries.

In November 2014, a Tea Party Republican named Matt

Adamczyk was elected state treasurer. Adamczyk’s

platform consisted of a promise to abolish the treasurer

position, which is largely powerless but, along with the

secretary of state and attorney general, is one of three

commissioners overseeing BPCL. Before he was even sworn

in, Adamczyk requested from Nelson years of cellphone,

email, and leave records. He soon discovered that her

office subscribed to five newspapers—three from Wisconsin

as well as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

“He went through them and all of our expenditures,” Tia

Nelson told me when I visited her in her modest ranch

home in a Madison suburb, a few blocks from the

governor’s mansion. “That’s where he found the

expenditure for the New York Times, which he objected to.”

Nelson wrote Adamczyk an email noting all the papers

the agency subscribed to, and asking if he objected only to

her subscription of the New York Times. “If he said, ‘I don’t

think you should use state resources to buy any out-of-state

newspaper,’ I wouldn’t have agreed with it, but at least it

would have had a line of reasoning,” she told me. “But he

wrote back ‘yes.’ ”

Adamczyk was equally concerned that Nelson’s name

appeared on BPCL’s letterhead just below the names of the

commissioners. According to the minutes of a board

meeting on January 2, 2015, “Commissioner Adamczyk said

he felt ‘passionately that the name Tia Nelson should not

be listed.’ He again stated his concern about her name

being listed directly below the commissioners’ names.

MOTION: Commissioner Adamczyk moved that the

executive secretary’s name be removed from the

letterhead. A second to the motion was not made.”

The opposition got more substantive when Adamczyk

learned that Nelson had served on a climate-change citizen

task force in 2007 convened by the former governor Jim

Doyle. Adamczyk alleged that Nelson had engaged in active

“time theft” against the citizens of Wisconsin for serving on

the climate-change task force during work hours. He called

a vote of the three commissioners to have Nelson fired.

The effort failed when the Republican attorney general,

Brad Schimel, sided with the longtime Democratic

secretary of state, Doug La Follette, a distant relative of

Bob La Follette. (In July 2015, Doug La Follette was himself

a victim of Republican vindictiveness when legislators

moved his expansive tenth-floor office overlooking the state

capitol to a small, windowless room in the building’s

basement.) It did not matter that the climate-change task

force had included a representative of every major utility, a

conservative Republican farmer, and a Republican

legislator, as well as a Democratic legislator. Nor that the

vast majority of the task force’s recommendations were

unanimously supported by industry, environmentalists, and

legislators. “It never occurred to me that someone serving

in state government would not accept a gubernatorial

request to serve on a citizen task force aimed at making

Wisconsin more energy independent,” Nelson said.

At a meeting to address the issue, Adamczyk and his

fellow Republican Schimel briefly put Nelson under a gag

order, preventing her and her staff from even speaking the

words “climate change” during work hours. In an interview

with the New York Times, Adamczyk said it would be

permissible to briefly talk about climate “by the water

cooler,” in the same manner as a Wisconsin Badgers

basketball game. A public backlash caused Schimel to

partially reverse himself, allowing the words to be spoken

but forbidding on-the-job advocacy related to climate

change.

In July 2015, Nelson, exhausted from the conflict,

resigned. “I do think the challenge that climate change

poses to society must be discussed,” she said in a press

conference. The issue has resonance for Nelson, not only

because of her father but because of her own career: She

moved back to Wisconsin from Washington, DC, after

seventeen years of climate-change advocacy for the Nature

Conservancy. “I had traveled the world,” she told me. “I’d

gone to most of the UN climate meetings, I was in Rio in

1992 when George Bush signed the Convention on Climate

Change, and I was in Kyoto in 1997 when the Kyoto

Protocol was passed. Truth be told, I had left climate-

change work because I was weary and heartsick at the lack

of progress.”

In addition to his gag order, Adamczyk had instructed

Nelson to remove any reference to “climate change” from

BPCL’s website. That step was a precursor to the vanishing,

in December 2016, of the issue from the website of the

Wisconsin DNR. For several years before that deletion, the

DNR had been gradually watering down climate-change

references on its website, but it continued to host a page

dedicated to the effects of global warming on the Great

Lakes. “Earth’s climate is changing,” the page used to

read. “Human activities that increase heat-trapping

(‘greenhouse’) gases are the main cause. Earth’s average

temperature has increased 1.4° F since 1850, and the eight

warmest years on record have occurred since 1998.”

Now the same page states: “As it has done throughout

the centuries, the earth is going through a change. The

reasons for this change at this particular time in the earth’s

long history are being debated and researched by academic

entities outside the Wisconsin Department of Natural

Resources.” As Tia Nelson noted to me, climate-change

language has now been scrubbed from every Wisconsin

state agency website except one: the Division of Emergency

Management.

THE BRADLEY FOUNDATION has poured millions of dollars into

all three of Wisconsin’s conservative think tanks; in 2009, a

third of the budget of Wisconsin’s MacIver Institute was

given by the foundation. While Scott Walker has denied

that the think tanks had anything to do with Act 10, a post

written by Brian Fraley, the MacIver Institute’s

communications director, on the organization’s website

three weeks after Walker won, and before he had signaled

any attack on collective bargaining, suggests otherwise.

“The next 60 days should bring a sea change to Wisconsin’s

anti-job creation, anti-innovation labor laws,” Fraley wrote.

“Two simple but fundamental steps to kick start the

Wisconsin economy and get our state budget mess resolved

would be to repeal collective bargaining for public

employees and to make Wisconsin a right-to-work state.”

In September 2017, I arrived at the Lion House and

followed a Bradley Foundation secretary into the elegant,

austere library for a meeting with Rick Graber, the group’s

current president. For decades, Graber, an Ohio native,

worked as a corporate attorney in Milwaukee before

serving as Wisconsin’s Republican Party state chair and

then, during the George W. Bush administration, as

ambassador to the Czech Republic. The library’s shelves

were lined with conservative classics: Whittaker

Chambers’s Witness; a bound set of Cato’s Letters, donated

as a gift to the Bradley Foundation by the like-minded,

libertarian Cato Institute. I also noticed a few books critical

of the mission, including Jane Mayer’s Dark Money and

Jason Stahl’s Right Moves. Framed pictures of medal-

wearing recipients of the foundation’s $250,000 Bradley

Prize hung alongside a painting of the Milwaukee Brewers’

stadium; an array of Germanic beer steins lined the tops of

the bookshelves. After a few minutes, Graber, a trim, white-

haired sixty-one-year-old dressed in a navy-blue suit,

entered and took a seat at a large table near an ornate bar

cart.

Graber was named to head the Bradley Foundation in the

summer of 2016. He told me he was “shocked” by Trump’s

victory that fall. “I spent much of the election cycle in

Washington, DC,” he said. “I was not here on the ground

until late in the process.” I asked if he thought there was a

connection between the result and the Bradley

Foundation’s work. “I think it’s very difficult to tie election

results to that kind of infrastructure directly, but the fact of

the matter is Wisconsin is a different state politically,” he

said. “Certainly, it’s different than when I was Republican

Party chairman. Bradley has played a role in building the

conservative infrastructure in the state that didn’t exist

fifteen, twenty years ago. There are now public-interest law

firms, think tanks promoting a lot of the ideas you see

playing out: free markets, limited government, federalism.”

(Those three priorities also happen to be the exact motto of

ALEC, a group the Bradley Foundation has funded since the

mid-1980s.) Graber told me the foundation’s main goal is to

fulfill Harry and Lynde Bradley’s vision. “We sit around this

table all the time and say, ‘What would Lynde and Harry

Bradley do?’ ”

Just before the 2016 election, hackers from a group

called Anonymous Poland breached the Bradley

Foundation’s server and briefly posted tens of thousands of

the organization’s documents online. Daniel Bice, an

investigative reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,

confirmed the documents’ authenticity and published a

three-part series based on them. One document included a

consultant’s assessment of the states most ripe for political

transformation. Colorado topped that list, and the Bradley

Foundation gave $575,000 to five organizations in the state

in 2016. Another document, a staff recommendation to

approve an application for a three-year, $1.5-million grant

that Bradley would give to the Freedom Foundation, an

anti-union think tank based in Olympia, Washington,

revealed the patience and long view of the Bradley

Foundation’s strategy. The Freedom Foundation is focused

on diminishing the strength of unions in the same way

Walker succeeded in doing in Wisconsin. “The Pacific Coast

as a region is more unionized than the Midwest, where so

much employee-rights progress has been made recently,”

the recommendation read. “While this might be an

argument to philanthropically invest elsewhere, or in

another issue area, staff believes it to be a reason to go

there.” The grant would “educate union workers

themselves about their rights—which, if and when

exercised would defund Big Labor.”

“States truly are the laboratory where things change,”

Graber said. “Look at this state: School choice and welfare

reform started here. They didn’t start at the federal level.”

Graber believes the same transformation is possible

elsewhere. (One of the other Bradley documents Bice

analyzed ranked states on their conservative infrastructure:

“think tank(s),” “receptive policymakers,” “opposition

research,” and “investigative journalism”; Wisconsin was

tied for the highest score.) “You go to places where you can

move the needle and make a difference,” he said. I asked if

he believed he could export the foundation’s success in

Wisconsin to other states, places that might be viewed as

impregnable “blue walls,” just as Wisconsin was not long

ago. “Sure,” Graber replied, without hesitation. “That’s

where it goes. Wisconsin is a laboratory for the rest of the

country.”

“SO WHY DO WE CONTINUE?” Peter Anderson, a founder of the

Madison chapter of 350.org, Bill McKibben’s climate-

change organization, wondered aloud. He was driving his

gray Prius to Medina, the site of Enbridge’s new Dane

County pump station and a painful reminder to Anderson of

his defeat by the company and its allies in the Wisconsin

legislature. Anderson, a voluble New York transplant who

speaks in a gravelly Bronx accent, admitted to a growing

sense of fatalism about staving off climate-change disaster.

“If people changed their mind-set about what gives them

satisfaction from things to family, it’s eminently doable,” he

said. “But that’s a huge hurdle. So why do I continue? I’m

seventy years old. I have all these friends and they go to

Europe or Asia three or four times a year. In between that

they’re fixing up their kitchen for fifty, sixty, seventy

thousand dollars. That’s how they consume their days.” He

paused and stared at the passing farmland. “I have maybe

ten good years left. I have four kids and two grandkids:

How can you not try, you know?”

Anderson designed the strategy to try and force

Enbridge to buy additional insurance to cover a potential

spill. “It’s the marketplace’s truth meter of where risk lies,”

Anderson said. If underwriters believe a project is safe,

premiums will be low, but if the risk is high, expensive

premiums might compel a company to abandon the project.

Anderson learned that lesson during the 1970s, when he

and other activists took on the nuclear-power industry.

“There’s no stake in the heart of nuclear power that killed

it,” he said. “It was the fact that the economic conditions

could no longer attract capital to sustain it. It becomes

riskier over time, compared to what it was, and more

uncomfortable for the existing investors. They start saying,

‘I’m not going to do this,’ and the cost of capital goes up,

and more and more wheels fall off the cart. The lesson from

the nuclear fight is victory often comes from a battle of

attrition.”

Despite his urban upbringing, Anderson’s

environmentalism took hold as a teenager. “I remember the

1965 blackout,” he said. “A window in our apartment faced

south, and we saw Manhattan starting to go black, black,

black, black, black. It was a mind-blowing event that

showed the precariousness of these technological marvels.”

Another turning point came during college, at Cornell,

when a young sociology professor abruptly told Anderson

and his classmates that he was retiring the following year,

selling all of his possessions except a record player, and

heading to the Grand Canyon to become a nature poet.

Instead of sociology readings, the professor assigned

environmental writers like Loren Eiseley and Joseph Wood

Krutch, a mid-twentieth-century critic whose skepticism

about the value of technological progress resonated with

Anderson. “The most important part of our lives—our

sensations, emotions, desires, and aspirations,” Krutch

once wrote, “takes place in a universe of illusions which

science can attenuate or destroy, but which it is powerless

to enrich.”

In 1970, Anderson moved to Wisconsin to work on the

congressional campaign of Doug La Follette, an ardent

environmentalist. After La Follette narrowly lost the

Democratic primary, Anderson went to graduate school in

Ohio, but he dropped out after a week and returned to

Wisconsin. With La Follette, he cofounded Wisconsin’s

Environmental Decade, paying himself a salary of twenty

dollars a week. Too broke to afford rent, he slept on the

floor of a committee room in the state capitol. By 1980, he

was earning $20,000 a year and living in a rooming house,

but with the organization’s relative prosperity came

problems. “When you get money, you have salaries—and a

lot of tensions,” Anderson said. He started managing the

group’s canvassing operations, which became increasingly

difficult to sustain. “We had 120 people on staff and four

offices,” he said. “I would wake up in the middle of the

night on Tuesday and Wednesday and think: How the fuck

am I going to be able to make payroll on Friday?” By 1989,

it became too difficult to recruit canvassers. “Under

Reagan, activism was no longer cool,” he said. He quit and

started working in the recycling industry. But in 1997, an

extreme El Niño temporarily warmed the planet by 1

degree Fahrenheit and led to worldwide droughts, flooding,

and a widespread recognition of the potentially calamitous

effects of climate change. Anderson decided to return to

grassroots organizing and has been dedicated to climate-

change advocacy ever since.

From the rustic state highway we pulled off of, the new

Medina pump station was barely visible. But planted

behind the old pump station, which was not demolished,

sits the new, undistinguished beige building. Orange posts

dotting the grassy landscape read “Warning: Petroleum

Pipeline.” The posts appear across the entire state,

marking Line 61’s underground route. During construction

of the new station, Enbridge fenced off the area and hired

sheriff’s deputies in anticipation of protests, but there were

none. Anderson jogged eagerly up to the top of a hill,

ignoring “no trespassing” signs, to get a better view of the

new station. A worker mowing the grass stopped

momentarily to stare at us before returning to the lawn.

“The company would love to sue us for trespassing,”

Anderson said. “But these guys work for the local power

company and don’t give a shit.”

On the hill, Anderson explained how he hadn’t given up,

even though the new fuel station was built and Enbridge

might be pumping as much as 1.2 million barrels a day of

tar-sands crude. Despite this, he had persuaded several

nearby landowners to file a lawsuit on behalf of Dane

County, contending that the provision inserted into the

budget was not retroactive, so the county’s stipulation

mandating insurance prior to the budget passing was in

effect. In July 2016, a circuit judge ruled against the

landowners, but the plaintiffs appealed that decision.

Anderson returned to the slow, attritional success of the

campaign against nuclear power. “We want to win,” he

said. “But if we lose, we win.

“Democracy measures intensity, not numbers,” Anderson

continued. He described his arrest with Bill McKibben and

others protesting the Keystone pipeline at the White House,

in 2011. The Tea Party was new then, and ascendant, and

had helped block the Obama administration’s modest cap-

and-trade bill from even being brought up for a vote in the

Senate. Anderson did not want the resistance to Keystone

to be as passive. “Bill McKibben had a plan that fifty people

are going to be there every day, getting arrested, for the

last two weeks of August,” Anderson said. “But somebody

in the Obama White House wanted to scare us off. So we

got thrown in jail, in a cell block underneath Judiciary

Square, which has terrible conditions.” Anderson was held

there for three days with fifty others. “We were in the

holding pen for five hours, packed like sardines. All there

was was one little toilet in one corner, and when you’re

older . . .” He paused. “It was not fun. They don’t have any

mattresses, it’s just a steel plate, and I have a bad back.

When I woke up the next morning, I had lost sensation in

my right toe. I still don’t have sensation there, but you say

to yourself: ‘I can hang in there for three days.’ The reality

is that the fossil-fuel industry is so strong, the idea that

we’re going to win by letters to editors and picketing—it’s

not going to happen.”

We walked back to the car and got in. “Besides,” he said,

before starting the drive, “I could not not be there.”

BEFORE I LEFT ASHLAND, Rose returned to the prophecy of the

seventh fire. “Anishinaabe had been given a very special

gift,” he said. “We use the word mashkiki for that gift.

Loosely interpreted, it means ‘medicine.’ But mashkiki also

encompasses the knowledge and wisdom of how to live in

harmony with the four orders of creation: the physical,

plant, animal, and human worlds. That’s at the very

foundation of our Native spirituality. It has nothing to do

with salvation. It’s a different worldview altogether.

“Along with a gift as powerful as that goes a great

responsibility,” he continued. “In this age of the seventh

fire, we turn and we look back, and we retrace our

footsteps. Our footsteps take us back to ancient times and

ancient knowledge. We begin to pick up those sacred

bundles that have fallen by the wayside because of

persecution from the US government and missionaries that

tried to erase our identity. Our responsibility is to educate

the new people as to how to live in harmony and balance

with the natural world.” He returned to the idea that

humanity is at a perilous crossroads. “These corporate

windigos have no respect for the natural world,” he said.

“Their motivation is based on greed and excess. When they

acquire more materialistic possessions and money than

what they can spend in generations, then they get into

power and control, which is even worse.” Rose laughed

darkly. “That’s where your democracy is threatened,” he

said. “That’s what’s happening right now.”

7

WHICH SHALL RULE, WEALTH OR

MAN?

The cost of the conservative war on Wisconsin’s political legacy has mostly been borne by the state’s citizens. Since

2011, Wisconsin has experienced a dramatic increase in

child poverty rates, nonexistent wage growth, steep cuts to

K–12 public schools and the state university system, and a

significant decline in water quality. Minnesota, by contrast,

has invested in its citizens and public institutions. In 2010,

the state elected Mark Dayton, of the Democratic-Farmer-

Labor Party, who pushed through a tax hike on Minnesota’s

wealthiest residents—one of the largest in the state’s

history—and used its revenue to fund all-day kindergarten,

expand early childhood education programs, increase

funding for the University of Minnesota (which began

poaching professors from Wisconsin), and improve water

quality.

While the two states’ economies differ in significant ways

(Wisconsin’s is more dependent on manufacturing jobs,

which are declining nationally), Minnesota has experienced

higher wage growth, higher labor force participation, a

lower unemployment rate, and better job growth in higher-

wage occupations. Wisconsin, which has passed more than

$8 billion in tax cuts since Walker took office, has a budget

deficit of nearly $2 billion. The vast majority of those cuts

have benefited corporations and the state’s wealthiest

citizens, at a time when Walker has been forced to issue

bonds to fix Wisconsin’s dilapidated roads.

Julie Allen, the Scandinavian studies professor, noted

how crucial the trade-union movement and the

communitarian ethos of Scandinavian Lutheranism had

been in fostering the progressivism of the Upper Midwest.

In both Wisconsin and Minnesota, that effort translated into

strong support for public institutions like state government

and their flagship universities. Allen believes that

Minnesota’s progressive tradition endured partly due to the

state’s continuous support for the public sector, a tradition

that had eroded in Wisconsin before Walker. “Minnesotans

have retained more trust in their institutions,” she said.

“That was lost in Wisconsin—and it wasn’t something Scott

Walker invented.” Though Governor Jim Doyle, a Democrat,

didn’t carry out his 2002 promise to cut 10,000 state

workers fully, his rhetoric helped pave the way for Walker’s

attack on state workers. “I’ve made deeper cuts [to state

employees] than any governor’s ever made,” Doyle boasted

to a reporter in December 2010, three months before

Walker announced Act 10. During Allen’s ten years of

teaching at the University of Wisconsin, four of which were

under Doyle, she got one raise.

Still, Allen loved teaching in Madison—until Walker and

his allies made it unbearable. “The rhetoric coming from

the governor and state legislature always seemed to be

telling us how little our contributions mattered,” she said.

“We were just mooching off the taxpayer.” Allen recently

left Madison for Brigham Young University, and feels valued

at her new job. But there was much she missed about

Wisconsin. “It was lovely the first five or six years,” she

said. “Then it got so painful.” Like many UW faculty

members, Allen believed fervently in the Wisconsin Idea

and was heartbroken to see it banished from state

government.

In 2015, Walker tried to erase the Wisconsin Idea more

literally. Four decades earlier, core tenets of the Wisconsin

Idea—service to the state’s citizens, a search for truth—had

been enshrined in statute. The mission of the university is

“to extend knowledge and its application beyond the

boundaries of its campuses,” the 1974 law reads. “Inherent

in this broad mission are methods of instruction, research,

extended training and public service designed to educate

people and improve the human condition. Basic to every

purpose of the system is the search for truth.”

Walker’s 2015 budget struck these passages. His staff

inserted a new clause that the university’s mission would

be “to meet the state’s workforce needs.” Walker never

announced the change, but it was discovered by the Center

for Media and Democracy, buried in the 1,800-page bill.

The find prompted a massive and immediate backlash,

which included some conservatives. Emails later released

between University of Wisconsin administrators and

Walker’s staff revealed that the university was pressured to

accept Walker’s revision months earlier, but when Walker

rescinded the change, he claimed it was merely a “drafting

error.”

A RED-WINGED BLACKBIRD darted across the windshield as I

parked in front of Robert La Follette’s childhood home in

Argyle, a village of 850 people twenty miles from the

Illinois border. In 2000, a group of civic-minded residents

formed Historic Argyle, a local nonprofit, to save La

Follette’s crumbling home, then on a list of Wisconsin’s ten

most endangered historic properties. Fifteen years later,

with the house largely restored, they marked the 160th

anniversary of La Follette’s birth with the first “La Follette

Days,” a chautauqua celebrating the birthday of

Wisconsin’s Progressive lion. At the third annual event, I

joined a small crowd milling about on the front lawn, near a

wooden stage straddled by a Wisconsin flag on one end and

an American flag on the other. Neighbors caught up with

one another, drinking beer in the late-afternoon sun, as

they waited for a free talk by Jim Leary, a folklorist at the

University of Wisconsin.

Leary has devoted his career to the Wisconsin Idea.

Since the 1970s, he has exhumed the forgotten music and

folklore of Wisconsin’s immigrant and Native communities

and brought his findings—the songs of French-Canadian

lumberjacks, Finnish miners, Potawatomi ironworkers, and

Mexican farmhands—to hundreds of small gatherings like

this one. A bearded sixty-five-year-old with a graying

ponytail and bushy eyebrows, Leary hopped on stage and

began running through a playlist that recounted the state’s

history through labor songs like the a cappella “Cranberry

Song,” a lighthearted homage to transnational solidarity

among cranberry pickers; “Corrido Pensilvanio,” a

Mexican-American ballad about steelworkers recruited

from Texas who bump into a group of Italian women in

Milwaukee on their journey to the Pennsylvania mills; and

“Ironworker Blues,” a Johnny Cash–tinged rockabilly tune

written in the 1960s by an ironworker from northern

Wisconsin named Dewain Olby.

After Leary’s talk, the High Street Revelers, an old-time

string band from Mineral Point, prepared to take the stage.

Kristine O’Connor drank a beer in the backyard. O’Connor,

a founding member of Historic Argyle, worked on the La

Follette renovation, stripping century-old paint off the

house with her husband. “If you walk down Main Street,

you’ll run into people who don’t know La Follette even lived

here,” she said. “That’s the main reason why we opened

this up again. Because what he stood for was just—he was

for the common person.” She took a sip of beer. “I think

living in Argyle formed a lot of his beliefs.” O’Connor

equally admired Belle La Follette, Bob’s wife and the first

woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin Law

School. She particularly liked how, when Bob and Belle

married, in 1881, Belle made the Unitarian minister take

the word “obey” out of their vows.

“To tell you the truth, I didn’t know about Bob La Follette

either, until I joined Historic Argyle,” O’Connor admitted.

She had joined only because she thought a tourist

attraction might help her struggling town. “But the more I

read about him, the more I thought, Gosh, we need him

now. ” For many years, O’Connor worked at a local bank on

Main Street, where she approved personal loans. Lafayette

County is one of the poorer counties in Wisconsin, ranking

fifty-first out of seventy-two in per capita income. “Divorces

and medical bills,” she said. “Those are the two things that

can just destroy a family.” O’Connor watched helplessly as

Argyle grew depleted. “The area used to be full of family

dairy farms, and most of them have died out,” she said.

“We’ve got big corporate farms around here. Some people

lost their farms. As farmers got older, the majority of them

just sold out, and the younger generation doesn’t want a

24/7 day job. When I grew up, a mom and dad could run a

farm, and the wife didn’t have to work off the farm, you

could make a living.” Many of O’Connor’s friends now

commute from Argyle to Madison for work.

“We want people to be aware of Bob La Follette and the

importance he has on Wisconsin history,” she said. “I hate

to say this, but people don’t seem to be interested in

history. Even local history. You know, they’re concerned

with putting a meal on the table and meeting their next car

payment.”

IN JUNE 2017, Randy Bryce officially launched his campaign

against Paul Ryan with a two-minute video. It begins with

President Trump introducing a smiling Ryan at a press

conference focused on repealing Obamacare. “Everybody

doesn’t get what they want,” Ryan says in a cutaway

interview. The video moves to green Wisconsin farmland

and then to Bryce and his mom, Nancy, sitting in her living

room, as Nancy describes the pain from multiple sclerosis

and the twenty medicines she needs to function. It’s a

poignant moment, and Bryce hugs her after she chokes up.

Equally memorable is a taunt Bryce delivers at the end of

the video. He is at a job site, wearing his hard hat and a

blue denim shirt emblazoned with an ironworkers’ union

logo. “Let’s trade places,” Bryce says, staring hard at the

camera. “Paul Ryan, you can come work the iron, and I’ll go

to DC.” The video went viral. Within days, Bryce was

appearing on multiple MSNBC shows, as well as on CNN

and other networks.

Soon after the video was released, I saw Bryce at his

official launch event in the gymlike meeting hall of UAW

Local 72 in Kenosha. Red, white, and blue balloons

decorated the hall, and at the end of his speech, everyone

gathered together for a posed picture holding a “Randy

Bryce” sign. Outside in the hallway, I saw Nancy Bryce,

who arrived late. Her MS is making driving more difficult,

and she seemed a bit disoriented. She was happy for Bryce,

but she had always been happy for him, whether he was

unloading boxes at a warehouse or appearing on national

television. She never projected her ambitions onto him.

I saw Bryce again a month later in New York City, at a

fundraiser at an East Village wine bar. The room was

overstuffed with ironworkers, millennial office workers, and

a few prominent supporters like Cynthia Nixon, who

cohosted the event. Bryce had met earlier that day with

New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, who offered to help him in

any way he could. Just two months earlier, Bryce had been

struggling to pay his rent after being laid off from the

Northwestern Mutual job. Now waiters in New York and

Los Angeles recognized him. They called him “Ironstache,”

after the Twitter handle he came up with during the Act 10

fight, and begged him to defeat Ryan.

IN 2016, Kathy Cramer, a political scientist at the University

of Wisconsin, published The Politics of Resentment, which

detailed the anger in rural Wisconsin that Walker drew on

—and stoked—in his attack on the public-sector unions. It

was the product of five years of fieldwork: countless

predawn drives to drop in on small-town diners, bait shops,

and gas stations. Cramer met with thirty-nine different

groups in all, including a few in urban and suburban areas,

but she concentrated on rural communities. Sometimes her

presence made people uncomfortable. On one visit to a

group that met at a gas station along the Wisconsin River,

the regulars, who had met with her three times before, got

up from their table and stood on the other side of the room

until she left. Most people were friendly, though, and grew

more so over time. Many were thrilled that someone from

the distant state capital, which they viewed with fascination

and contempt, would be interested in them. Cramer