Madison BookBeat

On the second and last Madison BookBeat show during the fall pledge drive, Stu Levitan welcomes a long-time friend of community radio and other alternative media, Dave Zirin. His new book The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World

For his first show during the fall pledge drive, Stu Levitan welcomes Nicholas D. Hayes, author of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Forgotten House: How An Omission Transformed The Architect’s Legacy from our very good friends at the University of Wisconsin Press.If you ask someone who knows even a little bit about architecture about FLW, they’ll probably mention the breathtaking design of Fallingwater, or the glorious Guggenheim Museum or maybe Taliesin. Those in Northern California no doubt think about the Marin County Government Complex, while here in Madison it’s Monona Terrace, and maybe the Lamp House and the Jacobs House.But before all that, before he became known as the world’s greatest architect, Wright had a vision that was truly transformative – to design beautiful houses with organic integrity which would be affordable to ordinary people. He called it the American System-Built Houses (Ready-Cut), and starting in 1912 devoted an extraordinary amount of time and energy to the project, churning out more than 950 drawings encompassing more than a hundred unique iterations.Unfortunately, W’s partner, Milwaukee businessman Arthur Richards, was someone with whom he already had a troubled relationship – their Lake Geneva Hotel suffered serious financial difficulties, and the 8-story hotel they planned for the corner of East Doty and Monona Avenue in Madison was never built. And so, between the transformative idea and the resultant reality fell numerous shadows – bad planning, bad execution, and then a world war. Finally, in 1917 Wright ended the program precipitously, sued Richards, and never spoke of it again. And Wright’s assistant on the project, Russell Barr Williamson, was even more damaged by the experience – both personally and professionally.The rise and fall of American System-Built Houses – and one small ASB house in particular, the Elizabeth Murphy House, a bastardized version of model A203 located at 2106 East Newton Avenue in the Milwaukee suburb of Shorewood – is the business that occupies Nick Hayes in this illuminating and engaging account that’s part architectural analysis, part business lesson, part mystery story. It is an account he is uniquely qualified to write – because he and his wife Angela are now the owner-stewards of that house. He is also cofounder and CTO of the water stewardship company Wellntell, columnist for Sailing magazine, and author of the award-winning book Saving Sailing – The Story of Choices, Families, Time Commitments, and How We Can Create a Better Future.It’s a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat Nick Hayes.

Stu Levitan marks the Jewish High Holy Days with an encore presentation of his conversation from April 2020 with Jonathan Z. S. Pollack, History instructor at Madison College and Honorary Scholar at the George L. Mosse / Laurence A Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin, which last year issued his new book Wisconsin The New Home of the Jew: 150 years of Jewish life at the UW-Madison. It’s available both in paperback of about 150 pages and a pdf download from the CJS website, cjs.wisc.edu.Jon is the co-editor, with Jonathan Rees, of The Voice of the People: Primary Sources on the History of American Labor, Industrial Relations, and Working-Class Culture, which includes some of the scholars discussed in this new book. Jon has published several articles on the Jewish history of the Midwest, and he is a frequent guest on Wisconsin Public Radio. He had the advantage of attending two of the three best schools in the Big Ten, getting his bachelor’s at Michigan in 1990, then his masters here in 92, doctorate in 99. And of particular interest to music lovers, from 1997 to 2002, Jon played drums for Madison’s most renowned klezmer band, Yid Vicious

Stu Levitan welcomes Madison’s favorite journalistic son, and his most frequent guest, David Maraniss. As proud Madisonians know, David grew up on the west side, the son of Capital Times editor Elliott Maraniss and University of Wisconsin Press editor Mary Cummins Maraniss, graduating from West High in 1967. To the rest of the world, he is a best-selling author and an associate editor at the Washington Post, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1993 for his coverage of presidential candidate Bill Clinton, and was part of the Post’s team that won the Pulitzer in 2008 for its coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting.

Stu has had the pleasure of interviewing David about several of his bestselling books, most recently A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father, about the aforementioned Elliott. We’ve also aired conversations about his books Barack Obama: The Story, Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero; Once In A Great City: A Detroit Story; Rome 1960: The Summer Olympics that Changed the World, and the book that hits closest to home, They Marched Into Sunlight: Vietnam and America October 1967. Unfortunately, Stu didn’t have a show like this when he published When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi.

Today, we’re going to do something different, and talk about a book that hasn’t even been published yet, because David has only just finished writing the main text, and this is the first public conversation he’s had about it. It’s another in his series of using sports to examine larger social issues – this time, the promise and plight of the American Indian in modern America, as exemplified by one of the greatest athletes of the 20th century. The book is Path Lit By Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, and you can look for it from Simon and Schuster late next summer.

But before we talk about Jim Thorpe, we’re going to take a few moments to preview something that’s also very near and dear to David, the Cap Times Idea Fest, a week-long series of panels and interviews on reckoning with change that kicks off a week from tonight.

As always, it is a great pleasure to welcome back to MBB, our friend, David Maraniss.

Stu welcomes Richard L. Pifer for a discussion of his book “The Great War Comes to Wisconsin: Sacrifice, Patriotism, and Free Speech in a Time of Crisis.” It’s from our very good friends at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, and was awarded the Silver Award for Best Regional Non-Fiction category in the Independent Publisher’s IPPY Awards.

It was 107 years ago this month that the guns of August roared and plunged Europe into the most terrible war the world had yet seen. By the time the guns fell silent at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, about ten million military men would die – 1800 of them from Wisconsin, with another six thousand or so Badger boys injured, leaving about 110,000 who made it back to Wisconsin without physical damage. Of the 118,000 troops from Wisconsin, about 3,000 came from Madison – enabling women to enter the labor force in such large numbers they even had their own machinists union.

Among the Wisconsin doughboys, the fabled 32nd Army Infantry Division, or, as they would come to be known after they pierced the German Hindenburg line of defense, the Red Arrow Division. The French called them Les Terrible, and they paid a terrible price for their combat success, suffering a casualty rate of about 15-18 percent, third highest of any American unit.

As a state, Wisconsin’s military losses were not disproportionately high. But we did bear a unique burden, due to demographics and politics. As the war began, close to 40% of Wisconsinites were either born in or had parents from Germany, Austria or Hungary, compared to only 9% with similar ties to the Allied powers. Add to that, our greatest political leader fight so fervently against going to war that he was branded a traitor by the national press, and  9 of our 11 members of congress also voted against the declaration of war. A leading politician, born in the Austria-Hungary empire, was even criminally prosecuted for his opposition to the war. Needless to say, Wisconsin was not popular with the loyalty leaguers of the day.

On the bright side, local disagreement about the war and Fighting Bob La Follette did cause the creation of one of the country’s great crusading newspapers, The Capital Times. On a more somber note, Togstad Glenn, a street in the Midvale neighborhood, memorializes Madison’s last casualty of the war, journalist Morris O Togstad, winner of the French Croix de Guerre, killed in action the day before the Armistice, and Victor S Glenn, the city’s first casualty of WW2.

What our life was like in the period 1914 to 1918 – not only for Wisconsin’s soldiers and politicians, but also for our housewives, farmers, students and others – is the business which occupies Rick Pifer in this compelling account of how we rose to shared sacrifice and sunk to intolerance and injustice.

It is an account he is supremely qualified to provide, as a scholar of the home front in Wisconsin during the First and Second World Wars. For his UW Madison master’s degree, “Total War on the Home Front: La Crosse, Wisconsin and the World Wars,” he studied life during wartime in that riverfront city in Western Wisconsin. For his doctoral dissertation, also here, he looked at the wartime labor movement in the great lakefront city in eastern Wisconsin, published by the Wisconsin historical society press in 2003 as “A City at War: Milwaukee Labor during World War II.” And it was easy for Rick to consult with his editor on that project, because until 2015, he was just down the hall as Director of Reference and Public Services for the Library-Archives Division of the Wisconsin Historical Society.

It’s a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Rick Pifer.

Stu Levitan welcomes UW Professor Emeritus John Milton Cooper, Jr., for part two of their discussion of one of the most important presidents in American history – Thomas Woodrow Wilson, whose legacy is as complex and controversial as any of our Chief Magistrates.

Wilson amassed one of the most impressive records of progressive legislation of any president, yet left the worst record on race relations of any president in the 20th century, and allowed egregious violations of civil liberties. He kept us out of war in Mexico, but took us into war in Europe. A great student and thinker about good government, he was sloppy in appointing his cabinet officials and negligent in supervising them. A devout Presbyterian, he appointed the first Jew to the US Supreme Court, was the first president to visit the Roman Catholic Pope, and was buried in an Episcopal cathedral. And he’s the man after whom Woody Guthrie is named. It’s a record so rich for discussion this is our second show devoted to it, following a segment on February 15.

There’s no better guide to the life and times of our 28th President than John Milton Cooper, Jr., whom the Boston Globe called “the preeminent living historian of Wilson and his era.” We take for our primary text his 2009 volume Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, which the NY Times called “monumental,” and which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. And we also note his earlier work, The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.

It seems Professor Cooper has spent his life in the world of Woodrow Wilson. He even graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington D.C., and received his bachelor′s degree summa cum laude from Wilson’s alma mater, Princeton University, where Wilson later taught and served as president. Prof Cooper took his advanced degrees at Columbia University, and after a few years at Wellesley College, came to the University of Wisconsin, where he rose to hold two named chairs in History and American Institutions, and chair the famed Department of History before taking Emeritus status in 2009. And that’s even another Wilson connection – when Wilson was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, one of his favorite professors was Richard T. Ely, and one of his favorite students was Frederick Jackson Turner, both of whom would become famed members of the Wisconsin faculty. He has written half a dozen books, dozens of articles, and received numerous honors. He was the honorary president of the Woodrow Wilson Birthplace Foundation, and the chief historian on the 2002 American Experience biography of Wilson produced for PBS.

I hope you were with us last week for the conversation with Jennifer Chiaverini about her historical fiction, The Women’s March, about the Woman Suffrage Procession of 1913, and the suffragists effort to get Wilson to endorse a constitutional amendment enfranchising women. Because that is where we pick up our conversation, before going on to talk about race, the war, and other matters.

It is a pleasure to again present on Madison BookBeat my friend, UW Professor Emeritus John Milton Cooper, Jr.

Madison authors, topics, book events and publishers

Stu Levitan welcomes NY Times best-selling author Jennifer Chiaverini, here to discuss her latest novel of historical fiction, The Women’s March, about the historic 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession. It is just out from the good people at William Morrow, and imprint of HarperCollins. Although Jennifer technically lives in Middleton, she identifies as a Madison author, so that’s good enough for Stu.

On March 3, 1913, the National American Woman Suffrage Association held the first large political protest march in the history of Washington DC. Its purpose was to press its demand for a constitutional amendment to enfranchise women. March organizer Alice Paul chose the date and location very well – down Pennsylvania Avenue, the day before the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson – the last president to be elected before universal suffrage.

And what a march it was to be, with floats and chariots and thousands of women in color-coded outfits, all led by a herald on a white horse, culminating in a tableau of historical allegory at the Treasury Building. Among the several thousand women there that day, the legendary Black journalist and activist Ida B Wells-Barnett and a militant suffragist librarian named Maud Malone.

Alas, things did not work out as planned, as hecklers and hooligans broke through the inadequate security to abuse, even assault the women. But the arc of the moral universe does bend towards justice, albeit slowly at times, and the constitutional amendment they demanded in 1913 was finally passed by Congress in 1919 ratified by the states in 1920. Wisconsin, by the way, has pride of place as the first state to file its ratification vote with the Secretary of State.

How Alice Paul, Ida B Wells-Barnett and Maud Malone came to be on Pennsylvania Avenue that day – the battles they fought, the choices they made – is what occupies Jennifer Chiaverini in this moving and insightful account of an event which has perhaps faded in memory but not in importance.

It is a story Jennifer Chiaverini is exceptionally well-qualified to tell, as a very successful author of historical fiction. In addition to the 20 novels in the Elm Creek Quilts series, set mainly in the Civil War era, she has written historical novels starring the martyred UW student-turned Nazi resistance fighter Mildred Fish Harnack, Lord Byron’s brilliant daughter Ada Byron King, Mary Todd Lincoln, Julia Grant and others. It is a real pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat Jennifer Chiaverini.

On the 76th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, an encore presentation of Stu Levitan’s conversation from last August with Greg Mitchell, about his twelfth book The Beginning Or The End: How Hollywood – And America – Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, published by the good people at the New Press, and getting rave reviews.

“The Beginning or the End” was a B movie about the A bomb, released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in February, 1947. It promised to disclose what it called “the biggest, best-kept secret in the history of the world – the men, the magic, the machines behind the world’s strongest force – the atom bomb.” The movie was, the studio declared in all caps with exclamation points FACTUAL! AUTHENTIC!”

Well, not quite. Because a movie set in motion by scientists wanting the world to know the truth was taken over by the military and the White House needing the world to believe a lie. How that happened is the business that occupies Greg Mitchell in The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood – and America – Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It’s not just a great yarn with some surprising participants, it’s also an urgent warning about secrecy, manipulation and suppression.

Those are frequent topics in Greg Mitchell’s oeuvre. Stu had the pleasure of interviewing Greg nine years ago this week for a related book, his important expose Atomic Cover-Up: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki and the Greatest Movie Never Made. Since then, the movie Greg made based on that book, and the previously suppressed footage, has won film festival awards from Rio to Venice. Among Greg’s earlier books, two fascinating looks at politics in California. The Campaign of the Century, about Upton Sinclair’s radical campaign for Governor in 1934, which won the Goldsmith Book Prize, and Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady, about Richard Nixon’s redbaiting campaign for the Senate against Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950.

Greg is a former editor of Editor and Publisher magazine, Nuclear Times and has an important place in the history of rock and roll journalism, as the editor at Crawdaddy magazine who commissioner the first major profile of Bruce Springsteen before his first album was even released. Bruce returned the favor by writing the preface to the 2013 edition of Greg’s So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits--and the President--Failed on Iraq. Greg is on Twitter at GregMitch, and you can subscribe to his free newsletter at gregmitchell.substack. com

Well, the Olympics are giving us some great performances and amazing story lines, so we have dialed up an encore presentation of our 2020 conversation with a true grandson of Madison, Andrew Maraniss, about his award-winning book Games of Deception, the True Story of the First U.S. Olympic Basketball Team, and the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Germany.

You all know what basketball is, you all know what the Olympics are, you all know who Hitler was. So that part doesn’t need any more introduction.

As to Andrew Maraniss. First of all, he is, as you may have surmised, the son of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author David Maraniss and the pioneering environmentalist Linda Maraniss, born right here in Madison, now a resident of Brentwood, Tenn., with his wife Alison, and their two young children. David, of course, has also written a best-selling book about the Olympics, Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World. I interviewed David about that book when it came out in 2008, but no longer have access to the audio. David has also written a book about Andrew’s grandfather, the great journalist Elliott Maraniss, who I am proud to say   was also my former boss at the Capital Times. That interview, about David’s book A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father was the pilot episode of MBB in 2019. You see how this all comes around?

Like his father, Andrew is really good at telling historical and sports stories with a larger social message.  Games of Deception received the 2020 Association of Jewish Libraries Sydney Taylor Book Honors for middle grade readers and was named one of Amazon’s Top Books of 2019. His first book, the New York Times-bestseller Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South, received the 2015 Lillian Smith Book Award and the lone Special Recognition honor at the 2015 RFK Book Awards, the first sports-related book so honored. The Young Reader edition was named one of the Top 10 Biographies and Top 10 Sports Books of 2017 by the American Library Association and was selected as a Notable Social Studies Book for 2019 by the National Council for the Social Studies. And, of course, you’ll recall that Andrew was our guest in June for his new book about sports and society, Singled Out: The True Story of Glenn Burke, the first gay ballplayer in major league baseball.

Andrew is a contributor to ESPN’s TheUndefeated.com. and Visiting Author at Vanderbilt University Athletics, where he was formerly the associate director of media relations – a lesson in the value of leaving a job on good terms. He was also the first-ever media relations manager for the Tampa Bay Rays. You can follow him on Twitter @trublu24 and visit his website at andrewmaraniss.com.

Well, against much of the world’s better judgement, the Olympics are underway, so we have dialed up an encore presentation of our conversation with Madison native and former WISC TV sports reporter and anchor Jessie Garcia, about her book Going For Wisconsin Gold: Stories of Our State’s Olympians, from our good friends at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.

The spine-tingling thrill of victory. The mind-numbing agony of defeat. All on the world’s greatest athletic stage. In the 118 years after the first modern Olympics in 1896, there were more than 400 Olympic athletes with Wisconsin ties. In 2014 alone, more than 35 of the 230 athletes representing the United States were bound to the Badger state in one way or another. This year, there are 32, including 10 from the UW and 2 from your world champion Milwaukee Bucks.

Several past Wisconsin Olympians are known around the world as among the greatest – or in fact, the greatest – ever to compete in their sport. Some are remembered only in their own small town. Jesse Garcia has focused on 22 of the most captivating stories; some of them you know, many you don’t.

Jesse Garcia’s story is pretty captivating, too. She was born in Madison in 1970 to a Jewish mother from Long Island and a Catholic Mexican-American from Chicago who met while working for Volunteers in Service to America, the so-called domestic peace corps. Her mother turned her on to newspapers at a very early age; a few years later, it would be her step-father, Howard Landsman, who instilled in her a love of sports.

When we aired this show in early January, Jessie was our second straight guest who had graduated fromf East High School, following the appearance by Greg Renz, but the only Purgolder to have worked as a hostess at the old Ella’s Deli on East Washington Avenue. She went to Boston University, where she became assistant sports editor of the campus newspaper, and one summer got an internship at the sports department with the Madison CBS affiliate, WISC-TV, ch 3.

After graduating in 1992, they hired her as a part-time sports reporter – Madison’s first female sports reporter. Less than a month later, when sports director Van Stoutt fell ill, she was pressed into service to become the first female sports anchor in the state of Wisconsin. Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway, some sports fans let her know they were not happy hearing their sports news from a young woman.

Well, they were in a minority, because after two years at Channel 3, she stepped up to the Milwaukee market, covering sports for 23 years at WTMJ. Among her duties – hosting both the Mike Holmgren and Mike McCarthy Shows – again, becoming the first woman to host an NFL coach’s show. Those experiences provided the material for her first Historical Society Press book, My life with the Green and Gold: Tales from 20 Years of Sportscasting."

During much of that time, and for a little bit afterwards, she was also a journalism instructor at several universities, including Marquette and UW-Milwaukee, while also writing and producing corporate and video documentaries and doing audio narrations., Since January 2019, she has been back at WTMJ as Broadcast Director. It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Jessie Garcia.

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