Madison BookBeat

An encore presentation of a program which originally aired November 23, 2020.

Stu Levitan welcomes one of the brightest new stars in the literary firmament, Danielle Evans, coming back to Madison on Wednesday, virtually at least, to present her new collection The Office of Historical Corrections at the Wisconsin Book Festival.

Grief and loss, apologies and corrections, anxiety and forgiveness. Women demanding to live full and complex lives. History. Performance. Race. These are the things which occupy Danielle Evans in the six stories and one novella which comprise The Office of Historical Corrections, just out from the good people at Riverhead Books, and already getting rave reviews.

Danielle Evans burst onto the scene at age 26 with Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, a collection of eight short stories which she finished while on a fellowship at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. That collection received several awards and made her a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree. In the decade since, she has taught creative writing at the aforementioned UW Institute for Creative Writing, American University and now the Johns Hopkins University. In recognition of her artistic excellence and merit, she is also the recipient of a 2020 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

It is a real pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Danielle Evans.

On this third Monday of February, a day commonly, but mistakenly, called President’s Day, Stu Levitan welcomes UW Professor Emeritus John Milton Cooper, Jr., for a 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. It’s a record so rich for discussion we’re taking two hours to cover it, with out second segment set for early April.

He 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.

There’s no better guide to the life and times of our 28th President than JMC 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 NYTimes 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.

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

As part of WORT's continuing celebration of Black culture and history, a special rebroadcast of a candid conversation that first aired live on February 10, 2020.

Stu Levitan welcomes the award-winning Black, Queer and Poz poet and performer Danez Smith, who will be at the Central Library tonight at 7 pm, in support of their brand new collection Homie, poems about friendship and loss and violence and love, it’s a presentation by our friends at the Wisconsin Book Festival.

Now as long-time listeners know, it is Madison BookBeat policy to regard students at the UW as Madisonians, so Danez hits two of the three criteria.

Because before Nezzy was a finalist for the National Book Award and the youngest person ever to win the Forward Prize for Best Collection for Don’t Call Us Dead, before the Lambda Literary Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for [insert]boy, before the video of “Dear White America” got 387,000 views, thank you very much, before the fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, before the individual and team slam championships, before the Poetry Foundation podcast VS with Franny Choi, before they were on WORT’s A Public Affair with Ali Muldrow last January, it’s in the archives, check it out, before all that -- Danez Smith was in the first cohort of the ground-breaking First Wave program in the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives and a member of the University of Wisconsin Class of 2012, On Wisconsin.

Their third collection of poems, Homie, is now out from Graywolf press, and receiving rapturous reviews, NYT calling it a work of ‘startling originality and ambition.” which as I said is what brings them back to town for a Wisconsin Book Festival event at the Central Library, 201 West Mifflin St.  tonight at 7, it is a special reading and conversation with Sofia Snow, the director of the aforementioned Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives and the First Wave Scholarship Program. It is a real pleasure to welcome Danez Smith to Madison BookBeat.

Airdate on WORT 89.9 FM: Feb. 10, 2020; rebroadcast, Feb. 8, 2021

Stu Levitan welcomes R. Richard (Dick) Wagner, author of We’ve Been Here All Along: Wisconsin’s Early Gay History, covering the period from territorial days to the 1960s. It’s from our friends at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, which in September will publish his companion volume, Coming Out, Moving Forward: Wisconsin’s Recent Gay History. Some breaking news about volume one – it was just awarded the gold medal in the LGBT category by the Independent Publishers association.

In 1982, under Republican Governor Lee Dreyfus, Wisconsin became the first state in the country to adopt a gay rights law, making discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation illegal. In 1983, under Democratic Governor Tony Earl, Wisconsin became the first state to have a Governor’s Commission on Lesbian and Gay Issues. Wisconsin is the only state to have elected three openly gay members of Congress – 2 Democrats, 1 Republican.

But the dairy state has not always been so friendly to non-normative sexuality. In fact, laws against gay sex predate the state. When the Wisconsin Territory was created in 1836, territorial legislators took the law against sodomy from the Michigan Territory and increased the penalty from three years to five.

In 1905, the Wisconsin Attorney General called oral sex “this unspeakable offense,” ‘the infamous crime,’ degrading and disgusting.” In 1928, the Supreme Court called sodomy “repulsive and detestable,” but “too prevalent to be ignored.”

In the 1940s, Wisconsin criminalized even thinking gay, passing the Sexual Psychopath Law to prosecute people whose impulsiveness of behavior rendered them sexually irresponsible – whether or not they ever acted on those supposed impulses.

Even that citadel of sifting and winnowing, the University of Wisconsin, got into the gay-bashing business, investigating hundreds of gay students in the fifties and early sixties, and sending many of them for therapeutic discipline. UW business manager A.W. Peterson even took the doors off the toilet stalls in the Bascom Hall men’s rooms, to stop gay assignations.

It’s part of our state’s history that most people, straight or gay, don’t know, but should. Because a community cannot fully know itself, or be fully known by others, without knowing its history. As they say, you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.

There is no one more qualified or appropriate to write this groundbreaking history of early gay life in Wisconsin than Dick Wagner, who is himself historic, as the first openly gay member of the Dane County Board of Supervisors. He even lives in a landmarked building on Jenifer Street which long before he came to town was a center of Madison gay life.

Dick came to Madison as a graduate student in history in 1965, getting his doctorate in 1971. In 1972, Gov. Pat Lucey named him executive director of the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission. After Lucey resigned in the summer of 1977 to become Ambassador to Mexico, Dick ran the executive residence for Gov. Martin Schreiber until January 1979, when he joined the Department of Administration as a budget analyst. Dick retired from state service in 2005.

In addition to serving on the Dane County Board from 1980-1994 – including four years as the first openly gay county board chair in Wisconsin – Dick’s record of state and local public service is extensive. In 1983, Gov. Tony Early appointed him co-chair of the aforementioned Governor’s Council on Lesbian and Gay Issues. That same year,

Stu Levitan welcomes journalist and author Rob Zaleski, for a conversation about his new book Ed Garvey Unvarnished: Lessons from a Visionary Progressive. Published by our friends at the University of Wisconsin Press.

As the subtitle indicates, Ed Garvey was indeed a visionary progressive. With a long and very varied resume of public service. Sixty years ago this week, he became President of the Wisconsin Student Association. In August 1961, President of the National Student Association. UW Law School, a job with a Minneapolis labor law firm. Then from 1971-1983, the job that, for many, would define him, the first executive director of the National Football League Player’s Association. Deputy Attorney General under Bronson La Follette, Democratic nominee for Senate against Bob Kasten in 1986, Democratic nominee for Governor against Tommy Thompson in 1998. Environmental lawyer waging – and winning – lawsuits or political fights against Exxon, Perrier, and an out-of-state factory farm corporation. And finally, the founder and driving force behind Fighting Bob Fest, the unabashedly progressive Chautauqua that brought Jesse Jackson, Bernie Sanders, Jim Hightower and others first to Baraboo then to Madison. Ed Garvey died of Parkinson’s Disease in 2017 at age 76.

Like the Burlington-born Ed Garvey, Rob Zaleski is a Wisconsin native, from the Bay View neighborhood on Milwaukee’s southside. And he probably knew Ed Garvey as long as anybody in Madison today, and longer than most. Because when Ed was the young, brash executive director of the NFLPA in the early seventies, Rob was the young, brash sports editor for the Green Bay Daily News, and the recipient of a number of scoops from Ed. And although we did not know it at the time, Rob and I were actually colleagues then, because I was doing some writing for the paper from Washington. Rob came down to Madison after that as night editor for United Press International, became sports editor of The Capital Times in 1981, had a brief sojourn with the Los Angeles Times before returning the Madison for another 23 years as news columnist and special projects reporter for the Cap Times, in which capacity he amassed more than a dozen writing awards. In addition to freelancing, Rob has also written a novel, Searching for Sal. It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat my friend and former colleague, Rob Zaleski.

Stu Levitan welcomes Matthew Levin, who scores a trifecta -- he’s a Ph D from the UW, and the author of “Cold War University – Madison and the New Left in the Sixties” from our friends at the University of Wisconsin Press.

As to the topic - in the 1960s, the university of Wisconsin Madison was one of the four or five most important campuses for both antiwar and civil rights activism.

As portrayed on the cover of Cold War University, it was at the UW in May 1966 that hundreds, at times thousands, of students peacefully occupied the administration building for a week, in a popular protest against university compliance with the military draft. It was at the UW Stock Pavilion just five months later that a handful from the Committee to End the War in Vietnam heckled Sen. Edward M. Kennedy so relentlessly that he left that stage. It was at the UW in February 1967 that hundreds of students occupied the offices of the president and chancellor – while they were there. It was at the UW on October 18, 1967, the Battle of Dow, that American police for the first time used tear gas to quell an on-campus antiwar disturbance. And it was at the UW at 3:42 on the morning of August 24, 1970 that the first fatal antiwar bombing took place – the New Year Gang’s attempted destruction of the Army Mathematics Research Center in Sterling Hall, which killed physics graduate student Robert Fassnacht.

In fact, Madison’s importance even predates the sixties. For a time in the early 1950s, the UW was the only campus in the country where the Communist Party’s Youth Labor League was still allowed. It was at the UW in 1959 that a group of graduate students started the journal Studies on the Left, almost three years before the Students for a Democratic Society adopted the Port Huron Statement. And it was Studies on the Left, not the Port Huron Statement, that would successfully define the New Left’s relationship with liberals.

Studies on the Left even had a major impact on race relations, publishing a 1962 essay that inspired Huey P. Newton and others to form the organization that was a forerunner to the Black Panther Party. One of many examples of UW-Madison’s significance in civil rights.

UW students were among the nation’s first in February 1960 to picket local chain stores in support of the lunch counter sit-ins at the southern franchises. In the Summer of 61, UW students joined the Freedom Riders, and some were jailed at Parchman Farm. In early 1964, UW students were part of the sit-in at Sears department store conducted by the Congress of Racial Equality. A few months later, other students participated in Freedom Summer, registering voters in Mississippi and Tennessee – and starting an extraordinary collection of documents now held by the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives. In March, 1965, UW students joined the march from Selma to Montgomery. And in February 1969, black students coordinated the university’s most successful political protest of the decade, the strike that led to a full degree-granting Department of Afro-American Studies.

It is quite a history, historic at times, and Matthew Levin lays it out with precision and perspective in Cold War University – Madison and the New Left in the Sixties. The editor of the first book about Madison and the New Left agrees. Paul Buhle, editor of History and the New Left: Madison, Wisconsin 1950-1970 and the journal Radical America, says Levin has done “a masterful job,” and that he has. I know that when I was researching my book Madison in the Sixties,

Stu Levitan welcomes former Madison journalist Bill Christofferson, author of The Man From Clear Lake: Earth Day Founder Senator Gaylord Nelson, himself a former Madisonian, from our friends at the University of Wisconsin Press, still located right here in Madison.

As to Gaylord Nelson – Tom Brokaw calls him “one of the great public servants” of the post-war era. His Senate colleague George McGovern calls him “a magnificent man.” Former VP Al Gore says his story is “an inspiration.” Even Ralph Nader calls him “one of the great can-do senators of his time.” And those are just the folks who wrote endorsement blurbs for this book. Pretty much everybody who worked with him or for him, or covered him, agrees. Conservation, the environment, peace, social justice, consumer protection – pick just about any important issue, and Gaylord Nelson made things better. And he did so with honor and humility and humor

And as to Bill Christofferson – well, he’s a pretty fine fellow, too. He’s a Marine Corps veteran, served 17 months in Vietnam as a combat correspondent … which is why he’s a long-time active member of the Milwaukee chapter of Veterans for Peace.

After Vietnam, he was a reporter and editor at daily newspapers in Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois before coming to Madison in 1973 to cover the legislature and politics for the Wisconsin State Journal. He also became president of the State Journal Union so when the strike came in 1977, he became a reporter and editor of the strike newspaper, the Madison Press Connection. Which is when we went from being competitors to being colleagues, which I much preferred.

After the strike, he spent four years as the director of Nukewatch, educating the public on nuclear weapons and nuclear power and helping to pass a statewide nuclear freeze referendum. He is also a past chair of the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, a statewide coalition of 165 organizations working for social justice.

As a political consultant and aide, his clients have included Ed Garvey, Tom Loftus, Senator Herb Kohl, Governor Jim Doyle, Supreme Court Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, and Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist.

It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, my friend and former colleague, Bill Christofferson.

Stu Levitan welcomes a true grandson of Madison, Andrew Maraniss, coming back this Thursday, at least virtually, for a presentation of his new 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. That event is Thursday at 7 through our friends at Mystery to Me. More details at M2Mbooksdot com.

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. Follow Andrew on Twitter @trublu24 and visit his website at andrewmaraniss.com.

Second, he’s really good at telling historical and sports stories with a larger social message. GAMES OF DECEPTION has already 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.

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.

It is a pleasure to welcome to MBB my friend Andrew Maraniss.

Stu Levitan welcomes Madison’s own John Nichols for a discussion of his new book The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party: The Enduring Legacy of Henry Wallace’s Anti-Fascist, Anti-Racist Politics, from the fine folks at Verso Press.

As to Henry A. Wallace, he was, during the thirties and forties, the highest-ranking antiracist, anti-fascist leader in American politics. For a time in the late thirties and early forties, he was also, after Franklin Roosevelt, the most important American politician. Two terms as the New Deal Secretary of Agriculture, the war years as the most powerful vice president in modern history, up to that point. Even after losing the vice-presidential nomination to Harry Truman in 1944, he remained powerful, as secretary of commerce.

But then FDR died six weeks into his fourth term, and Wallace was not enough of a Cold War imperialist for the new President, who fired him in the fall of 1946. Which set the stage for his ill-advised and ill-fated campaign as the Progressive Party candidate for president in 1948, and a long slow slide into an outcast’s obscurity. What his career meant at the time, has meant since, and could mean for the Democratic party in the future, has occupied John Nichols for some time, and is the focus of this new book.

As to John Nichols, you probably know he is a Wisconsin native, associate editor of The Capital Times, National Affairs Correspondent for The Nation, and contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times. And in his spare time, he writes books. In addition to this latest book about Henry Wallace, John is the author of Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America; The Genius of Impeachment (New Press); Jews for Buchanan; and a best-selling biography of former vice president Dick Cheney, Dick: The Man Who is President , which was also published in French and Arabic. He edited Against the Beast: A Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire (Nation Books), and with Robert W. McChesney, has co-authored half a dozen book about the failings of the media and politics, most recently People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy.  

Brothers and sisters, brothers and sisters, it is a pleasure to welcome to MBB my friend, John Nichols.

Stu Levitan welcomes Madison attorney and author Dean Strang, whose latest book Keep the Wretches in Order: America’s Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department and the Fall of the IWW is from our friends at the University of Wisconsin Press, and will soon be out in a new paperback edition.

As to the IWW – that’s the Industrial workers of the World, organized in Chicago in 1905 to be one big union, an industrial union for all wage workers regardless of trade or skill, and also regardless of race, gender or nationality.

As to the Justice Department – it had only been created in 1870, and by the early twentieth century was still a modest and limited enterprise.

But at 2 o’clock on the afternoon of September 5, 1917, scores of local law enforcement officers under the direction of agents from the Bureau of Investigations executed 48 federal search warrants at IWW offices across the country, the start of a series of searches during which they would seize five tons of IWW material.

What led up to that raid, and what followed - the indictment in Chicago of 166 Wobblies for allegedly violating the Espionage Act, the lengthy trial of 122, and very quick conviction of 97, along with essentially identical indictments in Sacramento, Wichita and Omaha – is the business of Dean Strang’s startling new book. , Keep the Wretches in Order: America's Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department, and the Fall of the IWW.

As to Dean Strang, he is of course known to millions as one Steven Avery’s trial attorneys, featured in the Netflix series, Making a Murderer. He is a native of Milwaukee, schooled out east at Dartmouth and Virginia Law. In addition to his criminal defense practice, his resume includes five years as Wisconsin’s first federal public defender, a short stint on the other team as an assistant U.S. attorney, some civil litigation, a bit of law school lecturing, and the book Worse Than the Devil: Anarchists, Clarence Darrow, and Justice in a Time of Terror, also from UW Press. It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Dean Strang.

Airdate - June 29, 2020