VIII.

History

A.

Early Inhabitants

The earliest inhabitants of Wisconsin were Paleo-Indians, a nomadic people who appeared in the Great Lakes region about 11,000 bc, during the last Ice Age. Evidence from archaeological sites indicates the Paleo-Indians hunted with spears, killing caribou and other large animals. About 7000 bc, with the warming climate, an Archaic culture emerged. The area was later inhabited by a number of groups known as Mound Builders, who created large earth mounds as burial and ceremonial sites. Remains of some of these mounds may be seen at Butte des Morts (Hill of the Dead), near Neenah; at Aztalan Mound Park, near Lake Mills; and near Baraboo.

When Europeans first entered present-day Wisconsin, they encountered a number of Native American groups. The Menominee, Kickapoo, and Miami were Algonquian-speaking groups, while the Winnebago, Iowa, and Dakota, better known as Sioux, spoke Siouan languages. Most native peoples lived in villages, raised corn and other crops, and hunted and fished. In the mid-1600s many other groups entered Wisconsin, mostly Algonquian people fleeing enemy tribes farther east. These new groups included the Fox, Sac (Sauk), Potawatomi, and Ojibwa, also called Chippewa.

B.

Exploration

The first European known to have set foot on Wisconsin soil was Jean Nicolet, a French explorer. In 1634, while searching for a water route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, he reached Green Bay. In 1659 and 1660 the French fur trader Médard Chouart, Sieur des Groseilliers, and his brother-in-law, Pierre Esprit Radisson, explored the Lake Superior area. During the next 15 years the Jesuits, a Roman Catholic religious order, established the first missions in the territory, near present-day Ashland and at De Pere. In 1673 the French explorers Louis Joliet and Father Jacques Marquette crossed Wisconsin by way of the Fox and Wisconsin rivers to the Mississippi River.

C.

The Fur Trade

The explorers had found the Wisconsin region rich in fur-bearing animals, particularly beaver, whose pelts were in great demand in Europe. Soon trappers and traders from Québec and Montréal entered the Wisconsin wilderness. The first trading post was established at La Baye (now Green Bay) in 1684, and soon after others were built—Fort Saint Nicolas, near Prairie du Chien, and Fort Saint Antoine, on Lake Pepin. In 1689 Nicolas Perrot, French commandant of the Green Bay region, claimed the Upper Mississippi Valley, including what is now Wisconsin, for France. The profitable fur trade of the region soon attracted English trappers, and competition between France and England for the trade with the Native Americans was intense.

The French soon came into conflict with the Fox people, who controlled a strategic trade route along the Fox and Wisconsin rivers. From about 1700 to 1740 the French and the Fox fought a series of battles, until the Fox were nearly wiped out. The surviving Fox were taken in by the Sac. The long struggle weakened French defenses in the region and turned many of France’s former Native American allies against it, at the same time France was fighting Britain for domination of the continent. Under the Treaty of Paris that ended the French and Indian War (1754-1763), France ceded all its territories east of the Mississippi River, including Wisconsin, to Britain. Under British rule the fur trade continued as the basis of Wisconsin’s economy.

British possession of Wisconsin officially ended in 1783, when Britain signed the Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolution (1775-1783). Under the treaty, Britain ceded to the United States all its territory east of the Mississippi River. The region was included in the Northwest Territory that the U.S. government organized with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, but the government exercised no effective control over the Wisconsin area. It remained under the unofficial control of the British, who continued to monopolize the fur trade. There was no great influx of American settlers after the war, and the area’s few white inhabitants remained predominantly French-speaking. In 1800 there were only about 200 settlers in the region.

D.

End of British Domination

In 1800 the Wisconsin area became part of the Indiana Territory, which included all the Northwest Territory except the present state of Ohio. In 1809 Wisconsin was included in the new Illinois Territory, which was separated from the Indiana Territory.

The British still exercised control, however, and encouraged Native Americans to oppose American expansion. Some Wisconsin tribes, particularly the Winnebago, joined the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, who tried to form an alliance to drive the Americans out of the Midwest. Tecumseh urged native peoples to return to their traditions and to reject the white concept that individual tribes could sell land shared by all. Tecumseh’s forces were defeated in 1811 at the Battle of Tippecanoe in Indiana, but many native peoples in Wisconsin remained hostile to the Americans.

In 1812 war again broke out between the United States and Britain, caused by disputes over the rights of neutral American shipping. During the War of 1812 (1812-1815), most of Wisconsin’s Native Americans sided with the British. Only after the war ended did American settlement begin, and the Wisconsin fur trade also came under American control. The U.S. Army governed the vast territory from Fort Howard, at Green Bay, and Fort Crawford, at Prairie du Chien. A future president of the United States, General Zachary Taylor, was in command of the post at Prairie du Chien. While the fur trade continued to be the chief economic activity in the region, small settlements around the forts grew steadily.

In 1818 the Wisconsin region became part of the Michigan Territory, which also included all of what is now Minnesota. The first great rush of American settlers into Wisconsin occurred in the 1820s, as a result of a mining boom around the Fever River (now the Galena River), in northwestern Illinois. By 1823 mining had spread north into southwestern Wisconsin, where more extensive lead deposits were found. The population of Wisconsin’s lead-mining region increased from a few hundred to several thousand in a few years, with most of the early miners coming from Tennessee, Kentucky, and other states in the South. In about 1840 the Wisconsin lead region produced almost one-half the total U.S. output of lead ore. The region established close trade relations with the South, since most of the ore was transported down the Mississippi by flatboat or steamboat to markets at St. Louis or New Orleans.

E.

Black Hawk War

The movement of white settlers into the Midwest caused severe friction as the federal government and settlers attempted to displace the Native Americans from their lands. Federal policy under President Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) included uprooting entire tribes and forcing them to resettle west of the Mississippi. In 1832 about 1,000 Sac people, who had been forced to move to a reservation in Iowa, tried to return to their lands east of the Mississippi in northwestern Illinois. But Illinois settlers shot a peace emissary sent by their leader, Black Hawk, setting off the Black Hawk War. As Black Hawk and his followers retreated through Wisconsin, trying to return to Iowa, they were pursued by U.S. troops and local militiamen and fought a series of battles. The Native Americans reached the Mississippi near a stream called the Bad Axe River, but before they could flee back to Iowa, almost all of them were killed by the army on August 3 in the Bad Axe Massacre. Only 150 of Black Hawk’s people survived. Over the next few years other Wisconsin tribes, realizing that resistance would bring a similar fate, gave up title to their lands east of the Mississippi. Some, however, negotiated for reservation lands in central and northern Wisconsin as well as other rights.

With Native American resistance eliminated, a second great wave of settlers came to Wisconsin. These new arrivals came mainly from New England and the Middle Atlantic states, particularly New York. Most of them traveled through the newly built Erie Canal, completed in 1825, and the Great Lakes and settled along the shores of Lake Michigan. Milwaukee served as the chief port of entry for settlers and became the center of commerce for southeastern Wisconsin. These settlers were interested in farming, trading, and building cities.

F.

Wisconsin Territory

The population grew rapidly in this period, from around 3,000 in 1830 to 11,683 in 1836. Residents of Wisconsin, which was still part of the Michigan Territory, began to call for their own territory. In 1836 the Wisconsin Territory was organized, including the Wisconsin area, all of the present states of Iowa and Minnesota, and parts of North and South Dakota. Two years later the Wisconsin Territory was reduced when the region west of the Mississippi River was reorganized as the Iowa Territory.

The capital of the Wisconsin Territory was first located at Belmont in the heart of the lead district, where almost half the settlers lived. In succeeding years the southeastern counties along the shore of Lake Michigan grew more rapidly than the lead region, and by 1838 the legislature had moved to the new capital of Madison, which lay between the two areas. The first governor of the territory was Henry Dodge, one of the region’s most prosperous miners. Until the 1850s settlement in the territory was confined to the area south of the Fox and Wisconsin rivers.

A third wave of settlers, including a large number of European immigrants, came to Wisconsin during the territorial period. The first important group included highly skilled miners from Cornwall, England, who arrived in Wisconsin’s lead district after 1835. In the next 15 years they were followed by large numbers of Germans, Scots, Irish, Welsh, Swiss, and Norwegians. By 1850 Wisconsin’s population was 305,391, and more than one-third of the residents were foreign-born.

G.

Economic Development

Most of the new settlers of the 1830s and 1840s were attracted to Wisconsin by good farmland rather than mining opportunities. In response to the demand for acreage, the first government lands in Wisconsin were put on public sale in 1834. By the 1840s wheat had become the principal crop, and after ten years Wisconsin’s wheat crop was the second largest in the nation.

In the lead district of southwestern Wisconsin, mining remained the major economic activity until the late 1840s. Farming on lands containing mineral ore was discouraged by the federal government, which owned all such lands and until 1847 leased, rather than sold, tracts to individuals and companies for mining. Lead mining reached its peak in 1845, then declined rapidly as richer mines were exhausted and the price of lead dropped. Many miners then turned to farming, but about half of the miners, including many of the Cornish settlers, left for California after gold was discovered there in 1848.

H.

Statehood

The need for internal improvements, such as roads, railroads, harbors, and canals, was a major reason that residents of the Wisconsin Territory began to press for statehood. Both the population and the economy were expanding rapidly. As a state, it was argued, Wisconsin would be able to secure more federal money and land and could issue charters for transportation companies. Residents also hoped statehood would bring political strength and stability and attract Eastern capital with which to build needed improvements.

After rejecting several proposals for statehood, voters endorsed admission to the Union in 1846 and called for a convention to draw up a constitution for the future state. The first constitution was rejected by the territory’s voters in 1847, but a second similar constitution was approved a year later. This constitution is still in use, though it has been much amended. It prohibited the use of state funds to construct internal improvements, such as canals, because the framers wished to avoid the financial chaos that occurred when neighboring states had undertaken vast canal-building projects. The constitution also sharply limited the amount of debt the state could incur for any purpose. The provisions for voting rights were very liberal for that time, although women were excluded.

In May 1848 Wisconsin was admitted to the Union as the 30th state. Its first governor was Nelson Dewey, a Democrat. Contrary to expectations, statehood did not bring rapid development of transportation facilities. Despite the clamor for canals in Wisconsin, few were completed. Even after a canal was opened in 1851 at the portage of the Fox and Wisconsin rivers, the route was little used. Railroad building also proceeded slowly. Railroad promoters engaged in widespread bribery of state officials to secure railroad charters, and many charters were issued for railroads that were never built. The prohibitions on state spending for internal improvements meant the railroads had to turn elsewhere for financing. An unusual arrangement was devised, in which several thousand farmers mortgaged their land to raise funds for the earliest railroad lines. In 1857 one railroad was completed, reaching across the state from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River. Soon afterward, however, a widespread financial panic hit, resulting in the bankruptcy of all the railroad companies in Wisconsin. Farmers who had mortgaged their land to support their railroad held almost worthless pieces of paper.

To attract European immigrants to Wisconsin, the state established an office in New York City in 1852 that distributed pamphlets and placed advertisements in European and U.S. newspapers. In the next few years thousands of Europeans, the majority of them Germans, settled in Wisconsin. Some of the German immigrants were political refugees from the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848. The intellectuals of this group soon provided important leadership in Wisconsin’s political, cultural, and social development (see German Americans).

I.

The Civil War

Before the outbreak of the Civil War (1861-1865), Wisconsin opposed the extension of slavery into the Western territories. Sympathy for fugitive slaves was widespread, and in 1854 the Wisconsin Supreme Court refused to honor the Fugitive Slave Act, which Congress passed as part of the Compromise Measures of 1850, an effort to settle the disputes over slavery that were dividing the nation. There was also widespread opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would allow the extension of slavery into the Western territories. Wisconsin opponents of the bill met in Ripon in 1854 to discuss what measures to take and founded the state’s Republican Party, one of the first in the nation. The next year the Republicans won many state offices, including the governorship.

Some European immigrants in Wisconsin, especially the Germans, opposed the Civil War and the draft, since some of them had left Europe to avoid fighting for their own countries. In 1862 antidraft riots broke out in several Wisconsin counties. However, most Wisconsin communities easily raised their quotas of troops, and conscription was not widely used. Wisconsin suffered many casualties, and veterans became a political force for the remainder of the century.

J.

Postwar Economic Growth

The post-Civil War period was a time of great development and change for Wisconsin’s industry and agriculture. Of primary importance was the expansion of the state’s railroad system in these years. Rail lines increased from little more than 1,400 km (900 mi) in 1860 to 4,760 km (2,960 mi) in 1880 and more than 10,400 km (6,500 mi) by 1900. Tracks were first laid into northern Wisconsin in the 1870s.

Before this time, logging was limited to a few miles on each side of Wisconsin’s rivers, which provided the sole means of transporting the logs to mills and markets. The coming of the railroads opened up remote timberlands to exploitation and also made it possible to ship and sell timber to many parts of the country. By 1890 lumbering had become the state’s leading industry. The production of paper and wood products, particularly shingles, accompanied the growth of the lumber industry. By 1905 Wisconsin had become one of the top paper-producing states.

In the late 19th century, dairy farming gradually replaced wheat as the chief agricultural pursuit in Wisconsin. The trend away from wheat, begun during the Civil War, accelerated in the postwar years as superior wheat lands opened up in Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. The shift to dairying was encouraged by the introduction of the refrigerated railroad car, which allowed perishable products to reach a larger market. Because cheese was not highly perishable, cheese making was the first aspect of the dairy industry to be developed. Wisconsin’s dairying pioneers were mostly Scandinavian, Dutch, Swiss, and German immigrants or settlers from New York, then the nation’s leading dairy state.

As the northlands were stripped of trees, some of the cleared land was converted to farmland by new immigrants and by farmers from southern Wisconsin, where the soil was rapidly being depleted. Although the cleared land was unsuitable for growing wheat, it supported small-scale farming until nearly 1920.

Among the important industries that began in Wisconsin during the postwar years were meatpacking and tanning, natural accompaniments to livestock raising. Because it was close to the iron mines of Minnesota and Wisconsin’s Gogebic Range, Milwaukee flourished as a metalworking center and as a manufacturer of farming, dairying, and milling machinery. As industry and agriculture expanded and diversified in the 35 years after the Civil War, Wisconsin’s population more than doubled, reaching more than 2 million by 1900.

K.

The Granger Movement

As the economy became more industrialized, businesses became large and powerful. Large industries wielded great influence over the state and national governments, enjoying immunity from taxes and from regulation of their business practices. Corruption among politicians was widespread. Many citizens, especially farmers, became outraged. Among the heavy burdens facing farmers were the exorbitant and discriminatory freight rates charged by the railroads, the banks’ high interest rates, and the high prices charged by retail companies for farm supplies.

In an early attempt to bring about reform through political pressure, many Wisconsin farmers supported the national Granger Movement of the 1870s, which tried to improve the social, economic and political status of farmers. In 1873 the Wisconsin Grangers supported and helped elect Democrat William R. Taylor governor. During his administration the Potter Law and the Vance Act, the first of the so-called Granger laws in the nation, established a state railroad commission to regulate railroad practices and rates. The Taylor administration was turned out of office after only one term, however, and its reforms were soon undone.

Wisconsin suffered one of its worst natural disasters in October 1871, when a forest fire swept through its northeastern counties. The Peshtigo fire killed more than 1,000 people and damaged $5 million worth of property, beginning the same night as the great Chicago fire.

L.

La Follette and the Wisconsin Idea

For the rest of the century, many other movements campaigned for reform, including the Greenback Party and the Populist Party. But little was accomplished in Wisconsin until after 1900, when a group of political reformers known as Progressives gained control of the Republican Party. In their crusade for reform on a state and national level, the Progressives were led by Robert Marion La Follette, governor of Wisconsin from 1901 to 1906 and a U.S. senator from 1906 to 1925.

La Follette and the Progressive Republicans believed that a government should conscientiously serve its people, and they sought to restrict the power of big business when it interfered with the needs of the individual citizen. Specialists in law, economics, and several social and natural sciences, most from the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, participated in political reform in the state, helping legislators to draft laws and serving as experts on governmental commissions. This collaboration became known as the Wisconsin Idea.

During La Follette’s three terms as governor he won passage of a number of landmark reform laws. Anti-corruption and civil-service measures were passed. Direct primary elections were established, which gave voters, not conventions run by political bosses, the power to select candidates for public office. The powerful railroads came under state regulation and were made to pay their share of the state’s taxes. Later the railroad commission was given power to regulate other public utilities. Laws were also passed to help farmers form cooperatives to purchase supplies and sell their products directly.

Wisconsin continued to pass reform legislation after La Follette had left the state to serve in the U.S. Senate, especially while Francis S. McGovern was governor from 1911 to 1915. The Wisconsin legislature in 1911 created the nation’s first effective worker’s compensation program to protect workers injured on the job; passed laws to regulate factory safety and working hours for women and children; established a state income tax and state life insurance fund; and passed forest and waterpower conservation acts.

Many of these social and industrial reforms were supported by a third party, Wisconsin’s Socialists. They were led by Victor Louis Berger, who helped found the national Social Democratic Party in the late 1890s with labor leader Eugene V. Debs. It was later reorganized as the Socialist Party. With a base of support among German immigrants, the Wisconsin Socialists were most powerful in Milwaukee, winning most city and county offices in 1910. That year, Berger became the first Socialist elected to Congress, and a number of Socialists were elected to the state legislature.

La Follette took his reform campaign to a national stage in 1924, when he ran for president as the candidate of the Progressive Party. He was overwhelmingly defeated, but received more than 4.8 million votes, about 16.5 percent of the total. After his death in 1925, his family continued to play a major role in Wisconsin and national politics.

M.

World War I to the Great Depression

During the years of World War I (1914-1918), the Progressives were turned out of office by the conservative faction of the Republican Party known as the Stalwarts. Wisconsin’s new leaders, however, kept most of the Progressive reforms. During the war, high farm prices and the demand for farm goods at home and abroad encouraged farmers to cultivate many additional acres, even marginal land in cleared northern areas. Dairy production increased greatly, and Wisconsin soon surpassed New York as the nation’s leading dairy state. The war spurred the growth of the machinery, heavy equipment, and transportation industries. Shipbuilding, which had first developed with the growth of commerce on the Great Lakes, flourished in Manitowoc and Superior. Wisconsin’s industrial expansion continued unabated after the war, although the state’s large brewing industry was badly hurt by Prohibition, the national ban on alcohol that took effect in 1920.

The state’s farmers began to suffer from falling farm prices in the 1920s. Their distress became acute during the Great Depression, the national economic disaster of the 1930s. It became clear that most of the cleared northern land was better suited to trees than crops, and reforestation and rural zoning programs were adopted. Constitutional amendments passed in the 1920s permitted the state and county governments to buy land to convert to forests and parks. Nicolet and Chequamegon National Forests also were established. Industry as well as agriculture suffered severely during the Great Depression. The state’s important machine tool and machinery industries were badly hurt, and only the paper industry continued to prosper.

In 1931, when the full effects of the depression struck Wisconsin, Philip F. La Follette, a son of Robert La Follette, became governor. Under his administration, thousands of jobless Wisconsin residents were given work on road-building projects. In 1932 the legislature passed the nation’s first unemployment compensation law, which served as a model for laws later passed by other states and the federal government. La Follette’s efforts anticipated some of the programs of the New Deal, the economic strategy used by President Franklin Roosevelt (1933-1945) to combat the depression.

When the depression worsened in 1932, Wisconsin voters elected their first Democratic governor in almost 40 years, Albert G. Schmedeman, and voted overwhelmingly for Roosevelt for president. Two years later, Philip La Follette was elected governor for his second term, this time as the candidate of the newly organized Progressive Party, a coalition with farmer, labor, and Socialist groups.

His brother Robert La Follette, Jr., filled their father’s seat in the U.S. Senate from 1925 until 1946, when he was defeated in a Republican primary by Joseph R. McCarthy. At that time the Progressive Party rejoined the Republican Party, ending a long era of La Follette leadership. In the early 1950s McCarthy became the leader of a campaign against Communist influence, but he made unsubstantiated allegations and used abusive investigating tactics. He was censured by the Senate in 1954, and McCarthyism became a synonym for wild, unfounded accusations of disloyalty.

N.

Economic Development After World War II

World War II (1939-1945) stimulated the state’s economy and helped it recover from the depression. Southeastern manufacturing cities with a skilled labor force, especially Milwaukee, readily converted to war production. In the 1950s and 1960s Wisconsin continued to fare well economically as both its agriculture and industry prospered. The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 allowed some oceangoing vessels to reach state ports, but the amount of such traffic was not as large as expected.

Wisconsin’s economy began to weaken in the 1970s. Smaller markets for milk, changes in eating habits, and the costly mechanization of milk production seriously affected the dairy industry. The number of dairy farmers dropped sharply, while the size of their farms and production costs rose. The traditional family farm that had long dominated rural Wisconsin and had possessed economic, political, and social power almost disappeared.

A much sharper setback occurred in the state’s manufacturing industries, located in Milwaukee, along the Lake Michigan shore, in the Fox, Rock, Chippewa, and Wisconsin river valleys, and on the Mississippi. Workers were laid off as some businesses became more automated or changed to new processes, producing more with fewer and more highly skilled workers. Large industrial employers began to relocate to the suburbs, the southern United States, and abroad. Some major firms reduced their Wisconsin operations, and the state’s largest employer, the Allis-Chalmers Company, which built machinery, closed. Some industries survived but lost their previous prominence. Breweries, for example, had once existed in 100 of the state’s cities, and Milwaukee had been a major influence on the national market for beer. By the 1990s brewing had been reduced to one major brewery (Miller) and many microbreweries.

Although Wisconsin continued to lose manufacturing and farming jobs in the early 2000s, the state’s agricultural and manufacturing sectors benefited from a drop in the value of the dollar compared with currencies overseas. Exports of machinery and equipment rose, especially farm machinery and construction equipment, as did exports of agricultural products. The prices of grain and milk also shot up, along with the price of livestock feed. Tourism gained importance for Wisconsin’s economy. Most of the tourists came from within the state or from one of the four neighboring states.

Wisconsin suffered huge losses when the Mississippi River flooded in the summer of 1993. Hardest hit were the 47 counties declared federal disaster areas. Severe flooding again struck Wisconsin and neighboring states after heavy rains in the late spring of 2008.

O.

Postwar Political Developments

Wisconsin became a Republican state before the Civil War. After 1904 the direct primary allowed the Progressives to split the Republican Party between Progressive Republicans and Stalwarts. Progressive Republicans dominated Wisconsin politics for many years.

A resurgence of the Democratic Party began in the late 1940s, and in 1958 a Democrat, Gaylord Nelson, was elected governor, the first Democratic governor since 1932. Since then competition between the two parties has been greater than ever before in state history. In 1964, for the first time since 1892, the Democratic Party won all statewide offices and control of both houses of the legislature. In 1994 the Republicans resumed legislative control. The governor’s office has been split almost evenly between the two parties since 1959, and on the whole governors have been moderates.

In recent decades most state issues have not been clearly partisan, and most voting blocs have not been fixed. Republicans reflect the views of business and professional people and the suburbs, while the Democrats represent labor and the cities. Both have areas of strength in rural and farm areas, with Republicans stronger among the wealthier farmers, but each party needs support from unpredictable independent voters to win.

The most persistent issues, ones often crossing party lines, have involved taxes and state financial aid. Since the Progressive Era, the state had used the graduated personal and corporate income tax it pioneered in 1911 and an inheritance tax, while local government depended on property taxes. After World War II, state spending grew, requiring more revenue, and a selective state sales tax was adopted. The income and sales taxes produced enough money that the state became more generous, with a variety of state aid programs for local governments that depended largely on property taxes. By the 1980s, as local governments were pressed to expand commitments, bipartisan support grew for property tax relief. In the mid-1990s the legislature approved a measure pledging that the state would cover two-thirds of the overall cost of local education, beginning in 1997.

Starting in the Progressive Era and the 1930s, the state has had a reputation for high taxes, heavy spending, and regulation of business. Since about 1970 the trend has been reversed by efforts to hold down or reduce the cost of government; to turn over some government functions, such as auto-emission testing, to private contractors; to reduce the regulatory role of the state; and to involve the state directly in economic expansion through tax changes, subsidies, and an aggressive search for business expansion. The legislature has also expanded the concept of Cabinet government to widen the governor’s role in such economic intervention, a contrast to the state’s Progressive tradition of strong, independent state agencies. Other major issues have included welfare reform, gun control, abortion restrictions, and control of crime and drugs.

Republican Governor Tommy Thompson advocated major changes in welfare that attracted national attention. From 1987 to 1995, under Thompson’s administration, Wisconsin’s welfare rolls were cut significantly, and programs were established to link parents’ welfare grants to their children’s school attendance. In 1996 Wisconsin passed a law aimed at ending welfare and putting recipients to work. The law abolished welfare payments by late 1997 but created Wisconsin Works (W2), a system of programs to help residents find jobs and assist them with childcare, transportation, and housing. Other states looked to W2 in devising their own welfare reforms.

Wisconsin was the first state to ratify the women’s suffrage amendment to the Constitution of the United States in 1919, but women’s rise to political prominence has lagged. By the early 21st century, no woman had yet been elected governor or U.S. senator, although many women served in the state legislature, on local legislative bodies, and as mayors of smaller municipalities. Women have held major non-elective positions in state and federal service, in the universities, and as chief executives of several major Wisconsin corporations.

State higher education in the first half of the 20th century was limited to the University of Wisconsin in Madison and a system of ten state teachers colleges. The university gained a national reputation for the social and natural sciences and for two extension systems serving the public statewide. Changes beginning in 1951 led to a merger creating the University of Wisconsin system in 1971, with 13 major campuses and about 150,000 students governed by a single board of regents.

P.

Social Ferment

Urban and rural areas of Wisconsin were affected by the social ferment that began in the 1960s, inspired by the civil rights movement, protests against the Vietnam War (1959-1975), and youth rebellion. Unrest was concentrated among college-age students and on the state’s four-year college campuses, especially in Madison, which had a long history of student activism. Another focus for civil rights was in Milwaukee, which had the largest black population in the state and a high degree of segregation. Milwaukee also had growing Hispanic and Native American communities.

Desegregation efforts in Milwaukee led to two federal lawsuits. In the first, blacks alleged discriminatory treatment by Milwaukee public schools. In 1976 a federal court ordered the schools to implement a desegregation plan, and in the mid-1990s schools were still operating under the court order. The second suit was brought by the Milwaukee public schools against the surrounding suburbs, alleging blacks were denied access to the suburbs, which worsened segregation within the city. That 1987 suit was dismissed but resulted in a limited, voluntary student exchange program with the schools.

Public dissatisfaction with public schools’ performance, especially in Milwaukee, led to intervention by the state legislature in the 1990s. Business interests have strongly supported reforms, including vouchers for private schools, mandated achievement testing of students, stronger school boards, and authorization of state-funded, privately run charter schools. A parental choice program in Milwaukee gave vouchers to low-income parents, which the parents could use to send their children to private schools. The majority of the children in the choice program attended religious schools. New schools also opened with minimal government supervision; not all of them survived.

Q.

Native Americans in the 20th Century

Most native groups were forced to leave Wisconsin in the 1830s and 1840s, and most of those who remained, mainly Menominee and Ojibwa, lived on reservations established in the northern part of the state. In the 1820s a group of Oneida from New York resettled in the state, and some Winnebago returned in the 1880s after their people were relocated.

In the 20th century, the Menominee used timber resources on their reservation to become fairly prosperous and self-sufficient. But under a 1954 law federal recognition of the Menominee tribe was terminated, part of a federal policy that sought to assimilate Native Americans into white society and end their special status. Economic decline followed; by 1972 Menominee County, which included the former reservation, was the poorest in the state. The federal action was reversed in 1973, restoring the reservation.

The Wisconsin Ojibwa, living on six reservations, also struggled with poverty and unemployment. In the 1980s and 1990s they asserted rights under 19th-century treaties to hunt and spear fish on traditional lands off their reservations. These rights were upheld by federal court decisions, prompting some violent reaction from whites in reservation areas.

The most important change in Native Americans’ status came from the expansion of gambling in Wisconsin. Since statehood, Wisconsin had rejected legalized gambling, but in 1987 voters approved a state lottery to raise money for property-tax relief. The lottery expanded into multiple games and multi-state games with huge prizes, then opened up other gambling avenues. Gaming compacts allowed Native Americans to operate casinos, and some have been highly profitable, especially in Milwaukee and Wisconsin Dells and near Green Bay. Restricted to high-stakes bingo, slot machines, and video poker, these casinos have brought unprecedented prosperity to some native groups, providing jobs and money for education, health, and cultural programs. This economic boom, however, has not been shared by all of the state’s Native American residents.