The Wisconsin Idea
A strong vein of progressivism ran through Wisconsin, the university at its heart. Credited originally to UW president John Bascom (1874-1887), the “Wisconsin Idea” forms a central tenet in the state's political history:
The essence of Bascom's teaching and of the Wisconsin Idea was simply but emphatically expressed in the belief that government had an affirmative obligation to promote the well-being of its citizens, and that the University had an equally affirmative obligation to serve the state in helping to achieve that objective. |
The increasing spirit in Wisconsin demanded that the university should serve the state and all of its people and that it should be an institution for all the people within the state and not merely for the few who could send their sons and daughters to Madison. |
This philosophy burgeoned through the work of alumnus like “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, John Commons, and Edwin Witte. The resulting laws placed Wisconsin on the cutting-edge of social insurance and labor legislation in the early Progressive Era, earning it the nickname “the laboratory for democracy”.
[Wisconsin] has become literally a laboratory for wise experimental legislation aiming to secure the social and political betterment of the people as a whole... In that state there has been a successful effort to redeem the promises by performances, and to reduce theories into practice.
- Former President Theodore Roosevelt, 1912
A product of Commons' school of Institutional Economics, Edwin devoted his life to using economics for the betterment of the human condition through public institutions.
He was an optimist and he believed in 'progress.' He saw social and economic institutions in a continual process of change.
- Wilbur J. Cohen, student and friend of Witte
For Witte, Wisconsin's progressivism came to mean, as a practical matter, government for the protection and welfare of the common man, especially to the industrial laborer; and personal devotion to public affairs, according to the "Wisconsin Idea" of the intellectual committed to the service of the state.
- Theron Schlabach, Cautious Reformer