On my first night in Madison I asked my host to describe the situation at the Capitol building. “Saturday was huge,” she said. “Since then the protests have been smaller, but they’re definitely continuing. On Sunday they cleared the top levels of the rotunda, and today they restricted access to the building. Do you drink?”
Yes, of this I am capable, but how did the authorities get the demonstrators to vacate?
“They told the people who’d been camping out on the ground level to wait upstairs while the janitors cleaned the floor. When they finished they told everyone upstairs to wait on the ground level while they cleaned the second and third levels. Then they wouldn’t let anyone go back upstairs.”
This was all in accordance with the Governor’s “boa constrictor” strategy of gradually killing off opposition to his budget bill through a campaign of steady demoralization. Visible resistance to Walker’s plan began almost as soon as he formally unveiled it on February 11th, attracting enormous protests within a matter of days and inspiring hundreds to camp out inside the Capitol building. In retaliation Joe the Plumber was brought in to lead a counter-demonstration, but his 4,000-strong idiot brigade was quickly laughed out of town by over 65,000 supporters of labor rallying on the same day. Soon the most prominent resistance website was temporarily shutdown in suspicious circumstances, followed by a lame “fireside chat” by the Governor where he claimed that his bill wasn’t “aimed at state workers.”
My host, Betty, had agreed to let me use her apartment as a base of operations for a few days before she headed out of town later in the week. She studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin, where her roommates also attended, and was happy to shelter someone observing developments in Madison as closely as she. Though swamped with class work, her roommate Wilma evidently was not, offering to accompany me to the supermarket now that my bags had been safely deposited.
“You can’t buy alcohol at the store after 9pm here,” she informed me. “After that you have to go to a bar or a restaurant.”
“Absurd,” I said. “What about beer?”
“Beer, wine, you can’t get anything…”
Wisconsin’s history is as intertwined with alcohol as any other state in the union, from its earliest French traders swapping moonshine for exotic pelts from the natives, to later German settlers celebrating their conquest of nature by guzzling beer in grand halls where fun could be efficiently synchronized. When Prohibition plunged America into darkness in the 20th Century, Wisconsin responded by producing a senator, John J. Blaine, who wrote the 21st Amendment to the US Constitution repealing the ban. Today the state boasts the highest rate of binge drinking in the country while the powerful Tavern League of Wisconsin converts the dollars of its patrons into lobbying muscle to maintain the 9pm deadline.
Without the option of buying a courtesy six-pack for the house, I returned with a large bag of carrots to eat for breakfast throughout the week. The girls forced some wine on me and told the epic tale of Wisconsin’s natural history, though not being much of a geologist to speak of I retained little of what was told. Apparently thousands of years ago malicious glaciers invaded from their icy home world of pre-Canadian Canada, ravaging the land before finally melting into lakes. Somehow this process made the northern part of the state flat and the southern part hillier, influencing soil conditions and mineral deposits, and by extension, future human settlement.
In all, a saga worth remembering but mostly lost in the noise of competing anecdotes. One roommate’s father was a Midwest meat kingpin. Arby’s and Tacobell are even worse than McDonald’s, she insisted, and the contents of a hotdog include things which shouldn’t be mentioned in mixed company. Another roommate said that small amounts of pot were legal in the city. Ordinance 23.20, passed in 1977, permits the individual possession of up to 28 grams of marijuana in a private place. And proud was everyone of the German-style beer hall in the heart of the University campus.
Yet the University of Wisconsin-Madison should be celebrated for more than just its swill. As one of the original land-grant colleges of the nineteenth century, it was built by the early Republican Party when the elite universities of the East Coast proved incapable of teaching anything beyond British-inspired “free trade” economics. In those days Republicans didn’t take kindly to Ivy League anglophiles pontificating on the wonders of letting England manufacture everything while America remained an undeveloped backwater, so they bypassed the crackpot establishment and founded a national system of colleges that provided the technical training necessary for making the United States a self-sufficient economy. Smelling anti-American socialism, Scott Walker targeted the UW-M in his 2011 budget with over $100 million in cuts and plans to remove the institution from the state university system entirely.
I asked what the layout of the city was in relation to the University, and Betty obliged with answers: “The University is on the west side, where the students live; the Capitol is in the middle, on the isthmus between Lake Monona to the south and Lake Mendota to the north; and the hippies live in the east. Further east is the ghetto.”
Ghetto? Nobody I talked to during my stay seemed to know much about this fabled slum, except to say that was where Spanish-speaking immigrants tended to live, concentrated in a city with an 84% white population. The lack of diversity wasn’t entirely surprising for an inland state like Wisconsin, but for those of us who eat hot sauce and add food to it as a secondary consideration, the dominance of northern European cuisine in this fair city was noticeable.
Yet the kind of food on hand was largely irrelevant in any case, as without sleep I tend to eat little. Over the next few days I failed to drift off for more than a few hours a night, a rough situation compounded by the brutal fact that I had only slept an hour the evening before I flew to Wisconsin. Maintaining optimal health was essential to my mission, especially if I were to get anywhere near the deeper pulse of the town. Any true analyst of social ferment will tell you the action is where strangers mingle, and here that was clearly at the bar over pints or at the Capitol waving pitchforks. I would need my strength to participate much in either.
The show had to go on, and I dragged myself out of the living room and into the wild streets of Madison every brisk morning. My hosts were exceptional in their graciousness but had one incontestable rule: vacate the apartment when they weren’t around. This was perfectly understandable, for not every blurry-eyed young male claiming to be a free-lance writer is trustworthy. The possibility of a guest inviting a dozen anonymous low-lives into the house to whip up some crank while they were away was very real, and one they did well not to disregard. As it turned out I had no mischievous designs of any sort to unleash, but in my fealty to their will was never able to sleep-in long enough to become fully rested.
After showering, dressing, and stuffing my sleeping bag into my backpack, the typical morning would consist of me dashing out of the house with a handful of carrots up West Washington Avenue to the Capitol. Most people who eat in the morning are in the habit of easing their stomachs awake with soft food—eggs, oats, hash browns, yogurt, etc—but after years of experience I can say with certainty that when time is of the essence, nothing calibrates a freshly wakened body like raw plant matter. No wave of lethargy creeps up as would follow a meal laden with protein, and with history unfolding quickly, I could ill-afford to be sluggish.
The day before I arrived the internet hacking group “Anonymous” launched a cyber attack against Americans for Prosperity, a right-wing propaganda organ created and funded by the same billionaire Koch brothers who bankrolled Scott Walker’s run for Governor. The AFP website was brought down for about a day in a coordinated denial of service attack, a tactic which drew attention to the power behind Walker’s throne but risked derailing the carefully crafted narrative of reasonable workers versus ruthless Republicans. If the Wisconsin story turned into one of left-wing hooligans battling the forces of Law and Order, then the attack could play right into the Governor’s hands. In any case the blip in the headlines generated by Anonymous’ stunt lasted only about a day, and the pro-labor forces active in Madison were too preoccupied with maintaining a physical presence in and around the State Capitol to seem to notice.
The strategy of the demonstrators was one of extreme maturity, and obviously influenced by recent events in Egypt. When government thugs proved incapable of driving pro-democracy crowds out of downtown Cairo, aging dictator Hosni Mubarak sent in the army to clear Tahrir Square, only to have the protesters win over the military’s rank-in-file by publicly thanking them for their “protection.” Likewise, the demonstrators in Madison chanted “thank you, thank you” whenever the police were mentioned, a technique that kept the authorities reluctant to break the skulls of the assembled rabble.
That the crowd was largely middle-aged workers—firefighters in their gear, janitors holding up mops, and others with signs stating their trade union affiliation—made it especially difficult to bait the protesters as “useless hippies” who deserved to be taught a lesson. It would be easy to sneer at angry students waving signs about “revolution this” or “imperialism that,” but much trickier when the people look a lot like yourself and are simply demanding the same bargaining rights you enjoy as a cop. The demonstrations at the Capitol were entirely on-message, with nary an irrelevant pet issue being promoted or fringe political sect trying to hijack the spotlight.
Eyes were firmly set on the prize: remove the anti-union provision from the budget bill. While most everyone agreed that the entire bill stunk like burning garbage, they knew the fourteen Democratic senators obstructing its passage could only hold out if their demands were minimal. An awful budget was inevitably going to pass, complete with sell-offs of public resources and deep cuts to popular programs. Stripping public employees of their rights, however, obviously had nothing to do with the budget and would be a tough sell in the court of public opinion. The longer the “Fab 14” remained in hiding, the more voters across the state and country would become aware of Governor Walker’s true nature as a mean-spirited ideologue, and the less viable his career and the position of the entire Wisconsin Republican Party would become.
Walker’s big State Budget Address was to be delivered inside the Capitol on Tuesday at 4pm. In response to the heavy restrictions on visitors put in place on Sunday, Dane County Judge Daniel Moeser issued a temporary restraining order to open the Capitol on Tuesday. The Department of Administration, headed by Walker-appointee Mike Huebsch, countered this by simply claiming that the building was indeed “open” and had been all along. The lock-down continued, enforced so rigorously that a team of firefighters was denied entry when trying to respond to an emergency call. Eventually they were allowed in, rescuing a policeman stuck in an elevator. Meanwhile, a handful of frustrated Democrats moved their desks outside to meet with their constituents in the snow. When it became apparent that the building was going to remain closed no matter what, County Sheriff Dave Mahoney withdrew his deputies in disgust, saying they weren’t there to be a “palace guard.”
Walker seemed a little bit nervous when making his speech, like he was afraid the whole chamber would start booing and chase him out of the room, but he soldiered on and unveiled his strange vision anyway. Healthcare spending was to be gutted while money was to be pumped into a new statewide agency with the power to award subsidies to businesses. Breaking teachers’ unions was going to give school districts greater “flexibility” over their budgets at the same time local tax rates were to be “locked-in” at a fixed rate. He also kept referring to his anti-union budget provision repeatedly as a “tool,” which I suppose is accurate in the same way that a set of brass knuckles is also a “tool.”
The hard core of the protesters who never left the Capitol rotunda chanted and banged away on plastic buckets while the speech went on in the other room, trying to make as much ruckus as possible to remind the Republican legislators that they couldn’t hide from the public completely. Outside, where I was embedded with an angry mob of several thousand, the crowd kept chanting “Let us in! Let us in!” and pounded on the doors of the building for about an hour. After a while a young woman came out and said “They can hear you inside! Keep it up!” Finally the crowd marched around the building to its various entrances, leaving hundreds of hand-scrawled messages on post-it notes denouncing Walker.
The energy of these people cannot be overstated. Events were planned for every day of the week, and in the long hours before and after the scheduled protests, about a hundred people remained assembled at the east end of the Capitol. At any given time small clusters of union supporters were walking around town, holding their signs up to their chests in a deliberate way so that onlookers could read them. I overheard a man saying to his friend “I’ve been driving into town to help for a couple of hours every day since this thing started” while an elderly woman in a wheelchair had a sign in her lap reading “96 years old and angry enough to protest.”
I dropped into an Irish pub adjacent to the Capitol Square one afternoon and found myself in a nest of thick-necked union guys talking about the situation over beer, their signs propped up against the bar. A couple of large semis brought in by the Teamsters were parked down the block, where two surly-looking truck drivers stood waving at traffic. The pro-labor people had dramatically altered their daily routines to participate in something profoundly meaningful, and the shared sense of justice with which total strangers had come together was of a warmth and authenticity more persuasive than all of the flimsy counter-arguments desperately pushed by the Governor.
In contrast to the prevailing spirit of popular optimism, on Wednesday the Republican Senate passed a resolution fining the missing Democratic senators $100 each day until they returned. It was a petty move, reinforcing the Republicans’ image as a gang of vicious bullies. The following day they turned it up a notch and voted to hold the Democrats “in contempt of the Senate” if they didn’t return by 4pm, directing the Senate’s Sergeant-at-Arms to take “any necessary step” to retrieve them, including using the state police force.
This tantrum coincided with another attempt to kick the last of the protesters out of the Capitol. On Thursday the police claimed to have found “live ammunition” scattered outside the building, and state attorneys arguing before Dane County Judge John Albert said the protesters inside should be ejected as part of a “security sweep.” The Department of Administration also told the court that it would cost $7.5 million to repair the damage caused by the demonstrators, a number later revised down to $350,000 and made largely moot by the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades District Council 7’s offer to fix any damage for free.
I managed to get inside the rotunda on Thursday before any ruling was reached. Throughout the week, visitors could only enter as others left, thus regulating the number of protestors in the building at a constant low level. I stood in line for about half an hour while some guy calling himself the “King of the Hobos” addressed the nearby crowd at the east end of the building. A Don Imus look-alike in a black cowboy hat with a guitar got inside just before I did, where we both went through a security checkpoint about two degrees less invasive than the screening process at an airport. The cops bent over backwards to be as friendly to us as possible, perhaps in part because off-duty police were among the visitors.
Signs were taped up everywhere, on the walls and pillars of the ground floor and dangling from the balconies up above. One of the most prominent was a white bed sheet with the words “TAX THE RICH” painted on it, while other posters promoted specific trade unions or simply listed what Republican campaign contributors to boycott. An “Information Center” was handing out pamphlets and a long desk was loaded with free food. I grabbed a piece of pie but was quickly scowled at by a young woman who ambushed me with as accusatory a “hi” as one can imagine. The pie had a strange Nutella-esque filling but looked pretty lonely so I ate it anyway and continued my tour.
The whole scene was multi-generational, but a hippie vanguard of a couple dozen college-aged kids were the most active, hanging out in the center of the floor making signs and constantly beating on plastic buckets. The Don Imus guy from earlier thankfully interrupted them with a political song on his guitar, a simple melody that I’m sure the security people appreciated for its lack of percussion. When he finished everyone started chanting “Kill the bill! Kill the bill!” and the plastic bucket ensemble resumed. A never-ending drum circle is as harsh a weapon as they come, but if there was ever an appropriate time and place for one to be deployed, it was surely in that rotunda, targeting that legislature, in the arduous winter of 2011.
After about a half an hour I had reached my limit and fled the premises. The New Orleans-style “Funeral March for Wisconsin" that was about to begin struck me as much more palatable, with infinitely better music. Several thousand people gathered at the University, mostly dressed in black and many carrying coffins, and proceeded to march up State Street to the steps of the Capitol. I embedded once again, right behind the brass band, and took note of the workers cheering from rooftops as we passed. There was only one negative reaction I could find anywhere, an angry college student yelling at us from his second-story apartment. No one seemed to notice him as his shouting was drowned out by the chanting and music. He tried to lean out his window but was too dumb to figure out how to remove the screen, frantically clawing at it to no avail and bending its metal frame in the process.
We finally got to the west entrance of the Capitol and listened to some guy in a black top hat deliver a eulogy for Wisconsin. Two enterprising protesters dressed as alpine demons climbed up on lamp posts behind him, blowing ram horns and staring over everyone like a couple of gargoyles. During a subsequent speech one of the doors to the building suddenly swung open, and a grinning woman leaned out to beckon people inside. Scores of demonstrators bum-rushed the entrance, but after a few minutes and much confusion, it was solemnly announced that some medical assistance was needed indoors, and no, it was probably not a good idea to physically storm the building.
While all of this was going on, Judge John Albert finally made his ruling. Stating the unions “need to be commended for their conduct [in] the largest expression of free speech...in the history of our state,” he ordered all restrictions on visitors to the Capitol to be lifted by 8am Monday. However, he said the protesters had to be out after closing time, 6pm that night, and further sleepovers were prohibited. The protesters complied and declared victory, ending their seventeen-day occupation of the State Capitol.
In an ominous twist, when Democratic Representative Nick Milroy tried to enter the building that evening, a security guard wasted no time tackling him to the ground. The whole episode was recorded on camera by a local ABC affiliate and ended with Milroy’s shoe coming off and him angrily waving his ID at the officer. It was an unsettling note on which to end that phase of the continuing conflict, as if to serve as a stern reminder of just who was really in charge. While the people of Madison had their unity and principles to guide them to victory, Scott Walker still had the machinery of government to block them. With no end in sight to the unfolding drama, I hoped for the best, but braced myself for the worst.
