What Would Bascom Do? On J. David Hoeveler’s “John Bascom and the Origins of the Wisconsin Idea”

J. David Hoeveler | John Bascom and the Origins of the Wisconsin Idea | University of Wisconsin Press | 2017 | 248 Pages

In 2015, when I was a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, the bête noire of my professors, Governor Scott Walker, covertly attempted to revise, in his two-thousand-page budget proposal, something known as the Wisconsin Idea. The Wisconsin Idea has many interpretations, but chiefly it remains a commitment to academic freedom and shared governance, and a mandate that research activity at Wisconsin’s state universities seek the pursuit of truth and benefit the communities that the universities reside within. Taking what could only have been a comically large pink eraser to this century-old guiding principle of the University of Wisconsin System, his proposal excised the lofty mission to seek knowledge and truth not only within classrooms but beyond the university, replacing it with bland, sterile language about meeting the state’s workforce needs.

The state caught on and took Walker to task for abandoning what Madison’s Capital Times described as “one of the longest and deepest traditions surrounding the University of Wisconsin.” Walker had hit his head on the metaphorical cabinet door once more, claiming that the pointed, precise changes were the result of a drafting error.  Then Walker’s administration kept the budget proceedings under wraps until a lawsuit by the Center for American Progress and The Progressive forced them into the light, where it became clear that Walker was giving Wisconsinites what Walker gave Wisconsinites best: bald-faced lies.

So why did Wisconsinites make such hay over Walker’s proposal to change some minor budgetary language? As the Capital Times pointed out, erudite Wisconsinites love the Wisconsin Idea perhaps more than beer, brats, cheese, and the Green Bay Packers. Yet, when one examines the University of Wisconsin System’s guiding philosophy, its exact origins seem to be shrouded in myth. Enter J. David Hoeveler, an emeritus history professor from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and his 2016 book, John Bascom and the Origins of the Wisconsin Idea.

In the course of writing this work, Hoeveler expanded greatly on two of his articles, one from 1976 on the Social Gospel, a strain of progressive Protestantism, and another piece from 2010 on John Bascom himself. An intellectual and religious historian by trade, Hoeveler’s goal in the book is to assess Bascom’s direct and indirect philosophical contributions to the Wisconsin Idea and chart the influence of Bascom’s thought on two of his most famous pupils, Charles R. Van Hise, who became the most famous articulator of the Wisconsin Idea as the University of Wisconsin’s president, and Robert M. La Follette, the famed Progressive politician.

Hoeveler’s book is an impressive piece of research, combining in-depth readings of Bascom’s writings with extensive secondary literature stretching from Kantian philosophy to Temperance movements and, of course, the history of the University of Wisconsin. Unfortunately, however, Hoeveler set himself up for the Herculean task of providing what appears to be the first comprehensive biography of Bascom and drawing his formative connections to what became the Wisconsin Idea. The result is a rather dense two-hundred-odd pages wherein Hoeveler’s interventions, interpretations, and intentions are often unclear. Beyond this, Hoeveler’s engagement with the (admittedly small) literature on the origins of the Wisconsin Idea is sorely lacking. What is more, his broader historical observations frequently lack the evidentiary backing required to paint large movements and periods in American history with broad brushstrokes.

To guard against these issues, readers may fruitfully separate Hoeveler’s book into two sections, one that proceeds chronologically and the other thematically. The first five chapters detail Bascom’s youth and his formative years at Williams College and Andover Theological Seminary in the late 1840s and early 1850s, where, as Hoeveler argues, he was first exposed to the force of liberal Protestant theology. That theology would eventually shape Bascom’s progressive views on slavery, women, and labor. Perhaps the most compelling part of Hoeveler’s narrative comes from this section of the book, where Hoeveler details Bascom’s role as a constant presence at the University of Wisconsin in the 1870s, a time when large state universities underwent protracted change on a vast scale. “Bascom believed,” writes Hoeveler, “that the state universities served as harmonizing agencies in a United States where diversity—ethnic, religious, and more increasingly social class—challenged its national identity as never before.”

The latter parts of Hoeveler’s book focus on the political events that shaped Bascom’s tenure as president of the University of Wisconsin between 1874 and 1887, or as Hoeveler demarcates it, between his first sermon upon arrival which addressed religion, to his final sermon before his departure, which attended to the social issues wrought by the Gilded Age. In these later chapters, Hoeveler has a more thematic focus, addressing the issues of temperance, women’s equality, and labor. In these chapters, however, Hoeveler’s interpretations of 19th-century temperance movements and the Gilded Age rest on shaky historical ground.

In his explanation of temperance, for example, Hoeveler somewhat sanitizes it by citing a single work, Ian Tyrrell’s Sobering Up, which he summarizes as arguing against the fundamental interpretation of temperance movements as conservative, primarily divided along urban and rural lines, and intimately linked to nativism. (In the spirit of transparency, I was unable to evaluate Tyrrell’s book due to the constraints of the current public health crisis.) Of course, support for temperance was not monolithic. Still, nativism remained intimately linked with the cause due to Hoeveler’s aforementioned wide-ranging demographic shifts.

Here Tyrrell is at odds with sociologists like Joseph R. Gusfield, whose Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement counters Tyrrell’s assertion that temperance activists typically did not “[look] back nostalgically to a former era.” Instead, Gusfield argues that they were interested in preserving or defending the prestige of their lifestyle in the face of threats from outgroups with a different lifestyle. Hoeveler’s interpretation of the Gilded Age, which follows soon after, is even more questionable. He brushes aside the “politically liberal perspective of most historians who have written about it,” telling the reader that he does (and thinks readers should) “concede all the moral judgments about this era, the race issue especially, and yet try to see the era on its own terms, indeed even enjoy the whole gaudy show.” I’ve read enough Herbert Butterfield and von Ranke to know that “how it really was” has its limits.

By the time Hoeveler reaches the end of Bascom’s tenure at Wisconsin, the story has unwound. Added into the mix are Van Hise, La Follette, John R. Commons, and Richard T. Ely, all prominent Progressive voices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We see their actions but lose the sense of connection to Bascom. We learn of Ely’s persecutions for alleged radicalism (more serious than the politics that Hoeveler alleges forced Bascom out) that led to the famous Board of Regents “sifting and winnowing” declaration of academic freedom. Still, we see no materialization of his intervention in the literature surrounding the origins of the Wisconsin Idea, particularly Charles McCarthy’s The Wisconsin Idea from 1912 and Jack Stark’s “The Wisconsin Idea: The University’s Service to the State” from the 1995-1996 Wisconsin Blue Book, which comments on Hoeveler’s writing from the 1970s:

Hoeveler's evidence about Bascom is somewhat impressive, but there is another side to both Bascom's philosophy and his influence on La Follette. In regard to his philosophy, to make an absolutely convincing case that Bascom was important to the Wisconsin Idea one would need to add two more links to the chain. One link would connect Bascom's Social Gospel background to an educational philosophy that fits with the Idea, and another link would connect that background to a conception of the state that would fit with that Idea.

Stark and I have similar conclusions regarding Hoeveler’s writing, which seems to have changed little from 1976 to 2016. Where Stark believes Hoeveler “overstated his case,” particularly regarding Bascom’s direct influence on the Wisconsin Idea, I contend that Hoeveler has unnecessarily complicated the picture by combining erudite, detailed accounts of Bascom’s life and writing with less-expertly organized narrative directions and character emplotments. There is value in his portrait of Bascom, which appears to be the first of its kind. But readers looking for a complete picture of the fabled Wisconsin Idea would do better to read Hoeveler’s articles or Jack Clark’s entry in the Blue Book. By sifting and winnowing, much like the University of Wisconsin System that brought me to where I am today, readers will arrive at the truth.