A right-wing effort to rewrite Wisconsin history to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the re-call.
"In today’s Wisconsin, even history is no longer safe from right-wing spin. Hoping to peel off a small but potentially decisive slice of voters, Governor Scott Walker and his well-funded conservative backers have sought to rewrite history to discredit the concept of recall itself. They even have the audacity to cite “Fighting Bob” La Follette, the father of the progressive movement in Wisconsin, as an authority against the recall of Scott Walker. This is the “say anything” school of public relations taken to a shocking extreme.
The Wisconsin Public Policy Research Institute (WPRI), the Bradley Foundation funded right-wing advocacy group, is seeking to give intellectual legitimacy to this counterfactual position, dedicating an entire edition of its monthly magazine to a history of the recall in Wisconsin, and placing an OPED in leading newspapers. In the introduction to the magazine issue the organization’s president, George Lightbourn, explains that WPRI decided to send “our resident history buff,” Christian Schneider, to spend a few “days digging through the archives.”
As a trained scholar myself who spent 5 years in a cubicle at the Wisconsin State Historical Society Library researching my own book on the Progressive Era, I am stunned that WPRI thinks that one can deeply understand the historical context of anything by spending a couple of days in the library. In many ways, this is the difference between conservatives and progressives. Conservative “think tanks” grab anything they can use to promote their preconceived ideology, where progressives believe that the acquisition of knowledge can deepen our understanding of a complex world.
Given the high stakes of getting the history right before voters participate in the historic recall of Governor Walker, I asked one of the leading historians of Progressive Era Wisconsin, Professor John Buenker, to analyze the WPRI’s supposed history of the recall. Buenker is the author of a definitive history of the period, The History of Wisconsin: The Progressive Era, 1893-1914 and the 1911-1912 Wisconsin Blue Book feature article “Progressivism Triumphant: The 1911 Wisconsin Legislature.” Professor Buenker spent 15 years researching his book on the Wisconsin Progressive Era, and therefore has a deep understanding of the historical context which produced the recall amendment.http://citizenactionwi.org/economic-development/the-real-history-of-recall-in-wi.html