Politics

John Hidinger (Sep 11, 1839 — May 7, 1883). Photo 1864.

Sometimes mom talked about her grandfather's being in the Civil War and how he was captured and spent time in Confederate prisons. It was fascinating, especially considering that she was born and raised in Saskatchewan and was a naturalized American citizen. Her American roots are deep, going back to the founding of New Haven, Connecticut in the 1630s, but all that turned up later. Her grandfather John Hidinger was from Iowa, though born in Saxony and coming to the United States as a boy (the name was probably Heidinger in the old country). Imagine my surprise when rooting through the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society to find that he served with the 8^th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, the Eagle Regiment, so denoted because of their mascot, the eagle Old Abe, a sensation who occupied the Wisconsin state capitol for many years after the war, and whose replica overlooks the Wisconsin Assembly to this day. It tickled me as an anti-war protester on the University of Wisconsin campus circa 1970, because the right-wingers in the legislature would always call us out-of-town agitators. More like coming home I often thought when passing the Civil War cannon at Camp Randall where great-grandfather Hidinger trained, now a little park on the UW campus.

Robert E. Lee Moore (1882-1974)

It's a statement when someone names their child after Robert E. Lee, a man who did his best to destroy the United States in order to preserve slavery. Robert E. Lee was lionized more in death than in life, a paragon of the Lost Cause, the glorious if doomed rebellion of a brave people who wanted nothing but to be left alone, crushed by the soulless and brutal industrial juggernaut (Sherman's march to the Sea!). It's the big lie, forwarded for 150 years to defend the indefensible. What a wretched history of oppression, assiduously rebuilt over the generations by people like Moore, Sr. and his illustrious and vicious son Robert E. Lee Moore. The Compromise of 1877, peonage, disenfranchisement, lynching, Plessy v. Ferguson, Jim Crow, the Dunning school false flag on reconstruction. Read the old classics by W. E. B. Du Bois, Eric Foner, and C. Vann Woodward (himself a son of the south), among others, if you still doubt the long-standing construction and reconstruction of anti-black racism in this country down through the generations since 1865.

State Journal front page — Sep 4, 1952.

Scott Milfred is out the other day with Newspaper has stood for public good — for 175 years, meaning the paper he is the editorial page editor of, the Wisconsin State Journal. These folks seem to realize they are almost down for the count and are scurrying around trying to justify themselves and their often baleful enterprise before the final round. Milfred has a taste for authoritarianism (centrist authoritarianism though, no worries), so perhaps it's no surprise to see him taking liberties on the subject of Joe McCarthy and the State Journal — not a 100% supporter!

It is almost beyond belief reading of the antics of the late Senator from Wisconsin, how he cowed the press and political elite, becoming virtual co-president of the republic. Criticize Ted Cruz all you want, he is a statesman compared to McCarthy, a drunken buffoon and known as such by anyone who had ever been in the same room with him. I recommend Richard Rovere's timeless account^[1], written shortly after the fact. Rovere calls McCarthy a gifted demagogue in the first sentence and follows with "no bolder seditionist ever moved among us — nor any politician with a surer, swifter access to the dark places of the American mind."

The predecessor of the Wisconsin State Journal was founded in Madison in 1839 when Wisconsin was a rude territory, and as Whigs they endorsed William Henry Harrison in 1840 - Wikipedia has a great write-up on this paper over the years. The State Journal played a heroic role as anti-slavery crusaders in the Glover case in Milwaukee in 1854, helping to defy the Fugitive Slave Act and spring recaptured slave Joshua Glover from jail (I remember reading about it circa 1970 in Eric Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men and feeling oddly proud of my hometown paper). Like many Whigs, including Abraham Lincoln, they became Republicans and duly endorsed the Great Emancipator. They became a progressive and even muckraking organ in the period 1890-1916. Since then they've been a reliable right ring mouthpiece, recent timid attempts to transcend that heritage notwithstanding. They were virulent jingoists in the First World War, scurrilously attacking Fighting Bob La Follette. They were shameful McCarthyites from the get-go, endorsing him in every one of his state-wide campaigns, including the first run for Senate in 1944, when they were one of four papers to do so and the only one outside the Appleton area. They broke their workers' strike in 1977 (I was on the board of the strikers' paper, the Press Connection).