While much attention has been given of late to the reappearance of Indiana Jones and the Ghostbusters crew, there`s a sequel playing here that promises to have an even longer run.
Call it ”The Return of the Radical” or, as his detractors of earlier days might prefer, ”Rabblerouser II.”
Its star is Paul Soglin, who grew up in Chicago and Highland Park and again is mayor of Madison after a self-imposed 10-year exile from politics.
Now 44, Soglin is the former student antiwar activist at the University of Wisconsin who was elected a Madison alderman in 1968 and then mayor five years later, causing considerable consternation and delight throughout the country. Among the delighted was the national press, who converged in great numbers on Madison to interview the new chief executive. It wasn`t every day that a campus protestor was in charge of the same city whose police had tear- gassed, beaten and arrested him.
One of those occasions was in 1967, while he was leading a demonstration against Dow Chemical Co., the manufacturer of napalm. Terri Schultz, a classmate, wrote in a magazine article of observing ”Soglin huddled under a coat” as ”police hit and kicked him.”
In addition to being big news, Soglin was good copy. He was brash, smart and witty, and he did some politically outrageous things, such as traveling twice to Cuba and, during one visit, presenting Fidel Castro with the key to Madison, which Castro has yet to use.
Soglin was also effective enough as a leader and administrator to have been reelected twice before leaving politics for the practice of law. The achievements to which he points with pride include strengthening the bus system, dedicating a new Civic Center and revitalizing the downtown area.
This spring after deciding to come back-”I didn`t like the way my city was being run,” he says, still brash after all these years-he defeated the incumbent mayor, Joseph Sensenbrenner, by a wide margin in a race described by Soglin as a contest between two liberal Democrats over who was more competent and offered the sharper vision of the future.
Except for a few differences primarily caused by the passage of time, today`s Soglin is much the same as he was a decade ago.
His thick, dark hair, for instance, isn`t as long as when he was in office during the `60s and `70s; his mustache, too, is trimmed more conservatively, no longer curling downward as rakishly as it once did; and middle age being what it is, he`s heavier in the paunch.
Yet there have been some important changes. Soglin was divorced when he left office in 1979, and at that time an article in The Tribune`s Sunday magazine noted: ”Eight years out of college, Paul Soglin has no wife, no children, no job, no responsibilities and lots of options. Maybe he`s still a slight bit radical after all.”
Soglin has since remarried and has two daughters, 4 and 2, with a third child on the way.
He thinks of himself as a pragmatic politician more than a radical, but he`s still good copy. The local reporters who cover him regularly still find him abrupt, sardonic, savvy, a think-out-loud, no-nonsense kind of politician, which is unusual for a lot of the people in this line of work, although maybe not so much in this town.
For many people, Soglin`s elections, then and now, bolster Madison`s reputation as a hotbed of what these days are regarded by many to be political undesirables, namely liberals and radicals.
If Madison is widely perceived as leaning farther left than other American cities, it`s probably because there`s a basis for this perception.
While there has been no move by the Bush administration to consider some type of quarantine, Madison really is-and has been for quite some time-pretty much a hotbed of liberals and radicals.
This is not to say everybody in town is a leftist, but it`s hard to ignore the last three presidential elections. Bucking state and national trends, Madison voted Jimmy Carter in `80, Walter Mondale in `84 and Michael Dukakis a year ago.
These left-of-center tendencies are a tradition, and most agree that the most significant factors have been the University of Wisconsin and the heritage of Robert LaFollette, a Wisconsin graduate who became a fierce Republican reformer, serving as governor of Wisconsin and U.S. senator and leading the national progressive movement in the first quarter of this century.
Perhaps the last liberal to do poorly in Madison was Abraham Lincoln, who lost the city in both of his presidential races.
It`s likely that Madison`s political image often overshadows its other qualities, chief among them its scenic beauty.
The city, shaped like a barbell, embraces four large lakes, its downtown built on a narrow strip of land between Lake Mendota on the north and Lake Monona on the south; most of the residential areas lie in what would be the barbell`s weighted ends.
The southern shoreline of Lake Mendota also forms a border of the university campus to the west and at one point laps at the sprawling patio behind the Student Union.
On the top of a hill at the center of the downtown isthmus is the state capitol, a handsome domed edifice of limestone and marble modeled on the national capitol in Washington.
`Competent liberals`
Soglin, seated in his office on the fourth floor of Madison`s City Hall on a recent weekday, resists the city`s political stereotype.
”Madison`s not as liberal as people think it is,” he says. ”I`d say it`s about a third liberal, a third conservative and a third nonideological. What the third group wants is good, clean, innovative government.
”What Madison has managed to do over a period of years, perhaps because of the presence of the university, is produce a lot of competent liberals.”
Such as? ”Such as all the people who have been in the state legislature from this area in the last 15 years and such as our congressman (U.S. Rep. Robert W. Kastenmeier).”
Soglin says he is far more preoccupied with tackling the same sort of problems he faced the first time around than he is with political philosophy or the types of global issues that engaged him as a student.
Indeed his ”Vietnam” as mayor is urban sprawl, the centrifugal forces pulling new development away from the center of a city to its outskirts.
”I want to provide incentives for people to develop in the downtown area so they won`t go to the edge of the city,” he says. ”But it`s hard. The land on the edge of a city is cheaper, the construction costs are cheaper. You don`t need high-speed elevators or, for that matter, you don`t need as many elevators.”
At present, he says, he`s trying to persuade AT&T to locate its offices downtown, which reminds him of a phone call he has to make to an AT&T official. ”Stick around,” he says. ”You can listen to the mayor in action.”
As he waits for the call to go through, he`s asked if he would encourage Dow Chemical, for example, to move its headquarters here.
He pauses. ”Jeez,” he says. ”If they`d like to be, I suppose we could find a spot for them.”
Spontaneous fun
Maybe he hasn`t been back long enough for his office to reflect his personality or maybe he isn`t much for interior decorating. At any rate, institutional blandness dominates, and only two personal photographs hang on the walls.
One, circa the late `70s, shows Soglin shaking hands with President Jimmy Carter in the White House. The other is a political advertisement that appeared in a Madison newspaper in 1968.
The ad features a picture of Soglin that despite its blurred focus-he may have been photographed as he was ducking a police truncheon-leaves no doubt that the person in question is young, hirsute and goateed. Under the photo are these words: ”If you don`t vote, this student may be your next alderman.”
The warning by his conservative opponent failed to provoke a stampede to the polls by those fearful of such an ominous prospect, and Soglin was elected, 718 to 487, to the 22-member Madison City Council. (Soglin had received an undergraduate degree in history and political science in 1966 and attended law school while serving as alderman.)
In the `79 magazine article, Soglin commented on the contrast between his generation and the next cohort of college students, who seemed more interested in parties than politics.
”I said that today`s young people had to work at having fun. I meant they lacked the spontaneity that we had,” he says. ”People have been asking me for the last 10 years about the differences in the generations. The discussion takes place in terms of external factors. Vietnam. Apartheid.
”To a degree, I even subscribe to the notion that if this generation was to be confronted with a Vietnam experience that it would reveal its best side, its less career-oriented side, in making sacrifices for the common good.
”That`s not to say my generation wasn`t in its own way indulgent and self-centered. But as a generation we were willing to make far more sacrifices for a cause than any of the succeeding generations.
”I can`t explain the generation of the late `70s and `80s, but I think I can explain my generation. It`s World War II.
”I was born in April, 1945, just before Berlin fell, and I can recall from the age of 4 and 5 and certainly through my teen years that everything was in the context of that war. We were taught why we fought, what the values were, what was at stake. It gave us our own definition of America and the horrors of genocide. We took the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as being real.”
Soglin, the son of a teacher, says he grew up in a family that was politically motivated and involved. When he came to Madison to school and encountered the social and political upheaval triggered by the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War, he concedes he was a certified outside agitator.
”One of the reasons I came to Wisconsin was its liberal tradition. Many kids here came into the antiwar and the civil rights movements without much of a political background. You could see that in the arrest records. In the beginning there were hardly any Wisconsin kids, unless they were from Milwaukee and Madison.
”The vast majority of arrests would be kids from Chicago and New York, so when people said a bunch of out-of-state agitators were causing trouble, they were right. But as the years went by, the proportions changed.”
No brainwashing
Those who blamed the faculty for instigating unrest were also correct, he says, but for the wrong reasons. ”There was talk about all those communist teachers brainwashing the students.
”The critics didn`t understand what was happening. When I look at the faculty members who influenced me-the professors who taught U.S. diplomacy, constitutional history and American political thought-they never advocated anything.
”And if we took positions, they challenged us. What they did was to make us think and question. Obviously, if you want to open up a generation`s mind, you teach them how to think politically for themselves. That has far more impact than teaching them any political ideology.
”I was shocked to find out how far to the left one of my professors really was. We used to argue all the time, and I assumed he was a moderate Republican.”
Being mayor, he says, is infinitely more complicated than debating geopolitical issues. ”It`s a very trying job. I try being nice and sociable, but I go around with a frown on my face a lot of the time because the problems are so great and I`m so overwhelmed.”
He points to a small mountain of paper on a bookcase. ”There`s material here that goes back to the first of May that I haven`t read. This is the urgent pile. This is the important pile. This is a pile that can wait. And I`ll do this.”
He stacks the urgent on top of the important. ”I`ll take these home tonight.”
Will he quit again after this term?
”You think I would have given up a law practice to do this for two years? Even I don`t have that many screws loose.”
