The Wisconsin Idea: An Italian Perspective

In the present climate of cynicism about the ability of governments to do anything but harm, it is refreshing to be reminded of the innovative and meliorative activities of the Wisconsin Progressives ninety years ago. Oltre la Politica is a case study of Wisconsin’s regulatory commissions between 1905 and 1915 — the philosophy behind them, developed by leading social scientists at the University of Wisconsin; the creation and operation of the commissions in the La Follette period; the hedging of their power over time; and the conservative victory over them in 1914–15.

The book displays the earmarks (some bad, many good) of a dissertation, but a fine one. The author earned a doctorate in American history at the University of Genoa, won a first-book prize with this volume, and is presently a research scholar at the University of Bologna. She joins the growing rank of highly accomplished scholars of American history and culture in Italian universities, who are doing not just the reflective think-pieces to which Europeans, distant from American sources, were long restricted, but also very intensive monographic work that can certainly compare with what is being done in this country. Much of the best European scholarship on the United States now comes from Italy and Germany, thanks especially to support from their Fulbright Commissions and the long-time (now retired) directors, Cipriana Scelba and Ulrich Littmann.

Baritono used seventeen manuscript collections at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin Archives; many manuscripts and publications of the commissions and other state agencies; newspapers; a massive collection of the Progressives’ writings; and a thirty-page list of American and Italian secondary works. Some post-1986 American items are missing, but otherwise the research is not simply competent, it is exhaustive. With such constant and direct reliance on primary sources, Baritono shows no signs of the Marxist framework that until recently was de rigore among Italian students of politics and political history. Instead she shows the Wisconsin social-scientists and other progressives grappling with transnational problems of public administration within their own American context.

In her introduction, Baritono explains her purpose and locates her work historiographically. She began intending to analyze the role of independent commissions in the thought of such Wisconsinites as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, Balthazar Meyer, E. A. Ross, Charles McCarthy, and Charles Van Hise. But before long, the commissions became the more important story: how they were meant to pacify social conflict, rationalize economic life, reconcile state and society, and cope with “the movement toward an industrial, urban, and mass society.” She is concerned not with economic regulation but with political-institutional history, particularly the commissions as instruments of expanded state regulation, the motivations for creating them, and thus the principles behind them. They were not only to regulate and manage problems confronting state government, but also were to operate “out of politics” and indeed obviate or delegitimize political parties.

Surveying the historiography, she dissociates herself from the view of Gabriel Kolko and others that the commissions were tools of the interests they were supposed to regulate. Nor does she wholly agree that the commissions were merely part of an “organizational” drive. Praising Steven Skowronek and Richard L. McCormick, ¹ she nonetheless believes there is more to learn about “the crisis of political parties and the birth of administrative structures,” especially at the state level. The book in fact only glances at parties through reformers’ eyes, and devotes itself to the administrative structures.

Five chapters follow. The first, “Political-institutional Context at the End of the 1800s” sets up reasonably well the question of how to establish mechanisms both independent yet within legal traditions going back to the Federalist; how to remain responsible to the people, rather than become irresponsibly statist. The “Wisconsin Idea,” with commissions, was the answer. Baritono then examines Progressive thought...