Thursday, April 30, 2009

To Belle and Back

It must’ve been excruciating, not to mention overwhelming, to condense a hundred years of magazine writing into one publication. But the result, the May edition of The Progressive, founded and still based right here in Madison and edited by the extremely smart and dedicated Matt Rothschild, is a masterpiece—not to mention a collector’s item.

A powerful cover image of a white dove whose trailing footprints stamp peace signs across the page is a powerful introduction to a remarkable collection of excerpts from dozens of writers, activists, politicians and intellectuals through the years. Regardless of your personal politics, this magazine is worth reading for its historical significance if not its raw and uncensored social, political and economic commentary. At times it’s heady stuff, and in the “history repeats itself” category, many of the essays can be bitter pills to swallow.

The Progressive does not, has never and will never mince words, which is why the next three days of conversation and celebration are going to be so well attended. Starting with a concert tonight and ending with a star-studded sendoff by Robert Redford himself on Saturday night, the magazine’s 100th-anniversary fete is chock full of anti-Establishment fun.

While the Sundance Kid will have the last word this weekend, Yoko Ono nabbed the last page of the anniversary issue. A full-page ad featuring a small billowy cloud floating in the clear blue sky below her signature message, “IMAGINE PEACE,” graces the magazine's back cover. It’s simple, subtle and stunning—and, I imagine, it covered a huge chunk of the production costs!

With today’s report by the Wisconsin Women’s Council on a continuing gender pay gap—77 percent here and 79.9 percent nationwide—it’s clear The Progressive’s seasoned voice crying out for equal justice for all is as valuable in 2009 as it was in 1909. I’m sure the magazine’s co-founder and spirited suffragette Belle Case La Follette—and probably Yoko Ono—would agree on that.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Remembering Midge

I was so saddened to open this morning's paper and find out Midge Miller had passed away. She was an inspirational feminist and civic activist who changed the world with her true grit, smarts and sincere honesty. I am going to miss having her on the planet.

Here's an article I wrote about a woman's place in Wisconsin ... Midge's place.
A Woman's Place is in Wisconsin

By Brennan Nardi


Go back to 1856 and tell the stories of not just the men but the women who built this city into what it is today and Madison: The Formative Years author David Mollenhoff would have another hefty tome on his hands. To do the women of Madison and their contributions justice, you really need a Ph.D., a book deal, and permanent residence at the state historical society. I possess none of the above, but I did once ponder a Ph.D. - in women's history, no less. That is, in fact, what drew me to Madison.

It started back in 1989 at the University of Virginia, where a fledgling women's studies program was offering a freshman course called "The History of Feminism in America." It would be my subversive ticket out of plain-old history and into a world where the lives of Jane Adams, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eleanor Roosevelt and Betty Friedan leapt off the pages of a different academic canon, and landed inside my psyche.

Along my merry undergraduate way, I discovered a political activist and historian named Gerda Lerner from the University of Wisconsin--Madison. Not only did she teach history, she had made history as a young Jewish woman who escaped the Holocaust in 1938, chronicled in her 2002 autobiography Fireweed. Lerner's work turned up on more than one course syllabus during my college career (she pioneered women's history as its own academic discipline). Then, in my senior year, I took a class called "Women's Health in America." When I saw that the textbook was written by UW professor Judith Leavitt, I took it as a sign. My grandmother's family had "summered" in Wisconsin since that late 1800s. Having spent glorious vacations in the Northwoods as a girl, I was eager to find a way to extend my time there as a grownup. Grad school in Madison seemed like a respectable option.

I chose journalism over women's history, and never did meet Professor Emeritus Lerner, though I did solicit her for a campaign donation or two during my brief career in Madison politics. Instead of following Dr. Lerner into Bascom's Ivory Tower, I shadowed the women who were making history right before my eager eyes. It was on former State Rep. Midge Miller's porch -- where my mentor, political activist Jeanne DeRose, had wisely taken me one sunny afternoon -- that I fell in love with Wisconsin's progressive tradition, passed down to me by someone who had lived it and fought to keep it alive for nearly half a century.

Inspired by the Madisonians who came before them -- names like Belle Case LaFollette, Ruth Doyle and Carrie Lee Nelson -- women like Midge Miller, Supreme Court Justice Shirley Abrahamson, NOW co-founder Kathryn Clarenbach, Native American leader Ada Deer, and many, many others carried the torch of female leadership during the upper decades of the 20th century. While many are still hard at work today, that generation of leaders has begun to pass its legacy on to the women of Madison who are making history into the 21st century. Women like Madison's first female mayor: Sue Bauman; Fire chief: Debra Amesqua; UW System president: Katherine Lyall; County Executive: Kathleen Falk; Elected Lieutenant Governor: Barbara Lawton; conservationist Tia Nelson (daughter of Gaylord) and U.S. Representative: Tammy Baldwin.

It's the last name on that impressive (and not at all comprehensive) list that might resonate most for the next generation of women leaders in this city. A product of Madison public schools, and of Madison politics from the city council to the county board, the state assembly to the U.S. Congress, Tammy Baldwin has intelligently and gracefully broken through gender and diversity barriers all of her life. And she's only forty-four.

This fall, my daughter will start kindergarten. She will grow up not only witnessing but learning in school the accomplishments of Tammy Baldwin and the scores of influential women who have made Madison the kind of rich and varied community the Belle LaFollettes, Midge Millers and Ada Deers intended. The women's history of the next 150 years will be nothing less than … history itself. And it won't take a Ph.D. to find it.

Brennan Nardi is the first female editor of Madison Magazine, which was founded in 1978.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Hearing the Whispers

I can’t remember when I first read Jason Stein’s byline, but I do remember thinking to myself that this guy had a future in writing. I knew his name from the UW–Madison journalism school where we’d both studied. He was a real talent and everybody knew it. Since 2003, Jason’s been a full-time reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal.

Last June, he wrote a series on Native American languages in Wisconsin called “Down to a Whisper.” It was an emotionally charged, beautifully crafted story about the vanishing languages of the tribes—what had happened to them and how, maybe, some of them could be saved, or at least preserved, in a way that future generations could appreciate and understand their heritage. It was published in print, and the online version was presented into a nicely crafted new media format with audio, slideshows, maps and graphics.

Jason’s piece was so good it recently won a national honor—the Freedom Forum/American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for Distinguished Writing on Diversity—and two Milwaukee Press Club awards.

I asked Jason about why and how he decided to take on such a complex and multifaceted story—without much time off from his regular state government beat.

“It sort of germinated for a while,” he says. “It was just a little thing that led me to write the story.” And then he launches into the “little thing,” which like most big things has deeper roots once you start digging around in your mind for the seeds. Jason lived in Strasbourg, France, for a year, where residents speak a regional language called Alsatian, but like Native languages here it’s not being passed on to future generations as readily as it once was. He also spent time in a Mayan village in Guatemala. “Some of the languages have hundreds of thousands of speakers but I still noticed them weakening,” he says.

While he was in grad school at UW, he read about a professor’s language preservation work with the Menominee tribe, which piqued his curiosity. This was about five years before he would actually sit down to write the story.

“I reached out to a couple tribes and tried to break through and I really didn’t,” Jason explains. “For years I tried to reach out to people. I finally broke through and got to the right people. It’s not easy coming in from the outside to do the kind of story that I wanted to do.”

Before he started the research and reporting in earnest, Jason had a feeling he might not find evidence that any of the five languages had much chance for survival. Years of federal government assimilation practices and benign neglect by tribal elders who believed their children and grandchildren might be better off without it had taken their toll. But the further he delved, the more confident he became that solutions were out there, they just wouldn’t be easy. And in some cases, the spoken word might be preserved but not entirely restored or with total authenticity.

I asked Jason how the tribes, particularly the educators and advocates for the cause, reacted. “It was really gratifying. I was prepared for it not to be,” he says. “For you to spend your life working on preserving these languages, you have to really have a believe that you can accomplish that goal. And yet a real finding of the series was that the situation was dire. I was prepared for people to feel uncomfortable with that. But they weren’t.”

I’m always fascinated with the ritual of writing. For some the words spill onto the page like beer from a tap, and the writer returns to them only to revise, polish and send off to the editor. But for many more of us the words need coaxing before they trickle out like erratic drips from a leaky faucet. Writer’s block is real and menacing. I love Jason’s leads, so I asked him how he approached them.

“It comes very slowly and painfully for me,” he says. “On day one I went back and forth on a couple different leads. Up until the end that was one thing that I was prepared for people to object to because [the lead] comes out and states pretty explicitly that these languages are dying and that isn’t really their view of it.”

But the consummate journalist has only one master: “I felt an obligation to present things as a mainstream reader would see them,” he says.

At the same time, Jason took a measured and diligent approach to the story—it took about a year to write and produce for the web—that feels deeply respectful of the state’s Native American culture and experience.

“We ended up using a lot of historical photos. We did slide shows and a lot of them told stories that crossed over decades. Because of the nature of this particular story, I was very concerned about not having something perceived as just being taken and not adequately credited.”

While Jason says he’s skeptical about how much a newspaper story can affect the political process, he’s proud of the fact that his has had some impact. Gov. Doyle’s budget bill includes $250,000 a year for competitive grants tribes and school districts can apply for as part of a broader strategy on native language preservation that Jason details in his story.

Of course the funding is controversial in a recession, and Jason’s been reporting on the proposal’s fate from his desk at the state Capitol. Stay tuned.