THE WISCONSIN UNION

[Tape I

This series of interviews is with Porter F. Butts, the noted, long-term director of the Wisconsin Union. It is being conducted by Donna Taylor Hartshorne in Mr. Butt’s office in the Union beginning on August 2, 1979.

I think I would like to start this morning, Mr. Butts, with some information from you about your early years—where you were born and grew up, how you came to the University, and maybe a little about your undergraduate days here.

All right. My birth place was Pana, Illinois—a small coal mining town near Springfield, Illinois. That was in 1903 and we stayed there only three or four years and so my early school education was all in Springfield, Illinois—primary school, high school, etc. And for whatever reason, possibly as much as anything due to the influence of my father who was a very busy and active person, I guess I became what you would say “a do-er” —a doer outside as well as inside the classroom. So in high school, I found myself as I went through the years of high school, active on the basketball team, president of the chemistry club, president of the high school debating society, president of senior class. and of assorted other minor organizations, active in musical shows of the high school and Friday morning assemblies (translated means partly singing in a school quartet and after school playing in the school orchestra and independent pickup dance/band and playing in school plays).

What instrument did you play?

Well, I started playing what was called a banjo ukelele and then I moved on to clarinet and saxophone and actually earned part of my way later on in college days playing in a dance orchestra during summer seasons back home.

Well this was all what was known then, and still is, as extracurricular activities but not, I guess, at the sacrifice of school work because I turned out to be valedictorian of my senior class and gave the valedictory speech at commencement time, and so on. But I was very school-oriented and activity-oriented. Anything that had to do with life in the high school was for me. In fact, when the first World War armistice was signed in 1918 and the whole town was celebrating this spectacular occasion and all the schools were closed for that purpose, I went to high school as usual and was very disoriented and disappointed that the school wasn’t opened. I didn’t know why. In short, I hadn’t kept tract of national events. I was locally involved in the ongoing daily activities at high school. I wandered back down town where everybody was and found this big celebration. This gives you a kind of a clue to my liking for participating in whatever the school had to offer, whether inside or outside the classroom.

Well then came the time, of course, of graduation and trying to decide on college and my brother had gone to the University of Illinois and was not enchanted with it. Left and did not, therefore, want to go back to Illinois so we took a family tour to the midwestern universities—the big ten universities: Indiana, Purdue, Michigan, Chicago, and Normal, Illinois. One hot summer day I actually enrolled in the University of Michigan thinking that was going to be it, and my brother with me. But on our way home we stopped at a friend’s house in Bloomington, Illinois. This was a friend of my father, and this friend had a son who was a Wisconsin student and the Badger yearbook was on the table. The son wasn’t there but there was the book. They asked if we had thought about Wisconsin. Well, we hadn’t at all but turning the pages of the Badger and seeing the lovely lakes and hills and scenic pleasures that Madison and the campus offered stimulated a very immediate and strong interest on the part of a couple of young chaps who had grown up in the hot corn fields of Illinois and had never been exposed to a waterland of any kind. So we thought if you can go to school where it is pleasant—and where there is a lake on the campus shore—why not go there at least for the first year after which we would go to Princeton because in those years you couldn’t enroll in Princeton without four years of Greek and Latin and I only had two years, but Princeton would admit you upon showing a good record in the first year of an accredited major university elsewhere.

Oh, they would.

The whole intent was to go to Wisconsin for one year and then, hopefully, transfer to Princeton.

Why, Princeton particularly?

Princeton because of some friends in Springfield who were Princeton graduates and had encouraged it. We respected them and Princeton was a kind of magical word in the higher education field then as it is now and liberal arts was its emphasis, of course, and we had no specialty in mind as a profession or vocation. So, I think it was the influence knowing particular friends who told us about Princeton.

I see.

Well then, on to Madison, Wisconsin which was a two day drive by automobile trying to seek out the proper turns in the road. No highways were marked then except by symbols on telephone poles—the Black Diamond Trail, Cannonball Trail, the Liberty Trail, and so on, and you had to watch carefully to see where each road turned and how it led on to Wisconsin. But we got here.

Did you have maps?

Of a kind—not very precise and not all that helpful but my father had been assistant postmaster back in Pana, Illinois and he knew where towns were in northern Illinois like the back of his hand and so he would say Rockford must be about thirty miles up there and to the left and so on.

Well we got to Madison and since we were socially-minded and had an uncle—I’m his namesake in fact (Porter Paddock was his name) who was a member of Phi Gamma Delta fraternity—so he had written ahead to introduce us to the local chapter of his national fraternity and we just assumed that very likely the fraternity living situation was where we would end up. But we didn’t because we didn’t get invited and this was one of the first indications, perhaps for your archives’ benefits, of what student life was in the early 1920s in Wisconsin.

The Greeks, so called fraternity and sorority people, were the dominant social group/political group/active group on campus, though they numbered only 600 out of maybe seven or eight thousand students and the other some thousands of students were rather deprecatingly called barbarians or “Barbs” which was the custom that day. We now call them, or did in the years after, “independents.” But the fraternities and sororities had ample and rather posh buildings for chapters for living and dining and social life and independents or barbs did what they could to find rooming house accommodations and dining up and down the street in hamburger joints and there was one cafeteria down on State Street and Lawrence’s Restaurant on State Street which was a kind of general gathering place for everybody for breakfast and late evening snacks, and so on. But the so-called independents or barbs led a pretty thin kind of existence because at that time in the ’20s, and presumably before I came too, there were literally no general meeting places, no university provisions for housing. Dormitories hadn’t happened yet except for one women’s dormitory—Chadbourne Hall—and no university provisions for food service except a tea room over in Lathrop frequented mainly by the faculty and by girls. And so there was literally no way to find fellow students or to fraternize with them or to meet together in club groups or social groups except if someone was aggressive enough to find a classroom that was empty to meet in and this was an especially painful experience for anyone who had hoped to be associated to a fraternity or sorority. They were high prestige groups in those days and in the case of the girls, in particular, if they were not bid or pledged, there was deep sorrow, tears. Many girls left school soon because they felt rejected and were unable to establish a reasonable social life on their own.

How did you and your brother feel about it?

Well, we were quite disappointed. We were huddled in a little first floor room in a rooming house over on Dayton Street that had been converted into a bedroom and shared a bath with some of the other family members of that house. It was rather dreary. It really was, and we shortly found that our existence consisted of moving from our rooming house to class and back with a detour for breakfast somewhere and lunch and so on, wherever we could find it and the disappointment was quite real and since we both had been presidents of our senior class, my brother as well as myself, and highly socially motivated and active, this sudden isolation was a new experience and frightening, I must say. Well, it didn’t last long because one of the fraternities that didn’t seem to be attractive to us as members, one or two members of it nevertheless told another fraternity that we were on the loose and that fraternity that needed members rather badly to fill the partly empty house, came around and did ask us to join and we did and so this established us as part of what was really the mainstream of student life.

Which fraternity was this?

Alpha Tau Omega and in the end I became president of that too which is, I guess, and indication that almost anything I achieved or gotten exposed to I kept up with and continued in, and the fraternity was helpful not only to us but all of its members, as freshmen, as was the custom in those days. In fact, pushing them into university activity was supposed to reflect favorably on the fraternity if their members were out doing things and reaching some place of recognition on campus and all the fraternities throughout would spell this out to all of the prospective members that “we have members who are active on the football team and are leaders of publications, of the “Union Board", or whatever, you see. Well it was that self-interest partly on the part of the fraternity but it was also a rather gratuitous and helpful nudge for a stranger like myself. This campus was totally new and foreign. We had no other friends of other kinds. No contacts that represented a point of reference to ask questions even.

So one of the early things that fraternity apparently did in our case was it noticed we both sang and had been in variety shows in high school, and so on, and got us to try out for what was called Union Vodvil and I mention this because it does represent my very first original contact with something called a union. This was in the fall of my freshmen year in 1920. And for whatever reason we were in the tryouts and we were accepted as one of the acts. Union Vodvil was one of the Union Board’s many means of raising money to build the Union building. This wasn’t all that apparent to me at the time but it right off made me aware that there was such a thing as a Union and an active Union Board and we were adopted as one of the acts of the show and this was just the year following Fredric March’s spectacular success in Union Vodvil which we had heard about and we didn’t know that he was going to be all that famous at that time but we heard a great deal of Fredric March (Fredric Bickel as he was known) at the time and you know what happened to Fredric March from there on. As you know, fifty years after this building opened we dedicated our small theater to Fredric March partly because he got his first start in the theatrical world in the Union Vodvil and, indeed, was a member of the Union Board itself.

Well, the fraternity also, by the following fall had another idea. A fraternity brother was on the staff of the humor magazine called the Octopus and knowing that I was in part a journalist and was already working on the Daily Cardinal, he got me to be a kind of a promotion person, advertising person, for promoting the sale of the Octopus humor magazine and that fall there came along what seemed to be fairly characteristically the so-called Homecoming Parade with the theme often being the oncoming, hoped for Union building. And so I was given the job of designing a float for the Octopus with a Memorial Union theme to it and did do that. It was an old Ford which we dressed up and I still have a photograph of it. It was on the theme of a gift to the Union, support the Memorial Union campaign, and so on, and I got a telephone call from the parade management of the night after the parade saying this float had won first prize. And so I thought well of the Union at that point, too.

Well, these were my first two introductions to what was an ongoing student effort to get a Union building for this campus. There were annual fund-raising campaigns amongst students. One of the remarkable things in the background of this building and Union development was the outpouring of interest and funds by students to get this building to happen. And as you probably have seen in our literature of the 1920s, about one out of every two students pledged and paid—some did not pay in the end, but most did—fifty dollars or more for a life membership in the Memorial Union, and fifty dollars in the 1920s would be equivalent to around $250 in today’s dollars. So, when half the student body comes forth with that kind of interest and support, you can tell something was happening and there was great excitement over the prospects of having a union because everybody knew what I’ve told you: that life was pretty grim on this campus unless you lived in a fraternity or sorority and one of the advertised benefits of having a union would be that there would now be a general social meeting place for everybody—a place to eat, a place to find your friends and talk, and ultimately there would be a theater. So there was an air of excitement about it all on the part of students who came to realize it would never be built while they were still in school and, therefore, they could see they would not be the users of it but they wanted it to happen for their student successors and whatever benefit there might be when they came back as alumni.

So they still contributed the money even though they knew they would not benefit from it.

That’s right and in the end the students contributed more money to build this building then the alumni did, which is another interesting facet of our financial history.

Well, I was only peripherally related to the Union in the two ways that I mentioned in the beginning, because my other impulses for out-of-class activities ran to the Daily Cardinal and to the Haresfoot Club. In the case of the Daily Cardinal I moved up the ladder and after four years ultimately became the editor-in-chief, and concurrently with that this business of appearing in a Union Vodvil that attracted the attention of the Haresfoot show people. Are you familiar with Haresfoot?

Oh, yes.

Did you see the special feature article last week where a Capital Times gal came and interviewed me about that.

Yes.

And as a result of the Union Vodvil’s appearance someone nudged me to try out for the Haresfoot show my second year—my sophomore year.” We weren’t eligible in our freshmen year—and I seemed to make it because I was one of the few who apparently could carry a tune at that time and was small enough to borrow a dress from Delta Gamma House and a pair of shoes that the girls loaned me and so on. So Haresfoot became a major interest for the succeeding years—sophomore, junior and senior years.

You stayed with it then?

Yes, each year, and became the president of the Haresfoot Club in my senior year and then continued on in the first graduate year by writing a book for the Haresfoot show called “Ivan Ho” and some of the lyrics of the Haresfoot serenade songs and so on and so on. Well, these two major activities, the Cardinal and the Haresfoot show, I guess on hindsight, did have some direct connection with the Union in the end and what happened at the Union because the Cardinal editor was obviously someone that the Memorial Union fund-raising group wanted to enlist for support of the student campaigns, and support of the union idea. So I was one of each succeeding editorial staff who was so enlisted and persuaded that it was an enormously good thing to have happen. So, therefore, many editorials written by me and my associates in support of the Union venture and anything related to the Union got front page play and a real public relations boost from the Cardinal and partly for self-interest reasons, too, because the Daily Cardinal had no offices worth mentioning. We operated out of a couple of rooms not much larger than the two rooms we are sitting in here. They were in the so-called “old union building,” a private residence, and the Daily Cardinal was in one or two of the bedrooms up on the second floor. So we knew as Daily Cardinal people that the Union was going to provide office space and access for reporting purposes to all the other student organizations that would be housed in the Union instead of having to search them out and try to find them by moving around the campus or by telephone and then in the case of Haresfoot shows, we had the very difficulty and distressing experience of trying to find a place to rehearse. The rehearsals started, say, in December with our show in April and we took any church basement or Women’s Club rooms or ballroom downtown whatever we could find for the dance chorus to rehearse, the orchestra to rehearse, and not to mention putting the show together for dress rehearsals which had to happen at the old Fuller Opera House, now the Parkway, after the last movie show was over two nights before we opened the show.

Oh, that late.

We could get on the stage at Parkway at about midnight for dress rehearsal. We would finish up the rehearsal at maybe four or five o’clock in the morning after the last movie. We got dressed and on-stage about midnight and on to four or five o’clock in the morning. Then we’d get the second night and we were out on the road for what amounted to about a ten day trip. So, the Haresfoot club as a whole was a strong supporter of the Union because they saw the possibility of an on-campus theater coming. The theater wing was shown as part of the Union physical plan as early as l920 or 1921.

Oh, it was.

So there was no theater worthy of the name at that time and never had been. The nearest thing to it was a flat-floored auditorium in Lathrop Hall. Are you familiar with Lathrop Hall?

Yes.

It has a stage that lies between the women’s gym on the one hand and then a small flat floor auditorium-type place on the other side of the stage.

I also know that some performances were held in Bascom.

Well that was a bit later.

Oh, yes.

Much later. Starting not earlier than the late ’20s or 1930s but in the mid-’20s there was no Bascom theater either. That had been added as an addition to Bascom Hall that came later. So the Haresfoot Club as a whole was on record as ardently supporting the construction of this new union and I had had the three or four years of direct personal experience with the difficulties of trying to put a student show together and it was an all-student enterprise. We wrote the music. We wrote the book. We designed and built the scenery ourselves. We scoured the campus for girls’ dresses which came somewhere near fitting and a little later on we got a little more professional than that and began to design costumes and get them made by seamstresses, and so on. But except for the director to the show production, the whole thing was a student-created extravaganza, as they used to call it, with a pit orchestra being all students, and so on.

Well, I guess you can see it was not hard for me on becoming Union Director in 1928 to continue to put forward progressively the hope that my result in building a theater wing. The theater wing was not part of the original building. We didn’t have enough money to do it. As you probably know, the first units of the building were the central social and meeting unit and then the dining room wing as the second. So I guess it is fair to say that my own personal experience with Haresfoot was a factor in putting some steam behind the effort to keep going until we got the theater wing.

Well, I’ve talked I guess exclusively about out-of-class activity at college. There was, of course, also the in-class effort and I found myself to be an English major with a minor in dramatic literature. Again, the theater interest turning up and then upon undergraduate graduation in 1924, I continued with graduate work as well as I could. I had a full-time job. I continued with one or two courses each term including summers for some twelve years.

What was the full-time job?

Well, I guess I haven’t mentioned that, have I? Because I was editor of the Cardinal and had done, apparently, an acceptable job of promoting the Union’s fortunes while at the Cardinal, the executive secretary of the Union fund-raising committee asked me the week after I graduated to come into the Union organization as his assistant to do the publicity and promotion for the total Union fund-raising campaign. And so in 1924 beginning the week after graduation, I had a full-time job. It was rather masked by the title. The title was “Alumni Recorder.” This was a way to get the University to pay for an assistant without drawing upon gift funds to do it but to justify it because the University at that time in 1924 had no mailing list of its alumni. It had no record of who its alumni were other than their transcripts and registrar files and other than the membership lists of the Alumni Association which added up to maybe 2,000 names out of some 90,000 that attended the University. This was all discovered to be a vital problem because of the Union’s fund-raising campaign. The fundraisers went out to raise funds all over the United States and Wisconsin cities and there was no way to find out what Wisconsin alumni were in the given town to call together to talk to. And so the leaders of the union campaign, two or three of which were former alumni presidents, persuaded the University to make a major investment in the creation of an Alumni Record’s Office to find as many of our 90,000 former students as we could and get them on an active mailing list. Not just for the purposes of the Union fund-raising but for all University public relations purposes which were critical at that time. In the same year that I talked about, the legislature threatened to make a steep cut in the University budget. As I remember in those days it was a cut of half a million dollars out of a total five million dollar budget. Well that doesn’t sound like much when you’ve got a budget of almost one billion for the State system now but five million for the University at Madison in the middle ’20s was considerable, and indeed was in dollar value, in those days a big sum and the legislature thought so too and so they set forth to cut it by ten percent which would have been devastating to the University. And so the University—and this was mainly by way of the stimulus and leadership of George Haight. (Do you remember George Haight’s name?)

Yes, I do.

For many years he was considered Wisconsin’s “number one alumnus.” He was co-chairman of the Union’s fund-raising campaign and as one of the members of the committee later became chairman of the committee. But, at any rate, through his leadership alumni and faculty went aggressively throughout the State of Wisconsin to tell the University story and to get citizens to write their assemblyman and senators and ask that they oppose this cut. Well, they had to have lists of names to call together so this was another immediate use for this alumni records address file. And they had to have ammunition on the University’s services and benefits to the State to use in their appeals for help. In other words, be able to cite to farmer groups what the College of Agriculture was doing for the economy of Wisconsin agriculture and what Science Engineering were doing for industry in the State, and so on. So besides the direct publicity/promotion function for the Union campaign, I and my chief,—who was John Dollard, the executive secretary of the fund-raising committee,—went from department to department, much like you’re doing on oral history to find out from each department what their services to the State were. And as an outcome there was prepared a speaker’s manual setting forth in digest form what the benefits to the State were economically, socially, social welfare, citizen leadership and in science, medicine and engineering—so that these benefits could be conveyed to the citizenry and persuade them in turn to persuade their legislators not to cut out this half million dollars and happily this effort succeeded. The cut was not made.

Well, you asked what full-time job. This was the full-time job for the first two years and then John Dollard, who had asked me to come into help and whom I roomed with, was asked to become the assistant to the president at the University of Chicago. Max Mason, who was a physicist here on our faculty and was supposed to be the heir apparent to President Birge and become the University of Wisconsin president. But the Progressive Party Regents led by the La Folletts and Governor Blaine, Zona Gale, and others chose, instead, Glenn Frank. This is a story all by itself which I maybe will come to later if you want to talk about our relations with the Administration as to what happened at this crucial point in the University history which, I guess, is little known to your archivists.

But, anyhow, Mason not chosen was in the matter of days almost, was selected by the University of Chicago, an institution of higher education of some repute. And he took with him John Dollard in 1926 as his assistant, and at that point Dollard and the Memorial Union Building Committee asked me to take Dollard’s place as the executive secretary and campaign director. So beginning in 1926 I embarked on first the fund-raising job—and by the way, have continued as the fundraiser until this moment —in other words fifty years of it. And this involved also moving on the completion of the drawings for the Union building, the planning of it, and the rest of the fund-raising for it, and so on, and it was during this period of time with the so-called full time job that I was also taking graduate courses in art history. This was because I went to Dean Slichter, who was Dean of the Graduate school, to say I wanted to keep contact with what happened in the classroom and I thought I could do a better job of working with students and the faculty if I had a continuing notion of how things went in the classroom—the mood, the reactions, the objectives, so on—and maybe I could enhance my own learning some along the way although I had nothing in particular the mind, not a degree right then. And Slichter came out with the news that beginning next term Oskar Hagen was being brought from Gottengen, Germany to create a new Department of Art History, and that he was a good man, and the University had never had an art history department. And he would be glad to have graduate students but that their were no undergraduates ready to move into his seminars or graduate programs because their were no art history courses except maybe an isolated thing here and there in Greek and Roman history, and so on, (classical art and architecture for example). And I said I don’t know anything about art or art history and he said well “we can’t be choosers. I don’t have anybody else. Why don’t you try it and see what happens?” So I did and I was the first graduate student in art history, therefore, as it turned out. Before the semester was out their were three of us and we sat in a seminar with Hagen. And then, of course, as soon as he got going on his undergraduate courses—general basic courses in art history—I took one or two each term to develop as much background as I could.

Who were the other two graduate students?

Well, Clinch Calkins was one and John Dollard in the first year—this was before he left. This all happened in the fall of 1924 or 1925. I forget which—’24 I think and those were the three of us, and later on, people like Jim Watrous. He graduated in ’31 in art education and then he switched to art history after ’31 so that would have been six or seven years later and I never other students in graduate work in art history because there weren’t any students moving out of undergraduate majors in art history and the department wasn’t well enough known throughout the academic world for students to come here specifically for art history graduate work at that early time. Later, or course, it did happen.

Well, so by the time the Union planning was well under way in 1927 and the building opened in 1928, I had this set of exposures to art and art history and along the way I took a course in art education, too—etching and aquatint some under Professor Varnum to see if I could achieve anything and I found I couldn’t but the interest was there and so this had again, I can see on hindsight, an impact on what we did about the Union and the art field because up to that time there was no union in this country that had an art gallery. There was one in Canada—Hart House at the University of Toronto—that had what was called a sketch room and it was an exhibition hall or gallery and I was familiar with this and saw that it was at least possible that an art gallery could be in a union although no U.S. union had ever done it. And with the beginning apprehension of what art was about, especially art history, I helped to get the plans changed so that what was a kind of reception or assembly room was converted into an art gallery.

This is before the building was even started?

In the drawings stage. Well, mainly, in the equipment and furnishing stage because it meant a different treatment of the walls for hanging pictures and it was a modest change and actually not knowing any better, we had a piano in the room, too, to give students a chance to play classical music. See, I was beginning to get into the classical arts both visual and sound. But we had to give that up pretty shortly—give up the piano—because the students didn’t play classical music. They played chopsticks and assorted other disturbing sounds. Some were pretty good but we just learned that it was a distraction for people who were trying to concentrate on the art works to have this kind of music going in the background.

Yes, I would think so.

Well, up to this time the University had never had an art gallery, as far as I can determine of any kind. The Madison Art Association was given a kind of a toe-hold on a fourth or fifth floor in the State Historical Building for a Madison Art Association gallery. This was not University. There was a lot of University faculty personnel involved in the Association. In fact, I was secretary/treasurer for it for a number of years in the late ’20s and early ’30s. So, you know, having been introduced to art and art history, rather accidentally, I guess I wondered why hadn’t this University ever displayed art or encouraged art except as it did in its art education courses. I think we called then applied arts then, namely preparing teachers to teach art but no art exhibition potential even for them. So this notion was apparently accepted without any hassle and we had an art gallery and an art show the day the Union opened in 1928. And that continued every since with a steady program of art exhibitions, art lectures, competitive shows and on and on. Well I have to pause and let you tell me if this enough on college days to show my entry into the union field.

I would be interested in knowing something about the origins of the union idea and the union idea here in Wisconsin?

This, of course, is now seventy-five years after the first major pronouncement in favor of a union was made at Wisconsin and, of course as was indicated by the previous discussion, I didn’t come until 1920 and so how accurately I can recall some of the circumstances, I suppose, is dubious but there is ample documentation of it in our own archives which can be used to verify anything I say or to amend it. But in my reading of the history of the Union prior to my own arrival in 1920, the first mention of a union for the University of Wisconsin occurred in President Van Hise’s inagural address in 1904. That’s why I say it all started seventy-five years ago this year and that address has been published in full and in it two or three pages are devoted to really a very eloquent appeal for a gathering place for students and faculty where they would learn informally from each other and students would learn from each other and exchange ideas. And, well I can’t quote his exact wording, but it was to the effect that nothing is more important to the student in his later life than the ability to get along with other people, and for this and for his best learning he needs continuing daily association with his fellow students and the faculty. This has been going on at the unions in Oxford and Cambridge since the early nineteenth century, and at those unions, especially Oxford and Cambridge, it extolled the cultivation of its national leadership in government, in politics, in professions because the course work and the laboratory can do just so much for the student but if we are going to make leaders of men—and note the use of the word “men”—and men of character as well as scholars, we should do as much as we can to emulate what Oxford and Cambridge have done for the sons of England,—and note the word “son” again. Of course, we all know now that the women at the turn of the century that women had not yet come on to the campus in numbers and higher education/college education was generally conceived as something primarily for men. It was a time in the nineteenth century when women were discouraged from coming to Wisconsin. You heard the story of President Chadbourne and his unwillingness to have women enrolled, and so on?

Yes, that’s right.

Well, this was a very venturesome and original idea to be coming in 1904 at the University of Wisconsin because at that time there were only two unions in existence in the United States - Houston Hall at the University of Pennsylvania and at Harvard—and they were men’s social clubs, primarily. Well Van Hise was quite familiar with British education and had apparently learned much about the Oxford/Cambridge unions and saw in them a model for what might happen to fill the void as he saw it outside the classroom at Wisconsin.

The void you seem to have been describing earlier?

Exactly. And this appeal didn’t exactly fall on deaf ears, as original and innovative and spectacular as it was for the time, because in 1907 the Men’s Union Board was founded. The members of that first board, and I have this from one of the members of that year who kept in touch with us and with me over the years. They were not all that aware of Van Hise’s desire but I think it somehow got through to them by osmosis.

[Tape II]

The chap I am talking about was a member of Iron Cross, the senior honor society then, and he and the other members of the society kept in close touch with President Van Hise and University problems and University needs because the Iron Cross Society itself was founded and devoted to the idea of service to the University and professor Frank Sharp, philosophy department, was a kind of go between between President Van Hise and the Iron Cross society. There came the time when Van Hise recognized that the new YMCA building, which had recently been built on this site where the Union parking area is now—next to the Armory—was falling upon very hard times. It was very strongly religiously oriented and religious tracts were handed out to anyone who came into the building. It was also a dormitory, housing about 105 men, and it just was not appealing to the student populace because of an excess of religious fervor and so very few men rented the rooms which represented the major source of potential income. So it was about to go bankrupt. And what to do about it? And Van Hise, concurring with Professor Sharp, asked him to see if the Iron Cross student leadership had any suggestions on what might be done. Well, according to Stephenson’s story, and this is also in letters in our archives, he went to a Michigan-Wisconsin football games at Ann Arbor in 1906 and saw there a modest little building called a “union” building which had just been created and for the purpose of housing student offices and meetings and a social get-together place, again, for men. He thought to himself, “well, maybe this is an answer for the YMCA: to become a general men’s center instead of a religious headquarters.” So coming back and talking it out with the other Iron Cross men of his year, they devised the idea of leasing the main floor, which consisted of lounges and some meeting facilities and so on, as a union headquarters to be operated by the Men’s Union Board and with the Men’s Union paying rental for that space and with the Men’s Union working to develop a new student attitude toward the YMCA by enlisting the support of students. And I’m again referring to men, generally in living in the YMCA and there was a whole change of atmosphere and approach.

One question I have: before this the Union group had no headquarters?

No headquarters of any kind. There was no Union Board at this time. It was an Iron Cross society proposal that there be a Union Board like Michigan with a headquarters in the main floor of the YMCA. And so in 1907, and this, you see, is three years after Van Hise’s appeal for a Union which Stephenson said he somehow hadn’t heard about, but maybe the Board didn’t emphasize that because they want to feel they were giving voice, to that extent, to President Van Hise’s own idea but it came out naturally that if Michigan can do it, why can’t we?

So they formed the Men’s Union Board and Stephenson became vice-president of it and was the moving spirit (and there is his picture off in the corner of his room). He is literally the student founder of what we call the Union although it was in the beginning a men’s union following again the Oxford-Cambridge tradition which were exclusively for men, as you know, as was Harvard and Houston Hall of Pennsylvania. They were thinking particularly of a club-like center. They weren’t all that aware of Oxford and Cambridge and in their very great interest on debate and discussion. This had not got through to the Iron Cross boys, I believe, at that time. Well, they took over the YMCA main floor and they installed billiard tables, brought in daily newspapers and established a reading room, moved all the athletic trophies from the gym over and featured photos of Wisconsin football and other athletic teams and they setup a stand for the sale of candies and cigars and so on. Throughout, with that leadership and that kind of facilities there was a program of social evenings or “smokers,” —they were called Smokers for Freshmen—either in the YMCA main lounge or over in the adjacent old Red Gym, to get students acquainted with each other and so on.

This apparently all worked and they persuaded some well-known popular students to take rooms in the Y and other students said “if it was good enough for them, it’s alright for me too so I’ll live there too.” And the Y was indeed rehabilitated financially and saved and this went on from 1907, well I forget the exact date, but I think it’s something like 1912, ’13, ’14. When the YMCA, now on its feet and with a resurgence of moral values, thought it was evil to be selling cigars in the YMCA building and playing pool, and so they kicked the Union out. They wanted the lease terminated and it was terminated.

That’s gratitude for you.

And so at that point the Union headquarters moved next door into a private residence that sat here where the Union dining wing now is, and it housed the Daily Cardinal, and the Octopus humor magazine and Union Board offices and the Haresfoot club and the literary magazines and it had one or two small committee meeting rooms and one pool table. And when I came in 1920 this is what the Union building was. It was so labeled the Wisconsin Union. Well, the Union Board had not ceased its activity because of its cut-off of relations with the YMCA, and, in fact, they were expanding all through. They had, for example, an all-University exposition which is something like the present Engineering Exposition that lasted for a week and every department in the University was invited to setup exhibits and booths in the Red Gym and in the gym annex showing what they did and how they did it with moving parts in the case of departments that dealt with machinery or agriculture, and so on. And any other visible evidence of what a department was doing was displayed with a number of publications. This was all partly to get the legislature to come down and see what the University was doing. See, the Union then, as now, was on the track of trying to win support for their University which is a little strange in these days when we think of students mainly as protestors and as adversaries to the University administration and the faculty. Not so in the teens and ’20s. Students energetically went all out to support the University wherever they could because it was their University. They wanted it to succeed. They were proud of it. So the all-University exposition was a great thing. Thousands of visitors came and special invitations were sent to the legislature.

Then they invented or at least adopted what someone else maybe invented, and that was the “Grid Graph” as a way of reporting what was happening on out-of-town football games while the game was going on.

Would you explain what that is?

It was a translucent glass screen, maybe six or seven feet high and fifteen or eighteen feet long with a grid iron painted on it with all the ten yard stripes and behind it a chap with a flashlight would follow the progress of the ball according to telegraphic reports that were being received on a ticker in the back room. See, this was before the days of radio. Radio had not been invented yet. So these reports would come in that Wisconsin was on the opponents forty yard line and has to punt and the punt is received at the goal line. The punt would be shown by a flashing flashlight until it hit the goal line then a solid light would come back to say the eighteen yard line which was as far the opponent ran and they had another kind of flash for a pass and so on. So there had been maybe an audience for 2,000 people who paid twenty-five cents each to attend the Grid Graph in the gym and there would be an announcer who would announce the play as it came off the telegraph ticker while the guy with the flashlight showed the progress of the ball up and down the field and the cheerleaders were there and there would be a band playing at intermission—the whole works.

Well, this was all designed to raise money to add to the fund to build the Union and it was in this same era of the teens that they invented Union Vodvil, again to raise money for the Union building fund. And then they started a series of dances at Lathrop Hall—Lathrop parlors, you know, in the main floor of what is now I guess still a lounge setup but it was cleared every Friday and Saturday night for Union Board dances. Through the winter Lathrop Hall parlors were “the” place to go. When it came to late spring students would take one of the Lake Monona boats and go over to Esther Beach. Do you know where Esther Beach is?

No, I guess I don’t.

It was on the other side of Lake Monona. It was a kind of a dance hall/resort on the south shore of Lake Monona and everybody would wrap themselves up and get on this launch at 8:30 and get over at 9:00 or 9:15 and dance and start leaving by 11:30—had to get the girls back in before 12:15 or 12:30. Well this whole series of dance efforts were for the purpose of adding to the fund to build the Union which was going to have a ballroom in it. That had appeal. And then they brought in occasional traveling shows at the old Fuller Opera House. I’ve think I mentioned that in Union Vodvil. That was held at the old Fuller Opera House and also an occasional shows and concerts. We’re still talking about the teens.

Then the war came and things pretty much fell apart. Most of the men had to leave campus and go to war but when they came back there was a very interesting and critical expansion of their performing arts program in terms of the creation of the Union concert series in 1919. Charles Mills, the head of the Music School, had tried bringing in outside artists for concerts in Music Hall but never could get more than a handful of students over there. He had seen some of the results of the Union Board’s efforts in staging things on the campus and in the old Fuller Opera House and he said: “Wouldn’t the Union Board like to take over the concert program?” and they did. It was an immediate success because students were saying, “It’s rough going to advise attending a classical concert” so they promoted it like everything. And they would hold the concerts in the Gym and maybe get 1,500 or 2,000 people for a concert. This went on through the twenties and is still going on. As you know, the Union concert series is the oldest continually existing program that the Union has and is one of the best in the country at a college and, again, the proceeds went to the Union building fund. And having had this experience with organizing and presenting concerts, again, students were aware of the need for a concert hall, to wit: our theater which didn’t come in 1928 so when the first units of the building opened, the concerts were held in the Great Hall, the ballroom. But the switch was made right away to the Great Hall which was acoustically much better and in the case of a major symphony or a notable artist like Paderewski was held in the Stock Pavillion.

So there was this whole series of efforts on the parts of students by the Men’s Union Board prior to the 1920s to build the fund to create a new center. Concurrently with this, Van Hise was at work, too. He did follow-up. He did try to get the legislature to provide the funds to build a union and he did get an appropriation passed and then it was rescinded because somebody at the legislature prevailed and said that we should be using State funds only to create classrooms and laboratory facilities. This was about 1914 or 1915 that that fell apart although the legislature did give the site that this building sits on.

You’ve suggested that there was a turning point that came following the end of World War I. Do you want to discuss that?

Yes, it was indeed a turning point in the fund-raising and general development for the Union project and came about for several key reasons. One was, of course, that there was now a broadly-based interest in creating a war memorial at the University in memory of the men and women who had died in the war, former students of the University and, of course, all those others who had served in the war. So the natural question was what kind of a war memorial?

By 1919 President Van Hise had died so he was not a continuing leader, of course, of the Union project. But Dean Goodnight, who was now the Dean of Men, saw in the Union two possibilities that were of importance and one of them was that it could indeed be thought of as a war memorial project. The second motivation I think he had from all I learned later, because I wasn’t there in 1919, he was deeply concerned about morale of the student body after the war. He was himself a strict disciplinarian and one of high moral standards and was concerned about the whole nature of what student life would be like with the campus flooded with returning war veterans. And as the saying goes Dean Goodnight was interested in having attractions that kept students on the campus and away from what were called the “coarse attractions” of the city. This was in the days, of course, of alma mater—the alma mater concept of the University’s role—namely, as a protector of students, a foster mother who would see to it that students had both what they needed and that their behavior was somewhat supervised or even controlled. So an underlying motivation on the part of Dean Goodnight, as I understand it, was to get a campus-centered student life as opposed to a dispersal of students looking for entertainment and relaxation and funny business off the campus.

Fund-raising for the Memorial Union. Role of the Alumni Record’s Office and of Students

Well, there was, of course, a growing realization that the kinds of fund-raising that the Union Board itself could do, of the kind I’ve already mentioned: the Union Vodvil, and the dances, and the Grid Graph would never accomplish the volume of funds needed to construct a union of any substantial dimensions. So what happened, literally, was the joining of a felt need for a campus social and dining and recreation center with the now persuasive emotional appeal represented by a desire to create a suitable war memorial and these two elements in the picture were trying to create a new goal, namely a war memorial union and this was not untypical throughout the country. At the same time many other universities, particularly two in the middle west, as with Purdue, Indiana and numbers of others, were headed in the same direction, namely to create memorial unions with the thought that this was the most appropriate kind of memorial because it gave service to young people who attended the University in a kind of recognition of the service that their predecessors had given to the country during the war. In short, a living memorial.

Well, this was, as I say, in 1918/’19 and I believe it was Dean Goodnight more than anyone else who proposed that we now set forth to raise funds for a memorial union on a broad public gift basis. This was not easily accepted as a way of going ahead with the Union project because still at this time probably most Regents and administrators didn’t have all that keen an understanding of what a union might mean for the University. But the president of the Regents, Walter Kohler, Sr., who was head of the Kohler Plumbing Firm in Kohler, Wisconsin, got the message. I think it was because Kohler himself had established for his employees at the Kohler plant what he called the “American Club.” It was a very considerable physical building that provided for off-hour recreation for his employees—for dining, for games, for social get-togethers. So when the Union was proposed as a kind of club building for social and dining and service purposes, he, from his own experience at Kohler, I think understood what was intended what was meant by this and I got this impression myself when later on I came on the Union staff helping the fund-raising, visited and talked with Walter Kohler.