It’s campaign season. Time to ratchet up your fear that that one presidential candidate is going to bring ruin on your country. From here on out, the rhetoric about fighting the other side is only going to heat up.
We’re going to avoid that. Instead, we look back at a different approach that changed Midwestern politics…twice. It’s not about fighting your enemy, although it’s not exactly about being nice and gentle with them either. It’s about surveying the landscape, the needs of the people around you, and getting them together – the churches, the unions, the farmers, the citizens’ organizations, getting them all on the same page (maybe they don’t agree with everything, but they agree on enough) and either getting the right candidate on the ballot, or just forcing the hand of the person in office. It’s called…organizing. And my guest today has some stories about how it happened.
Cory Haala is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin—Stevens Point and a historian of Midwestern history, specifically political organizing, activism, politics in the 1980s. He’s working on a book about the Progressive Populists in the Upper Midwest in the 1980s and 1990s. This movement is perhaps best known by way of senators like Tom Harkin, Russ Feingold, and Paul Wellstone, but it came about through the on-the-ground work of countless organizers and activists.
We discuss the difference between fight and out-organizing your political enemies, what it means to be a “progressive populist,” what it took to build political power, a rumpled professor who became a beloved senator, and the time the entire South Dakota legislature flew to Washington, D.C.
