Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 57, number 2, winter, 1973-1974

              The 1911 Wisconsin Workmen's Compensation Law: A Study in Conservative Labor Reform
By Robert Asher
We cannot forever take things which Christianity has approved of since the time of Christ and put them in a bundle and write on the outside "Socialistic, don't touch." In all reforms which Christ would have advo¬ cated if he were on earth the only way to beat the Socialists is to beat them to it. (Charles McCarthy, 1910).'-
ATE in March, 1910, Paul J. Watrous, secretary of the Wis¬ consin Industrial Insurance Committee, sent John B. Andrews, secretary of the American Association for Labor Legislation, an analysis of the New York Employers' Liability Com¬ mission employers' liability and workmen's compensation bills. Watrous criticized the re¬ stricted scope of the compulsory compensation bill and advised abolishing all employer com¬ mon law defenses in the liability bill to make it provide a stronger inducement to employers to sign voluntary compensation contracts. But, though critical, Watrous sympathized with the predicament of the New York re¬ formers. He acknowledged that the peculiar compromises in the EEC's legislation prob¬ ably were necessary to assure legislative af>- proval. "You New Yorker's are more con¬ servative than we are," the Wisconsinite con¬ cluded.^
On one level of analysis, the political cli¬ mate in Wisconsin in 1910 and 1911 could be classified as "liberal" compared to the "conservative" climate in New York and Minnesota. (This distinction would not hold by   1913  with  respect  to  New  York.)    In  a
'^ Charles R. McCarthy, 1910 speech, in the McCarthy Papers, Archives-Manuscripts Division, State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
^Watrous to Andrews, March 20, 1910, in the John B. Andrews Papers, Labor Documentation Center, New York School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University.
larger sense, however, the political process in both Wisconsin and New York was aimed at the preservation of the free enterprise system. The bulk of the Wisconsin progressive Re¬ publicans were moderate progressives who shared most of the values of the smaller corps of progressive New York politicians who supported workmen's compensation in princi¬ ple. They wanted honest, efficient govern¬ ment; they wanted to eliminate waste and rationalize social institutions; they wanted to preserve social stability; and they wanted to blunt the upsurge of Socialist political parties. Nor were they partisans of the working class, out to soak business and redistribute income to labor. Many of these Wisconsin progressives subscribed to Theodore Roosevelt's "square deal" philosophy and did not forget that this implied a "square deal" for capital as well as labor.
Herbert Margulies has argued in his excel¬ lent study of Wisconsin progressivism^ that the heart of the progressive appeal and the bulk of the progressive electorate embraced conservative, Jeffersonian ideals of popular democracy, probity, and economy in govern¬ ment. Until 1911 the basic progressive reforms enacted in Wisconsin were essentially con¬ servative: the direct primary, the equalization of railroad taxation and the elimination of free railroad passes, and control of lobbyists
^ Herbert Margulies, The Decline of the Progressive Movement in  Wisconsin, 1890-1920   (Madison, 1968).
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