ABSTRACT
Before returning to Brown for his sophomore year, Adam Ulam visited Stan at his new academic post in Madison, Wisconsin. The University of Wisconsin was a distinguished university, its faculty full of eminent and interesting people. Madison was and is a charming place, with its lakes and its semi-rural ambiance. Wisconsin was then one of the principal farming states. Farmers then constituted a much larger percentage of the population than now and consequently their political clout was much stronger. For all semi-humorous aspects, local politics was a good example of grass-roots democracy in action. Europe completely under Hitler's boot, America's trade and communications paralyzed, and fascist coups all over Latin America. Isolationism was stronger in the Midwest than in other parts of the country and was ponderously proclaimed so by The Chicago Tribune, the dominant journal of the area.
