ABSTRACT
Over lunch one day in the mid-1980s, I asked Erwin Noll, editor of The Progressive why the arts were a low government funding priority in Wisconsin. I was a young administrator charged with the state’s Percent-for-art program and seeking counsel from a range of political advisors. The governor chaired the State Building Commission, which funded percent projects and approved artists’ proposals, and in his office he prominently displayed a portrait of Robert LaFollette, who founded the state’s Progressive Party in the 1920s. If the grassroots populism of that period inspired the governor, why he did not enthusiastically endorse public art, which by its intention and the process of its creation directly encourages public discourse? I hoped that Noll, editor of the magazine that has carried on the Progressive movement’s legacy since 1929, could enlighten me. Noll replied that while the founders of the party were committed to citizen participation and accessible government, their priorities were the health and welfare of the populace and addressing issues of social and economic justice. Then he said something that still reverber-ates—that Progressives believed the arts became important only after other needs were met and that the affluent classes should fund them.
