Thank you all for being here. I’m the director of the George L. Mosse Program in History here at UW Madison at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This is Libby’s and I’s, I believe fourth—is that right, Libby?
Libby Theune: Yeah.
Doney: —organized event for the Mosse-Friends Fellowship. You can find the most recent speakers—David Milne, Donatello Aramini, Stefania Ragaù, Norman Domeier—on the Mosse blog. Formed in 1948, the Friends of the UW Madison Libraries strive to inspire researchers, the campus and the public to engage with the libraries through visible, thought-provoking activities, such as this one. Programs like the Mosse Friends Fellowship help fulfill the Friends mission to build a community that encourages intellectual growth, examines diverse perspectives and values the distinctive collections, their use and all the exemplary service of the UW Libraries. The Friends appreciate all types of support, donated books, attendance at our events and book sales. And we are thrilled to see the sustained interest in these lunch talks even when they are in the middle of the summer, semester recess.
Today we’re here to learn from Eliana Chavkin, who’s the 2024-2025 George L. Mosse Program and Friends of the UW Libraries Fellow. In fact, she is the twenty-sixth fellow. This partnership between the program and the friends has been ongoing since 2002, when the very first Mosse Friends fellows traveled to Madison from Italy and Israel. The goal of our fellowship is to encourage scholars to use the vast archival holdings here in Madison and at the UW Libraries for their research.
Eliana is currently a fourth-year PhD student at the University of Minnesota—much closer than Israel and Italy—where she studies trends in American commemorative practices. Her dissertation focuses on the myriad ways that Americans work to remember the First World War. She holds an MA from the University of Minnesota and a BA from Bryn Mawr College. Her research interests include memory studies, twentieth and twenty-first century American history, and commemorative practices worldwide. Here at UW-Madison, she is currently researching the contradictions of this building, the Memorial Union, which was built to honor the students who died fighting against Germany in 1917 and 1918. And on the other hand it also holds the Rathskeller, which celebrates Wisconsin’s German history. The title of her talk today will try to bring these two ideas together: “A Paradox of Memory: Memorial Union and UW-Madison’s War Dead.” Please join me in welcoming her to Madison. [applause]
Chavkin: Thank you very much for coming. Can you hear me? Is the mic okay? All right. If you can’t, especially in the back, just like wave and I’ll try to talk louder. Thank you first and foremost to the Friends of the UW Library and the Mosse Fellowship for sponsoring me. I was telling Skye earlier this week that George Mosse’s work has been very influential on my own. Particularly his book where he discusses the way that Germany remembered the First World War. And so it was very exciting for me to come here in the scholarship under his name in particular.
As Skye mentioned, my dissertation focuses on the First World War. A war that is frequently overlooked as less exciting than the second one, in the United States. And the ways that Americans across the country remembered it. In the absence of a national message about what exactly this war had been for, what we were doing in Europe, Americans sort of took matters into their own hands. And they produced thousands of memorials across the country, all of which look very different and send very different messages about what this conflict was.
In particular, my dissertation focuses on memorials that I defined as somehow odd, (laughter) which is many of them. Where you look at it and you think, how exactly did you come up with something like that? And about September of this past year, I was having lunch with a friend here in the Rathskeller, and it occurred to me to think that about UW-Madison’s world war memorial.
So, the Memorial Union, as many of you probably know, but as you can see in the inscription, which I have printed out, on the front of the building, is a world war memorial. Strictly speaking, it was dedicated to the war dead of the Civil War, the Spanish American War, and World War One. But I would say really it is a world war memorial for a couple of reasons. One is that the dead are just simply on such a vaster scale. So there are 30 Civil War veterans honored downstairs, two Spanish American War veterans and 172 from the First World War. So on a sheer level of scale, it’s not quite comparable.
But Memorial Union was also built in the particular commemorative trend and moment of the 1920s that enabled its creation. And it saw the erection of similar world war memorials across the country. So it is, not to drive too fine a point on it, it is a memorial dedicated primarily to people who died fighting against Germany. Which is why when I was sitting in the Rathskeller, it occurred to me to think for the first time that that was a little strange. It’s not surprising at all that Wisconsin’s student union should have a space representing German heritage, which is of course a huge part of the history of Wisconsin. It is a little strange that that went on in the exact center of a building dedicated to people who fought in the war against Germany.
And so the research question that brought me to Madison was in essence: did no one think that was weird? (laughter) And if they didn’t, why didn’t they? What had happened in the ten years between the end of World War One and the opening of the union in 1928 that made it possible for these two things to exist next to each other without concern from the community?
In order to understand just how unlikely the creation of something like the Rathskeller is, however, we really do need to go back for a moment to consider what happened to German Americans during the First World War. Across the country, when the war initially broke out in Europe, American ethnic groups sort of vaguely followed whichever country they might have come from. So you might be rooting for the eventual independence of Poland, if you had come from Poland. If you were German, you were probably watching and mobilizing some support in support of the Fatherland. If you were Irish, you were also very pro-German. Because you were anti-English. (laughter) And in some cases, we even have evidence of people crossing the border into Canada to fight for the British, because they felt strong ties to British loyalty.
However, as the war went on and anti-German sentiment grew in the United States, particularly after the declaration of war in April of 1917, suddenly not only did German heritage become a liability, but any kind of connection with German language or culture at all. So, German language presses were subject to censorship. German teaching in schools was banned. The University of Wisconsin’s German program actually lost, they went from twenty-seven professors to eight professors over the course of six months because of the sudden rapid decrease in interest in learning German.
And, on the monument front, memorials to German scholars, famous German statesmen across the country were sometimes defaced or veiled, in the case of Milwaukee, taken down all together. This is a picture of Germania being removed from the Saint Paul Germania Life Insurance Building, now known to us as the Guardian Life Insurance Company Building because they changed their name during the war. What’s not recorded is that immediately after this photo was taken, it was pelted with rotten eggs by schoolchildren. (laughs)
And that happened across the country. But in particular I want to emphasize something that happened to many German Americans: that they were put into internment camps. Not on the large scale that Japanese Americans will be interned in the Second World War. But enough that there were four different camps set up across the country. And that they captured people who weren’t necessarily German. Most famously the conductor (Karl Muck, 1859-1940) of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who was in fact a Swiss national but from the German speaking part of Switzerland was interned down at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia. Many people who were here, it was not, I want to emphasize, a concentration camp. The goal was not to exterminate them. However, over 100 people died in these camps, mostly due to crowding conditions during the influenza pandemic. Many more were deported when the war was over. And in at least one case, we have evidence that someone who was interned at Fort Douglas went on to work as an advisor to the Nazi Party in the 1930s as an expert on American life and culture after this had happened.
Wisconsin, obviously, being a hotbed of German immigrants and German life for many years, faced particular problems during the First World War. I have here a couple of different sources you can find online from the Wisconsin Historical Society. One, a sedition map put together by the Loyalty League of Wisconsin telling you where you were most likely to find suspect Germans during the war. You can see obviously of course Milwaukee, the biggest German city in the country, is the hotbed. But also northern parts of Dane County. And I want to emphasize that even in places where this map is not saying there’s going to be concern, Germans were attacked. The only known lynching of a German American occurred in my home state, in Illinois. However, there was a tarring and feathering that took place in northern Wisconsin of a professor who was a professor of modern languages, one of which was German, who had been born in Germany but came to this country at the age of 14. And was attacked by a mob for his association with, again, not only the country, but the German language and German culture.
That continued here at UW-Madison. As I mentioned, UW Madison had an extraordinarily large German languages department. (I’m going to move this a little bit so I don’t have to go back and forth between the slides). And in an alumni reunion that took place over a commencement weekend in 1917, one of the heads of the alumni staff who would later become one of the chief fundraisers for Memorial Union railed pretty hard against German language and culture. He really, he sets out to frame the German language as sort of a giant plot. That everyone was studying German and it was a way to promote German ideals and culture and take advantage of innocent –or guileless, I think is the word he uses—institutions like the University of Wisconsin who just want to further knowledge.
The Wisconsin State Journal added to this later in this editorial by saying that actually the time has come for us not only to get rid of German as a requirement at the University of Wisconsin, which had been done at the start of the war, but to not allow students to teach it basically unless we knew they were of strong moral fiber and they really needed it for their research. Because the very culture and language of German—their philosophy, their literature—was corrupting to the American spirit and the values of the flag.
And that is why I say that it actually really is surprising that something like the Rathskeller, or Stiftskeller or any of these other German elements in this building, came to exist. Because the association in 1917 and 1918 was not just, it was not just bad if you were associated in some way with Germany as a nation; it was also a problem if you were associated in any way with anything German at all.
But in order to understand how exactly it is that it ends up in the Memorial Union, we also need to understand how we ended up with the Memorial Union as a war memorial at all. And so I want to turn to that before we come back to the question of the Rathskeller.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the university was in somewhat of a stage of evolution. If you came to class at University of Wisconsin in about 1900, you would be greeted with courses, maybe a place for you to stay, some fraternities, some sororities, and no community life at all. We take for granted now that tons of money every year goes into facilitating student life outside of classrooms. But this was not a given at the turn of the twentieth century. Instead, you could sort of assume that you were coming to hear from your professors, or that you were going to do experiments with your professors. Maybe on an intimate group, like in these images. Maybe at a big lecture hall if you couldn’t find small courses. And the University of Wisconsin-Madison is going to actually begin to expand quite dramatically as a result of the First World War.
But in the period before the First World War, the Wisconsin Union was founded in 1907 in an effort to kind of address some of these gaps. To say “there’s more to student life on campus than just their lives as scholars.” And they advocated strongly for the presence of a building where that life could take place.
One of the questions they asked was, ‘Well, what else could a university be doing for its students?’ Perhaps it could have a theater, where you could either act out plays that you had been reading about in your English courses. You could practice writing your own plays. You could try your hand at directing or stage construction or any of these other things. Perhaps it could function as a recreational center. Keep in mind that if students aren’t being watched by the university, they’re out having fun on the town, and we have no idea what they get up to there. But we know that students have been causing a lot of trouble for the town for a while now. So this is a safe place to corral them with adult supervision where you can kind of keep an eye on what they’re doing. So perhaps a bowling alley or something else like that.
But the real drive in the idea of the student union was the idea, a very American idea, that this was a place for students to practice self-government. University students come to us at a time when they are neither quite children nor quite adults. And the idea was, before we send them out into the world and expect them to be leaders in Congress, or in businesses or in hospitals, why not give them a place to practice some of those skills and develop some of those ideas where the stakes are maybe a little lower. So you could be, the idea from the beginning was that the Memorial Union would be run by students. And you could sit on the Memorial Union governing board, or you could sit on the bowling alley league governing board or whatever you wanted. And it would be a place where you could learn how to get along with your fellow Americans. And learn how to take good meeting notes and learn how to run a meeting. But where there was also probably a faculty member on standby to kind of step in if things got a little bit out of hand.
In essence, what advocates of the union building wanted was what’s now known as the living room of Wisconsin, Madison. To turn a university from a house of learning into a home of learning. A place where you could go between your classes, where you could meet new people, forge new bonds. And that this was just as important as coursework was in terms of turning out future leaders for American society. It’s somewhat ironic then that the thing that brought this very cozy and welcoming place into being was the most violent conflict known in human history by that point.
Before the world war, state legislators were not interested in funding this kind of project. A legislature sponsors a state university to build their academic buildings. But they didn’t see a need for this kind of recreational life. What did not change after the war was that the state of Wisconsin did not want to fund this building. (laughter) However, they were open to the idea that it could be built if the money could be found elsewhere. Which it was. It was funded ultimately by faculty, alumni and students. And the characteristic of the building, which is described by Dean Scott Goodnight (1875-1972) here—it’s worth noting that Goodnight had been a professor of German before he took up the position of the dean of men in 1916, and he was briefly kicked off of the Memorial Union campaign during the war, because of his association. They let him back in afterward.
One of the ideas that motivated these people was the idea that we could build a memorial to honor these young men who had gone off to war and died through acts of service, what became known in the 1920s as the living memorial movement. This idea that a memorial could function by honoring the dead, by creating a space that was usable by the living. And that that was a greater way to honor the dead who had died for our country than, say, a statue on the front lawn.
I just want to correct Dean Goodnight here. It was not true that 95% of memorials after the First World War went up this way. It was a hard idea to sell. My estimates are it was actually only about 25%. However, it was a considerable number, and they took a lot of different forms. This is Memorial Drive in Minneapolis, where people planted trees as a way to create more green space for citizens, also in honor of the war dead. Many Southern states in particular used this as a moment to build their state archives and give them houses, as a way to collect the history of the people who had gone to war and preserve it for future generations. And at Wisconsin, actually, the state legislature did fund a hospital, which is over on University Street. And they gave priority to treating veterans, but also treated the general public.
So we can see in all of these ideas this theme of service, that this is something that should be useful for the living, and that that gives meaning to the sacrifice of war dead.
College campuses prioritize really two things: football stadiums, (laughter) shocker, and student unions. Football, by this point, football is a popular game on many college campuses, but not all universities have a football stadium that can really host a proper game. And here again, state legislatures were not interested in funding this. But it became a common request from alumni that said, you’re going to come back and watch the games, right? You want to see this, right? You want a space where you can stay, right? So this is what the University of Minnesota did, this is what a number of other Big 10 institutions did. And you can see these are fundraising materials from the archives that the University of Wisconsin Madison knew that other universities were funding their things. And they wanted to use that knowledge to guilt their alumni into funding this thing.
Football stadiums were also popular because there was a feeling that American young men had been somewhat underequipped athletically when they came for the draft. Many failed the draft board, actually, because they weren’t fit enough. And that idea carries over into the idea of student unions as well: that there was a need for a space where men could form manly camaraderie environments, like what you might find in the army, but on college campuses. And that is the reason that the Rathskeller, in particular, will be all male for the first thirteen years of its existence. There is a goal that this should be a space that allows men to develop their own spirits among each other. The women, they were doing fine. They were very gung ho at all the campus events. They didn’t need this space. But the men, they needed a little extra encouragement. (laughter)
And so the idea again becomes we want this to be a memorial not only to students who died, but to the sense of service that sent them into the war. And the fundraising therefore at Madison will turn almost immediately to this idea of building this long wished for union building.
I want to emphasize, however, though that this would not have been possible without the First World War. This is a different piece of fundraising material also from the archive. The University of Michigan was the prime inspiration for what becomes the Rathskeller, initially the tap room in the union building. Keep in mind, Prohibition has just passed. There’s not going to be any beer in these spaces for a while. But it’s a place, again, where men can kind of gather and hang out with each other.
And so a lot of the time, Wisconsin fundraising materials reference Michigan. Now the key is, they’re using world war language to do that. Right? “Over the top” means going over a trench in the First World War. But actually, Michigan’s building predates the war. It was fundraised and completely set by 1917. Construction was delayed a little bit because of the war so it officially opened in 1919. But it had nothing to do with the world war at all. It was just that now that the world war is in people’s kind of psyche, it’s a good way to kind of mobilize people to fundraise.
Very, very early blueprints for Memorial Union—and I apologize for the quality of this photo that I took yesterday—did not actually show a space for a tap room at all. It comes out of the meetings with regents and with other people on the Memorial Union board saying this is a space that is needed. What transforms the tap room into what we now know as the Rathskeller, is the interior designer that they brought in for the process. So the building is complete, but they need someone to decorate it. In 1927, they bring their decorator through, who was raised in France. He stops short when he sees the arches of the Memorial Union’s basement, and he says, “Well, this looks just like a Rathskeller.”
Porter Butts (1903-1991), the first director of the union, who was a nice young man from Illinois who knew nothing about Germany, was like, “What’s that?”
And he explained that in German communities in Germany, that this was often a building that you would see in the basement of a city hall, where the men could come and drink and process the day’s events away from their wives, what have you. And Porter Butts, thinking about the fact that there’s been a desire for this building to reflect Wisconsin’s history, and that there’s been a desire for men to have their own place to gather on campus, says, “Well, great. Why don’t we lean into that? Why don’t we build the Rathskeller?”
That’s kind of the simple explanation. There’s a little more going on in terms of what Butts wanted from this space and why the community didn’t then protest it, given all of the anti-German sentiment a few years before. Part of that, as I said, lies with Butts directly. Butts himself admitted that he was not a great connoisseur of world events. In an oral history interview he did for the archives in the 1970s, he tells a story about how on November 11, 1918, he went to school and was surprised to find that no one was there. (laughter) And he eventually kind of made his way to town, which is where he discovered that the war that had been going on his entire adolescence had finally ended.
He got to Wisconsin in 1920 and he felt firsthand the lack of student space. He was a very people-oriented guy. He wanted a chance to build a community. And there wasn’t one. And so he went to work for the Memorial Union campaign as soon as he graduated in 1924. And he assumed the directorship I think two years later.
I don’t want to suggest, however, that he wasn’t aware of the building’s status as a war memorial. When he was asked to comment on it, and to encourage the way that the dedication of the memorial aspects of this building would work, instead he noted simply that he just wasn’t sure that it was grand American ideals that had sent people into battle. And he didn’t think that those were the ideas that should be represented in the Memorial Union. Instead, he wanted to emphasize the fact that people felt that when their country called them, they owed them a duty to serve. So notice how the emphasis there moves from what we were fighting in Germany towards the sense of service in the American people. And that begins to remove some of the challenge that the Rathskeller might have posed in his mind between these two things.
There’s a couple of other things going on, however. One is that American sentiment towards Germans is beginning to shift by this point in the 1920s. Arguably that shift starts with the 1924 Immigration Act, where in an effort to keep out Eastern European Jewish immigrants and Italian immigrants and other undesirables from other parts of Europe, Germans gain one of the highest immigration quotas of any country in the act, and the feeling is just well, they’re mostly Western European. They’re better than some of the other riffraff that we’re dealing with. (laughter) So that begins to kind of shift opinions.
And also, the opinions on the world war have begun to shift. No one was ever totally sure why we were involved in this conflict. And if you look at the memorials we left behind where they tried to explain what we were doing there, that becomes very obvious very quickly. But there is a feeling, especially ten years out, looking back at the violence and the destruction that it wrought, that the Germans were sucked in like anybody else. It hadn’t actually been their fault afterward. They were victims of circumstance. And we see that sympathy in monuments that begin to go up around the rest of the country honoring Germans. One is at Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City, honoring the German prisoners of war who died. Note that the sympathy had limits. Actually, only one person on that list was a German POW. The rest were interned German Americans, or Austro-Hungarian Americans. But there begins to be kind of an extension of sympathy towards these people. And it reaches its sort of natural apotheosis at Harvard University, where in the memorial church that Harvard builds for the world war, there is included a plaque honoring the four German students who were from Germany who, when they graduated, went back to Europe and fought for the German forces during the First World War. Again, this sympathy has its limits. Note that of course the plaque is in Latin. You were either a Harvard man, or you shouldn’t be reading it. (laughter) But it is this idea that perhaps Germans are worth our sympathy because they were as much a victim of circumstance as any other nation was in this conflict.
That said, however, I still was sort of expecting to find somebody who had a complaint. The archives keeps a very diplomatically named folder called “suggestions,” which are all the lists of complaints that they received from people visiting the union in the early years. Most of them actually have to do with the commemorative aspects of this space. So for example, you were meant to go up to enter the union through those stairs. I don’t know about you, the only time I’ve entered the union through those stairs is when I went to go take pictures of the stairs. It was almost immediately realized that that was not a practical way for students to access the parts of this that they were meant to be using. So one of the problems with the memorial hall is that hardly anyone ever sees it.
Another problem had to do with the paneling. A lot of thought went into the design of the memorial hall. If you haven’t been to that part of the building, I suggest you check it out. Very expensive Italian marble meant to kind of evoke a northern Renaissance feel. Originally, the names of the dead were supposed to be on big bronze plaques. They realized quickly that the only thing worse than spending thousands and thousands of dollars on expensive Italian marble is then destroying it by putting bronze plaques into it. And so the idea was changed to walnut. And so instead the plaques are made from sandblasted wood.
As you can see from these photos, and as you will see if you go downstairs yourself, even today, lighting and drawing attention to those panels remains a significant challenge. You can read the names if you’re right up in front of it; you’re not going to see them otherwise. And I think that’s actually quite evident in the fact that the university now has a second display where you can read about the names of the war dead, if you wish, that has been digitized. So people frequently wrote to complain about that. They felt it wasn’t actually worthy enough to honor the dead.
And a more recent complaint also has been some of the insignia in the ceiling. At the time, the inclusion of kind of a generic Indian figure was considered a gesture of respect and honor to Wisconsin’s so-called “first warriors.” These days there is a disclaimer down in Memorial Hall explaining that that was nice at the time and now it’s not considered very nice. So people have written in over the years about all of those things.
What they were not writing about is the Rathskeller. And I want to emphasize this picture in particular, because it literally shows German soldiers enjoying their beer. (laughter) And no one seemed to have an issue with that. And I think that actually the reason for that discrepancy is the success of the Memorial Union as a memorial project. Students knew what the Rathskeller was for. So did the local press. It was the number one thing they talked about when they talked about Wisconsin’s new student union. How cool this room was, and how it was going to give space for Wisconsin’s men to hang out together. Leaders of the Rathskeller committee also, again, emphasized that this is a recreational place. It’s an informal place. It’s a place for men to bond. And, in 1933, I want to emphasize that 1933 was the year that the Rathskeller started to serve beer, one half of the men surveyed on how they used the union double or triple checked how important the Rathskeller was, above every other space that the union offered to them. And by that estimate, the union sort of concluded, well, it’s the single most popular unit in the entire building, actually.
Comment: That’s where they served beer.
29:54
Chavkin: Part of that comes with the distinction that Porter Butts had drawn before he even visited, before the union was even opened. He made this comment after he came back from a conference with other student union leaders across America. And he noted that his position was actually Director of the Union. But most of the other people who held these positions were athletics directors, or recreational directors. Somebody who was kind of in an adjacent department, and the university had pulled them and said, “Hey, can you deal with this, too?”
And what he realized when he saw that was that actually most universities that had a building like this had built a memorial site in the aftermath of this drive to remember the First World War. And only then did they realize well, I guess we ought to do something with it. Wisconsin, however, had been wanting a memorial union, had been thinking what it could be used for, for years before the war came along. And therefore when they built their memorial union, they had clear ideas in mind. And the clearest idea of all of them was that it was going to be a memorial to the dead until it opened to the living. And that these were two distinct stages in the union’s life. So we see at the cornerstone laying, at the groundbreaking and at the dedication honors for the dead. What we don’t see is when somebody writes in 1929 and says hey, you left off a soldier. The walls aren’t updated. They’re now updated. We discovered another, I think it went from 179 to 192 is the total world war dead from Wisconsin. Those are all in the digital repository. But they were never added to the walls. The same for an extra Civil War soldier who was missing, etcetera. There aren’t really veteran ceremonies that are held in this space. It’s not conducive to that kind of event. And so it was dedicated honoring the past, and then refusing to be paralyzed by it. Instead of focusing on what had happened, what had sent people into war. Attention was now turned to how could this space be utilized for the living. And the living, very clearly, needed a place like the Rathskeller.
This reached sort of its natural apotheosis as a memorial in 1942. Porter Butts started his report that year by saying that out of the last war we had learned that when young people are gathered away from home, whether at military camps or whether at recreational centers like universities, they need a place to have fun. They need a place for recreation. And he reminds readers about the history of the Memorial Union. That this was a place that would motivate, that young people in Madison were motivated to build after the war in response to this need. And then he finally notes that as military units had been established on and near the campus to fight the next world war, this same memorial center was emerging in a new and singularly appropriate role of serving directly the young men of the military forces.
During the Second World War, for the first two years, visiting sailors and air force men from the local bases that were set up, and who were asked to take classes at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, were given free membership to the union for the duration of their stay in Madison. Eventually they started having to pay fees due to a ruling from the US military, which doesn’t like people to have fun. (laughter) But the whole time that they came through Madison, the union remained open as a recreational space that was welcome to them. And the center of that recreational space was the Rathskeller. Firstly, it was the best place in the building for air raid drills because it’s in the middle of the building and on the ground floor. (laughter) So people spent a lot of time there doing that. But also, whenever there was a social event up in the Great Hall over here, that was the place that you were redirected to if you wanted to have smaller conversations, quieter conversations. The Rathskeller was opened to women also in 1941. So it was a place to go and talk with the nice coed that you just met, and not think about the fact that you were headed off to war.
And Porter Butts, who wrote this report, saw that as sort of the natural endpoint of this union as a space. That it was entirely dedicated to the needs of the living. And those needs might be for military personnel who were passing through. But that that was a natural extension of the union’s role as a place for people who were away from home at college. And that if somewhere like the Rathskeller that could honor Wisconsin’s German heritage could serve that need, it didn’t matter, in other words, what had happened before. And so whereas during the First World War the very mention of German culture and German language was enough to get you dismissed from staff, during the Second World War it becomes sort of an interesting asset that the University of Wisconsin has to offer. An extra space to think not about the Germany that you’re headed off to fight, but about the more positive aspects of German civilization as a way to kind of get ready for the next tour.
So that is, as far as I’ve been able to find, why no one thought it was a little weird. Except for me. So, thank you. (laughter, applause)
Doney: Okay. We have at least 15 minutes for questions. If you have a question. Mike, yeah.
Mike: Yeah, I noticed it was very interesting if you read the small print on that map of areas of sedition one index they used was the amount of support that [Robert M.] La Follette (1855-1925) received. So that kind of makes me think that another concern besides ethnic origin was more related to class and economics and other things.
Chavkin: Yes, absolutely. And actually, the University of Wisconsin-Madison tried to censure him after he expressed—
Theune: Can you just repeat it?
Chavkin: Oh, sorry. Yes. A comment about the map, the sedition map, and how some of those suspicions were not just ethnic in origin, but also class-based in essence. Yes. Yes. Part of Lafollette’s fumble was that he had proposed, there was a referendum on whether or not we thought that going to war with Germany was a good idea that passed April 3, 1917. So the day after we entered the war, votes in places like Sheboygan, I believe the ballots were handed out in German and in English. And only 15 people in the whole town said that they were for the war effort. And so it was both a concern about what this means, generally speaking. But also this particular fumble that he had made, which leads to his getting censured at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as kind of a “we don’t want that anywhere near us” type thing.
Doney: Yes, go ahead.
David Null: I just comment another thing about Germany. We had some of the earliest visiting professors from Germany right after the war, also. I think by ‘21 or ‘22 we were having German professors coming over again. I think there was some controversy about that. But again sort of shows how quickly some of that feeling changed.
Chavkin: Yeah. Well, and once the Kaiser is gone, I think there’s also—oh, sorry. Thank you, Libby. (laughs) That Wisconsin had German professors back visiting. Because they had come before the war, as well, as early as like 1921. Some people were angry about that, and it still happened. Part of that, I think, is the shift in the government. Once the Kaiser is gone, there’s a feeling that the Germans are trying democracy out. We ought to kind of give them some support that meshes in with these ideas about democracy in the United States. And I think also people who are not feeling that way are no longer saying they don’t feel that way. That it sort of melts away once there’s no official state support. But there may have been people who still believe that that was not the right thing to do.
Doney: Yes, please. In the back.
Question: What was done like in the in between time? Because there was a union here before they put this building up. So were there any services for the students that died? Or does any of that continue today? Like after World War One, World War Two. What happens if a student is in the war and they die? What happens here on campus? Was there anything that, was that building also, it wasn’t called the Memorial Union until this building went up. Correct?
Chavkin: That’s correct. Yeah, so the question was about how war dead have been treated at UW-Madison more generally. And I don’t know about current practices. If someone else does, that would be fascinating. I do know that they’ve been updated through Iraq and Afghanistan in the gold star roll that’s digital downstairs. Later wars, the Memorial Library is actually what’s dedicated to the rest of them. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, it took a couple of years for them to organize a ceremony. But there was an independent ceremony from what was happening at Memorial Union where there were a number of wreaths placed at the statue of Lincoln up in the center of campus. And so a procession was done. And that was part of the struggle was that figuring out how to mourn these people and how to really acknowledge that loss often took many forms. And that’s why we have so many different world war memorials across the country. Because what one person thought was meaningful was not meaningful for someone else.
Doney: Yeah, go ahead.
David Null: A follow-up on that. The university archives does have an enormous like red star, gold star flag that was made during World War One.
Chavkin: Yes.
David Null: And that was hung from Bascom Hill and some other things at times.
Chavkin: Yes. So apparently it was actually originally hung in the union. But because it’s fully two stories high, they eventually realized there was nowhere to put it anymore. And that was why they had to, they put it away. (laughs)
Theune: A flag. A flag.
Chavkin: Yes, the service flag. I’m so sorry. (laughs)
Doney: Go ahead.
Peter Lawrence-Wehrle: I guess my question, your research may have stopped after World War Two. But if you have done research that goes beyond that, how was this space viewed in the 1960s and [19]70s as the antiwar movement heated up on campus. Because I was looking the other day at a newspaper clipping of the number of places that were bombed in Madison on one day. Like there were fires started or arson attempts. I was wondering if there was anything like that going on that targeted this building because of its war memorial status.
Chavkin: So the question is about the 1960s and how those protests did or didn’t play out at the Memorial Union. They did. And actually Porter Butts, who was still director in the 1960s, he doesn’t retire until 1968, wrote a pamphlet about how these particular centers of student life had been used in the protests against Vietnam. It was a logical gathering place for students. And so many buildings, including this one, all saw protests. If you look at what he has to say about it, it’s actually quite striking how many of the lines are similar to what we’ve seen in the last year of “well, the main agitators were hired. They were from the outside. They were trained to rile the students up. The students just went along with it because they didn’t know any better.” Whether or not that was true then or now, it was a way of sort of protecting the reputation of the Memorial Union. Because it was a popular place for townspeople to accuse the Memorial Union of like, okay, well this is the place that serves alcohol on campus. We can’t trust these people. And it was a way to kind of protect the union’s reputation at a moment when students had been protesting. But it was seen as sort of a logical site for students to protest on campus.
Peter Lawrence-Wehrle: Well, and just to follow up then, right, I think that around that time like the late 1960s, early ‘70s, was when students were finally given more autonomy. I know women were allowed to live off campus at a certain point around that time. So I can see why there’s more, you know, there being pushback and want to protect that even more.
Doney: Thank you. Yes, please. All the way in the back.
42:09
Audience: Just to share the Union South, the original Union South building, built in 1971 was dedicated as a peace memorial as a conscious counterpoint for the war memorial.
Audience: Oh, interesting. (murmurs of interest)
Mike: I was going to point out that the name of Porter Butts and then also Frederic March of the play circle fell into disrepute in the early 2000s upon the discovery that, I think both of them had some kind of oblique association with the Ku Klux Klan, dating from the [19]20s when that was almost a mainstream organization.
Chavkin: Yes. I think, this is a point about Porter Butts and his I think faint association with the Ku Klux Klan. I will also note that one of the materials given out to visiting soldiers during the Second World War, however, explicitly warned soldiers—and was targeted at the soldiers coming into these spaces—they wanted you to know firstly not to discriminate against students who were in civilian uniform, because many of them were likely to be drafted. And then they included an additional note saying and many of these students are Black. And we expect you to be okay with that. And if you’re not, we’ll remove your membership. So just as a counterpoint for how people’s views did shift over time.
Doney: Please, yes. In the back again.
Audience: I was just curious how the Rathskeller was publicized when it was created. I mean, maybe the people just didn’t have any idea that it was German.
Chavkin: No, this is the really weird thing is that was the front and center thing that everybody said about it. They were like, it’s modeled after this cool German community center. Here’s what we think it is. You could tell about the time that the press learns how to spell it. (laughter) Which is like middle of 1927. Because before that, you see a bunch of like, it’s this German thing. But eventually they learn that they need to capitalize it, they agreed on a standardized spelling and all these things. But the lead photos of the Memorial Union are not of the exterior. They’re of the common room. And they’re like, isn’t this so cool? This is so neat! Which is, I think, what originally struck me as just so totally surprising. It’s like, they all knew. But they were just really into it. (laughter)
Doney: Why don’t we take two more questions? If there are two more. Please.
44:33
Audience: I understand that this is the first student union to serve beer.
Chavkin: It is. Yes.
Audience: And that part of German tradition, so that started in the very beginning? Or did that occur later?
Chavkin: So the question is about when they started to serve beer. They are the first student union in the country to serve beer. It was a source of great debate in 1933. They didn’t start when they opened, because it was Prohibition. And that was considered, that was like a bridge too far. You know? But literally, I mean, like the act is repealed in 1933. And the Rathskeller starts serving beer in 1933. They are almost immediate. And there is some concern, actually, about people coming in and getting drunk here and causing trouble in the town. Or underage students buying beer. And the union spends a lot of time documenting that those are not things that are happening. Or at least not most of the time, as a way to kind of uphold their reputation.
Doney: Yes, please. Last word.
Audience: You alluded to the pandemic. I know that about 80 of those soldiers died from influenza rather than a military conflict. Is that distinguishable in the records?
Chavkin: So the question is about the influenza pandemic.
Audience: It is in the yearbook.
Chavkin: And how, whether or not that’s distinguished, and where it would be distinguished. In the gold star roll that was handed out explaining how students died at the cornerstone-laying ceremony in 1927, each student, we get a detailed description of how they died. Disease, wounds, if they were wounded or they died in battle, which battle they were at. It’s true actually also for the Civil War and for the Spanish American War. Both of UW-Madison’s Spanish American War dead died of disease and not in combat. It was a subject of debate in many places. Do these people deserve the same amount of honor because they died of disease? But actually, almost universally—and I don’t mean just in Madison, I mean almost everywhere across the country—they were not separated out in any way. And it was decided that basically if you died wearing a US Army uniform, it didn’t matter how you died.
I will add as a side note that that has an interesting effect on civilians who died from the influenza pandemic. Because the soldiers get remembered, but they don’t. But the soldiers get remembered regardless of whether or not they died from wounds or anything else. And they’re listed downstairs I believe alphabetically so you wouldn’t know.
Doney: Well, please join me in thanking Eliana. (applause)
47:11
[End Session.]
Eliana Chavkin (she/her) is currently a fourth-year PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota, where she studies trends in American commemorative practices. Her dissertation focuses on the myriad ways that Americans commemorated the First World War. She holds an M.A. from the University of Minnesota (2023) and a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College (2016). Her research interests include memory studies, twentieth and twenty-first century American history, and commemorative practices worldwide. At UW-Madison, she will be researching the contradictions of the Memorial Union, built to honor the students who died fighting against Germany in 1917 and 1918 on the one hand and to create Der Rathskeller, which honors Wisconsin’s German history, on the other.