- Today, we are pleased to introduce
Bill Christofferson as part of Wisconsin Historical Museum's
History Sandwiched In lecture series.
The opinions expressed today are those of the presenters
and not necessarily those
of the Wisconsin Historical Society
or the museum's employees.
Bill Christofferson is a former journalist
and long-time Wisconsin political consultant.
Christofferson's book,
The Man From Clear Lake: Earth Day Founder
Senator Gaylord Nelson ,
explores the journey of a small town boy from Wisconsin
to become a national champion of environmentalism.
Here today to discuss the life of Gaylord Nelson,
his roles as one of the leading environmentalists
of the 20th century and the founding of Earth Day,
please join me in welcoming Bill Christofferson.
(applause)
- I usually start with a little disclaimer
that I'm a writer, not a speaker,
and I'm much more at home in front of a keyboard
than I am in front of a microphone.
So, bear with me.
There's an extra feature today.
I'm doing a multimedia presentation.
I have never done this before,
so we'll see whether I can talk and push buttons
at the same time.
If not, enjoy the show here.
(laughter)
Anyway, my book is called The Man From Clear Lake,
and here's why.
Gaylord Nelson was a small town boy his entire life.
He achieved more than he dared imagine possible.
He became a friend and confidant of some of the nation's
most powerful political leaders.
He won recognition as the unquestioned national leader,
eloquent spokesman and major influence on the issues
closest to his heart: the environment.
He mobilized millions of people and launched a new wave
of environmental activism.
He traveled widely to give thousands of speeches
in a half a century of public life.
He received high honors and prestigious awards for his work
and achievements.
But none of it changed, disturbed, or unsettled
his inner core.
He was always the boy from Clear Lake, Wisconsin,
off on an adventure.
And so that's the premise of the book,
and it's not a stretch at all.
If you sat next to Gaylord Nelson on an airplane
and you didn't know who he was,
when you arrived at wherever you were going,
you probably still might not know anything about him
or what he had done,
but he would know everything about you.
He would have interrogated you until he knew
about your family background and what you were doing
either in school or at work,
what you thought about the issues.
He was just genuinely interested in people
and what made them tick.
And that had a lot to do with his political success
over the years.
But let me get back to the book for a minute
and to Clear Lake, which is a village of about 700 people.
It's about 50 miles from St. Paul
in northwestern Wisconsin.
And if you'd listen to Gaylord, you would think
just down the road from Lake Wobegon.
(laughter)
But let me try to give you just a small taste
of why that was so important in his life.
When people would ask him
how he became an environmentalist,
he would say by osmosis growing up in Clear Lake.
Gaylord and his friends had the run of Clear Lake,
exploring everything.
Gaylord and Sherman Benson, his closest sidekick,
were rascals, like two puppies, always getting into mischief.
And this is not Sherman, but this is Gaylord
and his brother, Stannard.
Gaylord is the older one.
Gaylord and Sherman Benson, his closets sidekick,
were rascals, like two puppies,
always getting into something and causing minor mischief.
Putting a heifer in the banker's house
while the family was at the movies,
or hiding in the bushes to embarrass young lovers
saying good night.
Gaylord and Sherman were up in Clyde Jones' apple tree
one night, borrowing some apples.
And when Jones came out and turned on the light,
"So you could see better," he said.
Then he went back inside while the embarrassed
would-be thieves ran away.
Fred Booth moved to Clear Lake as a fifth grader
and found that when Gaylord was my friend,
everybody in town was my friend.
While there were a lot of hijinks,
they were never mean or destructive.
Rusty Pierson, a neighbor, said,
"They weren't bad boys but they had a little life.
"They were more apt to help you than hurt you, though."
That is Gaylord and Sherman Benson
with Gaylord's dog, Sport,
who they trained to be a sled dog.
Or maybe didn't train but turned him into one.
And that is sort of Our Gang in Clear Lake.
Gaylord is the fourth from the left there.
The other one with the arrow over him
is his brother, Stannard.
Those are his parents, Anton and Mary Nelson.
His dad was a country doctor; his mother was a nurse.
Maybe we can stop there for a minute.
Young Gaylord spent much time outdoors in the woods,
lakes, marshes, and farmlands surrounding Clear Lake.
Swimming, hiking, and camping in the summer;
skiing, skating, and sledding in the winter.
The lakes contained fish, turtles, cattails,
and muskrat houses,
and migrating birds and ducks visited
every spring and fall.
Gaylord and his buddies got well acquainted with nature,
catching snakes, trapping rabbits, snaring gophers,
and trying unsuccessfully to disrupt
the annual turtle migration
from big and little Clear Lakes at one end of Main Street
to Mud Lake on the other end.
When the 50 or 60 turtles would migrate in the fall,
they would go right through the village's backyards.
And Gaylord and one of his sidekicks would pick them up,
spin them around, put them in high grass,
put them behind a tree.
Whatever they did, the turtles always knew
which way to go to reach Mud Lake,
where they were going to hibernate for the winter,
and young Gaylord was intrigued.
Excuse me.
Contrary to what Sinclair Lewis said about small town life
and how it made,
how it bred conformity,
Nelson would argue that small town living
actually encourages individuality
but it demands you to be civil.
He would say if you live in a small town,
you can't irritate somebody that you know
you're going to see again the next day.
You can't steal their parking place.
You can't treat them any other way
than the way you'd like them to treat you
because you can't get away from them.
You're going to seem them again tomorrow
and the day after that and probably the same afternoon.
And he said
one of the things he learned from his parents was that
although he disagreed with people,
he never made it personal and he never carried a grudge,
and that had a lot to do with his success in politics,
that he never personalized it.
He said, "I never saw my father angry,
"although he surely was.
"I'm always very careful about losing my temper,
"so I don't ever go into a rage.
"I always figured that's a losing game,
"getting mad at somebody.
"That takes up a lot of energy.
"You hurt yourself more than the object of your anger."
Later, that philosophy helped him win friends
on both sides of the political aisle and accomplish things
he never could have achieved otherwise
and win recognition from his peers as the most
popular and well liked member of the United States Senate.
Just one example
of how he was able to do that
was his friendship with Melvin Laird.
When Gaylord was first in the State Senate,
he became the, in 1948,
he became the democratic floor leader,
which wasn't quite as impressive as it sounds.
There were only five democrats in the senate at the time.
So if you voted for yourself,
you only had to find two other people to support you.
But Melvin Laird was the republican leader,
and the two of them would debate all day long
and disagree on every issue and sometimes quite heatedly.
And when the senate adjourned late in the afternoon,
Gaylord and Laird would adjourn as well
to the bar at the Park Hotel,
where they would hang out and tell stories
and swap jokes and
often long into the evening when Laird would end up
at the Nelson's for dinner until Carrie Lee
finally kicked him out.
And the next morning, they would be back in the senate
and start all over going at each other hammer and tongue.
And it never became personal,
and it's a friendship that lasted their entire lives.
Even later on,
when Melvin Laird became the Secretary of Defense
and was the one who was running the Vietnam War
for Richard Nixon,
and Gaylord was one of the first senators
to stand up and oppose it,
the two of them were still friends
and would go out for drinks and be able to socialize
and put that aside.
And when you think about how things work today,
it's really amazing.
He would, in the senate private dining room,
go sit at the table with the republicans sometimes,
just to tell stories and find out about people
and kind of what made them tick.
If you did that now, they tell me,
you would probably get kicked out of your own caucus.
You would not be welcome with the democrats.
So, anyway, I got a little sidetracked there,
but Gaylord was always rooted in Clear Lake.
He didn't live there after 1946.
But he came back every year a couple of times, usually,
for more than 60 years.
And if you walked down the street with him,
the way I did a couple of times,
you would have thought he still lived there.
He knew everybody.
Everyone would stop and talk to him.
When the book came out, he did a book signing in Clear Lake
with me.
And there's been a population boom there.
They're a little concerned.
When Gaylord was born, there were only 700 people there.
Now, it'll be a hundred years next year.
Now there are a thousand people.
(laughter)
So there are probably maybe 600 households, I guess,
in the community.
300 people showed up for that book signing,
and they lined up afterward and came through,
and everyone had some personal connection with him.
They'd say, "Do you remember
"Bessie Jones?"
And he'd say, "Oh yeah, she lived down on Highway K.
"They had the Guernseys, I think."
And the guy would say, "Yeah, she was my aunt."
At least half a dozen of the people
who came through the line that day said,
"You know, your father delivered me."
So he really was from Clear Lake.
He is buried there.
And he became famous over the years
for his Clear Lake stories,
which he started telling,
well, he started telling before that,
but he really became known for them during his campaign
for governor, when he used that kind of as a way
to introduce himself and also...
...also talked a little bit about his background.
One of the people he liked to tell stories about,
no relation, but his name is Trolly Christofferson.
He would tell a couple of stories about Trolly.
One, Trolly was a big baseball fan, he'd say,
and his friends in Clear Lake all pitched in
to send him to a game in Minneapolis.
At the time they had a minor league team,
the Minneapolis Millers.
And so when he got back,
everybody was really curious and asked,
"Well, Trolly, how did you like the game?"
And he said, "You know, there was so much going on
"at the station in Minneapolis that I never did get down
"to see the Millers."
(laughter)
Another story, Trolly got up to speak at a unity dinner.
Polk County was pretty well split and
this had been a particularly divisive election.
The democrats had won,
and they were all going to get back together
because it was a small town and they all had to get along.
So we're all going to be friends now that the election is over.
And Trolly got up, got a little carried away and he said,
"You know for years, Republicans have been
"lying and cheating and stealing elections."
And his wife kind of tugged at his sleeve and said,
"You know, Trolly, this is the unity dinner."
He said, "But this year, with God's help,
"we beat them at their own game."
(laughter)
So did those things really happen?
I don't know.
Some of them could have happened.
Some of them might have happened in Clear Lake.
Some of them might have happened to somebody else,
but he became famous for those stories.
He told them for 60 years,
and people who had heard them 60 times before
would ask him to tell them again at the end.
He was just...
I think had he not been in politics,
he probably could have made it as a standup comic.
Anyway, Gaylord is best known, of course,
for his work in environmental issues.
In Wisconsin, we know him as the person
who saved the Apostles Islands and the St. Croix River,
as much as anything.
But he had a long list of achievements
and accomplishments on a wide range of other issues.
He fought for civil rights.
He enlisted in Johnson's war on poverty.
He took on the big drug companies and tire manufacturers
to protect consumers.
He stood up to Joe McCarthy,
the House Un-American Activities committee,
and the Nixon White House to defend our civil liberties.
And he stood up very early,
risking his political career against the war in Vietnam.
If you read the book, I hope you will,
you'll find out about those things.
But today, I want to talk about the environment,
which really remained his passion
and the thing closest to his heart.
So that's what we'll focus on.
As governor, he--
After the army, he was elected to the State Senate.
And then as governor, he won passage of a visionary program
to preserve open space wildlife habitat
and recreational land.
It was a program called ORAP, which, I think,
didn't pass because of the catchy name they had for it.
It was the Outdoor Reaction Action Program.
It was a simple idea.
They put a one-cent package tax on cigarettes,
which raised $50 million over 10 years
for a land acquisition program.
A penny a pack.
Imagine what, in the session a couple of years ago,
they added a dollar a pack.
Think of what he could have done with that.
But the program put Wisconsin in the forefront nationally
in conservation programs.
And it became a model for a lot of other states
that adapted similar kinds of things.
It stamped Nelson
as an environmentalist and made him a national leader
on the issue.
It was the forerunner
of what today we call the stewardship fund,
which continues to acquire and preserve precious land
before it's gobbled up and developed.
ORAP and the stewardship program combined
have protected a million acres through state acquisition,
partnerships with nonprofits and local units of government
and through purchase of conservation easements.
It has always been, had bipartisan support.
Recently that has eroded somewhat.
There have been cutbacks and a freeze on purchases,
but even the name of the program,
it's the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund,
named for Warren Knowles, the republican governor
who came after Gaylord.
The fact that his name is first, I think,
suggests that when the name was chosen,
the republicans were in charge of the legislature.
But nonetheless, it has always been
a nonpartisan until recently.
After two terms as governor,
Nelson was elected to the US Senate
in 1962, and his conservation record
was a big part of the campaign.
This is a shot during the campaign
with Gaylord, John Reynolds, who was running for governor,
who won the election for governor that year.
And of course, Bobby Kennedy.
And once he was elected to the senate,
Nelson didn't waste any time.
Even before he took office, he went to Washington,
partly to try to get some good committee assignments
and find a place to live,
but he also went to visit Bobby Kennedy,
who was the president's,
besides being the attorney general,
his chief political advisor.
And he said, "You know, the president's really missing
"a great opportunity by not talking about
"conservation issues more."
He said, "Look at what we've done in Wisconsin."
He brought a big scrapbook of clippings with him,
where there was this phenomenal coverage
of his ORAP program.
He had gotten editorials from practically every newspaper
in the state.
Everybody supported it.
He thought the idea to sell,
the way to sell the idea to the Kennedys
was to say it would be a big political advantage.
He said it will really help him; he should do this.
And, amazingly, it happened.
This was during the campaign.
The president did go on a tour, a national tour
to talk about conservation issues.
And when they left Washington to go on an 11-state tour,
Gaylord thought, "This is it."
He said, "The president's going to say this is important,
"everybody is going to agree this is important,
"we're going to put this issue on the national agenda.
"It's going to be part of the political discussion
"in this country."
And they had all three, if you can imagine that,
all three television networks were on the plane.
That's all there were at the time, so they had everybody.
They made a lot of stops across the country,
including one in Ashland,
where the president flew over the Apostle Islands
and Gaylord got to make his pitch about
what a great thing that would be.
There's John Reynolds again on the left.
And Kennedy gave his
prepared speeches about conservation
all across the country, except that it turned out that
deep down, he wasn't really that interested in the issue,
and the national press was even less interested.
And so a lot of the coverage from the trip
became about other things.
It would be whatever came out of the question
and answer period after his speech.
And so sometimes it would be about the
eight-hour work day or it'd be about
the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty or...
The basic message kind of got lost in the shuffle,
and Gaylord was quite disappointed.
He went back to the senate,
and of course, the president was assassinated
a couple of months later.
This all happened in September of 1963.
And then everything changed.
So Gaylord went back in the senate
and began working on environmental
And it was six years later before he had his
eureka moment.
He had been on a speaking trip to the west coast,
and had just spoken in Santa Barbara,
where he had also visited the scene of a massive oil spill
in the ocean.
On the way to his next talk
on the airplane, reading a magazine article
about the Vietnam War teach-ins that were going on,
on campus all across the country.
This is September of 1969.
And the light came on and he said,
"Well, why don't we have an environmental teach-in?
"Why don't we get people to talk about that issue
"in the same way?"
And so he tried the idea out on a few people
who seemed to think it might work.
And in September,
he announced in a speech in Seattle
that there would be an environmental teach-in
in the spring, and the date yet to be determined
but that this was all going to happen.
There was a small wire story that ran in newspapers
around the country.
It wasn't a major thing.
But the response to that was overwhelming.
His office was inundated with letters and calls
from people who wanted to know how they could get involved
from all across the country.
To the extent that his office couldn't handle it,
the volume, and they set up a nonprofit organization
called Environmental Teach-In.
And this was in September.
They settled on April 22nd as the date,
so it was only seven months later that 20 million people,
10% of the population of the country at the time,
did something on Earth Day.
It was so beyond his wildest expectations
that he was perhaps as surprised as anybody else.
This is his senate newsletter
when he first announced the idea.
Environmental Teach-In Plan.
And it was not called Earth Day until
somewhat later.
I think an advertising agency eventually came up with it.
This is a full page ad that ran in the New York Times,
kind of announcing it.
It was well received
and there was a huge participation.
What really made a lot of it work
was that the schools got involved at every level.
It wasn't just college campuses;
it was local community organizations
and grade schools and high schools.
Interest in the issue had been building for a long time
and Gaylord had been traveling around the country,
speaking about environmental issues
and he sensed that it was there.
Everybody had some local horror story
about something that was going on,
that the landfill was leaking into the groundwater.
He was able to convert that
into this incredible national movement.
But don't think for a minute
that Earth Day was universally popular
or accepted by everybody
or that it was without its detractors,
both on the left and the right.
The John Birch Society, remember them?
They're still around, by the way.
They didn't like the date that he had chosen, April 22nd.
Gaylord had picked it because it was a time that
classes were...
That it wasn't a vacation on campuses,
that it didn't conflict with any holidays,
some other logical reasons.
The weather might be good by then, and so on.
And so he kind of arbitrarily picked that date.
Well, it turns out the John Birch Society said
this was the 100th anniversary of the birth
of Vladimir Lenin,
and Earth Day was nothing but an ill-disguised attempt
to honor that revolutionary communist.
Here's one of my favorite quotes.
"Subversive elements planned to make American children
"live in an environment that is good for them,"
A Mississippi delegate to a Daughters
of the American Revolution Convention warned.
So Nelson, of course,
had no idea it was Lenin's birthday,
but he did some research, and he came up with a response
because, believe it or not,
people were taking this seriously,
and he was being asked about it
when he'd be out making public appearances,
and the media were beginning to ask.
So he did a little math and he said,
"You know, with only 365 days in the year,
"and at the time, 3.7 billion people in the world,
"that every day was the birthday of 10 million
"living people, not to mention a lot of dead ones."
And so he said, "A person many considered
"the world's first environmentalist,
"St. Francis of Assisi, was born on April 22nd,
"so was Queen Isabella,
"and, more importantly, so was my Aunt Tilly."
(laughter)
And his humor defused the question somewhat,
but people still took it seriously.
The Los Angeles City Council
passed a resolution supporting Earth Day
but with an amendment that said they hoped
he would change the date in the future.
So on the left, meanwhile, Earth Day was drawing some fire
for taking attention from other issues,
like racism and poverty and the Vietnam War.
And Richard Hatcher, who at the time
was the mayor of Gary, Indiana, said,
"The nation's concern with the environment
"has done what George Wallace was unable to do,
"distract the nation from the human problems
"of the black and brown Americans
"living in just as much misery as ever."
I.F. Stone, the muckraking journalist,
this always amazes me because he was speaking
at an Earth Day rally on the mall
at the Washington Monument
when he said, "Earth Day was a beautiful snow job
"designed to distract attention
"from government's military and spending policies.
"We here tonight are being conned," Stone said.
"The country is slipping into a wider war
"in southeast Asia, and we're sitting here
"talking about litterbugs."
But Nelson was not just talking about litterbugs.
This photo is from an Earth Day speech in Denver.
But the night before Earth Day,
he spoke on campus here at the Union Theater.
And he made it clear he saw the movement broadly focused.
He said, "Our goal is not to forget about the worst
"environments in America, in the ghettos,
"in the Appalachia and elsewhere.
"Our goal is an environment of decency,
"quality and mutual respect for all human beings
"and all other living creatures.
"An environment without ugliness, without ghettos,
"without poverty, without discrimination,
"without hunger and without war.
"Our goal is a decent environment in its deepest
"and broadest sense."
But Earth Day, for all its success,
and this is his subsequent senate newsletter,
was just a means to an end for Nelson,
not an end in itself.
It was a catalyst for public involvement in activism,
and it sent a wake-up call to the politicians.
Congress closed on Earth Day because so many people,
so many members had been invited to speak on Earth Day
back in their home districts.
Most of them, or many of them at least,
had to come to Nelson's office for help
in drafting a speech because they had never spoken
about the environment in their lives.
That all changed pretty quickly.
Earth Day introduced what became known
as the environmental decade.
During the next 10 years, more significant legislation
was passed into law and signed
than in all of the years leading up to 1970.
They passed 28 major environmental laws
during those 10 years,
and hundreds of other public lands bills
to protect and conserve natural resources.
Philip Shabecoff, who was an environmental writer
for the New York Times,
one of the early people who actually had that assignment
before there were environmental reporters,
said, "After Earth Day, nothing was the same."
He said, "Earth Day brought revolutionary change
"and touched off a great burst of activism
"that profoundly affected the nation's laws,
"its economy, its corporations,
"its farms, its politics, science,
"education, religion, and journalism.
"It achieved Nelson's long-sought goal
of putting the environment
"on the national political agenda, of course,"
But most importantly, he said,
"The social forces unleashed after Earth Day
"changed probably forever the way Americans think
"about the environment."
Earth Day, in the last
45 years, has become institutionalized.
Part of the genius of it is that it took root
in the schools where millions of students at all levels
now learn about and are sensitized
to environmental issues during Earth week and Earth Day,
but also throughout the year.
It's become an international event.
More than a billion people participate
in Earth Day activities, now making it the largest
secular civil event in the world,
according to the Earth Day Network.
And that's part of Gaylord Nelson's legacy.
But the most important, probably, lasting thing
is what Aldo Leopold called the land ethic
and what Gaylord Nelson called an environmental ethic.
"We need a generation imbued with an environmental ethic,"
Nelson said repeatedly over the years,
"which causes society to always ask the question:
"if we intrude on this work of nature,
"what will the consequences be?"
"Such an ethic would recognize the bonds
"that unite the species, man, with the natural systems
"of the planet and would affirm human stewardship role
"on the planet," he said.
The message and goal had not changed in the half century
since Aldo Leopold wrote in a Sand County Almanac
of the need for what he called a land ethic.
He said, "A land ethic then reflects the existence
"of an ecological conscience.
"And this, in turn, reflects a conviction
"of individual responsibility for the health of the land.
"The land ethic changes the role of homosapiens
"from conqueror of the land community
"to a plain member and citizen of it."
That, in a few sentences, is what the environmental movement
was all about.
Nelson's environmentalism was the direct descendant
of Leopold's conservation.
"A new environmental ethic is evolving," Nelson said
25 years after Earth Day.
And he said that in his visits to schools
around the country,
that he found grade school students in the 1990s
were asking more informed questions
about environmental issues than college students had
in 1970, because they had grown up learning about it.
He used to tell a story
of one little girl who--
He was speaking to a group of grade schoolers in Florida--
and a little girl raised her hand and said,
"You know, my mother
"came home from the grocery store the other day
"and she had a can of tuna, but it didn't have that
"dolphin-free symbol on it."
She said, "You know, I got her to take that back
"to the grocery store
"and exchange it for one that did."
That's having an environmental ethic instilled in you.
This was maybe a 10-year-old.
When I think about that
and compare that with what it was like
when I was growing up in Wisconsin just the other day.
(laughter)
Well, in the '50s and '60s, I grew up in Eau Claire.
I think about,
I remember the first litterbug campaign.
We had to pay for radio ads.
There's a little jingle.
"If you throw litter from your car,
"a litterbug is what you are."
We had to pay for radio advertising
to tell people not to throw garbage out their car windows.
Not that it never happens now,
but it is very rare that you would ever see that.
We would walk across the bridge
on the main street, on Barstow Street,
and right near where the Eau Claire
and Chippewa Rivers come together.
And sometimes, just upstream
was a laundry and dry cleaners.
And sometimes there would be foam on that river
six feet high all the way across,
and no one thought a thing of it.
We'd grown up fishing down below.
So when you think about that
and how far we have come,
not that we don't have a long ways to go,
I think a lot of that is
because of the person you see here,
who really changed people's attitudes.
He got a lot of recognition in later years.
Here, he's getting the Medal of Freedom,
which is the highest award a civilian can get.
The Institute for Environmental Studies,
at least so far,
is still named for Gaylord Nelson.
(laughter)
Well, I understand
they're undoing a chair that was named for him.
But when he was in Clear Lake on one of his visits,
a little girl asked him how it felt
to be named after a school,
because she went to Gaylord Nelson Elementary School.
(laughter)
And this, he told me,
was his favorite picture of himself.
Fritz Albert from Madison,
who some of you may know, took that photo of Gaylord.
And he did all that, won all those honors,
did all those things,
and really was unchanged by it all.
And the best,
classic thing he would say about it was:
"It's not bad for a guy from Polk County, I guess."
So, thank you all for coming today.
(applause)