Forging Fiscal Reform: Constitutional Change, Public Policy, and the Creation of Administrative Capacity in Wisconsin, 1880–1920

Journal of Policy History

Volumn 20, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 94-112

  Mehrotra, Ajay K ^a  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 79957378976     PISSN: 08980306     EISSN: 15284190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jph.0.0005     Document Type: Article

References (108)

1. H. S. Wilson to Nils P. Haugen, 1 September 1910, Box 56, Nils P. Haugen Papers, The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison (SHSW).
2. Biennial Report of the Secretary of State of the State of Wisconsin, 1927-1928 (Madison, 1928)
3. Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present, ed. Susan B. Carter et al. (New York, 2006), table Ea132-59, table Ea247-75, table Ea489-518.
4. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (New York, 1982)
5. Clifton K. Yearley, The Money Machines: The Breakdown and Reform of Government and Party Finance in the North, 1860-1920 (Albany, N.Y. 1970).
6. W. Elliot Brownlee, Progressivism and Economic Growth: The Wisconsin Income Tax, 1911-1929 (Port Washington, N.Y. 1975)
7. John D. Buenker, The History of Wisconsin, Vol. IV, The Progressive Era, 1893-1914 (Madison, 1998)
8. Robert C. Nesbit, Wisconsin: A History (Madison, 1973)
9. David P. Thelen, The New Citizenship: Origins of Progressivism in Wisconsin, 1885-1900 (Columbia, Mo. 1972).
10. John O. Stark, “The Establishment of Wisconsin's Income Tax,” Wisconsin Magazine of History (Autumn 1987): 27–45
11. Stark, A History of the Property Tax and Property Tax Relief in Wisconsin (Madison, 1992)
12. Joseph A. Ranney, “Law and the Progressive Era, Part 2: The Transformation of Wisconsin's Tax System, 1887-1925,” Wisconsin Lawyer 67 (August 1994): 22–25, 62-63.
13. R. Rudy Higgens-Evenson, The Price of Progress: Public Services, Taxation, and the American Corporate State, 1877-1929 (Baltimore, 2003)
14. Morton Keller, Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900-1933 (Cambridge, Mass. 1990)
15. Jon C. Teaford, The Rise of the States: Evolution of American State Government (Baltimore, 2002)
16. John Joseph Wallis, “American Government Finance in the Long Run: 1790-1990,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 (Winter 2000): 61–82
17. Yearley, The Money Machines. On the importance of slavery to the early development of the American property tax
18. see Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation/American Slavery (Chicago, 2006).
19. Lawrence Friedman, History of American Law (New York, 1974), 497.
20. See also Harry N. Scheiber, “The Road to Munn: Eminent Domain and the Concept of Public Purpose in the State Courts,” Perspectives in American History 5 (1971): 400
21. James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (New York, 1986), 355.
22. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, 1967)
23. Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914 (Chicago, 1957)
24. Louis Galambos, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review 44 (1970): 279–90.
25. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Report on the Manufacturers of the United States at the Tenth Census, 1880 (Washington, D.C. 1991), 189, table IV
26. Statistical Abstract of the U.S. 1921 (Washington, D.C. 1922), 253, table 161
27. Campbell Gibson, Population of the 100 Largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States (Washington, D.C. 1998), 37, 41, tables 11, 19.
28. Wallis, “American Government Finance,” 69–71
29. Thelen, New Citizenship, 30–31
30. Brownlee, Progressivism and Economic Growth, 45.
31. Higgens-Evenson, Price of Progress, chap. 2. In real terms, Wisconsin spent approximately x0024;1.34 per capita on common school spending in 1880 and x0024;2.62 by 1900
32. Estimates suggest that by 1902 property taxes accounted for 57 percent of all state government revenues, and roughly 73 percent of all local revenues. Wallis, “American government Finance,” 70.
33. Title XIII, chap. 48, sections 1034, 1036, 1052, Supplement to the Wisconsin Statutes of 1898 (Chicago, 1906).
34. Alfred D. Chandler Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass. 1977)
35. William G. Roy, Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton, 1997).
36. Wisconsin Tax Commission, Report of the Wisconsin State Tax Commission (Madison, 1898), 109–10.
37. The Wisconsin Commission also “found frequent instances of an almost open and avowed practice of favoring particular interests and industries or classes of property.” Report of the Wisconsin State Tax Commission 78.
38. Seligman, “The General Property Tax,” Political Science Quarterly 5, no. 1 (1890): 62.
39. F. W. von Cotzhausen, “A Graduated Income Tax,” Milwaukee Sentinel, 17 October 1904
40. in 1873, von Cotzhausen, as state senator, was one of the first government officials to call for tax reform. Emanuel L. Philipp, Political Reform in Wisconsin: A Historical Review of the Subjects of Primary Election, Taxation, and Railway Regulation (Milwaukee, 1910), 107.
41. Charles J. Bullock, “The State Income Tax and the Classified Property Tax,” in Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference under the Auspices of the National Tax Association (New Haven, 1917), 369
42. Teaford, Rise of the States, 47–49.
43. Yearley, The Money Machines, xii-xv
44. Higgens-Evenson, Price of Progress, 13–14
45. Teaford, Rise of the States, 45–46.
46. Stark, History of the Property Tax, 8
47. Bullock, “State Income Tax and Classified Property Tax,” 375
48. Teaford, Rise of the States, 46.
49. T. S. Adams, “The Significance of the Wisconsin Income Tax,” Political Science Quarterly 28 (December 1913): 569–85, at 575.
50. Glenn Fisher, The Worst Tax? A History of the Property Tax in America (Lawrence, Kans. 1996), chap. 4
51. Einhorn, American Taxation/American Slavery, 204.
52. Gail Radford, “From Municipal Socialism to Public Authorities: Institutional Factors in the Shaping of American Public Enterprise,” Journal of American History 90, no. 3 (2003): 863–90.
53. Wisconsin Constitution, Section 1, Article VIII.
54. Marsh v. Supervisors 42 Wis. 502 (1877)
55. see also Hersey v. Board of Supervisors, 37 Wis. 75 (1875)
56. Bradley v. Lincoln County, 60 Wis. 71 (1884).
57. Thelen, New Citizenship, 204–7, 288
58. Richard L. McCormick, “The Party Period and Public Policy: An Exploratory Hypothesis,” Journal of American History 66 (1979): 279–98
59. Michael McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 (New York, 1986). For an updated reassessment of the party period
60. see Richard John, “Farewell to the ‘Party Period’: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Policy History 16, no. 2 (2004): 117–25.
61. Philipp, Political Reform in Wisconsin, 109–11
62. Kossuth Kent Kennan, “The Wisconsin Income Tax,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 26, no. 1 (November 1911): 169–78
63. Wisconsin State Tax Commission, 1898 Report.
64. Nils P. Haugen, Pioneer and Political Reminiscences (Evansville, Wis. 1930)
65. Brownlee, Progressivism and Economic Growth, 49–51
66. Buenker, History of Wisconsin, 442–43
67. Stuart D. Brandes, “Nils P. Haugen and the Wisconsin Progressive Movement” (Master's thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1965).
68. Charles McCarthy, The Wisconsin Idea (New York, 1912)
69. Buenker, History of Wisconsin, 573–77.
70. Fredrick C. Howe, Wisconsin, An Experiment in Democracy (New York, 1912), 133–39
71. Philipp, Political Reform in Wisconsin.
72. Wisconsin Constitution, Section 1, Article VIII.
73. T. S. Adams, “The Wisconsin Income Tax,” American Economic Review 1 (December 1911): 906–9, at 906.
74. Buenker, History of Wisconsin, 488–89
75. Jack Stark, The Wisconsin State Constitution: A Reference Guide (Westport, Conn. 1997), 8.
76. “Praise Income Tax,” Milwaukee Journal, 24 May 1911
77. “Income Tax Hearing,” (Milwaukee) Evening Wisconsin, 24 May 1911.
78. Wiebe, Search for Order
79. Eldon J. Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence, Kans. 1994)
80. Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 113–32.
81. In this sense, the tax experts employed by state tax commissions were similar to the “mezzo-level” actors of national executive agencies. On the importance of mezzolevel administrators, see Daniel P. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovations in Executive Agencies, 1862-1928 (Princeton, 2001), 18–25.
82. “Income Tax in Place of Personal Property Tax,” Milwaukee Free Press, 26 May 1910.
83. Haugen, Pioneer and Political Reminiscences, 158–59. On the transatlantic roots of American economic ideas during this period
84. see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass. 1998), chap. 3.
85. Merle Curti, The Making of an American Community: A Case Study of Democracy in a Frontier County (Stanford, 1959), 270.
86. Brownlee, Progressivism and Economic Growth, chap. 3; Buenker, History of Wisconsin, 551–54
87. Stark, “Establishment of Wisconsin's Income Tax.”
88. “Genesis of Wisconsin's Income Tax: An Interview with D. O. Kinsman,” Wisconsin Magazine of History, September 1937, 4.
89. Wisconsin Session Laws (1911), Section 1087m-8(1) and (2), Chapter 658
90. Kennan, “The Wisconsin Income Tax,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (1911)
91. Seligman, The Income Tax, 421
92. J. C. Stamp, “The Tax Experiment in Wisconsin,” Economic Journal 23, no. 89 (March 1913): 142–46.
93. T. S. Adams, “The Significance of the Wisconsin Income Tax,” 572
94. Kossuth Kent Kennan, “The Wisconsin Income Tax,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 58 (March 1915): 65–76
95. Thomas E. Lyons, “The Wisconsin Income Tax,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 58 (March 1915): 77–86.
96. Brownlee, Progressivism and Economic Growth, 49–50
97. Buenker, The History of Wisconsin, 554
98. James K. Conant, Wisconsin Politics and Government: America's Laboratory of Democracy (Lincoln, Neb. 2006), 298
99. Clara Penniman, State Income Taxation (Baltimore, 1980), table I, 2-3
100. State ex rel. Bolens v. Frear; Winding v. Frear. The Court consolidated these two cases as the Income Tax Cases, 148 Wis. 456 (1911).
101. “Believes Income Tax Law Invalid,” Milwaukee Sentinel, 16 November 1911
102. “Income Tax Law Is Argued” Milwaukee Free Press, 21 November 1911.
103. Income Tax Cases, 504.
104. In signing the bill, Governor McGovern attached a lengthy memo that stated in part that “the plan of adjusting public burdens according to ability has been in successful operation for many years in Switzerland, Austria, France, England, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, and the German states.” “Governor Calls Income Tax Just,” Milwaukee Sentinel, 14 July 1911.
105. Income Tax Cases, 505.
106. Income Tax Cases 511.
107. “Income Tax Law Valid, Says Court” Milwaukee Sentinel, 10 January 1912
108. “Hold's State's Taxation Plan Revolutionized,” Milwaukee Free Press, 10 January 1912.