Wisconsin

A state built by German and Scandinavian immigration that produced the most distinctive reform tradition in the country. Wisconsin was lead mining country before it was farmland - the badger nickname comes from miners who dug into hillsides - and statehood came in 1848, the year of the failed European revolutions, which sent large numbers of educated German liberals to Milwaukee. That immigration made the state culturally German for generations, with German-language newspapers, schools and a brewing industry, and it also made Milwaukee the only large American city to elect socialist mayors, which it did repeatedly for most of the first half of the twentieth century. The Wisconsin Idea, formulated around 1904 under Robert La Follette, held that the state university's research should serve the whole state, and the progressive programme that came out of it - the first state income tax, workers' compensation, direct primaries, railway regulation - was copied nationally. The state also produced Joseph McCarthy, elected to the Senate in 1946. Dairy became the defining industry, and it produces more cheese than any other state. Madison is the capital and the university town. Its politics have been closely divided for two decades. Milwaukee is the largest city. The state borders both Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. Its progressive era produced the first unemployment insurance law in the country, in 1932. The Ringling Brothers circus began at Baraboo. Wisconsin has more dairy cows than any state except California. The Door Peninsula reaches out between the bay and the lake.

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