Charles McCarthy

• Charles McCarthy
• Born: June 29, 1873
• Died: March 26, 1921

Political scientist, librarian, publicist, and architect of the “Wisconsin idea” of legislative reliance on academic expertise, was born in Brockton (then called North Bridgewater), Massachusetts, the elder of two sons born to John McCarthy, a shoe-factory engine tender, and Katherine (O’shea) Desmond McCarthy, a boardinghouse owner, both Irish immigrants and Fenians. His earliest schooling in social and labor problems was acquired from factory workers at his mother’s boardinghouse, and he resolved to become well educated in order to better the lot of working people. His interest in helping the educationally disadvantaged was partly the result of his experience as an academically ill-prepared star athlete at Brown University, where he studied history with Professor J. Franklin Jameson and worked at a variety of jobs, including stagehand and football coach.

After taking his Ph.B. degree in 1876, coaching football at the University of Georgia, and being rejected for service in the Spanish-American War because of an attack of malaria, McCarthy entered the University of Wisconsin in 1898 and soon attracted the attention of Professors Frederick Jackson Turner, Richard T. Ely, and others who were in the process of developing an outstanding public university in Madison, the state capital. He was awarded a Ph.D. in political science in 1901. The following year his dissertation won the Justin Winsor Prize of the American Historical Association. In September 1901 he married Lucile Schreiber, a postgraduate student. They had one child, Katherine O’shea.

While in graduate school, McCarthy frequently attended sessions of the state legislature and realized the potential of government for effecting social and economic reform. In 1901 the first year of Governor Robert M. La Follet-te’s reform administration, he accepted a post as research director of Wisconsin’s newly created Legislative Reference Library, having been advised by his professors that he could make this seemingly innocuous job into almost anything he wanted. He then wrote to every member of the legislature, offering to collect information and expert advice to help legislators draft bills. A more modest version of this kind of service had been inaugurated by the New York State Library in the 1890s, but McCarthy was the first to succeed in getting lawmakers to use the resources of a state library on such a large scale.

Within a short time, the Legislative Reference Library was employing draft writers to see that bills were properly drawn up, a service previously available only through lobbyists or private attorneys whose fees had to be paid by the legislators. Under McCarthy’s direction, the library helped shape laws establishing regulatory commissions on utilities and railroads, the income-tax law, and other progressive legislation that made Wisconsin known as a “laboratory of social reform.” Though McCarthy insisted that he was simply a librarian, he took an active part in drafting bills and lobbying them through the legislature, where he usually “dropped by” on his way home.

At the same time, McCarthy was attracting national attention to the ideals of the Wisconsin progressive movement through speeches and magazine articles. In 1912 he worked on the platforms of the national Republican, Democratic, and Progressive parties, as well as of the Republican party in Wisconsin. His influence was clear in the Progressive plank on the recall of judicial decisions, and he successfully opposed the mildness of a statement in favor of voting rights for qualified Southern blacks. In 1912 he published The Wisconsin Idea, which Theodore Roosevelt in his introduction recommended as a handbook for reformers because “all through the Union we need to learn the lesson of scientific popular self-help and of patient care in radical legislation.”

McCarthy’s influence was indeed spreading all over the Union, and by 1914, when McCarthy himself organized the legislative service of the Library of Congress, more than half the states had established reference libraries based on Wisconsin’s, many of them staffed by personnel McCarthy had trained. But in Wisconsin a reaction against McCarthy’s influence had set in. His opponents charged that he put his own ideas into legislators’ heads and that the Reference Library was a “bill factory”—in effect, another legislature. The campaign was waged with such force that progressives including La Follette, hesitated to defend him. McCarthy, however, successfully defended himself in an appearance before a legislative committee, which then recommended that a bill for the dismantling of the Legislative Reference Library be indefinitely postponed.

From the beginning of his career, McCarthy considered his mission to be that of an educator, a role that was soon formalized by his appointment to the University of Wisconsin faculty. He taught courses on legislation from 1905 to 1917. From this position he was able to put into effect two of his most cherished projects, the University Extension Service to provide adult education and a system of continuation schools for young people who had had to leave public schools to go to work. To help create the well-trained and nonpartisan civil service he considered essential to proper administration of the law, he founded a training school for the Wisconsin State Board of Public Affairs and helped establish the national Society for the Promotion of Training for the Public Service. For citizens who had not attended high school—by far the majority—he collaborated on an elementary civics text published in 1916.

McCarthy also believed in the power of magazines to win support for progressive causes. He helped plan the New Republic, worked with the staff of Horizon (to which Theodore Roosevelt was a contributor), and was named general director of a new magazine, Watchman, which never materialized because of the advent of World War I.

In 1914 McCarthy was named director of research for the new federal Commission on Industrial Relations. After recruiting a well-trained staff that included Gertrude Barnum and Crystal Eastman, he was removed from the post because of disagreements with the commission’s chairman, who, he believed, preferred crusading in the limelight to the careful investigation and reporting that were McCarthy’s hallmark.

During these busy years, McCarthy spent much time traveling in Europe and the United States studying and promoting the farmers’ cooperative movement. He was also involved in athletics at the University of Wisconsin, serving briefly as football coach in 1907 at the players’ request and taking a group of Wisconsin baseball players on an exhibition tour of Japan in 1913.

When the United States entered World War I, McCarthy, rejected for military service, became a highly successful administrator of the draft in Wisconsin, a state whose noncompliance had been widely predicted. Later he served with Herbert Hoover’s Food and Fuel Administration.

In his travels around wartime America, McCarthy was dismayed by what he considered a pervasive lack of patriotism. When a special election was called in 1918 to fill Wisconsin’s vacant U.S. Senate seat, McCarthy entered the primary race for the Democratic nomination in the belief that he alone among all the candidates would unreservedly support President Woodrow Wilson. Although he did not win, he made a good showing in an eighteen-day campaign.

Early in 1921 McCarthy went to Prescott, Arizona, for his health. He died there of a stomach ailment at the age of forty-seven.

McCarthy’s writings include The Anti-Masonic Party, in Vol. 1 of the Annual Report of the American Historical Association (1903); The Wisconsin Idea (1912); and An Elementary Civics (with F. Swan and J. McMullin, 1916). E. A. Fitzpatrick, McCarthy of Wisconsin (1944), is a biography by a friend and colleague. See also the article in the Dictionary of American Biography (1933). J. A. Gable, The Bull Moose Years (1978), gives an account of McCarthy’s role in the 1912 presidential election.