Dave Wagner: a pioneer of the alternative press in Madison

Historian Paul Buhle remembers the journalist who died Feb. 21

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Before there was Isthmus, there was Connections, the first and arguably the best in a series of other local “underground” tabloids, and The Madison Press Connection, which lasted from 1978-80. Dave Wagner, who recently died at age 78 in Tempe, Arizona, played a central role in the two papers that offered an alternative to the day’s mainstream, daily newspapers. 

Connections formed in spring 1967 with Robert Gabriner, Stuart Ewen and others seizing the moment to add local content and artistry to what was becoming a national press phenomen. Cheap runs on the web press allowed papers of eight pages, more or less, to be printed so cheaply that street sales (sometimes by the unpaid staff) covered the bills.

These papers, hundreds of them by 1968-69, across the country, stretched from campuses to bohemian ex-student neighborhoods. They were above all things opposed to the Vietnam War and the drafting of young men. But they were pro-marijuana as strongly as anti-war, and more “cultural” in a popular, eclectically radical sense than anything in the U.S. since the 1910s or 1930s. Poetry often appeared on the first page! Like “underground comix” of the day, they were uncensored in language and images, shocking, fascinating and often funny.

Connections really came to life with the Dow incident at UW-Madison in October 1967, what demonstrators considered a “police riot,” and the authorities treated as a civil or uncivil disturbance. A bloodied Paul Soglin projected himself as a future political leader of restless young people. The “Dow” issue of Connections was distributed by the thousands in the campus dorms and was even sent home by some students, presumably to convince parents or at least younger siblings. The best part was perhaps not the angry rhetoric but the photos of confrontations, showing the Madison Police Department in its worst light, badly needing the reform that was a few years away.

The newspaper faded by 1970 and Wagner, its poetry editor and by then a UW graduate, moved on to become editor of a yet newer tabloid, Madison Kaleidoscope. This paper emerged at the worst possible moment, perhaps, and faded quickly, publishing from 1969 to 1971.

Wagner’s journalism career picks up a few years later when the Capital Times, having turned against the war with vigor, gained a freshness of journalistic idealism. Elliott Maraniss, a leftwing labor activist during the 1940s, offered young journalists a chance, and his favorite, by any estimate, was Dave Wagner. Their temperment jibed. Wagner went from the police blotter to the cultural pages and some will still remember his review and essays on local theater and music (perhaps most of all his coverage of Ben Sidran’s rise).

The good will at the paper ended with a newspaper strike, the most historic in Madison’s history, and the major event in Madison journalism since the founding of the Capital Times as an anti-war daily in 1917, when opposing the First World War offered threats of repression to anyone who tried. The strike, touched off by the disposal of the pressmen (with the coming of “cold type” that is, digital text in place of typesetting, they could be set aside or simply fired) and the determination of the local Newspaper Guild chapter to take a stand for fairness and labor solidarity. Wagner would be regarded by all as a leader of the strike.

The Wisconsin State Journal and the Capital Times had formed a joint publishing agreement in 1948 to share certain production functions and profits under the umbrella of Madison Newspapers Incorporated. With a new headquarters far from the capitol, where strikers might have blocked outgoing deliveries, MNI had the winning hand. As the strike wore down, the activists in the “strike paper” committed themselves to creating a new daily, a rerun (so to speak) of the original Capital Times. The office of the Madison Press Connection was run, almost, as an experiment in workers’ cooperative or democracy.

David Montgomery, the leading labor historian in the U.S., proclaimed that this experiment proved that industrial democracy could work after all. Sadly, the Press Connection failed a few months after Madison Mayor Paul Soglin’s putative successor, James Rowen, lost the 1979 mayor race. The city’s progressives and its labor movement had lost a crucial round, with a small consolation. According to David Newby, former leader of Madison’s Central Labor Council and later the head of the state AFL-CIO, the intense organizing around the strike and support of the daily paper prompted the replacement of the city’s conservative labor chiefs within three years.

Still, Reaganism was around the corner. Some would say that the freewheeling Madison bohemianism of the 1970s, with dozens of cooperative enterprises, had come to a crashing end. Others, staying around long enough or returning, would observe that the defeat of the protracted, sometimes enormous “Wisconsin Uprising” of 2011-13 against the Walker regime, had its precursor in the defeat of the newspaper strike. The liberal city could not, finally, defend its own.

Wagner went on to the Waukesha Freeman and then the Arizona Republic. He never regained his byline, working instead as an editor. But he gamely joined me in the creation of a small 1970s magazine, Cultural Correspondence, dedicated to an appreciation of the rebellious elements in U.S. popular culture. It was a sentiment arising from life in Madison, back when it seemed to be a sort of epicenter of a certain promise of American life.

From there, he would co-author four books about the lives, work and accomplishments of the Hollywood Left, banished by the blacklist but come to life in memory. Wagner would also become one of the treasured scriptwriters of the new genre of nonfiction graphic novels, with an adaptation of Howard Zinn’s famous People’s History as a foremost achievement. It was, perhaps, enough for a life.

Paul Buhle published the eclectic new left magazine Radical America from Spaight Street, 1967-71, including Radical America Komiks (1969), one of the earliest “alternative” comic books. Later on, he became a senior lecturer at Brown University.