Tony Earl wanted to be DNR Secretary. Nobody could figure out why.
Only 39 years old in 1975, Earl had already been Wausau city attorney, Assembly majority leader, a failed, but promising statewide candidate for attorney general, and secretary of the powerful Department of Administration. His future seemed bright and leading the unpopular Department of Natural Resources (also known as “Damn Near Russia”) seemed like political suicide.
But Earl had developed a love for the environment growing up in the rough and beautiful country of the Upper Peninsula. So, despite the political risks, he took the DNR job when it was offered.
“I knew the very first thing I had to do was change the notion that it was an isolated agency,” Earl said in an oral history recorded in 2010. “I had to use the popular parts of the agency — parks, fish and wildlife — to try to push for other things.
So, Earl spent his weeknights flying around the state to speak to every rod and gun club he could find. His message was that there was no point in stocking fish, for example, only to have them die in polluted waters. “We’ve got to do something about the damn paper mills, dumping all this stuff in the river,” he said he would tell them. “And I could see there would be some nodding.”
Earl then made a strategic decision to enforce the new clean water laws against the state’s biggest polluters. “Up to this point the DNR had gone after cheese factories and little villages, but now we are going to go after the two biggest surface water polluters in the state. Scott Paper and the city of Milwaukee.”
One day Gov. Pat Lucey called Earl to a meeting with Milwaukee Mayor Henry Maier. “Well, Henry fired his tobacco pouch across (the room) and he said, ‘Pat, you gotta rein this young whipper snapper in, he’s gonna destroy the city of Milwaukee,’” Earl recalled. But Earl was able to carry on and he prevailed in his lawsuits against both Milwaukee and Scott.
A decade later, when Earl was running for reelection against Tommy Thompson, Maier formed a rump group to push for “progressive” policies, but it was really an effort to make trouble for Earl within the Democratic Party. If the clean water suit hadn’t been enough, as governor, Earl had also been pushing hard to locate a prison in Milwaukee, closer to the families of a lot of the inmates and a place where people of color could be hired as guards. Maier thought it would destroy his city.
And Maier wasn’t his only problem. Despite Earl’s masterful handling of the DNR, the environmental community had soured on him. He had appointed a Republican to run the Department of Transportation and they believed Earl had sanctioned too much road building. And on other issues they felt that he had not lived up to their high expectations. So, in 1986 they largely sat on their hands.
Forty years later it’s clear that Tony Earl was the most progressive Wisconsin governor of the 20th century, not just on the environment, but on a wide variety of issues. He reformed marital property law to make women equal financial partners in their marriages. He brought the wages of state positions dominated by women (like nurses) to rough parity with jobs dominated by men (like janitors). He hired the first woman to lead the DOA, he hired the first Black man, Howard Fuller, to head a state agency, and he famously hired the first openly gay person to work in any governor’s office. The Milwaukee Sentinel welcomed Ron McCrea as Earl’s new press secretary with the blaring headline, “Earl Hires Avowed Homosexual.”
Earl was caught in the middle: too far ahead of his time for many Wisconsinites but not liberal enough to meet the sky high expectations of some of his base.
And his aides say that he could be stubborn. They’d point out the political pitfalls of some plan that might anger either the right or left and he’d say, “But God dammit, it’s the right thing to do!” That stubbornness and that political courage to do the right thing no matter what, probably cost him his political career. He was the rare politician who freely admitted to loving politics and yet he refused to play it safe just to keep his job.
Tony Earl died on Feb. 23 at age 86 in Madison. He used to say that “good policy is good politics.” It didn’t turn out that way. Voluminous good policy couldn’t win him a second term. But for those of us determined not to forget him, it earned our undying respect.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. He’s working on a biography of Gov. Tony Earl.
