When most students think of presidents and UW-Madison their thoughts drift to one of the more famous sites on campus: the stately statue of Abraham Lincoln perched atop Bascom Hill. This underscores the rich history of presidential visits to the city of Madison and the UW-Madison campus.
From Rutherford B. Hayes to Barack Obama and nine commanders-in-chief in between, the campus has seen its fair share of presidential pomp and circumstance.
The visits began in 1878 when Hayes paid a visit to the Wisconsin State Fair, then held at Camp Randall Stadium. While Hayes spent most of his time drumming up support for the Republican Party with predecessor Ulysses S. Grant, he still found time to visit the UW-Madison campus. According to a 1929 Milwaukee Journal article, the 19th president stopped by “the Ladies Hall at the university and mingled in ‘a friendly manner with the young lady students.’”
The next sitting president to visit campus was Herbert Hoover, who did so for a campaign visit in November 1932. William Taft and Theodore Roosevelt visited in 1915 and 1918, respectively, but both had left office before they came.
A Wisconsin State Journal profile of the event estimates that roughly 12,000 people attended Hoover’s campaign speech at the old UW Field House, while 60,000 more lined the streets to watch the presidential motorcade roll by. Despite the support of the large crowd, Hoover was trounced by Franklin D. Roosevelt days later, garnering only 38 percent of the popular vote.
Eighteen years later President Harry Truman spoke at the same building to deliver a speech on the nation’s foreign affairs. Truman offered high praise for the university, calling it “a university center that has done so much for our great nation,” according to the Truman Presidential Library, but other parts of his speech struck a decidedly serious tone, coming mere weeks before the official start of the Korean War.
“It is more than ever necessary for us to work together with the other free nations, to preserve our freedom and to increase our common welfare,” Truman said in his speech. His visit also showed the simpler security that a 1950 visit would elicit relative to with modern times.
A tongue-tied Daily Cardinal reporter found himself face-to-face with the president at one point during the event.
“The writer looked at the President and racked his brains for something cheerful and encouraging to tell the world’s top executive,” reporter John Hunter wrote, referring to himself. “All he could manage was a weak ‘How are you, sir?’ When the car pulled away, he discovered he was standing stiffly at attention.”
Fortunately, a driver who had witnessed the events ushered Hunter into a car “two … behind the First Family” in the parade—an experience implausible today.
John F. Kennedy also paid a visit to the new Field House, adjoining Camp Randall Stadium, in October of 1960, less than a month before becoming the youngest president ever elected, and, like Truman, used the opportunity to unveil a new policy agenda to a younger crowd.
“We can do better and we must do better,” Kennedy declared to the estimated 12,500 people who turned out to see the senator tout his ideas for international aid to newly independent countries and nuclear disarmament.
Between the passage of the 26th Amendment, which gave 18-year-olds the right to vote, and more sophisticated ways of targeting messages, college students became more important in getting candidates elected.
By the time the next commander-in-chief came to campus 32 years later, the visits were increasingly political, rather than policy driven. More recent visits embodied this tendency, including Bill Clinton in 1992 and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.
Clinton’s speech antagonized George H.W. Bush, as he implored the crowd to choose a government that “is on our side.” The nation agreed and Clinton, propelled by the majority of the national youth vote, defeated Bush weeks later.
As a young Illinois senator in 2008, Obama complimented Wisconsin, saying “where better to affirm our [Democratic] ideals than here in Wisconsin, where a century ago the Progressive movement was born.”
Obama’s most recent visit came as president in 2012. In his speech on Bascom Hill, he encouraged the roughly 30,000 spectators to turn out for early voting. The president criticized his opponent’s performance in the debate the night before and touted his own record throughout his first term. He reaffirmed that “we’ll finish what we started in 2008.”
As for Lincoln? While the 16th president signed the Land-Grant College Act of 1862, re-inventing the university, there is no record of the man coming to campus. A UW-Madison alumnus commissioned the bronze representation atop Bascom Hill and sold it to the university in 1909. Even though no Wisconsin politician has reached the Oval Office, the statue serves as a connection between presidents past and the birthplace of the Progressive movement and modern Republican Party.
