Madison, April 1, 1969. The city elects a conservative mayor.
Republican attorney William Dyke, who lost to Mayor Otto Festge by only sixty-four votes in 1967, announces his 1969 campaign on January 4; two days later, Festge announces he’s not running for a third two two-year term – a decision he says he made before Dyke’s announcement. Liberal Democratic attorney and former west side alderman Robert “Toby” Reynolds, a leader in Senator Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 Wisconsin primary campaign, is Festge’s heir apparent.
After four years of rising property taxes, and growing crime and disorder, Dyke is happy to run against a candidate who celebrates his relationship with the incumbent. “This city deserves change, and you can’t tell one of these Bobbsey Twins from the other,” he says.
Dyke, formerly an aide to Republican lieutenant governor Jack Olsen and a television announcer, wins the primary with more than 56 percent in the six-candidate race, beating Reynolds by better than 2-1 and carrying thirty-seven of the city’s forty-one wards. Reynolds, former head of the trust department at Security State Bank and senior warden and lay reader at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, doesn’t carry a single ward, as UW–Extension curriculum analyst Adam Schesch, twenty-six, backed in the nonpartisan race by the new leftist Wisconsin Alliance Party, carries the four student wards. Quirky attorney and clothing shop owner Edward Ben Elson finishes a very weak fourth, followed by two other fringe candidates.
The clearest policy difference in the campaign is in transportation. Dyke wants “a major highway connector from the east side through the center of the city” and says mass transit systems “haven’t worked,” either financially or programmatically. Reynolds is “totally opposed to freeways” and says the city “must buy the Madison Bus Company and must do it at once” as the first stage to a comprehensive mass transit system.
Both candidates say the city is in bad fiscal shape. Dyke blames Festge for “the most expensive” administration in city history; Reynolds blames the legislature for legal limits and low state aid.
Endorsements are predictably partisan. The Capital Times and Union Labor News endorse Reynolds; State Journal and the political action committee run by former mayor Reynolds support Dyke.
Dyke campaigns on cutting city spending and working with the private sector to generate economic development, and not on law and order or cultural issues. And he harkens back to Mayor Reynolds’s go-slow policy on annexations, calling for a “good neighbor policy of cooperation” with surrounding towns, and a “metropolitan approach toward mutual problems and interests.” Candidate Reynolds says he’ll “declare war” on the suburbs and continue the Festge/Nestingen policy of aggressive annexations.
Appointed to the Madison Housing Authority by former mayor Reynolds – no relation –Reynolds also campaigns for more scattered-site low- and moderate-income housing. And Reynolds, who championed the fair housing code in 1964, attacks the lack of diversity in city appointments. “Citizen participation is too white, too college educated, too West Side,” he says, vowing to appoint minorities and students.
As the campaign winds down, Reynolds narrows the gap—until a chaotic city council meeting four nights before the election results in an illegal 52-hour strike by the firefighters union. Dyke rides high taxes, campus chaos, and the election-eve firemen’s strike to a four point, 2,000-vote victory.
Dyke focuses in his inaugural address on city finances, vowing to “halt the march up the tax mountain” and bring economic development to the abandoned Truax Air Field. He decries “the harm we do daily to our air, water and land” and calls for adoption and enforcement of a “code of environmental control.” And while his campaign largely steered clear of hot-button social issues, he declares he will “not reward public tantrums with participation in government.”
Finally successful in his third campaign for mayor – he finished third in the 1965 primary – Dyke makes full use of his appointment power. There’s wholesale housecleaning at the Equal Opportunities Commission as he doesn’t reappoint Mary Louise Symon the liberal chairwoman and four other members. He limits student-area aldermen Eugene Parks – just elected the council’s first African-American – and Paul Soglin to single appointments that they didn’t request, to the Family Services Agency and Board of Health, respectively. He reappoints former republican country chairman Stuart Becker to the Police and Fire Commission, along with Ellsworth Swenson, the alderman Soglin unseated in 1968. He puts Republican feminist Betty Smith, chair of the Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women, and wife of former alderman William Bradford Smith, on the Madison Redevelopment Authority. For the Madison Housing Authority, no respect for his vanquished foe, but more good political instinct – he doesn’t reappoint Reynolds, and names Richard Harris, the African American director of the South Madison Neighborhood Center, to replace him.
Festge’s disappointing spring continues when the Alliance of Cities, which he founded and served as president, rejects his bid to become its full-time executive director. He takes a job selling insurance instead, later serving sixteen years as home secretary to US Representative Robert W. Kastenmeier (D-Watertown).