John Nichols: Justice Day prevailed on one man, one vote

John Nichols  —  8/03/2008 8:08 am

Roland Day, the former chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court who died last week at 89, is being remembered primarily for his judicial accomplishments. That's fair. He was an able jurist who served for more than two decades on the state's highest court, during which time he upheld civil liberties and privacy rights and took the sort of sound stances that have historically been associated with Wisconsin's elected judiciary.

But Day's greatest accomplishment came a decade before he was appointed by Gov. Pat Lucey to the Supreme Court in 1974.

As is so often the case, Day earned his place in history when he took on what many saw as a thankless task.

In the spring of 1963, Gov. John Reynolds was determined to end the practice of apportioning legislative districts along geographic rather than population lines -- an approach that discriminated against urban areas, where racial and ethnic minorities tended to reside. And he asked Day to lead the fight.

Like other states in those days when the civil rights movement was only beginning to succeed in establishing the principle that legislative districts had to be drawn according to the principle of one man, one vote, Wisconsin did not apportion its districts equally.

Rural legislators, representing sparsely populated districts, cast votes in the Assembly and Senate that were equal to those of urban legislators, who represented crowded inner-city districts. This imbalance meant that elections in Boscobel carried more political weight than elections on the same day in Milwaukee.

The grandson and son of northeast Wisconsin progressives, Reynolds was a passionate proponent of racial justice. And he knew that it was not just in the rigidly segregated South that the struggle to achieve equal representation was playing out in the early 1960s.

Unfortunately, Republican legislators who wanted to protect their seats blocked reform, so Reynolds began to fight in the courts for change.

As Wisconsin's attorney general in 1961, Reynolds had sought a declaratory judgment to force a fair reapportionment of legislative districts. The state Supreme Court rejected the plea on the grounds that it was a premature cry for justice and told Reynolds to try again in two years.

By that time, Reynolds had been elected to replace his friend and ally Gaylord Nelson as the state's governor. Unfortunately, the new attorney general was a Republican who was not so committed to the struggle. So Reynolds appointed a trusted fellow progressive as a special counsel to bring the second suit seeking a court order to overturn discriminatory districts.

"It is clear that the Legislature finds it politically impossible to do a fair job of redistricting itself. I intend to fight for constitutional reapportionment in Wisconsin because equal representation is the cornerstone of democracy," Reynolds declared as he announced that Roland Day would be his special counsel.

Day won the historic 1963 Supreme Court ruling that he proudly noted "resulted in Wisconsin being the first state where the legislative districts were apportioned by the court to guarantee the principle of one man, one vote."

That was two years before the federal Voting Rights Act was finally approved, a fact that Day always noted with a measure of pride that, while uncharacteristic for a Norwegian, was fully justified.

John Nichols is associate editor of The Capital Times.

John Nichols  —  8/03/2008 8:08 am