Dave Wagner, a leader of the 1977 Madison, Wisconsin, newspaper strike at The Capital Times/Wisconsin State Journal, and a leader in the cooperatively-produced daily progressive newspaper Madison Press Connection (1977-1980) created by the striking workers, died on February 21 at the age of seventy-eight.
Dave Wagner
David Cloyd Wagner was born on July 3, 1944, spent his early years with his widowed grandmother in Centre Hall, Pennsylvania, at the heart of Amish country, where the formation of the Grange politics in the later nineteenth century had given farmers a voice in their destiny. An antecedent of the Grange at the dawn of that century, which had joined together a socialistic utopian colony with the literary traditions of Pennsylvania-Dutch poetry and its folkish egalitarianism, would become an important part of Wagner’s later literary interests. His father took a teaching job in Bradford, Pennsylvania, when Dave was seven years old, and he graduated from high school there. He was a popular student there, and also spent a year abroad in Germany, further shaping his interests.
Wagner received a bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in comparative literature, became poetry editor of the underground newspaper Connections, and a short-time editor of the alternative weekly, Madison Kaleidoscope. He worked at The Capital Times from 1966-1972, a protege of left-leaning editor Elliott Maraniss (himself a former newspaper striker and unapologetic ex-Communist during the 1940s).
Wagner rose from the “police beat” at The Capital Times to a widely admired cultural critic on films, music, and theater. In 1972, he left Madison to teach, for a year, at the Cambridge-Goddard Graduate School in Boston, Massachusetts, then devoted a year to advanced graduate study in Germany. Returning to Madison after a pause, he resumed his job at The Capital Times until the historic strike.
Blacklisted from returning to work at the CapTimes after the strike, Wagner became the editorial page editor of the Waukesha Freeman, later going on to work as an editor at The Arizona Republic until his early retirement for health reasons.
Wagner subsequently became a noted scholar of the Hollywood Left, including its activity in films and in the politics of antifascism, antiracism, and (after the Blacklist witch hunts ended) the social struggles of the 1960s-1970s.
His most widely-read volumes included Tender Comrades, a book of interviews with the survivors of the Blacklist (co-edited by myself and Patrick McGilligan), A Very Dangerous Citizen (a biography of the blacklistee and noir master, Abraham Lincoln Polonsky), Radical Hollywood, and Hide in Plain Sight (the work of Blacklist victims after 1950).
His final book was The Politics of Murder, a study of the Goldwater family in Arizona from the 1930s to 1980s and the interconnections of mob activities with the political leadership of the state. With a keen eye for theatrical and film scripts, he also became a fine writer of non-fiction graphic novels, including A People’s History of American Empire (the graphic adaptation of Howard Zinn’s classic A People’s History of the United States), and scripted several Madison-centered comic booklets around the life and ideas of historian George Mosse.
Dave Wagner leaves behind his wife, Grace Wagner, well known for her own political work in Madison, his daughter Anna, and grandchildren Nathaniel, Madeleine, Abigail, Seraphina, Lily, and Diego.