The Wisconsin Democratic Party Oral History Project was sparked and partially funded by longtime party activist Julia Boegholt. Other sponsors were the Evjue Foundation, the Cudahy Foundation, Friends of Carl Thompson, and many individual donors. In September 1982 Catherine Coberly began interviewing former and current party activists. By the end of June 1983 she had interviewed seventeen individuals for a total of twenty-one hours of discussion. In October 1984 Jim Cavanaugh of the State Historical Society picked up the project. Between December 1984 and May 1985 he interviewed fifteen people for a total of nearly forty-two hours of discussion.
In September 1986 four additional interviews were conducted by Jim Cavanaugh as a supplement to the Wisconsin Democratic Party Oral History Project. Descriptions of these interviews have been integrated into this finding aid.
With but three minor aberrations, the Democratic Party in Wisconsin was a minority party for an entire century beginning with the Civil War era. Between World War I and World War II the party's fortunes hit rock bottom. For a period of eight years in the 1920s and very early 1930s the party had not one member in the state senate. Indeed, at that time it was the state's fourth party in effect, trailing the Republicans, the Progressive Republicans, and the Socialists. During the 1930s, despite the presence of the liberal and electorally successful New Deal on the national level, the Wisconsin Democratic Party, after a surprise coattail victory in 1932, remained basically conservative and the state's third party behind the Republicans and the Progressives.
The party gained status slightly during World War II, largely by default however, as the Socialists broke up and the Progressive Party went into a rapid decline. During and immediately after World War II, longtime Democrats, former Progressives, former Socialists, New Deal Democrats, labor unionists, and farm leaders began to work towards making the Democratic Party the state's liberal party and its majority party. The first widely noticed effort in this direction was the creation of the Democratic Organizing Committee (DOC) in 1948. A decade later the Democrats won the governorship and a majority in the state assembly. Having reached parity with the Republicans, the Democrats struggled for another seventeen years before reaching a fairly secure majority status in 1975.
