From now until Election Day, the Back Issues blog will be looking at this year’s swing states through the lens of the New Yorker archive. We’re kicking things off with Wisconsin—home of Representative Paul Ryan.

As imagined from the offices of The New Yorker, Wisconsin has sometimes seemed a little unreal—a foreign country, or a rural wonderland. In the magazine’s early days, brave reporters ventured West and brought home stories of the strange and improbable. In 1953, Eli Waldron wrote about a small Wisconsin town that had been overrun by millions of frogs (“the explosions of amphibians beneath the wheels of automobiles at night sounded like rifle fire”); in 1956, a Comment brought New Yorkers word of Wisconsin’s strange courtship rituals (“an ardent young man spelled out his girl’s name in dry nitrogen across a vast, rolling hillside; when her name presently materialized in lush green grass, she was so enchanted that she married him”). In 1960, Philip Hamburger reported on Milwaukee—a city, he wrote, where a man “is judged by the beer he drinks”:

A Milwaukeean drinks beer made in Milwaukee. He may prefer Pabst (Milwaukee) to Schlitz (Milwaukee), or Miller’s High Life (Milwaukee) to Blatz (Milwaukee), or Gettelman (Milwaukee) to all the other Milwaukee beers, but the fact remains that he drinks or serves a “foreign beer” (i.e., a beer made elsewhere than Milwaukee) at his peril.

Wisconsin, at least for The New Yorker, seemed defined by its distance from the coasts. In his perceptive 1999 piece on The Onion—the satirical newspaper which was founded and for many years published in Madison—Hendrik Hertzberg argued that the paper was so successful because, among other things, it had spent its formative years “marinating in Midwestern isolation.” Read these older pieces and you’ll have a pleasant idea of Wisconsin. It seems friendly and bucolic.

Wisconsin may, in fact, be isolated from the New York media world. But it’s long been at the center of America’s political history. For more than a century now, Wisconsin has been a swing state—spiritually, if not always statistically. In his New Yorker essay “The Storm,” published in March of this year, William Finnegan reports that many Wisconsinites view their state as, historically speaking, “indispensable to social progress in America”:

It was here that the first progressive state income-tax and workers’-compensation laws were passed, in 1911; the first unemployment insurance established, in 1932; the first collective bargaining agreement for public employees signed, in 1959.

There’s a lot of progressivism in Wisconsin. The country’s first kindergarten was opened there. Milwaukee has had three socialist mayors, the last of who served until 1960. Madison, Wisconsin, where the University of Wisconsin is centered, is one of the most liberal cities in America. But there’s a lot of conservatism, too. Lee Dreyfus, who was governor of Wisconsin from 1979 to 1983, famously called Madison “fifty-two square miles surrounded by reality.” Joe McCarthy was a senator from Wisconsin. Tommy Thompson, who is very conservative, was a popular governor from 1987 to 2001. In fact, Wisconsin may look more liberal than it actually is: “McCarthy’s behavior provoked such disgust among moderate local Republicans,” Finnegan explains, “that many left the Party, strengthening the Democrats and helping make Wisconsin a blue state for much of the past fifty years.” It’s possible that those moderates could come back to the G.O.P.; that’s why, in recent years, Republicans have seen “potential for a sharp rightward shift.”

“The Storm,” is about the furious battle which erupted last year over Governor Soctt Walker’s “budget-repair bill,” which cut funding for education and health care and effectively ended collective-bargaining rights for public-sector workers. Walker had promised budget cuts, but, in its union-busting, the bill went beyond what many Wisconsinites were expecting. “Vast crowds of demonstrators descended on the Capitol Building,” Finnegan writes—as many as a hundred thousand. (“Paul Ryan,” Finnegan reports, “a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, compared the protests, disapprovingly, to those occurring simultaneously in Cairo.”) Walker, along with the Republicans in the state legislature, passed the bill anyway, citing, among other outrages, a Madison bus driver who had made $159,258 in 2009. Liberals saw the bill as “a stake through the heart of social-Democratic Wisconsin.” Finnegan’s story follows a number of activists as they collect signatures for a campaign to recall Walker. After the piece was published, they succeeded, and the state held a recall election. Walker won. (He is the only governor in U.S. history to survive such a recall.)

The political disagreements in “The Storm” happen on an epic scale. Mark Singer’s piece “I Pledge Allegiance,” from November, 2001, offers a more intimate look at a different Wisconsin controversy. Before September 11th, Singer explains, the state legislature passed a law requiring all public and private schools to begin the day with either the Pledge of Allegiance or the national anthem. After September 11th, Madison’s left-leaning seven-member school board met to discuss the new law, and ended up passing a resolution that countermanded it: “Every school,” Singer writes, “would offer, every day, a wordless, instrumental version of the national anthem. Period.” (The anthem would be instrumental, Singer explains, because some board members objected to its militaristic lyrics.)

The country—which, Singer writes, had “begun to think in unprecedented ways about what it meant to salute the flag or publicly express one’s love of country”—immediately focussed on Madison. Angry and supportive e-mails began pouring in “at the rate of a thousand per hour”; talking heads accused the school board of being un-American. Singer follows the crisis through its various stages. The school board meets to reconsider its move; at the meeting, a hundred and sixty-six people speak, each for three minutes, “by turns pro, con, eloquent, inarticulate, sentimental, arrogant, humble, coolly analytical, belligerently nationalistic, self-righteous, philosophical, and, of course, unassailably patriotic.” The board reverses its previous decision, 6-1, and votes to allow each school to decide how it wants to start the day. Scott Klug, a former Republican Congressman, starts a campaign to recall the school board.

Singer visits a local high school to see what the kids think. Under the new system, the Pledge of Allegiance is preceded by an annoying disclaimer: “We live in a nation of freedom. Participation in the Pledge or Anthem is voluntary. Those who wish to participate may stand; others may remain seated.” Only one of the students chooses to stand during the national anthem. “Some kids rested their heads on their desks,” Singer writes. “Others had that vacant why-am-I-here-oh-yeah-this-is-high-school look.” The students have various views. One asks Singer, “What’s the difference between standing and sitting? Does standing mean that you appreciate it more?” Other say that they oppose “militarism and nationalism in the classroom,” or explain that they’re “grateful to live in a nation where I have the ability to sit or stand.” One student makes a suggestion: perhaps the school could use “a more musically interesting version of the anthem,” by Whitney Houston, Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix.

Singer’s article offers a partial answer to a question many people ask: What’s it like to live in one of those states which, because of history or statistics, becomes, periodically, the center of political attention for the whole country? It’s not all that great, he concludes. Your local disputes become an occasion for national “carping” and “self-indulgence”; you’re encouraged to argue amongst yourselves. You must negotiate your way not only through genuinely important political challenges but also through manufactured ones. Being a swing state is exciting, because it means that, in certain ways, you get to lead the rest of us—but it’s not very fun.