Above all things, Milliken is remembered as practicing the politics of civility. Rather than demonizing or shunning opponents, he worked to resolve differences in a tone of respect for those of alternative views. Milliken embodied what his two-time Democratic opponent for governor, Sander Levin, called “cherishing diversity and rejecting extremism.”
A Michigander to the core, Milliken was born in Traverse City, Mich., in 1922, and except for college years and military service in World War II, he has lived in the state of Michigan all his life. His home of Traverse City, tucked away in the center of the Great Lakes region, has had a great impact in his approach to environmental protection and his politics of moderation.
Equally remarkable in Michigan political history is William Milliken's wife, Helen. A Colorado native who moved to Michigan in the 1940s after marrying William, Helen Milliken evolved from political homemaker to champion of equal rights for women, inspiring both fierce criticism and passionate devotion. Her personal and political journey is an inspiring parallel to the political career of her husband.
“William G. Milliken: Michigan's Passionate Moderate” is the story of the forces and times that shaped the Millikens and the legacy they have left to the people of Michigan and the nation. It is also a story of a time when the Republican Party of the Midwest stood for moderation.
From Chapter 6:
'The Green Governor'
To understand William Milliken's reputation as an environmental governor, it is critical to understand the beauty of the area surrounding Traverse City where he grew up, and to which he returned almost weekly during his time as Michigan's chief executive.
Milliken “survived 14 years in office” by jumping in the car many weekends, going home to Traverse City, and coming back on Monday, said Capitol correspondent Tim Skubick. The drive from Lansing to Traverse City, mostly on limited access highways, took about three hours.
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During that time the governor's state automobile moved from the intensively cultivated farmland of south central Michigan through a perceptible ecological boundary just north of Clare, where the agricultural lands yielded to forest. From there to his home in Traverse City, he could breathe easier, knowing he was in a portion of the state recovering some of its ancient grandeur after the ravages of the late 19th-century lumbering era.
Milliken's longtime environmental and natural resources policy advisor, Bill Rustem, credited the bay and the surroundings in general with shaping the governor's view on conservation.
Rustem, an enthusiastic hunter and angler, took the Millikens to a remote state park near Craig Lake in the western Upper Peninsula in 1980 where they slept in a rustic cabin, fished, canoed and watched eagles rise above the conifers. Capitol reporters had sport with the idea of the polite, formal governor in the backwoods. “The governor just doesn't look like a lumberjack,” wrote Robert Longstaff, the chief of the Booth News Service in Lansing. “He looks undressed if he's not wearing a tie … He's quiet, refined, dignified — the sort who would wear a robe on a midnight dash to the outhouse.”
Milliken came to office in 1969 at a time when the nation's and state's environmental crisis was reaching a new high level of severity, triggering a public clamor for reform and action. Black plumes of smoke were a typical sight in the state's industrial cities, especially downriver Detroit. The Rouge River at Dearborn was often orange or black with wastes dumped by the Ford Motor Co., and hundreds of miles of Lake Michigan swimming beaches were considered unfit for public use at times because of high bacteria counts.
[On Jan. 22, 1970, three months before the first Earth Day, the first Milliken Administration set forth a 20-point, comprehensive environmental strategy.]
Three of the points resulted in significant new laws passed that year. One made agreements between the state and water polluters to clean up their messes enforceable in court; a second spawned the Great Lakes Shorelands Act, to help conserve the state's more than 3,000 miles of Great Lakes coast; and the third fostered the Natural Rivers Act, designed to protect the scenic beauty and environmental health of designated rivers and streams of high quality.
What Milliken proposed that did not result in significant reform is also noteworthy. Milliken appointed a special commission on land use to address urban sprawl. More than 30 years later, he would serve on another governor's land use leadership council, the state still having failed to produce a coherent policy and program on the management of growth.
But in 1970, it did not always seem that Milliken was at the helm of the environmental ship. One after another, seismic shocks struck the state and the Great Lakes region, forcing the governor to respond in a sensitive election year. The first jolt was announcement in March 1970 of the discovery of the toxic metal mercury at dangerously high levels in fish from the St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River, waterways shared with Ontario, Canada.
Notorious for causing the death and deformity of 111 persons who had consumed fish and shellfish from Minamata Bay in Japan between 1953 and 1960, mercury as an aquatic pollutant was a serious concern. Although it was the Dow Chemical Company facility in Sarnia, Ontario that caused most of the St. Clair River and Lake St. Clair pollution, Milliken supported aggressive efforts by the Department of Natural Resources to crack down on Wyandotte Chemical Co., which was dumping 10 to 20 pounds of the highly toxic metal into the Detroit River every day.
A greater challenge to Milliken was the question of what to do about fishing in Lake St. Clair, adjacent to northeastern suburbs of Detroit and a highly popular recreational resource. The science was uncertain: Would consuming Lake St. Clair sportfish cause significant health risks? Both commercial and sport anglers who enjoyed the lake bristled at the idea of limits on fishing. Milliken's handling of the issue illustrated his concern for hearing the views of experts. He summoned not just agency directors, but technical and legal experts from the lower levels of state government to advise him.
After hearing from the experts, Milliken commendably decided he couldn't put the health of those fishing Lake St. Clair at risk. On April 11, he issued an executive order closing fishing in the St. Clair River and Lake St. Clair as “a precautionary measure.” A few days later, he announced support for legislation requiring users of toxic materials who discharged wastewater to register with the state, calling it a “truth in pollution” law. He reiterated his support for the bill in a 30-minute airplane tour of Detroit River pollution on April 15, accompanied by reporters. He said the state had needed to “know precisely what industries are dumping and the time these are occurring.” Later in the year, the Legislature agreed to Milliken's proposal.
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While students stormed on campus in spring 1970, older environmental activists from across Michigan organized to pass a new law called the Michigan Environmental Protection Act. The proposed law essentially deputized any citizen who could afford an attorney to protect the environment by granting him or her standing to sue in a court of law. The business community fought the legislation tooth and nail. The State Chamber of Commerce said the proposal “would create a serious threat to the operation and growth of business and industry.” But hundreds of citizens, mostly supporters of the bill, turned out for a series of public hearings.
After initial hesitation, Milliken endorsed passage of House Bill 3055 by May and signed the bill into law July 27, 1970. It would become identified with Milliken as one of the signal accomplishments of his tenure and became a model law for other states.
In 2004, 22 years after his retirement from office, Milliken took the unusual step of filing a third-party brief in the Michigan Supreme Court's consideration of whether to gut the law by striking down its grant of standing to any citizen. “This is a crucial decision of the Michigan Supreme Court. Much is at stake,” Milliken said. In the 2004 case, the court did not strike down MEPA's citizen standing provision.
As the decade deepened and environmental values occupied the mainstream with voters, if not lawmakers, Milliken embellished upon his initial commitment in gestures both small and large. During a tough battle, his insistent offer of a state plane to fly a reluctant state Sen. Oscar Bouwsma of Muskegon back to a Capitol committee meeting to provide the necessary quorum for a vote on the proposed Inland Lakes and Streams Act was critical to the law's passage.
Milliken's appointment of environmental activist Joan Wolfe to the state Natural Resources Commission was important both symbolically and substantively. Wolfe was a hero to environmentalists as the founder of the West Michigan Environmental Action Council, which had pushed for MEPA and other environmental law landmarks. She was the first “environmentalist” and the first woman to serve on the commission.
'William G. Milliken: Michigan's Passionate Moderate'
A biography by Dave Dempsey
University of Michigan Press, 2006
328 pages
$29.95
An even larger gesture was his decision to become the first signature for a citizen petition drive to enact a beer and soda beverage container deposit law in 1976. Under industry pressure, the bill had died several times in the legislature. In signing on to the petition first, Milliken was taking a position opposite that of beer and soda wholesalers and the retailers who would be required by the law to take back the deposit containers.
Milliken also challenged a powerful Michigan employer, and a major contributor to the Republican Party, when he backed a proposal by the Department of Natural Resources to limit the phosphorus content of laundry detergent. Scientists had determined that detergent phosphate was a leading culprit in the gross outbreaks of algae on Lakes Erie and Michigan, contributing to the “death” of Erie, which had lost most of its value as a recreational lake.
Adamantly opposed by the Amway Corp. of Ada, near Grand Rapids, the Michigan DNR's proposed phosphate limit resulted in a phone call to the governor from Jay VanAndel, co-founder of the corporation.
“I can still remember how incensed he was. He was adamant, but so was I,” Milliken later said.
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The beneficial water quality effects were almost immediately realized. In 1978 and 1979, the amount of phosphorus dumped into the Detroit River by the city's mammoth sewage treatment plant declined 40 percent, reflecting the new controls. Because the river supplies more than 90 percent of the lake's inflow, the Michigan action was a significant contributor to the recovery of Lake Erie. As the years after his governorship passed, and no successor seemed to make quite the same personal and moral claim on the environmental issue, conservationists and environmentalists began to look back with yearning, and to realize that whatever differences they had at the time with Milliken, he was still the greenest governor of the 20th century.
From Chapter 15:
'Battling Over The Milliken Legacy'
The nomination of Democrat James Blanchard and Republican Richard Headlee in 1982 set up one of the most clear-cut ideological choices in a governor's race since the 1940s.
Headlee was not a conventional politician. He spoke candidly and sometimes with devastating invective about his conservative political views. While that appealed to conservative voters, the trait likely cost him the governor's job — and all because one of the targets he chose to attack was the pro-Equal Rights Amendment position of Helen Milliken, the first lady of Michigan.
Headlee called supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment “proponents of lesbian marriage, homosexual marriage, things of that nature, which I categorically resist and categorically reject as a basis for a sound society.” Some interpreted the remark to apply to Helen Milliken, who refrained from commenting.
By the end of September, the issue began to harden. Blanchard began actively touting his positions on so-called women's issues and Headlee was forced to clarify repeatedly that he was not anti-female. Headlee reiterated unfavorable complaints about the governor's wife, criticizing “the carping, backbiting and whining” going on in the Republican ranks.
The governor rarely spoke out during the campaign. When he did, he was not warm to Headlee. After the primary, he had responded unenthusiastically to Headlee's win. Meanwhile, Blanchard offered assurances he would continue Milliken's policy of vetoing bans on state funds for elective abortions for women receiving Medicaid assistance, winning the formal endorsement of about three dozen prominent women leaders from the party.
Responding to a survey showing Headlee 14 points behind Blanchard, Milliken said, “[Headlee]'s gotten himself involved in some other issues that have tended to turn attention away from the key issues of jobs and the economy.” After disclosing he had already cast his vote by absentee ballot, Milliken declined to tell a reporter which gubernatorial candidate he had supported. “I always believe in keeping my vote private,” he said, touching off speculation that he had voted for the Democrat Blanchard.
The Nov. 2 election delivered the governor's office to Blanchard by a clear but not overwhelming margin of 1,561,291 votes to 1,369,582, or about 53 percent to 47 percent. Headlee reacted angrily, grousing that “a governor that was sitting around sucking his thumb” during the campaign did him no good. Milliken had his own pointed view. “The coalition sought by Mr. Headlee was not successful and therein lies a lesson for the Republican Party … It's really appalling that we've seen this kind of negative advertising in Michigan.”
Milliken had called Blanchard with congratulations and Headlee with condolences, but “Headlee did not come to the phone,” an aide said.
“There's nothing, really, that I could have done to save Mr. Headlee from himself,” Milliken told reporter Tim Skubick. “I found that Mr. Headlee, beginning with the primary campaign, focused … almost solely on the Milliken administration, attacking many of the things in which I deeply believe.”
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Enmity between Headlee and the Millikens continued for years. The summer after the election, Headlee attacked Helen Milliken. The former governor rose to the defense of his wife, telling Detroit Free Press columnist Hugh McDiarmid that Headlee “puts me in mind of an ass … I don't know how he can presume to be a credible candidate in the future … and you can quote me on that.”
At the funeral of former Governor George Romney in 1995, Headlee and the Millikens were seated next to each other, and the former governor said Headlee “graciously” acknowledged that his previous remarks about Helen Milliken had been excessive.
With the benefit of more than two decades of hindsight, it now appears that Blanchard's win postponed but did not prevent the conservative Republican takeover of the state government. During the 1980s, conservative John Engler engineered a right-wing takeover of the GOP machinery, leading to his upset win over Blanchard in 1990. By the mid-1990s, the Republicans also controlled both houses of the Legislature and were able to promote a pro-business, anti-regulatory, anti-abortion rights, socially conservative agenda.
In effect, Blanchard's two wins were an extension of the Milliken legacy, victories won by a pro-choice, activist governor who operated in the style of the Traverse City man for a time. But by 1990, impatience with high property taxes, another economic recession, and the increasing coarseness of the tone of both Blanchard and Engler made the Democrat ripe for a surprise defeat. The Milliken legacy of moderation at the helm of state government would endure only eight years after his retirement.
(Dave Dempsey is a published author of two books and environmental advocate for Clean Water Action in Minnesota and the Michigan Environmental Council. He served as former Michigan Gov. James Blanchard's environmental adviser.)
