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PERRY FINELLI: Good morning from the Minnesota Public Radio newsroom. I'm Perry Finelli. A House committee approved a nuclear waste bill today that leaves out the major item that Northern States Power Company is seeking permission to store more waste. The Environment and Natural Resources Committee voted to end the search for an alternate storage site away from NSP's Prairie Island nuclear plant in Red Wing. The utility opposes the bill, saying it gains nothing from it.

The state health department is organizing meetings this week for people who design and run air conditioning systems, in an effort to develop better ways of preventing Legionnaires' disease. The largest Legionnaires' epidemic in Minnesota since 1957 struck Mankato and Luverne last summer. The outbreaks were traced to bacteria growing in local cooling towers that were being maintained according to industry standards. State epidemiologist Michael Osterholm says the meetings may lead to better national standards for preventing Legionella bacteria from growing in cooling towers.

MICHAEL OSTERHOLM: Some of our studies here in Minnesota over the past six to 12 months related to the outbreaks actually have been used quite a bit on the national level, to further understand why these outbreaks happen and what we can do about them. So in a sense, we're leading the way nationally to help develop guidelines that are going to be useful throughout the country.

PERRY FINELLI: Osterholm says procedures for disinfecting cooling towers against Legionnaires' may differ for each tower, but he doesn't expect they'll add much to maintenance costs.

The state forecast, mostly cloudy and windy today. High temperatures in the 40s and lower 50s. For the Twin Cities, mostly cloudy and breezy today. A high temperature around 50, those winds south at 15 to 25 miles per hour. Temperatures range from 30 in Thief River Falls to 41 in Marshall at this hour. In Rochester, it's 38 degrees. The Twin Cities temperature, 39, and the skies are cloudy. And that's the news from Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Perry Finelli.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Six minutes now past 10 o'clock. You're listening to Midmorning on the FM News station. I'm Paula Schroeder.

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Bill Frenzel says this has been the most expensive presidential primary season in history. And he says we, the public, appear unwilling to rein in campaign spending. Today on Voices of Minnesota, we hear a conversation with this former member of Congress from Minnesota. Every Monday at this time on Midmorning, we bring you a conversation with a Minnesota resident who has an interesting life story.

Bill Frenzel lives in a Washington, DC, suburb now. He's a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. The 67-year-old former member of Congress served the residents of Minnesota's 3rd congressional district for 20 years. He retired from Congress in 1991. Well, three years ago, President Clinton asked Frenzel to be special advisor on the NAFTA, or North American Free Trade Agreement, talks. For 15 years before that Frenzel was a representative to the GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. He's a big supporter of free trade, as you might guess.

Bill Frenzel was in Minnesota last week to receive an award from St. Paul Academy, where he went to school. Frenzel wanted Colin Powell to run for president, and he told Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson that Bob Dole is nearly certain to be his party's nominee.

BILL FRENZEL: I think Bob Dole is one of the great legislators of all time, certainly a hero. There is a problem, however. He is not a young man. He does not look vigorous on the stump. He has not looked very good so far. I don't want to say I'm unenthusiastic, because I'm going to campaign very hard for our nominee. But I worked hard to get Colin Powell into the race and was very disappointed when he decided not to join.

DAN OLSON: How large, in terms of numbers of voters, do you think are the people backing Patrick Buchanan, if he were up for an election today?

BILL FRENZEL: I think a lot of the people who backed Buchanan today-- and it seems to be somewhere between 25% and 28% of the people voting in the Republican primaries where he has run-- would probably think twice about voting for him for president. I think a number of them are making a statement. They are unhappy about one thing or another, and Pat is their standard bearer to tell the world that they are unhappy. Whether they would vote for him in a head-to-head when it really meant something, I don't know.

DAN OLSON: Do you buy the analysis that Buchanan has changed the economic debate from balancing the budget and putting Social Security on a sustainable footing to economic insecurity and focusing on that issue?

BILL FRENZEL: Yes, I think he has driven the debate in that direction. However, when you get out of the preliminaries into the general election, I think the balanced budget question, the question of deficits, will again attain its primacy.

DAN OLSON: Who are Buchanan supporters, in your opinion? Are they the bread and butter or angry blue-collar voters, or are they the social conservatives attempting to advance the social conservative agenda?

BILL FRENZEL: If we take a look at the exit polls in the states where he's running, they seem to be mostly social conservatives who are anxious to promote his social agenda, particularly the abolition of abortion. I think much has been made of his trade stance. I think he has-- the polls show that he has attracted not a lot of people. While he has attracted attention, it hasn't brought him a lot of votes.

DAN OLSON: Does Buchanan's brand of populism fit the definition of populism? Especially the way we used to know it in the Midwest here, with the Nonpartisan League and all of that?

BILL FRENZEL: Yeah, he's been a very different kind of guy. He's a fascinating guy to follow in politics, mainly because he's so very good on television. He is just a splendid campaigner. But it seems to me often that he is running from both the right and the left, and beating up the corporations, railing against free trade, and then coming back to the social values and building walls against immigration. It is a hard thing to follow, and one-- a set of positions that I think would be very hard to sell in a general election.

DAN OLSON: Who is the money going to at this point, especially among the Republicans? Is it flowing to Senator Dole or are the other candidates draining away some of the campaign contributions?

BILL FRENZEL: Well, Senator Dole has probably raised all the money that he is going to be allowed to spend. And at the end of the primary season, particularly in California, he's going to be very short. I'm not sure that the money is going to others. Tell you, the Republicans, beginning with Phil Gramm going through Bob Dole, have fleeced Republican contributors pretty well this year. They have certainly raised and spent more money than ever before in a primary season.

DAN OLSON: What does this campaign season tell you so far about the analysis that the two major political parties really are dominated, or heavily managed at least, by the extremes in either party?

BILL FRENZEL: Well, I think that's been true for the last 15 years, and maybe before that. I'll tell you, the people who will go to the caucuses, who will walk the last mile, who will take the precinct duties, have to be very enthusiastic. They're the activists. They're going to always, I think, be the extremists in both parties. To the extent that they are a little more open-minded, they're going to wind up with better candidates. But I think we can always expect the most avid partisans to be the most extreme.

DAN OLSON: Mr. Buchanan and others have been standing in front of closed-up plants saying, well, the jobs went south to Mexico. And of course, when President Clinton in 1993 named you special advisor to the North American Free Trade Agreement talks, I assume it became a special issue for you, a big topic for you. And what do you think of the assessment that indeed the jobs are flowing south of the border?

BILL FRENZEL: For one thing, trade has always been a very important legislative priority for me, and certainly it was during NAFTA. And I'm glad the president wanted to do business with me and I enjoyed doing business with him. With respect to the jobs, I think the Buchanan message is absolutely wrong. I don't think the jobs are running away.

Yes, we are losing some where we are not competitive. On the whole, we are the only economy in the industrialized world that seems to be able to produce new jobs. We are dynamic, and partly that is due to our trade policy. I really think one good effect of the Buchanan trade message has been that he has forced all the other Republicans to come out and say, Pat doesn't make any sense on this. There are almost no responsible economists who believe in the message that he is preaching. And I think that's been good for the party, to have our so-called leaders and spokesmen making that case.

DAN OLSON: At this point, a year and a half after NAFTA-- is that where we stand, or so? What has it meant for North American trade? You are asked all the time, I'm sure, to make an assessment of where we stand in relation, pluses and minuses.

BILL FRENZEL: Yes, I think that if we look at the first year of NAFTA, we look at enormous increases in both imports and exports from the United States. Looks good for both sides. The second year, the Mexican economy craters. Now, it did that in 1982, and without NAFTA, we had a lot of restrictions raised against US exports to Mexico. Under NAFTA, Mexicans can't do that. And so while our exports declined because Mexicans didn't have any money to import anything, we were not artificially frozen out of the economy. So NAFTA was a big boost to us.

Now, if we look at our unemployment rate, which is rather low in this country, under 6%, and we look at the people, the component of people who have been laid off or fired, it's about the same as it was 20 years ago. So even in the face of this bad Mexican economy, blaming trade for our woes is a bum rap. If you live in a mill town somewhere in the South and there's no other industry, yeah, you can be in big trouble. But in gross, trade has really helped us.

DAN OLSON: I'm sure you've gotten the question more than a few times, from maybe some of those folks who live in those mill towns. When will we see the NAFTA payoff, if there is a NAFTA payoff, and what might it be?

BILL FRENZEL: I think we've already had the beginnings of the NAFTA payoff. I think it is going to continue to pay off. In addition to whatever extra business we've been able to do between our two countries, we have furnished hope to many of the growing economies of our own hemisphere, who believe that ultimately, they're going to be in a hemispheric trade agreement with us or accede to the NAFTA themselves. And our business continues to increase with Brazil, Argentina, Chile and others. Chile, of course, wants to be first in line. We get most of the business in these areas. We'd like to continue getting it. And I think the NAFTA shows them that our intentions are good.

DAN OLSON: I think there is some thought about that the United States is a pretty free, willing, and easy trading partner. I don't know about that. That we have relatively few barriers compared to a lot of our trading partners who have relatively high trading barriers. Is that true? And are we, to a degree, taking the fall for some of our trading partners?

BILL FRENZEL: One of our most famous trade ambassadors, Bob Strauss, used to say that nobody comes to the trade table with clean hands, and the US certainly doesn't. We have the highest textile tariffs in the world, and we have more textile quotas than any country in the world. We inhibit steel. We inhibit leather goods and footwear and semiconductors and automobiles. So we are not an open market as is alleged.

Now, that doesn't mean that somebody trying to export and hitting a closed market does not have a legitimate gripe, and the US has to go to bat for that person. Nevertheless, the United States is awful, I think, a shameless practitioner of badgering people that want to ship to us through our antidumping laws, which I find terribly unfair. But no, I'd say that we may be better than most, we're not better than all of them, and we all have trade restrictions.

DAN OLSON: I suppose we're going to get a lot of encouragement in this presidential election year, maybe from candidates from both major parties, to enact tariffs for certain industries where there are higher rates of unemployment. And I wonder what your reading of history tells you about the value of tariffs. If they're imposed in a measured way, if they're proposed, enacted, with a sunset provision of some kind, what do you think?

BILL FRENZEL: Tariffs are the best and most honest way to restrict trade. They beat the heck out of quotas and antidumping statutes and sneaky ways in which consumers have to pay more money for imports, but they don't know about it. At least with the tariff, we know what to do.

And in fact, in the WTO, the World Trade Organization, there's a strong movement to try to get all trade restrictions tariff-icated or tariff-icized, so that you can at least identify them. I don't look for new tariffs after this election no matter who wins, either in the Congress or in the president's office. I think that we're smarter than that. The world is globalized. We need them, or we need it, and it needs us.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Bill Frenzel talking with Dan Olson. You're listening to our Voices of Minnesota interview, heard every Monday as part of Midmorning. I'm Paula Schroeder. We'll continue our interview with Bill Frenzel in just a moment.

It's coming up on 20 minutes past 10 o'clock, and programming on Minnesota Public Radio is supported by Bendix, a front-loading washer-dryer combination with water and energy-conserving capabilities, new at independent appliance dealers. Coming up later in the program, we'll hear about a St. Paul woman who fought as a man in the Civil War.

But back to Bill Frenzel. Press coverage of the presidential primaries has obscured another big story. There's still no agreement on a federal budget. Let's return to our conversation now with Bill Frenzel. Here's Dan Olson.

DAN OLSON: Well, as we speak we're just, oh, I don't know, a few days, maybe a week and a half away from the next federal budget deficit. A federal budget breakdown, whatever you want, meltdown, whatever you-- I suppose it's the continuing resolution. Is that what's in effect, at ends?

BILL FRENZEL: Yes, and the debt ceiling, the government's ability to borrow, expires at the same time in the middle of March.

DAN OLSON: So now we're hearing one strategy the Republican-led Congress may try is the so-called carrot approach, where they'll say, well, we'll restore some of our proposed cuts in some social programs if you, the Democrats, and the president of course, will go along with this. What do you think the strategy is that's emerging?

BILL FRENZEL: I think that there is a lot of work being done in the Congress by members of both parties, and in the White House, to try to come up with some kind of a compromise which might include modest Medicare changes, devolution of welfare to the states, devolution of Medicaid to the states. But I must say-- and maybe a splitting out of the tax question, which seems to bother the White House a bit even though the White House wants to have a tax cut.

So everything that I hear at the Capitol leads me to believe we aren't going to get there. Pete Domenici, the Senate chairman of the Budget Committee, is working hard on it. He's going to break his neck to make a compromise. Most of the other people up there do not think it is possible. In the first place, the president has no political. Incentive to come anywhere. He's doing great on his veto.

Republicans, particularly in the House, believe they would be defaulting on campaign promises if they indulged in compromise. So I don't think there's enough incentive on either side of the table to make an arrangement, so I think they'll just pretend that FY '96 never happened, and operate on a continuing resolution through the year.

DAN OLSON: So is it a disastrous scenario, a disastrous deal for those especially federal agencies who we hear have been forced to put some of their activities on hold while they await the outcome?

BILL FRENZEL: Yes. When you can only cut discretionary expenditures, which we are doing now, this means the agencies and their employees have to do less or they have to defer work. It is a dangerous way to cut one's way down to zero. But on the other hand, I think a good lesson administered by the Congress to the president, and perhaps incentive for themselves and himself to make an agreement next year.

DAN OLSON: Well, we keep hearing that this is not a spat over details but a fundamental disagreement over philosophy of government. How would you describe that fundamental disagreement?

BILL FRENZEL: I have to agree. The president would like to balance the budget in the year 2002, he says, but he doesn't want to make any of the cuts necessary to do it. The Congress has, I think, made very difficult decisions, made some cuts that seem to be very unpopular with the public, which generally supports the president. And that is a fundamental disagreement. They say, let's balance it, and here's how we'll do it. The president says, well, let's balance it, but somebody else will do it after I'm gone. And that, I think, is about the difference.

DAN OLSON: Well, we touched on it earlier, and I want to return to it because I know, among other things, it's another area of your expertise. Campaign financing, campaign spending, campaign limits. What is it going to cost to run a presidential campaign this year, do you think, for the major party candidates?

BILL FRENZEL: Well, the major party candidates will be financed by the taxpayers, as they always have in the general election. In the primaries, they get matching money from the federal government. This, as I said before, has been the most expensive primary season in history, and I couldn't even estimate what the costs are.

As I recall, they get in the general election about $20 million, but it has escalated from 1974. So it's, of course, several times that amount. They will spend that in the general election. And as long as you have a Steve Forbes in the primary, they're going to keep on spending until they run out.

DAN OLSON: Remind me now of what I, as an individual citizen or as a corporation, can contribute to an election.

BILL FRENZEL: You may contribute $1,000 to any candidate for federal election in any election. And so if you liked Pat Buchanan, for instance, you could give his campaign a thousand dollars in the primary. You could not give it to him in the general if he were nominated, because he would be getting the taxpayers' money. If you liked Senator Wellstone, you could give him a thousand in the primary and a thousand in the general election, and that's the maximum.

DAN OLSON: But even with those limits, the candidates appear to be raising sums of money almost beyond comprehension. I think a few weeks ago, the Clinton campaign said it had raised $24 million. I assume Senator Dole had raised at least an equal amount. These are vast sums of money. Where is the money coming from?

BILL FRENZEL: The money comes from contributors in thousand-dollar shots. Now, if you're running for president, as Senator Dole is, you get matching federal money up to $250 per contribution. And so that adds perhaps a quarter or a third onto what they are able to raise. Money comes from apparently willing contributors who don't mind being fleeced because they believe in the candidate.

DAN OLSON: For corporations, for other entities, there are no limits?

BILL FRENZEL: No. Corporations are not allowed to contribute to any federal campaigns. Political action committees, which are composed perhaps of employees of corporations or members of certain unions, may contribute. If they are so-called major committees, they can contribute up to $5,000 to any candidate for federal election. As a matter of fact, only about a dozen of them have sufficient money to make that kind of contribution.

DAN OLSON: Is the big difference for most political campaigns in the area of soft money, so-called soft money, where groups, organizations, individuals, can contribute in-kind services?

BILL FRENZEL: I don't think so. I think the so-called soft money that we hear a lot about occur in presidential campaigns of the two parties, and they will make-- or huge contributions will be made by individuals. And those will go to the states, who will use them for so-called party-building money, so they won't be attributed to the presidential campaign. But guess what the party is building for? It's the current election, of course. And I think most students of elections would say that we could ban soft money without hurting our elections at all.

DAN OLSON: Why do you suppose we appear to resist limits on spending and contributions to political campaigns? Is it because in the final analysis people want-- groups want to have that access by way of making the contribution?

BILL FRENZEL: No, I think it is that the solutions that are suggested are always packaged into a sack in which there's something to offend nearly everyone. Limits on expenditures are thought to be very bad for challengers of incumbents, and that's my cut on it, anyway. Often there is the use of the taxpayers' money involved, and there are many people, a majority of Americans, who think that's not a very good idea.

Those are the two major irritants when arrangements are put together. But I think it would be easy to get a bill approved that would simply prohibit bundling, prohibit soft money, straighten up some of the silly rules that we have in the presidential at least, state-by-state limits that are honored in the breach more than in the observance.

DAN OLSON: Is that the best way to go? Or is limiting, literally placing a limit on the length of the campaign season, would that have the effect of limiting campaign expenditures?

BILL FRENZEL: I'm inclined to doubt it. I think that would most limit challengers. And I think what you could do is limit what incumbents could carry over from campaign to campaign, and you might limit their fundraising season. I don't think I'd want to limit challengers, but I would not mind limiting the time period of incumbents. Even though I was an incumbent, I think they have too many advantages.

DAN OLSON: I think one news piece pointed out that when you were getting ready to leave after 20 years in Congress, you had about $358,000 or so in the campaign fund. And you declined to take it with you to buy that Bill Frenzel boat in the Caribbean or whatever, and--

BILL FRENZEL: (LAUGHING) That's right.

DAN OLSON: --did something else with it.

BILL FRENZEL: Yes. It took us about two years because my campaign, like everyone else, is limited. It can give a thousand dollars per candidate. I could give more to political parties. I did make some larger contributions to parties. First of all, we gave back everything that had been contributed in the last cycle, and then we gave all the rest for what we thought were political purposes. Took us two years to unload it.

DAN OLSON: But a lot of office-holders, when they leave, they take the money with them?

BILL FRENZEL: It is perfectly legal as long as they pay taxes on it. But unseemly, I thought.

DAN OLSON: There are people looking not only at the current field of candidates, but looking at political discourse generally in this country and wondering why it's gotten so meanspirited. And I'm just wondering, what are the techniques? What are the ways that we might raise the level of discourse, the level of civility in the political process?

BILL FRENZEL: I think partly it's dependent on the press. I think a lot has come from the scatteration of a jillion channels of this and a million frequencies of radio and newspapers competing. And so we look in garbage cans and laundry bags, and I'd like to have a bigger scandal than you do and then people will listen to my program or read my sheet. I think part of that is out there.

Also, there's no question that the political parties and political causes have been subject to acute polarization. Republicans and Democrats didn't like each other much when I came to Congress. When I left, it was really pretty awful. Well, it isn't fair to say the well was poisoned, but there was a spirit of meanness around that was excessive.

I think one of the reasons there is that we find that that's the way you win campaigns. You advertise nasty. And if you look at the campaigns of Forbes, Buchanan, Dole, the whole crowd, you will see an awful lot of negative campaigns. Pious folk will say, oh, that's just awful. That should be forbidden. They wouldn't use it if the pious folk weren't persuaded by it. And so I think the public can look in the mirror when it shaves and often see who the culprit is here.

DAN OLSON: Bill Frenzel, thank you so much. A pleasure talking to you.

BILL FRENZEL: Very nice to be with you. Thank you.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Bill Frenzel, a former member of Congress from Minnesota, now a scholar at the Brookings Institution, talking with Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson on this week's Voices of Minnesota.

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It's 27 and a half minutes before 11 o'clock. I'm Paula Schroeder. Hope your day is going well. It's quite mild today and we're expecting that weather to continue for the rest of the week. Look for high temperatures in the 40s and lower 50s both today and tomorrow. Could be even a little bit warmer tomorrow. Some light rain or light freezing rain expected in Northern Minnesota this evening. I am looking at a temperature of 60 on Wednesday in Southwestern Minnesota. It is going to cool off a little bit Thursday and Friday, though, but continued above freezing, anyway. You're listening to Midmorning on the FM News station.

Well, the Great American History Theater in St. Paul is celebrating Women's History Month with the world premiere of Beth Gilleland's Civil Ceremony. It's the story of Frances Clayton, one of an estimated 400 women who disguised themselves as men so they could fight in the Civil War. Little is known of them. Their stories are buried in letters and diaries, long gone or hidden away in an unsuspecting relative's attic.

But Gilleland, a Twin Cities actress best known for her one-woman shows, says she scoured books and files looking for whatever information she could find, and tapped into her own imagination as well to determine what would prompt Frances Clayton and others like her to fly in the face of tradition and go off to fight in a war.

BETH GILLELAND: It's estimated that over 400 women fought as men in the Civil War, disguised as men. And given the confines of Victorian ideals for male and female at that time, there's a reason that we don't know their stories, because it was such aberrant behavior for a woman to don trousers in the first place. And those that were discovered were not popular.

PAULA SCHROEDER: So tell us about Frances Clayton. Who was she?

BETH GILLELAND: She was a woman, purportedly from Missouri originally, who married a man from St. Paul. So she lived here in St. Paul, Minnesota, for some time. And as the scant information that I have found goes, they mustered in '61, 1861, together, that he found a uniform for her, and she had a mustache.

And it's hard to know from these different reports what is true and what is not, as with all history. So I have taken some of those things that I've learned from different reports of her, scant though they be. And then I've also taken some information from research I found on other women who fought where there was more information about them, and then made up from my own imaginings, conjured the rest.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Well, that's what any good stage production does, of course, is imagine what might have happened. And you must have some sense of what motivated her, or at least you've thought about that, anyway. What have you come up with?

BETH GILLELAND: Well, there's a wonderful book called An Uncommon Soldier by Lauren Cook Burgess, and it's edited letters of a woman, the only woman that we know of who wrote home disguised as a man with a photo, with all the proof. And that was a big help. And in her foreword, Lauren talks about how the reasons were as varied as they were for men.

Some women were filled with patriotic zeal, and they didn't see themselves as nurses or bandage-rollers at home. Some were immigrants who had no other recourse for work, they could earn a living, other than prostitution. So it was a way out. Some were spies. Some wanted to be with their mates, and disguising themselves was an answer to that.

PAULA SCHROEDER: I would be very interested to find out how the other men, who must have known that she was a woman-- after all, you can't live outdoors in close quarters for very long without discovering that one of your fellow soldiers is a woman.

BETH GILLELAND: I think some were discovered in that respect, and some men kept it a secret. And I think some were not. I know of one, a woman who lived almost her whole life as a man after the war and entered a soldier's home and received a pension.

PAULA SCHROEDER: [LAUGHS] You're kidding.

BETH GILLELAND: In fact, she was only 5 feet high, tall. And they called her our little woman, not knowing that she was a woman, her company. So there's some really fascinating stories.

PAULA SCHROEDER: She must have been quite ingenious at hiding things.

BETH GILLELAND: Yeah, well, there are a lot of people that have an androgynous look. And also modesty and bathing, it was all different then. And the examinations, the medical examinations weren't as strict.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Or as thorough.

BETH GILLELAND: Right, right. And you weren't expecting to see a female in pants. So if somebody came up and said, I'm a man, and wore pants, you might think, hmm, something seems different about you, but go ahead.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Right. If you want to fight, we'll take you.

BETH GILLELAND: Yes, especially when they're desperate for volunteers. So there were a lot of reasons, and some women were discovered and some were not.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Do you know how long Frances Clayton fought in the Civil War?

BETH GILLELAND: About a year and a half. She was discovered at Stones River, when her husband was killed before her and she had to charge over his body, because they had lines. You stayed in line. You kept ranks. And if ranks were broken, you would be shot from behind. So you had to keep going. So that is the legend.

PAULA SCHROEDER: And so what-- so she stopped when she came to her husband's body?

BETH GILLELAND: No, she charged over. Mm-hmm.

PAULA SCHROEDER: But how was she discovered, then?

BETH GILLELAND: She was wounded in the hip in that battle, and so her sex was discovered.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Ah, OK, I'm just wondering if there were other women around, like you say, in terms of the nurses that were on the battlefield, of course. But were there some ladies of pleasure, who also followed the troops?

BETH GILLELAND: Yes, those were called camp followers, prostitutes who followed the army and serviced the men. And I know that Clara Barton came across a dying female soldier at Gettysburg. So the books say.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Just another question about the play itself. Is this one of your monologues, or is it--

BETH GILLELAND: No, no.

PAULA SCHROEDER: --a full-blown play?

BETH GILLELAND: It's a full-blown play, and I was told I could have six characters. Six actors, I should say. And I asked that number be increased, so it's eight. But we have eight people playing, doing a war. And that's been difficult.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Eight people doing a war.

BETH GILLELAND: Yeah, and eight people having to play a wide assortment of characters. So it will be interesting to see if people are confused--

[LAUGHTER]

--because of the quick changes. I don't want anyone to think that, isn't that that brother that just died, or-- but that's just financial constraints. So a lot of hat-changing.

[LAUGHTER]

PAULA SCHROEDER: Yeah. Well, thanks a lot for coming in today.

BETH GILLELAND: Thanks for having me.

PAULA SCHROEDER: It really sounds like a fascinating project.

BETH GILLELAND: It has been.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Thanks.

BETH GILLELAND: [LAUGHS]

PAULA SCHROEDER: Beth Gilleland. Her play Civil Ceremony will be performed at the Great American History Theater in downtown St. Paul through the end of the month. For ticket information, you can call 292-4323.

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19 minutes before 11 o'clock. Well, at another theater in Minneapolis, another story of a woman in history-- Eleanor Roosevelt, who of course was criticized and honored, admired and mocked. And the life of this controversial woman is examined in a new play at the Jungle Theater in Minneapolis as the theater commemorates Women's History Month.

Eleanor Roosevelt-- Excursions stars Claudia Wilkens in this one-woman show. The play focuses on three years in Eleanor Roosevelt's life. From 1918 to 1921, she dealt with her husband's paralysis due to polio and also discovered her husband's affair with her friend and social secretary, Lucy Mercer. Claudia Wilkens says the discovery of this affair shattered Eleanor's confidence and self-image, and forced her to remake herself into a stronger, independent woman. Claudia Wilkens told Minnesota Public Radio's Greta Cunningham the affair is also a focal point for the play.

CLAUDIA WILKENS: Actually, she-- well, that incident, Rhoda feels, and from the reading I've done, I think a lot of people feel that was the turning point in Eleanor's life. Up until that time she was under the thumb of her mother, and she'd been pregnant. She'd been married to Franklin for 13 years, and had been pregnant almost that entire time. If she wasn't pregnant, she was nursing, and had six children up to that point. One of them had died. And that's in 13 years. So you can imagine.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: Yeah.

CLAUDIA WILKENS: And her mother had been running the household. I mean, her mother furnished and bought the home they lived in New York. Hyde Park was hers, her mother's, her mother-in-law's. And she basically ran her life. Raised the children, did everything. Eleanor just sort of-- she liked to put her linens away, you know? She'd like to do something, but there was very little that she was asked to do except to be the wife of the great man.

And when Franklin-- actually, Lucy Mercer was Eleanor's social secretary, did her little notes and the little cards and answered the invitations and stuff like that for Eleanor. And she was around the house a lot and Franklin saw her and met her. And then I think Eleanor was away for a little while and they started to see each other, and then Franklin fell in love with her.

And when he went over to Europe after World War I, or during-- he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and he went to see the battlefields and everything. When he came back he had letters from Lucy Mercer in his luggage, and he put them in the linen closet, where he had to know that Eleanor would find them there. I mean, that was her place. That was the one place that she could be busy.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: Her territory.

CLAUDIA WILKENS: Yeah. And she found them. And actually he offered her, I understand, her freedom, and then she offered him. And the reason they didn't, really, was because Mama said, all right, you have no future in politics if you divorce. This was in 1918. Also, I'll disinherit you if you do. So they went on.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: Mm. But it must have grieved her terribly to find this.

CLAUDIA WILKENS: Oh, terribly. She loved him. And she still did. She always did, I think. She didn't want to not be with him. They were-- I think they were soulmates. I truly do.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: In the play, how does Eleanor deal with her grief after finding this out, after making this discovery that her husband has been unfaithful?

CLAUDIA WILKENS: She has to find a way to go on. And in the play, she's recalling-- actually, the play takes place in August of 1921, and this is after Franklin has contracted polio. And so she's looking back on the past three years. And she finds herself that night, sort of. She starts to see where the future could go.

And even after she found out about Lucy, she had to go on. That was her spirit. She just had to. I mean, she could sit down and she could kill herself. She had some options. She could kill herself. She could step back. Or she could go forward and say, all right, I'm not going to let this ruin me.

She was a very intelligent woman. Even when she was saying, OK, Mama, and letting her-- she still had a mind that wanted to exercise itself so much, but there was so little she could do then. And after Franklin did this, or Franklin had the affair, all of a sudden, she started to think, well, I'm going to go. I'm going to go to the Working Women's Congress. I'm going to see what that's all about. I'm going to see what suffrage is about. I'm going to see what-- she saw the battlefields of France. She actually was one of the few women that actually saw that, and it was horrifying to her.

And then she started to see that the same thing was really happening in the United States. The anarchists were blowing things up and saying, we've got to pay some attention to people here. And she started to see that, and all these things were coming into her at that time. At a time when she had said, I'm not going to have any more children. And she never did. In fact, she and Franklin had slept in separate rooms from then on. And that was her choice, not his.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: Do you think her story is one of someone reaching the bottom point of their life and then bouncing up higher than they thought they could before?

CLAUDIA WILKENS: Yes, yes, I do. And I think that's one of the reasons that people who met her and people who read about her and people who had heard about her know that she was a true person, that she was not doing this for any reason other than the fact that she believed in what she saw and what she felt and what she espoused. She truly did.

And she was not-- she did it in a way, and she was in such a position-- the position she was in as being the wife of the president of the United States, and after, the former first lady-- she was in a position to actually implement some of these things in a way that other women couldn't.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: Can you talk a little bit more about her low point? Particularly I'm thinking of the story of her going to a statue for comfort.

CLAUDIA WILKENS: Oh, yes, yes. When she was at her lowest, she used to-- Franklin had gone to Europe, actually, to see the battlefields. And she wanted to go too, but she couldn't. Her mother said no. And she would visit this grave of Henry Adams, who was a historian, a very famous historian, and one of the ancestors of President Adams, President John Quincy. She would visit this statue in this graveyard of Henry Adams' wife. Her name was Clover, and the statue was called Grief. And it was a life-sized statue of a woman with a big cowl over her head, looking down. And she loved going to see that statue.

And during that time, which was in 1918, she found in the newspaper, she found a poem that she carried around with her for the rest of her life. And the poem is called "Psyche." It's by Virginia Moore. And it says, "The soul that has believed and is deceived thinks nothing for a while. All thoughts are vile. And then, finding the pull of breath better than death, the soul that had believed and was deceived ends by believing more than ever before." Which I think is what happened to Eleanor. I think she read it, and she went, that's the only way I have to go. And she certainly did.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: Let's talk a little bit about your particular portrayal of Eleanor Roosevelt. She's of course known for her very distinctive voice and her delivery. Did you try to copy that in any way?

CLAUDIA WILKENS: No. Well, yes, somewhat. I could do it. I could try to imitate her, but I would rather not do that. She spoke with an English accent, which the people, the bon monde of that time did. They spoke almost as if they were from England. You know, the very soft A's, and the-- and the reason she spoke, she had all this, is that she was trying-- she was learning to be a public speaker, and she was trying to throw her voice. And that's why we think of her so much as being, you know--

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: Straining her voice.

CLAUDIA WILKENS: Straining her voice, like this way. But when I've heard her-- I've heard her speaking to an interviewer, like me to you. And that isn't there. It's a lovely, beautiful contralto voice.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: Current discussion about first ladies and their roles criticize Hillary Clinton, or admire Hillary Clinton for things that she's done. And first ladies in the past, Pat Nixon, have dealt with a lot of things. How do you think Eleanor Roosevelt felt about her role as first lady? Was she comfortable in that role?

CLAUDIA WILKENS: She didn't want to be first lady. When Franklin became president of the United States, Eleanor actually had more things going on in her life. She was more important than he was, as far as politically. She was like members of the Women's Committee for the Democratic Party, and very active in politics. She wasn't going to run for anything, but she certainly was making a difference.

And when Franklin ran for president and won, she just went, oh my god, now I'm going to have to be-- now I'm going to have to be the first lady, and how can I do that? I'm going to have to give up-- everybody's going to be watching me and everything I do is going to be out there, and I have to be this public woman. I'm going to have to be a hostess for these parties.

But Franklin-- she was in a position, a unique one in a way, because Franklin was handicapped then. He couldn't walk. And he was wheelchair-bound. Nobody knew this, because he'd found a way to walk with his sons on either side holding him up, and it looked like he was walking. So the people didn't even know that he was crippled. But of course, she did.

And she started to go for him and look around and do trips and come back and report to him. And I think when she was doing that, she discovered that she could have a marvelous influence on what's-- she used to send little notes to him all the time and insist that he act on them. So she made some enemies, but--

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: But she had some power as first lady.

CLAUDIA WILKENS: She had some power. Yeah, she did. And people loved her. The people loved her.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: When people come to see the world premiere of Eleanor Roosevelt-- Excursions, what do you hope they take away with them?

CLAUDIA WILKENS: I just hope that they feel, maybe, that they have been in the presence of Eleanor Roosevelt for two hours. That's all I can hope. And that they will know that she was a human being and a wonderful personality and a wonderful heart, and that there is possibility. There are endless possibilities for everybody's life. Doesn't matter who you are or what sex you are. It doesn't even matter. But you can go somewhere. When you think that all is lost, it's not. We know that all was not lost for Eleanor. And I think we just have to be reminded. That's what I want to do, is just remind people of that. That all is not lost.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Claudia Wilkens is Eleanor Roosevelt in the Jungle Theater's new production of Eleanor Roosevelt-- Excursions. The play has its premiere this coming weekend. And for ticket information, you can call the Jungle Theater box office. It's in Minneapolis.

[GENTLE PIANO MELODY]

GARRISON KEILLOR: And here is The Writer's Almanac for Monday. It's the 11th of March, 1996.

It was on this day in 1811, in a village in England, a man named Ned Ludd led a pack of workers in the hosiery trade on a rampage, destroying stocking frames. They were afraid that mechanization would put them out of work. It was from his name, Ludd, L-U-D-D, that we take the term Luddites, meaning people who are opposed to mechanization and automation.

And it's the birthday in Cambridge in 1952 of Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Here's a poem for today by William Matthews entitled, "The Cat."

"While you read, the sleep moth begins to circle your eyes, and then a hail of claws lands the cat in your lap. The little motor in his throat is how a cat says, me. He rasps the soft file of his tongue along the inside of your wrist. He licks himself. He's building a pebble of fur in his stomach. And now he pulls his body in a circle around the fire of sleep.

This is the wet sweater with legs that shakes in from the rain. Split ear, the sex burglar. Fish breath. Wind minion. Paw poker of dust, tumbleweeds. The cat that kisses with the wet flame of his tongue each of your eyelids as if sealing a letter.

One afternoon, napping under the light ladder let down by the window, there are two of them, cat and cat shadow. Sleep. One night you lay your book down, like the clothes your mother wanted you to wear tomorrow. You yawn. The cat exhales a moon, opening a moon. You dream of cats. One of them strokes you the wrong way. Still, you sleep well.

This is the same cat. Plunder. This is the old cat. Milk whiskers. This is the cat, eating one of its lives. This is the first cat, Fire Fur. This is the next cat, St. Sorrow. This is the cat with its claws furled like sleep's flag. This is the lust cat, trying to sleep with its shadow. This is the only cat I have ever loved.

This cat has written in tongue ink the poem you are reading now, the poem scratching at the gate of silence, the poem that forgives itself for its used-up lives. The poem of the cat waking, running a long shudder through his body, stretching again, following the moist bell of his nose into the world again."

A poem entitled "The Cat" by William Matthews, from Selected Poems and Translations published by Houghton Mifflin Company and used by permission here on The Writer's Almanac, Monday, March the 11th. Made possible by Cowles Magazines, publishers of Historic Traveler and other magazines. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Two minutes now before 11 o'clock This has been Midmorning on the FM station-- FM News station, excuse me. Midday is coming up next at 11 o'clock, and Gary will be talking to Richard Bohr of Saint John's University and the College of Saint Benedict about the history of China's relationship to Taiwan. This as the US Navy sends two warships to the waters off Taiwan to keep the peace there. Some increasing tensions between China and Taiwan. We'll have all the news about that coming up at 11 o'clock.

At noon today, a continuation of the series on Black radio. Today, women in radio, African-American women in radio, and also Blacks in management of radio stations. All that on Midday. Stay tuned for that. And tomorrow, we'll be bringing you the Campaign Connection once more, here on Midmorning at 9:00 AM. I'm Paula Schroeder. Thanks for joining us today.

[GENTLE MUSIC]

JOHN RABE: I'm John Rabe. On Friday, All Things Considered goes to Fargo-- the new Coen brothers movie Fargo, that is. It's All Things Considered, weekdays at 3:00 on the FM News station, KNOW-FM 91.1 in the Twin Cities.

PAULA SCHROEDER: You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio. 39 degrees under cloudy skies at the FM News station, KNOW-FM 91.1, Minneapolis-St. Paul. It's going to be partly sunny and breezy in the Twin Cities today. Look for a high around 50 degrees, the overnight low around 35. And tomorrow, partly sunny, a little bit warmer with a high in the low 50s.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

GARY EICHTEN: Good morning. It's 11 o'clock, and this is Midday on the FM News station. I'm Gary Eichten. In the news this morning, the US is reportedly sending a second aircraft carrier to the Pacific to show US support for Taiwan. China is conducting live-fire military exercises near Taiwan this week to slow.