Customer Reviews

Wisconsin Death Trip

5 star:		(32)
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The first of Michael Lesy's books, 'Wisconsin death trip' is as harrowing and breathtaking today as when it was first published, back in the early 1970s. Utilizing a veritable treasure-trove of miraculously preserved glass negative plates taken in rural Wisconsin during the period of the 1880s-early 20th Century, and combining them with newspaper clippings and other snippets of local news from the area and era, Lesy has pieced together an amazing (if bleak) view of life in that day and age. Times were hard, and the challenges faced were many and daunting -- anyone bemoaning the state of life in America today should read this book...anyone who wants a truer sense of American history should read this book. You will never forget it.

On a related note, readers might be interested to know that this book inspired Stewart O'Nan's great novel 'A prayer for the dying' (also available through amazon.com).

In the spring of 2000, I was sitting in the admissions office at Hampshire College, waiting to be interviewed. With some time to kill, I browsed a bookshelf featuring the works of Hampshire professors. One of these books was Wisconsin Death Trip. It caught my attention thanks to the Static-X album of the same name (of which I was a big fan at the time...no longer, though), so I pulled it from the shelf to find that haunting cover photo staring at me with its dark, blurry eyes. It drew me in, in a way that was far from comfortable. It left me no choice. I had to see what was inside.
As it turned out, I had a long wait for my interview, and I made it through most of the book. If it had been anything other than a sunny spring afternoon, I doubt the interview would have gone well at all. Suicide and murder, madness and despair, babies in coffins and grim stone-faced Lutherans. The images were haunting, and those conjured up by the simple matter-of-fact accounts even more so. This book haunted me.

Fast forward a year and a half, and I'm a first-year student at Hampshire. I walk into the bookstore and what do I see but Wisconsin Death Trip. I'm short on cash, but I buy it. I haven't really got a choice. Just about everyone who comes into my room gets to look at it. Fortunately, this is Hampshire College, so that probably helps my social life a bit.

Four years later, the Death Trip still holds a prominent place on my shelf. Every so often I take it out and open it, and inevitably I end up reading it cover to cover. This book is powerful, haunting, and above all else important. Uncomfortable as it may be, this is American history. This is a tale of the price we pay for progress. These are the souls who were caught in the gears of the machine.

In my time at Hampshire I had Mr. Lesy as a teacher. Towards the end of the semester, I asked him why he felt compelled to write this book. He told me that after looking through the images and articles used herein, that he realized that he was looking at "an American Holocaust." And that, he felt, was something that people needed to know about. I wholeheartedly agree.

Pick up this book and you will not put it down.

"The pictures you're about to see are of people who were once actually alive." So begins historian Michael Lesy's masterpiece - a by turns touching and disturbing examination of life and death in a small Wisconsin town during the final 15 years of the nineteenth century. Lesy stumbled across a cache of 30,000 glass plate images made by a local town photographer named Charley Van Schaick and spools of microfilm from the local newspaper - and combined the most compelling of these images and newspaper excerpts to create a vivid examination of Victorian prairie life. Although there are numerous post-mortem memorial photographs to add morbid appeal to the book, the newspaper and insane asylum excerpts are what I find absolutely enthralling. If ever anyone tries to suggest to you that times were better "before", you might want to refer them to these matter-of-fact tales of murder, suicide, insanity, and lethal pestilence. Death was a constant threat and entire families of 6 children could be wiped out by diptheria in a matter of days. It's no wonder that so many were driven to suicide: the depth of despair that these people must have gone through is at times palpable.

To give you an idea of the sort of macabre fascinations you can find in these olde newspapers, here are some excerpts:
"The 60 year old wife of a farmer in Jackson, Washington County, killed herself by cutting her throat with a sheep shears"
"Mrs. James Baty... died suddenly of a hemorrhage of the lungs. She leaves a husband, her family of 6 children having died of diptheria last summer"
"Mrs. John Larson... drowned her 3 children in Lake St. Croix during a fit of insanity... Mrs. Larson imagines that devils pursue her"
And my personal favorite:
"Mrs. Carter... was taken sick at the marsh last week and fell down, sustaining internal injuries which have dethroned her reason. She has been removed to her home here and a few nights since arose from her bed and ran through the woods... A night or two after she was found trying to strangle herself with a towel... It is hoped the trouble is only temporary and that she may soon recover her mind"
You don't see entries like that in newspapers anymore!!

At the end of the nineteenth century and up through World War II, sociologists debated human behavior and intelligence. Are people born predisposed to genius or moronity? Are they born with a genetic ability to be or become wealthy and others are born to be poor? Can one's environment affect one's intelligence and one's station in life, or is it a genetic quality?

Leading advocates of both positions certainly used a great deal of research to prove one point or another. Ironically, a leading advocate of the environmental influences of behavior eventually went into advertising, the greatest proof of environmental influences on individuals. And, in another bit of irony, Adolf Hitler influenced his audiences with propaganda to lead them to believe race and genetics determined who and what people were!

Michael Lesy's scholarly work (it was originally a thesis for his degree) takes a practical look at this debate. In fact, Mr. Lesy addresses that debate in his conclusion, as he relates the debates raging in ivory towers, his book in the main related the reality of the world in the heartland. These men in academia might not have known of the individuals who are named in the news reports, but their debate sought to answer those question that arose from these actions.

In reading these accounts, we realize that the only difference between "the good ol' days" and today is likely the speed of communications. Many of these articles were already several days, if not weeks, old when they printed; today they would be splashed on the front pages and people would debate what is happening to our society that it is eroding so. Attempts on others lives were frequent. Mental illness prevalent.

The photographs also tell a story. Infant mortality. Newlyweds looking to a bright future. Vibrant businesses. Artistic photographs that seek to illuminate certain features of a photo. These glass plate photos were what originally inspired Mr. Lesy to do this project.

Amazingly, these accounts are not from the large metropolitan areas, but from the rural areas of Wisconsin. At this same period, Wisconsin was the leader in Progressivism with Robert "Fighting Bob" LaFollette leading the state to lead the nation in enacting reforms such as Social Security, Worker's Compensation, and the minimum wage. So while the environment improved, the sad state of human affairs remained similar to the nation at large.

This book also proves to be a conversation piece. After reading it, I started bringing it to family gatherings. My grandmother remembered similar stories from her youth. My mother read similar accounts as she did geneology. Others were amazed that news reports then are eerily similar to news reports today. Obviously, the human condition remains bizarely similar. The "good ol' days" it would appear weren't so good.

This is a true story.

When I was around 11 years old (I'm 46 now), we got this book as a Christmas present from my quiet uncle, who was a doctor far away. I pored over this strange book in horror. I said, "Mother, I think something's wrong with Uncle James. Why would someone give a book like this to us?"

About three years later, he gassed himself to death.

From my child's eye view, it was a book overflowing with black and white pictures of long-dead children: propped in coffins, posed in their lying-outs amidst prickly flowers and poofy silk pillows. It was filled with photos of wasp-waisted women and descriptions of the brutality of a diptheria death. I read about the "black membrane" of diptheria growing over the backs of countless babies' throats--of parents made desperate by the wheezing (and then strangling) of hundreds of children. It was riveting, immediate, terrifying: history whipped into a frenzy.

Honest to goodness, this was unspoken--but when I heard Uncle had killed himself, I wasn't surprised in the least.

I know there must have been more to the book (as reviewers here attest)--I do recall reading a few newspaper articles about madness--but all I truly remember, too vividly to ever forget, is a dead girl then my age, slumping at a grotesque tilt in a coffin, her eyes waxy and lids half-closed, with vine-like lilies circling her. They'd propped her coffin up in order to photograph it, for goodness sake. If you were ten, wouldn't that be all you recalled?

The book disappeared, and I didn't find it when my mother died. I'd dearly like to read it again. The Victorian-era obsession with children who'd gone to Jesus didn't make sense to my vaccinated, O.J.-nourished, moderately-exercised kid's mind, but I see it now: a world where people were MORE THAN LIKELY to lose most of their children to one of myriad childhood killers. The pittance they paid for their child's grave was all that they could give them--except their love, which I now know was no different from ours.

I read this book frequently during the 70's after leaving Wisconsin where I went to college and lived briefly on a farm. The impact has remained with me throughout my life; the devastating loneliness and alienation and great griefs that actually are so much a part of the 'roots' of white America. The spectre of the end of the timeless native american cultures, without a media to sensationalize or distort, were nevertheless traumatic to watch. Especially to people for whom there were few social holding places- in a world plagued and stark.

The style of the book with entries from the State Assylum intake log, the local newspapers, some journals and the shocking family pictures, and pictures of the dead, constitutes a multiple fact assault that feels nothing less than gothic fiction.
I don't believe it is possible to get a clearer understanding of the European agrarian foundations of America- and the incipient madness that was never far from the essence of that life. My Antonia is like a fairy tale by comparison.

There is relatively little I can say about this book.

The book is essentially photographs and news clippings from a newspaper in Wisconsin from about 1890 to 1910. Interspersed are snippets from novels dealing with life during the period.

Turning the pages, reading the articles, and looking not at the pictures but into the eyes of the people in the photographs, one gets a sense not of some sterilized, backward glance at these people as some great societal force, not as a band of pioneers, but as very human people, who die in childbirth, die as children, die of diseases that sweep through whole towns and infect the entire state with fear, go insane, murder, and still maintain enough inner dignity to be able to look into the lens of a camera and mask most of their emotions long enough for the half-second exposure but not long enough to pierce the heart of people living a century later. It is pain. It is a death trip.

The book speaks for itself. Actually, it doesn't. The people in word and image speak for themselves.

Ah, the Good Old Days! that time when the men and women were wrapped like a warm blanket in Christian piety. When boys and girls grew up straight and tall, amid swimming holes and Sunday schools, and read aloud in the public schools from the Protestant Bible. When men bore the guns that kept us free on their broad shoulders, and women were demure, graceful, with chaste and untroubled souls.

This remarkable collection of photographs --- many depicting funerals and similarly mournful scenes --- and the accompanying anthology of ephemeral journalism will go a long way towards showing that this, like any other lost Eden, never really existed. These people had other virtues, of course: they lived in the presence of death; they cultivated a sort of stoicism in the face of hard lives made harder by the rise of national capitalism.

It seems that people in rural Wisconsin were heirs to the same failures that all flesh is heir to. People committed adultery back then, and bore children out of wedlock. People went mad back then, and often expressed their madness in violence. There was drunkenness, grinding loneliness, indifference to neighbours, and murder. They coped with problems, too, that we have managed to conquer: most notably, epidemic disease, and wholly inadequte health care. It is good to remember this when this period is portrayed as a golden age of piety and patriotism.

I read this book over 16 years ago. It left a lasting impression that will stay with me forever. It may not have the same affect on others but reading some of the reviews posted here, I know that it has on most. You can't really ask somebody "did this really happen?" becuase they either died then or in the 100 years that have past. We have no perspective on these people, places and times other than to read books like this. If any of these folks were alive today and heard someone say, "those were the good old days." They might be inclined to give the speaker a quick education. This book will do it for them. I have pictures just like this in a family archive. You wonder how anybody lived into middle or old age. Disease, starvation, hypothermia, and farm accidents all took their toll. Winters are hard enough in the south. Why did these people decide to stop the wagon in Wisconsin or if they lived thru their first winter there, why didn't they head south? I went to a Brewers baseball game at the end of May some 25 years ago and wore a down parka and was cold. You can still see houses in small towns outside of Milwaukee that look like the houses in this book and you can feel the desolation, pain and suffering looking out at you thru 100 year old panes of glass.

Reading this book was like watching a ten-car pile up in slow motion. At the turn of the century, the bottom dropped out of the local economy in a rural area of Wisconsin. Soon after, local newspapers that had reported nothing more exciting than hog births begin to fill up with stories about arson, murder, madness, and infanticide. Truly creepy.