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Wisconsin Death Trip

Description

First published in 1973, this remarkable book about life in a small turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town has become a cult classic. Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by a Black River Falls photographer, Charles Van Schaik.

The last decade of the 19th century was, for some Americans, a time when great fortunes were to be made. For many others, however, the period was a time of economic dislocation, when the gap between city and countryside, rich and poor, grew ever wider. As the Indian Wars ended and the Gilded Age extended into America's first Imperial Age, social critics such as Mark Twain and William Dean Howells began to examine the dark side of the American dream: violence, poverty, degenerate behavior, suicide, and insanity.

In the late 1960s, another desperate time, historian Michael Lesy took a long look at fin-de-siècle America. Examining a collection of several thousand glass plate negatives and historical documents from Jackson County, Wisconsin, he concocted a sprawling treatise on a past that had been willfully forgotten, a brooding rejoinder to Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology. First published in 1973, Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip, now reissued in a handsome paperbound edition, became a key text of the counterculture, a book to shelve alongside Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Custer Died for Your Sins--and it sometimes reads like a hip product of its time. Lesy documents the unsettling record of one small corner of rural America, turning up accounts of barn burnings, attacks by gangs of armed tramps, threatening and obscene letters, death by diphtheria and smallpox (the Wisconsin townsfolk had, some years, to attend several funerals a week), alcoholism, madness, business and bank failures, and even a case or two of witchcraft.

After reading Lesy's texts and viewing the sometimes unsettling images he's turned up, you would be forgiven for thinking that no one in small-town Wisconsin in our great-great-grandparents' time was well-adjusted--which is, of course, not the case. Hyperbole notwithstanding, this is a remarkable study, one that Lesy himself rightly calls an experiment in both history and alchemy. --Gregory McNamee

Reviews

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-07-18
Summary: "Wisconsin Death Trip"

An amazing catalogue of actual newspaper clippings, assorted news and the author's own creative musings on the suicides, murders and madness among otherwise normal citizens in late 19th century Wisconsin. Accompanied by photographs from a Black River Falls photo studio from the era. Unlike any book before or since.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2009-10-23
Summary: "a VERY one-sided--and thus limited--review"

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.

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Rating: 2 / 5
Date: 2009-07-20
Summary: "This book could be anywhere..."

You can read through all the reviews here to get an idea of what the book is about, but the things which occur in this book did not all happen in just in one county as other reviews from Wisconsin point out and as the author fails to mention. These things could have happened, and I'm sure did, in most every other state/territory in the country at that time. Also, look at today's headlines and you will find the same or worse everywhere. Yes, rural life was difficult in those days, and I agree with WisconsinGal reviewer in her admiration of people living back in those conditions. And by the way, most people looked serious in pictures back then, check your own family's photos from the day. Disappointing book. Don't waste your money.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2009-05-14
Summary: "haunting, humorous, genuine"

I recently read "The Time-Traveler's Wife" and noticed a small reference to a book I hadn't heard of -- "Wisconsin Death Trip." Intrigued by the casual mention of an apparently famous book about my home state, I decided to investigate, and stumbled upon something before my time in more ways than one.
"Wisconsin Death Trip" came of age in the 1970s, well before I was born, and is set in the 1890s, well before my grandparents were born. Then again, in reading it, I felt a connection to the people, and to the land we shared. Reading "Wisconsin Death Trip" was quite a, well, trip; for one, the story of a relative of mine was traced throughout the book. For another, I was offered a glimpse of a life much different than the bucolic, pastoral pleasantry I had always, albeit subconsciously, envisioned. Were these the Wisconsinsites I was descended from? Apparently so.
What people may not mention about this book is that it is FUNNY. "More poetry is said to come from Wisconsin than from any other state in the Union," it tells us, but apparently so do more "wierdies" [sic], and women who cut their hair off in their sleep, and daughters who burn their fathers' barns down. It is black humor, true, but I found myself laughing out loud as often as I was horrified. How many times will Mary Sweeny try to break a fine plate-glass window?
A beautiful book, one whose legacy deserves to be revived, "Wisconsin Death Trip" strikes the right balance between photographic exhibition (of Black River Falls) and fin-de-siecle, daily-life exposition via newspaper clippings from both Minnesota and Wisconsin. And now those who have never before heard of Prairie du Chien (Prardoosheen), Menominee, and Sheboygan can know them intimately, and know the humanity populating them (in all its racist, incestuous, sexist, clinically insane glory).
I just wish it were available for cheaper.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2008-08-24
Summary: "Moving, effective, original, singular"

Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip, originally a doctoral thesis, is one of the most touching, poetic, beautiful, harrowing, moving and dislocating works I have read. Basically a compendium of found glass plate negative photos taken by the (himself knock-knees odd) Charles Vam Schaik in and around the rural community of Black River Falls WI, and leavened by snippets taken from the Badger State Banner newspaper and the Mendota State Record Book (an insane asylum), as well as a few personal reminisces, the book instead is a commentary and an indictment of a brutal time of economic dislocation, social upheaval, religious confusion and obsession, and personal decay in a farming community. It is an endless repitition of suicide, madness, arson, children dying of disease, and of a mostly sternly religious people living the grimmest of lives of back breaking work in the country. The photos by their sheer repetition and some of the games played with them by the author, pound out a tattoo of strain, people only barely suppressing their madness, and a society truly on the edge of collapse. Hardly the bucolic paradise so often evoked in our time.

The afterword by the author provides some backstory and statistics backing the point up, and illustrating in numbers and facts what the pictures and excerpts made clear by anecdote, and is also well written.

This was something of a cult book in the mid 70s, a most unusual way of looking at local history, lifting up the rock under which society had crawled. It is haunting, tragic, striking. You will never forgot it.