First sentence:

The pictures you are about to see are of people who were once actually alive.

Reason for Reading: In the book A Reliable Wife by Roderick Goodwin, the author mentions in a note that this book gave him the idea for the atmosphere to set his own book in. His characters read from the newspaper regularly and his description of this book made want to read it. So I put an ILL request in for it right away.

Comments: This is a very unusual book. It is a collection of both photographs and newspaper clippings from the period of 1895 to 1900 from a newspaper called the Badger State Banner which covered local Jackson County news as well as having access to state wide news. During this period, the author contends that a certain presence of death, and tragedy loomed over the agricultural towns of the American Midwest. What became a mundane part of their everyday lives as reported in the newspapers, now, to us looking back, seems to be a macabre era of history.

The newspaper articles which run from one-liners to several paragraphs report on suicides, diphtheria deaths, baby deaths, insane declarations, window smashers, arsonists, found dead bodies, deaths, funerals, charges of obscene letters sent through the mail and much more plus repeated instances of the same over and over with each one different and many the same. Suicides are rampant, men shooting themselves in the head, hanging themselves in the barn and one guy blew his head off with dynamite. Women poisoned themselves with the plenty of rodent killers found on the farm, drowned themselves in barrels and rivers or set themselves on fire, one lady in a bath of kerosene. The asylum must have been filled to the rafters with all the reports of committed people. How many times I read of women with 8 to 13 children being committed as insane with symptoms of despondency and men who lost their jobs and wouldn't do anything were declared insane. Of course then there were also the usual religious insanity, the tobacco insanity, the "thinks the neighbours are after him" insanity, too. All this and the other topics make for absolutely fascinating reading of a time when life must have been a hard road to travel.

Then along with the text between each year, are sections of photographs which were taken by a local studio photographer, Charley Van Schaick. It was the finding of the glass negative slides that prompted the compilation of this book. None of the photos are snapshots, they are all photos taken because someone wanted them taken. They are very striking and range from the morbid dead babies in coffins and old women who are scary to look at to studio shots of people but whose eyes are strangely lifeless and there are even some photos of picnics and local businesses. The way they have been arranged though is not just a sequence of photos but is an artistic presentation. I almost felt as if I were watching a silent movie at times.

The combination of the text and the photos together presents an unusual artistic viewing of social history in a manner not likely to be seen again. I think this is only something to come about from the mindset of the seventies. Both the preface and the authors ending thesis (this was originally presented as his thesis at Rutgers) suffer from a lot of seventies psycho-babble but the history presented is unblemished and fascinating ... and macabre. This is the type of book that would be a pleasure to own and dip into or just to come back to over and over for the pictures alone. While not for everyone I highly recommended it for those who, like me, enjoy this sort of thing.

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Wisconsin Death Trip is a unique historical perspective, or as its author, Michael Lesy says, "an exercise in historical actuality." It is an "alchemy" as he puts it, that allows us to experience the past at a gut level, a gestalt, something we feel and understand on levels that are bigger than the book itself.

The book is comprised of many black and white photos that were preserved from several thousand glass negative plates taken between the years of 1890 and 1910 by a photographer in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. It also contains text that is taken from the newspaper accounts of two journalists also from Black River Falls. The journalists subscribed to a state wire service so the accounts come from all over Wisconsin, including many from the area in which I currently live. It contains excerpts from the intake journal of the state mental institution, as well.

In the Introduction, Levy tells us, "None of the accounts are fictitious. Neither pictures nor the events were, when they were made or experienced, considered to be unique, extraordinary, or sensational."

He further states, "The people who looked at the pictures once they were taken weren't surprised, and the people who read about the events weren't shocked."

The photos and the text are like two separate streams that flow in and around each other, complimenting each other in an organic way, but not a prescribed way. The little snips of stories from the newspaper reveal a constantly repeated theme to which the faces and hands of the people in the photographs give testimony. You don't so much learn their stories as you absorb them. You sense the patterns of life during this time period in ways that would be impossible with a traditional history book.

The death trip is the commonplace presence of poverty, suicide, insanity, danger, violence, ignorance, disease, alcoholism, grief, deprivation, loneliness and boredom that were the weft in the weave of rural life at the turn of the 20th century. This book unveils the hardships that were seen as routine and to which no especial emotional response was displayed if even felt. It implies the guilt and sorrow that the diseases like diphtheria, small pox and cholera left in their wake, when they stalked the countryside taking the children and leaving the adults. How does someone manage to love a child that has every reasonable chance of falling to disease or farm accident, and who is more likely to end up in a miniature coffin in the parlor than he is to grow up? How does your mind keep from breaking when you cannot feed the ones who do live. Ponder these things and feel them and you are on the death trip into the darkness of the good ol' days.

My sister-in-law loaned me Wisconsin Death Trip when it was first published in 1973 and it creeped me out. I was young and inexperienced and the notion of a death trip seemed entirely foreign. This book seemed like a voyeuristic freak show to me back then. I glanced over the written accounts and photographs, skipping around, and ultimately missing out on the opportunity it brilliantly presents to go back in time and realize what was happening not only in people's physical lives but in their emotions and in their minds.

Life has dealt with me since I first read this book so when it came out in paperback in 2000 and I read it again, perhaps I was more seasoned, shall we say, and I was able to relate to its powerful observations from the standpoint of someone who herself, has struggled with the capriciousness of life, who has seen the random insanity that lives side by side with the mundane.

This book is a time machine indeed and can take us to the lives of people in ways that the usual historical texts do not. Rather than walking the streets of ghost towns in our minds, trying to imagine life, here we find ourselves perched on the horse-hair settee in the parlor, looking at the infant in her coffin, during the last of several funerals that week, breathing diphtheria air. We are cinched into our corsets over hot cook stoves and vats of lye soap, coerced by Calvinism into judgment of the frailties of others on one hand and acceptance of our own miseries on the other. There's no place this side of madness to even release a scream.

The second time around, I appreciated the brilliance of this book's author. This book is history but it is also art. It is psychology and sociology. It's the genealogy notes that you won't find in the middle of your family Bible. This book's lessons seep in through the pores of your skin. You smell the lessons. You cringe and poke at the lessons with the stick of your mind. No one here will tell you what it is that you should learn. You find yourself walking around in the rural Mid-west of 1890-1910 and seeing it for yourself. The conclusions are Lesy's but you come to feel that they are your own as well, seen with your own two eyes.

Excerpts like these are just the tips of the iceberg that this book contains.

"In a family consisting of 3 maiden sisters and 2 bachelor brothers named Niedtke in the town of Liberty, near Appleton, 2 sisters and a brother have gone insane within the past few weeks, one of the sisters being a school teacher. Saturday the insane brother became violent and was taken to the asylum. The two sisters are being cared for at home."

"Thomas Galt died at his home in this city Friday night last from the effects of the Ackerman anti-dipsomania gold cure which he was taking. He was 37...he contracted the drink habit and it so obtained the mastery of him that he was much of the time incapacitated for labor."

"An old man was found in a brush shanty a mile south of Peshtigo. He was unable to move owing to hunger and exposure. He came from Canada a month ago in search of work."

By digesting the many accounts we come to feel the creeping paranoia and obsessive-compulsive behaviors that resulted from the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethic. We stand in the shoes of people being unnaturally pressed and formed into fine upstanding American citizens despite the pressures and terrors on the road of progress. We see the corpses of the ones who buckled under the strain.

This book tells the story of rural decay. It strips the Sunday Best from our ancestors and tells their stories in a way that deserves to be heard all the more because it does not whitewash or otherwise hide the pain and the madness that were an integral part of our forebear's lives. The hardness of our grandmother's life has inevitably trickled into our own and so to know ourselves we must seek out hers.

The parade of tiny coffins that passed through my grandmother's parlor as her siblings succumbed to diphtheria had a direct effect on how my mother was loved and reared and her paranoia shaped my life. Our lives come clearer when we step through the mists of time, picking up the subtle, untold aspects of our history, examining the chaff as well as the wheat.

Wisconsin Death Trip could just as easily be called The Heartland Death Trip. It is fascinating, yes, creepy, and most definitely a part of our trip wherever that may lead. ( )

“Wisconsin Death Trip� (1973) is a combination of old photographs and news stories of the late 19th century. The photos were taken by Mr. Charley Van Schaick, a photographer in Black River Falls. There were 30,000 plates in the Van Schaick collection of which 200 were chosen for publication in “Wisconsin Death Trip�. The news accounts were taken from a newspaper called the Badger State Banner. Along with stories about arson, madness, drunkenness, and other high times of the good old days, this is typical:

Joseph Shotgoe, aged 45 years, who lived in the town of Rose, Waushara County, tried to kill his wife with a kettle of hot water. A 14-year-old daughter sprang between them and saved her mother but was badly burned herself. The father then got a rope and . . . attempted to hang himself, but being discovered by neighbors was rescued before life was extinct. His wife soon [afterward] went to the barn and discovered that her husband had taken the lines out of the harness, put them over a beam, and hung himself.

Looking at the photographs of country people at the end of the 19th century, during a terrible economic slump, I recalled in one of his essays Edmund White says the French see us Americans as simple and nice. We’re uncomplicated, no sense of the tragic. Yeah, right. Check out these news stories and photographs of a happy-go-lucky people