Would it surprise you to learn that in rural Wisconsin, at the end of the 19th century, there was poverty, failure, vandalism, arson, domestic violence, disease, depression, alcoholism, insanity, suicide, and murder? Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip (1973, reissued 2000) is built on the assumption that it will. The book consists largely of clippings from the Badger State Banner, of Black River Falls, Jackson County, WI, and images by Charles Van Schaick, a local commercial photographer. After some 200 pages of grim citation, Lesy steps in to comment directly:
Pause now. Draw back from it. There will be time again to experience and remember. For a minute, wait, and then set your mind to consider a different set of circumstances….
The book certainly made a strong impression on me when I saw it as a boy. Reading it now, I have to wonder what the fuss was. The people in the pictures look…pretty much OK. You can see that they lived tough lives (there are some awesome farmer’s tans), but there are hardly any whose faces I now find scary, not even the tendentiously blurred ones Lesy enlarged from group photos. Real people can in fact look pretty strange — take a good look at your fellow passengers on the bus, or in the mirror (or, not to put too fine a point on it, at Lesy today). And in the 1890s, many of us were still new to having our pictures taken. (The nakedness of Julia Margaret Cameron‘s portraits is even stranger, though from a different place and a more privileged social world.)
Similarly, I’m unconvinced that the objective difficulties in Jackson County at that time were historically unusual. (There was an economic depression, certainly, but that was national.) Lesy tries to argue statistically that the area was worse off than its neighbors, considering the suicide rate, economic growth, etc., but his figures are inconclusive. (The suicide rates he cites, for example, are close to that for the US today.) Warren Susman, the Rutgers historian who introduces the book (he was Lesy’s thesis advisor) writes that “Many historians have become convinced that there was a major crisis in American life during the 1890s; some have gone so far as to call it a ‘psychic crisis’…”, but does not explain or offer citations.
The credibility of Lesy’s vision of rural hell is not strengthened by his handling of the text. What he excerpts from the newspaper is principally police-blotter items, briefly recounting murders, deaths, the commitment of the insane to the Mendota asylum, etc. Beyond that, he uses no other primary or secondary sources (until the epilogue). Instead, he interpolates invented material — passages attributed to a “Town Gossip” and a “Local Historian”, and excerpts from fiction (Hamlin Garland, Glenway Westcott, and apparently Lesy himself).
What bothers me most about the book now is its treatment of Van Schaick, the photographer. First, the book’s atmosphere of doom severely constrains one’s reading of the photos — it overwhelms the normal liveliness and humanity of such pictures as the young couple laughing, the woman bathing a baby; the handsome young man in a turtleneck, and the men clowning in an office. (OK, I’ll relent — to read that they’re doctors, clowning with electrical shock equipment, makes that last one legitimately ghoulish.) But worse, I think, is Lesy’s strange uncharity toward the man who supplied the meat of the book. In the introduction, Lesy dismisses him as merely conventional, and in the text he gives an anecdote (unsourced, and presumably made up) of Van Schaick’s poor hygiene in old age.
Thirty years after, Lesy gave an interview to Identity Theory, which is quite a bit more gracious and humane. Now he gives Schaick his due, making an apt comparison to August Sander — clearly a stronger image-maker, but likewise an example of how meaning and value in documentary photography are built by serial accumulation. So if I’m ungracious to Lesy now, perhaps I should reflect that my equanimity in the face of the images he assembled is partly owed to the shock they gave, to me and many others, back in the day.
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Photos from the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Death Trip Flickr set, used under a Creative Commons license. See also the large Charles Van Schaick archive at the WHS’s own site.
[Updated with some minor corrections.]
The Edge of the American West 
17 comments
October 21, 2008 at 5:22 am
FBR
Okay, I’ll bite. Is the point here that the book is irrelevant, because we shouldn’t be surprised to find that turn-of-the-century rural Wisconsin was home to “poverty, failure, vandalism, arson, domestic violence, disease, depression, alcoholism, insanity, suicide, and murder”, as suggested by the first paragraph in this post? Or is the point here that life in turn-of-the-century rural Wisconsin was not, in fact, as depicted in the book, and you can tell this by the way the young man in the turtleneck is so nicely dressed? Or is the point just that Michael Lesy is a big fat jerk? Forgive me if I’ve lost track of the argument here.
October 21, 2008 at 5:44 am
The Modesto Kid
Or is the point here more on the order of “Wow look! Interesting photos!” That is what I take away from the post. Glad to have them pointed out to me. (Speaking of Wisconsin death trips, I’ve been watching Stroszek a lot in recent weeks — it features most of “poverty, failure, vandalism, arson, domestic violence, disease, depression, alcoholism, insanity, suicide, and murder” in rural Wisconsin of 1976.
October 21, 2008 at 5:53 am
Ben Alpers
Wisconsin Death Trip is more a product of the turn of the 1970s than of the 1890s. It’s an important document of the “old, weird America” (in Greil Marcus’s famous phrase) that Dylan and the Band explored (invented?) in the Basement Tape sessions about five years earlier, and that is wonderfully evoked in the Billy the Kid segments of Todd Haynes’s recent Dylanological film I’m Not There. This partially imaginary place haunted at least a significant corner of U.S. culture during the late 1960s and early 1970s. I agree that as an assessment of its primary materials, Lesy’s book is lacking. But as a document of its own time, Wisconsin Death Trip may only grow more essential.
October 21, 2008 at 6:14 am
Vance
Thanks, Ben, for filling in what I failed to. FBR, you probably don’t remember a time when there was a copy of this book in every used bookstore in the country. (Back when there were used bookstores.) The term “cult classic” is quite appropriate.
Lesy’s writing in WDT is hollow and pretentious, and he sells his source material short…but in the later interview, I think he comes off well. I’m curious now to see his more recent books.
October 21, 2008 at 9:45 am
The Modesto Kid
Lesy’s book was apparently made into a movie in 1999.
October 21, 2008 at 12:03 pm
jmsdonaldson
I was forced to read this in a grad seminar about the construction of the narrative, and I’ve yet to forgive the professor that assigned it. WDT is quite possibly one of the worst books I have ever encountered.
October 21, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Matt L.
Vance, I think you are being a bit hard on Lesy and WDT. I read it for the methods section of my dissertation, and I’ll agree the book is problematic. But its also not any more pretentious than most books written about ‘Visual Culture’ or documentary photography since the 1970s. He is also not the only one to ‘sell his source material short.’ Sure, its a period piece and a lousy narrative, but its also one of those most rare objects in the annals of historical research: a null result.
The most instructive part of the book is the preface by Warren Susman. I think he described WDT as a successful failure. It tried to capture the historical experience of the 1890s in a unique way using unusual source materials, and came up short. Lesy tried and failed to invent a new methodology for history. It seems to me that this failure is at least as instructive as a success.
October 21, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Vance
Where Lesy achieved a null result, I think, was in the attempt to use subjective assessments of photographs as evidence for a historical argument about mood or tone or culture. I think, having seen this, most people would say he had made the best possible shot and not succeeded. But his failure to show that that place and time were objectively worse than others, for example, shouldn’t be taken to mean such an argument is impossible in principle.
Susman’s preface is cautiously hedged praise: “Where Lesy has not succeeded, his relative failure is the consequence of his daring and his very daring ought to add a dimension to historical understanding.” He certainly accepts that Lesy has demonstrated something about the period.
All that said, no doubt I am being too harsh. I had remembered this book as unbearably ominous, from my encounters with it at the home of my hippie cousins in the ’70s; that impression was reinforced by browsing another of his books (possibly The Forbidden Zone?); so it was with real disappointment that I found myself unchilled this time.
October 21, 2008 at 2:57 pm
andrew
and excerpts from fiction (Hamlin Garland
Garland’s stories in Main-Travelled Roads (except, in my opinion, the first one) are pretty good. I was pleasantly surprised.
October 21, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Vance
Thanks, Andrew, I’ll check that out.
The tautologous title, by the way, is from the inscription on this presentation photo of an opera singer. It turns out to be from Abraham Cowley, the original Stuffed Owl. The singer was born Pauline Elsässer (“Alsatian”) in Germany, and took the stage name L’Allemand (“German”)…and died in the Mendota asylum.
October 21, 2008 at 3:56 pm
andrew
The copy I had – an old Rinehart paperback, I think, from a 50 cent rack, which fell apart as I read it – included a long introduction on Garland’s career and life by someone who thought the original and only the original versions of the stories were worth reading (and so those were the versions in that edition). I guess Garland later went back and changed some of the stories – apparently, not for the better.
October 21, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Jason B
My only knowledge of this subject comes from Professor Wayne Static et al.
October 22, 2008 at 5:20 am
Michael Lesy
Gentlemen: Thanks for your comments. Perhaps you might also be interested in the essay(‘Visual Literacy”) I contributed to the June,2007 issue (Vol. 94,#1) of the Journal of American History. I believe you’ll be able to view it as a PDF at: http://www.indiana.edu/jah/issues/941.shtml.
Best wishes-
M.Lesy
October 22, 2008 at 5:44 am
Vance
Thanks for the comment! I hope it’s clear that though this is a group blog, I’m speaking for myself, certainly not for any of the real historians on the masthead.
Your link doesn’t work for me, but this one does.
October 22, 2008 at 9:09 am
JPool
I’ve seen the film. It had gorgeous cinematography, but was … underwhelming. Maybe it’s because I’m from the upper midwest, but the notion that occassionally people kill themselves or engage in compulsive behavior seems unsurprizing. What was weird about that? Is this part of a larger cultural whatzit in which Americans were fascinated that midwestererns could be capable of violence and derangement (In Cold Blood, Ed Gein and such)?
October 22, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Mark Lioi
I’ve pulled this one down repeatedly over the years. As far as I’m concerned, WDT should be approached as a work of art. And it’s a very good one — not a sweeping survey of a time and place but a careful selection of materials from same, arranged to deliver visual and emotional impact, and provoke thought. Like a camera lens, it manipulates the beholder’s senses by providing an extremely selective view and leaving much outside the frame, but the majority of individual elements themselves are each rooted very much in some person’s actual experience. The material in the first and last several pages, to me, serves more to justify the work’s purpose as a thesis than as a serious work of history.
I’m personally grateful that WDT inspired me to explore further in several directions, e.g. the economic and social turmoil of the 1890s, the work of early commercial photographers, and our neglected legacy of great Midwestern American literature. Cheers!
October 22, 2008 at 9:05 pm
Vance
Thanks for the comment, Mark. Hope you’ll stick with us!
The article Prof. Lesy points us to is interesting (though somewhat truncated). What’s directly relevant to the discussion here is its treatment of the problem of subjectivity in doing history with archival photos. He makes the practical suggestion that one take a photography workshop, to gain practice in looking at and discussing photos. I can well believe this would improve one’s ability and confidence in selecting and ordering pictures. But he goes further:
I’m sure it seems that way, and I’m sure that certitude is essential for getting through an archive of tens of thousands of photos (his example is Angelo Rizzuto, a triumph of Lesy’s own archive work). But that doesn’t mean it’s literally true. There’s a reason the word “workshop” is pejorative before “poetry” and “fiction” — that narrowing of meaning and aesthetic freedom he describes is part learning, part groupthink.