March 22, 2024

This March, we are looking at the Segelke Kohlhaus Manufacturing Co, (S&K). In Activity #1 we focused more on S&K’s history and what its products were like. Now in Activity #2, we want to turn our investigation to the people who made both the corporation and the products. In other words, we now want to look at surviving sources through the prism of labor history.

What is Labor History?

As the editors of the scholarly journal Labour: Studies in Working Class History describe it, Labor History is focused on asking and answering questions like: who does the work? under what economic and political terms do they do the work? Labor history also focuses on using available primary sources to piece together what the “world” of people who worked in particular industries might have been like: the physical conditions in the places where they made products and performed services, the social conditions in which they formed bonds with coworkers, organized mutual aid societies and debated unionization, the cultural conditions in which their identities as laborers were shaped by their pride in the objects they made or their alienation from the managerial class.

Labor history overlaps significantly with another kind of history we often explore in History Club: social history. Both approaches seek to recover what is knowable about the everyday lives of people who didn’t have the leisure time and means to produce memoirs or donate documents to archives. So labor history looks for ways to explain what it was like to do particular kinds of work, how people defined the meaning and/or value of the work they did, and how they reacted to the circumstances they did their work in.

How do surviving sources shape how we can study labor history?

While looking for available primary and secondary sources for this month, we quickly discovered that the perspective of the employee’s of S&K are not well represented in the archives. Historically, working class employees rarely created many records, but sometimes little snippets sneak through the classist, racist, sexist, colonialist foundation of early U.S. record keeping. In La Crosse, we’re lucky to have had Howard Fredericks interviewing folks in the 1960s who worked in local early 20th century factories and the surviving UWL Oral History Program collection. But few other sources exist that show working class perspectives in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

One source that allows us to peek into the reality of La Crosse’s largely working class population are newspapers. Newspapers give us information on what was happening in the community, and the way that the media shapes the narrative can speak volumes, if you read the articles with a critical eye. Sometimes newspaper articles don’t give us the worker’s perspective, but report that there was a strike and the terms that were being negotiated between a company and a union. Sometimes a reporter interviewed an employee, which appears on the surface to be a glimpse into their perspective, but is still funneled through the voice, experiences, and biases of a reporter who is not a factory worker.

The Activity

With this understanding of what labor history is and how surviving primary sources may not fully present workers’ perspectives, let’s look at some primary sources written largely during the time that S&K was still operating (1857-1960) and analyze them from the labor perspective. Below, we’ve prepared some questions to consider as you read each source.

One last note: part of labor history also involves considering what else could be happening in the world that impacts someone in their everyday life. For example, during the Great Depression in the 1930s, fewer houses and buildings were constructed—which in turn would have likely impacted S&K’s profit, and in turn could have been the reason employees were laid off. During wartime, important materials like wood, lumber, and metal were rationed, and many U.S. manufactures saw huge profits if they were contracted by the government to produce war materials. Many factory workers before WWII were men, but after WWII this changed. While reading the newspaper sources we’ve assembled for Activity #2, try to consider what contextual events and eras could have shaped the experiences of the workers.

Guiding Questions

• Who wrote the source you are looking at? What might their background be? What biases could they have?
• What would the author’s sources be?
• What is the purpose of the source you are reading? For example, is it a historical overview of the company? Is it an advertisement? A news story alerting the community of an event or milestone?
• In what terms are the workers talked about, if at all? What are some adjectives used to describe them? What language is used to describe the work they do?
• Do you see any examples of the workers being erased from the narrative completely? For example, does the author give the company as an entity credit for work done by individuals?
• Can you think of any contextualizing events to explain any details or language within these newspaper articles?

Sources

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This month’s meeting will be held on March 27, 2024 at 5:30-6:30pm (RSVP here). At our meeting, we will look at photographs of some Segelke Kohlhaus woodwork in houses still standing in La Crosse today, and try to think more about what an S&K employee’s world may have looked like.

April 7, 2023

At the March meeting, our conversation led to La Crosse’s working class history and the experiences of laborers in La Crosse. We began to think about the La Crosse Rubber Mills Co. (later known as LaCrosse Footwear, Inc.), which for over 100 years was one of the community’s largest employers. The Rubber Mills hired the first employees for its factory on La Crosse’s North Side at the turn of the 20th century and closed that factory’s doors in 2001. Today, the company is headquartered in Portland, OR.

In 1915, the La Crosse Rubber Mills Co. created and distributed a booklet to celebrate the company’s 20-year history. The booklet contains photographs showing off the newly-expanded factory, and a small amount of information on the origins of the raw rubber that would become boots and galoshes produced, sold, and worn here in La Crosse. This booklet is made accessible by the UWL Murphy Library Digital Collections.

As you read through pages 3-10, pay special attention to who is credited for cultivating raw rubber: does it specify where these laborers work/live or their names? What about their working conditions?

“THE MANUFACTURE OF RUBBER FOOTWEAR: AN ILLUSTRATED STORY OF RUBBER FROM ITS GROWTH TO THE FINISHED PRODUCT,” WRITTEN BY THE LA CROSSE RUBBER MILLS COMPANY OF LA CROSSE, WIS., PUBLISHED 1915

View booklet here.

One thing you’ll notice as you read through this section, the corporate authors don’t explain much about where the raw rubber they used in their factory came from or how they got it. Page 4 includes two pictures of a rubber plantation in Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), while text on the page references the Amazon. So far, we haven’t found any other references to the source(s) of the raw rubber used by the La Crosse Rubber Mills Co. in any of their other records that still exist. So, we decided to make April’s first activity an investigation of the context for both southeast Asia and Brazilian rubber farmers and plantation workers. This context will come from a book called The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber, by historian John Tully. 

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  Content Warning: racist language and treatment described in the following pages.

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  Content Warning: racist language and treatment described in the following pages.

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We never want History Club to feel like homework, so remember to only read what interests you!

As you read, consider the following:

• Think about this history from the perspective of the people whose labor contributed to the products made by La Crosse Rubber Mills Co. Which people in which parts of the world might need to be included in the story of Rubber Mills’ products? Why?
• To what extent does reading about rubber production and collection in the Amazon and Southeast Asia change how you think about the story of the La Crosse Rubber Mills Co?  How and why?
• Do you think that laborers working in Ceylon or the Amazon are connected to La Crosse for their role in rubber production?

If you’ve been following History Club since the beginning and this activity feels a bit familiar: we did a similar activity two years ago in February 2021.This time around we’re thinking about how to bring the story of the global connections between rubber workers more into focus. No harm in looking at this history again from a new perspective!

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This month’s meeting will be on Wednesday, April 26, 2023 from 5:30-6:30 at the La Crosse Public Library in the Archives Reading Room (800 Main St., La Crosse, WI). RSVP here.

March 4, 2022

Archives Are Not Neutral? What does that mean?

This four-word phrase sums up multiple, intersecting issues:

1. Institutions like archives, museums, historical societies, etc. in the U.S. were established using western practices. This means they are inherently a product of colonialism, as well as an enforcer of colonialism.
2. Using these western practices, repositories typically only contain physical documents and artifacts that were saved and preserved through time. Other, just as meaningful primary source evidence—like Indigenous oral tradition, for example—was never considered a “real” record to be collected by record-keepers throughout history.
3. This makes it pretty evident that record-keepers—whether they were archivists, librarians, archaelogists, or oral historians—have historically had the same biases that we see in the rest of society, including classism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, xenophobia, etc. And this bias has shaped the historical record.
4. If repositories only contain certain kinds of records, then researchers and historians who use archival repositories typically will only tell the stories of that preserved information. There are many stories we cannot tell—but at least we can try to talk about what those stories may be.

This phrase means that our society suffers because of this systemic way in which our records shape our history. If we have limitations in available primary sources, that means that we have limitations in how we can understand and teach history. 

This month, we are going to look at some examples of how this concept shapes the historical record of La Crosse. Below are some primary sources and some context we’ve created that explains what makes them Not Neutral, and how they make the history of our community Not Neutral. Our second activity this March will then look at the UWL Oral History Program collection, and we will take the skills we learn here in Activity #1 and look at how this mindset can be applied to an organization or a collection as a whole.

To do this, here are some questions to be thinking about this month:

• Who created/published these documents, and why?
• What could have been the process for these documents/information to make it into the archives?
• What experiences, stories, and perspectives do we miss out on? 

Example 1 

A few weeks ago, Jenny attended an event about the Tomah Indian Industrial School, the most local-to-La Crosse boarding school that attempted to commit cultural genocide on the area’s Indigenous peoples. We talked about this school in September 2021’s second activity. At the event, Jenny learned the names of the founders of the boarding school, one of which was Reuben Gold Thwaites. 

After the event, Jenny wanted to reread the September activities, to check in if anything should be changed and discovered something very coincidental: one of the sources in Activity 1 was edited and annotated by Reuben Gold Thwaites. How could this be? 

She looked Thwaites up and found that he was a librarian and archivist. Thwaites served as a president for the Wisconsin Historical Society and is credited for many accomplishments. Most notably, perhaps, he is celebrated for publishing the journals of Lewis and Clark, to highlight their journey. But none of the secondary sources recognize that he was also a founder of a boarding school.

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Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Edited and Annotated by Reuben Gold Thwaites. Accessed here: https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/whc/id/7178/rec/12

What does it mean that Reuban Gold Thwaites, co-founder of the Tomah Indian Industrial School, edited and annotated sources that we use today to understand our history? As a librarian and archivist at the state level, how did Thwaites shape our history?

Example 2

One of the ongoing programs at the La Crosse Public Library is called Footsteps of La Crosse. These are walking tours that look at how class, culture, and architecture intertwine on our city streets. Jenny guides some of these tours every May to celebrate Historic Preservation Month. However, these tours typically focus on rich, elite historic figures in La Crosse history—the lumber barons, bank barons, and brewery barons. They focus on the men who owned companies and made their riches off the backs of working-class residents who worked hard, long, dangerous days. In the mid to late 1800s, there were no labor laws to establish 8-hour work days or unions to protect these laborers. These figures in our local history have just as much importance to our cultural heritage as Giddeon Hixon, yet we don’t know their names or consider their homes historic landmarks, do we?

The Footsteps tours also often forget to mention the domestic staff that lived in these large homes, and took care of them so that they are still standing in such good condition today. Domestic staff throughout history can be given credit for these houses to be appreciated as historic landmarks in our community. Yet, they are left out of the narrative. 

When Jenny guides these tours, she tries to encourage people that as they look up at these houses and their intricate architectural details, to consider the gardeners who worked on the landscape around the houses, the valets who took care of the horses (and later cars), the maids who lived in small rooms on the top floors and used back entrances with steep stairs, and the person who had the job to climb up and clean the windows, brackets, and spindles.

In the Archives, we hold many historic photographs of mansions and the prominent families who lived in them. And sometimes, we’re lucky enough to have photos of the staff of the homes. The photos above are all from the La Crosse Public Library Archives & Local History Department photo collection and depict the Easton estate, which was located on the 1300 block of Cass St.

Our Archives Are Not Neutral because record-keepers of the past typically only wanted materials donated to their institutions from prominent families, so that is the foundation of our collections today. This is not to say that these families weren’t important in our history, it’s just that we need to acknowledge how they amassed their wealth and how those details impacted other community members. The fact that we don’t know those details makes this history Not Neutral.

March’s History Club meeting date/time is TBA, but it will be the week of the 28th-31st. Check here for upcoming details.

March 5, 2021

A Banana’s Journey to La Crosse, Part 1

Like last month, we’re going to look at the history of a commodity this March: bananas.

In this first activity, let’s explore bananas in early 20th century La Crosse. How did they travel here? Who brought them here? Where did people buy them? What did they look like?

To get started, let’s begin with the end of the journey (La Crosse) and, in activity 2, we’ll work backwards to the bananas’ origins (Central America).

How did they travel here?

La Crosse’s downtown waterfront district was historically full of warehouses where commodities coming in from the wider world were stored. Turn of the century maps depict one of the primary banana storage facilities and its location within the waterfront district: the John C. Burns Wholesale Fruit House, cold storage located at 112 N. Front St. This is where the bananas were stored.

John C. Burns Wholesale Fruit House in the 1905 City Directory.

When a shipment of bananas arrived by railroad, the Burns warehouse was conveniently located a short distance away.

1906 Sanborn Map.

1898 City Atlas, showing the many railroad lines in the downtown area. The yellow arrow indicates where the Burns Fruit House was.

Who brought them here? Where did people buy them?

John C. Burns was likely La Crosse’s best-known fruit wholesaler in the early 1900s. And it’s pretty clear in many primary sources that his company was most associated with bananas.

In 1980, his granddaughter, Sarah Jane Fellows was interviewed by the UWL Oral History Program. Let’s listen to a short clip from her oral history, which describes her grandfather’s banana storage facility and how the bananas made their way to La Crosse. You can listen and read her story about her grandfather’s banana warehouse here: http://www.hearherelacrosse.org/stories/sarah-fellows-2/

One primary source that Jenny and Tiffany love from the Archives is this caricature of John C. Burns, which is from a small booklet called “The Spirit of Rotary.” This booklet contains about 15-20 of these humorous depictions.

What did the bananas look like?

Below is a small handful of photographs showing the warehouse that Sarah Jane Fellows describes on Front St. as well as some of the employees. Within these photos, you get a glimpse of large banana bunches.

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In the second activity, we will have a small handful of options for secondary readings to further investigate the contexts shaping banana production and consumption in the first half of the 1900s.

Remember to register for the meeting on Sunday, March 28, 2021, at 2pm.

February 19, 2021

Now that we have gathered some general knowledge on rubber history (from activity #1), let’s look at our own community’s connection to the production of rubber goods. Though La Crosse cannot be considered a rubber capital in the same way as Akron or Manchester, one of the historically top employers in the city was the La Crosse Rubber Mills (later known as LaCrosse Footwear, Inc.). The Rubber Mills started at the turn of the 20th century and closed its La Crosse doors in 2001. Today, the company is headquarters in Portland, OR.

To get a sense of rubber workers’ experiences in La Crosse, this activity shares an oral history and promotional brochure. Each of these primary sources will illustrate the Rubber Mills in the 1910s. We will get to hear about working conditions from Herman Tietz, an employee, and we will get to see how the corporation itself presented rubber production to outside eyes.

As you explore, consider the following things that stood out to Tiffany and Jenny:

• Did you hear or see any human costs of rubber production? Where was someone’s health or well-being most impacted?
• In what ways would you say La Crosse’s relationship to rubber production is similar or different to Akron?

After you digest these primary sources, ask yourself, what does labor history mean to you?

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Primary Source #1:

Herman Tietz Oral History Audio

Transcript

Howard Fredricks (interviewer): Was the Rubber Mills there in 1903?

Herman Tietz (Rubber Mills employee): It was just an old shack—just a red shack. The first thing they had—they started with, uh, raincoats! And then they, uh, started making shoes.

Fredricks: And was Funk in charge at that time? In the beginning?

Tietz: Yeah, I believe Funk—I think Old Funk was the first one.

Fredricks: And that was located where it is now?

Tietz: Right now, yep. A one-story shack. And they made shoes in there.

Fredricks: Rubber shoes?

Tietz: Yep. I worked there for a while. I worked there in 1907, I believe—1908 I worked there. 

Fredricks: What did you do?

Tietz: Made shoes. We had to work two weeks for nothing. They’re called strikers. If you went in and started making shoes, why, you worked with another fellow and you learned how to do it, you know. You worked for two weeks and you didn’t get paid until you learned. Then they would give you twenty-four pairs of tennis shoes to make or twelve pair four-buckle overshoes. You would have to lay your lining and put cement on them the night before so it would be dry the next morning and have that laid out and then your insoles and ___ all the different things. And you had to get your lathes and you put your lining over and get your insole in and then put it over and then put your right sole on and your counter in the back and then your vamp and your uppers and then your foxing and then your, uh, outsole. You had to put all that on and roll it down and stitch it. 

Fredricks: You would make the shoe from scratch then?

Tietz: From scratch, yes. Yeah.

Fredricks: And you were supposed to make how many?

Tietz: Well, uh, when you started out, well, you just made about twelve pair. I made as high as thirty pair of overshoes—

Fredricks: In one day?

Tietz: In one day. And if you made eighteen dollars a week, boy I’ll tell ya what, that was a lot. The guys used to get sore, you know, when you made that much money.

Fredricks: Who would make…?

Tietz: The other guys who didn’t make that many shoes, you know—

Fredricks: Oh, you were paid by the piece?

Tietz: Sure, every piece.

Fredricks: How much?

Tietz: Well, I forget now just exactly how much we got paid per the piece but I remember that, uh, one day—one week I got eighteen dollars and the other guys get thirteen and fifteen dollars and, boy, they didn’t like that at all, you know. My brother, he was working in the office there, and he was making out the list for making shoes and then they always used to say that he was favoring me, you know. And that there is why he always used to make it tougher for me because he didn’t want that said. He would give me the big sizes and the real small sizes—the real small sizes are just as hard to make as the big sizes. The ones in between, why, you could handle them a bit faster.

Fredricks: Was each finished product inspected?

Tietz: Yes, after it was cured, you know, they’d take them and cure them. And you had a stamp and you’d stamp them–

Fredricks: What do you mean, ‘cured’?

Tietz: Cured. Put through the, uh, heat!

Fredricks: You make—you make the shoe…?

Tietz: Yeah, and they put ‘em—they’d put them into the ov—like, an oven, you know, and cure ‘em! Uh, in the morning, they’d open—open up and that stuff would come in there and, boy, you’d get drunk from that—uh, you know, a lot of—you’d get sick! You’d definitely get sick and definitely get drunk from breathing that. It wasn’t ventilated, you know. Now they got it all—they got it different. It was tough. They had it all—it was just blue in there! And if it was cold, you know, you couldn’t open a window or anything of that kind because if you open a window, the shoes—it would get frost, you know, they would dry out too fast and it wouldn’t stick.

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Primary Source #2:

“The Manufacture of Rubber Footwear: An Illustrated Story of Rubber From its Growth to the Finished Product,” Written by the La Crosse Rubber Mills Company of La Crosse, Wis., published 1915.

Note: we are not asking you to thoroughly read through this booklet; just glance through it, look at the photos, and read areas that strike your interest.

View booklet here.

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To attend the February History Club meeting on February 28th, 2021 at 2pm, register here (registering just means that we can send you the Zoom credentials).

February 5, 2021

This month, we want to introduce one of our favorite pathways into studying history: Labor History. The backstory begins 6 years ago, when Jenny took her first class with Tiffany. It was a class about commodities in world history. Tiffany taught the class focusing on four commodities: sugar, coffee, rubber, and bananas. This class impacted Jenny so much that she even got a tattoo in its honor. The primary and secondary sources in that class taught her 1) that she values learning history from a perspective that focuses on the lives of the workers (aka laborers) who built our world as we know it, and 2) that rubber has a surprisingly large role in our everyday lives, as well as the millions of people who were historically exploited for the production of rubber.

When studying labor history, Tiffany and Jenny typically like to focus on two things: workers’ experiences and their working conditions. This month, we will try and present resources that cover both of these aspects. First, we will read two short chapters from a book called The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber, by John Tully, which will give us an idea of the experiences and conditions for rubber laborers in two rubber capitals: Akron, Ohio and Manchester, England. The second activity will have us look at some primary sources from La Crosse to connect our community to this wider, global history of the production of rubber goods.

Chapter 3 & 9 of Devil’s Milk are together about 30 pages of reading. We included the preface of the book, so you can read John Tully’s small explanation of what inspired his research. It’s good to remember that historians too have biases and Tully explains his in his preface.

Download the pdf here:

Tully-John_Devil’s-MilkDownload

As you read, consider the following ideas that stood out most to Tiffany and Jenny:

• Did you notice any human costs of rubber production? Where was someone’s health or well-being most impacted?
• How was Akron environmentally, economically, and even culturally transformed by rubber production?

Register for February’s meeting on Sunday, 2/28 here.

October 16, 2020

In 1960, as planning was underway for the first Oktoberfest celebration, supporters often referenced a community festival from the 1920s: the Winter Carnival.  Oktoberfest planners saw themselves restoring the kind of community festival that they thought the Winter Carnival had once been. But what exactly was the Winter Carnival?

According to a calendar of events published in January 1922 (below), the Winter Carnival was a family-friendly event that celebrated La Crosse sports and industry. At the time, speed skating and skiing were part of the community’s identity; winter and the activities it brought were something to celebrate in La Crosse culture. As was the city’s identity as a factory town. To showcase this, the Winter Carnival Grand Parade starred “marching clubs,” which were groups of employees sponsored by their employers.

La Crosse Tribune, January 26, 1922, page 1.

However, one significant difference between Oktoberfest and the Winter Carnival was the selling and consumption of alcohol. Both the 1921 and 1922 Winter Carnivals took place during Prohibition (1920-1933), which to be sure played a huge role in officially eliminating alcohol from the Winter Carnivals (though there was likely still consumption of alcohol in some form).

Looking back at the primary sources, we can now see with clarity just how much the Winter Carnival meant to La Crosse’s working-class residents. In 1921, La Crosse Mayor Arthur Bentley released a proclamation that the Winter Carnival was a city holiday and called for businesses to give their employees a half-day off. At a time when working-class employees suffered long hours and minimal, if any, benefits, a half-day was something to cherish. This was even a time before companies like the La Crosse Rubber Mills had implemented Taylorism on their factory floors (the ideology that factories and industrial labor are more productive with repetitive, assembly-line practices). When Winter Carnival was celebrated, shoe makers at the Rubber Mills still found pride in their expert craftsmanship. And they felt pride in their company, putting everything they had into their Winter Carnival float (pictured below).

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A Souvenir booklet from the 1922 Winter Carnival showcases parade floats and marching clubs celebrating local businesses and the labor force of La Crosse. Though many workers got their half-day off, they used it preparing themselves to walk in the community parade as part of marching clubs for their employers. For the parade, the marching clubs even competed for a “Best Marching Club” award by designing their own costumes and gimmicks to represent their employers.

This week, we are asking you to help us make sense of what exactly the Winter Carnival meant to community members at the time. We’ve written some guiding questions to help you as you’re looking at the photos listed in the Souvenir booklet (link is below).

• Are there any business names that you’ve heard before? 
• Do you recognize any of the buildings or streets in the background? 
• How does the Winter Carnival remind you of Oktoberfest? 
• In the booklet, there are white employees of the La Crosse Tribune engaging in redface and dressing in Native American stereotypes. What is the significance of the fact that the only group participating in a racist gimmick for their marching club was the La Crosse Tribune staff–the very people who controlled the town’s news and media. What does this say about the town’s news in the 1920s?

[click image to view full booklet]

CONTENT WARNING FOR VIEWING BOOKLET

Within this booklet, there are white people engaging in redface and dressing in Native American stereotypes. The people photographed were employed by and represented the La Crosse Tribune.

Performative, mimicry acts like redface, blackface, brownface, as well as dressing like people experiencing homelessness, sex-workers, and self-described hobos was (and still is) a common gimmick for white people creating costumes.

Racial parodies show up in many early 20th century photographs of working-class white people. Historian Dale Cockrell explains that “Poor and working-class whites who felt ‘squeezed politically, economically, and socially from the top, but also from the bottom, invented minstrelsy’ as a way of expressing the oppression that marked being members of the majority, but outside of the white norm.” In other words, they created caricatures of other groups to distance themselves from people who they deemed “below” themselves. This behavior, however, causes real harm to people who claim the identities that are caricatured, and they are people who actually existed (and still exist) within our community.

Though these images portray hateful and racist behaviors, it is important for us to realize that they exist and the deeper implications within them. To ignore them would be whitewashing our cultural heritage and community history.

October’s meeting will be on Sunday, October 25 at 2pm. Register here.

September 18, 2020

For September’s second History Club activity, we are going to continue our theme of searching for evidence of our city’s layered history through traces.

This time, we invite you to flip through a architecture history tour of the Cass & 10th Street neighborhood, which is presented as a scavenger hunt to introduce you to architecture features.  The introduction on pages 1-2 of the tour will help guide you through the questions below.

As you flip/scroll through the pages, what clues—or traces—are you noticing from past residents that exist in our built environment? What role do you think architecture has in understanding the history of our community? Whose stories do we focus on when we typically learn about architecture? Whose stories are we missing in that narrative? Whose story are you interested in?

Architecture for Beginners: 10th & CassDownload

You can do as little or as much of this tour as you like. You can go walking out on the street, or read it from your car, or comfortably at home—whatever you prefer. If you go walk outside, we ask that you please consider wearing a mask.

Discuss your findings and thoughts with Jenny and Tiffany on Sunday, September 27.

Register for September meeting here.