Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy Search Amazon for other books by or about Michael Lesy. Rating: Reviewed by: John L. Hoh, Jr.

Debates rage today about the state of society. Many feel that people and situations are getting worse by the day. Viewing the evening news we hear about drive-by shootings, children brandishing guns, increasing occurrences of domestic abuse.

Often our nostalgic memories long for a simpler day when neighbors helped each, everyone knew everyone else in town, families and neighborhoods were at peace, and people respected each other. There were no drugs, no gangs, and no domestic squabbles.

Into this arena comes Michael Lesy's book, Wisconsin Death Trip. This book soon shatters those myths of previous generations living in peaceful, idyllic tranquility.

First, let me express my wonder at those who view the past with rose colored glasses and see a better time. The average life expectancy was much shorter; a part of our past as a nation is a past filled with the bloodshed wrought by gangsters, robbers, and hoodlums prowling our city streets and roaming the ranges; working conditions left much to be desired; and race relations with Native Americans were rather tumultuous.

In his introduction, Michael writes:
"The pictures you are about to see are of people who were once actually alive. The excerpts you're about to read recounts events these people, or people like them, once experienced. None of these accounts are fictitious. Neither the pictures nor the events were, when they were made or experienced, considered to unique, extraordinary, or sensational." (Introduction, page 1.)

If these events were not considered "unique, extraordinary, or sensational," then the innocence of an earlier age is lost when you read of infant deaths, murders, insanity, jealousy, rage, and "obscene mail." Many suicides are reported; numerous are the accounts of poisoning or attempted poisoning using "paris green" (paris green is an insecticide); reports of mixed marriages between whites and "coloreds" (this being against the law at the turn of the century); arsons set; and people committed for insanity, many classified as "insane over religion."

The news accounts were taken from a newspaper published by Frank and George Cooper, a father and son editorial dynasty in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, their newspaper called the Badger State Banner. The photos were taken by Mr. Charley Van Schaick, a photographer in Black River Falls who "used plates from St. Louis that permitted half-second exposures, [so] he could take pictures of anything whenever the sun was out just so long as it didn't move any faster than a slow walk." There were 30,000 plates in the Van Schaick collection of which 200 were chosen for publication in Wisconsin Death Trip.The news accounts of the Coopers and Van Schaick's photos are balanced by the "clinical sterility and disavowal of a medical records keeper at the state madhouse." Lesy balances the distant and frigid accounts with two mythical characters he inserts: a local historian and a town gossip.

Wisconsin Death Trip was Michael Lesy's Ph.D. thesis (dissertation). He was inspired when he saw the Van Schaick photographs that Paul Vanderbilt, of the Wisconsin State Historical Society, had found and of which he selected 3,000 for display. But fear not, for Wisconsin Death Trip does not read like a tome from academia. In fact, the publisher eschews page numbers, but it is the type of book that one might consider meandering from page to page, year to year. One can find interesting news nuggets on every page, and these news clips produce a tapestry of life from 1885 to 1899, when this nation experienced a Depression. It was a time when Mr. Lesy felt our nation experienced a profound cultural shift from a rural society to an urban, industrialized society; some may well argue that there are other events and eras that had as much if not a more profound impact, such as the Civil War; the 1929, or "Great," Depression; Vietnam and the 1960's; or even Watergate. But that is a debate that historians inevitably will engage in.

The Introduction is a must read as Michael Lesy sets up his hypothesis and explains the characters that will come "on stage" in the following pages. The Conclusion must also be savored after reading the various accounts, as Mr. Lesy begins:
"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: consider those scholars and social philosophers who never knew that Anna Myinek had burned her employer's barn or that Ada Arlington had shot her lover, but who nevertheless understood that something strange and extraordinary was happening in the middle of the continent at nearly the same instant that they sat in their studies, surrounded by their books. Such men did their best to understand what it meant, and in the process they tried to predict that future in which we are now enmeshed." Lesy then continues in his conclusion to illustrate the debates that were circulating in the field of sociology as to the origins of crime and degenerate behavior. In reading these hypotheses, it is hard to believe that educated men devised, debated, and believed these debates. But these debates serve as the bedrock of present day sociological debates.

There is no moralizing in these pages, no choosing who was right or who was wrong. Mr. Lesy presents his arguments and lets the reader decide for himself or herself what society is and what people are.

On a final note, this book has become something of a conversation starter. To many of my generation (post-World War II), it is an interesting look into the past and the lives lived by those that lived before us. Those of my grandmother's generation tended to have vivid memories of similar events that they remember from their youth. Once the initial revulsion of the macabre title wears off and curiosity takes over, the book becomes a conversation piece and bridges generations while teaching about life at the end of the 19th century.