Wisconsin Stories is a partnership
of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin
and Wisconsin Public Television.
Wisconsin's early settlers came here to find work.
And they found it.
With incredible labor and astonishing speed
they transformed a wilderness
and created a modern economy.
On the farms, and in the forests,
in the factories, and in their homes,
Wisconsin's people work dawn to dusk
taking on the tremendous task of building a state.
- Bob Nesbitt talks about shoveling coal off the ships
and they take three or four men
and you would shovel a hundred tons of coal in six hours,
a level of effort that leaves one speechless.
- Wisconsin's workers weathered booms and busts,
wage labor struggles that tore whole communities apart
and adapted huge changes in the economy.
With strength, courage and tremendous endurance.
They put in the long hours,
raised families, informed communities,
made the farms and developed industries,
building the state we call Wisconsin.
Major funding for Wisconsin Stories was provided by:
AT&T, providing business and residential
long distance service throughout Wisconsin;
S.C. Johnson Wax, a Wisconsin manufacturer
of home cleaning and home storage products;
the Credit Unions of Wisconsin,
serving the financial needs
of two million Wisconsinites and their families;
and the Wisconsin Sesquicentennial Commission,
celebrating 150 years of Wisconsin statehood.
Funding also provided by:
Firstar Corporation;
Harley-Davidson, Incorporated;
Marshall and Illsley Corporation;
The Outdoor Advertising Association;
The Philip Morris Companies;
W.H. Brady Company;
Weber-Stephen Products Company;
and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce.
And now, Wisconsin Stories.
Early settlers in Wisconsin work to their own rhythms
and to the rhythms of the natural world.
Bound to no master, they relied on muscle power,
their own and their animals.
And on the bonds of family and neighbors
nothing moved faster than a horse.
- If the immigrant has acquired an old improved farm,
it will not be difficult to operate it.
If however, he is bought wild woodland
out of which to make a farm
that will indeed be hard labor
and requires strenuous exertion and grim endurance,
as I have found through personal experience.
As soon as a certain area of woods has cut down,
the brush that has been piled up is first burned off,
then the farmer obtains the assistance of several strongman
and one or two yokes of strong oxen.
The oxen dragged the logs together
and the men roll them in piles, after which they're burned.
Often as many as twenty or thirty acres
are in flames at the same time,
which gives to the night a peculiarly brilliant appearance,
and seen from a farm is not unlike a military camp.
For such first breaking of the land only oxen are used,
for horses are too fast and would soon destroy
both harness and plow.
One can readily imagine however what pains and labor
it cost to break up such new land
because of the many stumps and roots,
which aside from the oak, do not run deep
but live very near the surface.
Observing it, one can hardly tell
whether the farmer is more to be pitied
or his poor cattle: [Christian Trogit Ficker].
- Basically all members of the family
would be involved in developing a pioneer farm,
even children as early as, say, six years old.
There were certain things that they could do to help
and everybody contributed.
And they were literally Jacks and Jills of all trades.
- On a farm outside of Kenosha,
Carolyn Davison kept sheep, spun wool and dyed and knitted it.
She made all of the family's clothing,
then made soap out of lye and ashes,
collected rainwater in barrels and boiled it to wash them.
She kept a fire in the stove, picked and dried apples,
and made pork sausage in the fall.
When the wheat threshing crew arrived,
Carolyn, and a hired woman,
prepared hams, pork and beans, baked bread, rows of apple pies,
and dozens of doughnuts.
For cash she collected eggs, raised chickens,
and churned butter, and over 14 years,
Carolyn Davison gave birth to seven children.
In southwest Wisconsin,
miners carved out a living by digging the lead ore
out of the ground, an enterprise that saw
Fox and the Ho-Chunk Indians had already begun.
Miners established settlements on Indian land
in Dodgeville, Mineral Point and Platteville,
as well as Hardscrabble, New Diggings and Gracchus Grove.
Miners ship millions of pounds of lead
south down the Mississippi,
but large ox drawn wagons called prairie schooners
also hauled lead overland to the trading center
of Milwaukee for shipment east.
- When I first set foot on the soil some 30 years ago,
I little thought I should behold such a sight
it now presents itself.
Here we behold a city of 12,000 inhabitants,
when eleven years since the soil was unbroken: [Solomon Juneau].
- One of the messages about Wisconsin development: it was so rapid.
Maybe thirty thousand people lived here in 1840.
By 1850, there are 300,000.
- In Milwaukee and other Wisconsin towns,
shoemakers, and other craftsman, tailors, blacksmiths,
wagon makers, Coopers, and woodworkers,
all found steady demand for their work.
- So that it's, it's boom times.
I mean, this is a classic frontier boom
mainly because of the tremendous demand for wheat.
- Raising wheat for cash
swept the new state of Wisconsin like wildfire,
fed by high demand and high prices.
It was said that a grain farmer from biblical times
would have felt at home on a Wisconsin wheat farm
harvesting by hand with a scythe and a cradle.
Flailing the grain to separate it
was a slow and back-breaking process.
- In those early days, long before
the great labor-saving machines came to our help,
almost everything connected with wheat raising
abounded in trying work, and it often seemed to me
that our fierce, however industrious way,
of getting the green from the ground
was too closely connected with grave digging: [John Muir].
- In 1842, J.I. Case arrived in Wisconsin
with six horse-powered threshing machines.
Threshers revolutionized the processing of wheat.
Farmers could now thresh as much grain in an hour
as they could flail by hand in a day.
Case began to build threshers in a small shop in Racine
and a new industry was born.
He soon put up his own factory
and was building a hundred machines a year.
By 1849, wheat growing was booming
and new settlers harvested four million bushels.
Every Wisconsin stream soon powered a mill,
and milling wheat into flour
had become the leading industry in the state.
In the 1850s, new immigrants and farmers began the work
of building the first railroads out of Milwaukee.
With each new mile of track, more bushels of wheat flowed
into Milwaukee's warehouses for shipment east.
And by 1862, Milwaukee overtook Chicago
to become the greatest wheat shipping port in the world.
After the Civil War, the value of Milwaukee's industries:
meatpacking, leather tanning, iron and steel working,
and brewing, increased rapidly each decade.
The work of skilled crafts workers
like the barrel-making coopers
began to give way to mass production.
The craft shop, with a few employees, began to die out
and plants began employing workers by the hundreds.
At the biggest plant, the rolling mills in Bayview,
a thousand workers produced iron rails
for the expanding railroads to the west.
The huge plant marked Milwaukee's turn from commerce,
as the foundation of its economy,
to manufacturing.
As Milwaukee joined the national industrial economy,
workers found themselves caught up in
the harsh working conditions that existed
throughout the country.
- In the late '70s and '80s,
the conditions of the workers were very severe.
It is said that as many people died in industrial accidents
between the end of the Civil War
and the beginning of the century,
were killed in the Civil War.
That's speaking in the terms of maybe 600,000 people.
In addition, many got injured.
Now the workers at that time
worked 10 to 12 hours a day
and then had a walk maybe an hour each way
to get to and from their particular work,
so they almost had no time at home.
Work six days a week at least,
sometimes a half a day and Sunday
with relatively low wages.
Then if they got injured, there was no protections with them.
If you got hurt on the job that was too bad for you,
and too bad for your wife and your children.
It was on that basis that the labor movement started,
largely influenced by German immigrants
who had the experience of organizing in Germany,
to bring those ideas over of a shorter workday,
workers vacation, workers benefits, and so on.
In the spring of 1886, thousands of Milwaukee workers,
fed up with working 10 or more hours a day,
join the Knights of Labor
and prepare to take part in a national strike
for an eight-hour day.
And they wanted a general strike
to close down all the manufacturers
on the 1st of May, Mayday.
In two hundred workshops and factories
workers made the demand for the eight-hour day.
Most of the owners refused precipitating a wave of strikes.
- By the morning of May 3rd,
you had about 15,000 workers off the job
and that was roughly half Milwaukee's workforce
at the time, so the city was literally shut down.
Nothing was moving
and the only major employers who were still left
became the targets of a group of strikers
who were determined that this would be,
not just a general strike, but a universal strike in Milwaukee.
400 Polish workers marched up the railroad tracks
of the Menomonee Valley and stormed through
the Chicago Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad shops.
This was a shop complex that employed
roughly 2,000 workers at the time
and they made and repaired all the rolling stock
and the locomotives for one of the major American rail systems.
So by a combination of persuasion and intimidation,
the marchers prevailed and this plant
became one of those that shut down completely.
- Alexandra Mitchell, who was one of the truly great
entrepreneurs in Milwaukee had had a shop closed down,
his railroad car shop closed down
because of the general strike.
And he called the governor
and arranged for the governor to come over,
free of course, on his railroad,
and put him up in the Plankinton Hotel,
because he was concerned about what was going on.
And the governor, being a former Civil War officer
and holding the rank of general after the war,
was quite prepared to send the troops.
And so the state militia was positioned there.
Governor Rusk ordered 31,000 rounds
of ball cartridge ammunition sent to Milwaukee
and placed several companies of the National Guard on alert.
On May 5th 1,500 strikers
gathered at St. Stanislaus Church
and marched toward the Bayview Rolling Mills
carrying the flag of the eight-hour movement.
The National Guard was now stationed
inside of plant gates around the city.
As the crowd approached the Bayview Mills,
Major George P. Traumer telephone governor Rusk
to report that the mob was approaching.
- And when the militia was called out on May 4th,
they were stationed inside the plant gates.
And it was on that rise
around where the cottonwood tree stands today
where they were standing in the morning of May 5th.
And from that rise, they had a sweeping view
of both the mill proper, that whole complex
of factory buildings, and more especially.
They had a clear view of Bay Street just for that.
Police cars coming out of Lincoln Avenue onto Bay Street
is the intersection where the marchers stood.
And from here, that's a distance of at least two hundred yards
and might even estimate more.
Major Traumer signaled the crowd to stop.
Now this was before bull horns, before public address systems,
and the crowd at that point was probably 1,500 strong
and the chances that they heard or even saw him are fairly slim.
The soldiers had been instructed to use deadly force.
There was one of the militia companies' commanders
who said pick out your man and kill him.
(Repeated gunshots)
- A schoolboy following the crowd fell dead on his books.
A half mile away, a 69-year-old man
struck down as he fed his chickens.
At least three marchers were killed outright.
And an untold number of others injured
in the bloodiest labor incident in Wisconsin's history.
The shootings ended the clamor for the eight-hour day
and workers returned once again to the 70-hour week.
- The obvious significance of the movement back in 1886,
is that what we take as a basic right
was something people marched and died for.
When we punch in, punch out, put in the eight-hour days
and think of that as having been something of a birthright.
So the obvious message is that that birthright was won
at great price.
In the mid-1800s, waves of immigrants
settling into the treeless prairies to the south and west
created an insatiable demand for lumber
for building homes and towns.
To a farmer out in the Dakota Prairie,
a white pine board was an essential.
And it all began back in a pinery in northern Wisconsin.
- Wisconsin's pinery or pine forests,
covered most of northern Wisconsin.
Through the forests, ran streams and rivers
which became highways for logs,
and flowing outward, connected Wisconsin
with the great lumber markets to the east and west.
- I don't like to say many things are inevitable
but it seems to me that cutting down the trees in Wisconsin
was pretty inevitable.
Somebody was going to do it,
because there was a market for it.
And they did it, and the surprising thing
is how fast they did it.
- During its peak years, lumbering employed,
in the woods and the sawmills,
more workers than any other Wisconsin industry
and produced more than 60 billion board feet
of first-rate lumber.
At the core of the industry were the lumberjacks.
Men cut down the trees, one at a time.
With their own peculiar language, the songs, stories,
the myth of the lumberjack
remains the Wisconsin version of the cowboy.
But in reality, the work of the lumberjack
was among the most dangerous,
difficult and poorly paid in the country.
Many Lumberjacks were farmers who left their wives behind
to take care of family and farm
while they earned some much-needed cash.
Others were rivermen and itinerant laborers,
tough and desperate men, capable of handling
long hours of hard labor, held in place for a season
by the severe winter and the isolation of a logging camp
miles from the nearest town.
At first lumber men were only drawn to the big white pine.
Its wood was light and workable, ideal for construction.
And unlike hardwood trees,
it would float to the mill and to market.
- In the fall, they would send a team in,
like a reconnaissance team, and they would plan
the tactics of the winter operation.
You'll set up the main camp
and then make roads and so forth.
Then when freezing came and the snows came,
then they'd get into the serious business of logging.
- The sawyer was the king of the camp.
He could size up the lay of the land,
spit a few times to see where the wind was blowing from,
and drop a tree that would drive a stake
into the ground when it fell.
Sawing was dangerous in some ways.
Tree might kick back when it fell.
Might hit another tree on the way down
and the butt would jump back awful fast.
If the sawyer didn't get out of the way pretty quick
he'd be killed dead as a doornail: [Louis Blanchard].
- A log never did anything you wanted it to do.
Plus it was huge.
And so, to get this log from that site to the stream
that was bone labor for a man and oxen or horses.
- Camps would often vie with one another
over the size of their loads.
Large loads might require hitching several teams of horses
to pull it up a hill.
- It was dangerous to ride on a big load,
since he could get squashed to death of a chain broke.
I've seen them break, too.
One broke over on Mud Brook, and a hell of a good man
was on top of a big load when it broke.
He was coming down a grade pretty fast
and logs went off in all directions.
He was crushed to death
and the team went on down to the landing all alone
with what was left of the sleigh.
- These were big trees and so there were injuries there.
And then of course, when you're working
with axes and sharp saws, you're courting danger.
And then working around large animals
is always dangerous.
They tried to provide for medical care.
And there were in fact little hospitals set up
across northern Wisconsin
whose primary purpose was the logger.
But the biggest problem was the isolation
and getting sick or hurt person
to a place where he could be treated.
- Lumberjacks awoke before dawn,
ate a huge breakfast and were at work with the first light.
Lunch would be brought out to the men,
who would then work until dark,
and then head back to the logging camp.
- The logging camp wasn't exactly a fancy hotel,
but it was home to a bunch of men
for several months every winter.
The shanty boss never scrubbed the floors,
but he did sweep up now and then.
The spittoons are made of nail kegs,
cut in half and filled with dirt.
And you'd spit in them
and the shanty boss would empty them once in a while
when they got messy.
Everybody's clothes got wet from the snow every day
and so we needed a lot of racks for drying.
When the socks begun to send off steam at night
you sure knowed you was in a logging camp
and you mix the smell of wet socks
with the smell of baked beans and chewing tobacco,
you have a smell the lumberjack never forgot
even if he lived as long as Methuselah.
You made your own bed of marsh hay or balsam boughs
covered with blankets.
Now and then you'd add some more boughs.
When the lice got awful itchy,
you had to take the better part of Sunday
to boil the blankets.
No lumberjack ever took a bath.
Somehow, he just never got dirty.
But you'd take off your clothes and boil them
every three or four weeks or something like that.
- The cook was the most important man in any camp.
Camps with a poor cook were said to have two crews:
one coming and one going.
- There was always plenty of grub in camp
and he baked and cooked enough for everyone.
We had salt pork and beef and plenty of potatoes,
and baked beans to dress it up.
Sometimes we had big barrels of sauerkraut, dried prunes,
dried apples, dried currants, and always plenty of flour.
The cook baked pies by the hundreds, maybe thousands.
We used to wolf 'em down like it was the last food left in the world.
- At the end of the season, the lumberjacks broke camp
and headed off in different directions.
- Though there was a part of the crew
who would help move the logs downstream, the driving crew.
And this was an exciting time for these guys.
- The logs were set loose
and rolled into the fast-moving water.
Bearing the stamp of the logging company,
they made their way through bends,
rapids, over dams, to the mill.
Driving logs was a wet, cold and difficult job.
The crew walked for miles freeing the unruly logs,
gathering up logs that had drifted into back waters
and venturing out in boats to masses of logs
that were jammed up.
Even the most skillful rivermen fell occasionally,
and if caught under a mass of logs in a whirlpool
his comrades were helpless to save him.
He drown before their very eyes.
- Over on the St. Croix River
where the river narrowed up at the falls,
it took a good many men to keep the logs moving through there.
In 1886, there was a jam
that was about as dangerous as anything could be.
They're hard to break up
and the logs kept piling up behind.
The longer he worked at the front of the jam
looking for that one log that held up the whole works,
well when she went, she went with a bang,
tearing out trees on the banks.
And you had to be pretty good on your feet
or you'd get a foot smashed or a leg broke.
- As the drivers delivered the logs to the milling company,
the mill would then pay the logging camp operator,
who could then pay the lumberjacks
for their season's work.
- We know that when they got paid in the spring
that a lot of them were rowdies and drank up, gambled,
and did other things with their money,
but I think that most of them headed home
with their money in their pocket and glad to be headed home.
- The life of a lumberjack was a good life.
It was a hard life, but if I had to live my life over,
I'd be a lumberjack again
and ride the logs down the Chippewa: [Louis Blanchard].
- In the 1870s while lumberjacks
were cutting the forests to the north,
steam-powered threshers took their place
in the fields of southern Wisconsin.
Farmers could now harvest more wheat than ever,
but the enthusiasm for planting a single cash crop
also planted the seeds for an agricultural disaster.
- What happened is that
various kinds of insect, pests, got into it.
For instance there was rust and there was smut,
and then there was this terrible chinch bug.
Then in addition to the insect problem,
if you keep putting the same crop
on the same field, year after year,
you destroy the qualities of the soil,
the till, the fertility, and all the rest.
And so your yields go down, down, down,
and you're making less and less money.
And that's what happened to southern Wisconsin.
- Few thought of dairy farming as an alternative to wheat.
Many farm families kept a cow or two
and drank the milk or churned the cream into butter.
But the cows often roamed the woods
eating whatever they could find
including wild onions and garlic
which added peculiar flavors to the milk.
- The butter, that was coming out of individual farms,
was terrible stuff.
It was known in the New York market as "western grease."
- And in Chicago, it is said that Wisconsin butter
was used to lubricate wagon wheels,
wasn't fit for consumption.
- A few dairy farmers from New York State
began to build small cheese and butter processing plants,
but most wheat farmers
wanted nothing to do with dairy production,
which tied a farmer and his family
to an endless round of hard work.
- With wheat farming, you put it in the ground.
There was a long period of time
when you didn't really have to worry about it very much
until harvest, but with your dairying
you have to be there every day
and you have to milk at set times.
You have to feed at set times.
- William Dempster Hoard came to Wisconsin in 1857 from New York,
a state that had already made the change
from wheat farming to dairying.
Hoard began promoting dairying in his farm newspaper
advising Wisconsin's farmers
devastated by declining wheat harvests
to substitute the cow for the plow.
- And so he thinks he can, by his newspaper editorship,
and then later by founding Hoard's Dairyman,
he can help these people out.
And he's a character, let's face it.
He loves to get up in front of an audience
and he was given to a very colorful language
and he said that he was going about the countryside
preaching the gospel of the dairy cow.
That's the way he put it.
- Hoard traveled the state
to whip up enthusiasm for dairy farming,
to convert farmers, to convince them to take a leap of faith
that the relentless effort of dairy farming
would pay off in cold hard cash
and restore fertility to the depleted soil.
In 1872, Hoard and other dairy leaders
established the Wisconsin Dairy Association
to develop markets and convince farmers and processors
to cooperate, to improve the quality and reputation
of their dairy products.
- That's how cooperation gets involved in it,
and believe me, it was needed.
If you're just weighing what comes in
or measuring it by volume,
you do better if you stop at the creek
and get a couple of buckets of something and throw them in.
The only trouble is you also picked up minnows
and there were many those
who are running cheese factories and creameries
who complained about the minnows that certain farmers brought in.
- Blocks of ice harvested from Wisconsin lakes
were used to cool a new invention:
the refrigerated rail car.
The Dairy Association negotiated low freight rates
shipping cheese on these trains
to the large markets of the East Coast.
The Dairy Association sponsored
experience meetings across the state.
Traveling shows where farmers swapped ideas
and took part in spirited and entertaining discussions
with Hoard and other dairy leaders.
- There was for example of one speaker
who had a speech titled: "The cow, America's queen."
And then there was another famous New York dairyman
and his famous saying is:
"Speak to a cow as you would to a lady."
- With its first Farmers' Institutes,
the University of Wisconsin carried on the tradition
of the experience meetings around the state.
In 1885, 50,000 farmers attended
anxious to hear about the university's early attempts
to use science to unravel the mysteries
of feeding, breeding and milk production.
In 1880, the university hired its first
full-time agriculture professor, William Henry.
Henry turned the University Farm into a laboratory
testing different types of cattle feed
and measuring the effect on production.
He proved the advantages of storing feed
in a French invention, the silo,
which would extend the milking season into the winter months.
In 1886, the University started its Farm Short Course
and soon added a Dairy Short Course
which provided practical information to farmers
and milk processors in a special winter session.
Professor Stephen Babcock devised
the first measurement of milk quality
by perfecting an easy and reliable butter fat test.
Shown here performing the test forty years later,
Babcock refused to patent the device,
which was immediately used in dairy plants
all over the world and worth millions of dollars.
The test he said belonged to the people.
Wisconsin farmers found that feed grains,
grasses and hay were well-suited to Wisconsin's climate
and soils.
Applications of manure began to restore the worn-out soil
and bring the farms back to life.
Neat dairy barns, higher producing dairy cows
began to dot the landscape.
Nearby towns and villages began to grow
benefiting from stable incomes of dairy farmers.
At local creameries and cheese factories
farmers begin showing up with more cans of milk.
In 1890 Wisconsin produced 44 million pounds of cheese.
The hard work and cooperation began to pay off.
The vision and faith in dairy farming,
scientific agriculture came to pass
and Wisconsin is well on its way to becoming America's Dairyland.
In the 1890s, the railroads were hauling out
the last of the big white pines
and Northern Wisconsin faced the future
without a booming lumber economy.
Loggers had taken only the prime timber,
carelessly leaving the treetops and branches
to dry as fuel on the forest floor.
Fires swept through millions of acres
leaving a devastated landscape.
None of the North escaped the cutting,
leaving a wounded environment and steadily declining economy.
In Porter's Mills, like many mill towns,
sawmills employed almost half of the people.
The mills were the heart of the whole economy,
supporting blacksmith shops, stables, a shoe shop, a hotel
and two candy stores.
The town built a school and a church
and had survived floods and fires.
But when the timber to the north gave up
the town of Porter's Mills died.
The church and some other buildings were hauled away.
Others were abandoned
and Porter's Mills disappeared from the map.
It seemed inevitable that farming would father logging,
that the plow would follow the axe
just as it had in Wisconsin and States to the East.
Lumber companies began to advertise
often in foreign language papers
for Polish, Finnish, Norwegian and other immigrant settlers
to buy land and begin farming the cutover.
- For the settlers who are coming it's an opportunity.
They see it as a place where they can develop farms
and be sort of small farmers, yeoman farmers,
the kind of farming they've seen is successful
in southern and central Wisconsin.
- It soon became a land boom.
Hundreds of speculators, large and small, jumping in.
Land dealers employed agents on commission,
armed with optimistic literature that took little account
of the true potential of the land,
but instead provided idyllic images
of prosperity and happiness.
- This is the American way, to be optimistic, to anticipate
that things are going to be good in the future,
and that spirit just, I think, caught up public officials,
land salesmen, the farmers themselves look at the bright side.
They did not literally look at the land,
often before they bought it.
- The settlers began the difficult process
of clearing the land of giant white pine stumps
that were all too slow to decay.
Horse-drawn contraptions could extract these stumps
only with great difficulty.
Those that could afford it, used well-placed sticks of dynamite
to blast the stumps out of the ground.
(repeated explosions)
With relentless effort, the settlers yanked and blasted out
enough of the enormous stumps to plow their fields.
Thousands of modest farms were carved out of the cutover.
Settlers planted crops and milk cows.
Got married and raised children.
Schools were built. Towns sprang up.
But in the 1920s, the high crop prices
that had supported all their efforts and paid all the bills,
collapsed.
The price drop held on
becoming a long-lasting agricultural depression
that pushed farmers on poor land to the breaking point.
Taxes went unpaid.
Land companies could no longer attract
new settlers to buy their land.
And like the farmers,
the county governments in northern Wisconsin
stared into the face of bankruptcy.
- And so new laws are passed,
zoning to restrict areas that could be farmed,
to encourage reforestation, to encourage tourism.
And so, there's a real shift.
- In northern Wisconsin the trees have grown up now
and you have to search hard for evidence of the struggle
to make farms out of the Northwoods.
But in some places you can still make out the outline of a barn
where a dozen cows were kept.
You can still see the foundation of a house
where a family worked for years to make a new life,
where a community formed to share life together.
But it was a place where the hard work
of wrestling crops from the soil was not enough.
For the dream of a farming frontier, in the Northwoods,
came to an end.
- Sometimes I feel a bit sad when I drive past our farm
thinking of the labor that my father put into it,
but then I think that he made our living out of it
while he needed to.
And now since it never could be really good farmland,
it's only fitting that it goes back
to doing what it does best, growing trees: [Mary Bouvanovich].
- The turn of the century saw huge changes
in the way Wisconsin's people lived and worked.
In the 1880s the average workman could trade one hour's wages
for a pound of cheese or pound of bacon.
A plane suit cost $14,
about a week and a half's wages.
But over the next 20 years
skilled workers of industries like Allis-Chalmers
found their wages rising and prices for goods falling.
- Wages rose sharply that is in terms of buying power
in the late 19th century.
And while there was a lot of endemic unemployment,
that is, you'd be briefly unemployed,
these could be steady jobs.
You could be part of that core
that worked there for a long period of time.
You could bring your kids in.
You could hire them, bring them in for jobs.
These were really good jobs.
- With the introduction of new machinery
factory owners began hiring more women,
though employers considered most of the jobs off-limits.
- Certain occupations were clearly and exclusively for men.
They tended to be the skilled work
and the higher paying jobs
so that women tended to be concentrated in
very few types of manufacturing establishments,
such as garment work or boots and shoes.
- Most women found work and other growing fields
as telephone operators, as sales clerks, or in clerical work
using a Wisconsin invention: the typewriter.
And since few families could survive on only one income,
married women often carried on
much less visible type of work within their homes.
- They took in laundry.
They took in piecework from factories.
They made artificial flowers.
They took in boarders,
as many as 40 or 50 percent of families
sometimes took in boarders
and the maintenance of the boarding business
was essentially women's work.
- As wages rose and factories became more productive,
business leaders realized
giving into labor's long-standing demand
for a shorter work week
would actually expand the economy
by giving workers more time to shop for the products
and expanding consumer economy.
By the 1920s, prices for consumer goods of all kinds:
radios, vacuum cleaners and refrigerators, were dropping
and with installment loans
even the automobile was within the reach
of a growing number of families.
The consumer economy opened up new opportunities
for service businesses and supported
a comfortable middle class that began to seek out new ways
to spend their money and newfound leisure time.
Those who could afford it now began hitting the road
savoring the beauty of the Wisconsin countryside...
...in areas like Lake Delton and Kilbourn,
which was later renamed Wisconsin Dells.
Scenic attractions provided the basis for new businesses
geared to the freewheeling tourist.
Resorts and hotels, catering to the new automobile traffic,
sprang up.
Towns offered free campgrounds
to keep rambling tourists from camping on the side of the road.
With farmers and other businesses
calling more and better roads,
the State Highway Commission began work on a plan
to connect every county seat
and every city with more than 5,000 people.
By 1926, over 10,000 miles
of paved well-drained gravel highways
began to knit the state together
and fuel the growing tourism industry.
As roads stretch to the north, towns in the cutover Northwoods
began to advertise themselves
as tourists and recreation havens.
Tourists soon discovered that though the big trees were gone
the cool north lakes still had plenty of fish.
Old resorts expanded, and new facilities appeared
to serve growing numbers of travelers.
And many vacationers
from busy cities like Chicago and Milwaukee
discovered the solitude of a rustic northern cabin.
As tourism grew, it brought an injection
of much-needed cash to northern Wisconsin.
"The tourist crop," said one northern newspaper,
"was becoming one of the most profitable crops
"raised in the state."
In 1929, the United States economy crashed
and the country was plunged into The Great Depression.
Banks closed their doors.
Jobs disappeared, wages were slashed,
precipitating waves of labor unrest.
In 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt signed a bill
to begin a government program to create jobs
with the growing numbers of unemployed young men.
During The Great Depression
the Civilian Conservation Corps or CCC
would transform the Wisconsin landscape
and employ over 90,000 young men
who had few other prospects for work.
- There'd be a job in the want ads
like for somebody to wash dishes at a restaurant.
And I go to answer that ad and I'd find when I get there
that there was a line of applicants
going way around the block about three or four abreast.
I think it was a real blessing that the CCCs came along.
- In Wisconsin, the CCC would be put to work
to solve the state's worsening conservation problems,
like soil erosion that was eating away the land.
in some agricultural areas.
In the cutover North, the failure of farming
showed the need for a massive reforestation effort.
What some called "Roosevelt's forest army"
started tree nurseries and planted trees
in the new state and national forests.
They protected the forests that had survived
by fighting fires during the drought years of the 1930s.
The CCC constructed nearly 500 bridges
and more than 4,000 miles of fire lanes,
truck trails and roads.
In agricultural areas, the young men put in place
water diversions, terraces,
and other erosion control structures.
The government gave the new recruits
uniforms, a haircut, a medical exam,
three square meals a day
and a bunk in a tent or a barracks.
In return they agreed to abide by the strict discipline
of the camps, which were run by the U.S. Army.
- We earned a magnificent sum of $30 a month
of which we received five dollars in the camp,
and $25 was sent back to our family.
- The CCC set up camps in eight state parks
and began work to develop them,
building the trails and roads we now enjoy today.
- Wyalusing became a state park in 1917,
but was left pretty much natural.
It wasn't really until the CCC provided the labor force
to provide a lot of the development
that things really took off within the park.
At Wyalusing and other parks
the CCC cleared trees and brush
and smoothed out the land for miles of hiking trails.
The corps cored stone and hauled it by hand
for steps and other trail structures.
The CCC built rustic park shelters and other structures
with the strength to stand the test of time
using native materials and a lot of hand labor.
The young men of the CCC
transformed the Wisconsin landscape
and in turn were transformed by the work.
- We went in boys and came out young men.
We learned a lot about discipline.
We learned a little bit about handling money
and we learned how to get along with other people,
and we learned an occupation.
So, it was really a wonderful experience, I would say.
- In our state parks, in hiking trails,
cut and smoothed out of the woods,
in the steps made of stone quarried and carried
and laid by hand,
in the unique old stone shelter buildings,
in the beauty of a reforested northern Wisconsin,
we can all enjoy the legacy
of the work of thousands of young men
brought together by adversity
who work shoulder-to-shoulder for the good of us all.
In 1943, Superior greeted the arrival of the Dionne quintuplets
who caused a sensation when they traveled from Canada
to take part in the launching of the last of 18 ships
built for the British Navy.
With the outbreak of war in Europe,
contracts for shipbuilding and other products
began to lift Wisconsin industries
out of the Depression of the 1930s.
- Then all of a sudden Pearl Harbor comes
and wham, it was off to the races.
- The U.S. entry into World War 2
created huge changes in nearly all areas of Wisconsin's economy
but Wisconsin's historic strengths
in both agriculture and industry
served the country well.
Wisconsin dairy farmers increased milk production
during the war by 20%.
Dairy plants produced millions of pounds of cheese
and evaporated and dried milk to feed the troops.
Packing plants turned out a wide variety of meats
for military rations.
Wisconsin led the nation in the canning of vegetable crops
and it's 150 canning plants operated at full capacity
processing peas, sweet corn, beets, beans,
tomatoes and sauerkraut.
Despite shortages of labor and machinery
and materials of all kinds,
Wisconsin's farm families
working even longer hours than usual
achieved or surpassed the government's wartime goals.
While the farmers fed the troops,
Wisconsin's textile and leather industries clothed them,
supplying uniforms, footgear, underwear, raincoats,
socks, gloves, and blankets.
The military found the skilled workers
of Wisconsin's metalworking industries
capable of producing just about any commodity
the Armed Services demanded.
Wisconsin industries supplied parts
needed to build land-based vehicles
and the engines to power ships and planes.
Workers in the shipyards at Manitowoc, Sturgeon Bay,
Superior, Milwaukee, Kewanee and Green Bay
turned out a wide array of vessels
including 28 submarines
built by the Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company,
which had never built a submarine before.
Near Sauk City, the government built a munitions plant
on 10,000 acres of farmland
and employed 7,500 workers
producing ammunition for the war effort.
In Milwaukee, a large variety of manufacturing industries
geared up for an almost total conversion
to wartime production.
- One of the biggest impacts the war had
was on industrial employment in Milwaukee.
It went from roughly a hundred thousand
at the start of the war
to two hundred thousand in the middle of the war
and most of the people, and it was men and women,
were putting in long hours and long weeks.
I met a man named Les Greget
who came down from rural Wisconsin
to take a job in the Falk Company and the war hit
and Les Greget was down working on his boring bar
which drilled big holes in big gearboxes
every single day of the week for the next five years
without a single day off.
And that was fairly typical.
If there was a silver lining to the war,
it was opening up opportunities for people
who had not been part of the workforce,
best known, of course, the women.
And it was the women in many cases
who supplied maybe a third to a half of the employment
in a lot of the shops.
There were also new opportunities for African Americans
and shops like Falk and some of the other heavy industries
in the Milwaukee area.
- The war meant not just
an increase in the number of women working,
but it meant really a mass migration of women
into the kinds of work
that had been set aside for men only.
High-paying machinery work, mass production, in factories.
The kinds of women who were working
changed dramatically.
Now women over 35, women who were married,
women who still had young children at home,
were taking these jobs.
- With selfless and patriotic commitment,
while coping with shortages of food, fuel and housing,
Wisconsin citizens gave of their work
laboring day and night knowing that their efforts
directly supported the soldiers on the frontlines.
- Without equipment, the supplies,
the munitions and materials supplied on the Homefront,
they wouldn't have been able to fight a war at all,
so in a very important sense
the war at home was the equivalent
of war on the front.
- In the incredible process
of gearing up Wisconsin's economy
to meet the demands of the war,
Wisconsin workers set the stage for another huge change:
retooling for a post-war economic boom.
- Right after the war there were fears
that the economy would just
go right back into the tank again
just as it had been before the war.
What happened of course was quite the opposite.
American industry just retooled and took off for the races.
It was the longest sustained boom in American history,
ending not until the late 1960s.
- Wisconsin's people in the day-to-day task
of making a living, created an economy
with great strength and diversity.
Each generation put in place new ways of living and working,
learning new skills and building on the work
of those who came before them.
Some created works of lasting value in (inaudible). [State Capitol carvers]
Others labored in dangerous jobs for long hours
or in the endless, unpaid tasks of raising families
and building communities.
But the work of all of them lives on
in the world around us
for through their work, they built the state
we call Wisconsin.
- Major funding for Wisconsin Stories was provided by:
AT&T, providing business and residential
long distance service throughout Wisconsin;
S.C. Johnson Wax, a Wisconsin manufacturer
of home cleaning and home storage products;
The Credit Unions of Wisconsin serving the financial needs
of two million Wisconsinites and their families;
and the Wisconsin Sesquicentennial Commission
celebrating 150 years of Wisconsin statehood.
Funding also provided by:
Firstar Corporation;
Harley-Davidson, Incorporated;
Marshall and Illsley Corporation;
the Outdoor Advertising Association;
the Philip Morris Companies;
W.H. Brady Company;
Weber-Stephen Products Company;
and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce.