cc >> Good evening and welcome to
the second day of the Tenth Annual Wisconsin Book Festival.
My name is Jim Cavanaugh. I'm president of the
South Central Federation of Labor and a former member of the
Wisconsin Humanities Council. On behalf of the Wisconsin
Humanities Council, I am very excited to introduce this
evening's speakers. First however, we want to thank
the volunteers and sponsors who helped make this happen,
including the Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation,
the Madison Community Foundation,
Distillery Design, University of Wisconsin Press,
and Friends of the Libraries of the University
of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as many more whose names you'll
find in the Overture Center lobby, as I'm sure you noticed
when you came in.
While you're in the lobby, visit the booksellers lounge, on the
second floor actually of the Overture Center, where you'll
find books for sale and free parking.
If you come after 1:00 on Saturday or Sunday,
and you're one of the first 200 people to get here,
you'll get a free tenth birthday cupcake from the
Humanities Council. Though the Humanities Council
organizes the festival, the Wisconsin Book Festival
belongs to you. By coming to the festival you
show your support for a world were words and ideas matter.
Please help us even further by filling out the surveys which I
think you received on your way in, and by considering a small
donation in support of the festival's Birthday Fund.
Your gift will make a difference in ensuring that the festival
has a healthy future. After our speakers this evening
we'll open things up for questions from the audience.
And after that, there will be a book selling
and book signing by our authors, hosted by the UW Press.
One final note, as Ernest Hemingway
was fond of saying, please turn off your cell phones.
Now I will introduce our speakers.
The two books that we have tonight, the first one is called
The Strike, about a painting that was entitled The Strike.
The author of that book is James Dennis.
He's a professor emeritus of Art History at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison. He's author of Karl Bitter:
Architectural Sculptor, 1867-1915,
and of Grant Wood: A Study in American Art and Culture,
and of Renegade Regionalists: The Modern Independence
of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and
John Steuart Curry, as well as catalog essays on traveling
exhibits about Grant Wood. Mr. Dennis unfortunately cannot
be here, couldn't make it, because he's in Europe.
The flight would have taken too long, but we are pleased
that we have a more than able substitute, Paul Boyer.
Paul is the editor of the Studies in American Thought
and Culture series at the University of Wisconsin Press,
which is the series in which The Strike
is the most recent publication. Paul is Merle Curti Professor of
History Emeritus at UW-Madison. His numerous works include,
Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft,
When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern
American Culture, and Purity in Print:
Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age
to the Computer Age. Paul has also served
as Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Companion
to United States History. With that, we'll hear from Paul
some remarks about The Strike.
Paul Boyer: Well, thank you very much.
It's a pleasure to be here. Welcome and thank you folks for
coming right at the dinner hour. I appreciate it very much and I
certainly want to thank the sponsors of the Wisconsin Book
Festival and especially the Labor Council and the
Wisconsin Humanities Council. I'm a former member also and
it's a wonderful organization. As was mentioned, we're
here to talk about this book, The Strike:
The Improbable Story of an Iconic Painting
of Labor Protest, from 1886. I would call this a Wisconsin
story in five parts, but a story that extends far beyond
Wisconsin to encompass labor history, social history,
art history obviously, and cultural history.
So part one would be the origins of it all.
Robert Koehler, here's a self-portrait of himself as,
obviously, a mature and confident adult.
Robert Koehler was born in 1850 in Hamburg, Germany.
His father was a machinist. Together with many other
Europeans, the family emigrated to Milwaukee in 1854
when Robert was four years old. Milwaukee at that time,
a thriving, and emerging industrial city, and a city with
a very conscious labor movement, and labor population.
Robert showed early promise in art and he studied with local
artists in Milwaukee. In 1873, when he was 23 years
old, he went to Munich, he returned to Germany to study
art at Munich's prestigious Royal Academy of Art, and it
was there that he produced the painting that is certainly
his best known work, The Strike.
It actually was his diploma painting.
It was like a graduation thesis, but if you're an artist you do
a painting, and this was his diploma painting at the
Munich Royal Academy of Art. It's a history painting.
This was a very familiar genre in the 19th century, a very
popular form of art, but by the 1880's it was really
rather old fashioned. Impressionism,
French Impressionism was very much under way with the
paintings of Claude Monet and others, but Koehler chose this
form for his diploma painting, and he invested it with
something new. History paintings typically
recorded great battles, they recorded notable public events.
He chose to use this form to present what at the time was
almost unprecedented for artists, that is, a contemporary
scene of a very dramatic walk-out by workmen and the
confrontation with the boss. James Dennis, in his book,
traces the history of labor painting in the 19th
century and he finds a few in Europe, practically none in the
United States, but he did find a few in Europe which he
discusses in the book, and has reproductions of the work.
Here's one from 1846, the Labor Uprising as part of
the turbulence in Europe that culminated in the revolutions
of 1848. This was an uprising recorded
by the artist Hoyoll, Phillip Hoyoll.
It represents a scene in Breslau, Silesia, which is
now part of Poland. So there were a few,
but not very many before Koehler's painting of 1886.
There was one painting that Robert Koehler did in Munich
before The Strike, that Jim Dennis discusses
in some detail. It was called The Socialist.
This is a very timely painting if you're in Germany in
the early and mid-1880s, because Socialism was extremely much in
the public mind, and Socialists were feared and admired,
and Koehler chose this image. It's hard to know what he
thinks about the figure in the painting.
Is he presenting him as a little bit frightening,
or is he presenting him in an admiring way?
Notice the man down in the lower left.
It's a rather dark reproduction, but this is evidently a reporter
transcribing the speech that's being given, which can then be
published later in a newspaper. So Jim Dennis, in the book,
does a number of things, and one thing as an art historian
he does, is to present a very careful analysis
of the painting itself. Whoops.
This is only my second PowerPoint.
The first one was to a very forgiving audience at
Oakwood retirement center, so we'll get through it all right.
Here's the painting again. Notice the figure.
History paintings told stories. This was the point.
Audiences, the public, when they viewed a history painting,
was sort of trained to look at little details and to note
what the artist is conveying. Robert Koehler shows the
confrontation between the mill owner, the factory owner,
with his top hat adding to his power and authority, and that
brick building behind him. The figure confronting him,
the figure has a red shirt on, which is of course the symbol
of revolution and protest. He's pointing back to his
supporters behind him. Just as an aside,
this is purely personal. My grandfather was born in 1871,
and he was a factory owner--- a factory worker--
I wish he had been an owner! He was a factory worker
in Dayton, Ohio, in the 1890s. I happen to have inherited
the cap that he wore as a young workman.
It's exactly like the cap that the workman is wearing who's
confronting the factory owner in this painting of 1886, so I
really identified with that particular part of the painting.
Down in the lower left is a young mother, presumably the
wife of one of the workers who has walked off the job,
looking very nervously up at the factory owner.
Her little girl is also wearing red, red stockings,
looking at the workmen who are walking off the job.
Then, a very interesting part of the painting, and a very
controversial part of the painting, Koehler included
a workman who is bending down to pick up a rock.
And clearly the hint here is of incipient violence.
If a compromise isn't reached, if some settlement isn't reached
the suggestion here is this could turn violent.
James Dennis discusses these details of the painting
in very interesting ways. I'm sorry this is so dark.
The reproduction in the book itself is much clearer.
Jim Dennis sees this as the center of the whole painting.
This is a woman confronting one of the workers.
He has his arms out like this, as though to say
"What else can I do?" She's imploring him.
She has her hands up like this. Now the conventional,
traditional interpretation of this focal point in the painting
was that this women was his wife, and that's a very
reasonable guess. But Jim Dennis says,
wait a minute, if you look very closely at her clothing,
she's very well dressed. She doesn't seem to be wearing
the dress, the kind of clothing that you expect the wife of a
working man to be wearing. Jim speculates, and I think very
plausibly, that she may be a middle class supporter of the
labor movement who has come to this scene, and is concerned
about how it's all going to play out.
Then Jim Dennis talks about middle class women in Germany
and in the United States in the 1880s, who actually were
supporters of labor's cause and who were publicly identified
in that way, so he links these scenes in the painting with the
actual social reality of the 1880s in very interesting ways.
Jim Dennis, in the book, also links the painting to
contemporary labor and political developments in Germany
and in the United States. He was often asked, well,
what scene does this represent? and he always answered that
it's not a specific strike, it's a general scene.
Some people thought it was set in Belgium where coal miners
were striking at this time. Robert Koehler said no, although
we do know that he traveled to England in the mid-1880s when he
was preparing this painting and visited Birmingham and other
factory centers in England. He said, "I especially wanted
to get the smoke for the background," because English
factory towns were famous apparently for being especially
smoky and rather foul air. He also said that the railroad
strike in America, the famous strike of 1877 was very much in
his mind when he painted this, although he didn't literally
represent that strike. He was in New York in 1877.
He knew about the strike, he read reports about the strike.
There were even demonstrations in New York City that he may
even have witnesses, so he was very aware of what was happening
in labor in-- Sorry about that, I touched
something totally by mistake. He was very aware of what was
happening on the labor scene transatlantically in the U.S.
where he was a citizen by that time, and in Germany, where he
was living as an artist. Part two of this five-part story
would be the early history of the painting.
It's a history of initial public exposure, public display, but
also of controversy, and James Dennis traces now the
history of this painting in extremely interesting ways.
It was first exhibited in New York City at the National
Academy of Design, a very prestigious institution
at that time. In May of 1886, now if you know
your labor history that's a very important time period,
because on May 4, 1886, in Chicago occurred the famous
Haymarket Massacre. At the end of an Anarchist
rally, a peaceful rally, someone unknown threw a bomb,
a policeman was killed, the policemen began to fire wildly.
Other policemen were killed from the police firing,
their own gunfire. In the aftermath, the most
prominent leaders of the Anarchist Movement in Chicago
were arrested, several of them were hanged, although there was
no evidence of their direct involvement in this event.
At the same time in Milwaukee, this is less well known, there
was a march, a labor march, in Milwaukee in which the police
and National Guard under the direct command of Wisconsin's
governor at that time, a man named Jeremiah Rusk,
fired on the marchers and seven of them were killed.
So this was a very, very tense time in American labor history,
at the same moment this painting of Koehler's is displayed
in New York City. Well, you can imagine
the attention it drew. The reviews of it
very much reflected the politics of the reviewer.
Conservative reviewers were very critical, "Why are you
inciting violence and portraying violence at a time
when the foundations of our society seem to be collapsing?"
The painting returned to Europe then and was displayed at
a Great World's Fair in Paris, the Exposition Universelle,
displayed as part of the art exhibits in Paris,
but the managers of the fair chose to hide it.
They put it up very high. It's called "skied," I guess,
in art history lingo. They skied the painting above
a high doorway so it was really hardly visible and you certainly
couldn't see very clearly some of these details.
Robert Koehler's friends thought that this was probably a
political decision, that they didn't want to upset the
attendees of the fair with this image of contemporary labor
violence, potential violence. It came back to Milwaukee then
and was very well received, local boy makes good.
Then it was displayed at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.
So it got, you know, major attention in it's
initial few years. Meanwhile, Robert Koehler had
married, in 1895, a young German woman, actually from a very
prosperous middle class family, and returned to the United
States and moves to Minneapolis. He's appointed director of the
Minneapolis School of Fine Arts. Of course he brings
the painting with him. Now his work in Minneapolis
was not-- It would be nice to say he
continued to support the cause of labor and he portrayed it
sympathetically. But no, his work in Minneapolis,
his painting was quite different.
You got a preview a moment ago by accident.
This is a painting of a very sweet domestic scene of his
wife, Marie, and their little baby Edwin, born in 1898.
He painted local scenes of the city.
This is called Rainy Evening on Hennepin Avenue .
If you visit the Minneapolis Institute of Art, you'll find
this on display together with, I believe, the self-portrait
that I showed earlier. He also did some society
paintings, prominent, wealthy women of Minneapolis of his day.
So part three of this five-part story would be a
story of neglect and obscurity. In 1901 Robert Koehler organized
a show of his own work in Minneapolis clearly hoping
to sell some, but nothing sold. The art community of Minneapolis
was rather embarrassed by this, because they really liked him,
he was director of the School of Fine Arts, and so to sort of
show their appreciation, a fund was raised, a campaign
was organized to buy The Strike from Robert Koehler.
I believe the sum was $3000, and this was presented to him
as kind of a offering of appreciation for his career
in Minneapolis. Not really because they loved
the painting but it was his best known painting and they wanted
to show their support for him. The conservation cultural
community of Minneapolis at that time was led by a man
named Thomas Walker. If you know the Twin Cities
you may be familiar with the Walker Art Museum,
it was named for him. He was a wealthy timber baron
and by no means a supporter of labor unions, but he
nevertheless contributed to this fund to show support for Robert
Koehler, who by this time was doing paintings that were
not at all controversial. So The Strike, the painting,
went to the Minneapolis Public Library which also housed the
fine arts school, the Institute of Arts, and it was hung in a
hallway, a rather obscure part of the library, no lighting
to distinguish it, and there it stayed.
Part of the reason Jim Dennis speculates is changing fashion.
These big history paintings of the 19th century were considered
pretty out of it by the early 20th century when all the new
streams of modern art were coming along.
Also, Jim Dennis speculates it related to the very conservative
political climate in Minneapolis in the 1920s and '30s.
We think of Minnesota, we think of Hubert Humphrey
and Walter Mondale, you know. Actually, at the time very,
very conservative, anti-union, corporate figures were really
dominant in the city. It was certainly not a climate
to give a lot of publicity and notice to a painting like this.
The Depression came, labor activism revived,
artists began to paint scenes of labor activism once again.
This is Philip Evergood's painting of 1937
called American Tragedy. Robert Koehler was clearly not
a part of that and his painting, The Strike, was not even
rediscovered or revived at that time.
It continued to hang in obscurity and eventually
the Minneapolis Public Library took it down, put it in
a storage room in the basement. Part four of this Wisconsin
story would be the story of its rediscovery.
Now, I needn't tell this audience that the 1960s
was a time of turbulence on the University of Wisconsin campus,
a time of anti-war activism, radical demonstrations,
and so on. One of the people who was sort
of at the center of that was a grad student in English
named Lee Baxandall. Lee Baxandall was an
undergraduate, got his degree here in, I think, '57,
or something, but he stayed on, became a grad student in English
and very much joined at the center of the radical activism
of the time. He was a founder of a journal
called "Studies on the Left," he published a couple of
books himself of Marxist cultural criticism.
He was active in founding something called the
Anti-Militarist Ball. Every year, the ROTC would have
a Military Ball, so the anti-war people organized the
Anti-Militarist Ball. They got posters that said,
"Do Anti-Militarists have balls? Yes!
We're having one this Saturday. Be sure to come!"
Lee Baxandall was in on that. In 1970, he happened to be
walking in Harvard Square, in Massachusetts, and someone
handed him a newsletter from a local radical group.
There was a reproduction, of all things, Robert Koehler's
painting, The Strike. Baxandall noticed this
and had some knowledge. Apparently, he did some research
and was able to find out a little bit about Robert Koehler,
and decided he was going to try to track down this painting.
He first thought it was in Milwaukee, because that's where
Koehler came from. They said, "No, but we think
it's in Minneapolis." So he goes to Minneapolis,
he tracks it down to the storage room of the
Minneapolis Public Library. He finds it in terrible
condition. It's been neglected for decades.
There are rips and tears around the bottom of it,
but overall, he found it in salvageable shape
and he purchased it for $750. He spent $2000 more
to have it restored, and then he wanted it to be displayed.
So he goes to a guy in New York by the name of Moe Foner.
Moe Foner is an old Lefty. He's actually the uncle of
a very well known American historian today
named Eric Foner. Moe Foner runs a gallery at a
Labor Headquarters in New York. The Hospital Workers' Union
in New York has an art gallery. He calls it
the Bread and Roses Gallery. The idea was, of course, that
labor Unions shouldn't only work for the economic interests of
their members, they should work for their cultural interests.
Foner is delighted to have this great painting.
It's big. It's six feet by nine feet.
It's a big, dominant kind of painting, and it becomes a
centerpiece of the Bread and Roses Gallery in New York.
It's there for some years. It actually goes on tour,
an exhibit in the U.S. of Labor Art.
It also went on tour to Europe. In 1983, a group of German
activists organized an art exhibit of American radical art,
labor art, and they wanted The Strike as part of that
exhibit. It was called
"The Other America," a title they took from
Michael Harrington's famous book on poverty in America.
So Baxandall agrees to it's loan, it returns to Germany
once again and it's part of this exhibit that really toured
all over Europe. Well, meanwhile Baxandall tried
to make an arrangement where the painting would be acquired
by the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.
It looked promising for a while, but that fell through.
So Baxandall decides to sell it. He places it with an art dealer
in New York City, and this art dealer combines it with a
package of a number late 19th century history paintings
and landscape paintings, and a wealthy industrialist in Detroit
buys the whole package. This guy made his money
apparently in inventing and marketing faucets that you
could control hot and cold, rather that having two separate
faucets. Great invention.
Well, this Detroit guy bought these paintings, not really
knowing what he was getting, and certainly not in great sympathy
with The Strike, but it goes to Detroit.
Meanwhile, Lee Baxandall remains interested in its destiny,
and he would like to see it in a different venue.
He has a curator at the Deutsches Historisches Museum
in Berlin. Through this contact, the
Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin in 1990,
bought The Strike for $450,000 and it is now displayed--
I have to jump forward. If I really knew PowerPoint
I'd have all these inserted at the proper place.
It's now displayed at the Deutsches Historisches Museum
on Unter den Linden, Berlin's great cultural street,
between the museum island on one side and the Reichstag
at the other end. This is the
Deutsches Historisches Museum, and actually, Jim Dennis and I
visited it here about three years ago.
It's on the second floor, it has kind of a gallery of it's own
and then opposite it, is The Socialist, that other
radical painting that Robert Koehler did in the 1880s.
Well, part five, the book itself, The Strike.
Around 2000, Lee Baxandall was back in Oshkosh and actually
was running a very prosperous family printing business.
He had become a naturist and he published the
World Guide to Nude Recreation, "Nude and Natural Magazine."
He founded National Nude Week, among other things.
The book does not deal with that phase in Baxandall's career in
any depth, I'll have to admit. Unfortunately, he was also ill.
He was suffering from Parkinson's Disease, from which
he died three years ago. At this point in his life, he
contacted Jim Dennis, retired Art Historian here
a the University, and said, "Could you do something about
the story of this painting?" He presented to Jim two packed
boxes of correspondence, of clippings, of research
he had done over the years about the history of this painting.
Jim agreed to try to do something with it,
and indeed he did. Now Jim was the perfect person
to approach because he's a first-rate art historian,
and also he was part of that radical scene in Madison
in the '60s and '70s as a grad student.
He has photographs to document it.
So he had knowledge not only about the painting and
the art history side of it, but about the larger context.
Both its original origins in the 1880s, then its rediscovery
in the 1970s. So Jim wrote this book.
He approached the University of Wisconsin Press, and I'm
delighted to have it in the Studies in American Thought
and Culture series. I'll just read the last
paragraph of the book.
"Although The Strike missed the Depression-Era advances
of organized labor, a World War against Fascism,
and much of the combat-plagued Cold War as it languished
in obscurity in a Minneapolis library and museum storage room,
it emerged into a rapidly changing Post-Modern world,
to experience a succession of quick-change associations
before finding a home in a history museum
in a reunited Berlin as one link in the millennia
of German history. But who could say what yet lay
ahead for an enigmatic painting with such tenacious powers
of survival, and such a capacity for stirring
radically divergent responses in successive generations
of viewers and commentators." Jim did sign four copies of the
book before he left for Europe, so if you're among the first
four purchasers you can actually get an autographed copy.
Thank you very much. [applause]
The Wisconsin Book Festival provides...
a lot of good things for folks. And one of the good things
it provides for me is discovering this book.
I'm not an art guy, but for many, many, many years I had--
In my office, I have a collection of political,
strike, and boycott buttons and stuff behind my desk.
And for many, many years, included in that collection was
a postcard-sized reproduction of this painting.
I knew nothing about it, other than it was obviously
19th century. I certainly didn't know that the
artist was a Milwaukeean and I didn't know that it was so huge,
over nine feet by over six feet. Then Wisconsin Book Festival
comes along, and I didn't know, but found out that somebody
actually wrote a history about this painting, and that somebody
was a UW-Madison professor. It's a fascinating book.
You should read it, because it's not just about the history and
travels of this painting, but it's also kind of a broad sweep
of the social and economic history of the various times
when the painting was displayed and not displayed.
Some of the ironies involved in this is that the artist's name
is Koehler, and those of you who know a little
Wisconsin labor history, or U.S. labor history, know
that the longest strike in the history of the United States
was at the Kohler company in Kohler, Wisconsin,
where they make bathroom fixtures, but not the ones
of the Michigan guy with the single-handled faucet, which
is another strange connection. Another strange connection is
that Koehler wound up spending really the bulk of his life in
Minneapolis as did the painting, and in today's world one of the
more penetrating and insightful books about the labor movement
and the predicament that it finds itself in today is a book
by a born, bred and still living there author,
a labor lawyer actually, by the name of Joe Burns.
That book is entitled Reviving the Strike.
If you're into Mysticism there are all these things
going on here. Similarly, our next book
about George Edwin Taylor, by the same token,
the Wisconsin Book Festival exposed me to this book.
I hadn't known about it. I have a masters degree
in U.S. History with a research emphasis in late 19th century
and early 20th century, and I had never heard
of George Edwin Taylor until this book.
Certainly I didn't know that a biography had been written by,
again, a Wisconsinite, a UW-La Crosse emeritus professor,
Bruce Mouser. The book, of course,
is entitled, For Labor, Race and Liberty.
Emeritus Professor Mouser was an African History
and Asian History professor at UW-La Crosse.
He retired in 1996 with three file cabinets
filled with research notes. Some of which already
had led to publications. He took a year off after
retiring from his professorial duties and tried to avoid doing
much of anything academic and instead volunteered for a year
refinishing furniture at the Salvation Army
thrift store in La Crosse. He then returned to his file
cabinets having decided to finish something within a year
or to burn the whole set. [laughter]
He published five articles and a monograph on African and
African-American topics in 1998 and then four more articles
and two more monographs in the next two years.
While the history of the African slave trade remains a writing
interest of his, his primary focus is on the period of
African-American history that connects the collapse
of reconstruction to the rise of independent black politics
at the beginning of the 20th century.
He's currently working on a biography
of William Thomas Scott of Cairo, Illinois,
who is also an influential state and national black Democrat
at the turn of the last century. With that I'll turn it over
to Bruce Mouser. [applause]
Bruce Mouser: I'm an Africanist, and when I came to
La Crosse in '68, my colleagues thought, well he's interested
in black folks so he must be interested in black America,
and they began to feed me data about the black American
settlement in La Crosse. Gradually I picked up
an interest in that. But you didn't come here to
hear about my history. George Edwin Taylor, how many
of you had heard about this guy three months ago?
Two, three. Wonderful.
A couple. I recall, three years ago
when I started this, I went to the World Wide Web
and I typed in his name and I got three responses.
Today I tried it again and there were 35,000.
Now that says something about the Web and the ability of
search engines to find things. I guess that's what it says.
George Edwin Taylor was born a free person--
a free person of color in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1857.
His mother was a free black. His father was a slave,
so he says.
Little Rock at that time had about 1000 free blacks and
Arkansas was intent to get rid of the free blacks completely.
Every state in the South basically was attempting
to do that, but Arkansas was the only one that succeeded.
It passed a law in 1859 requiring all free blacks to
leave the state as of January 1, 1860, and so Taylor's mother
gathered him and they moved to Alton, Illinois, and they
remained there, at least that's where he lived from 1860-1865.
His mother died when he was four years old, 1861 or 1862.
So he's an orphan. He says he slept
in storehouse boxes. Obviously, someone took care of
him during that period, but you can imagine a four year old,
a five year old. Alton isn't terribly warm
in the winter so it must have been a chore.
Any case, in 1865, a month after the war ended, he ended up
in La Crosse, Wisconsin. He'd ridden a paddle wheeler
up the Mississippi somehow. He was there for two years.
At that time he took the name of George Southall.
There was a family in La Crosse, the Southall family.
Southall was a waiter, a black waiter, on one of the
paddle wheelers between St. Louis and St. Paul.
The Southalls left after two years and they left George
behind, so George was a street kid again at the age of ten.
At this time the court intervened.
He was fostered out, or apprenticed out, to a black
farmer in West Salem, and that farmer was a fellow
by the name of Nathan Smith. Now, let's see if
I can work this thing.
There's Nathan Smith. Nathan and Sara Smith,
they took care of a number of foster children.
That was the way you dealt with problem children, and also,
this is the frontier and the frontier is a rough place.
In any case, Smith was very interested in education.
He made sure that all of his boys, his problem boys,
that he took care of got an education.
There was a one-room schoolhouse very close by.
Taylor was required to stay with Smith until he was 20 years old.
When he was 20, he went to Wayland University.
Now that's not quite Wayland at the present time, in Beaver Dam.
It's called Wayland Academy I think, at the present time.
It's a preparatory school. At that time
it was a university. It had a three-year curriculum
and two tracks. There was a classical track
which was pre-law for all practical purposes,
it was a feeder school. The people who designed Wayland
thought it was going to be another Brown University.
It didn't quite end up that way, but that was their objective.
Taylor took the classical curriculum, so he studied
language, and grammar, and Latin, and Greek,
I think, German. I doubt he did
all of those things, but two years, he was there.
All we have of his time is his financial record.
Wayland, when I went to them and said, "You had a student here
back in the 1870s," and they said "No, we didn't."
We dug through their files and in fact we found this, and they
were very surprised, and he's become a hero now for them.
In any case, he was there for only two years.
He said he left because of finances
and because of poor health. He went back to La Crosse
in 1879. Now 22 years old, or 23.
At that time he had finally adopted his name.
This was not uncommon. He had no idea really
who his rightful father was. He took the name
of George Edwin Taylor at that point, and he kept that
for the rest of his life. Once he was in La Crosse
he picked up journalism. He got a job as a journalist.
He worked for-- Let's see if I can work this.
He worked for Brick Pomeroy, who was the editor and owner
of "Pomeroy's Democrat" it was also called
"The La Crosse Democrat." Pomeroy was famous, or infamous,
depending on how you want to look at it.
He was very much a Democrat. He called for the assassination
of President Lincoln during the Civil War, which got him
into a bit of difficulty. That was his basic claim.
He had one of the largest circulations of newspapers
in the country. Taylor worked for him as
city editor for a year or two. He wrote for the other
newspapers in La Crosse. He even wrote for the Chicago
"Interocean" which was a big name newspaper for Chicago.
Then in about 1883-1884, a flamboyant politician came on
the scene in La Crosse. His name was Frank Powell.
He became known as White Beaver because he supposedly saved
an Indian tribe from small pox or something.
I forget the details, but in any case Powell came into
La Crosse, and he came in at a time when labor was beginning
to really get organized. The Knights of Labor were
setting up assemblies. The mayor of La Crosse
conveniently said he wasn't going to run again, and Powell
jumped in and took advantage of that and decided to
run himself as an Independent, so to speak, as a pro-labor, but
he didn't call himself labor. Taylor was a very good editor
and a good writer, and Taylor latched himself to Powell,
not out in front, but behind the scenes.
He was his campaign manager, so to speak.
He stayed that way for Powell's two terms as Mayor of La Crosse.
That's 1885, now comes labor.
Here we're to the other topic that we talked about earlier.
The strike in Milwaukee was a major event in Wisconsin labor
history, we all know that. Powell was an opportunist and he
saw this as his opportunity to expand beyond La Crosse Mayor
to something bigger, and Taylor saw it as well.
I think very much it's a matter of taking an opportunity,
but they were also convinced in the Labor movement.
In La Crosse with Powell, and also with Taylor, they called
the first labor convention of the state in 1886.
This was the La Crosse Convention.
The La Crosse Convention sort of caught the folks in Milwaukee
by surprise. La Crosse was the second largest
city in the state at that time. It's hard to believe.
They had called the convention and it was supposed to be
representative, so many people, there were supposed to be
delegates that were selected according to the number of
people who were in the Labor movement.
Milwaukee rushed to the train, supposedly, to La Crosse to make
sure that they controlled the convention, and they did.
Basically, what happened here was that Taylor was able to
maneuver himself into position as secretary of a new political
party, the Union Labor Party. Now secretary in parties at that
time was an important position. Normally, it was, maybe not the
leader of the party, but it was second in command, so to speak.
He was secretary of the Union Labor Party, 1886-1887,
two years. Let me go back.
He established his own newspaper, the "Wisconsin Labor
Advocate" which was the official voice of the Union Labor Party
and it was published in La Crosse.
In the process however of establishing this newspaper,
he sort of had to put himself out front.
This is where he began to get into difficulty
because he was black. As long as he could be
a wire-puller or manipulator from behind that was all right,
but as soon as he emerged in front then he began
to get static from others who were jealous of his position,
and they began to criticize him for his race,
as well as his stand in labor. Taylor was a student of Pomeroy,
and Pomeroy was abrasive. He delighted in sarcasm,
and Taylor did the same thing. I'll use some examples later.
Taylor responded in kind, words. The same words as he got.
One editor called him a descendant of the cannibal race,
for example, and that was too much.
He just couldn't resist and he lost his readership pretty fast.
You could say most anything, but you could criticize openly,
white people, even at that time. Basically, he burnt his bridges
in La Crosse. For all practical purposes
he really was outspoken and he left.
He vanishes from La Crosse in 1887-1888 and he surfaces
again in Iowa in 1891.
There's a transformation that's gone on.
Until that time his emphasis was labor.
It's almost as if Taylor thought of himself as--
He didn't recognize his color. A friend of mind from Chicago
said La Crosse is "Wonderbread Land."
That's the way he views it. There's a white landscape
out there. He was the anomaly,
he was the odd one. He was more than that.
He wasn't a barber. He was more than middle class.
He was an editor of a newspaper. Maybe that is middle class.
In any case, he was Labor. When he moved to Iowa,
he gave up on that altogether. Not quite, but he moved
from Labor and he began to emphasis race.
It's almost as if, when he moved to Iowa he'd exhausted his
opportunities in Labor and now he was going to a new discovery
which was that of race. In Iowa, he wants to play
politics as well. To be in Black politics in Iowa
in 1891 you had to be a Republican, because that's where
the votes are. Probably 95% of Black voters
were Republican because the Republican Party had liberated
them from slavery. Plus the Democratic Party
was the party of slavery and the party that defended
states' rights, so there was little option.
If you want to play politics you had to be a Republican.
He tried that for one year. He tried it, and he was very
successful at it. At the National Convention
of the Republican Party in 1892, he was one of three,
and one of those three was Fred Douglass.
He was one of three to carry the platform, or planks, to the
Republican National Platform Committee, and
the platform committee rejected every one of their suggestions.
He left it in a huff. He departed the Party and turned
to the Democratic Party as fast as possible.
Because after all, the Democratic Party was the
party closest to his roots. He was a populist in Wisconsin.
He also was Labor in Wisconsin, and at least the Democratic
Party was close to that. So for the next period
from 1892 to 1904, Taylor moved up rapidly,
not within the party itself, but in a parallel part of it,
the Negro Bureau within the Democratic Party.
He couldn't really be a major player in the Democratic Party
because it's strength is in the South at that time.
For there to be an important Black person within the party
structure, the South would rebel, they'd move out.
That wasn't a possibility, but you could play politics in
the Negro Bureau so he did that. And he did it very well.
In 1900 he was elected president of the National Negro Democratic
League, which would be the Negro Bureau within the party.
But it was also clear that by the 1900,
he wasn't getting any success. That was going nowhere.
By 1900 you have the resurrection of complete
white rule in the South. Blacks are being disenfranchised
throughout the South. Scientific racism
is very much in vogue everyplace,
lynching. And there seems to be no one
in either party that's interested in bringing that
under control. So in 1904 when another--
This takes us to another period for Taylor.
That's the title of the book. We went from Labor to race,
and now we're finally going to liberty.
That's an independent course completely.
He's given up on Labor, of working within the political
party system. He went to race in a parallel
fashion, along side the Democratic Party, as a part of
it, but not in it really. Then finally in 1904 when the
National Negro Liberty Party formed, he wasn't
a part of the formation. But when they asked him
to be their standard-bearer, he agreed.
The party promised him a great deal.
This new party promised him that they would get their message
across in the newspapers. That was a folly, obviously,
because newspapers, almost all of them
were party newspapers in one way or another.
They were either democrat or republican.
No one was going to publish this party.
He didn't have a newspaper. They promised 300 people that
would go out on the stump to speak for the party.
None of those appeared. They didn't even have the money
to get on the ballot for most of the states.
So it was a disaster. He lost big-time
in this election. He did travel the states and
gave speeches, but it was not very successful.
In the book, I said that he retired from politics;
he left it completely. And that's the problem.
I wish I had someone deliver two boxes of material!
All the data, and all I had to do was go through and sort it.
That would be wonderful. That didn't happen in my case.
I discovered a reference in 1913.
Taylor marched in the inaugural parade for Woodrow Wilson,
which means he didn't retire from politics.
Not as completely as I wrote it. So that last chapter
is going to be revised. I don't know
whether I will do it. I'm sure someone will spot it.
That's the problem with writing the first one about a guy.
[laughter]
I see I do have a few minutes. Or do I?
I want to read a couple things.
One of the-- I hadn't intended on doing this,
but I'm going to do it anyhow, since the earlier speaker.
1886. The platform of the Union Labor
Party in Wisconsin. I'll just read a couple of the
ideas that I think you'll find interesting.
One is, "The repeal of all laws that do not bear equally upon
capital and labor; the removal of unjust technicalities.
Delays in discrimination of the administration of justice.
Two, the enactment of laws to compel corporations to pay their
employees weekly in lawful money for the labor of the preceding
week; and giving mechanics and laborers a first lien upon
the product of their labor." Hmm.
"The abolition of the contract system on national, state and
municipal works. The enactment of laws providing
for arbitration between employee and employer,
and to enforce the decision of the arbiters.
To prohibit the hiring out of conflict labor."
[light laughter] "The enactment of a law for the
levy of a graduated income tax." Radical stuff.
Then, this comes back to our point about the strike.
"Resolved that we favor law and order and condemn all officials,
anarchists and Communists who seek to advance their interests
or theories in violations of the rights of men to liberty, life
and the pursuit of happiness." Now, I may have thrown that in,
you know. You've got to say something
after what has gone on before.
Do I have time?
Well, I do.
These are examples of where he gets to the spot where he almost
says too much. Frank Powell, who is
White Beaver, had decided to go to London with Buffalo Bill.
Frank Powell was a fancy shot with a pistol.
So he was going to go and participate in this
for the Queen of England. He decided to do that,
and his brother decided to run for mayor.
Then Frank Powell decided he didn't like his brother,
so this became a big fight. He opposed his brother's
candidacy. Now, this is Taylor.
"Mayor Frank Powell displayed the black hand all through
the campaign that ended last Tuesday.
For his trouble in so doing, the working classes will
remember him in the future, and the common talk of the
businessmen of the city is that he played anything but
a manly part in the campaign." "The dusky man," that's Taylor,
"of the Advocate, was good enough to save him,"
Frank Powell, "from the severe attack of
political paralysis in the state convention that was held in this
city on the 13th of July last, and also in the -- convention.
But because we were honest enough to stand by the true
colors of the Union Labor Party this spring, and support George
Powell," his brother, "for mayor, against the wishes
of the noted Beaver, we were branded by him
'The Dusky Man.' With pride, we own our color,
but the color is on the surface, and not buried beneath a shroud
of transparent whiteness that displays a heavy coat
of diabolical blackness in the background, as does the right,
honorable mayor of La Crosse. All good citizens agree
that he has clearly shown the black hand."
You don't say those things in 1880.
A friend of mine from Cincinnati said that if he had said that
in Cincinnati, he'd be dead. And this is my point.
I think he didn't see himself as in danger by doing that.
In La Crosse, he could be cute and say some of these things.
And he did, it was very good. He was pretty good at it.
I have one more. This is a case where a fellow,
he was the editor of a newspaper in La Crosse called
the Commercial Advertiser and Record, and he had called
Taylor a descendant of the cannibal race.
He goes on, he says, "We have but three causes for regret.
Not that the color of our skin is black, not that we do not
receive a liberal patronage from the people of La Crosse and
vicinity, and not that the Commercial Advertiser will hurt
our business, but because the editorial for -- Wisconsin
is scourged by the 'It' that writes the Commercial
Advertiser, because the businessmen of La Crosse
will be humbug to some extent by this 'It,' and because
the same 'It' is a disgrace, not only to the editorial
fraternity, but also to the noble race he represents.
Though you are only an 'It,' Jacob, you have our regrets.
And when you want to write on cannibalism again, come over and
borrow our encyclopedia, so that you can get your article charged
with a little common sense. You are externally white,
but God only knows the color of your heart."
[laughs] Those are fighting words.
That's it. [applause]