The Underside of History
KING, RICHARD H.
The Underside of History Wisconsin Death Trip By Michael Lesy Pantheon. Unpaginated. $15.00 (cloth); $5.95 (paper). Reviewed by Richard H. King Assistant Professor of History and Philosophy,...
...provincial lay secret horrors...
...The successful fell into an obsessive-compulsive pattern, seeking to master social and personal chaos by avoidance...
...Lesy may even have fallen into the trap of implying that only the violent and the aberrant are "real...
...The interspersed photographs of native Americans, recent German and Scandinavian immigrants, and a few Indians and blacks, amplify the printed excerpts...
...It forces upon us a world whose inhabitants were hounded by death, disease, the self, and others, and driven by economic desperation...
...And one modern outgrowth of this, Lesy alleges, is America's dazzling consumer society, which diverts and entertains, but fails to sustain people when they are confronted with disappointment or death...
...We seldom see or read of mundane activities church and school outings, hunting trips, picnics, moments of closeness or displays of affection and trust Although these undoubtedly existed and kept the glue of society from dissolving completely...
...Hopefully, this book will lay to rest the popular conception of the "Gay '90s," as well as our unrealistic nostalgia for rural and small-town America...
...Ignoring "important" outside events like the devastating depression of 1893 and the Spanish-American War, Lesy constructs a collage made up of photographs, local newspaper accounts, state mental hospital reports, descriptions by the region's novelists, and the observations of an imaginary town gossip...
...For Lesy provides a substantive and methodological bridge between the dark, pessimistic and driven world of much American fiction and the bland, optimistic and coherent world of most American historiography...
...Wisconsin Death Trip is not without faults...
...Wisconsin Death Trip reveals that behind the familiar bland and tight-lipped "American Gothic" manner of the U.S...
...the poor, on the other hand, succumbed to paranoia, constantly fearful that random circumstance was about to overwhelm them...
...they write analytic monographs offering clear and present causes Generally large-scale and public for readily observable effects...
...Depressions, for example, are discussed primarily in terms of price levels, rates of unemployment and protest movements...
...As a result of fragmentation, the town's inhabitants had no convincing raison d'etre Aside from a rationale that defined success and failure in terms of material prosperity and individual effort...
...As Lesy notes, because the pictures are "composed," they have an iconic Almost religious quality: Families of various stations pose stiffly and sternly, in counterpoint to the accounts of infanticide, mayhem and depredations by gangs of tramps who roamed the countryside during the worst years of the depression...
...Taken together, these impart a powerful picture of the reality rural and small-town Mid-westerners were "up against" around the turn of the century...
...The objection that he has created a skewed and excessively dismal picture, therefore, carries some weight...
...More over, with Wisconsin Death Trip in mind, we can better grasp the impetus behind the works of, among others, Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and, most recently, Joyce Carol Oates...
...Indeed, fire seems to have been the great purgative for them, a way of asserting control through destruction...
...Historians also prefer to construct linear narratives that stress sequential and orderly development...
...Lesy's description of his approach is opaque and does not adequately explain his principle of selection...
...Reviewed by Richard H. King Assistant Professor of History and Philosophy, Federal City College...
...In a short concluding essay, Lesy draws back to give a broader perspective to his material...
...Family life, insanity and murder, if dealt with at all, are handled by statistical tables or with easy sociological tags such as "an-omie" and "alienation...
...Those who "survived," he says, suffered one of two fates, depending on their economic condition...
...Emphasizing the lack of community, the isolating impact of a market economy and the cruel workings of nature, he contends that Beaver River Falls is an emblem of the "death trip" rural America had become by 1900...
...Since these two decades have been studied to death, we can only be grateful for the author's fresh, intimate approach...
...Despite his vaguely economic interpretation, Lesy helps us to understand that more than economic necessity drove Americans from the land into the cities...
...author, "The Party of Eros" Most American historians have a tendency to shun the private and the deviant...
...Nevertheless, Lesy has captured a truth about the lives of people in certain communities...
...In this fascinating book, Michael Lesy has imaginatively departed from his profession's current conventions to re-create the sense of life in a fragmenting society the small town of Beaver River Falls, Wisconsin, during the years from 1890-1910...
...Suffering the physical and psychic ravages of bitterly cold winters, they committed arson with apocalyptic regularity...
...The careful arrangement of the photographs, often by symmetrical doubling, effectively suggests a society split off from itself...
Vol. 56 • October 1973 • No. 20
