Notes On A Wisconsin Ego Trip (February/March 1984 | Volume: 35, Issue: 2)

Notes On A Wisconsin Ego Trip

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Authors: Geoffrey C. Ward

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February/March 1984 | Volume 35, Issue 2

PICTURES LIE . Or they can be made to lie. Joseph McCarthy knew that, and so do all the lesser propagandists with products or political causes to sell.

Historians know it, too, and for a very long time too many of them used old pictures selectively to portray a relentlessly cheerful American past that never was. The oversize shelves of every library are filled with nostalgic picture books in which our parents and our grandparents and their parents come off as quaint and dear; less shrewd, somehow, than we are; admirable, maybe, but awfully naive and fit only to live in their clean, untroubled, slow-paced world. The cliché had it that our ancestors lived in “simpler times.”

All of this is nonsense, of course. Times were never simple. And ever since the turbulence and disillusionment of the 1960s, the chastened compilers of picture histories have tried hard to restore the balance, to include the seamy and the painful as well as the sunny aspects of our past.

The curious career of Michael Lesy, whose fourth book, Bearing Witness , has recently been published, shows that the new sort of pictorial history can be just as misleading as the old.

His first and best-known book, Wisconsin Death Trip , was published just ten years ago, but it already has become a historical artifact: within its pages the sensibilities of the sixties are perfectly preserved. At a time when we were eager to believe the worst about ourselves, Lesy was happy to oblige. The supposedly idyllic turn-of-the-century small town had been the special favorite of an earlier generation of pictorial historians. Wisconsin Death Trip sought to show that such places were actually “charnel houses and the counties that surrounded them … places of dry bones.” The main ingredient in this strange stew of distorted fact and unconvincing fiction is a collection of some two hundred uncaptioned photographs of the people of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, made between 1890 and 1910 by an unusually able town photographer, Charles Van Schaick. The author shrewdly chose each for its power to disturb the modern eye: memorial portraits of coffined children are prominently featured (one is used twice); so are pictures in which the sitter is clearly uneasy before the camera or physically distorted in some way (there are four portraits of the same doubleamputee). A spurious historical context for the pictures is provided by lurid snippets from the local press (epidemics, suicides, and barn burnings are emphasized), as well as excerpts from madhouse records, passages from writers such as Sinclair Lewis and Hamlin Garland, who loathed small-town life, and the words of two “mythical creatures” whom Lesy simply invented. There are also collages made by the author using portions of Van Schaick’s pictures, rearranged, he says, to “emphasize emotions and elaborate meanings” the photographer failed to make clear in the originals.