Current Issue of the Wisconsin Magazine of History
Fall 2018, Volume 102, Number 1
Wisconsin Magazine of History Cover Image
Adolph Treidler’s image of a female factory worker comes from a poster commissioned for the United War Work Campaign in 1918. The tagline, omitted here, reads, “For Every Fighter a Woman Worker.” The poster is one of many from the Society’s World War I poster collection, which is profiled in this issue by Simone Munson.
Table of Contents
United War Work Campaign Poster
This poster promoted the joint efforts of the YWCA and YMCA to endorse President Woodrow Wilson’s United War Work Campaign, an effort to raise money for the ongoing war in Europe. Ironically, the armistice was signed the first day of the campaign, which was scheduled from November 11 to 18, 1918. View the original source document: WHI 132388
Collecting for Victory: World War I Printed Propaganda and the Wisconsin Historical Society
By Simone Munson
Mobilization for war encompasses more than soldiers, guns, and ammunition. When the United States entered World War I in April 1917, the entire nation mobilized to take part in the war effort, including the librarians, curators, and archivists of the Wisconsin Historical Society who had already begun to collect print propaganda related to the war. Their efforts increased after President Wilson commissioned the Committee on Public Information to mass produce posters, pamphlets, and handbills and distribute them to the American public. Through a survey of the Society’s World War I posters and pamphlets, author Simone Munson explores the ramifications of producing war propaganda, which encouraged patriotism, collective action, and individual responsibility while at the same time vilifying anything perceived to be outside the scope of pure “Americanism.”
W. A. Rogers cartoon
W. A. Rogers published this cartoon in the New York Herald on March 3, 1918, at the height of suspicion toward German-born people in America. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS LC-USZ62-105705
America's "Alien Enemies": Registering as German in Wisconsin During World War I
By Lee Grady
In 1918, President Wilson signed an order requiring all “enemy aliens” to register with the government. The order applied to anyone who had been born in Germany or one of its allied countries and was not yet naturalized. With over ten percent of the German-born population in the United States, Wisconsin was disproportionately impacted by the measure.
Otto and Ida Grady, the author’s great-grandparents, were among those forced to register. They had arrived in Wisconsin as children fifty years earlier. In 1918, in a climate of intense anti-German propaganda across the country, they went to the post office in Green Bay, had their photographs and fingerprints taken, and were issued registration cards. The Grady’s were required to stay within one mile of their home, and had to carry their cards with them at all times. If they were caught without them, they could be imprisoned. A year after the war, Otto and Ida—who sent three sons to the war—finally got their citizenship papers. On the petition they explained that having arrived as children, they had always believed they were citizens.
Memorial unveiling in Vilas Park, Madison
In 1914, the Society of American Indians met for its fourth annual conference, hosted by the University of Wisconsin at Madison. As part of the week’s celebrations, a memorial was placed at an Indian mound site in Vilas Park in Madison. Pictured here is Menominee tribal member Sara Mallon, who unveiled the memorial. UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN DIGITAL COLLECTIONS
In "The Winnebago's Country": The Society of American Indians at the University of Wisconsin in 1914
By Larry Nesper
The Society of American Indians was the first secular, progressive, Indian-led Indian rights organization in the United States. It held annual meetings from 1911 until 1923, mostly at academic institutions as it saw education as the key to the transformation of both Indian people and the image of Indian people in the eyes of the dominant society. The SAI sought citizenship for Indian people, equal education, and a legal means for tribes to bring claims directly before the US government at the Court of Claims. In 1914, the Society met at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for their fourth annual conference. It was the first time the meeting was held in a state with a relatively large Indian population, with twelve different tribes and several reservations. Half the attendees were from Wisconsin Indian communities and they played an important role in shaping the meeting and the future of the SAI.
Henry Sink
Civil War veteran Henry Sink was a member of the Grand Army of the Republic’s Samuel Harrison Post 91 in De Pere, Wisconsin. The style of the badge in his official GAR portrait dates the photograph to 1883 or later. DE PERE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Henry Sink: Settler, Soldier, Citizen
By Victoria B. Tashjian and Jeff Kannel
Through the lens of the life of Henry Sink, born into slavery in Batesville, Arkansas, in the 1830s and a resident of Northeast Wisconsin from 1864 until his death in 1905, the authors explore Northeast Wisconsin’s small but steadily growing African American population of the mid- to late nineteenth century. A veteran of the Civil War, Sink was shaped by injuries sustained in battle, which limited his ability to work and earned him a small pension that he requested numerous times to be increased. The article also examines the dissolution of Sink’s African American community at the dawning of the twentieth century: in a pattern replicated across the northern United States, African Americans became increasingly unwelcome in communities they had long called home. The number of African Americans living in Northeast Wisconsin plummeted over the early decades of the twentieth century, and as they left, local memory of this population faded away too.
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