New sources for Wisconsin

The March-April issue of the Wisconsin Historical Society newsletter Columns notes two batches of documents recently placed on line at Turning Points in Wisconsin History:

300 pages of a total of around 3000 pages of records of the Anti-Saloon League focusing on the league's "secret infiltration of taverns in 1917-18," including "private investigators' reports of drinking in Delavan and Oconto Falls." (Query: can we see the PIs' expense reports?)

documents on Hispanic history in Wisconsin, including a history of migrant farm workers a century ago, "a social worker's mimeographed report on the Mexican-American community in Milwaukee in 1930, and a 1968 account of the founding of Obreros Unidos, a migrant workers' labor union."

Pullman

The Newberry Library's always-informative blog points to a recent Washington Post story about Pullman porters, and uses that news peg to remind us of the Newberry's gargantuan 2500-cubic-foot of Pullman company papers, most of which are open to researchers. Here is the 808-page guide to the collection (PDF). The company employed an unusually diverse workforce, so the genealogical possibilities are good if you know what you're doing.

My closest brush with the collection so far has been reading Susan Eleanor Hirsch's fascinating 2003 book based on it, After the Strike: A Century of Labor Struggle at Pullman. It's a history with a complex argument, and real people make regular appearances:

In 1940 the upholsterer Tillman Davis took action and accused his foreman of discrimination against black workers in assigning overtime. Davis, who had been hired as a helper-apprentice at the Calumet Repair Shop after the 1922 strike, experienced the best that Pullman repair shops had to offer black men....but he was not satisfied with less than complete equality. The shop manager threatened Davis with a thirty-day suspension for insubordination unless he retracted the charge and apologized for the language he used. Davis readily apologized for the way he had made his charge but refused to retract its substance. He accepted the thirty-day suspension and returned to the shop, a symbol of black assertion but also a reminder of management's power in the absence of a real union. {157-158}