Edmund Eisenscher's Milwaukee Union Photographs

The Eisenscher gallery showcases 133 photos taken by Edward Eisenscher (1909-1995), photographer for the "Wisconsin CIO News." Today only about 11 percent of American workers belong to a union. But when Eisenscher was working, more than a third of working Americans were union members. Milwaukee was one of the nation's leading manufacturing centers and, after four decades of socialist government, one of its strongest union communities, too. Residents considered labor unions a basic part of the social fabric like schools and churches. Eisenscher's images document the role unions played in people's lives during this vanished era.

The Eisenscher Collection

His images range in time from 1938-1956, but the majority date from 1946-1948 when he was a photographer for "Wisconsin CIO News." The nation was experiencing sharp price increases at the time and workers' demands for raises to keep up with inflation met stiff opposition. The passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 outlawed or restricted many organized labor activities. On top of this, many labor unions also faced anti-communist persecution during the McCarthy Era.

 

Eisenscher's photographs document union life in Milwaukee during this tumultuous time. They are especially valuable because they depict more than just strikes and demonstrations. Instead, most of his images show union members and their families outside of work at recreation such as dances and bowling.

 

His focus on life outside the factory conveys a sense of the strength of unions and the central role they played in workers' lives. Dozens of images capture dances, picnics, weddings, bowling and other sports, and various social events. Eisenscher also took photos of the factory floor, strikes and union meetings, but the unique value of his work is its depiction of everyday life for working-class Milwaukee people during and after World War II.

Collection Highlights

Some of the topics that Eisenscher documented include a 1946 strike at Allis-Chalmers, demonstrations the same year of railroad car ferry workers for a 40-hour week, and the leftist People's Bookstore. As large numbers of African Americans migrated to Wisconsin after the war, the "CIO News" ran a series about black union leader Isaiah Pyant (pictured above). The online collection contains more than two dozen images documenting African-American participation in union activities during the years that many of the state's black families first arrived. The entire collection contains 891 prints and 939 negatives, from which 133 have been selected for this gallery.