I wrote this
paper during the first semester of my Freshman year at Michigan State University
in the fall of 2001 for HST 201, which is US History from the US Civil War
to the present. I do not know what what grade I received for it, but I suspect
it was a 4.0 because it exceeded the standards of the required project. It
may already be outdated. JDA, June 19, 2002
“Well Walter I
like you - you little soak.
I wish you was with me. You
wouldnt work in the Mines if I had to say. Well
goodby. Kiol. TP.”
This note on a postcard postmarked 1912 in
Peoria
,
Illinois
, to my great grandfather, Walter Petlewski, from his brother, Anthony, is the
last known contact with Anthony and his family in
Calumet
,
Michigan
. It indicates an interfamily and
generational struggle between the old and new, the family dependent and the
independent, and an effort to survive versus a vision of something better.
The direct and indirect conditions of the copper mines obviously had
something to do with Anthony’s departure at the age of twenty-two.
Perhaps Anthony saw the rising conflict between the workers and
Calumet
and Hecla Mining Company in the years to come.
Possibly, Anthony sensed the eventual downfall of the copper industry in
the
Keweenaw Peninsula
. Regardless of the reasons of
Anthony’s escape, these last words would come back to haunt Walter two and six
years later, and Walter later illustrates his frustrations with the mines.
Therefore, the rise and fall of the copper mining industry in
Houghton County
,
MI
; federal governmental policy failure to regulate the social consequences of
industrialization; and other underlying events had a profound impact on the
inner events that molded the values possessed by future generations of my
family.
Like many families of different nationalities, the Pytlewski family
immigrated to
Houghton
County
in the late nineteenth century. The
first member of the Pytlewskis to immigrate to the
United States
was one of the three original brothers, Stanislaus, in 1875.
It is unknown why he immigrated, or why or if his intentions were to
settle in the Calumet Region. Unlike
some families of foreign origin, Stanislaus emigrated from the
Poland
area of the German Empire to the
United States
solo according to his passenger manifest on
June 12, 1875
. His occupation is listed as a
laborer that was traveling by steerage.
This would lead me to believe that he and his family were not in a
situation of wealth, which would possibly be a reason for his emigration from
Germany
. Five years later other Pytlewskis
would follow.
The next members of the Pytlewski family to immigrate to the
United States
were Stanislaus’ two brothers, John Joseph & Joseph, in 1880.
Again, the brothers seem to have traveled separately.
Interestingly, both of the future wives of Stanislaus and John Joseph
immigrate the same years that they would marry their husbands.
Antonia Sikorski, Stanislaus’ wife, immigrated on
June 22, 1880
,
while Wladyslawa Sikorski, John’s wife, immigrated on
February 16, 1882
,
according to both of their manifest records.
Reoccurring is the fact that both of these women seem to have immigrated
by their lonesome.
If
there were more Petlewski relations to immigrate to the
United States
, or to
Calumet
, is irrelevant as compared to the origin of other immigrants in
Calumet
.
Calumet
was the true example of an American European melting pot city in its prime.
It is about sixty thousand people included Cornish, Finnish, Irish,
Croatians, Italians, Polish, along with many other ethnicities in which nearly
all worked for a job that was directly or indirectly connected to the copper
mining industry in the Keweenaw Peninsula.
Along with the
many nationalities, came an emerging ethnicizing of the workforce in the mining
industry. For example, the Irish
started as poor laborers, while the Cornish obtained managerial jobs
underground.
This seemed to hold true for the Polish.
All three immigrant Pytlewski brothers held day laborer jobs at Calumet
& Hecla Mining Co. when they first arrived according to census, marriage,
and mining employment records. A
good example of this ethnicizing can be seen in who held trammer jobs, which I
will describe later. The Senate
report on the 1913 strike in
Calumet
indicates that “Tramming is done mostly by the Finns, Croatians, Hungarians,
Italians, and Poles. The work is so
hard that Cornish men and other miners will not touch it.”
This blunt language of the Senate Report draws almost a picture of acceptance of
ethnicizing by the federal government.
The church played
an important role in the
Calumet
immigrant. There were thirty-three
churches in the
Calumet
area at its peak. Many of them
preached the same religion, the only differences lying within the language and
the people addressed. Many churches
of the area addressed the literacy problems of the new immigrants by
establishing schools or by interpreting the spellings of their names for church
records. This would become a very
important practice in the
Calumet
immigrant community as well as across the nation. In
Calumet
, the church official was often a member of the ethnicity of the church, and
therefore, was more influential in determining the spelling of a family’s last
name by following the traditions of that ethnic group.
The Polish church, St. Anthony’s, followed the Polish practice of
ending the last names of females with an “a” as shown by Walter
Pytlewski’s spelling of the last name of his godmother on his baptismal
certificate.
Take, for example, the last name
Pytlewski, a church official would spell the last name of a female Pytlewska.
Since a number of
Calumet
immigrants were illiterate, registering with the county turned out to be a
process of many mistakes. The
government clerk filling out the registration for the foreign families often
misspelled many of the foreign names because the clerk often had to sound it out
from another language. In other
words, the register often anglicized many last names according to their
knowledge.
Another source of
name change was the family itself to make the spelling of their name easier to
pronunciate and to escape the ethnicization placed upon them by other groups.
For example, a cousin of the Pytlewski family changed his name from
Zwierzchowski to Rinksi. The
Pytlewski family name itself was generally changed to Petlewski, although there
were many exceptions through various misspellings by government officials and
even by the mining company.
Because of the schooling, both by the Polish church and the government,
of the second generation of Pytlewski family, their name permanently became
Petlewski in the John Joseph branch and remained Pytlewski in only some branches
in Stanistaus’ family. This
would not matter as much as what they would face in the copper mines.
The harsh
conditions of the copper mines took a toll on people of the “
Copper
County
”. The son of John Joseph, Walter,
witnessed the bore the conditions that the copper mines had to offer,
particularly in 1914 and 1918. In
each year he witnessed one of about sixty deaths a year,
both to good family friends. In
1914, he witnessed the death of Thomas Wills.
“I am a partner to Thomas Wills,” Walter testified in a Mine
Inspector’s Report. “We left
each other at the 10th level to go to the 15th level to
start the pumps and he told me to start sprinkling and that he would come up
after me. That was the last I saw of
him.”
Chilling words, but these words would not describe the last time a
jolting experience would rock Walter.
The death of
another friend, Henry Jarvi, was even more dramatic.
Walter testified in a Mine Inspector’s Report in 1918 that he and Jarvi
“were taking down drills in the man car from the 20th to the 21st
level. One of the drills caught in
the crossing plank, swung over and threw Jarvi out.
I called for help to stop the cage, and then went down and found him
lying in the shaft.”
In fact, the Mine Inspector’s Report is missing that the accident not
only killed Jarvi, but it also nearly killed another co-worker, George Eskola.
The Calumet News on
December 12, 1918
writes that Walter “saw Jarvi grab him and pull him into the shaft.” It also
says that Eskola was found about fifty feet beneath the twentieth level
unconscious and Jarvi’s body was found at the 24th level.”
My grandmother says her father despised working in the mines, but
she never knew why until I found these mining reports.
Not surprisingly, Walter quits working in the mine in March the following
year and is found in the 1920 US Federal Census in
Detroit
working as an autoworker.
Like Walter, many
members of the Petlewski family abandoned the mining industry most likely due to
the harsh conditions of the mines. Stanislaus,
as previously stated, left the mines in 1882 to work as a clerk and eventually a
saloon entrepreneur. Joseph, on the
other hand, seemed to be indecisive about his choice.
He would alternate working at the mines and working for his brother, and
sometimes he would work in both. Two
of Stanislaus’ sons worked at the mines for a brief period of time. Many of
Stanislaus other children left and were spread all over the country from
Montana
to
Detroit
. John Joseph’s son, John
Joseph Jr. never did work in the mines, and eventually left for
Detroit
in 1928 to join his sister, Cecilia, and her husband.
The only known member in
Calumet
after the defection of many were Joseph, possibly some of Stanislaus’
children, and John Joseph and his children, Alex, Mary, and Vincent
I alluded to
before that John Joseph’s son, Anthony, would leave the mines and the city at
the age of twenty-two in 1912. It
is not known why he left, at least to current generations, or where he went.
Family folklore has two versions of what became of him.
First, he may have walked into
Lake Superior
and never came back. This has been
proven false by the postcard that he wrote to his brother, Walter, from
Peoria
. Second, he may have moved to
Erie
,
Pennsylvania
, and died in the Johnstown Flood along with the circus he possibly joined.
This may be true since my grandmother has an artifact in her possession
that indicates that it is from
Erie
,
PA.
However, Anthony doesn’t show up in a list of people taken by the
flood. Also, who hasn’t said a
deranged member of a family left and joined the circus?
These folklores must be put into context considering that two of the
stories were told of a sister-in-law who didn’t have a high opinion of the
Petlewski family.
Other workers of
the
Calumet
copper industry also expressed their dissatisfaction with the mining conditions
with the strike of 1913. In an
effort to secure their jobs, the miners took on a nine month strike.
It was a result of the introduction of the one man drill, which the
miners worried this innovation would cut the labor force.
Before the one man drill, a drill required two workers; one to drill and
one to pour water into the hole. Other
issues involved the recognition of the Western Federation of Miners, which the
miners not receive, and the reduction from a ten hour workday to an eight hour
work day. C & H did not
cease to use the one man drill, and in fact kept the workers that they hired as
strikebreakers along side the original employees when they ceased their strike.
It is interesting to note that on the mining applications, post 1913,
there is an excerpt in the application that requires the employee to pledge that
they aren’t aligned with the Western Federation of Miners.
It is worthy to
note that not all mining employees went on strike.
Many above ground employees, such as smelters who were not organized by
the Western Federation of Miners, did not strike at all.
Even some loyal underground employees did not strike, and this would
cause tension between the loyal or scab miners and the organized labor force.
The strike would result in many injuries, arrests, and deaths in the nine
month period. At the peak of the
strike, a terrible incident occurred when the strikers gathered together with
their families at the Italian Hall in
Calumet
on Christmas Eve. A man, whom many
believe acted in the interest of the mining companies, yelled fire.
The patrons of the event scrambled for the door, which the people could
not open because the doors opened inward or because it was barricaded depending
on the source. Seventy-three people
died, many of whom were women and children, as a result of being trampled.
Doors that opened inward seemed to be a reoccurring safety problem all
across the nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as
indicated in other incidents in
New York
and
Chicago
. This is an example of failure of
the federal government to address the safety conditions of buildings.
Nevertheless, the
Calumet
incident made national headlines and achieved sympathy for the miners’ fight.
The conditions of
the copper mining industry would lead to many health problems among its local
citizens. The death records of
Houghton County indicate people dying of many diseases such as Typhoid,
Diphtheria, and Small Pox Even
though Stanislaus quit working in the mines at an early age to work in and
eventually own his own saloon and a funeral parlor, he died prematurely of
pneumonia in 1916.
His first wife, Antonia, presumably died of unknown reasons in the early
1890’s. John Joseph’s wife,
Wladyslawa, died of unknown reasons in 1908
leaving Walter, at age thirteen, under the domestic care of his sister, Mary.
Other problems among miners included goiters.
Apparently, all of John Joseph’s male children that worked in the mines
had goiters, according to my grandmother. Empirical
evidence shows that Walter was discharged from the Michigan National Guard after
a year of service in 1918 at
Fort
MacArthur
,
Waco
,
Texas
for having an internal goiter.
.
The miners had to deal with the hard physical labor of the mines, which
caused health problems later in life. John
Joseph Petlewski’s mining record indicates that he suffered from rheumatism.
At one point he was a trammer,
an employee who pushed carts along the tracks, which the Senate Report on the
1913 strike described as “exhausting, muscle-straining, back-breaking work,
really work for beasts of burden or for mechanical motors.”
If this profession is as bad as the Senate Report makes it sound, it is
easy to understand this burden on the body.
As
a result of the primitive health care of infants of the mining city of
Calument
, numerous children died from diseases as well.
Stanislaus would lose about half of his children; born by both wives,
Antonia and Mary; to death. He lost
one daughter, Octevga, to Measles;
another daughter, Fanna to Scarlet Fever;
Pygale to Diphtheria;
Roman to Pneumonia,
and Kate to stillbirth.
It is possible that John Joseph lost a child to stillbirth as well.
Perhaps, the reason why Stanislaus lost so many children was the result
of Stanislaus not having the health insurance of the mines.
Healthcare provided by the mines to its employees was one dollar per
month.
The fact that there were so many premature deaths in one family shows that
health conditions were poor in
Calumet
, as well as the nation, in the early twentieth century.
There were also
positive social conditions of
Calumet
as well. A first class theatre was
built in the early twentieth century that showed Broadway plays.
Saloons and other stores were popular with local miners along with secret
societies and clubs. Stanislaus was
the treasurer for the local St. Stanislaus’ Society, a Polish church society,
at one point in his life.
Sporting events were also popular. In
fact, the first American hockey player to play in the Stanley Cup playoffs, a
tournament for the National Hockey League championship, was from
Calumet
.
C & H also did many things for the community as well, such as
building a library and maintaining a hospital in Laurium,
Calumet
’s sister city.
Progressivism, as
a result to address the social consequences of industrialization, took a
stronghold in
Calumet
like much of the rest of the nation. One
example directly affected Joseph Petlewski in his daily operation of
Stanislaus’ saloon after Stanislaus passed on.
Joseph, in 1917, was “charged with having his place of business
open on Sunday,” according to the Calumet News.
In reality, Joseph claimed that he was not opened for business, but open
for doing inventory as required by a war revenue law enacted during World War I.
His Polish friend, who was not identified in the paper, came into the bar
and “demanded a drink.” Instead
of selling him one, which was illegal due to the no Sunday business law in 1917,
Joseph gave him a drink. This shows
a conflict emerging out of a misunderstanding between moral progressives and WWI
law. Progressivism would also affect
Joseph, with the passage of the 18th Amendment, which prohibited the
production, sale, or consumption of alcohol.
The Progressive laws passed still affect my father to this day as he
cannot sell liquor before
noon
on Sunday in his grocery store.
The longer the
two families in
Detroit
and
Calumet
were separated by the Straight of Mackinac, the more distant they became.
With the exception being between Walter and his sister, Mary, the
Petlewski family did not see each other much after the split.
They remained within their own extreme ends of
Michigan
, and only saw each other during funerals.
The Petlewski Detroiters and the Calumet Petlewski family did have their
commonalities such as the continuing problems of the urban and industrial
cities. In contrast, one branch
prospered after the Great Depression of the 1930’s while the other family
became extinct by old age, the lack of children, and the fall of the Mining
industry.
There were
several problems that occurred in the
new city
,
Detroit
, to the Petlewskis. During the
1920’s and the early 1930’s, Walter lived as a boarder or lived with his
brother, John Joseph Jr., until he became self sufficient with his job at Dodge
as a millwright.
[The other problems have been removed for this internet version of this
paper for privacy reasons]
Out of World War
II, emerged a new Petlewski middle class.
Walter was able to afford a house as a single male with his only son,
Walter Paul, still living in his house. He
had many luxuries that would begin to define the middle class.
Walter thoroughly cherished his automobiles, and by the late 1950’s he
was at least on his second car according to the many pictures of him and his
cars. He was able to obtain his
first car in about 1928 according to his license plate in one of pictures, most
likely as a result of company credit which became a popular way to purchase
expensive items in the 1920’s.
John Joseph Jr.
and his wife, Ivy, were also able to make gains.
According to a grandchild who lived with them for a period, they were
well off financially. He was now an
interior decorator, and didn’t work in the auto factories as a result of his
dislike of the unions. This
may have resulted in his observations of the mining unions up north.
Cecilia’s family also achieves the same status as her husband worked in
the auto factories along with her sons and daughter.
After the Petlewskis entered the middle class they would stay there until
the present.
There were three
reasons for the decline of the mines which lead to the decline of the Calumet
Petlewskis. Before
World War I
,
Germany
was the primary purchaser of Copper from northern
Michigan
. An already hurting post 1913
strike copper industry in northern
Michigan
would be harmed even further due to the war.
The second downfall of the copper industry was the federal government's
cease in purchasing copper from the Michigan Copper Companies.
This put people out of work, and because of this, many went to
Detroit
to find jobs in the auto industry. The
final hit was the Great Depression, which severely put the area at a standstill.
As a result of
the decline of the mines, the Petlewski family in
Calumet
faced a bleaker picture than its counterparts in
Detroit
. John Joseph’s other son,
Vincent, would be layed off by C & H nine times between 1921 and 1932, and
virtually did not work for C & H much in the 1930’s.
His mining record indicates, at one point, he was working for the Works
Progress Administration for ten months in Osceola, a nearby community.
The WPA, a government program, had an aim to employ people in vast areas
of work and pump money back into the economy during the Great Depression of the
1930’s in which the nation suffered a severe economic breakdown as a result of
the overproduction of the 1920’s. For
example, one division in the WPA was devoted to soundex, an indexing system to
the United States Census, and other divisions were responsible for building or
renovating public buildings such as schools and post offices.
It was the largest New Deal program first requiring funding of five
billion dollars when first established.
Vincent’s
brother, Alex, did marry a girl originally from
Marquette
,
MI
, in 1925,
but he worked in the Copper mines until they shut down in the 1950’s, and they
failed to have any children. Mary
took the domestic role replacing her mother after her death handling the
domestic duties of her brother Vincent until his death in 1960.
The saloon took a hit, by Joseph’s age, the beginning of the Great
Depression, and prohibition as it is listed as a soft drink shop in the Michigan
Business Directories during prohibition in the 1920’s and eventually ceased to
exist in the early 1930’s. Joseph
would die in 1935 as a result of having a heart attack bringing wood up from the
cellar to the fireplace in the winter.
All of these
underlying events would have a great impact on the spreading of a family that
started off with three central brothers. Because
of job opportunities, in just one hundred and twenty years from 1880, this
family would be in at least eight cities in at least five different states from
California
to
Florida
. Another part of this was the
emergence of transportation. Originally
in 1880, the only way to get from
Calumet
to
Detroit
was by Train or ship. Over time,
the Mineral Range Railroad in
Calumet
gave way to the automobile, car ferries, the
Mackinac
Bridge
, highways, and aviation, which made it easier and cheaper for people to
migrate.
The values since
Petlewski immigration in 1875 have survived to this very day, at least in my
immediate family. The first
generation used hard work and its Catholic faith just to stay afloat.
Stanislaus innovated this value by using his knowledge and intellect to
push that upward mobility even further. This
would have an affect on his nephews, especially when they traveled to work in
Detroit
. Walter, particularly, used
his knowledge from the army and mines to come out ahead and emerge his family
into the middle class.
History does not enter a person through one event, but
as a blend of events exits a family through their personality as described by
the many historical consequences on my Petlewski family.
From the direct
Calumet
mining consequences to its indirect results that would aide interfamily conflict
in spreading the family apart, the effects of history on the Petlewski family
has evolved the family to show new family values while retaining old country
beliefs. Therefore, I can say that
the
snowballing effects by immigration and industrialization, that have entered my
family’s core of values over 122 years,