A Working Town

In the opening decades of the 20th century, Wisconsin's industrial economy shifted from its pioneering base in mining, logging and agriculture to more modern, value-added manufacturing. Logging companies became paper makers, wagon makers became auto builders and so on.

In 1918-'19, General Motors came to Janesville, first by purchasing J.A. Craig’s Janesville Machine Company, then by moving the Samson Tractor factory to the city. After making trucks and tractors for a few years, GM concentrated its Janesville operations on Chevrolet autos and bodies for other vehicles. During World War II, the plants were refitted to make artillery shells and produced about sixteen million by war's end. Peace brought a conversion back to Chevy cars that lasted until 1983, followed by pick up trucks.

As early as 1925, GM employed about 2600 men and women, or about sixty percent of Janesville's full time industrial work force of 4400. City population hit 13,000 in the 1890s and stayed there until World War I, then doubled to 26,000 between 1918 and 1927. The impact of General Motors on the growth of the city cannot be overestimated, but just having GM in town did not automatically make the good times roll.

Welder on truck car assembly line, Chevrolet plant, late 1940's.

While GM brought a lot of jobs to the Janesville in the 1920s, the majority were low wage, paying forty-fifty cents per hour. A 1925 study conducted for a "Better Cities Contest," and therefore not likely to stress negative findings, reported that nearly ten percent of working families in Janesville were not earning enough to provide a minimum level of food, clothing and shelter. Working families that were able to make ends meet, did so because they had more than one member working outside the home. Fathers may have been the leading breadwinners, but mothers, and certainly teenage sons and daughters, worked outside the home and helped support their families. Of Janesville's 4,400 full time industrial workers in 1925, more than 1,000 were women, almost half of whom worked at Parker Pen. Note that these were industrial workers. Women also worked in familiar female jobs as teachers, nurses and office clerks while both women and teenagers worked as retail clerks, receptionists, delivery people, and go-fers in workshops and commercial operations. The two or three paycheck family was common in the working class decades before it made its well-publicized appearance in the middle class of the 1970s.

If Janesville was not necessarily heaven for working people in the relatively prosperous 1920s, it was certainly less so in the 1930s. For example, the GM plant was shuttered in 1933 and 1934. When it reopened, the economy was still shaky and remained shaky until the onset of World War II, a fact which only adds luster to the courageous participation of Janesville's autoworkers in the successful union recognition sit-down strikes of 1937. As a result of the UAW victory, in the post-World War II years Janesville's autoworkers were among the elite of American blue collar workers. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century a Janesville high school graduate working for a few years at GM could expect to be paid as much as or more than most of his teachers and many other professionals. Janesville enjoyed the golden age of the American blue collar middle class--1950s-1970s--and has, of course, been dealing with its decline since the 1980s.

The golden age of the autoworker is a distinctive historical fact of Janesville. While J.A. Craig and other GM managers helped create the golden age, so did Janesville's UAW leader Elmer Yanney and the men he led in the sit down in 1937.

The other Janesville industrial story is that of Parker Pen. It has all the elements of an old-fashioned American success story. A young man disregards his family's advice to follow a seemingly secure career path as a telegrapher and strikes out on his own. Parker develops a practical and attractive fountain pen and, more importantly, takes advantage of modern marketing and advertising know-how to build a successful company. The Parker Lucky Curve, Duofold, Vacumatic and 51 pens wrote well, looked stylish and made Parker Pen one of Wisconsin's first internationally-known companies.