Wheel Fever by Jesse J. Gant

Author:Jesse J. Gant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Published: 2013-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

The good roads movement helped transform the Wisconsin landscape. By the middle 1890s, new maps documented area roads, paths, and trails. This one, produced in 1896 by the Wisconsin Division of the LAW, also illuminated changes in terrain—“level,” “hilly,” and “very hilly”—on routes through several counties.

WHi Image ID 68728

In addition to creating urban bike paths, wheelmen also pursued opportunities to spread the cycling gospel with renewed energy after 1894. They pedaled around Wisconsin to meet with rural residents and used a variety of tactics to approach rural communities. Again, they appealed to “civilization.” Writers for the Pneumatic liked to point out that North Milwaukee, a factory town situated around the large A. D. Meiselbach Company bicycle plant just north of downtown, lacked good roads, undermining the town’s livability. What was the use, editors asked, of having bike factories if roads were so impassable that workers couldn’t even ride their bikes to their job? Though the Pneumatic praised the community for its beautiful homes, well-equipped general store, and modern electric system, along with “a goodly number of high minded citizens,” wheelmen feared North Milwaukee would never become a great city without better roads. Stung by these charges, North Milwaukee residents turned to the wheelmen for advice on how to improve their situation. They invited Otto Dorner and LAW chief consul Frank P. Van Valkenburgh, also a Milwaukee lawyer, to advise them on how to build better roads. After a short bike ride to the community meeting, the “good roads apostles,” as they were called, demonstrated the need for improved streets by shaking the dust from their clothing. Dorner, who was not well known outside the wheelmen community, brought newspaper clippings praising his good roads credentials and made the meeting chairperson read them aloud to the crowd. For three hours, “the apostles” spoke about roads and shared their stories to an enthralled crowd of fifty residents. Part of the presentation undoubtedly included photographs Dorner had collected for the LAW’s yearly competition for the most deplorable road conditions in America.33

The apostles who rode into town on their fancy bikes and used the dust in their clothes to demonstrate the poor condition of roads made for great political theater, but the wheelmen often failed to win rural support. They were impatient and condescending in their negotiations with rural people. One of the best examples of this is Isaac B. Potter’s Gospel of Good Roads: A Letter to the American Farmer (1891), which outlined a detailed case for road improvement by talking down to the farmer at every turn.34 In depicting the state’s farmers as ignorant rubes hostile to all forms of change, Potter’s book expanded the growing divide between city and country in Wisconsin. Eventually, seeing that their words had won them few friends, the wheelmen backed off.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.