| Notes |
- BIOGRAPHY: http://www.itcs.uiuc.edu/users/beaumont/PFRAME.HTM
It seems that Joseph Plogmann, born April 30, 1881, was close to his cousin, Charles Marxer, born April 29, 1884. There were born on almost the same day of the year but three years apart. They worked on the same threshing crew as young men. And Joseph was Charles' best man when he married Mary Ehrstein. Mary's sister, Mathilda Ehrstein, was her maid of honor, and this is likely how Joseph and Mathilda met. Charles and Mary were married, a few years later Joseph and Mathilda were married. It is also interesting to note that George Ehrstein, Mathilda's brother, was Joseph's best man and Mary Plogmann, Joseph's sister, was Mathilda's maid of honor.
Joseph and Mathilda's wedding announcement said, "Mr. Plogmann is owner of a grocery store at 39 South 16th Street, St. Louis, where they will reside." Millstadt Enterprise, September 6, 1911.
The St. Louis City Hall is located in the 1200 block of Market Street, the Court House in the 1300 block, and Union Station in the 1800 and 1900 blocks. In between were smaller commercial sites. Market Street divides the city north and south, so 39 S. 16th Street would have been in the first block south off Market Street on the north side of the street. Other businesses in this block included Daniel Russell, lodging, Anton Georgevich, barber, and the Johnson Hotel, and Crane Plumbing on the south side of the street.
The Plogmann Grocery store was listed in Gould's Redbook for the City of St. Louis for 1914, but not in the directory for 1915. Retail businesses continued to be listed in this area in the directory for 1921, so development does not seem to have been a factor in their business closing sometime late in 1914 or early 1915.
On April 5, 1914, the Millstadt Enterprise reported that Mrs. Joseph Plogmann had left Sunday with her baby (Irma) to return home to St. Louis. This suggests that the grocery store was still in business at this time and that Irma was born in St. Louis. Another Millstadt Enterprise article announced that "Joe Plogmann and family moved into a house of Jacob Hofsetter which was vacated by Professor Pierce and family on Monday (March 19, 1915). I believe this is the point at which the grocery store was lost and Joseph and Mathilda moved back to Millstadt.
The grocery business, at this time, was on the cusp of dramatic changes. In 1912, general inflation and high food costs were an issue in the presidential campaign. Also, grocery store chains started their proliferation. For instance, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company or A&P literally exploded in size between 1912 and 1927 from 480 stores to 15,000 stores. The company outraced all its competitors spreading its low-price, standardized retailing concept across America under the banner of "A&P Where Economy Rules." One cash register, a scale, and a small refrigerator were installed at each location with shelving predetermined to display 300 standard grocery items.5 "In those days, we spoke only German. It was really what everyone spoke, although most people could also speak English. I remember pointing to household objects such as a chair and asking, 'Was ist dieses?' And Mom and Dad would say, 'That's a chair,'" said Irma.
German immigrants settled in communities where Germans banded together to create an ethnic enclave, striving to preserve their old-world culture. They were strangers in a strange land, awkwardly suspended between the world they had left behind and a world where they were not yet fully at home. Naturally, they looked to one another for reassurance and strength. They shopped at stores and patronized banks that exclusively catered to them. They prayed in churches where sermons were preached in German. And they joined fraternal organizations to keep alive the old traditions. Millstadt, Belleville, and certain neighborhoods in St. Louis certainly fit this description.
The transition from German to English in these areas typically began around the time of America's entry into World War I and a subsequent wave of anti-German hysteria. For instance, parishes began to offer services in English once a week. Then, by the mid-1920s, some switched their parish records to English. German persisted in churches until World War II, but increasingly, services were held in English.2
Joseph found work in a Belleville coal mine later in 1915 so the family moved there, where Eleanor (1919), Helen (1921) and Babe (1925) were born. Irma remembered moving first to "B" Street, then winding up at 44 N. Missouri Ave. off of E. Main St.
Irma mentioned that her father was out of work more than at work in the coal mine because of union activity and poor economic times for coal mines. Of course, coal mining was a precarious and pervasively insecure way of life, especially at this point in time. For nearly two centuries, coal had been the basic fuel powering the global industrial revolution, but even before World War I the coal-era was on the wane. Diesel engines had replaced coal-fired boilers. Coal bins were disappearing from basements as Americans abandoned smudgy coal furnaces for clean-burning gas, oil, or electricity. Plagued by competition from these new energy sources, especially the recently tapped oil fields in southern California, Oklahoma, and Texas, coal displayed through the 1920s all the classical symptoms of a sick industry: shrinking demand, excess supply, chaotic disorganization, cutthroat competition, and hellish punishment for workers.
The Great Depression of the 1930s exacerbated this already calamitous cycle. Operators fought more savagely than ever to stay alive by cutting prices and pay checks. At one point some of them even begged the government to buy them out. Coal that had fetched up to $4 a ton in the mid-1920s sold for $1-3 a ton in 1932. Miners who had earned seven dollars a day before the Crash now begged the pit-boss for the chance to squirm into thirty-inch coal seams for as little as one dollar. Men who had once loaded tons of coal per day grubbed around the base of the tipple for a few lumps of fuel to heat a meager supper.1
The Plogmann family broke up sometime between 1930 and 1932 in the depths of the Great Depression. Irma recalled that the Depression had a definite affect on their home life. As with the majority of the nation, the Plogmanns had very little money and were living hand to mouth. They wouldn't have lost any money when the stock market crashed or when many banks failed. They didn't have any to lose. Irma said, "There were a lot of small children and not much work or money."
"It wasn't all bad though. I remember being Dad's buddy when I was little. He would sharpen blades in the backyard, and he'd sing. I remember some good things about him that the younger girls wouldn't have experienced because he kept getting worse. The final straw was one day when I walked in the front door and an iron flew through the air hitting me in the chest. Mom went berserk. It could have killed either one of us. A neighbor told us to get out before someone is killed. He was always out of work, and he made homebrew, and drank too much. In fact, he went into debt buying supplies to make beer and Mom had to pay that off after we left. If Mom asked him to move so she could wash up the floor, he would get mad. He just sat brooding and drinking."
On Missouri Avenue, Helen remembered Grandmother Lena visiting at times and giving them each a penny. "Sometimes we'd ride the streetcar to St. Louis, and all the girls would get sick. Mom would give us each a penny to hold, hoping that would take our minds off the motion of the streetcar. Eleanor told a story about me holding my breath to get my way, and Mom telling her to take me out on the porch for air."
"Mom raised a garden for food and took in wash to earn money. This was all done with a hand washer and ringer. In the winter, wash hung all over the house when it was too cold to hang it outside," said Irma.
At some point, Joseph found work at a foundry. Irma recalled that he was a "shaker outer," separating iron from the coal embers. This is near the time Mathilda left him. Helen remembered going to visit him at work. They could have been visiting to simply take him a meal, or this could have been a more serious meeting about the separation.
In the end, Helen remembered secretly moving to a small, two-room "apartment" in a lady's home on "D" street to get away from Joseph. "He was getting mean. Mom was afraid of him. One night there was a knock on the door and she was scared to open it in case it was Joseph. But it turned out to be another "drunk" who had come to the wrong door," she said.
"We were scared when we met him on the street. It was a bad time and we really didn't know where he lived after we moved out. When we moved out, I was a teenager and a friend helped me find an office job at Eagle Foundry," Irma said.
A 1931 telephone directory lists Joseph as employed by the Excelsior Foundry and living near the L&N Railroad line and Carlyle Avenue. This would have been the Missouri Avenue address in East Belleville. The Excelsior Foundry Co. still exists at 1123 East B Street in Belleville.
The Plogmann family breakup occurred in the midst of an unprecedented national calamity, the Great Depression, which followed a decade of stagnation in agriculture, flattening sales in the automobile and housing markets, the piratical abuses on Wall Street and the October 1929 stock market crash, the woes of the anarchic banking system, and the chaos in Europe resulting from the aftermath of World War I.
At first, the crash of the nation's stock market only affected a small minority of people and in Belleville it probably seemed like an event that was far away and of little consequence. But it ultimately led to a total breakdown of financial markets. 1933 was the nadir of the Great Depression. In the country, unmarketable crops rotted in fields and unsaleable livestock died on the hoof. In towns and cities, haggard men in shabby overcoats, collars turned up against the chill wind, newspapers plugging the holes in their shoes, lined up glumly for handouts at soup kitchens. Tens of thousands of displaced workers took to the road, while those who stayed put took in their jobless relatives, kited the grocery bills at the corner store, patched their old clothes, darned and re-darned their socks, trying to shore up some fragments of hope.
Unemployed men skulked at home while their wives and children scrounged what work they could find. Traditional patterns of family authority and status eroded. A Polish woman told a social worker in Chicago that, because she had been working for four years while her husband was jobless, "I am the boss in the family for I have full charge in running this house. You know, who makes the money is the boss."
Roughly half of all workers did not have jobs and those who did have jobs found themselves working for smaller paychecks. The country had never before known unemployment of this magnitude or duration, and there was no mechanism to combat the mass destitution either. Unemployment powerfully rearranged the psychological geometry of families. One Chicagoan later reflected about his Depression-era childhood, "A common feeling was one of your father's failure."
"Before the depression," one jobless father told an interviewer, "I wore the pants in this family, and rightly so. During the depression, I lost something. Maybe you call it self-respect but in losing it I also lost the respect of my children, and I am afraid that I am losing my wife."
"There certainly was a change in our family," said another victim of unemployment. "I relinquished power in the family." Said another, "'It's only natural. When a father cannot support his family, supply them with clothing and good food, the children are bound to lose respect. When they see me hanging around the house all the time and know that I can't find work, it has its effect all right."
Harry Hopkins, federal relief administrator under Franklin Roosevelt, saw the Depression as a social disaster. "Three or four million heads of families don't turn into tramps and cheats overnight," he said, "nor do they lose the habits and standards of a lifetime. They don't drink any more than the rest of us, they don't lie any more, they aren't any lazier than the rest of us. And, if such a change actually occurs, we can scarcely charge it up to personal sin."1
Different people suffered and coped according to their own peculiar circumstances, but most everyone was unhappy during the Great Depression. Obviously, many families stayed together, but others broke apart. Such was the case with the Plogmanns.
After the breakup, Mathilda moved the family to Millstadt. This took place the year Helen entered high school, about 1935-6. They moved into a house owned by Mary Marxer, nee Ehrstein. Mathilda found work in a garment factory that made underwear. Dorothy, Eleanor, and Helen each worked there when they reached the age of sixteen. Irma continued to work in Belleville, and Babe found a job at a Belleville foundry when she turned sixteen. Helen remembers welding smokescreen machines in a Belleville foundry during World War II.
Mathilda's daughters recall that she worked as a nanny at the Halladay House in Cairo, Illinois when she was young. After the war, she worked in a dress factory in St. Louis. In fact, her obituary says that she belonged to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, local 182. The Women's Garment Workers, by L. L. Lorwin, described how this labor union formed in 1900 by the amalgamation of seven local unions. In New York, Communists drove for control of the union during the 1920s, but were defeated by moderates under the leadership of David Dubinsky. Although the struggle seriously hurt the ILGWU, the union benefitted by the labor policies of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and membership rose to 300,000 in 1942. In 1937 the ILGWU briefly joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO); it then temporarily became an independent union and finally rejoined the AFL in 1940. Under the presidency of David Dubinsky, the ILGWU grew into one of the nation's most powerful and progressive unions, with a wide range of member benefits.
Women made up about 18 percent of all workers in 1900 and 22 percent in 1930. The typical woman worker was single and under the age of twenty-five. She worked in a small handful of occupations including teaching, clerical work, domestic service, and the garment trade. Once she married, as almost every woman did, typically before the age of twenty-two, she was unlikely to work again for wages, particularly while she had children at home. Only one mother in ten worked outside the home, and the numbers of older women workers, with or without children, were few. Even in this late phase of the industrial era, the traditional division of family labor that the industrial revolution had introduced a century earlier -- a husband working for wages outside the home, and a wife working without wages within it -- still held powerful sway in American culture.
Yet traditional definitions of the family, and of women's place within it, were weakening. Married women might remain a distinct minority of all women workers, but their numbers were rapidly increasing. Well before the century's midpoint, the dynamic changes in women's employment patterns that would transform the very fabric of family life by the century's end were already visible.
Other evidences of changes in women's status were more immediately apparent. The legendary "flapper" made her debut in the postwar decade, signaling with studied theatrical flourishes a new ethos of feminine freedom and sexual parity. The Nineteenth Amendment, enacted just in time for the 1920 presidential election, gave women at least formal political equality. The Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed by Alice Paul of the National Women's Party in 1923, sought to guarantee full social and economic participation to women.1
I remember Mathilda as quiet and modest, but as I finish this family history, I have come to realize just how remarkable she was, embodying many of the positive cultural traits of the German Catholics who emigrated to the United States. To me, it took great courage to leave an abusive husband, especially in the 1930s. She was always a hard worker, living a simple and plain life by necessity and design, being frugal and adaptive simply to keep her family in food and clothing during the Great Depression. It's funny, but I can still remember her laugh and the wonderful caramel rolls she made from scratch without a recipe each time she visited our home.
As for Joseph, he died on September 27, 1950 at the age of 69. His death certificate says that he died of cerebral hemorrhage and arteriosclerosis in the St. Clair County Home and Hospital and that he was a coal miner. His Social Security number is 328-03-8466, and he is buried in the St. Clair County pauper's cemetery just off Old Caseyville Road near the new Metro line. There are no names on the simple, stone markers, and many of these markers have been disturbed.
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1881 - 1950 (69 years)
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