When Kohler died, Ellen Raskin was twelve years old and living in Milwaukee. The month after the indictment, Kohler died of a heart attack that looked, to many, to have been caused by shock. In 1940, a federal grand jury indicted the Kohler Company on charges of conspiracy to fix industry prices. Violence broke out when special deputies attempted to escort a coal car across a picket line, and two strikers were killed. (This was probably incorrect.) Two years later, the American Federation of Labor organized a union of Kohler workers and lobbied for raises Walter Kohler refused to negotiate, and the workers went on strike.

Haack, an alderman first elected in 1897, as the country’s first-ever socialist officeholder. In 1932, Kohler lost a bid for reëlection the Socialist Party of America held a national convention in Milwaukee and hailed Sheboygan’s Fred C. Then came the crash, and the Democratic wave led by F.D.R. The Kohler company was wildly prosperous, and Kohler, a moderate Republican, was elected governor of Wisconsin, in 1928. Factory foremen helped enroll workers in nighttime Americanization classes every April, the company celebrated “Americanization Day” by driving workers to the courthouse to fill out citizenship paperwork in flag-festooned cars. Walter Kohler instituted a company policy stating that promotions would only be given to American citizens. According to Suellen Hoy’s “ Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness,” Walter Kohler, at the building’s dedication, said that he hoped the name would be “ a factor in inculcating in the men of foreign antecedents, a love for their adopted country.” Kohler, like his workers, lived in Kohler, on a lavish Tudor Revival estate called Riverbend that reportedly cost him, in the early twenties, more than a million dollars to build. The first building in Kohler was called the American Club, and it was decorated with American flags and portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

By 1914, Kohler employed more than a thousand workers in its factory, many of them immigrants. Kohler, turned the land into Kohler, Wisconsin, a company village. Kohler died in 1900, but his son, Walter J. The company hit it big with bathtubs, and, in 1899, Kohler bought land west of Sheboygan, which sits an hour up the coast of Lake Michigan from Milwaukee, to situate a new factory. During the financial crisis of 1873, an Austrian immigrant to Wisconsin named John Michael Kohler bought the Sheboygan Union Iron & Steel Foundry from his father-in-law and created the Kohler Company.

The westing game book by ellen raskin