Search

Back to top

Search Constraints

Start Over You searched for: Online Content Includes Digital Content Remove constraint Online Content: Includes Digital Content Collection Robert W. Schoening papers, circa 1896-1923 Remove constraint Collection: Robert W. Schoening papers, circa 1896-1923
Number of results to display per page
View results as:

Search Results

Folder

Correspondence

Online

The Correspondence series includes letters written by Schoening to James Oliver Curwood (seeking literary advice of the author and screenwriter from Owosso, Mich.) and G. Cameron-Émslie (a request for the recipient, an editor at Physical Culture Publishing Corporation, to consider the manuscript of Red Biz). Also included is a letter from one S.G. Randall, a manager at a saw mill in Westwood, California (and personal acquaintance of Schoening and his wife), detailing his experience implementing Schoening's saw hammering methodology.

Collection

Robert W. Schoening papers, circa 1896-1923

0.3 linear feet — 18 GB

Online
German-born resident of Saginaw, Michigan; worked variously as a laborer, mechanic, shop foreman, factory superintendent, and traveling salesman. Includes scattered correspondence and unpublished literary works and essays with details of early cross-country automobile travel on the Yellowstone Trail and Lincoln Highway and perspectives on Michigan's manufacturing economy.

The Robert W. Schoening papers are primarily of interest due to their detailed description of his cross-country automobile trips and extensive traveling through the western United States from 1919 to 1921. Other writings reveal period attitudes towards capitalism, patriotism, and industrialism. The collection includes original manuscripts and correspondence as well as digitized images of these works created by Schoening's family.

The collection also includes a series of digitized photographs from Schoening's trip out west circa 1919 and collected materials related to the Saginaw Cigar Manufacturers and local life in Saginaw and Flint, Michigan.

Folder

Essays

Online

The Essays series includes various short, nonfiction works on written by Schoening on both philosophical and practical topics. These include "The American Soul Aflame" (a treatise on America's embodiment of humanist ideals and democratic values), "The Price of Fun" (an incomplete piece that explores issues of leisure and class), and "What Is Business?" (a review of modern capitalism and social inequalities). "Scientific Saw Hammering" lays out an alternative methodology for straightening and tensioning large saw blades and reflects Schoening's experience in the lumber industry.

Folder

Manuscripts

Online

The Manuscripts series contain longer pieces, both fiction and nonfiction, that reflect Schoening's interest in automobiles, travel, and socio-economic perspectives on the United States and Michigan. Both "The Automobile" and "The Story of Our 'Billy' Buick" provide accounts (with slight variations) of Schoening's experiences as a travelling salesman in the western United States from 1919 to 1921 and the cross-country journeys he took with his wife as he set forth and returned from this endeavor. These pieces include firsthand accounts of life on the road and the often harrowing conditions of highways in the early twentieth century, with narrations of stops in Flint, Chicago, Portland, Salt Lake City, Yellowstone, and other locales. The manuscript Red Biz is also significant for its depiction of conditions in a factory and the relations between the titular floor manager and his employees immediately after the first World War, with additional domestic scenes and back story set in late nineteenth-century Ann Arbor and Saginaw.