The $16 Billion Dynasty That Built Their Own Town and Private Army to Crush the Workers: The Kohler

On the night of July 27, 1934, in a Wisconsin village that bore the family's name, a force of private armed deputies opened fire on unarmed factory workers gathered outside the main plant gate. Two men died on the pavement. Forty-seven others were wounded. The man who directed the response had also commissioned the Olmsted Brothers to design a garden city for his workers, paid wages 28.9 percent above the Wisconsin factory average, and built a Tudor-style dormitory called The American Club to house his immigrant employees. His name was Walter J. Kohler. His descendants today control a $16.2 billion fortune, the 25th richest family in America, and they still own the village, the police force, the foundry, and the golf course built on a decommissioned anti-aircraft range.

-------------------

Gain FREE access to secret full-length documentaries on wealthy families "too scandalous for YouTube" by joining our newsletter: https://www.substack.com/@oldmoneyluxury

-------------------

John Michael Kohler II was born in 1844 in Schnepfau, a mountain village in the Austrian Vorarlberg. His family emigrated in 1854 after his mother's death, settling first in Minnesota, then in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He apprenticed to a butcher, worked as a furniture salesman, and in 1873 bought into a struggling foundry for $5,000. The company made farm implements: ploughs, cast-iron horse troughs, hog scalders. In 1883 he enameled one of the hog scalders, sold it to a farmer for one cow and fourteen chickens, and called it a bathtub. He had invented, for the American market, the modern enamelled cast-iron sanitary fixture.

The new line outgrew the Sheboygan plant inside a decade. Within a generation Kohler had cornered roughly one in seven American plumbing fixtures and was the dominant supplier to the new mass-market American bathroom.

John Michael Kohler died in 1900. His son Walter J. Kohler Senior, born in 1875 and trained at the foundry from boyhood, took over.

In 1899 the company moved out of Sheboygan to a green-field site four miles west. Walter Senior had been to Europe and seen the model industrial communities of Krupp at Essen and Cadbury at Bournville. He commissioned the Olmsted Brothers, the firm founded by Central Park's designer Frederick Law Olmsted, to plan a garden city around the new plant. Built between 1917 and 1931, the Village of Kohler covered four and a half square miles, with deed restrictions, architectural review, paved streets, libraries, a recreation hall, and the company itself as ground landlord. The American Club, finished in 1918 and now a five-star resort hotel on the National Register of Historic Places, was built as a Tudor-style dormitory for the immigrant Polish, German, Italian, and Russian workers who poured the iron and applied the enamel. It had reading rooms, a barber shop, a bowling alley, and English-language classes.

It was paternalism on the European model. It was real, and it was meant to make the workforce loyal.

It was also enforced. In 1934, when AFL-affiliated workers struck for union recognition, the company refused to bargain, hired roughly 250 armed men, and had them deputized under Wisconsin law. On the night of July 27, those deputies opened fire on a crowd outside the plant. Lee Wakefield, age 25, and Henry Engelmann, age 26, were shot from behind and died. Forty-seven other men were wounded. The strike collapsed without a contract. Walter J. Kohler Senior, who had personally directed the response, served as Republican Governor of Wisconsin from 1929 to 1931 and remained the face of the company for another decade.

A second strike followed in 1954, this time against UAW Local 833. It ran for eleven years, produced seven volumes of testimony before the McClellan and Kennedy Senate subcommittees, and is still the longest major strike in American history. The company refused federal mediation, blacklisted strikers, hired permanent replacements, and pressured suppliers to break the boycott. The National Labor Relations Board ordered the reinstatement of fired strikers in 1960. The strike ended in 1965 only after federal courts intervened. Churches in Sheboygan County cancelled their summer picnics for years. Families stopped speaking. Some never spoke again.

The company survived all of it. By 2024 it generated between $7.4 billion and $10.9 billion in annual revenue across Kitchen and Bath, Power, and Hospitality, employed roughly 30,000 people across six continents, and ran more than 52 manufacturing facilities. It has never been publicly traded and has no outside shareholders.

Herbert V. Kohler Junior took the company in 1972 and ran it for fifty years, transforming a plumbing manufacturer into one of the most acclaimed luxury hospitality groups in the world. He commissioned Pete Dye to design Whistling Straits on a decommissioned Army anti-aircraft training facility on Lake Michigan. It has hosted three PGA Championships and the 2021 Ryder Cup.