Conservative Counterrevolution

Challenging Liberalism in 1950s Milwaukee

Tula A Connell

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780252098062
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the 1950s, Milwaukee's strong union movement and socialist mayor seemed to embody a dominant liberal consensus that sought to continue and expand the New Deal. Tula Connell explores how business interests and political conservatives arose to undo that consensus, and how the resulting clash both shaped a city and helped redefine postwar American politics. Connell focuses on Frank Zeidler, the city's socialist mayor. Zeidler's broad concept of the public interest at times defied even liberal expectations. At the same time, a resurgence of conservatism with roots presaging twentieth-century politics challenged his initiatives in public housing, integration, and other areas. As Connell shows, conservatives created an anti-progressive game plan that included a well-funded media and PR push; an anti-union assault essential to the larger project of delegitimizing any government action; opposition to civil rights; and support from a suburban silent majority. In the end, the campaign undermined notions of the common good essential to the New Deal order. It also sowed the seeds for grassroots conservatism's more extreme and far-reaching future success.

1 A Liberal in City Government

Municipal government is not purely housekeeping. It involves a philosophy of government.

—Frank Zeidler, A Liberal in City Government

Milwaukee emerged from World War II with urban challenges the city could no longer ignore—significant urban decay, including crumbling infrastructure and outmoded technology; limited public amenities; and the housing, education, and employment needs of a rapidly changing population. In the immediate postwar years, the struggle over Milwaukee’s future involved a competition between those who espoused an individualist, free-market-based ideology and those who saw government as the foundation for pursuing the collective good. Like similar tensions around the country, the contest took place on an urban battleground defined by economic power, one that often manifested around issues of working people and their unions. As Milwaukee’s veterans shed their military uniforms and took their places back at the metal lathes, the iron smelters, and the vast vats of yeast and brewery hops, the nation’s return to normalcy removed the constraints of war, opening the way for the reemergence of the conservative challenge to the Rooseveltian landscape. Milwaukee’s 1948 municipal elections, which ended a caretaker administration and ushered in an unabashedly liberal mayor, dislodged this latent discord and laid the groundwork for a heated grassroots conservative challenge.

“Plump and Complacent” Postwar Milwaukee

Stretching along the west shore of Lake Michigan, Milwaukee early on was defined less by that vast body of water than by the three rivers slicing through the city, the Menomonee, the Milwaukee, and the Kinnickinnic. Running north to south, the Milwaukee River, which flows through the central city, formed the area’s first natural boundary, dividing Juneau Town from Kilbourn Town, two settlements founded in the early to mid-1800s by Solomon Juneau, a fur trader and land speculator, and Byron Kilbourn, a surveyor and railroad executive. By the 1870s, Juneau’s east river settlement on bluff land above the lake was largely inhabited by the English or native-born business owners. Kilbourn’s west side became home to middle-class German immigrants and their families. The marshland area across the Menominee valley, which ultimately made up Milwaukee’s South Side, started out as the area’s least pleasant district. Unskilled workers, largely of Polish, Russian-Polish, and Bohemian extraction, settled there and on the limestone bluffs beyond, with the less-desirable land providing lots and housing they could afford. Between the North and South Sides, the Menomonee River valley, cut through with rail yards, stretches 4.5 miles inward from Lake Michigan and long had cradled industrial factories, tanneries, and tool-and-die shops filled with workers pouring in from either side.1

By the mid-twentieth century, descendants of German, Austrian, Scottish, and southern European immigrants still inhabited the valley’s north side, while those of primarily Polish and Serbian heritage lived on the south side. Overlooking the valley from the north, the central downtown included the Italian and Greek Third Ward, sandwiched between the Milwaukee River and the lake. Farther west and north, African Americans were replacing the once largely Jewish population in the city’s Sixth Ward, with 80 percent of Milwaukee’s 8,821 African Americans living there after the war. Another 10 percent of the city’s small black community lived in the adjacent Tenth Ward. Just west of downtown, Irish families clustered on the edges of Marquette University.2

Elsewhere, the city’s primarily German population filled a large stock of duplexes, the two-story, two-family homes with living room, dining room, kitchen, and multiple bedrooms that had replaced the cottage as the dominant house form in many working-class neighborhoods. Tenants of a “Milwaukee flat” could achieve a “comfortable quality of life and standard of domesticity without relying on homeownership or the single-family house to achieve it.” Such housing, identified in the early twentieth century as the standard domicile for skilled German workers, was unaffordable for most Milwaukee Poles, the city’s second-most-numerous ethnic group.3

Germans still made up the vast majority of the population in the 1940s, and most were Lutheran, their steepled churches dotting the city landscape. By 1940 the number of foreign-born whites in the urban community had dropped to less than 15 percent, but more than 20 percent of the residents still spoke German. The first large group of Germans had arrived in 1848, refugees from the failed European revolutions. By the end of the 1800s most of Milwaukee’s German laborers were skilled or semi-skilled, and the pool of unskilled labor, which floated from one plant gate to another, in good times as well as slack, was made up largely of immigrant newcomers, especially Poles, who began arriving in large numbers in the 1880s and became the second-largest foreign-born group by 1890.4

Even in the early decades of the century, when Poles generally held lowerpaying jobs, most Polish families owned their own homes, wood-frame houses that filled the city’s south-side Fourteenth Ward, some still retaining the “rear alley houses” that had contributed to vast overcrowding in the century’s early decades. As throughout the rest of the city, nearly each block was anchored by a tavern or two, some opening their doors at 6 A.M. to accommodate third-shift factory workers. Two towering churches presided over the Polish community, the twin-steepled St. Stanislaus Catholic Church on Mitchell Street, the main South Side artery, and the hulking Basilica of St. Josaphat, the city’s largest church. Many poorly paid Polish laborers had taken out second mortgages on their homes to fund the construction of St. Josaphat, which was completed in 1901 and declared a basilica in 1929. Serbian families, although not as numerous, also settled on Milwaukee’s South Side. Only after World War II were they joined by Mexican Americans, the city’s first Spanish-speaking residents.5

Between 1930 and 1940 the number of Polish Milwaukeeans increased slightly, from 18.3 percent to 19.6 percent, while the percentage of those of German heritage fell from 44.9 percent to 40.7 percent. Despite the clear geographic separation between the largely Protestant area north of the Menomonee River valley and the predominantly Catholic South Side, religion in the 1940s and 1950s played little part in municipal politics. But the German mark on the city was unmistakable, not only in the city’s preferred cuisine—bratwurst and beer—but also in its dark stone architecture. A New Yorker who moved to Milwaukee in 1949 was struck by how German pronunciation and phrases lingered in the local language. “Burleigh Street was pronounced ‘Burl I’ as if written in German, not ‘Burl-EE’ as in England where the name originated; shoppers went not ‘to,’ but ‘by’ Schuster’s (from the German ‘bei’).”6

In the late nineteenth century, Milwaukee’s most prosperous families had moved to the high ground east of the central business district on the Milwaukee River. Distant from the crowded, closely built working-class houses in the city’s central core and South Side, the North Shore offered a stunning contrast. There, brewery barons built massive mansions, perched on the cliffs with stunning views of Lake Michigan. Beginning at the northeastern edge of downtown along Prospect Avenue and extending north through the well-appointed villages of Shorewood and Whitefish Bay, their dark stone manses sat heavily behind thick foliage.

The geographic distance was paralleled by a social and cultural separation, as the families of the city’s biggest breweries—Pabst, Schlitz, Miller, and Blatz—joined with those of the area’s wealthiest industrialists in a closed, mutually reinforcing social circuit. “It has been the way of well-to-do Milwaukee families, both those of German heritage and those out of New England, to build the biggest homes they could afford, and, in a manner of speaking, to wall themselves up inside,” a local reporter, Richard Davis, wrote after World War II. Frederick Pabst, owner of Milwaukee’s largest brewery, built a large estate in Whitefish Bay that became the premier summer resort for Milwaukee’s upper crust of the 1890s and 1900s.7

Although many midcentury cities received a boost from their resident rich, Milwaukee’s beer barons and iron industrialists had rarely given to charity and had invested little in their city. “The wealth in the city is far greater than outsiders realize, but most of it was hard to come by and apparently is even harder to give away,” Davis wrote. Few improvements had been made since the Depression, and after World War II, wrote another contemporary observer, “nearly everyone admitted the town was starting to show its age,”8 with deteriorating commercial buildings and blighted neighborhoods. Even basic steps toward modernization moved slowly: the city did not retire its last horse-drawn sanitation cart until 1952. “The commercial buildings were old. Neighborhoods of little frame houses on little lots had gone to blight,” Davis wrote. He described postwar Milwaukee as sitting “in a complacent shabbiness on the west shore of Lake Michigan like a wealthy old lady in black alpaca taking her ease on the beach.”9

Downtown Milwaukee was the least pretentious business district in all of urban America. The skyline was nearly the same as it had been in the 1920s and only superficially changed from 1900. Two heavy stone buildings, the Pabst Theater and the elegant Pfister Hotel, anchored the city’s core district. Both were built in the late nineteenth century. The few twelve-story brickand-stone office buildings and the half-dozen movie and live-performance theaters had been erected primarily before the 1920s and were showing their age. As Davis noted: “Numerous cities of half the size are twice as imposing in the height of their office buildings, in the number of their good hotels, in their look of hustle, bustle, and wham.”10

City Hall, an eight-story, asymmetrical, wedge-shaped building, topped off with a Romanesque–Northern European bell tower, sat on the site where the typewriter was invented in 1868 by a Wisconsin reporter. Facing south, its back to the northern suburbs, the city’s most recognizable landmark overlooked the expanse of downtown, from the city’s eastern edge along the Lake Michigan shore and miles into its ragged western boundaries. Along Wisconsin Avenue, the city’s main thoroughfare, the Pfister and Boston Store, Milwaukee’s second-largest department store, perched along its edges, as did the Empire Building, a twelve-story, buff-colored brick-and-stone office building that housed the twenty-four-hundred-seat Riverside Theater, built for vaudeville and movies. Emanating from the dark, heavyset brick breweries farther north and west of the central core, the smell of hops and yeast hung heavily over the city, matched in intensity by the pungent odor from the tanneries in the Menomonee River valley.11

Gimbels Department store, an eight-story neoclassical building whose monumental façade curved along the Milwaukee River, was downtown’s primary draw. Selling goods that ranged from Limoges china to woolen mittens, the store served as a unique space in Milwaukee, drawing together residents of all income levels. Its vast interior provided a cheery respite from the freezing winter winds and the steel-gray skies that rarely broke for weeks on end. Children and their parents flocked to its Tasty Town restaurant for banana splits and strawberry shortcakes, part of the sixteen hundred orders employees filled each day for sundaes, sodas, and malts. In 1948, Tasty Town customers consumed more than one hundred gallons of ice cream on an average day.12

Milwaukee also was distinguished from other midcentury American cities by well-established commercial decentralization that already had begun at the turn of the twentieth century. Major store chains like Schuster’s, Milwaukee’s popular department store on North Third Street, never had a downtown outlet, and many of the larger plants had followed the European custom of having their business offices next to the production facilities rather than wasting money on the luxury of downtown office space. While Gimbels remained a big draw in central downtown, Milwaukee shoppers had other options. South Siders could patronize stores along Mitchell Street, and West Side residents were close to the clusters of commercial options on upper Third Street; smaller shopping districts along Twelfth Street and Vliet Street offered even more West Side options. All were situated at trolley-line terminations not more than two or three miles from the principal hub of activity, creating early competition with downtown and restricting the growth of the central business district.13

Although ethnic and racial enclaves defined Milwaukee’s geographic composition and therefore, to a large extent, the social and cultural experiences of its residents, several citywide traditions crossed these boundaries. In addition to baseball and beer—and the corner taverns to drink the Milwaukee beverages—the Friday-night fish fry found families across town lining up each week for beer-battered feasts. Once associated with Catholics who observed Lenten abstinence from meat on Fridays, the all-you-can-eat fish frys became a staple of restaurants as diverse as Italian and Serbian and appealed especially to Milwaukeeans’ penchant for penny-pinching. Sausages turned out by the family-run Usinger’s in the downtown Third Ward also crossed ethnic culinary lines, with bratwurst and beerwurst becoming staples of corner pubs and family meals. In time for the holidays, the November Folk Fair drew huge numbers to the Milwaukee Auditorium, in 1953 attracting twentyeight thousand visitors who sampled food and purchased goods produced by the area’s many ethnic groups. When the long winters broke, Milwaukeeans joined up for picnics throughout the city’s extensive park system, which included miles of green space along the lakefront—fifty-eight landscaped parks in all.14

While the city was best known for its breweries, far more factory workers—115,956 out of 177,202—were employed in heavy industry in 1947. Its highly skilled and semiskilled workforce, along with high unionization rates, made it a solidly middle-class city in the mid-twentieth century. Among the twenty-five largest cities in the United States, Milwaukee had the fifth-highest income, according to the 1950 census. Along with major factories such as Allen-Bradley and Allis-Chalmers, a heavy machinery producer with more than ten thousand employees that manufactured turbines for the Hoover Dam, hundreds of small plants dotted the industrial landscape, specializing in die casting, stamping, pattern making, and metal working. Lake Michigan, running north to south along the city’s eastern edge, gave Milwaukee a deep-water port sufficient for lakes trade as well as the ability to dock some oceangoing vessels.15

Physically atypical compared with cities of similar population and size, Milwaukee’s political temperament also set it apart. As another observer at the time wrote, “Chicago and Milwaukee are less than a hundred miles apart geographically. Politically, they are on different planets. In Chicago, smallscale graft causes no more stir than a tip to a hat-check girl; in Milwaukee, a municipal employee discovered accepting a five-dollar bribe would be pilloried on the front page of the [Milwaukee] Journal and bounced out...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 A Liberal in City Government
• 2 The Media Makes the Message
• 3 Public or Private? The Battle over Channel 10
• 4 Let the People Vote
• 5 Race, Class, Free Enterprise, and Suburbia
• 6 Collective Action and the Threat to Free Enterprise
• 7 Public Interest vs. Public Employees
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index