Contesting the Postwar City : Working-Class and Growth Politics in 1940s Milwaukee 9781107248816, 9781107036352

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Contesting the Postwar City

Focusing on midcentury Milwaukee, Eric Fure-Slocum charts the remaking of political culture in the industrial city. Professor Fure-Slocum shows how two contending visions of the 1940s city – working-class politics and growth politics – fit together uneasily and were transformed amid a series of social and policy clashes. Contests that pitted the principles of democratic access and distribution against efficiency and productivity included the hard-fought politics of housing and redevelopment, controversies over petty gambling, questions about the role of organized labor in urban life, and battles over municipal fiscal policy and autonomy. These episodes occurred during a time of rapid change in the city’s working class, as African-American workers arrived to seek jobs, women temporarily advanced in workplaces, and labor unions grew. At the same time, businesses and property owners sought to reestablish legitimacy in the changing landscape. This study examines these local conflicts, showing how they forged the postwar city and laid a foundation for the neoliberal city.

Contesting the Postwar City Working-Class and Growth Politics in 1940s Milwaukee

ERIC FURE-SLOCUM

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013–2473, usa www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107036352 © Eric Fure-Slocum 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Fure-Slocum, Eric Jon. Contesting the postwar city : working-class and growth politics in 1940s Milwaukee / Eric Fure-Slocum, St. Olaf College, Minnesota. pages cm Includes index. isbn 978-1-107-03635-2 1. Working class – Political activity – Wisconsin – Milwaukee. 2. Milwaukee (Wis.) – Economic policy. 3. Milwaukee (Wis.) – History – 20th century. I. Title. hd8079.m55f87 2013 3220 .2097759509044–dc23 2012049126 isbn 978-1-107-03635-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To Carolyn, Anna, and Jacob

Contents

List of Illustrations

page viii

List of Tables

x

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction Contesting Democracy: Working-Class and Growth Politics in the City

1

Chapter 1

Milwaukee: A Mid-Twentieth-Century Working-Class City

38

Chapter 2

New Deal Legacies and Wartime Urgencies: Housing Politics, Private Enterprise, and Public Authority

61

Chapter 3

Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7

Wartime Gambling, Working-Class Leisure, and Urban Reform: “Why Do Our Boys Have to Fight If We Can’t Play Bingo?” A Militant CIO Vision for City Democracy: Power, Security, and Egalitarianism Debt, Growth, and Democracy in the Early Postwar City: Planning a City without Class Housing the Postwar City: Crowding, Race, and Policy Public Housing, Redevelopment, and Urban Citizenship: The 1951 Referendum Fight

110 157 211 264 320

Epilogue Revisiting Postwar Democracy: A City with Class Appendix: Referenda Votes

367 375

Index

385

vii

Illustrations

maps 1.1 2.1

Milwaukee census tract map with city wards superimposed, 1945. Locations of Milwaukee’s low-income and veterans’ public housing projects.

page 39 75

figures 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1 5.2

Parklawn, a Public Works Administration housing project, being built, 1937. Scene of “blight” in area of proposed Sixth Ward public housing project, 1946. Milwaukee bingo players, 1943. CIO News cartoon of upper-class women playing bridge, 1943. Celebrating the end of the war on Milwaukee’s Wisconsin Avenue, 1945. The Milwaukee CIO’s Labor Day parade on Wisconsin Avenue, 1945. Bronzeville All-Star bowling team, CIO Tournament, 1946. UAW Local 248 strike march on the Pearl Harbor attack anniversary, 1946. Political campaign work in the CIO office, 1946. Editorial cartoon portraying the bond referendum as a modernization program, 1947. Emblem used for the Centurama, Milwaukee’s centennial celebration, 1946. viii

76 97 148 156 158 178 199 204 208 217 218

List of Illustrations 5.3 5.4 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 7.1 7.2 7.3

The Improve Milwaukee NOW Committee’s pro-debt advertisement, 1947. Frank Zeidler’s inauguration as mayor of Milwaukee, 1948. Temporary housing project adjoining Milwaukee’s Civic Center, 1950. Milwaukee Journal cartoon on the housing shortage’s political significance, 1948. The Southlawn veterans’ housing project under construction, 1949. The Hillside Terrace low-income housing project under construction, 1949. Early residents of the Hillside Terrace low-income housing project, 1949. Milwaukee Labor Press cartoon advocating public housing legislation, 1947. Milwaukee Journal on the resolution of the Greenfield trailer camp incident, 1949. Milwaukee Housing Authority director Richard W. E. Perrin vilified, 1951. Anti–public housing attack on “tax free government housing projects,” 1951. Citizens’ Anti-Slum Committee contrast of “slum” and Hillside project images, 1951.

ix

230 257 268 269 272 278 279 287 309 344 351 357

Tables

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 3.1 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6

6.1 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5

Milwaukee population, 1940 and 1950. Milwaukee labor force, by major occupation groups, 1940 and 1950. Workplace strikes in Milwaukee, 1930 to 1949. Profile of Milwaukee consumption, 1940, 1949/1950. Milwaukee arrests for gambling and vagrancy, by race, 1942–1944. 1947 debt referendum vote, by ward. Variables in the regressions of the 1947 debt referendum and 1948 mayoral election. Two-variable regressions of Milwaukee’s 1947 debt referendum, by ward. 1948 mayoral election (Zeidler vs. Reuss), by ward. Two-variable regressions of Milwaukee’s 1948 mayoral election, by ward. Multiple regression for working-class vote in Milwaukee’s 1947 debt referendum and 1948 mayoral election, by ward. Red Cross housing bureau report, 16 June 1947. Pro–public housing referendum, 1951, by ward. Anti–public housing referendum, 1951, by ward. Variables in the regressions of the 1951 public housing referenda. Two-variable regressions of Milwaukee’s 1951 public housing referenda, by ward. Multiple regression for vote in Milwaukee’s 1951 public housing referenda, by ward.

x

page 40 42 46 58 133 376 377 378 378 379

380 267 380 381 382 383 383

Acknowledgments

Every historian knows that the question of where to start is a tough one. For these acknowledgments, however, the answer is easy. I am blessed with a wonderful family, all of whom have encouraged me and made it possible to take time – and then some more time – to research and write. To Carolyn, thanks always for your companionship, support, and love. I am grateful for your careful reading of the manuscript and bolstered by your conviction that a more just world is possible. To Anna and Jacob, our children who now are young adults, thanks for your love and help as I labored away at this book. Being part of your lives is a gift of infinite proportions. We are eager to see what’s next, as you shape your futures. My parents, Valborg and Haakon Fure, began their marriage in the years this study covers. We miss them greatly, but their memory sustains us. I am grateful as well to others in our family – Kirsten and Jay Johnson, Harold and Bjørg Fure, Jim Slocum, Adrienne and Jerry Mohrig, and Charlotte and Allan Patriquin – for suggestions that worked their way into this project and for our times together. Work on this book began while I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa. I had the good fortune of working closely with superb teachers. Shel Stromquist has been an exemplary advisor and mentor. A true master of the craft, Shel brings rigor, insight, and compassion to the study of history. I am grateful for his generous comments on the many drafts sent his way and I am glad to count him as a friend. Linda Kerber has been a great teacher and friend at every stage of my education and this project, asking important questions and always providing needed encouragement and sage advice. I benefited also from Ellis Hawley’s vast knowledge of recent United States history and his example of thinking and writing precisely. For their encouragement and insights, I thank as well the late Ken Cmiel, Colin Gordon, Sarah Hanley, David Reynolds, Leslie xi

xii

Acknowledgments

Schwalm, and Allen Steinberg. I was lucky to run into Philip Otterness soon after arriving in Iowa City. He helped me to get my bearings and continues as a good friend. Others who helped as I first began working with the questions that launched this project include fellow students Dennis Deslippe, Charles Hawley, David Lewis-Colman, Kim Nielsen, Anthony Quiroz, and the late Paul Young. I began my graduate studies in history at San Francisco State University, while still working. There I learned much from Robert Cherny, Barbara Loomis, the late Donald Lowe, and others. I especially thank Bill Issel whose History as a Field of Knowledge class convinced me that this is what I need to do. His many good suggestions for this book and his friendship are two important reasons why I am so glad to have found my way to San Francisco State. While my return to graduate school made this book possible, the roots of this project are planted also in my experience as an organizer. That work with organizers, leaders, and members taught me about grassroots politics, the great costs of inequality, and power. Thanks to the late Paul Wellstone for guiding me into organizing and to the many remarkable people I had the opportunity to work with, including Jeff Blodgett, the late Steve Chadwick, Joe Chrastil, Carolyn Fure-Slocum, Al Kurki, and Doug Nopar. Without the good work of archivists and librarians, historians would be lost. I am grateful for the guidance given by dozens of librarians and archivists around the country and am especially indebted to those at the Milwaukee City Records Center, the Milwaukee County Historical Society, the Milwaukee Legislative Reference Bureau, the Milwaukee Public Library, the Archives Department of the University of WisconsinMilwaukee Libraries, the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota, and the Wisconsin Historical Society. The area research center network of the Wisconsin Historical Society and the University of Wisconsin system is a model for making archives accessible to researchers. Thanks to the special collections staff at the Platteville and River Falls campuses of the University of Wisconsin. The interlibrary loan people at the University of Iowa, Carleton College, and St. Olaf College have been a tremendous help, responding to scores of requests. For their help in securing permissions and images for this book, I also appreciate the work of the first-class librarians at the Milwaukee Public Library, Alan King and Judy Berger at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Harry Miller at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and Paul Williams at the Milwaukee Housing Authority. I appreciate the many people who commented on portions of the manuscript (at various stages), made suggestions, taught me the historian’s craft,

Acknowledgments

xiii

or helped me to understand 1940s Milwaukee. I would like to thank Margo Anderson, Steve Avella, Paula Baker, Jorunn Bjørgum, Petr Boltuc, Cecelia Bucki, John Buenker, Lizabeth Cohen, Jack Dougherty, Gloria Downing, Michael Ebner, Robin Einhorn, Robert Fairbanks, Elizabeth Faue, Michael Gordon, Jim Grossman, Scott Henderson, Alexander von Hoffman, Kirk Jeffrey, Knut Kjeldstadli, David Klaassen, Kenneth Kusmer, Paula Lackie, Elaine May, Lary May, John McCarthy, Joe McCartin, Steve Meyer, the late David Montgomery, Tom O’Connell, Anthony Orum, Peter Rachleff, Gail Radford, Joel Rast, Doug Rossinow, Carol Rutz, Kevin Smith, Kristin Szylvian, Joe Trotter, Barbara Welke, and Mary Wingerd. The participants at a number of conferences and gatherings have been influential for this project, including the Midwest Labor History Colloquia, the Center for Recent U.S. History Scholars’ Seminar on postwar political culture, the Milwaukee History conferences sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (thanks to Margo and Amanda Seligman for their expert organizing), and research seminars at the University of Oslo. One of the great joys of this research was the opportunity to spend a couple of afternoons with the former mayor and political elder of Milwaukee, the late Frank Zeidler. I hope I expressed my gratitude adequately when I had the chance. At St. Olaf College, I work with a good crew of colleagues in History, American Studies, American Conversations, and elsewhere. For support during research and comments on the manuscript, I thank Jeane DeLaney, Jim Farrell (first as a teacher, now as colleague), Megan Feeney, Michael Fitzgerald (who read an early version of the full manuscript), Judy Kutulas, Odd Lovoll, Dolores Peters, and Paul Roback. I also am grateful to the many students who have been part of my education or helped on this project, including Maren Gelle and Ben Bayer. I offer a special thanks to my fellow non-tenure-track faculty members at the college – a truly dedicated group of teachers and scholars. Eric Crahan, Debbie Gershenowitz, and Abigail Zorbaugh helped to shepherd this book through the process at Cambridge University Press. I am grateful for their ready advice and high standards. I also thank the many others involved in the book’s production, including Cherline Daniel. Sarah Entenmann’s offer to help with both proofreading and the index came at just the right time. The readers for Cambridge, Josh Freeman and an anonymous reviewer, gave the manuscript careful consideration (in two rounds) and provided extraordinary counsel. Their attention to the manuscript’s larger aims and their well-focused suggestions made this a much better book. The flaws that remain are indeed my doing. Earlier versions of some material in this book appeared elsewhere first. Comments by anonymous reviewers for each of these publications helped

xiv

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to strengthen this book. Portions of Chapter 5 were published in “Cities with Class?: Growth Politics, the Working-Class City, and Debt in Milwaukee during the 1940s,” Social Science History, 24:1 (2000), 257– 305. This is reprinted by permission of Duke University Press. Other portions of the text appeared in two collections: Shelton Stromquist, ed. Labor’s Cold War: Local Politics in Global Context (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); and Margo Anderson and Victor Greene, eds., Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). These are reprinted courtesy of the University of Illinois Press. Support from a number of institutions made this book possible. As a dissertation this project benefited from the generous financial help offered by the History Department and the Graduate College at the University of Iowa, as well as the encouragement given by the award of the D.C. Spriestersbach Dissertation Prize in the Humanities and Fine Arts. I also am grateful for the resources provided by a Clarke Chambers Travel Fellowship (Social Welfare History Archives); a Merrill Travel Grant in Twentieth-Century American Political History (OAH); a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development dissertation grant (the interpretations offered here do not necessarily reflect the views of HUD); and a Fulbright grant that allowed me to spend time at the University of Oslo. Help in the later stages of the project came from St. Olaf College faculty development grants, travel funds, and the Kenneth O. Bjork Fund. I apologize to those people who ought to be named in these acknowledgments but are not. My memory and note-taking need improvement. But I am grateful.

INTRODUCTION

Contesting Democracy: Working-Class and Growth Politics in the City

Wisconsin Avenue, which cuts across the center of Milwaukee, also bisects the twentieth century. This downtown thoroughfare held center stage in two contrasting early post-World War II episodes – a 1947 ordinance fight and a 1951 parade – that illuminate a pattern of change underway in the industrial city. At the core of these incidents and of this history were ongoing frictions between contending visions of the city, defined as working-class politics and growth politics. These were crucial components that fit together uneasily in the city’s mid-twentieth-century political culture. Both working-class and growth politics were shaped and reshaped by a series of social and policy clashes: from the hard-fought politics of housing and redevelopment, to controversies engendered by petty gambling, to questions about the role of organized labor in urban life, to a battle over municipal fiscal policy and autonomy. These local, everyday conflicts helped to shift the prevailing “common sense” of how a city works. As the second-half of the twentieth century began, an increasingly insistent growth politics reconfigured perceptions about the city’s public purpose and constrained democratic aspirations. Accounts of urban change in the midcentury industrial Midwest, especially as precursor to the Rust Belt city, often evoke images of economic dislocation, empty factories, and deteriorating blue-collar neighborhoods. But this transition in the Great Lakes city known as “America’s Machine Shop” was not solely a function of changing economic circumstances. It also points to a rupture in urban political culture. Conflicts between working-class politics and growth politics propelled these changes, pitting the precepts of metropolitan efficiency and productivity against the principles of democratic access and distribution. This transformation toward a political culture driven by growth politics weakened the political and social arrangements that characterized the industrial city and its early 1

2

Introduction

development. On the two sides of this divide, city residents thought and spoke differently about urban problems and prospects. Postwar democracy in the city, then, bore the imprint not only of changing economic relations, increasingly racialized images of urban disorder, and mounting Cold War fears, but also of the growth politics that had emerged dominant from this period of contention. This book contributes to the histories of the twentieth-century city and American political change by looking closely at local conflicts that both forged postwar growth politics and positioned it at the center of American urban political culture. On Labor Day in 1951, business and civic leaders promoted the early phases of Milwaukee’s postwar development program with a parade along Wisconsin Avenue. Rather than celebrate labor’s power and place in the city, this Labor Day parade advertised the benefits that a “downtown modernization program” promised the city as a whole. Funded by a bond issue, the two-million dollar project removed streetcar tracks and rebuilt the city’s main downtown thoroughfare. During an earlier groundbreaking ceremony for the project, business leaders lauded this as a requisite first step forward for Milwaukee’s economic growth and promised to help develop a modern metropolis. The Milwaukee Journal boasted that “the new street will help make Milwaukee look like the big city it is.”1 The Downtown Association, an organization of central city business leaders, sponsored this Labor Day parade which drew an estimated one hundred thousand onlookers. The labor councils for the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) each contributed a float. They were overshadowed, however, by the many other entries in the parade. The Milwaukee Journal’s report barely noted organized labor’s participation in this Labor Day event. Late in the article the CIO and AFL received a brief, belittling mention: “The AFL float had nice things to say about AFL workmen, and the CIO float felt the same way about the CIO.”2 The AFL’s Milwaukee Labor Press, perhaps made uneasy by unions’ marginal role, gave the parade minimal coverage. The CIO News expressed ambivalence, acknowledging “ironically enough this parade is sponsored by industry.”3 CIO attorney 1

2 3

“Ceremony Launches Repaving Project: Buses to Replace Streetcars,” Milwaukee Sentinel [hereafter MS], 9 January 1951; “Wisconsin Av. Work to Start,” Milwaukee Journal [hereafter MJ], 7 January 1951; “Power Shovel vs. Concrete, There’s a Show for Crowd,” MJ, 11 January 1951; “100,000 Here Cheer Parade,” MJ, 4 September 1951; and “Milwaukee: Wisconsin Av. Project Will Help Us Look Like a Big City,” MJ, 9 January 1951. “100,000 Here Cheer Parade.” “Plan Labor Day Celebrations,” Wisconsin CIO News, 10 August 1951. CIO coverage of the parade consisted of just one front-page photograph of their float, with a caption blandly stating that the display depicted the “CIO’s goals in community welfare.” “Milwaukee CIO

Contesting Democracy

3

Max Raskin mourned the loss of Labor Day. Raskin, who had served as a Socialist city attorney in the 1930s, contrasted this parade with Milwaukee’s spirited Labor Day and May 1st festivities of the past. He lamented that the Downtown Association’s event was “hardly a day of celebration for organized labor.”4 Labor Day had ceased to be labor’s day. The streetcar lines that this downtown development program displaced had been important for working-class life in the city. Workers had boarded Milwaukee’s streetcars to toil in the city’s factories and offices, to play in the city’s bingo halls and bowling alleys, to shop downtown and in neighborhood markets, and to display their power on picket lines and in earlier Labor Day celebrations. As in many other cities, streetcars and streetcar companies also had been flashpoints for labor and political conflict. An unsuccessful two-month strike in 1896 by motormen and conductors, which included a boycott that gained widespread support, helped to establish grievances against the “streetcar ring” as a staple for local politics and contributed eventually to the Socialists’ victories in municipal politics. An explosive four-day strike in 1934 forced the Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company to recognize the streetcar workers’ AFL unions and energized the city’s labor movement. Despite the company’s forcible efforts to break the unions, the strikers enjoyed strong public backing and earned the support of local officials.5 Mayor Daniel

4

5

Float,” Wisconsin CIO News, 7 September 1951. The AFL promoted the parade to its members by claiming that the event would show “labor’s role in making Milwaukee a bigger and better community.” AFL coverage of the parade and Labor Day celebration consisted of just a photograph of their parade float accompanied by the slogan “AFL Skilled Craftsmen Built This Magnificent Mile – and On Time.” “Plan Labor Day Parade,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 9 August 1951; “Labor Float in Big Parade,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 30 August 1951; [photograph], Milwaukee Labor Press, 6 September 1951. The AFL float was sponsored by the Milwaukee Federated Trades Council (FTC), the Building and Construction Trades Council, the Union Label Trades Department, the International Ladies Garment Workers, and the Allied Printing Trades Council. The FTC’s Labor Day message stressed social harmony. “A Labor Day Message!,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 30 August 1951. Max Raskin, “Labor Day, Now and Then,” Wisconsin CIO News, 31 August 1951. While unions throughout the United States after the war had “relinquished their claim to the holiday,” this 1951 parade signaled labor’s displacement by business and civic leaders. Michael Kazin and Steven J. Ross, “America’s Labor Day: The Dilemma of a Workers’ Celebration,” Journal of American History 78:4 (March 1992): 1320. Democratic candidate David Rose (1898) was the first to benefit from the earlier strike upheaval, but working-class voters moved later to support the Socialists. During the 1934 strike, the company paid the Bergoff Detective Agency thirty-nine thousand dollars to break the strike. The Amalgamated Association of Street, Electric Railway and Motor Coach Employees of America, Division 998, emerged from the strike to play an active role in 1930s labor disputes. Thomas W. Gavett, Development of the Labor Movement in Milwaukee (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 155–56; John Gurda, The Making of Milwaukee (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 1999), 198–99, 291–92; Florence Higgins, “Trial by Fire,” The Nation, 18 July 1934, 66–67; Karen Woolley Moore, “Missed Connections: The ‘Progressive’ Derailment of Public Transit in

4

Introduction

Hoan condemned the company, writing emphatically: “Your attitude toward your employees, our people, our city, our Federal Government is more arrogant than that of any ruler in the world. . . . You are now witnessing the harvest of pent-up public indignation you yourself have aroused.”6 The strike – the culmination of a forty-year fight for union recognition that was now spurred on by the promises of the early New Deal’s National Industrial Recovery Act – had demonstrated the power of working-class politics in the city. The removal of the streetcar tracks, undertaken to accommodate cars and buses, effaced part of this contentious past of the industrial city. Driving home the theme of “downtown modernization,” planners also staged a summertime event with a truck carrying a replica of an early streetcar and “thirty-five of the downtown area’s oldest employees,” followed by a new diesel bus motoring down the refurbished avenue. Rather than commemorating working-class power, the rebuilt Wisconsin Avenue at the center of Milwaukee’s 1951 Labor Day observance exhibited the strength of metropolitan business and civic leadership.7 These leaders aimed to make this downtown avenue and surrounding blocks not only the “hub of the city’s existence,” but a center for commerce, finances, and services.8 Downtown Association leader and department store executive Joseph A. Deglman hoped that the city center would become a “magnet,” offering “whatever anybody needs – merchandise, entertainment,

6

7

8

Metropolitan Milwaukee during the Electric Street Railway Era” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2011), 250–52, 281–82; Anthony M. Orum, City-Building in America (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 104–5; and Robert W. Ozanne, The Labor Movement in Wisconsin: A History (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1984), 65–66. On the significance of streetcar strikes in urban politics, see Shelton Stromquist, “The Crucible of Class: Cleveland Politics and the Origins of Municipal Reform in the Progressive Era,” Journal of Urban History 23:2 (January 1997): 192–220. Daniel W. Hoan, City Government: The Record of the Milwaukee Experiment (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936), 218–19. “‘Magnificent Mile’ in Business Again,” MJ, 9 September 1951. The demise of Milwaukee’s streetcars was an extended process, beginning in the late 1920s with the replacement of some street railway lines with buses. The last streetcar route was closed in 1958 (a trolley bus continued until 1965). Harold M. Mayer, “By Water, Land and Air: Transportation for Milwaukee County,” in Trading Post to Metropolis: Milwaukee County’s First 150 Years, ed. Ralph M. Aderman (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 1987), 373–74. The closing of streetcar stops and routes was not uncontested. See for instance: “A Petition to the Common Council of the City of Milwaukee,” July 1945, file 47–1070; William Ketterer, Assistant City Attorney, to Committee on Public Utilities of the Common Council, 1 March 1950, file 47–1067; both in Common Council files, City Records Center [hereafter CRC], City Hall, Milwaukee; and “Trolley Bus Fight Looms: Raised by Paving Plans,” MJ, 19 March 1951. “Hub of City Has Continued to Grow,” MJ, 2 September 1951.

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convenience, and professional services.”9 Many of the advertisements tied to this campaign targeted white upper- and middle-class women as shoppers, highlighting easy access and ample parking.10 The postwar city imagined in the parade situated organized labor as just one among many interest groups invited to support the goals of urban efficiency and economic growth. Rather than a city marked by sharp antagonisms and conflicts over resources, this version of Milwaukee consisted of coexisting groups that both articulated their interests and concurred about the basic principles of growth politics. In a sense, each distinct contingent in the parade marched to the same drummer. Wisconsin Avenue on Labor Day in 1951 served as a forum for this postwar pluralist democracy built around growth. In order to realize their urban vision, however, postwar city builders had to displace more than the streetcar tracks on Wisconsin Avenue. This was not only a brick and mortar project, but one that sought to reconstitute the “patterns of shared values, assumptions, and behaviors associated with public life.” Business and civic leaders had to excavate, remove, and reconstruct the political culture of the industrial city.11

9 10

11

“Thousands Travel ‘Magnificent Mile,’” MJ, 8 September 1951. See advertisements in “Up and Down the Magnificent Mile,” MJ, 2 September 1951; and MJ, 5 September 1951. Plans for a modernized Wisconsin Avenue were designed, in part, to help the downtown compete against new suburban shopping areas. On the Southgate shopping center, see Milwaukee Common Council, Roads to a Better Milwaukee: 1950 Report of 1949 Activities (1950). On consumption and attracting consumers downtown, see: Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: A. A. Knopf, 2003); and Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). On competing aims for downtown and urban renewal, see: John F. Bauman, “The Paradox of Post-War Urban Planning: Downtown Revitalization versus Decent Housing for All,” in Two Centuries of American Planning, ed. Daniel Schaffer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 231–64; Carl Abbott, “Five Strategies for Downtown: Policy Discourse and Planning since 1943,” in Planning the Twentieth-Century American City, eds. Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 404–27; and Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Quotation from Joanne Freeman, “The Culture of Politics: The Politics of Culture,” Journal of Policy History 16:2 (2004): 139. On conflict and change within and between political cultures, as well as contingency in these processes, see Margaret R. Somers, “Narrating and Naturalizing Civil Society and Citizenship Theory: The Place of Political Culture and the Public Sphere,” Sociological Theory 13 (1995): 229–74. On political culture, see: Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7:1 (Fall 1994): 107–46; Ronald P. Formisano, “The Concept of Political Culture,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31:3 (Winter 2001): 393–426; Glen Gendzel, “Political Culture: Genealogy of a Concept,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28:2 (Autumn 1997): 225–50; David Scobey, “Anatomy of the Promenade: The Politics of Bourgeois Sociability in Nineteenth-Century New York,”

6

Introduction

Four years earlier when business leaders had sought greater control over the use of downtown space, Wisconsin Avenue figured into a different calculus of working-class and growth politics. In 1947, the Milwaukee CIO Council (formally titled the Milwaukee County Industrial Union Council) opposed a business-sponsored measure to regulate downtown parades and demonstrations. Hoping to insulate commerce and economic life from the disruption of labor and political demonstrations, the Downtown Association proposed an ordinance prohibiting parades of more than twenty vehicles or two hundred persons on Wisconsin Avenue and other downtown streets during business hours. The Milwaukee CIO Council, its member unions, and allies mobilized quickly to thwart the proposal. Appealing to a sense of class injustice and citizenship rights, they decried such a restriction on downtown protests and political parades. Democratic participation necessitated access to this key city space. Union activists speaking at the Common Council hearings stressed their role and their rights as citizens, veterans, and workers. United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 283 President Joseph Konkel, representing workers at Wisconsin Motors, argued: “We want our civil rights preserved and extended. That’s what the boys fought for. That’s what labor believes in.” A representative from the Federated Trades Council, the AFL’s central body, also challenged the proposal, warning that this “precedent” to restrict parades downtown might be adopted by “businessmen’s associations” in other districts of the city. Bowing to union pressure, the Common Council soon dropped the measure.12 Attacked for having pushed this measure, the Downtown Association’s Perry Anderson responded that they “did not mean to step on any toes.”

12

Social History 17:2 (May 1992): 203–19; Margaret R. Somers, “What’s Political or Cultural about Political Culture and the Public Sphere? Toward an Historical Sociology of Concept Formation,” Sociological Theory 13 (1995): 113–44; and Robert B. Westbrook, Why We Fought: Forging American Obligations in World War II (Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2004). On the reconstitution of political culture, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). “Milw. Parade Ban Killed as Labor Voiced Opposition,” Wisconsin CIO News, 3 October 1947, 3; and “Parade Ban Hits Snag,” Wisconsin CIO News, 19 September 1947, 4. See: Milwaukee County Industrial Union Council, “Minutes,” 3 September 1947; Milwaukee County Industrial Union, Memorandum To all Local Unions, 11 September 1947; and Milwaukee County Industrial Union, Memorandum to Recording Secretaries, 19 September 1947; all found in folio 4, box 9, Milwaukee County Industrial Union Council Records, Milwaukee Mss DU, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, Archives Department, Milwaukee. See also the proposed ordinance and correspondence (especially Assistant City Attorney to Committee on Streets-Alleys-Sewers, 25 August 1947) in file 47–499, Common Council files, CRC. Although the Streets and Alleys Committee unanimously recommended the measure, in the face of opposition the full Council referred it back to committee and the proposal was dropped.

Contesting Democracy

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He claimed that the CIO misjudged the ban as an infringement on labor’s and citizens’ access to this important city space.13 The Milwaukee Journal, a major player in postwar development efforts, responded indignantly to the proposed ordinance’s defeat. The newspaper’s editors complained that the council had “caved in like a wet paper box when labor leaders and some others vigorously objected.” Declaring that the measure assisted business operations, just as prohibitions against double parking aided the flow of traffic and commerce, the Journal inquired: “Is it anybody’s constitutional right to tie a city’s traffic into knots? . . . To halt the movement of those activities on which the life of a city depends?”14 For the Journal and the Downtown Association, the life of the market and the life of the city were inseparable. An orderly, efficient downtown marketplace, they suggested, would help to produce a modern city. Regulations against parades and demonstrations were portrayed as technical measures (akin to traffic engineering), designed to make the city function efficiently. They were defined as axioms of growth: precepts beyond politics.15 The CIO Council and its allies, however, were unwilling to let this issue be ruled out of bounds for political debate. This was not simply a matter of creating a more efficient city and market or of following the prescription for modernization and growth. Concerns about political and economic power also stood at center stage. For Milwaukee’s business leaders, Wisconsin Avenue represented a commercial vision of urban vitality, one presuming that private economic interests rather than labor or even the wider public ought to guide the city. For the CIO, in contrast, this public site symbolized unfettered access to urban citizenship and collective action. Their organizing experience, their hours on picket duty, and the city’s tumultuous labor history had taught them that the right of assembly, the protection of free speech, and the need to demonstrate power – above all in visible and strategic urban spaces – were decidedly political and relevant to this dispute. Democratic access and the ability to mobilize people in public view were crucial ingredients of urban working-class political power, which the CIO refused to sacrifice for the presumed imperatives of modern economic growth. They maintained this united stand for working-class politics even though the local labor movement had just been riven by a

13 14 15

“Parade Restriction Proposal Set Back, Fails in Committee,” MJ, 25 September 1947. “Council Committee Bows Weakly on Parade Control Plan,” MJ, 26 September 1947. On the importance of physical public space and efforts to regulate access, see: Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Lisa Keller, Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York and London (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); and John R. Parkinson, Democracy and Public Space: The Physical Sites of Democratic Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

8

Introduction

fractious Allis-Chalmers strike (1946–1947) and despite the allegiance many labor activists held to New Deal policies inspired by Keynesian economics and to their own alternative visions of a modern Milwaukee. Those involved in the ordinance fight expressed a deep suspicion that this business-oriented version of urban growth politics threatened to remake the local landscape in ways that subverted working-class power.16 Both of these postwar episodes centered on Milwaukee’s Wisconsin Avenue. The distance between them, however, indicates a shift underway in the city’s political culture during the 1940s. This change, in turn, recast urban policy. The 1947 debate over the downtown parade ordinance arose amid a contested political culture. Organized labor and other workingclass groups championed the principle of democratic access and contended that business leaders’ priorities of economic efficiency and growth were fair game for political debate. The Wisconsin Avenue of 1947 harkened back to the first four decades of Milwaukee’s twentieth century, in which the politics of the Social Democrats, the rising power of organized labor, and the patterns of everyday life in working-class neighborhoods shaped the social relations of the industrial city and the ways in which people imagined that city. The 1951 parade down Wisconsin Avenue, in contrast, reflected a pluralist conception of postwar urban politics in which the discourse of growth provided the glue for a new consensus. Diverse players, or interests, gathered together publically to celebrate growth. Decisions about the urban economy were placed outside the purview of political contest. Whereas in 1947 labor and its allies defended Wisconsin Avenue as a political space, in 1951 the Downtown Association and its allies defined this same thoroughfare as a commercial space. The ground had shifted from a vigorously contested terrain in which working-class politics held sway to a “vital center” in which growth politics set the direction for the postwar city. The Wisconsin Avenue of 1951 anticipated 16

“Parade Ban Stopped,” Wisconsin CIO News, 3 October 1947, 4. Wisconsin Avenue was also home to the CIO’s headquarters. “State CIO Moves to Wisconsin Avenue,” Wisconsin CIO News, 31 January 1947. On labor’s public visibility, involvement in postwar cities, and defense of the right to strike, see especially: George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: Free Press, 2000); and Josiah Bartlett Lambert, “If Workers Took a Notion”: The Right to Strike and American Political Development (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). On limits black and female workers faced in making citizenship claims, see: D’Ann Campbell, Women at War with America: Private Lives in a Patriotic Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 44–45; and Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in TwentiethCentury America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). On the Allis-Chalmers strike, see Stephen Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin”: The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900–1950 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

Contesting Democracy

9

the last four decades of the twentieth century when the growth politics espoused by civic and business leaders would set the pace for Milwaukee’s political culture. With unintended but glaring irony, Labor Day at the beginning of the 1950s foreshadowed the neoliberal city.17 Challenges over democracy framed these contests and changes. As the 1930s drew to a close, New Deal supporters and opponents fought over the meaning of democracy in the United States. World War II became a war for democracy against dictatorship and the U. S. homefront was remade into the “arsenal of democracy.” As the Cold War escalated, both internationally and domestically, democratic prospects and threats stood at the forefront. The language of democracy also showed the effects of an ongoing but complex clash between growth politics and workingclass politics. In Milwaukee during the “long 1940s” (roughly the late 1930s to the early 1950s), workers, civic leaders, businessmen, reformers, conservatives, and other residents fought, compromised, and then fought some more in battles over policy and social order that posed urgent questions about self-rule, the prerogatives of private property, economic and political power, social welfare, access to urban spaces and resources, and participation in public life. Toward the end of this period a new understanding, or common sense, about the city had gained the upper hand, establishing different terms for urban development and civic order, while also altering expectations for postwar democracy. Both working-class politics and reactions to workers’ power played a pivotal role in this history of urban democracy.18 The mid-twentieth-

17

18

On the neoliberal city, see: Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007); Judith T. Kenny and Jeffrey Zimmerman, “Constructing the ‘Genuine American City’: NeoTraditionalism, New Urbanism, and Neo-Liberalism in the Remaking of Downtown Milwaukee,” Cultural Geographies 11:1 (2003): 74–98; Christopher Mele, “Casinos, Prisons, Incinerators, and Other Fragments of Neoliberal Urban Development,” Social Science History 35:3 (Fall 2011): 423–52; and Mark Purcell, Recapturing Democracy: Neoliberalization and the Struggle for Alternative Urban Futures (New York: Routledge, 2008). See also Joseph Heathcott, “The City Quietly Remade: National Programs and Local Agendas in the Movement to Clear the Slums, 1942–1952,” Journal of Urban History 34:2 (January 2008): 221–42. On the vital center and the making of a postwar consensus, see: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949); and Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Works on the history of working-class politics and culture that inform this project include: Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History (1976; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1977); Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994); David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth

10

Introduction

century city housed a politically and culturally robust working class. In the 1930s and 1940s, workers, working-class organizations, and allied groups laid claim to the city, extending the power they built in the workplace, in local communities, and in national politics. During the Great Depression, urban workers organized and established themselves as a political and social power. A rapidly growing CIO and a resurgent AFL, combined with increasing commitments to the national New-Deal Democratic Party and upsurges of support for local social democratic and progressive organizations, demonstrated the strength and vitality of the urban working class. At the same time, these organizations that faced regular attacks from outside were tested continually by the social and economic insecurities of their members’ daily lives. These challenges accounted for much of the volatility and contingency of working-class politics in the 1930s and later.19 As the new decade began, labor unions, civil rights groups, women’s organizations, and progressives rallied to protect New Deal gains and to seize wartime political and social opportunities. The urban working class also changed rapidly during the war and in the years immediately following, as thousands of women found temporary jobs in defense plants, the city’s black working class grew, and organized labor assumed a prominent place in society and politics. The wartime city, a busy and clamorous place,

19

Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). Important critical interventions include: John Arena, “Bringing In the Black Working Class: The Black Urban Regime Strategy,” Science and Society 72:2 (April 2011): 153–79; Ava Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, The Future of Class in History: What’s Left of the Social? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007); William H. Sewell, Jr., “How Classes Are Made: Critical Reflections on E. P. Thompson’s Theory of Working-Class Formation,” in E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives, eds. Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 50–77; and Marc W. Steinberg, “Culturally Speaking: Finding a Commons between Post-Structuralism and the Thompsonian Perspective,” Social History 21:2 (May 1996): 193–214. On 1930s urban working class politics and culture, see: Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Cecelia Bucki, Bridgeport’s Socialist New Deal, 1915–36 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996); Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Gary Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Sam Lubell, “Revolt of the City,” in The Future of American Politics, 3d ed., rev. (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 43–68; Andor Skotnes, A New Deal for All?: Race and Class Struggles in Depression-Era Baltimore (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); and Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

Contesting Democracy

11

fostered working-class combativeness and sparked a range of social, political, and cultural conflicts.20 The end of the war ushered in a period of turmoil, as organized labor and workers sought to secure and extend their role in politics and urban society. Almost immediately, they found themselves running up against opponents who sought to undercut organized labor, reestablish the privileges of private property, and redraw class and racial borders in the postwar city.21 Proponents of working-class politics who built on legacies of labor power during the first half of the twentieth century both demonstrated a heady sense of possibility in the late 1930s and 1940s and strained to consolidate and push forward their position in the face of intense opposition. In Milwaukee, labor unions and labor activists championed workingclass politics. Popular Front groups and allies on the left, including black, 20

21

On World War II-era working-class life and politics, especially in urban areas, see: Rosemary Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 137–76; Gary Gerstle, “The Working Class Goes to War,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, eds. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 105–27; Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Nelson Lichtenstein, “Class Politics and the State during World War II,” International Labor and Working-Class History 58 (Fall 2000): 261–74; Richard L. Pifer, A City at War: Milwaukee Labor during World War II (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2003); Megan Taylor Schockley, “We, Too, Are Americans”: African American Women in Detroit and Richmond, 1940–54 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). See also: Katherine Archibald, Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity, new intro. by Eric Arnesen and Alex Lichtenstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); and Alexander Saxton, Bright Web in the Darkness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1958; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). On early postwar working-class life and politics, see especially: Freeman, Working-Class New York; Laura McEnaney, “Nightmares on Elm Street: Demobilizing in Chicago, 1945–1953,” Journal of American History 92:4 (March 2006): 1265–91; Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945–1968 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Robert W. Cherny, William Issel, and Kieran Walsh Taylor, eds., American Labor and the Cold War (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Kenneth D. Durr, Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); David Lewis-Colman, Race against Liberalism: Black Workers and the UAW in Detroit (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight; Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin”; Wendell Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Shelton Stromquist, ed., Labor’s Cold War: Local Politics in a Global Context (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); and Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

12

Introduction

white, and interracial organizations, also put working-class politics into play.22 Milwaukee Socialism, a substantial force in local politics and governance since the early twentieth century, remained an important touchstone for working-class politics despite the decline of its organized presence after the 1930s. Frank Zeidler, a committed but pragmatic Socialist, served as mayor from 1948–1960. Labor unions, parties, and political leaders provided an essential institutional impetus and structure for working-class politics. These were integral to the patterns of everyday working-class life in the city. Working-class politics also was rooted in the social fabric and culture of Milwaukee’s moderate- and lower-income neighborhoods. As elsewhere, these neighborhoods were filled with people who lived with uncertainty and often experienced periods of austerity; this translated into a politics that was fragile and sometimes faltering. But as in other industrial cities, a vibrant working-class culture and politics also came to life regularly around kitchen tables, in taverns, in bingo halls, in bowling alleys, in churches and synagogues, on buses and streetcars, in public housing projects, amid election campaigns, at city hall, in workplaces, and on picket lines. Working-class politics in Milwaukee, made up of a rich blend of organizations, people, places, and practices of everyday life, proved to be neither monolithic nor wholly predictable amid the tumult of city life. For instance, different labor organizations’ approaches ranged widely, from a broad social unionism to a tightly defined business unionism that still articulated a clear understanding of power. Inside working-class neighborhoods, diverse political and social views were given voice. Nevertheless, we can discern a sensibility that undergirded working-class ideas and actions, guided by ideals of equal access and distribution, a recognition of power in public life, a drive to attain greater economic and social security, and expectations for broad public participation. Most crucially, working-class Milwaukeeans understood that a society without checks on concentrated economic power would leave them with little say over their lives or the life of the city. By piecing together various elements evident in the midcentury 22

The term Popular Front here refers to the left-wing groups, alliances, and social currents that emphasized class and racial egalitarianism. This history was shaped, of course, by twists and turns of the Communist Party’s formal politics – including the Comintern’s 1935 antifascist Popular Front directive, the 1939 nonaggression pact with Germany, and the post-1941 win-the-war focus that tempered some grassroots agitation. But local Popular Front cultural and organizational ties had considerable impact in industrial cities. Denning, The Cultural Front; Michael Dennis, “Chicago and the Little Steel Strike, Labor History 53:2 (May 2012): 167–204; Michael Kazin, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 155–208; and Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998), 14–25.

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urban debates, five facets of working-class politics can be identified: first, an insistence that the critical decisions a city faced were political issues, often revolving around power and its distribution, and not simply questions of technical engineering or administration; second, advocacy of far-reaching and often egalitarian public programs (for example, public housing), rather than reliance on the marketplace, to meet the everyday needs of workingclass people (for example, housing shortages or displacement); third, a requirement that cities exercise their political clout and retain their fiscal autonomy, especially to respond to working-class needs and to mitigate the consequences of metropolitan fragmentation; fourth, a demand that working-class access to public places in the city, whether for the purpose of recreation or political expression, take precedence over designs for increased productivity or efficiency; and fifth, a perception that class mattered in the life of the city and its politics. These building blocks of workingclass politics led, in turn, to a belief that widespread participation and public contention would invigorate democracy. These politics also emboldened some people to embrace a broad social egalitarianism; but popular prejudices and patterns of social hierarchy often closed off this path. Workingclass politics – in its inconsistencies, contradictions, and fragility – can be understood as a set of discourses and actions that were crafted and recrafted by people for whom the experience of class in the workplace, community, or public life was consequential but not necessarily uniform.23 The cluster of ideas and practices that constituted working-class politics neither existed in a distilled state nor remained static. These politics must be understood historically; they were not simply a function of class or social position. The ideas, talk, and actions making up working-class politics took shape and acquired meaning in the midst of a rapidly changing city and shifting power relations. This was not a systematic philosophy, but a set of ideas stemming from experience and perceived interests. 23

Miguel A. Cabrera, Postsocial History: An Introduction, trans. Marie McMahon (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004); David Camfield, “Reorienting Class Analysis: Working Classes as Historical Formations,” Science and Society 68:4 (2004–2005): 421–46; Donald Reid, “Reflections on Labor History and Language,” in Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis, ed. Lenard R. Berlanstein (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 39–54; Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); and Marc W. Steinberg, “Talkin’ Class: Discourse, Ideology, and Their Roles in Class Conflict,” in Bringing Class Back In: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives, eds. Scott G. McNall, Rhonda F. Levine, and Rick Fantasia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 261–84. See also: Margo Anderson, “The Language of Class in Twentieth-Century America,” Social Science History 12:4 (Winter 1988): 349–75; Freeman, Working-Class New York; and Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, 193–97. This study contributes to a literature that attends to the language and dynamics of class, countering the histories and popular commentaries that dismiss the salience of class in postwar America.

14

Introduction

Individuals who spoke or acted on behalf of working-class politics advanced certain aspects of these politics and rejected others. Now and again they contradicted themselves. This book explores the concrete transformations of 1940s-era working-class politics by investigating the patterns and complexities of political culture in one city. Importantly, race and gender shaped local working-class practices and attitudes, as did changes occurring on the national and global scale. At times, proponents of working-class politics challenged racism or recalibrated boundaries set by divisions of race and gender in the city. At other times, working-class politics reinforced white privilege or male advantage, hence restricting possibilities for an expansive democracy or egalitarianism. The nascent Cold War shook the institutional bases for working-class politics and constricted the reach of contests over urban democracy.24 These complexities in the history of working-class politics help us to see class as historically embedded and dynamic, rather than as abstract or stable. Business leaders’ and conservatives’ reactions in the 1930s and 1940s attest to fears stoked by labor’s power and the prominence of workingclass politics in urban America. Opposition to New Deal policies and 1930s labor organizing had materialized immediately, crystallizing notably around the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, the labor upheaval of 1934, and the Wagner Act of 1935. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which passed in the wake of an intense strike wave and conservative congressional victories in the first postwar midterm elections, aimed to limit labor and working-class power. Between these points lay a history of escalations in the battle to restrict or tame working-class power, including: conservative electoral gains in 1938; legislative efforts designed to restrain organized labor, such as the Wisconsin Employment Peace Act of 1939 (which foreshadowed the Taft-Hartley Act); wartime initiatives to reestablish the reputation and clout of business; a vigorous campaign against the ambitious Full Employment bill; and postwar plans to turn back labor’s New Deal-era gains in the workplace and politics. While an urban working-class presence may have been strongest in the industrial heartland of the Midwestern, Northeastern, and Mid-Atlantic states, as well as some West Coast cities, anxiety over an increasingly powerful working class affected even the politics of future Sun Belt cities. In Austin, Texas, for instance, business leaders and bankers resisted industrial expansion and 24

Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight; Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); and David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005). See also Eric Arnesen, “Up from Exclusion: Black and White Workers, Race, and the State of Labor History,” Reviews in American History 26:1 (March 1998): 146–74.

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worried “that new industry meant smokestacks and CIO organizers with un-Texan names.”25 Fears and hopes about working-class power in the city emerged as key political and cultural concerns in the United States throughout the 1940s. In the multipronged challenge that business and civic leaders mounted against working-class power, the discourses and practice of growth politics proved to be effective. But these were more than tactical weapons or tools. They would be deployed to carve out the foundation for a postwar version of democracy. Growth politics, broadly understood, had a long history in the city and elsewhere. City boosters in the nineteenth century promoted growth, arguing that industrial and commercial development would prompt urban expansion and make their city more competitive. Early twentiethcentury civic leaders, businessmen, and planners embraced growth as a public good that all city residents could share.26 The travails of the Great Depression – which precipitated plummeting real estate values, industrial decline, and fears of economic stagnation – undermined assumptions about inexorable economic expansion.27 The ensuing expansion of the state and introduction of federal-level Keynesian policies during the New Deal and the 25

26

27

Quote in Carl Abbott, The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993), 3. On the 1939 Wisconsin law, see Darryl Holter, “Labor Law and the Road to Taft-Hartley: Wisconsin’s ‘Little Wagner Act,’ 1935–1945”, Labor Studies Journal 15:2 (Summer 1990): 20–47. On business and politics, see: Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Colin Gordon, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920–1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); Andrew Workman, “Manufacturing Power: The Organizational Revival of the National Association of Manufacturers, 1941–1945,” Business History Review 72:2 (1998): 279–317; and Kim Phillips-Fein and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., What’s Good for Business: Business and American Politics since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). The literature on city building, development, boosterism, and growth is vast. See, for instance: Orum, City Building in America; Eric Sandweiss, St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); David Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); and Robert B. Fairbanks, For the City as a Whole: Planning, Politics, and the Public Interest in Dallas, Texas, 1900–1965 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998). On the quest for growth, understood broadly, see Steven Stoll, The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008). Isenberg, Downtown America; and Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). See also Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).

16

Introduction

war, however, began to transform policy makers’ and citizens’ ideas about how the government’s economic policies might guide modern society and stimulate growth. Policies inspired in part by the British economist John Maynard Keynes’s theories, even if applied on only a limited basis in the United States in the later 1930s, had favored enhanced public spending and planning, as well as the use of monetary powers, to boost consumption and create higher levels of employment in order to achieve economic recovery and a more equitable distribution of resources. Early postwar debates over full employment and the passage of the Employment Act of 1946 altered this formulation. While higher levels of employment might still be a desired result, increased private sector economic activity or growth itself became instead the primary goal for public policy and private action. As the leading scholars of postwar growth Alan Wolfe and Robert Collins contend, the Council of Economic Advisors under Leon Keyserling’s early leadership would serve as a policy home for growth politics and launch what would become a widely accepted approach to national economic policy in the 1950s and 1960s. The rapidly expanding global role of the United States also would help to instill ideas about growth into national and international policy and politics. But as was the case for working-class politics, midcentury growth politics represented a sprawling cluster of ideas and responses that developed historically and unevenly at multiple levels of society, rather than a tightly conceived package. At the local level, a commercial Keynesianism (even if cities’ powers to stimulate demand were minimal) mixed with the practices of urban boosters, civic reformers, and business leaders to produce growth politics.28 Of particular consequence in the story of metropolitan American growth politics were campaigns against what would be diagnosed as the “outmoded city.” Depictions of this worn-out, anachronistic city invoked images of inefficiency and corruption. Business and civic leaders during the 1940s decried the physical and moral deterioration of the urban landscape. They also raised the specter of a metropolis beset by class and social divisions. The growth politics crafted in the midst of these policy and cultural debates suggested a path out of this thicket. Professing that the 28

Alan Wolfe, America’s Impasse: The Rise and Fall of the Politics of Growth (New York: Pantheon, 1981); and Robert M. Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). This argument builds on Wolfe’s brief suggestion about the importance of working-class and labor politics, as well as city politics, to the history of national-level growth politics (24). See also: Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1995); Kathleen G. Donohue, Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 198–282; and Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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modern metropolis of their designs would bypass the divisive negotiations and antagonisms endemic to what they characterized as an obsolete politics of distribution, growth proponents depicted efficiency as a means to raise productivity and accelerate growth. In earlier years, Milwaukee Socialists and their heirs had upheld a different notion of efficiency and rational planning as they aimed to counter economic concentration, to develop a public sector supported by a system of equitable taxation, to boost democratic participation, and to distribute city services so that working-class residents benefitted in full. Progressive reformers often spoke of efficiency for the purpose of creating a well-administered democracy – good governance and fair taxation and spending. While traces of these other traditions of efficiency survived, a market-oriented language of efficiency coupled with demands for greater productivity and growth now took hold.29 The story of Milwaukee in the 1940s illustrates that as ideas about economic growth moved to the center of wartime and postwar political thought and practice, the concepts of efficiency and productivity shouldered an ever greater cultural weight. Business and civic leaders viewed efficiency and productivity through an economic lens, advocating a version of postwar growth politics that placed the needs of the metropolitan economy – especially aggregate private-sector economic expansion – at the top of the urban agenda. Theirs was not a laissez-faire economics. The public sector would play a role in aiding private sector aims and expansion. They stipulated, however, that these economic considerations ought to override politics in the life of the city and provide the basis for rational

29

On discourses of decline, obsolescence, and the outmoded city, see: Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of US Cities (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1993); Isenberg, Downtown America, 164–202; and Carlo Rotella, October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). On varied ideals of efficiency and rationality articulated by early planners, reformers, and Social Democrats, see: J. E. Treleven, “The Milwaukee Bureau of Economy and Efficiency,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 41 (1912): 270–80; Douglas E. Booth, “Municipal Socialism and City Government Reform: The Milwaukee Experience, 1910–1940,” Journal of Urban History 12:1 (November 1985): 51–74; M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983); Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Martin J. Schiesl, The Politics of Efficiency: Municipal Administration and Reform in America, 1800–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). Early twentieth-century reformers stressed the purification or differentiation of urban spaces; they later fused discourses of economic utility with efforts to divide the city functionally, laying a foundation for midcentury measures to enhance efficiency. Peter C. Baldwin, Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850–1930 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999).

18

Introduction

decisions about the future. In this effort, postwar business leaders sought to convince the public of the need to lower barriers to increased productivity and efficiency. They branded organized labor’s power and state intervention in the form of marketplace regulations as unproductive meddling in the affairs of private enterprise. Everyday life, city politics, and policy proposals came under greater scrutiny. Deploying metaphors of technological and social advancement, advocates for the private sector decried out-of-date methods and called for “modern, efficient” systems. As this language of efficiency and productivity was applied widely, proponents of a “modern” postwar society sought to diminish the role of politics and questioned the legitimacy of conflict. They deemed instead that urban problems should be addressed through technical and administrative means. Policies and practices determined to be inefficient or unproductive should be pushed aside. Urban business leaders and their professional allies called for the demolition and redevelopment of timeworn or unproductive places in the metropolis. They also championed the elimination of cultural practices viewed now as “outmoded” or inefficient, such as petty gambling in working-class neighborhoods, with the aim of reconstructing city life and building a modern Milwaukee.30 Market efficiency and productivity that would fuel growth were depicted as the resolution to the conflict-ridden city of the past. “Outmoded” working-class cities such as Milwaukee were marked as a scourge for the embryonic postwar politics of growth, standing in the way of the modern metropolis and nation. At the same time, many growth advocates postulated that their initiatives not only could be reconciled with democracy but indeed were consistent with the making of a more modern democracy. A pluralist liberal democracy would mesh well with market imperatives and nurture economic growth. Whereas working-class politics legitimized challenges to marketplace prerogatives – allowing for the regulation and reform of the political economy, as well as redistribution – postwar growth politics gave sanction to a market-driven public life. This “modern” and efficient democracy would aid economic growth. Ideas about progress that animated this emerging growth politics depicted a classless city, a consensual society, and a polity that conformed to this efficient and productive capitalist economy. But this ascendance of

30

On discourses of efficiency and productivity in growth politics, see Charles S. Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Collins, More; Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise; and Wolfe, America’s Impasse. See also K. Sabeel Rahman, “Democracy and Productivity: The GlassSteagall Act and the Shifting Discourse of Financial Regulation,” Journal of Policy History 24:4 (2012): 612–43.

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19

postwar growth politics was neither inevitable nor a clean break from the past. Instead, it was part of an untidy and often contradictory history.31 While working-class and growth politics can be distinguished analytically, they often overlapped or were interwoven in people’s lived experience and in the historical development of urban political culture. As growth ideologies grew in strength in Milwaukee and American society, people acted and talked in ways that fused elements of working-class politics to growth politics. Over the course of this history, working-class and growth politics collided and on occasion merged, as Milwaukeeans engaged in conflict, regrouped, and reconfigured social and political alignments. Working-class politics drew eventually from the language of growth itself, especially as growth politics became more influential in the later 1940s. Conflicts and concessions would be carried out within this “hegemonic language” or “genre.”32 The language of working-class 31

32

An “urban growth regime” literature review contends “that the principal effect of growth machines is to bend the policy priorities of localities toward developmental rather than redistributional goals.” John L. Logan, Rachel Bridges Whaley, and Kyle Crowder, “The Character and Consequences of Growth Regimes: An Assessment of Twenty Years of Research,” in The Urban Growth Machine: Critical Perspectives, Two Decades Later, eds. Andrew E. G. Jonas and David Wilson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 75. On growth coalitions, urban growth machines, and business-led urban regimes, see: Kevin Fox Gotham, “Growth Machine Up-Links: Urban Renewal and the Rise and Fall of a Pro-Growth Coalition in a U.S. City,” Critical Sociology 26:3 (2000): 268–300; William Issel, “The New Deal and Wartime Origins of San Francisco’s Postwar Political Culture: The Case of Growth Politics and Policy,” in The Way We Really Were: The Golden State in the Second Great War, ed. Roger W. Lotchin (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 68–92; John Logan and Harvey Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); John H. Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); and Clarence N. Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989). On Milwaukee, see also: Arnold Fleischmann and Joe R. Feagin, “The Politics of GrowthOriented Urban Alliances: Comparing Old Industrial and New Sunbelt Cities,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 23:2 (December 1987): 207–32; and Joel Rast, “Governing the Regimeless City: The Frank Zeidler Administration in Milwaukee, 1948–1960,” Urban Affairs Review 42:1 (September 2006): 81–112. On progress, classlessness, and liberalism, see: Christopher Lasch, A True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); Nelson Lichtenstein, “Market Triumphalism and the Wishful Liberals,” in Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History after the Fall of Communism, ed. Ellen Schrecker (New York: New Press, 2004), 103–25; Roland Marchand, “Visions of Classlessness, Quests for Dominion: American Popular Culture, 1945–1960,” in Reshaping America: Society and Institutions, 1945–1960, eds. Robert H. Bremner and Gary W. Reichard (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), 163–90; and Olivier Zunz, Why the American Century? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 93–111. Class struggles, rather than occurring always between opposed languages, are carried on often “within a hegemonic language” or within a dominant “genre.” Marc W. Steinberg, “‘A Way of Struggle’: Reformations and Affirmations of E. P. Thompson’s Class Analysis in the Light of Postmodern Theories of Language,” British Journal of Sociology 48 (1997): 486.

20

Introduction

politics, in short, took many forms during these years and would then be eclipsed. But for a time, the particular set of ideas and practices described here as working-class politics formed the most substantial reply to growth politics in the city. Hence, the business, conservative, and even Cold War liberal responses to working-class politics gave shape to the particular policies and coalitions that continued to redefine growth politics in the city. In these ways, working-class politics proved to be more than a “path not taken” in the mid-twentieth century. Rather, it was pivotal in the history of growth politics and integral to the development of postwar urban democracy. Race and racism, of course, also demarcated Milwaukee’s landscape and political culture. Both working-class politics and growth politics bore this deep imprint; the history of race was intertwined with their development. This is not, however, a story of race displacing class on the postwar urban landscape. Although a frequently invoked argument about race supplanting class has provided an important corrective to histories of modern America that overlooked the significance of African-American experiences and the power of white racism, succession narratives underestimate the salience of both class and race on each side of the World War II divide. Even in a city such as Milwaukee with a relatively small population of African Americans and other minority residents until later decades of the twentieth century, race shaped local politics and society long before and after wartime migrations. Restrictions affecting work, housing, schooling, and play – although not unchanging – defined much of black Milwaukeeans’ lives on both sides of this temporal divide. Similarly, black working-class and middle-class challenges to racism, carried out individually and collectively, pre- and post-date the middle years of the century.33 But two important changes distinguish this midcentury period, especially as the size of the city’s African-American population grew. First, black civil rights activism, often in alliance with labor-liberal groups, accelerated. Civil rights organizing during the 1940s often, but not

33

On Milwaukee, see: Jack Dougherty, “African Americans, Civil Rights, and Race-Making in Milwaukee,” in Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past, eds. Margo Anderson and Victor Greene (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 131–61; Kevin D. Smith, “From Socialism to Racism: The Politics of Class and Identity in Postwar Milwaukee,” Michigan Historical Review 29 (Spring 2003): 71–95; Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–45 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); and Patrick D. Jones, The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). The race-displacing-class argument, made effectively, is found in Ira Katznelson, “Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity?,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, eds. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 185–211.

Contesting Democracy

21

always, fit closely with working-class politics. Second, racial stereotypes and a race-specific geography of the working-class city became the predominant language for urban disorder by the early 1950s. Black workingclass migrants and African-American “inner core” neighborhoods were depicted increasingly as the source of urban decline and danger. These neighborhoods and the people living there were posed as inimical to the modern, efficient metropolis. The histories of race, class, and growth were woven tightly into the fabric of these contests over the city.34 This study focuses on the shifting patterns of growth and working-class politics and argues that the dynamic but often antagonistic relationship between these elements of the local political culture remade democracy in the midcentury city. But these patterns do not capture all the complexity of urban political and social life. Nor did all of the organizations and individuals active in the metropolis fit neatly into these categories. Conservatives, civic reformers, and liberals of many stripes played important roles in the battles of this era. They often drew from working-class politics or growth politics to make their arguments and to advance their causes and interests. They also tapped into a range of other political or social traditions to make sense of the city and its prospects. Conservative ideals of liberty and antistatism – accentuated in opposition to local socialism, the New Deal, and international totalitarianism – proved particularly potent. Realtors, especially those who made their living by selling or renting houses in the city’s neighborhoods as opposed to downtown landlords and commercial realtors, sometimes found themselves at odds with business leaders who touted plans for metropolitan or downtown development.35 34

35

On the black working class and civil rights, see: Laurie B. Green, Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Kelley, Race Rebels, 55–75; Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-TwentiethCentury South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Clarence Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936–75 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); and James Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). On racialized depictions of urban disorder, see: Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Beauregard, Voices of Decline, 161–84. Notable examples in the extensive literature on race and metropolitan change include: Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Self, American Babylon; and Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis.. See also: Preston H. Smith II, Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012) and Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008). On realtors in Milwaukee and elsewhere, see: John M. McCarthy, Making Milwaukee Mightier: Planning and the Politics of Growth, 1910–1960 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois

22

Introduction

Civic reformers, building on traditions as diverse as urban vice campaigns and the City Beautiful movement, were active during and after the war. Middle- and upper-class women took the lead frequently and provided the backing in sundry campaigns to reform the city and its residents. The scrapbooks compiled by the Milwaukee Woman’s Club, filled with newspaper clips and programs, illustrate the breadth of issues that these groups dealt with in the 1940s city. While often allied with liberal and labor groups on social policy, they did not necessarily find common ground with all of these groups when engaged in moral reform or social control campaigns.36 At the national, state, and local levels, liberalism was both malleable and ascendant. Coalitions of liberal public officials, business leaders, and professionals led initiatives to remake metropolitan America. Some scholarly and popular accounts assert that a liberal consensus reigned over the postwar urban landscape and the nation. Milwaukee’s history, from one perspective, could even be seen as supporting a triumphal story of postwar liberalism. The continued ascent of New Deal liberalism was marked by a series of wartime and postwar transformations, most notably as the

36

University Press, 2009); and Jeffrey M. Hornstein, A Nation of Realtors®: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). On midcentury conservative politics and policy, see especially: David Beito, Taxpayer in Revolt: Tax Resistance during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder, “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950,” Political Science Quarterly 108: 2 (Summer 1993): 283–306; Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 109–33, 165–93; Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands; and Nicholas Wapshott, Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 188–225. On the historiography of conservatism, see: Alan Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” American Historical Review 99:2 (April 1994): 409–29; Julian E. Zelizer, “Rethinking the History of American Conservatism,” Reviews in American History 38:2 (June 2010): 367–92; and Kim Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 98:3 (December 2011), 723–43. On urban-based reform initiatives during the first half of the twentieth century, see: Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); Amy Bridges, Morning Glories: Municipal Reform in the Southwest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); and Sylvie Murray, The Progressive Housewife: Community Activism in Suburban Queens, 1945–1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). On the working-class impetus to Progressive reform, see John D. Buenker, Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1973). On Milwaukee’s female reformers, see: Scrapbooks 6–9, Milwaukee Woman’s Club (mss 1780), Milwaukee County Historical Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Marie Anne Laberge, “‘Seeking a Place to Stand’: Political Power and Activism among Wisconsin Women, 1945–1963" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1995).

Contesting Democracy

23

bureaucratic and moderating tendencies within the labor movement led to a lasting alliance with anticommunist liberals. Organized labor, other working-class constituencies, reformers, and some business leaders negotiated new liberal alliances, converging on a “vital center.” Postwar racial liberalism, a moderate and halting step toward a more integrated public life, accompanied this shift. Cities sought to leave behind the shock and neglect of the Great Depression and the war years as liberal reformers from the public and private sectors trumpeted redevelopment and rebuilding projects. In these arenas, growth strategies helped to reinforce a liberal order that aimed to set the course for postwar policy, coming unhinged later amid the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s. The postwar liberal order was cemented by a complex set of arrangements and shared beliefs that featured: commercial Keynesianism and a consumption-based economy; compensatory social welfare and civil rights policy; and interestgroup pluralism and individual rights. This liberal order also allowed for institutions of collective bargaining, as long as these were restrained by a market that remained dominant.37 Local-level liberalism shared many traits of the liberalisms found at the national and state levels. And liberal influences moved easily between the local and federal levels. But local and national liberalism also diverged at times – due in part to differing points of view and scales of authority – and resulted in distinct policy and reform emphases. Historians interrogating “local liberalisms” observe, for instance, an eclectic mixture of approaches to economic policy. While the postwar rise of business- or consumptionoriented commercial Keynesianism was evident at all levels, liberal initiatives in local settings displayed significant continuity between the pre- and post-World War II periods. New Deal-style policies that brought a social Keynesian approach to core economic issues, although implemented 37

In the vast literature on liberalism, as well as midcentury pluralism and consensus, see: Jonathan Bell and Timothy Stanley, eds., Making Sense of American Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Fraser and Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order; Gary Gerstle, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” American Historical Review 99:4 (October 1994): 1043–73; Carol A. Horton, Race and the Making of American Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); David Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Doug Rossinow, Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Schlesinger, The Vital Center; Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933–1956 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Wall, Inventing the “American Way”. See also Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, “Regimes and Regime Building in American Government: A Review of Literature on the 1940s,” Political Science Quarterly 113:4 (Winter 1998–99): 689–702.

24

Introduction

within the constricted context of municipal authority, persisted and frequently operated in tension with commercial Keynesian approaches. The Milwaukee case, then, highlights both the regular exchange of ideas and practices between the federal and local policy arenas and the disjuncture between federal and local policy makers’ ways of tackling urban problems. In the case of the emerging public housing program especially, federal policy directives and local goals spelled out in the implementation process often pitted competing languages of liberalism against one another. Not all liberalisms were the same.38 While a complex and changing liberalism did indeed shape public disputes nationally and locally, this book begins with democracy as the reference point from which to make sense of the friction between workingclass and growth politics in the 1940s city. Such a reexamination heeds the historian James Kloppenberg’s suggestion to “refocus our attention away from Cold War-era controversies over liberalism and socialism, and away from the more recent scholarly controversies over liberalism and republicanism.” He advises instead that historians contemplate “the multidimensional and essentially contested concept of democracy.”39 Research and writing done since the end of the Cold War has moved the field of modern American history in promising new directions, with attention to conservatism mining an especially rich vein. Much of this work, however, keeps liberalism (and concerns about liberalism) at the forefront. Conservatism is interpreted largely in relation to liberalism. All of that makes sense. The onset of the Cold War, as well as the travails of liberalism and conservatism, played significant roles in twentieth-century American and urban history. But these interpretive boundaries leave insufficient leeway for other ways of seeing the city, including those that do not presuppose liberalism as the most powerful lens to bring the 1940s into focus. The “contested concept of democracy” allows us to notice and examine those dynamics of political culture that do not fit easily into a liberal-conservative grid, especially the antagonistic and persistent politics of class evident in the midcentury industrial city. Such an approach also

38

39

On “local liberalism,” see Guian A. McKee, The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). See also: William Issel, “Liberalism and Social Policy in San Francisco from the 1930s to the 1960s,” Western Historical Quarterly 22:4 (Winter 1991): 431–50; and Philip J. Funigiello, The Challenge to Urban Liberalism: Federal-City Relations during World War II (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978). James J. Kloppenberg, “From Hartz to Tocqueville: Shifting the Focus from Liberalism to Democracy in America,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, eds. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian Zelizer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 352.

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25

brings growth politics to the fore, charting its uncertain passage during this period. Attention to democracy and contention in the city, then, enables close investigation of working-class and growth politics. Concerns about participation, access, resources, and dignity, together with issues stemming from urban inequalities and power, propelled these debates in the city. Working-class ideas about democracy collided with an emerging conception of democracy being built on a foundation of growth and efficiency in this volatile local political culture of the long 1940s.40 Intellectual historians and political theorists, among others, have taught us a great deal about the history and nature of democracy. A social history of politics, however, can further our understanding of democracy’s uneven development by asking how particular people articulated ideas and practiced what they believed about democracy in particular times and particular places. What possibilities and constraints did people face in discerning their conception of democratic life? What different conceptions of democracy did people hold? How did these

40

Kloppenberg notes that even many conflict-oriented histories of liberalism accept the premises underlying consensus historians’ interpretations of American political culture. Kloppenberg, “From Hartz to Tocqueville,” 370–71. See also Mary Dietz, “Merely Combating the Phrases of This World: Recent Democratic Theory,” Political Theory 26:1 (February 1998): 112–39. Exemplary social histories of urban democracy include: Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Wilentz, Chants Democratic. For a survey, see John D. Fairfield, The Public and Its Possibilities: Triumphs and Tragedies in the American City (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010). For discussions about democracy and contention that also sharpen distinctions between democracy, liberalism, and capitalism, see: Michael Denning, “Neither Capitalist nor American: The Democracy as Social Movement,” in Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (New York: Verso, 2004), 209–26; Alice Kessler-Harris, “Capitalism, Democracy, and the Emancipation of Belief,” Journal of American History 99:3 (December 2012): 725–40; and Montgomery, Citizen Worker. Chantal Mouffe presents a compelling case for an agonistic pluralism that recognizes antagonisms inherent in the “political.” Attention to conflict as central to the remaking of urban political culture prompts skepticism toward minimalist liberal notions of democracy, including deliberative democracy. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso, 2000). See also Alan Keenan, Democracy in Question: Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Recent studies of liberalism, conservatism, and socialism that provide fresh perspectives include: Bell and Stanley, Making Sense of American Liberalism; Kathleen G. Donohue, ed., Liberty and Justice for All? Rethinking Politics in Cold War America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012); Colleen Doody, Detroit’s Cold War: The Origins of Postwar Conservatism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, eds., The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); and Shelton Stromquist, “Claiming Political Space: Workers, Municipal Socialism, and the Reconstruction of Local Democracy in a Transnational Perspective,” in Workers across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History, ed. Leon Fink (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 303–28.

26

Introduction

differ, depending on people’s varied social, cultural, workplace, and political experiences? In what ways were these democratic ideas and practices contested? How did power shape these contests and participants’ roles in these disputes? By concentrating on everyday democracy, this inquiry attends to arguments over the practices and principles lived out in local public life. It examines how conflicts over housing policy, working-class recreation, or municipal debt, for instance, shaped power and conceptions of democracy in the city. At the same time, how did the arrangements of power or ideas about democracy in the broader reaches of the economy, society, and politics delimit these local discourses and action? This study investigates the domains of democratic life and strife beyond electoral and party politics to include policy, social, and cultural clashes. These varied arenas and contests for power, as well as people’s words and actions in these specific settings, reveal the mechanisms of the city’s changing political culture.41 Popular and scholarly studies of urban American politics, especially as the “new urban history” flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, pointed frequently to structural forces – especially economic and demographic forces – as the drivers of change. These, in turn, were linked to the abstract processes of urbanization or modernization. Particular urban forms that emerged were seen both as inevitable and benchmarks of progress. Social scientists and historians conceived of city politics and culture as symptomatic, the function of socioeconomic conditions; they were commensurate with a particular stage of social development rather than resulting from particular human actions. Some structural interpretations, drawing especially from rational choice theory, depicted the modern city as first and foremost a marketplace, not a polity. This “marketplace” paradigm painted decisionmakers and urban inhabitants as rational actors whose behaviors were determined by a narrow range of ideals and possibilities bounded principally by the same underlying economic structures. Rooted especially in the liberal

41

On social and political history, see: Eley and Nield, The Future of Class in History, 139–76; Cabrera, Postsocial History, 95–122; Cohen, Making a New Deal; Philip J. Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Leon Fink, “Politics as Social History: A Case Study of Class Conflict and Political Development in Nineteenth-Century New England,” Social History 7:1 (January 1982): 43–58; Romain Huret, “All in the Family Again? Political Historians and the Challenge of Social History,” Journal of Policy History 21:3 (2009): 239–63; Patrick Joyce, “What Is the Social in Social History?,” Past and Present 206 (February 2010): 213–48; and Richard Oestreicher, “Urban Working-Class Political Behavior and Theories of American Electoral Politics, 1870–1940,” Journal of American History 74:4 (March 1988): 1257–286. On Milwaukee elections and politics, see John Buenker, “Cream City Electoral Politics: A Play in Four Acts,” in Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past, 17–47.

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27

economic logic of private property and rational self-interest, while often tied to teleological assumptions about progress, these varieties of determinism blurred the complex workings of historical change and clouded present possibilities. In particular, these approaches obscured the import of the everyday contests and the unpredictable mutability of city politics.42 Rights, property, and self interest did, in part, shape the urban landscape. But by itself, this partial perspective underestimates the reach of politics or of human action. Fear, prejudice, love, friendship, solidarity, security, habit, greed, generosity, faith, ideological commitments, community attachments, the quest for autonomy – to name just a few – need to be included in the catalogue of motivations that drove people’s actions and shaped the city. For instance, the 1951 Labor Day parade might suggest the logic and inevitability of modern city development. But the phrase “modern city development” needs to be historicized, rather than assumed to be a stage of urbanization. The history of discord over Wisconsin Avenue and other episodes explored here entailed a range of responses and reasons for action. They also speak to significant democratic contests that recast the postwar city’s political culture. Close scrutiny of midcentury political and social conflicts demonstrate that not only did proponents of working-class politics and advocates of growth politics offer up divergent conceptions of the “modern city,” but the vision of the “marketplace city” itself was a point of contention and under construction throughout this process. The power behind what became the “winning” conception of the modern marketplace metropolis accrued from the contests over housing, gambling, working, financing, and redeveloping the city. Ideas and discourses about the city that came out on top would continue to be challenged. But the newly entrenched political culture established the premises for postwar urban policy and paved the way for the later-twentieth-century neoliberal city.43

42

43

Terrence J. McDonald, “The Problem of the Political in Recent American Urban History: Liberal Pluralism and the Rise of Functionalism,” Social History 10 (1985): 323–45; and Dennis Hale, “The City as Polity and Economy,” Polity 17:2 (Winter 1984): 205–24. Arguing against depictions of the “marketplace city,” Hale maintains that the city “is a political community, and its most crucial dimension is therefore not the economic, but the political” (209). See also: Warren Magnusson, Politics as Urbanism: Seeing Like a City (New York: Routledge, 2011), 18; and Clarence N. Stone, “Urban Politics Then and Now,” in Power in the City: Clarence Stone and the Politics of Inequality, ed., Marion Orr and Valerie C. Johnson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 267–316. And see S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). On the “modern city” as a constructed and contested concept, see: Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (New York: Verso, 2003); Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin

28

Introduction

A shift from liberalism to democracy that shines a brighter light on local contests both moves the story of urban change out from the shadow of the national narrative and interrogates assumptions about economic inevitability. While this makes room for a more contingent view of the city’s history, it need not result in a tale of unbridled agency. Milwaukeeans lived and worked, of course, in a metropolis molded by powerful forces that included the institutions of American politics, a capitalist economy in flux, and the United States’ changing role in the world. Cities in the fragmented American federal system have limited formal powers, derived primarily from the state. Urban residents and leaders might have claimed a measure of autonomy, as did Milwaukee’s Social Democrats when aiming to secure home rule. But even this remained a “subjected sovereignty.”44 The legal framework limited the latitude to act at the municipal level. At the same time, cities operated within a larger political economy that bounded local autonomy and dampened the impact of municipal-level initiatives. Private sector interests, which held considerable power in the mid-twentiethcentury American capitalist order, exercised control over capital and investment decisions. City-level actors often found themselves reacting to business leaders’ decisions that sometimes were handed down from local headquarters but were made increasingly in faraway locations or prompted by distant events. Similarly, local-level advocates for making cities into engines of economic redistribution navigated a difficult course, coming up against institutional and cultural obstacles. Limits to local power and city authority, rooted in the structure of the political economy and the formal mechanisms of American federalism, narrowed the range of possibilities for intentional change and policy-making in the city.45

44

45

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Jon C. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940–1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); and Zipp, Manhattan Projects, 3–29. Gerald E. Frug, City Making: Building Communities without Building Walls (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 7. On legal constraints and fragmentation, see: Gerald E. Frug and David J. Barron, City Bound: How States Stifle Urban Innovation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); and Louise Nelson Dyble, “The Defeat of the Golden Gate Authority: A Special District, A Council of Governments, and the Fate of Regional Planning in the San Francisco Bay Area,” Journal of Urban History 34:2 (January 2008): 287–308. On home rule, see also Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870–1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). On cities within the federal system, see Paul E. Peterson, Local Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). On private sector power, see: Gordon, New Deals, 11–14; Paul Kantor, The Dependent City Revisited: The Political Economy of Urban Development and Social Policy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995); and Charles E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

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Such constraints, however, do not mean that the cities and local actions were inconsequential. Working within but also at times against the legal and economic confines, municipal officials and activists shaped policy as well as the collective life and political culture of the city. City-based strategies designed to stimulate local revitalization, local policies favoring redistribution over growth, and steps to open up public participation – even if difficult to enact and sustain – provide a counter-weight to accounts emphasizing only market determinism and local political inefficacy. Disputes over public financing or housing policy, for instance, make clear that Milwaukee leaders and residents did not simply respond to federal policy directives or so-called economic imperatives. They sought to define a direction for the city in the ways they implemented policies and in their battles over local initiatives. Institutional and socioeconomic structures circumscribed the possibilities for change and shaped people’s actions. But these did not decide the city’s course. Local actions and contests mattered in the city and beyond its borders.46 The uneven and often episodic process of change draws attention to a related question about the prospects and limitations that city dwellers faced. Events and chance play a role in change, as do human agency (actions and words) and the dynamic structures that constitute social orders (the state, capitalism, or racial and gender regimes). But rather than seeing agency and structure as antithetical, the historian William H. Sewell, Jr. proposes that a clearer grasp of change requires investigating how they are connected. Agency itself is, he argues, a “constituent” of structure. On the one hand, agency is defined and constrained but also enabled by the structures that shape the context for people’s everyday lives. On the other hand, agency can precipitate change or bolster structures. Although appearing solid and unshakeable, structures are susceptible to both small alterations and large changes brought about by the accretion of accident, event, and agency. People’s words and actions, individual and collective, can challenge, reinforce, or even produce particular structures. 46

On local agency and initiatives, however limited, see: Pierre Clavel, Activists in City Hall: The Progressive Response to the Reagan Era in Boston and Chicago (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010); Peter Dreier and Dennis Keating, “The Limits of Localism: Progressive Housing Policies in Boston, 1984–1989,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 26:2 (December 1990): 191–216; Jerome I. Hodos, Second Cities: Globalization and Local Politics in Manchester and Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011); and Joel Rast, Remaking Chicago: The Political Origins of Urban Industrial Change (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999). See also Thomas J. Sugrue, “All Politics is Local: The Persistence of Localism in Twentieth-Century America,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, eds. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian Zelizer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 301–26.

30

Introduction

For instance, actions casting doubt upon widely accepted way of comprehending the world or arguments encouraging compliance with rules (formal or informal) that govern society are indeed instances of agency meeting structure. But the outcomes are far from inevitable; one opens a door for change while the other fortifies the status quo. Historians, then, should attend especially to ways in which diverse groups of people or organizations mobilized discourses and resources to sustain, oppose, or reconfigure not only policies and political or social institutions, but also social conventions and assumptions about how the world works. Shifts in structure, in turn, altered the context and the potential for future actions, discourses, and events to prompt change.47 Such a focus on the interaction between structure and agency sheds light on the connections between changes in the city, the remaking of political cultures, and everyday conflicts. Likewise, recognition of the restrictions on local action imposed by a political and economic system, balanced by acknowledgment of the possibilities furnished by a democratic culture and ongoing contests over the political order (especially at the local level), steers this analysis between the extremes of unrestricted agency and unshakable determinism.48 In contrast, then, to histories of the post-World War II era that envisage a steady and predictable path for the growth machine, suburban prosperity, or conservative ascendancy, this book revisits the disparate and often incompatible ideas and actions of people who anticipated the possibilities and perils of the modern city. Across the political and civic spectrum, upstart activists and entrenched leaders began mobilizing resources to push their agendas for politics, society, and the city. This history of 1940s Milwaukee points to a broader history of contest over the shape of postwar democracy in the United States. Corporate and business leaders sought to thwart the New Deal coalition and fashion a postwar political 47

48

William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 124–51, 225–70; and Sewell, “Response to Steinmetz, Riley, and Pedersen,” Social Science History 32:4 (Winter 2008): 579–93. Structures are composed of both cultural and material building blocks. Marc Steinberg also sketches out a dynamic relationship between agency and structure, highlighting how people deploy and alter discourses. “People start with their collective understanding and memory of the material relationships that define their situation. Through discourse, actors inscribe meaning in these relationships and the contexts in which they transpire, though not just as they please.” Steinberg, “Talkin’ Class,” 276. See also: Cornelia Hughes Dayton, “Rethinking Agency, Recovering Voices,” American Historical Review 109:3 (June 2004): 827–43; Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37:1 (Fall 2003): 113–24; Chris Rhomberg, No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 201–07; and Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 773–97. Magnusson, Politics of Urbanism; Ryan, Civic Wars; and Charles Tilly, “What Good Is Urban History?,” Journal of Urban History 22:6 (September 1996): 702–19.

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culture and policies sympathetic to their vision of economic growth and productivity.49 Shifting coalitions of organized labor (both radicals and moderates), civil rights groups, women’s organizations, and progressives mobilized to protect and build upon the political and social gains of the New Deal and war years.50 Electoral politics also attracted renewed attention during this period, as reformers and political action committees intensified efforts to retool parties and elect candidates.51 In the city, the ever-changing friction between working-class and growth politics lay at the center of this turmoil. These competing and often opposing currents of social and political action had no predetermined outcome. Instead, such contests underscore the uncertainties, anxieties, and hopes of this period, as the city and the nation journeyed from the Great Depression and wartime society into the postwar world. What sort of democracy would thrive in the midcentury city? By delving into the language, actions, and actors in mid-twentieth-century urban contests, concentrating especially on the nuances and apparent inconsistencies of the debates in a particular place such as Milwaukee, we can better discern those ways of knowing and describing the city that now appear 49

50

51

Business leaders’ postwar initiatives had roots in late-1930s and wartime politics. Collins, More; Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise; Robert Griffith, “Forging America’s Postwar Order: Domestic Politics and Political Economy in the Age of Truman,” in The Truman Presidency, ed. Michael J. Lacey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 57–88; Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands; Phillips-Fein and Zelizer, eds., What’s Good for Business; and Brian Waddell, The War Against the New Deal: World War II and American Democracy (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 2001). Shana Bernstein, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth Century Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Freeman, WorkingClass New York; Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 75:3 (December 1988): 786–811; Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 179–261; Susan Lynn, “Gender and Post World War II Progressive Politics: A Bridge to Social Activism in the 1960s U.S.A.,” Gender and History 4:2 (Summer 1992): 215–39; and Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 193–220. See also: Catherine Bauer, “Good Neighborhoods,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 242 (November 1945): 104–15. On labor, see: Richard Norman Baisden, “Labor Unions in Los Angeles Politics” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1958); Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism; James Caldwell Foster, The Union Politic: The CIO Political Action Committee (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1975); and Richard Oestreicher, “The Rules of the Game: Class Politics in Twentieth-Century America,” in Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894–1994, ed. Kevin Boyle (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 19–50. See also: Jennifer A. Delton, Making Minnesota Liberal: Civil Rights and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); and Steven M. Gillon, Politics and Vision: The ADA and American Liberalism, 1947–1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

32

Introduction

anachronistic. Discourses of postwar growth politics, joined to racist depictions of black working class life as the antithesis of urban progress, increasingly assumed the status of “common sense.” Cold War fears bolstered arguments favoring property rights and called into question the efficacy of the public sector. These discourses, in turn, placed the demands of private economic growth and productivity in the foreground, while dismissing counter-arguments based in working-class politics as romantic, irrelevant, or outmoded. Working-class conceptions of the city, however, were neither antimodern nor inconsequential. They stressed social and political access throughout the city, municipal independence (although certainly not a rejection of federal or state assistance), and local flexibility to meet social needs and desires. Workers and working-class leaders put into practice a distributional politics that highlighted the legitimacy of the local public sector, recognized discord as a fundamental aspect of political and social life, and acknowledged the continuing vigor of class politics in the city. This rendition of the city clashed with the powerful politics of growth, offering a very different set of explanations about how the city functions. Growth politics put a clear priority on the market values of efficiency and productivity, which were presented as antidotes to urban disorder, class division, and the “outmoded” city. The changes Milwaukeeans debated, elicited, and experienced during this turbulent period were part of a kinetic political culture torn between the aims of growth politics and working-class politics. A return to these 1940s encounters enables us to fit this challenge of working-class politics into a larger picture of the formation of postwar policy and politics. Rather than understanding postwar growth politics as an inevitable outcome for the twentieth-century city, simply a function of modern social development, its history should be placed in the frame of power and political contention. In short, the brew of growth politics and liberalism that would define postwar democracy emerged out of a reaction with working-class politics in the city. Rather than treat the Great Depression, the war, and the early postwar years as three separate eras, this narrative explores the changes and continuities of these closely connected times. People living and thinking across the boundaries of these periods helped to produce a city and a political culture that bore the marks of their experiences, anxieties, hopes, and conflicts from the mid-1930s to the early-1950s.52 Building on political, 52

On anxieties and hopes during these years, see: William Graebner, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991); David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Richard Lingeman, The Noir Forties: The American People from Victory to Cold War (New York: Nation Books,

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economic, and cultural histories that figure prominently in scholarly and popular understandings of postwar liberalism, this social history of politics in a single city unearths the contingencies, choices, and contested claims involved in policy-making and in the remaking of postwar urban democracy. How did Milwaukeeans imagine they could change their city? What visions for the postwar city, whether well-focused or inchoate, were actively considered and contested during this tumultuous decade? How did these ideas and conflicts reconstitute the city’s political culture? By looking closely at a particular place, this history elucidates the urban alternatives that emerged during this period, explains those that gained ascendancy, and reinterprets the contours of twentieth-century urban political culture. After surveying briefly the economic, demographic, and political dimensions of Milwaukee as a working-class city (Chapter 1), this study turns to housing. This is not a history of housing, but accounts of housing and redevelopment contests serve as bookends since these were defining issues for midcentury urban politics. During housing policy debates and quarrels about the city’s physical development, Milwaukeeans distilled and articulated ideas about the urban political economy and local democracy.53 The narrative opens with an examination of housing controversies in the later 1930s and early 1940s (Chapter 2). Public housing debates, the wartime housing shortage, slum clearance proposals, racial segregation, and a prolonged campaign to establish a housing authority engaged many groups, from conservative real estate organizations to militant labor unions. The coalitions formed in these encounters set the stage for postwar politics. Liberals and left-wing radicals, including an important segment of black and white activists who confronted racial segregation directly, moved a broad public housing program to the center of their concerns. Real estate leaders placed housing at the forefront of conservative campaigns to assert the primacy of private-sector initiatives. An increasingly

53

2012); and Westbrook, Why We Fought. This study addresses indirectly the longstanding historiographic debate over whether or not World War II was a watershed on the homefront. See contrasting interpretations, for instance, in: Roger W. Lotchin, The Bad City in the Good War: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Diego (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); and Johnson, The Second Gold Rush. See also John W. Jeffries, Wartime America: The World War II Home Front (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996). He concludes reasonably that the wartime experience contributed to continuity and discontinuity, strengthening existing patterns and tendencies and opening doors to new possibilities and initiatives. In a similar vein, see Kevin M. Kruse and Stephen Tuck, eds., Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). On the importance of 1940s housing issues, see Roger Biles, The Fate of Cities: Urban America and the Federal Government, 1945–2000 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 1–46.

34

Introduction

influential group of business and downtown leaders began to articulate a privatist politics of growth while entertaining proposals for a limited public housing program. World War II was a critical juncture, as calls for wartime unity around the banner of democracy collided with heightened urban tensions over scarce resources such as housing. The politics of housing sharpened disagreements over the New Deal’s legacies, illuminated the urgency of wartime social provision, and raised questions about the balance and legitimacy of private and public authority in the city. Scuffles over wartime gambling, skirmishes involving organized labor’s militant ranks, and an early postwar battle over a debt policy referendum demonstrate the scope of local contention over the social and political order. These incidents brought differing conceptions of urban regeneration to the fore and gave shape to mounting antipathies between working-class politics and growth politics. Early 1940s gambling controversies were prompted by officials’ efforts to curb bingo, pinball, and numbers games and by the popularity of these “cheap amusements” among working-class Milwaukeeans (Chapter 3). These conflicts reflected, in part, reformers’ anxieties about working-class culture as they sought to reorganize everyday life around their ideas about wartime unity. As these reformers scrutinized working-class leisure, they characterized petty gambling and the places where these activities occurred as outmoded – impediments to modern metropolitan rationality and efficiency. At the same time, this investigation limns a fragmented landscape of urban working-class culture and everyday resistance to reformers’ designs, from the streets of the city’s black neighborhoods, to white working-class taverns filled principally with men, to bingo halls frequented especially by white female workers. The militant CIO played an especially visible and influential role in the 1940s city, even though the unions in which they held power represented just a portion of Milwaukee’s organized workers (Chapter 4). These union leaders and the rank-and-file – who played a crucial role in housing issues throughout this period – sought to demonstrate labor’s power and articulate an expansive urban agenda during both a Labor Day parade along Wisconsin Avenue just after V-J Day and a racially integrated bowling tournament the following year. These episodes, each outside the realms of workplace relations and formal politics, demonstrate how the CIO sought to establish broadly egalitarian principles and a capacious conception of security as rudiments for a reconstructed city, even though principles and practice did not always mesh. But the CIO’s postwar agenda and assertions of working-class power in workplaces, neighborhoods, public sites, and places of leisure also galvanized considerable opposition. Business leaders and conservatives reacted forcefully not only to rein in the city’s militant unions but also to exert their own power and cement their position. These

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moves put labor on the defensive. Anticommunism, incited by both the early postwar Allis-Chalmers strike and the 1946 congressional elections, spread through politics and society at the local and national levels. This, in turn, undercut the legitimacy and influence of militant labor. These early postwar defeats meant not only conservative gains but also opened the path to a growth politics coupled with Cold War liberalism.54 Urban fiscal policy, crucial to the trajectory of metropolitan development efforts, moved to the top of the list during a 1947 referendum fight (Chapter 5). Would the city continue its debt-free policies, initiated earlier in the century by Milwaukee Socialists, or would it sell bonds for downtown improvements? In contrast to early-twenty-first century fiscal policy battles, advocates for the city’s debt-free policies argued that freedom from long-term bond payments built a foundation for local autonomy and working-class politics. The costs to maintain and develop the city would by borne on a pay-as-you-go basis, with decisions about who pays and who benefits made within the process of municipal politics. Even during hard times such as the Great Depression, this fiscal independence enabled the city to meet working-class needs and continue providing urban services. Business leaders committed to growth, on the other hand, insisted that principles of class politics were obsolete in the modern metropolis. They sought to use the city’s bonding authority to redevelop the downtown and defer costs to a future time. These business and civic leaders navigated a key alliance with respected liberal and labor groups by suggesting that the city’s dire need for decent, affordable housing could be addressed first. This alliance tentatively brought together growth politics and postwar liberalism, outlining local approaches for an urban, commercial Keynesianism. Housing again stood out as a decisive policy arena during the second half of the 1940s, in large part because of a continuing postwar shortage and a public housing program in its formative period (Chapter 6). Arguments over housing and the politics of public provision engaged the city’s working-class population, middle-class activists, local elites, and national politicians. Race and racism were again central to this story. Organized white and black working-class Milwaukeeans and their allies, for the most part, continued to advocate for a public housing program that was both ambitious in scale and democratically accountable. But black

54

Unions populate this history of working-class and growth politics, but see the following for more on organized labor in Milwaukee during the 1940s: Gavett, Development of the Labor Movement in Milwaukee; Darryl Holter, ed. Workers and Unions in Wisconsin: A Labor History Anthology (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1999); Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin”; Ozanne, Labor Movement in Wisconsin; and Pifer, A City at War.

36

Introduction

residents, especially those who were working-class or poor and recent migrants to the city, became the targets of escalating racist attacks against egalitarian social policies. Likewise, the patterns and practices of racial segregation that were imprinted on the city’s geography by real estate interests and white residents, as well as by public policy, constrained the politics of housing. In response, civic leaders and organizations advocating public solutions to the postwar housing crisis appealed broadly to racial liberalism. Early postwar tensions came to a climax with a pair of dueling housing referenda in 1951 (Chapter 7). Fearing that public housing would infringe on the prerogatives of the private real estate market and become a political base for liberal and radical politics, conservatives and real estate leaders confronted a public housing coalition that advocated expanded city and federal programs to meet the housing shortage for veterans and lowincome Milwaukeeans. Progrowth business leaders, eager to foster an urban redevelopment program driven by the private sector, joined uneasily with moderate and liberal housing advocates to compromise and make a path for the city and its political culture. Throughout this debate, disputes over racial policies in veterans and low-income public housing projects intensified. This combination led to both a constricted public housing program that was stigmatized racially and a political discourse in which black workers’ claims to urban citizenship were undermined. Business and civic leaders, realtors, and many white residents characterized AfricanAmerican neighborhoods and black working-class migrants as the source of urban danger, disorder, and decline. The characteristics of what later would be known as growth liberalism became clearer as redevelopment triumphed over housing, as initiatives for racial egalitarianism stalled on a segregated urban landscape, and as the ideals of urban efficiency and productivity (infused with the presumption of social progress) now branded working-class politics as part of an outmoded political culture. Just half-a-dozen years after the close of World War II, growth dominated the metropolitan agenda by forging new popular understandings of urban progress and democratic possibility. Growth politics would prevail eventually as the basis for postwar urban policy. Working-class designs for democracy and power did not, of course, simply vanish from politics, workplaces, neighborhoods, or the city. A still-active organized labor movement and ongoing efforts by Frank Zeidler’s administration, which occupied City Hall until 1960, kept working-class politics alive. This also was a period of complex change in which racialized images of urban decline and mounting Cold War fears helped to mold this postwar political culture. These dynamics were integral to the story of growth politics’ formation in reaction to working-class politics. In large part, growth

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politics and a pluralist conception of the metropolis had won out, obscuring both a longer history of contention and the recent 1940s contests with working-class politics. Contesting the Postwar City reconstructs these conflicts, charting Milwaukee’s transformation from a place powerfully influenced by working-class politics to one bounded by growth politics. The 1951 Labor Day parade was more than just an advertisement for a reconstructed and modernized city center. This procession along Wisconsin Avenue featured instead a postwar democracy refashioned by growth politics.

CHAPTER

1

Milwaukee: A Mid-Twentieth-Century Working-Class City

Located on the western shore of Lake Michigan just ninety miles to the north of Chicago, Milwaukee grew rapidly in the nineteenth century. By the end of that century, Wisconsin’s largest city had become both a significant manufacturing center and a magnet not only for German immigrants but also for others from Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Milwaukee was the fourteenth largest city in the United States and jumped up to the twelfth spot at the end of the century’s first decade. Milwaukee earned a reputation as a wellgoverned city as Social Democrats and reformers filled the ranks of city leaders and administrators. The industrial city flourished during World War I and the 1920s. Prohibition idled local breweries, but the Great Depression shook the city especially hard. Although the effects of the economic downturn arrived later in Milwaukee than in other industrial cities, the eventual consequences were similarly severe. Jobs disappeared. Rents, mortgages, and local taxes fell by the wayside as Milwaukeeans struggled through the hardship. Between 1929 and 1933, the total wages paid in Milwaukee County fell by almost 65 percent. Twenty percent of the population was on relief in 1933.1

1

See especially Milwaukee’s two fine city biographies: Bayrd Still, Milwaukee: The History of a City (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1948); and John Gurda, The Making of Milwaukee (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 1999). See also: Margo Anderson and Victor Greene, eds., Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); John D. Buenker, “‘Neoteching’ Milwaukee: The Cream City’s Emergence as an Industrial Metropolis, 1886–1919,” Milwaukee History 27:1/2 (Spring/Summer 2004): 4–40; Judith T. Kenny, “Making Milwaukee Famous: Cultural Capital, Urban Image, and the Politics of Place,” Urban Geography 16:5 (1995): 440–58; and Anthony M. Orum, City-Building in America (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995).

38

A Mid-Twentieth-Century Working-Class City

39

m a p 1 . 1 Milwaukee census tract map with city wards superimposed, 1945. Adapted from Milwaukee County Community Fund and Council of Social Agencies, Census Tract Facts: A Handbook of Basic Social Data of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin (Milwaukee: Statistical Research Department, 1945), appendix. Reproduced by permission of the United Way of Greater Milwaukee.

Workers’ lives, workplaces, and cities were forged by industrial capitalism throughout this period of expansion and contraction. They acted individually and collectively in the face of uncertainty and opportunity. Through broad-based organizations, trade unions, and a wide range of political initiatives, workers responded to these changes. Labor organizing, most importantly, heightened the power and visibility of Milwaukee’s working class. From the swift growth of the Knights of Labor in the 1880s,

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t a b l e 1 . 1 Milwaukee Population, 1940 and 1950 Total City Pop. 1940 1950 Increase % Change

587,472 637,392 49,920 +8.5

White (city) 578,177 614,650 36,473 +6.3

African American (city)

Other Metro Area Races (city) Total Pop.

8,821 21,772 12,951 +146.8

474 970 496 +104.6

877,044 1,014,211 137,167 +15.6

Sources: United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 16th Census of the United States, 1940: Population and Housing Statistics for Census Tracts, Milwaukee, Wis. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942); 1950 United States Census of Population, Census Tract Statistics: Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Adjacent Area (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1952); and Roger D. Simon, The City-Building Process: Housing and Services in New Milwaukee Neighborhoods, 1880–1910, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1996), 125.

to the close ties between the city’s early twentieth-century Socialist Party and the Federated Trades Council, to the Congress of Industrial Organization’s 1930s rise and support for the New Deal order, Milwaukee workers had built a legacy of collective action and public engagement.2 With a population of 587,472 in 1940, Milwaukee settled into position as the thirteenth largest city. It grew by 8.5 percent over the next decade, counting 637,392 people by 1950 (see Table 1.1). As Milwaukee entered the 1940s, the industrial economy and working-class political culture continued to shape the city. Like cities throughout the nation, Milwaukee remained a focal point for economic production, especially during the war, as well as a crucial site of social, cultural, and political contention. More than 38 percent of the city’s workforce was employed in manufacturing in 1940. Milwaukee workers and businesses made heavy machinery, turbines, electrical equipment, automobile frames, beer, and a variety of other products. While the employment structure resembled that of other Great Lakes and Eastern cities, Milwaukee led its peers in the skilled metal trades especially and in manufacturing

2

Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 178–218; Thomas W. Gavett, Development of the Labor Movement in Milwaukee (Madison: University of Milwaukee Press, 1965); Darryl Holter, ed. Workers and Unions in Wisconsin: A Labor History Anthology (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1999); and Stephen Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin”: The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900–1950 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

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41

employment more generally. The trade and service sectors together employed about as many Milwaukeeans as did manufacturing.3 World War II–related production reversed, if only temporarily, earlier signs of decline in Milwaukee’s manufacturing sector. Over the course of the war, Milwaukee industries and companies secured more than $1.2 billion in contracts for combat equipment and $555.6 million for other war contracts. The federal government also pumped $163.5 million into industrial plants and $2.2 million into military facilities in Milwaukee during the war.4 Milwaukee-area businesses producing supplies and equipment for the war effort included Falk’s gear drives for ships, AllenBradley’s motor controls and electrical components, A. O. Smith’s bomb casings and propeller blades, Heil’s gun turrets and torpedo tubes, Vilter’s howitzers, Seaman’s auto bodies and helicopter parts, and Cudahy Brothers’ canned and packaged meats. Allis-Chalmers, with more than 20,000 employees, produced motors, tractors, turbines for ships, and construction equipment. The company was also one of the nation’s leading manufacturers of equipment for the Manhattan Project. Wartime production boosted Milwaukee’s manufacturing employment from 110,000 in 1940 to a high of almost 200,000 in 1943. By 1950, 42 percent of the city’s employed workers were engaged in manufacturing.5 The occupational distribution of Milwaukee’s workforce reinforces this picture of industrial strength. Operatives, or “semiskilled” factory workers, constituted the single largest group, expanding from slightly less than 20

3

4

5

U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 16th Census of the United States, 1940: Population and Housing Statistics for Census Tracts, Milwaukee, Wis. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942); 1950 United States Census of Population, Census Tract Statistics: Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Adjacent Area (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1952); 16th Census of the Population, 1940; Volume II: Characteristics of the Population, Part 7 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1943), 685; H. Yuan Tien, ed., Milwaukee Metropolitan Area Fact Book: 1940, 1950, and 1960 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962); and Harold M. Groves, Wayne Anderson, Harry Kahn, Louise Prober, and Hannah Westerfield, Report of the Commission on the Economic Study of Milwaukee (Milwaukee, 1948), 37, 39, 41. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, County Data Book: A Supplement to the Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1947), 37. Richard L. Pifer, A City at War: Milwaukee Labor during World War II (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2003); John Gurda, “Profits and Patriotism: Milwaukee Industry in World War II,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 78:1 (Autumn 1994): 24–34; Jonathan Rees, “Caught in the Middle: The Seizure and Occupation of the Cudahy Brothers Company, 1944–1945,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 78:3 (Spring 1995): 200–18; and William F. Thompson, The History of Wisconsin, Volume VI: Continuity and Change, 1940–1965 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1988), 94. See also Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II (New York: Random House, 2012).

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t a b l e 1 . 2 Milwaukee labor force, by major occupation groups, 1940 and 1950, number and (percent of labor force) Year

1940 Number and (%)

1950 Number and (%)

In labor force Employed

258,274 (100.0) 212,313 (82.2)

293,001 (100.0) 283,552 (96.8)

Professional and technical Proprietors and managers Clerical, sales, and kindred Craftsmen, foremen, and kindred Operatives and kindred Domestic service Service workers Laborers Occupation not reported

17,952 (07.0) 17,527 (06.9) 51,072 (19.8) 36,335 (14.1) 51,211 (19.8) 5,766 (02.2) 19,503 (07.5) 11,992 (04.6) 955 (00.4)

24,799 (08.5) 21,664 (07.4) 68,646 (23.4) 49,320 (16.8) 72,117 (24.6) 3,324 (01.1) 24,633 (08.4) 16,423 (05.6) 2,626 (00.9)

Sources: United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 16th Census of the United States, 1940: Population and Housing Statistics for Census Tracts, Milwaukee, Wis. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942); 1950 United States Census of Population, Census Tract Statistics: Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Adjacent Area (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1952).

percent of the labor force in 1940 to almost a quarter in 1950 (see Table 1.2). About a quarter of Milwaukee’s operatives in 1940 and 1950 were women, although that percentage was higher during the war. Men and women classified in a range of other occupational groups, including skilled workers and laborers, also worked in the city’s factories. In addition, jobs held by working-class residents of the city extended well beyond the reaches of heavy industry or light manufacturing. Craftsmen, service workers, clerical workers, and domestic workers built houses, helped customers in downtown department stores and neighborhood shops, cleaned houses, collected trash, or drove city buses and streetcars. Threats to economic security and struggles over control in these diverse workplaces remained a constant for most workers holding these jobs.6 Working-class culture and politics entailed much more, of course, than job descriptions. Workers’ lives and their ways of perceiving the wider world were cast not only in workplaces, but in their homes, in neighborhoods, and in the larger public life of the city. Workplace loyalties and 6

Bureau of the Census, 16th Census of the United States, 1940, Milwaukee, 52; 1950 United States Census of Population , Milwaukee, 20; Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin”; and Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). The number of women in manufacturing rose from 20,000 to 60,000 during the war. Thompson, History of Wisconsin, Vol. VI, 94.

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antipathies, recreation and leisure pursuits, political affiliations and policy disputes, racial divisions and gender tensions, organizational solidarities and identities, traditions and memories imported from other cities and countries, and everyday experiences in neighborhood or family life were all involved in making and sustaining working-class political culture in the city. Measures of Milwaukee’s economy and work-life, notably those calibrating its manufacturing base, underscore the visibility and significance of its urban, industrial-era working class. But the vitality of the midcentury city and the impetus for working-class politics arose also from a dense social fabric: the spatial organization of urban ethnic neighborhoods, a rich organizational life that helped carry concerns from the workplace and home into the public arena, and social networks that provided a foundation for political mobilization and civic coalitions. Although fragmented and fragile, due in part to the very hardships and insecurities that also defined working-class life, these local cultures and emerging politics made their mark on the city. The emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) provided the impetus for the explosive growth in organized labor’s ranks during the 1930s and 1940s. On the heels of the 1936 expulsion of the new CIO unions from the national American Federation of Labor (AFL), Milwaukee and Wisconsin AFL leaders had tried to keep the various factions of organized labor working together. But the disagreements between industrial and trade unionists over strategy, politics, and organizing turf proved too great. Following the local split, CIO and AFL unions set out to bring in members. The CIO’s industrial unionism and energetic organizing enabled it to build strong organizations in Milwaukee’s large factories and other workplaces, including those of city and county workers. But the AFL also grew in the 1930s, propelled by organizing drives among machinists and laundry workers in the early years of the Depression and by competition with the CIO in the later part of the decade. In 1932, Milwaukee unions counted only about 20,000 members. By the end of the 1930s, the total membership reached more than 100,000. One estimate placed the membership of the new CIO unions at 55,000 in 1938 and AFL unions at 80,000 in 1939. The AFL, with a long head start, remained the larger of the two, but the CIO was expanding rapidly. In 1937, sixty-two union locals met to form the Milwaukee Industrial Union Council, also referred to as the Milwaukee CIO Council. Led initially by Harold Christoffel from the United Auto Workers Local 248 at Allis-Chalmers, this central labor body for industrial unions helped to spur labor militancy and coordinate CIO participation in city and national issues. The Federated Trades Council (FTC), founded in 1887, laid claim to about 180 AFL unions as members in 1940. Whereas the early twentiethcentury FTC had been heavily involved in municipal issues, during the

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1940s the AFL’s central labor body tended to react rather than take the initiative in civic affairs and policy debates.7 Milwaukee’s skilled and semiskilled workers were well organized and labor unions grew throughout the war. By the early postwar years, a majority of Milwaukee workers belonged to an AFL, CIO, or independent union. The leadership and members of the local CIO were politically active, primarily in Democratic Party politics and on a range of policy issues. The local AFL, on the other hand, pulled back from politics during this time. The older FTC leaders who had worked hand-in-hand with the Milwaukee Socialists were replaced by more conservative leaders, many of whom moved into the Democratic Party but also favored a less political approach for trade unions. Although the AFL continued to weigh in on political and policy issues, it operated more deliberately and less overtly in the public arena during the 1940s. In the early 1950s, when union membership was peaking nationally, one count put the Milwaukee CIO at 52,000 and the AFL at 90,000 members. Labor union membership began to taper off in the 1950s nationwide and locally as a result of a number of factors, including Cold War purges, labor’s reduced emphasis on organizing, and the early phases of automation and economic restructuring that especially hit unionized workplaces. Despite setbacks and decline, the AFL-CIO represented 125,000 workers by the time that the city’s central labor bodies merged at the end of the 1950s. Milwaukee had earned its reputation as a strong labor city.8

7

8

Darryl Holter, “Sources of CIO Success: The New Deal Years in Milwaukee,” Labor History 29:2 (Spring 1988): 223; Pifer, City at War, 10–11; Gavett, Development of the Labor Movement, 77, 159–66; and Stuart Eimer, “From Business Unionism to Social Movement Unionism: The Case of the AFL-CIO Milwaukee County Labor Council,” Labor Studies Journal 24 (Summer 1999): 71–72. On FTC estimates, see the 80,000 figure in “W.E.M.P., Federated Trades Council Radio Address, 29 September 1940,” in folio “Radio Addresses, 1940–1942” box 3, Federated Trades Council of Milwaukee Records, Milwaukee Area Research Center, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries’ Archives [hereafter Milwaukee ARC]. Wisconsin was a battleground state between the AFL and the CIO; further research is needed to discern if such competition invigorated organizing or depleted resources. See also: Judith Stepan-Norris and Caleb Southworth, “Rival Unionism and Membership Growth in the United States, 1900 to 2005,” American Sociological Review 75:2 (April 2010): 227–51; and Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Gurda, Making of Milwaukee, 324; Holter, “Sources of CIO Success,” 221–24; Bertil Hanson, A Report on the Politics of Milwaukee (Cambridge: Joint Center for Urban Studies of M. I. T. and Harvard University, 1961), v-6; Eric Fure-Slocum, “Milwaukee Labor and Urban Democracy,” in Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past, 48–78; Milwaukee Public Library, Milwaukee City and County: A Statistical History (Milwaukee, 1958), 24; and William H. Riker, “The CIO in Politics, 1936–1946” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1948), 209. These estimates merit further research. Riker, relying on convention reports, may have undercounted Milwaukee CIO membership for the Fourth and Fifth Congressional

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45

Working-class activity in the city was also made apparent by the sharp increase in strikes and work stoppages (see Table 1.3). Beginning in 1934, thousands of Milwaukee workers took part in strikes often focused on basic demands for union recognition. In 1937, Milwaukee workers joined others around the country in sit-down strikes.9 Strike activity waxed and waned during these years, but remained at a high level until the United States became engaged fully in World War II. The post–Pearl Harbor No Strike Pledge certainly muted labor activity. During the war, workers on the homefront responded to patriotic calls and many unions sought to secure a place as leaders in wartime production. But militant unionists continued to pressure management through aggressive shop steward and grievance strategies, slowdowns, and informal work stoppages or wildcat actions. Many white unionists also sought to exclude black and other minority workers from the benefits of wartime production through intimidation or wildcat “hate strikes.” Although wartime Milwaukee appears to have avoided any incidents on par with the 1934 Wehr Steel strike, when white union members and police attacked black strikebreakers who had been excluded from the union, persistent racial tensions in the workplace and threats of violence infected labor relations and city life. Important exceptions to this included a number of CIO unions (especially auto and packinghouse unions), as well as the AFL’s longshoremen’s union, which used a variety of workplace tactics in the 1930s and 1940s to address employers’ discriminatory practices.10 Districts, arriving at a 1944 sum of 39,259. See also: Eimer, “From Business Unionism to Social Movement Unionism”; Colin Gordon, “The Lost City of Solidarity: Metropolitan Unionism in Historical Perspective,” Politics and Society 27:4 (December 1999): 561–85; Andrew E. Kersten, Labor’s Home Front: The American Federation of Labor during World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2006); and Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 9 Darryl Holter, “Sit-Down Strikes in Milwaukee, 1937–1938,” Milwaukee History 9:2 (Summer 1986): 58–64; Holter, “Sources of CIO Success”; and Orum, City-Building. See also: Henry Kraus, The Many and the Few: A Chronicle of the Dynamic Auto Workers (1947; 2d ed., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Staughton Lynd, ed., “We Are All Leaders:” The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); and Zieger, The CIO. 10 On Milwaukee see: Pifer, City at War; Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin”; Rees, “Caught in the Middle”; Paul Geib, “From Mississippi to Milwaukee: A Case Study of the Southern Black Migration to Milwaukee, 1940–1970,” Journal of Negro History 83:4 (Fall 1998): 229–48; and Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–45 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 147–75. See also: Joshua Freeman, “Delivering the Goods: Industrial Unionism during World War II,” Labor History 19 (Fall 1978): 570–93; Martin Glaberman, Wartime Strikes: The Struggle against the No-Strike Pledge in the UAW during World War II (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1980); Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home; and George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

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46

t a b l e 1 . 3 Workplace strikes in Milwaukee, 1930 to 1949 Year

Number of Stoppages

Number of Workers Involved

Number of WorkerDays Idle

1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949

4 6 1 6 42 21 24 76 40 18 17 28 8 6 37 7 26 14 18 26

182 1,973 100 482 13,980 3,952 4,512 14,079 10,053 16,788 1,135 3,012 887 1,548 11,017 15,200 16,700 11,500 12,400 10,000

2,650 44,027 600 8,489 307,002 69,587 60,360 224,969 215,607 97,364 15,268 38,623 2,854 23,747 3,605 298,000 367,000 240,000 211,000 188,000

Sources: United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Handbook of Labor Statistics, 1950 Edition (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1951), 153; Research Clearinghouse of Milwaukee, Milwaukee County, City, Suburbs: A Statistical History of the Community (1950), 73.

The approach of the war’s end precipitated an unprecedented wave of strikes nationally and locally. Cities such as Oakland, Houston, Pittsburgh, and Rochester (NY), witnessed general strikes. Other urban industrial centers, including Milwaukee, experienced an upsurge of strikes in the immediate postwar period. Many of these labor actions hit employers with large workforces. As the yearly strike counts indicate, three of the four years with the highest levels of strike activity (measured by workerdays idle) were in the period between the end of the war and passage of the Taft-Hartley Act (1947). Milwaukee was the site of intense labor militancy and turmoil in this era. The level and intensity of these strikes and the controversies that ensued meant that unions, labor conflict, and workplace concerns had a palpable presence in the city during this time.11

11

See Chapter 4. Table 1.3 shows that 1937 (the sit-down strike year) was the peak for work stoppages. Years with the most workers striking were 1939, followed closely by 1945 and

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47

During the war and the years following, organized labor also made its voice heard on a wide range of local and national issues. Milwaukee was not a wartime boomtown on the order of Detroit or San Diego. But as in other around-the-clock defense production centers, wartime and postwar workers experienced tight living conditions, packed buses and streetcars, crowded streets, noisy neighborhoods, and shortages. These frictions played a crucial role in shaping U.S. urban politics. The wartime and postwar housing shortages in Milwaukee and other U.S. locales, even though less severe than those faced by people in cities around the globe, proved to be especially contentious and consequential local issues. The CIO, and to a lesser degree the AFL, played an active role in advancing public housing and other proposals to assist workers in finding decent shelter. They also weighed in on midcentury racial issues that stemmed not only from the workplace but also from housing, leisure, and other conflicts. The record of unions and their leaders, of course, was mixed and complex. Many unions and their leaders acted to preserve or enforce a racially divided urban society. But wartime crises also presented opportunities for more egalitarian principles as racial tensions simmered in the city. In the wake of the 1943 riots that had erupted in Detroit and many other cities, for instance, Milwaukee labor, left-wing, and African-American organizations held an interracial meeting of about 200 people at St. Matthews CME Church. Speakers blamed fascist saboteurs, along with wartime crowding, poor housing, and racial discrimination, for having incited racial violence. During the war years, unions also advocated for a range of services and policies to aid working-class men and women, from child care to transportation to recreation. Night-shift workers at AllisChalmers, for example, petitioned the Milwaukee Park Commission for longer swimming pool hours to better accommodate their increased work schedules. The tumultuous wartime and early postwar city provided fertile ground for an assertive working class and a wide range of social, political, and cultural conflicts.12

12

1946. Orum, City-Building, 104–05; and Pifer, City at War, 87–122. On Wisconsin precedents to Taft-Hartley, see Darryl Holter, “Labor Law and the Road to TaftHartley: Wisconsin’s ‘Little Wagner Act,’ 1935–1945”, Labor Studies Journal 15:2 (Summer 1990): 20–47. “Fifth Column Causes Race Riots, Says Strong,” Wisconsin CIO News, 5 July 1943; AllisChalmers Workers Union, Local 248, UAW-CIO, to Jerome C. Dretzka, Milwaukee Park Commission, 24 July 1942, folio “General Correspondence, 1942,” box 2, UAW Local 248 Papers, Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan; Pifer, City at War, 29–34; and Marie Anne Laberge, “‘Seeking a Place to Stand’: Political Power and Activism among Wisconsin Women, 1945–1963” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1995). On urban racial conflicts, see: Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Marilynn S. Johnson,

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Milwaukee’s African-American population increased by almost 150 percent during the 1940s (see Table 1.1). The city’s relatively small black population, just 1.6 percent of the total in 1940 and about 2 percent by the middle of the decade, grew to 3.4 percent of the city’s population in 1950 and 8.4 percent in 1960. By 2010, African Americans made up 40 percent of the population. During the mid-twentieth century, this was largely a working-class black community. Or as the historian Earl Lewis attests in his study of Richmond, Virginia, black workers and the black community found themselves “more squarely in the center of the working class” during World War II than they had earlier.13 In 1940, most of Milwaukee’s black residents lived in the western precincts of the Sixth Ward and the southeastern corner of the Tenth Ward, just north of downtown (see Map 1.1). Neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of African-American residents were balanced approximately 50 percent black and 50 percent white in 1940. By 1945, this ratio shifted to roughly two-thirds black and one-third white. Within individual city blocks, however, rates of racial separation varied with some running much higher; other blocks were more mixed racially. Nevertheless, the readily apparent pattern of racial separation in the city was the result of widespread discrimination in housing enacted by realtors’ and landlords’ initiatives, white residents’ resistance, and public policy. This left the city’s

13

“Gender, Race, and Rumors: Re-examining the 1943 Race Riots,” Gender and History 10:2 (August 1998): 252–277; Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 55–75, 161–81; and Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 17–88. On wartime disruptions of everyday life and shortages, see: Perry R. Duis, “No Time for Privacy: World War II and Chicago’s Families,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, eds. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 17–45; Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in TwentiethCentury America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 179–220; and Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). See also Gary Gerstle, “The Working Class Goes to War,” in War in American Culture, 105–27. Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 188. See especially Joe Trotter’s path-breaking study of black industrial workers in Black Milwaukee, as well as: Citizens’ Governmental Research Bureau, Milwaukee’s Negro Community (Milwaukee: Council of Social Agencies, 1946); Thompson, History of Wisconsin, Vol. VI, 309–10; Tien, ed., Milwaukee Metropolitan Area Fact Book; and United States Census Bureau, “Milwaukee (city), Wisconsin,” State and County QuickFacts: http://quickfacts. census.gov/qfd/states/55/5553000.html. See also: John Arena, “Bringing In the Black Working Class: The Black Urban Regime Strategy,” Science and Society 75:2 (2011): 153–79; and James N. Gregory, “The Second Great Migration: A Historical Overview,” in African American Urban History since World War II, eds. Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 19–38.

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black residents with few options for living outside this single district in the metropolitan area. Over the course of the 1940s and following years, Milwaukee’s African Americans continued to confront notably high levels of segregation, as the city’s growing black population only slowly gained access to additional housing northwest of and adjacent to the earlier black neighborhoods. These lines of division and inequality continued to divide the metropolis, at the same time that AfricanAmerican women and men organized collectively and acted individually to claim their place in the city.14 As the wartime demand for labor intensified, African-American workers held out hopes of regaining the modest foothold in the industrial economy that they reached during the previous world war and the 1920s. But the Great Depression had erased these gains, throwing black men and women out of work. African-American unemployment rates remained high throughout the 1930s, hovering close to 30 percent at the end of the decade (a higher rate than in many comparable cities). In 1941, about seven hundred workers from Milwaukee’s black neighborhoods marched to upscale Lake Drive demanding access to defense jobs.15 Starting out with the hardest, dirtiest, and most dangerous jobs at the bottom of the pay scale, black Milwaukeeans and newer migrants made their way first into those workplaces that previously had hired black workers and then into factories and shops that earlier had barred them. African-American workers, as noted, continued to encounter racism and resistance from employers, white workers, and some unions. But their access to jobs expanded as a result of support from groups such as the 14

15

Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 176–78; Jack Dougherty, “African Americans, Civil Rights, and Race-Making in Milwaukee,” in Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past, 137; J. J. Brust, Housing Survey in the Sixth and Tenth Wards (Milwaukee Board of Public Land Commissioners, 1944); Citizens’ Governmental Research Bureau, Milwaukee’s Negro Community; E. R. Krumbiegel, Observations on Housing Conditions in Milwaukee’s Sixth Ward: A Report to the Mayor and Common Council (Milwaukee: Commissioner of Health, 1944); Bureau of the Census, 16th Census of the United States, 1940, Milwaukee; and 1950 United States Census of Population, Milwaukee. On Milwaukee’s high level of segregation, measured by an index of dissimilarity between black and white residency at the block level, see Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 47, 49; and Roger D. Simon, The City-Building Process: Housing and Services in New Milwaukee Neighborhoods, 1880– 1910, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1996), 128. Other highly segregated Midwestern cities included Chicago, Cleveland, Gary, and St. Louis. See also: Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and Carl H. Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 151–57; Steven Avella, In the Richness of the Earth: A History of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, 1843–1958 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2002), 636.

50

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Milwaukee CIO and Urban League and from government pressure exerted by the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) and other wartime agencies. Most important, however, were black workers’ and activists’ persistence and organizing that encouraged these organizations to respond to their needs and that pushed public entities such as the FEPC to take action.16 As a result, many black workers became supporters of an activist state and steadfast members of those unions that helped them to secure their jobs. Milwaukee’s African-American industrial workers, domestics, and service workers made up a crucial part of the city’s working class, and racial issues occupied a conspicuous place in the city’s political life.17 Milwaukee entered the twentieth century as a city of immigrants. It ranked first in the nation in 1890 for the proportion of its population made up of immigrants and their children. Renowned as the “German Athens,” Milwaukee also was home to a sizable Polish community and smaller pockets of other more recent immigrant groups from Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe. Reflecting changes in national immigration policies and patterns, Milwaukee’s foreign-born population continued to fall during the first half of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the century, 31 percent of the city’s population was foreign-born, including 19 percent from Germany and 6 percent from Poland. The city’s immigrant population dropped to 19 percent in 1930, to 14 percent in 1940, and just under 10 percent in 1950 (despite a small influx of refugees as a result of the war). In 1940, 4.8 percent of the population was German-born and 2.5 percent Polish-born. These figures dropped to 2.8 percent and 1.7 percent, respectively, in 1950. This steady decrease in the immigrant population, accompanied by broad political and cultural changes that fostered white unity and hardened racial divisions during the 1930s and 1940s, contributed to a blurring of white ethnic distinctions in this and other industrial centers. In working-class communities, the development of mass culture, Depression-era hardships, labor organizing, and workplace battles helped

16

17

Trotter, Black Milwaukee; and Geib, “From Mississippi to Milwaukee.” On the FEPC and racial employment policies, see: Andrew Edmund Kersten, Race, Jobs, and the War: The FEPC in the Midwest, 1941–46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); and Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State during World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). On black working-class support for an activist state, see: Michael K. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); William P. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005); and David Lewis-Colman, Race Against Liberalism: Black Workers and the UAW in Detroit (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008). On policies disadvantaging African Americans, see Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).

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to create a common ground for workers, especially white workers. These bridges between white working-class immigrants and their descendants were reinforced by calls for wartime unity and tolerance, by efforts to disassociate Milwaukee from World War II Germany (further muting German ethnicity), by persistent appeals to white privilege, and by the language of postwar nationalism in the American Century.18 Despite the diminished size of the immigrant population and the dampening of white ethnic identities during and after the war, a number of the city’s working-class neighborhoods were still noted for a strong association with a particular immigrant group (or set of groups) and for distinctive ethnic practices. For instance, Fourteenth Ward Alderman John Kalupa estimated that 98 percent of his district’s residents were of Polish birth or ancestry. Kalupa exaggerated the degree of ethnic homogeneity; many German and Russian immigrants, among others, also lived in these neighborhoods. But the ward indeed was heavily Polish and consistently elected aldermen of Polish ancestry. At the start of the 1940s, 87 percent of those listed as foreign-born and 14 percent of all the people living in a census tract located at the heart of the Fourteenth Ward were Polishborn.19 Ethnic identities also intensified in neighborhoods threatened 18

19

Tien, Milwaukee Metropolitan Area Fact Book, 23; and Gurda, Making of Milwaukee, 170–81, 233–36, 307. On immigration and ethnicity in Milwaukee, see: Kathleen Neils Conzen, Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836–1860: Accommodation and Community in a Frontier City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976); Victor Greene, “Dealing with Diversity: Milwaukee’s Multiethnic Festivals and Urban Identity, 1840–1940,” Journal of Urban History 31:6 (September 2005): 820–49; Robert Lewis Mikkelsen, “Immigrants in Politics: Poles, Germans, and the Social Democratic Party of Milwaukee,” in Labor Migration in Atlantic Economies, ed, Dirk Hoerder (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 277–95; and Anke Ortlepp, “Deutsch-Athen Revisited: Writing the History of Germans in Milwaukee,” in Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past, 109–30. See also: Kathleen Neils Conzen, “Mainstreams and Side Channels: The Localization of Immigrant Cultures,” Journal of American Ethnic History 11:1 (Fall 1991): 5–20. On white ethnic pluralism and racism, see: Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Robert L. Fleegler, “‘Forget All the Differences until the Forces of Freedom Are Triumphant’: The World War II Era Quest for Ethnic and Religious Tolerance,” Journal of American Ethnic History 27:2 (Winter 2008): 59–84; Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 187–267; and David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005). These figures are for census tract 140. Ald. John L. Kalupa, “The Fourteenth Ward,” Sroda, 12 February 1947, on microfilm reel 1, Arthur S. Janik Papers, Milwaukee ARC; Bureau of the Census, 16th Census of the United States, 1940, Milwaukee, 5, 48; Donald E. Pienkos, “The Polish Americans in Milwaukee Politics,” in Ethnic Politics in Urban America: The Polish Experience in Four Cities, ed. Angela T. Pienkos (Chicago: Polish American Historical Association, 1978), 66–91; Robert D. Ubriaco, Jr., “Choosing Sides: Restructuring the Political Landscape in Milwaukee’s Polish Community, 1945–1948,” Milwaukee History 22:2 (Summer 1999): 78–98; and Frank P. Zeidler, “Milwaukee’s

52

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with sudden change, as was the case for the Italian neighborhoods of the Third Ward. A redevelopment plan called for the destruction of homes, businesses, and the Blessed Virgin of Pompeii Church. Public protests beginning in the mid-1950s saved the church temporarily. But the conflict itself, as well as memories of the controversy and of the church, became rallying points for Italian-American ethnicity. Ethnic identities continued to be cultivated, practiced, and experienced in multiple contexts, including families, neighborhoods, festivals, and religious institutions. In the emerging Cold War, international concerns tied to ethnic and religious identities also played a role in working-class political culture, although in ways not always predictable. And as in other cities, the later years of the twentieth century witnessed not only renewed immigration and racial pride movements, but a resurgence of ethnic pride among white working-class and middle-class Milwaukeeans – the “new ethnicity.”20 The first half of the twentieth century was a period of political upheaval in Milwaukee. At the beginning of the century, local Socialists had built a solid political base through their close association with the FTC and by strategic organizing in the city’s immigrant, working-class neighborhoods. Labor historian David Montgomery, reflecting on this history, observes “Nowhere did municipal efforts to regenerate civil society flourish more than they did in Milwaukee.”21 Milwaukee’s Socialists and unions mobilized a base of working-class voters and middle-class reformers

20

21

South Side: A Historical Look,” Milwaukee History 8:2/3 (Summer/Autumn 1985): 56–84. In 1990, 30 percent of the Fourteenth Ward’s residents continued to claim Polish heritage, compared to 10 percent in the city as a whole. This ward also became a center for the city’s growing Latino population. Simon, City-Building Process, 139–40; Joseph A. Rodriguez and Mark Shelley, “Latinos and Asians in Milwaukee,” in Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past, 162–91, 332; and Marc Simon Rodriguez, The Tejano Diaspora: Mexican Americanism and Ethnic Politics in Texas and Wisconsin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). On the Eastside Third Ward and Italian immigrants, see: Judith A. Simonsen, “The Third Ward: Symbol of Ethnic Identity,” Milwaukee History 10:2 (Summer 1987): 61–76; Diane C. Vecchio, Merchants, Midwives, and Laboring Women: Italian Migrants in Urban America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Anthony M. Zignego, Milwaukee’s Italian Heritage: Mediterranean Roots in Midwestern Soil (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2009); and Thelma “Queen Tillie” Kamuchey and Jim “Rabbi” Hanley, Fractured Tales of Milwaukee’s Eastside (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2010). See also: Steven M. Avella, “Religion and the Shaping of Milwaukee,” in Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past, 256–84; Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and William Issel, Church and State in the City: Catholics and Politics in Twentieth-Century San Francisco (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013). David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 154; and Aims McGuinness, “The Revolution Begins Here: Milwaukee and the History of Socialism,” in Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past, 79–106.

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around an agenda that fused broad working-class goals with good government principles. Socialists held the mayoralty from 1910 to 1912 (Emil Seidel) and 1916 to 1940 (Daniel Hoan). The 1910 election, however, was the only one in which Socialists won both the mayor’s office and a majority on the Common Council, with twenty-one out of thirty-five wards. That year Socialists also gained a number of municipal posts, including city attorney (Hoan), as well as seats in the state legislature, on the county board of supervisors, and on the school board. In the fall 1910 election, Socialist leader Victor Berger was elected to the U.S. Congress from the Fifth District. In 1932, the re-elected Mayor Hoan would enjoy a working majority on the Common Council, with Socialist aldermen and their allies. To battle the Socialists, Milwaukee Democrats and Republicans joined forces in 1912 to pass a bill through the Wisconsin legislature mandating nonpartisan local elections. This pro-business coalition would run candidates against the Socialists and caucus in the Common Council under the Nonpartisan label, dividing Milwaukee politics along the socialist/nonsocialist axis for much of the first half of the twentieth century.22 Despite only partial control over municipal government and local politics, Socialist initiatives and reforms made a deep impact on the city. These included the following * *

*

*

*

22

fiscal policies to ease the burden on the city’s working class; stricter regulation of private utilities and proposals for public ownership; the building of an extensive park system and neighborhood social centers easily accessible to working-class residents; a planning agenda that tilted toward housing and social needs throughout the city rather than central city development; restrictions on the use of police against strikers or against workingclass leisure activities;

Sally M. Miller, “Milwaukee: Of Ethnicity and Labor,” in Socialism and the Cities, ed. Bruce M. Stave (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1975), 41–71; Miller, “The Socialist Party and ‘Old’ Immigrants: The Milwaukee Movement to 1920,” in Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Early Twentieth-Century American Socialism, ed. Sally M. Miller (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 47–72; Frederick I. Olson, “The Milwaukee Socialists, 1897–1941” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1952); Marvin Wachman, History of the Socialist Party of Milwaukee, 1897–1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1945); Elmer A. Beck, The Sewer Socialists: A History of the Socialist Party of Wisconsin, 1897–1940 (Fennimore, WI: Westburg Associates Publishers, 1982); and Frank P. Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government: My Experience as Mayor of Milwaukee” (unpublished manuscript, 1962). Zeidler’s manuscript recounting his years as mayor is available in the Milwaukee Public Library. A portion of this work has been published as Frank P. Zeidler, A Liberal in City Government: My Experiences as Mayor of Milwaukee (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Publishers, 2005). Unless noted otherwise, references here are to the unpublished manuscript.

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54 * *

* *

public school reforms and free textbooks; improvement to the city water system in order to better serve working-class residents; widely recognized public health initiatives; and city-run public jobs programs during the early years of the Great Depression.

The Socialists also fought off proposals to adopt the city manager and commission system, preserved (for the most part) the ward system for electing Common Council members, and secured home rule for the city in the 1920s, thereby allowing a greater public voice for working-class sections of the city and increasing municipal autonomy. Although Socialist and Progressive reform programs frequently overlapped, the Socialists distinguished themselves by championing policies that challenged the prerogatives of organized capital. And they did so with an approach to politics that emphasized the centrality of class dynamics. Although the institutional links of the municipal Socialists’ politics had largely disintegrated by the beginning of World War II, a legacy of policies, a pattern of thinking about municipal politics, and a distinctive vision of urban democracy continued to influence the city’s political culture.23

23

Douglas E. Booth, “Municipal Socialism and City Government Reform: The Milwaukee Experience, 1910–1940,” Journal of Urban History 12:1 (November 1985): 51–74; Sidney L. Harring, “The Police as a Class Question: Milwaukee Socialists and the Police, 1900–1955,” Science and Society 46:2 (Summer 1982): 197–221; Elizabeth Jozwiak, “Politics in Play: Socialism, Free Speech, and Social Centers in Milwaukee,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 86:3 (Spring 2003): 10–21; McGuinness, “The Revolution Begins Here”; Karen Woolley Moore, “Missed Connections: The ‘Progressive’ Derailment of Public Transit in Metropolitan Milwaukee during the Electric Street Railway Era” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2011); Lorne A. Platt, “Planning Ideology and Geographic Thought in the Early Twentieth Century: Charles Whitnall’s Progressive Era Park Designs for Socialist Milwaukee,” Journal of Urban History 36:6 (2010): 771–91; William J. Reese, “‘Partisans of the Proletariat’: The Socialist Working-Class and the Milwaukee Schools, 1890–1920,” History of Education Quarterly 21:1 (Spring 1981): 3–50; Robert C. Reinders, “Daniel W. Hoan and Municipal Reform in Milwaukee, 1910– 1920,” in Milwaukee Stories, ed. Thomas J. Jablonsky (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2005), 434–49; Kate Foss-Mollan, Hard Water: Politics and Water Supply in Milwaukee, 1870–1895 (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2001); and Judith Walzer Leavitt, The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). For socialist influences on Milwaukee city planning, see John M. McCarthy, Making Milwaukee Mightier: Planning and the Politics of Growth, 1910–1960 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009). On municipal socialism, see: Cecelia Bucki, Bridgeport’s Socialist New Deal, 1915–36 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Richard W. Judd, Socialist Cities: Municipal Politics and the Grass Roots of American Socialism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989); and Shelton Stromquist, “Claiming Political Space: Workers, Municipal Socialism, and the Reconstruction of Local Democracy in a Transnational Perspective,” in Workers across

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55

Developments of the 1930s and 1940s rearranged Milwaukee’s political landscape. These included the formation and growth of the CIO, the rise of a liberal New Deal Democratic Party and concurrent downward slide of the conservative state Democratic party, splits in the Socialist Party at the national level, Communist activism during the Popular Front era, Progressive Party gains and miscalculations, the short-lived FarmerLabor Progressive Federation, and the Wisconsin Republican Party reform movement. The Socialist Party was reduced to the status of a minor player locally, especially after Daniel Hoan lost the mayor’s race in 1940. Yet after a conservative interlude in the mayor’s office (Carl Zeidler, followed by John L. Bohn), the Socialist Frank Zeidler ran as the candidate of the newly formed Municipal Enterprise Committee and was elected in 1948 to the first of his three four-year terms. The political affiliation of Milwaukee liberals, progressives, former Socialists, and left-wingers were in flux during much of the decade. Some continued to pursue third-party strategies. Many CIO activists, AFL leaders, and Democratic Party reformers, however, kept working to plant a national New Deal party in local soil and recruited many urban working-class voters who previously had voted for Socialist or Progressive Party candidates. The growing prominence of the New Deal Democratic Party became evident particularly in national election returns. Franklin D. Roosevelt carried Milwaukee with 67 percent of the vote in 1932 and an overwhelming 78 percent in 1936. The working-class Fourteenth Ward gave FDR more than 93 percent of its vote in this 1936 election. These citywide totals dropped to 64 and 62 percent in 1940 and 1944 respectively, but indicated still strong support for FDR throughout the war. Harry Truman, in his upset 1948 election, attracted the backing of 61 percent of Milwaukee voters. Many Milwaukee business leaders, as well as a growing proportion of suburban voters, found a home in the Republican Party. A reform initiative led by the Republican state leadership and the incorporation of Progressive Party activists in 1946 (following the lead of Senator Robert M. LaFollette, Jr.) meant that the party included liberal modernizers and die-hard conservatives. Having built these broader coalitions, the postwar Democrats and Republicans emerged as the dominant parties in Milwaukee-area and Wisconsin politics, with the city itself becoming increasingly a Democratic enclave.24

24

the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History, ed. Leon Fink (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 303–28. Sarah C. Ettenheim, How Milwaukee Voted: 1848–1980 (Milwaukee: Department of Governmental Affairs, University Extension, University of Wisconsin, 1980); John

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Along with the growth of the industrial city during the war and the years immediately following, this also was a time of substantial spatial and economic restructuring. As in other metropolitan areas, Milwaukee’s suburbs grew quickly, drawing people, businesses, and industries from the city. The Milwaukee metropolitan area as a whole grew by 15.6 percent during the 1940s, almost double the rate of growth seen within the city itself (see Table 1.1). The city’s population as a percentage of the metropolitan area’s total fell from 70 percent in 1940 to 63 percent in 1950. By 2000, the city constituted just 40 percent of the metropolitan area’s population.25 An aggressive strategy of territorial annexation, pursued by earlier Socialist administrations, was renewed during Frank Zeidler’s administration. This response to suburban development, however, was cut off by legal and legislative challenges in the mid-1950s.26

25

26

Buenker, “Cream City Electoral Politics: A Play in Four Acts,” in Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past, 28–37; Gurda, Making of Milwaukee; Richard Carlton Haney, “A History of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin since World War Two” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1970); Hanson, Report on the Politics of Milwaukee; David M. Oshinsky, Senator Joseph McCarthy and the American Labor Movement (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976); Joel Rast, “Governing the Regimeless City: The Frank Zeidler Administration in Milwaukee, 1948–1960,” Urban Affairs Review 42:1 (September 2006): 81–112; Alexander Shashko, “‘Shoe Leather and Perspiration’: Grassroots Liberalism and the Building of the Wisconsin Democratic Party at Mid-Century,” Wisconsin Law Review 30 (2003): 1–30; and Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter I, 31–32. On party-based reform movements, see Thompson, History of Wisconsin, Volume VI. On politics and the labor-liberal coalition, see: Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); and Kevin Boyle, ed., Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894–1994: The Labor-Liberal Alliance (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998). Richard Dewey, “Peripheral Expansion in Milwaukee County,” American Journal of Sociology 54:2 (September 1948): 118–25; Simon, City-Building Process, 125; and Milwaukee County Regional Planning Department, Residential Development in the Unincorporated Areas of Milwaukee County, 1946, in folio “City Planning, 1946–47 (II),” box 32, City Club of Milwaukee Papers, Milwaukee ARC. On decentralization and suburbs, see: Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Greg Hise, “Home Building and Industrial Decentralization in Los Angeles: The Roots of the Postwar Urban Region,” Journal of Urban History 19:2 (February 1993): 95–125. See also Kenneth T. Jackson, “The Beginning of the End: World War II and the American City,” Queen City Heritage 54: 2/3 (Summer/Fall 1996): 3–10. Arnold Fleischmann, “The Territorial Expansion of Milwaukee: Historical Lessons for Contemporary Urban Policy and Research,” Journal of Urban History 14:2 (February 1988): 147–76; Orum, City-Building, 77–84, 119–21; McCarthy, Making Milwaukee Mightier; and Joel Rast, “Annexation Policy in Milwaukee: An Historical Institutionalist Perspective,” Polity 39:1 (January 2007): 55–78. On earlier annexation and working-class residence, see Jason Jindrich, “Suburbs in the City: Reassessing the Location of Nineteenth-Century American Working-Class Suburbs,” Social Science History 36:2 (Summer 2012): 147–67.

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Early warnings of industrial decentralization and decline, foreshadowing the later advent of the Rustbelt, also were discernible in Milwaukee and other Great Lakes and northeastern cities. The Board of Public Land Commissioners (BPLC) reported an upturn in manufacturing employment from 1939 to 1943, preceded by a steady drop from 1919 to 1939. This earlier decline, which of course included the Depression years, was offset by a rise in service and distribution employment in the metropolitan area. Civic and labor leaders, in conjunction with planners, began to express concerns about Milwaukee’s manufacturing sector.27 Many people also feared that the end of the war and demobilization would mean a jump in unemployment and resumption of the Depression, much as the economy had turned down in the wake of World War I.28 Pointing in the direction of economic vitality, however, the imminent expansion of a mass-consumption economy held the prospect of reshaping the metropolis and everyday life. Americans in suburbs and cities were buying more cars, refrigerators, furniture, clothes, and even homes. The wave of new purchases, specifically of bigger ticket items, also accompanied rapid growth of the credit market and a boom in personal debt. In Milwaukee, automobile registrations increased about 18 percent during the 1940s and homeownership rates in the city jumped 32 percent. The number of residential telephones doubled. In 1940, 42 percent of Milwaukee households still used ice boxes. Just ten years later, 87 percent had modern “mechanical” refrigerators (see Table 1.4).29 Postwar suburbanization and consumption, along with industrial decline and economic change, would profoundly affect working-class life and labor’s power in the city. Without the benefit of twenty-first

27

28 29

Board of Public Land Commissioners, City Planning Division, Industrial Trends in the Milwaukee Area: An Analysis of Manufacturing as the Economic Base in Planning for Milwaukee (October 1945). On Milwaukee’s industrial decline, see: Orum, City-Building; and Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). On industrial decentralization, see also Robert Lewis, Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Pifer, City at War, 153–61. Bureau of the Census, 16th Census of the United States, 1940, Milwaukee, 63; 1950 United States Census of Population, Milwaukee, 46; and Research Clearinghouse of Milwaukee, Milwaukee County, City, Suburbs, Today and Yesterday: A Statistical History of the Community (Milwaukee, 1950), 12, 20, 55. See also: Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: A. A. Knopf, 2003). On consumption and working-class culture, see especially: Cohen, Making a New Deal; Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of a Consumer Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); and Shelley Nickles, “More Is Better: Mass Consumption, Gender, and Class Identity in Postwar America,” American Quarterly 54:4 (December 2002): 581–622.

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58

t a b l e 1 . 4 Profile of Milwaukee consumption, 1940, 1949/1950 Year

1940

1949/1950

Autos registered, Milwaukee city Autos registered, Milwaukee county suburbs Residential telephones in area

161,671 35,857 105,790

190,090a 56,627a 200,312a

Mechanical refrigeration, percent Ice refrigeration, percent Other or no refrigeration, percent

47.7% 42.0% 10.3%c

87.2%b 9.7%b 3.1%b

Renters in city, percent Home owners in city, percent

63% 37%

51%b 49%b

a

Statistics reported for 1949. Statistics reported for 1950. c Includes also those not reporting (0.9%). Sources: United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 16th Census of the United States, 1940: Population and Housing Statistics for Census Tracts, Milwaukee, Wis. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942), 63; 1950 United States Census of Population, Census Tract Statistics: Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Adjacent Area (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1952), 46; and Research Clearinghouse of Milwaukee, Milwaukee County, City, Suburbs: A Statistical History of the Community (1950), 12, 20, 55. b

century hindsight, however, Milwaukeeans in the 1940s and even the early 1950s did not fully recognize the far-reaching effects and implications of underlying or incremental changes. Given the uncertainties of the era, they alternated between hope and anxiety. Many residents of this and other industrial cities looked to the postwar years with a sense of possibility. They saw their cities and urban life as the product of a century-long, city-building process in the United States. Cities also continued to carry weight politically and culturally in midcentury America, despite accelerating business and residential development in suburbs and outlying areas. Whether this moment would be the apex before the fall or another point along the way in the relentless rise of the city remained to be seen. Increases in population and industrial expansion seemed possible or maybe even probable, despite uncertainties all around. A mid1940s Census Bureau analysis, for instance, rated Milwaukee as a Class C-2 Area – “losing population, or barely holding [its] own, but chances of postwar ‘comeback’ fair.”30 Milwaukee shared this equivocal ranking with Chicago, New York City, Cleveland, and Toledo, among other cities. The populations of many Midwestern and Northeastern cities continued to increase during these years, posting their highest totals in the 1950s or early 1960s. Milwaukee’s population reached its peak in the 30

“Postwar Prospects for Cities,” Business Week, 8 January 1944.

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1960 census with 741,324 residents. Yet city dwellers also sensed that their urban landscape, their patterns and practices of everyday life, and their understanding of the city were undergoing change. These doubts account for a measure of the anxieties that many people carried into the postwar era. How, then, did the problems that people discerned and the possibilities they perceived define the future? Most importantly, both the anxieties and aspirations of this moment – expressed throughout 1940s social, cultural, and policy conflicts – fueled changes in the city’s political culture.31 Milwaukee, of course, was not “the typical 1940s American city.” No city was. But this Midwestern industrial center offers a rich opportunity to examine debates about democracy, to interrogate the unstable and often conflict-ridden relationship between working-class and growth politics, and to probe the dynamics of a volatile midcentury political culture. The broad spectrum of political traditions represented in Milwaukee’s past and present, including a solid grounding for working-class politics, opened the way for spirited debates about the course of the postwar city. Milwaukee in the 1940s shared traits with both the assertive social democracy of postwar New York and the business dominance found in cities such as Indianapolis and Phoenix. The path by which growth politics became the accepted “common sense” of how a city operates was also rockier in Milwaukee than in many other urban areas. Hence, a close investigation of this rough terrain – a microhistory of diverse social and policy disputes

31

Michael Johns, Moment of Grace: The American City in the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Milwaukee’s population declined steadily to 717,372 in 1970, to 636,295 in 1980, and to 594,833 by 2010. Replicating national patterns, the Milwaukee metropolitan area population rose by almost 50 percent during the half century after 1950, from 1,014,211 to 1,500,744 residents by 2000. U.S. Census Bureau, “Milwaukee City,” 2010 Census Interactive Population Search. www.census.gov/2010census/popmap/ipmtext.php?fl=55:5553000 (accessed January 1, 2013); Anderson and Greene, Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past, 331; Richard M. Bernard, ed., Snowbelt Cities: Metropolitan Politics in the Northeast and Midwest since World War II (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), table A2; and Kenny, “Making Milwaukee Famous.” Attention to wartime decentralization, industrial reorganization, and suburban growth need not foreclose recognition of the cultural and political significance cities held during the 1940s, especially in the Midwest and Northeast. Philip Ethington, “The Granite Frontier: The Triumph of Metropolitan Civilization in the United States, 1850–1950,” H-Urban List, www2.h-net.msu.edu/~urban, 1 April 1998; Joshua B. Freeman, American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, 1945–2000 (New York: Viking, 2012), 2–7; and Douglas W. Rae, City: Urbanism and Its End (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). On anxieties and aspirations, see especially: William S. Graebner, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne, 1991); Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight; and Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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in this metropolis – charts a reorientation of local political culture. Recognition of this contested history, marked especially by the constitutive role that working-class politics played in the emergence of growth politics, illuminates a transition from industrial to early postindustrial urban political culture not readily apparent in studies of national-level policy and political developments. The dynamics of urban political culture can be found amid conflicts between working-class and growth politics and contests over democracy in this Great Lakes city.32

32

Joe R. Feagin, Anthony M. Orum, and Gideon Sjoberg, eds., A Case for the Case Study (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). For a range of cities, see: Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: Free Press, 2000); Robert G. Barrows, “Indianapolis: Silver Buckle on the Rust Belt,” in Snowbelt Cities, 137–57; and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, “‘Take Government out of Business by Putting Business into Government’: Local Boosters, National CEOs, Experts, and the Politics of Midcentury Capital Mobility,” in What’s Good for Business: Business and American Politics since World War II, eds. Kim Phillips-Fein and Julian E. Zelizer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 91–106. See also: Carlo Ginzburg, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,” Critical Inquiry 20:1 (Autumn 1993): 10–35; and John Brewer, “Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life,” Cultural and Social History 7:1 (2010): 87–109.

CHAPTER

2

New Deal Legacies and Wartime Urgencies: Housing Politics, Private Enterprise, and Public Authority

A spring 1943 fire in Milwaukee’s Sixth Ward took the lives of two African-American soldiers on leave from nearby Fort Sheridan. The two had been trapped in the attic of an overcrowded rooming house in Milwaukee’s central black neighborhood. Milwaukee CIO activist Joe Ellis decried this tragedy. He and the CIO placed blame not on the landlady who took in eleven roomers in a house licensed for eight but on “a housing situation which is the fruit of decades of discrimination and real estate interests’ greed.”1 A few months later, the CIO again condemned private real estate interests and residential segregation after a black CIO member’s two-month-old child died of dysentery, attributed to poor housing. The Major family, whose two other young children had been hospitalized with pneumonia, had been unable to rent anything other than this “dilapidated housing, [with] windows and doors that . . . leak cold air ‘like sieves,’ walls and ceilings ‘that sweat so much when the place is warm that your hands come away dripping wet when you touch them.’” A Milwaukee Journal reporter noted that the father in this family, a defense worker, was a “good man – no drinker, no gambler, a steady working man.” Troy Major, a six-year Milwaukee resident who had moved from Illinois, worked at the Ampco Metal Company. He earlier had been involved in the International Fur and Leather Workers’ successful organizing drive against a recalcitrant employer at the J. Greenebaum Tanning Company. He and his wife, Dolly Major, paid $18 a month in rent but would have been willing to spend more if they could have found better housing. The CIO underscored the irony that segregation and a housing 1

“Housing Conditions to Blame as Negroes Die on Army Leave,” CIO News (Local 248 ed.), 31 May 1943. See also Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 187.

61

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shortage had forced this family into unsafe housing in the midst of a war against fascism and racism.2 A number of labor, liberal, African-American, and Popular Front groups advocated vigorously for better housing in the city during the war years. The black-led Sixth Ward Better Housing Community Club, pointing to the tragedy of the soldiers’ deaths, collected 1,300 signatures on petitions that demanded public housing and slum clearance. They sent the petitions to Representative Howard J. McMurray and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, public officials who embodied the New Deal.3 The Milwaukee CIO paid close attention both to the challenges facing working-class renters and homeowners and to the obstacles confronting black workers who sought decent housing. CIO unions and leaders worked with allied organizations and directly with black workers who needed housing. They pressured landlords, realtors, and public officials to respond. Ellis, an African-American tannery worker and secretary of the International Fur and Leather Workers Union Local 260, knew the difficulties black soldiers and workers encountered as they sought decent, affordable housing. When he went door-to-door in search of lodging for members of the armed forces, he discovered that many were forced to turn to the Rescue Mission or dangerously overcrowded rooming houses in the Sixth Ward. Black workers and their families had to double-up in the already crowded and deteriorating housing in Milwaukee’s Sixth and lower Tenth Wards. Attempts to live in other sections of the city were blocked by restrictive covenants, white neighborhood resistance, real estate leaders’ obstructions, and government policies that reinforced residential segregation.4 Ellis, the CIO, and allied organizations pushed for

2

3

4

Richard S. Davis, “Sixth Ward Hovel Death Adds to Tenants’ Misery,” Milwaukee Journal [hereafter MJ], 13 April 1944; and “Negro Segregation Writes Tragic Story,” CIO News (Wisconsin ed.), 14 February 1944. The CIO article also pointed to parallels between Milwaukee’s and Southern segregation patterns: “You don’t have to go down South to see the scourges and tragedies caused by segregation, ‘restricted’ property, and other forms of discrimination.” On the 1942 organizing campaign at Greenebaum, see Richard L. Pifer, A City at War: Milwaukee Labor during World War II (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2003), 113–14. “Petitions Call for Housing Project,” Milwaukee Sentinel [hereafter MS], 3 June 1943. On the Sixth Ward Better Housing Community Club see also: Correspondence with Acting Mayor John Bohn, 20 March 1943, folio “Housing, rents, and Real Estate,” John L. Bohn Papers, Series 081, Office of the Mayor, City of Milwaukee Archives, Milwaukee Public Library [hereafter Bohn Papers, MPL]; and Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 186. On McMurray’s role in building a New Deal Democratic coalition in Milwaukee, see William F. Thompson, The History of Wisconsin, Volume VI: Continuity and Change, 1940–1965 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1988), 438–39. Charles Vaeth, “Milwaukee Negro Residential Segregation” (unpublished manuscript, Milwaukee Public Library, ca. 1948); Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 66–73, 175–88. On

New Deal Legacies and Wartime Urgencies

63

better living conditions in the city, supported a muscular public housing program, and challenged discrimination.5 Wartime housing politics took shape in the face of severe overcrowding and the urgency of defense production, while also building on the controversies over public provision from the 1930s and earlier decades. Milwaukeeans debated advantages of both public and private housing during the late 1930s and the war. Contests over public housing became especially heated. The politics of housing entailed complex issues – from financing to siting. And these disputes mobilized an array of motivations – from private gain to community welfare. As in other cities, Milwaukee’s housing politics during the 1930s and the war engaged key questions about the relationship between the public and private sectors. Would housing remain predominantly a commodity, securing equity for some, profit for others, and debt for still others? What role would the public sector play in this market? Would government regulate the housing market? Would the public sector supply shelter? For whom? During a time of intense labor organizing in the late 1930s and a resurgent industrial economy undergirded by wartime production, battles over public housing revolved around a set of fundamental questions about political power, social provision, and the character of American democracy. Would public housing become another base, along with organized workplaces and grassroots politics, for working-class power in the city?

5

midcentury residential segregation, see: Kevin Fox Gotham, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900–2000 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002); Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 146–71; Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Stephen Grant Meyer, As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); Amanda I. Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Thomas J. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); and James D. Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 57–98. See also: “Special Section: Urban History, Arnold Hirsch, and the Second Ghetto Thesis,” in Journal of Urban History 29:3 (March 2003): 233–309; and Carl H. Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). On Ellis, the CIO, and black housing, see: Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 187–88, 199, 212; and Milwaukee Department of City Development, “Central Business District Historic Resources Survey” (City of Milwaukee, March 1986), 86–87. Trotter argues that “by the war’s end, the CIO had emerged as the strongest ally of blacks in their push for a municipal housing authority and low income housing” (188). On the urban North’s long civil rights movement, see Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008).

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Would public housing, by providing shelter in a labor city, further institutionalize working-class politics and a workers’ New Deal? Would an expansive public housing program strengthen the position of an evolving labor-left coalition as the city grappled with the challenges of the wartime emergency and then prepared for postwar development? Many political moderates and reformers active at the local and national levels imagined a closely circumscribed public housing program. They prescribed a limited public housing program that would target the lowest-income segments of the working class and help to displace slums. Although this scheme became, in large part, the policy direction for postwar public housing, this moderately liberal course was not a foregone conclusion for residents and activists in the midcentury city. Enthusiastic proponents of public housing envisaged greater potential for the program. In particular, they saw the political and ideological possibilities of a public housing program that served a capaciouslydefined working class. In contrast, conservatives who fought vehemently to protect the private housing market from public incursion understood this challenge clearly when they referred derisively to public housing as “political housing.”6 Despite Milwaukee’s relatively small African-American population, both white racism and initiatives promoting racial egalitarianism figured centrally into controversies over public and private housing. Sometimes 6

On public housing policy and conflicts, see: John F. Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920–1974 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); J. S. Fuerst, When Public Housing Was Paradise: Building Community in Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005); Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933–1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); A. Scott Henderson, Housing and the Democratic Ideal: The Life and Thought of Charles Abrams (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Peter H. Henderson, “Local Deals and the New Deal State: Implementing Federal Public Housing in Baltimore, 1933–1968” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1993); D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 15–66; Don Parson, Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 13–73; Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Kristin M. Szylvian, “The Federal Housing Program during World War II,” in From Tenements to Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America, eds. John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Szylvian (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 121–38; Lawrence J. Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 161–266; Lawrence J. Vale and Yonah Freemark, “From Public Housing to Public-Private Housing,” Journal of the American Planning Association 78:4 (Autumn 2012): 379–402; and Alexander von Hoffman, “The End of the Dream: The Political Struggle of America’s Public Housers,” Journal of Planning History 4:3 (August 2005): 222–53.

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65

race was at the forefront of the controversy, as in the case of efforts to prevent black families from moving into white neighborhoods or integrating public housing. Since most African Americans had little choice but to live in the segregated neighborhoods just north of downtown, disputes about where public housing should be built also raised the controversial question of where black and white Milwaukeeans ought to live. And since black workers had little choice but to take the lowest-paying jobs in the city, contention over rent guidelines and the potential size of the public housing program directed attention to economic disparities between black and white residents. Further, debates over the scope of public housing framed the controversial question about whether or not the new projects would serve a broadly defined, racially diverse working class. Would black and white workers live side-by-side in public housing? Or would this public provision disproportionately benefit white workers? Or would public housing be open only to the city’s poorest residents, possibly even targeting black neighborhoods? Race and class were intertwined in these housing controversies.7 In the late 1930s, Milwaukeeans fought over their first federallyfunded, public housing project. Labor, African-American, and middle class reform organizations, along with the Socialist administration, sought to bring the fruits of New Deal housing to the city. Their efforts led to the construction of the Parklawn project and the articulation of a workingclass politics built around housing issues.8 Real estate and businessoriented groups had opposed this project. Along with conservative allies on the Common Council, these groups sought also to block formation of a local housing authority. Throughout the late 1930s and during much of the war, this contest over a housing authority further differentiated working-class and conservative politics. Labor-left groups and others advancing working-class politics hoped to create an institutional presence 7

8

On housing, race, and class, in addition to sources already cited, see: Wendell Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). See the discussion of racial and social democracy in Preston H. Smith II, Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). The Resettlement Administration’s construction of Greendale on the edge of Milwaukee (one of three New Deal-era greenbelt communities in the nation) is another important episode in the local housing history. See: Arnold R. Alanen and Joseph A. Eden, Main Street Ready-Made: The New Deal Community of Greendale, Wisconsin (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1987); John M. McCarthy, Making Milwaukee Mightier: Planning and the Politics of Growth, 1910–1960 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), 94–103; and Ronald Wildermuth, “Greendale’s Federal Years, 1938–1952” (M.S. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1968).

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for public housing in the city. Conservatives worked to prevent intrusions into the private housing market. The controversies over these two important public housing issues – Parklawn and the housing authority – focused debates about the meaning and significance of New Deal initiatives and wartime needs in the local setting. The 1943 deaths of two soldiers and the defense worker’s child underscored the tangible and tragic consequences at stake in these housing conflicts. These housing and development issues, in turn, provide a vantage point to view the making of Milwaukee’s midcentury political culture. Persistent policy conflicts, often pivoting around class issues, and an emerging growth politics accompanied by a culture of consensus that became apparent by the end of the war would help to compose postwar democracy. Earlier in the twentieth century, Milwaukee’s Social Democrats had sought to regulate the housing market and improve living conditions for the city’s working class. These initiatives on housing issues complemented the Socialists’ priorities to strengthen working-class political power, to mitigate the social ills of the industrial city, and to bolster workers in their disputes with employers. In the early 1920s the Socialist administration, with strong support from the Federated Trades Council (FTC), built the Garden Homes project. Inspired by the garden city movement, this housing project was the nation’s first municipally built cooperative for working-class families. Garden Homes aimed especially to relieve workers’ post-World War I housing shortage, but black families were excluded from this project. Even more dire housing shortages during the Great Depression and World War II, for both white and black workers, animated later housing politics.9

9

Helen Terry, Garden Homes Housing Project: A Summary (Milwaukee: Municipal Reference Library, 1934); Wayne Attoe and Mark Latus, “The First Public Housing: Sewer Socialism’s Garden City for Milwaukee,” Journal of Popular Culture 10 (Summer 1976): 142–49; Daniel W. Hoan, City Government: The Record of the Milwaukee Experiment (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936), 260–61; John Gurda, The Making of Milwaukee (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 1999), 264–65; Judith T. Kenny and Thomas C. Hubka, “Surveying Milwaukee’s Residential Landscapes: Prospects for Research,” in Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past, eds. Margo Anderson and Victor Greene (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 240–46; McCarthy, Making Milwaukee Mightier, 28–33, 49–53; and Radford, Modern Housing for America, 49–51. By the end of the 1920s, private ownership supplanted Garden Homes’ cooperative plan. For earlier links between labor and socialist housing approaches, see an article by the Socialist City Clerk: Carl D. Thompson, “Socialists and Slums – Milwaukee,” Survey 25:10 (3 December 1910): 367–76. On the garden city movement’s influence, see: Richard E. Foglesong, Planning the Capitalist City: The Colonial Era to the 1920s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 167–98; and Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 178–98, 454–56.

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Milwaukeeans referred to their metropolis as the “city of homes,” although the city’s home ownership rate was roughly the same as the national average. Of the twenty-five largest U.S. cities, Milwaukee fell roughly in the middle of the pack for the proportion of homes that were owner occupied. According to the 1940 census, 32 percent of the homes in the city were owner occupied, as were about 38 percent of dwellings in the metropolitan area. Or by another measure, about 37 percent of the city’s residents lived in owner-occupied homes.10 While some of Milwaukee’s highest home ownership rates were found in middle and upper-class districts, especially those on the outskirts, many distinctly working-class districts also boasted high home ownership rates. In an area of the relatively affluent northwestern Twenty-sixth Ward, for instance, 70 percent of the dwellings were owner occupied (see Map 1.1). Similarly, a section of the well-to-do lakeside Eighteenth Ward had a home ownership rate of 59 percent. A mixed working and middle-class area in the South-Side Twentyfourth Ward ranked on top, with just over 73 percent of the homes owneroccupied. Other solidly working-class districts in the northern Twentieth Ward and the South Side’s Fourteenth Ward reported moderately high home ownership rates of about 44 percent and 41 percent respectively.11 Working-class Milwaukeeans deployed a number of strategies to own their homes. Many workers, including recent immigrants in the earlier twentieth century, built their houses in stages in the city’s outlying neighborhoods, opting for cheaper land costs and delaying installation of city services in order to avoid special assessments. Many home owners relied on income from boarders to supplement meager wages and to ensure some income during periods of unemployment of seasonal lay-offs. Others took

10

11

Home ownership rates of the twenty-five largest cities ranged from sixteen for New York City to forty-four for Seattle. Milwaukeeans were not alone in dubbing theirs “the city of homes.” United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940. Housing, Volume II, General Characteristics, Part 5 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1943), 863; Citizens’ Governmental Research Bureau, Milwaukee’s Negro Community (Milwaukee: Council for Social Agencies, 1946), 64; and Richard Harris, “Working-Class Home Ownership in the American Metropolis,” Journal of Urban History 17:1 (November 1990): 49, 56. United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: Population and Housing, Statistics for Census Tracts. Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942); and Milwaukee County Community Fund and Council of Social Agencies, Census Tract Facts: A Handbook of Basic Social Data of Milwaukee County, Wis. (Milwaukee, 1945). The relevant census tracts are: Twenty-Sixth Ward, census tract 94; Eighteenth Ward, census tract 12; Twenty-Fourth Ward, census tract 136; Twentieth Ward, census tract 65; Fourteenth Ward; census tract 140. Some older middle- and upper-class sections of the city, including those that adjoined census tract 12, had higher rates of renters than the city average. Hence, renter and home ownership rates did not reliably reflect social class.

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in relatives during times of hardship. These steps resembled those taken by workers in cities and working-class neighborhoods elsewhere, seeking to own their homes and achieve a modest level of stability and equity in lives often beset by economic and social uncertainty.12 The Great Depression and the wartime emergency compounded the challenges workers and others faced in the housing market. As the number of wage earners dropped from 117,658 in 1929 to 66,010 in 1933, money for housing payments and rent became scarce. The value of foreclosed residential property reached over $50 million by the late 1930s. In 1933, almost half the property taxes in the city remained uncollected. The World War II economy erased some of these difficulties, as employment and income rose. But the housing squeeze worsened, as material shortages and the in-migration of defense workers meant that the city’s vacancy rate dropped to almost zero. Depression-era and wartime home-building rates had fallen far below those of the years between 1910 and 1929. Even by 1945, the city’s residential construction rate was less than half that of the earlier period. Further, new construction within city boundaries occurred mainly in the outlying wards, despite plenty of vacant land in other districts. During the war, almost half of the new building was concentrated in the northwestern Twenty-Sixth Ward. Seven wards near the center of the city saw no new construction. By the end of the war, the city faced a shortage of 18,000 new housing units.13 For African Americans in Milwaukee, a predominantly working-class segment of the population, home ownership rates remained disproportionately low. African-American residents were confined largely to the rental 12

13

Roger D. Simon, The City Building Process: Housing and Services in New Milwaukee Neighborhoods, 1880–1910, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1996); and Kenney and Hubka, “Surveying Milwaukee’s Residential Landscapes,” 229– 39. On working-class strategies for economic security through ownership, see: Margaret Garb, City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Richard Harris, “The Flexible House: The Housing Backlog and the Persistence of Lodging, 1891–1951,” Social Science History 18:1 (Spring 1994): 31–53; and Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Milwaukee Housing Council, “Proceedings: Milwaukee Public Housing Conference,” 16 October 1937, Milwaukee Department of City Development files; Gurda, Making of Milwaukee, 276–83; Still, Milwaukee, 479–84; and Pifer, City at War, 29–34. On the wartime housing shortage, conditions, and costs, see for example: folio 533.14 (Housing, 1944), box 5219, War Manpower Commission, Record Group 211, Region 6, National Archives, Chicago; “War Workers’ Homes Needed Badly in City,” MS, 13 June 1943; and the many letters addressed to the mayor’s office in folios “Housing, Rents, Real Estate,” “Housing and Rents,” “Requests for Housing, 1945,” in Bohn Papers, MPL. On building activity, see Milwaukee Common Council, Annual Report of the City of Milwaukee, 1945 (Milwaukee, 1946), 37–39.

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market in sections of the Sixth and Tenth Wards, although a few families and individuals lived in areas such as the west-central Sixteenth Ward. Some middle-class blacks were able to afford better-quality rental housing on the edges of Milwaukee’s near-north neighborhood. A few had managed to purchase homes, aided especially by the black-owned Columbia Savings and Loan. As in other cities, however, everyday discrimination, widespread income inequality, and racially restrictive policies adopted by private and public agencies (including redlining by banks and federal mortgage insurance programs) combined to keep black residents out of newer, owner-occupied dwellings. Most working-class African Americans in Milwaukee had little choice but to rent overpriced, substandard housing.14 Compared to the city-wide home ownership rate of about one-third, less than 6 percent of African American homes were owner occupied. According to the 1940 Census, African Americans owned just 141 homes and rented 2,347 units.15 Home ownership rates in the four census tracts in which a majority of dwellings were occupied by African Americans fell far below the citywide average for ownership. In the Sixth Ward’s census tract 20, over 88 percent of dwelling units were occupied by

14

15

Citizens’ Governmental Research Bureau, Milwaukee’s Negro Community; J. J. Brust, Housing Survey in the Sixth and Tenth Wards (Milwaukee Board of Public Land Commissioners, 1944); E. R. Krumbiegel, Observations on Housing Conditions in Milwaukee’s Sixth Ward: A Report to the Mayor and Common Council (Milwaukee Commissioner of Health, 1944); Vaeth, “Milwaukee Negro Residential Segregation”; Intercollegiate Council on Intergroup Relations, The Housing of Negroes in Milwaukee (Milwaukee, 1955); Jack Dougherty, “African Americans, Civil Rights, and Race-Making in Milwaukee,” in Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past, 132–40; Trotter, Black Milwaukee; Leo C. Talsky, “Real Estate, Race, and Revenue: A Milwaukee Case Study” (M.S. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1967); and Charles T. O’Reilly, “The Inner CoreNorth: A Study of Milwaukee’s Negro Community” (Milwaukee: School of Social Work, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1963). On the Columbia Savings and Loan see: Rebekah L. Allison, “Columbia Savings and Loan as a Black Financial Institution: Its Role and Contributions to Milwaukee’s Black Community” (research paper, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1991) [copy in author’s possession]; “Halyard Dies,” Milwaukee Star, 26 January 1963; and Ardie Clark Halyard, Interview by Marcia M. Greenlee, 24 and 25 August 1978, Black Women Oral History Project, Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, MA. See also: Margaret Garb, “Drawing the ‘Color Line’: Race and Real Estate in Early Twentieth-Century Chicago,” Journal of Urban History 32:5 (July 2006): 773–87; and Louise Lee Woods, “The Federal Home Loan Bank Board, Redlining, and the National Proliferation of Racial Lending Discrimination, 1921–1950, Journal of Urban History 38:6 (November 2012): 1036–059. People categorized as “other nonwhite” in the census owned 16 houses and rented 146 dwellings in the city. Their ownership rate of 9.9 percent also was substantially below the citywide rate for whites. See: Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940. Housing, Volume II, 863; Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 179; and Citizens’ Governmental Research Bureau, Milwaukee’s Negro Community, 26.

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African Americans and other people listed as “nonwhites.” Of the total 390 dwellings in the district, only 8.2 percent were owner occupied: eighteen white and twelve African American. Rental units included twenty-five occupied by whites, 305 by African Americans, and eight listed as “other nonwhite.” Census tract 30 had a higher overall rate of home ownership (almost 11 percent), but still just a third of the citywide rate.16 By the end of World War II, the home ownership rates in these districts rose slightly, but remained a fraction of the citywide rate.17 Other housing measures point to the difficult living conditions black workers endured in these areas of the city with some of the oldest housing stock. Over two-thirds of the houses and apartments in which African Americans lived were classified as either needing major repairs or unfit for habitation. Black Milwaukeeans, less than 2 percent of the city’s total population, lived in about 10 percent of the city’s dwellings classified as needing major repairs and 52 percent of housing listed as unfit for use.18 The average value of white housing in the city stood at $4,485, whereas the average value of black housing was 38 percent less, or $2,762.19 Finally, surveys and contemporary accounts indicated that African-American renters paid more for poor quality housing than did white renters. In the area designated as a slum, two-thirds of white residents paid rents below $15 per month; just one-third of “nonwhite” renters paid less than $15 per month.20 The Great Depression had hit African American renters and homeowners hard. High rates of black unemployment during the 1930s, reaching above 50 percent and remaining at almost 30 percent by the close of the decade, forced families to reduce their housing costs or forego payments. A few middle-class African Americans who could afford to pay full

16

17

18

19 20

The black population in each of these census tracts (as opposed to a count of dwellings) was: census tract 20, 66.7 percent; census tract 21, 49 percent; census tract 29, 50.2 percent; and census tract 30, 53.3 percent. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census, 1940: Population and Housing, Milwaukee, 4, 52–53. Census tracts 20, 21, and 30 were in the Sixth Ward. Census tract 29 crossed the border of the Sixth and Tenth Wards (see Map 1.1). Categories used in this census do not allow for analysis of cases of mixed racial residency. Possible reasons for a slight increase in wartime home ownership rates include: new employment opportunities for area residents, including African Americans, might have allowed some renters to buy; and landlords, in response to wartime rent controls and the housing shortage, might have either sold off their rental property or moved in themselves. Citizens’ Governmental Research Bureau, Milwaukee’s Black Community, 27. Ibid., 25. Trotter reports that blocks with higher percentages of black residents exhibited steadily poorer quality housing, in Black Milwaukee, 182. See also Thomas P. Imse, “The Negro Community in Milwaukee” (M.A. thesis, Marquette University, 1942), 10–16. Citizens’ Governmental Research Bureau, Milwaukee’s Negro Community, 26. Ibid., 28.

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rents managed to move into houses or apartments previously restricted to whites. Some property owners overlooked race to bring in paying tenants. But black working-class families, who turned increasingly to local and federal relief programs, saw their housing conditions deteriorate as they doubled up to save money. And many hard-pressed landlords skimped on maintenance and repairs. Although wartime production eventually resulted in increased employment and incomes for black workers, housing conditions in the near-North Side neighborhoods continued to decline. The arrival of more black and white workers meant even more crowded houses and apartments, especially in African-American neighborhoods where new housing construction had stopped. The slowly widening boundaries of the areas in which African-Americans could find housing failed to keep pace with the wartime population increase.21 During the 1930s and the war, the areas of the Sixth and Tenth Wards in which most of Milwaukee’s black residents lived also became the subject of more intensive study and survey. A 1933 Mayor’s Housing Commission, the 1939 Real Property Survey by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and a 1944 housing study by Milwaukee’s Commissioner of Health defined this area as a slum or blighted area. These studies and others, including a number of early postwar surveys, brought needed attention to an area with specific housing and health needs. For residents of these areas, black leaders, and political allies, public recognition of these conditions prompted calls for public action to supply better housing. But the increasingly close identification of black housing with blight and slum conditions, in the popular imagination and policy debates, also served to intensify white racism.22 For conservative 21

22

Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 147–95; Michael Ross Grover, “‘All Things to Black Folks’: A History of the Milwaukee Urban League, 1919–1980" (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1994), 51–78; Pifer, City at War, 33–34; and “Housing Pleas in Circulation: Petitions Seek Action for Benefit of Negro War Workers Here,” MJ, 30 June 1944. Mayor’s Housing Commission, Report of the Mayor’s Housing Commission (Milwaukee, 1933), Milwaukee Department of City Development files; WPA, Real Property Survey, Low Income Area Survey, City of Milwaukee, 1939–1940, City Archives #161, MPL; E. R. Krumbiegel, Observations on Housing Conditions in Milwaukee’s Sixth Ward; Milwaukee Health Department, “Area ‘A’ Statistics” (March 1946), Milwaukee Department of City Development files; Imse, “The Negro Community in Milwaukee”; and Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 179. Definitions of slum and blight conditions varied considerably but often overlapped. The 1933 Mayor’s Housing Commission report stated: “One might consider blighted areas to be incipient slums” (12). See also: Karen Ferguson, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 165–218; Colin Gordon, “Blighting the Way: Urban Renewal, Economic Development, and the Elusive Definitions of Blight,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 31:2 (January 2004): 305–37; James Hanlon, “Unsightly Urban Menaces and the Rescaling of Residential Segregation in the United States,” Journal of Urban History 37:5 (September

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opponents of public action, especially those involved in the private real estate and building industries, municipal or federal intervention in this “city of homes” became cause for alarm and political action. Parklawn, the city’s first federally financed public housing project, quickly became a flashpoint for Milwaukee housing politics. Responding to Depression-era economic distress and housing shortages, the Public Works Administration (PWA) built public housing projects throughout the nation. Local planning, anticipating federal action, had begun when Mayor Hoan established his housing commission in 1933. Local and federal officials and activists imagined this housing both as an emergency response to private-sector shortcomings during the economic crisis and as a spacious public alternative to the private housing market. The prospect of the Parklawn project drew immediate opposition, however, from the real estate industry, the United Taxpayers’ Co-operative Association, Nonpartisan Common Council members (including the future mayor John L. Bohn), and others. Labor and reform groups, along with Socialist aldermen and their allies, pushed the public housing proposal forward. They hoped to clean up the city’s slums and provide housing for a wide cross-section of the city’s working-class residents who previously lived in substandard private dwellings. Conflicts over the location of the project and the race of occupants, disputes about who should benefit from public housing, and complaints about the project’s tax-exempt status set the stage for subsequent controversies over the housing authority and early postwar public housing.23 Public housing backers imagined an affordable but high quality PWA project that would provide jobs for unemployed workers and boost the area building industry, while also advancing the principles of “modern housing.” Parklawn would meet immediate needs for housing, jobs, and economic stimulus. And it would help to usher in new standards for housing in the city to benefit not only those at the top of the ladder;

23

2011): 732–56; and Wendell E. Pritchett, “The ‘Public Menace’ of Blight: Urban Renewal and the Uses of Eminent Domain,” Yale Law and Policy Review 21:1 (2003): 1–52. On PWA projects, see: Radford, Modern Housing for America, 85–109; and Joseph Heathcott, “‘In the Nature of a Clinic’: The Design of Early Public Housing in St. Louis,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 70:1 (March 2011), 82–103. On Parklawn, see: H. A. Gray, A History of the Development of the Parklawn Housing Project at Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Federal Emergency Administration of the Public Works Housing Division, 1937); and Vivian P. Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination: The Fight for the Creation of a Permanent Housing Authority for the City of Milwaukee, 1933–1945” (M.S. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1967), 38–71. Hoan had organized an earlier housing commission in 1918. On the real estate profession, see Jeffrey M. Hornstein, A Nation of Realtors®: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

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workers and their families also would see improvements in their lives and surroundings. As Mayor Hoan wrote in anticipation of the project, “The houses will be of fireproof material, economical in design, attractive in appearance, and provided with central heating and ample space for individual gardens and community recreational facilities.”24 All units in Parklawn were outfitted with electric refrigerators, an appliance found in fewer than half of local households at the time (See Table 1.4). Photographs of Parklawn apartments’ interiors featured families in kitchens with their modern amenities. Efficiency accounted for part of the attraction to “modern housing,” as did specific claims that female homemakers’ work and consumption would be made more efficient. Domesticity and efficiency were entwined in these images. Even more so, however, proponents for this project tied ideas about modern housing to a policy that aimed to meet needs and redistribute housing resources. The modern city imagined here, then, was one in which efficiency served redistribution. At the same time, the modern features found in Parklawn fed opponents’ complaints about government excess and overreach as they objected especially to these extravagant additions built into a public project for workers and lower-income people.25 This Depression-era project was slated initially for construction in an area of well-documented housing needs in Milwaukee’s Sixth Ward. The costs and difficulties of acquiring some of the property on the proposed site, a white home-owners’ lawsuit, and opposition from the property investors in this overwhelmingly rental district held up and eventually foiled plans for the Sixth Ward location. Critics alleged that such a project would heighten the “race problem” and encourage “mixing of the races.”26 The Milwaukee Urban League, on the other hand, endorsed low-income housing and slum clearance in the Sixth Ward and objected to the real estate industry’s tactics. “It appears that real estate interests 24

25

26

“Parklawn Gave Jobs, Now Gives Homes to Low Income Group,” MJ, 6 June 1937; and Hoan, City Government, 262–63. On “modern housing” see Catherine Bauer’s influential Modern Housing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934). “Refrigerators for Economy,” MJ, 6 June 1947; “Higher Living Standard Set,” MJ, 6 June 1937; and photographs of families in kitchens in Parklawn file, City of Milwaukee Housing Authority Photo Archive. Appliance companies used this opportunity to their advantage; Westinghouse placed a large advertisement boasting “Government Installs 518 Westinghouse Refrigerators in Milwaukee’s Housing Project.” See also: Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: A. A. Knopf, 2003); Ruth Schwartz Cohen, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983); and Radford, Modern Housing for America. Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination,” 52–53, 56, 61; and Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 183–84. The charge that a Sixth Ward project would foster racial mixing ignored prevailing Sixth Ward residential patterns.

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within the district together with the general real estate interests of the community have been largely instrumental in defeating for the present at least any effort to obtain the Federal assistance in its slum cleaning efforts.”27 A few years later the Milwaukee CIO renewed this plea for public housing on the near-North Side, arguing that “[a]ll working-class organizations should support the demand of the residents of the Sixth and Tenth Wards for establishing of a housing project in this area, open to residents of this area only.” The Urban League, the CIO, and allies such as the middle-class League of Women Voters pressed for a Sixth Ward project.28 Mayor Hoan and other officials began to look at possible sites in outlying areas in response to continued resistance and intensified calls for public housing. Their support for building Parklawn on vacant land on the city’s Northwest side was not only a concession to mounting opposition and a nod to cost considerations, but it also stemmed from local Socialist planners’ long-standing designs to decentralize the city (see Map 2.1). Vacant land, of course, often offered a less costly alternative to projects planned for slum sites or other previously occupied lands. Socialist planners and other progressive housing activists who backed this approach stressed the cost savings and political expediency of low-income projects located on vacant land. This put them at odds with housing reformers or activists who identified slum clearance and rehousing of displaced residents as central elements of public housing. They also discounted, whether intentionally or unintentionally, the possibility that public housing in outlying areas would be off-limits for many African-American residents and might serve to reinforce patterns of residential segregation in the city. Such blind spots tarnished pro-public housing politics at the local and national levels over the next decades.29 When Parklawn opened in 1937, over 5,000 applicants hoped to be among those selected to live in the 518 apartments. Tours of the two-story rowhouses drew thousands of Milwaukeeans (see Figure 2.1). A year later, 27

28

29

Board of Directors minutes, 15 November 1934, Frames 428–429, Reel 1, Milwaukee Urban League microfilm, Milwaukee Area Research Center, University of WisconsinMilwaukee Libraries’ Archives [hereafter Milwaukee ARC]. CIO quoted in Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 187. See also: Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination,” 66; and Marie Anne Laberge, “‘Seeking a Place to Stand’: Political Power and Activism among Wisconsin Women, 1945–1963" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1995), 62–63. Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination,” 61. On Socialist planners’ efforts to decentralize the city, see: McCarthy, Making Milwaukee Mightier; and Lorne A. Platt, “Planning Ideology and Geographic Thought in the Early Twentieth Century: Charles Whitnall’s Progressive Era Park Designs for Socialist Milwaukee,” Journal of Urban History 36:6 (2010): 771–91.

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m a p 2 . 1 Locations of Milwaukee’s public housing projects, including the 1937 Parklawn project and the postwar low-income and veterans’ projects. From the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee, Public Housing in Milwaukee, 2d ed. (Milwaukee, 1953), 18. Reproduced by permission of the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee.

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fi g u r e 2 . 1 Parklawn, a Public Works Administration housing project, under construction. The project opened in 1937. Reflecting Garden City design principles and a desire to provide modern housing for the city’s working class, this 518-unit, two-story development featured common spaces for play and everyday living. The local Housing Authority took over the project in 1950. Parklawn Housing Project – Milwaukee, Wisconsin, view showing interior court of block 7 (camera facing north), 30 April 1937, photo no. 54031, Milwaukee Housing Authority photograph archive. Reproduced by permission of the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee.

1,400 families remained on the waiting list. The racial composition of the project’s first set of residents echoed the city’s racial profile. Despite protests at City Hall and the construction site, which had insisted on black inclusion in the project, administrators followed the PWA practice of abiding by local racial patterns. In the case of Milwaukee, this meant admitting black families to the project at a rate equal to the proportion of African Americans in the city’s population (1.3 percent of the population in 1930). Just six African-American families were chosen to be among the first residents of Parklawn. In keeping with a strategy adopted by PWA planners to skirt white backlash, all of the black residents lived initially in the same building. This would change in subsequent years, but the number of African Americans in Parklawn remained low even if fluctuating slightly. Many of the organizations promoting public housing in the Sixth Ward disparaged this minimal gesture to improve black Milwaukeeans’ living conditions and charged that racial inequities compromised the project. They suggested that the racial composition of the population occupying the city’s worst housing would be a more appropriate measure of need and a better way to set

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benchmarks for the new project. Since African Americans lived in over half of the city’s housing classified as unfit for use and had few housing options, they should be given access to an equal portion of units in the Parklawn project. Placing the project on vacant land might have been a necessary response to public housing opponents’ objections to a Sixth Ward site. But it disregarded the degree to which the city’s racially divided geography configured policy-making, implementation, and everyday life. For black Milwaukeeans, the project fell far short in their quest for decent, affordable housing. While the project’s opening was a step forward for an emerging housing coalition, the site decision and early admissions numbers indicated that issues of racial fairness, much less egalitarianism, remained inadequately addressed.30 At the same time, many black Milwaukeeans recognized the significance of even a few families living in Parklawn, well beyond the boundaries of the city’s African-American neighborhoods. According to personal recollections and official reports, North Avenue at the top edge of the Sixth Ward had been a border for black Milwaukeeans in the 1930s. A black packinghouse worker remembered his as one of just a handful of African-American families living across North Avenue at the beginning of the 1940s. A smattering of black families lived outside these confines, including those farming cabbage on the city’s northern edge and those living in the western Sixteenth Ward. In light of this history, then, the black families in the Parklawn project represented a small but noteworthy break from fixed residential patterns. As one black worker emphasized, these Parklawn residents were “pretty far above North Avenue . . . [they] were pretty well up there.”31 This African-American presence in the project raised eyebrows and lifted hopes that the seemingly insurmountable geographic barriers in the city might someday be breached. Housing policy inevitably posed questions about race in the city, presenting as well the possibility of change. Parklawn’s income guidelines also provoked conflicting reactions. Officials set income ceilings and rents slightly above those used to determine

30

31

Jeanne Anderson Posada, “Public Housing in Milwaukee: A Case Study in Administration” (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1947), 36; Gurda, Making of Milwaukee, 288; Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 185, 187; Vaeth, “Milwaukee Negro Residential Segregation,” 18; Radford, Modern Housing for America, 104–05; and Arnold Hirsch, “‘Containment’ on the Home Front: Race and Federal Housing Policy from the New Deal to the Cold War,” Journal of Urban History 26:2 (2000): 158–89. Edward Wood, Interview by Rosie McDuffy, 16 April 1992, Milwaukee, Finding Jobs Oral History Project, Wisconsin Black Historical Society and Wisconsin Historical Society; and other interviews in the Finding Jobs collection. Wood was a teenager in the 1930s. See also “Depression Opened Some Doors to Negro,” MJ, 9 November 1967.

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relief eligibility. Housing advocates believed that a financially and politically sustainable public housing program necessitated the inclusion of a larger segment of the working class – not just the city’s poorest residents but a wider range of lower income residents. When it was first opened, Parklawn housed people with annual incomes ranging from $1,300 in three-room apartments to $2,250 in five-room units.32 These guidelines bore the mark of Parklawn’s genesis as a PWA housing project which, in turn, had been influenced by housing reformers such as Catherine Bauer and the Labor Housing Conference. Bauer and her allies maintained that public housing must aim to build a generously defined working-class constituency, rather than being pegged narrowly as an institution for the poor.33 This also reflected the approach to public housing adopted earlier by Milwaukee labor and the Socialists. Other housing activists in Milwaukee and elsewhere, including some social workers and middle-class reformers, disagreed; they concentrated their efforts on housing for the lowest-income groups. At the national level, settlement worker Mary Simkhovitch and the National Public Housing Conference were among the prominent housing reformers advocating a low-cost public housing program targeted to the most impoverished residents. While this latter position held the upper hand in the 1937 Housing Act (Wagner-Steagall Act) and the newly formed United States Housing Authority (USHA), the agency to which Parklawn was transferred, voices for a broader public housing as well as opponents remained active and influential. Due to the challenges of implementation, the uncertainty of future initiatives, and the decentralized nature of this program (and, for that matter, of housing politics more generally), these debates remained open at the federal and local levels. Housing politics would remain contested, especially at the local level, throughout the 1940s on these and related issues.34 Realtors, builders, and lenders, who earlier had opposed public housing on the grounds of ideology and economic interest, adapted to Parklawn’s

32 33

34

Posada, “Public Housing in Milwaukee,” 32–37. Radford, Modern Housing for America; Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 404, 461–68, 473– 78; and H. Peter Oberlander and Eva Newbrun, Houser: The Life and Work of Catherine Bauer (Vancouver, British Columbia: UBC Press, 1999). The benchmark 1937 Housing Act was a compromise between a disparate group of New Dealers and politically ascendant conservatives. Catherine Bauer “Now, at Last: Housing,” New Republic, 8 September 1937, 119–21; Jo Ann E. Argersinger, “Contested Visions of American Democracy: Citizenship, Public Housing, and the International Arena,” Journal of Urban History 36:6 (2010): 792–813; Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster, 15–34; J. Joseph Huthmacher, Senator Robert F. Wagner and the Rise of Urban Liberalism (NY: Atheneum, 1971), 224–30; Radford, Modern Housing for America,184–91; Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 473–78; and von Hoffman, “The End of the Dream.”

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construction by arguing that only the lowest-income Milwaukeeans should be eligible to live in the project. Otherwise, they complained, public housing would compete unfairly against private enterprise. The Milwaukee Real Estate Board and the Savings and Loan League sought enforcement of strict income limits. They also hired a private investigator to check on residents’ financial situations.35 The Milwaukee Journal took these arguments a step further, by contending that city taxpayers with incomes hovering around the guidelines would face a future of ever-worse housing as they and other taxpayers bore the burden of paying for their own housing and public housing for others. The Journal anticipated allegations that would arise in the later 1940s – including those leveled by Senator Joseph McCarthy – that accused public housing proponents of conniving to depress housing conditions and thereby creating an everexpanding pool of people in need of its assistance.36 Responding to such pressures and data on substandard housing made available by a WPA real property survey, Parklawn administrators lowered the income ceilings in 1940 to $975 for the smaller units and $1,300 for the larger apartments. They planned to evict almost half of the tenants in order to comply with these new income guidelines.37 This action to evict public housing residents followed a path charted by USHA administrator Nathan Straus, who responded to critics’ attacks by stepping back from an ambitious approach to public housing and tightening the agency’s spending. Straus’s efforts to placate opponents never proved sufficient, however. Likewise, his backing of more stringent building and maintenance policies eroded public-housing support.38 Parklawn residents protested the impending evictions. While opponents continued their efforts to undermine public housing, the stringent guidelines and the subsequent evictions may have fostered among a core constituency resentments against both public housing specifically and federal action more generally.39

35

36 37

38

39

“Disclose Quiz on Parklawn: Real Estate Groups Had Investigator on Job as U.S. Changed Rentals,” MJ, 14 September 1940. Milwaukee Journal position noted in Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination,” 81. “Moving Order Stirs Tenants,” MJ, 12 September 1940; “32 Parklawn Families Will Move Monday: Majority in Higher Income Groups Granted Extensions,” MS, 29 September 1940; “New Rush on at Parklawn: Ten Families Seeking to Get in for Every One That Moves Out,” MJ, 30 October 1940; and Posada, “Public Housing in Milwaukee,” 33–34. Gail Radford, “The Federal Government and Housing during the Great Depression,” in From Tenements to the Taylor Homes, 113–15; Roger Biles, “Nathan Straus and the Failure of U.S. Public Housing, 1937–1942,” Historian 52 (Autumn 1990): 33–46; and Nathan Straus, The Seven Myths of Housing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944), 94–126, 166–97. “Moving Order Stirs Tenants.”

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In addition to income qualifications, taxes became a crucial point of contention in debates over Parklawn and other public housing initiatives. Federally funded projects were exempt from paying property taxes, a principal source of funds for local governments. Housing legislation and administrative rules considered this exemption a part of the local contribution to the project, set at 20 percent by the USHA. The real estate and building industries grumbled that the tax exemption put private housing at a competitive disadvantage. Local governments also expressed concern about the costs of providing direct and indirect services and utilities (for example, police, fire, schools, elections, sewer and water) to a residential area that did not pay taxes. In 1936, Congress passed the George-Healy Act, which established a system of payment-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOT) for public housing, but did not specify an amount or percentage to be recompensed. In short, federal and local authorities were expected to negotiate the amount paid for services provided to the project and its residents. Parklawn administrators first proposed a payment equal to 5 percent of the projects’ rental income. This dispute lingered between Milwaukee and the USHA until the Federal Public Housing Authority in 1944 established a uniform 10-percent rate for PILOT.40 More importantly perhaps, public housing critics and conservatives focused on the issue of tax exemption and PILOT to undercut political support for public housing in the late 1930s and war years.41 In the postwar years, as the contests over public housing rose to the top of the city’s agenda, this issue took on a renewed prominence. A summer 1938 Milwaukee visit by the USHA’s Nathan Straus highlighted these controversies over public housing eligibility and taxation. Critics who defended the efficacy of the private housing market decried the redistributive effects of Straus’s public housing. The Milwaukee Journal editorialized against proposals “that groups of people be given homes without earning them.”42 Straus observed that he found the usual line-up 40

41

42

Milwaukee County Community Fund and Council of Social Agencies, “Interim Report of the Housing Committee to the Social Planning Committee,” September 1940, folio “Housing Committees, Dec. 1933-Sept 1945,” box 20, United Community Services of Greater Milwaukee Records [hereafter UCSGM Records], Milwaukee ARC; Posada, “Public Housing in Milwaukee,” 44–47, 50–52; and Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination,” 65, 72–73. This temporary resolution occurred in the wake of the National Defense Housing Act (Lanham Act) and wartime consolidation of federal housing programs under the National Housing Agency. See Szylvian, “The Federal Housing Program during World War II,” 124–32. See correspondence on this dispute in folio 3, box 16, Carl F. and Frank P. Zeidler Papers, Office of the Mayor, City of Milwaukee Archives [hereafter Zeidler Papers], MPL. See John J. Roache (executive secretary, Milwaukee Real Estate Board), “Private Industry and Housing,” in the Proceedings of the Milwaukee Public Housing Conference, 16 October 1937, found in the files of the Milwaukee Department of City Development. “Milwaukee: Straus on Housing,” MJ, 29 July 1938.

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of private builders, real estate businesses, and financial institutions opposing public housing; he criticized these “vested interests” for “posing as widows and orphans and building and loan associations.” While property investors complained that public housing constituted unfair competition, Straus pointed to private enterprise’s shortcomings in providing decent, affordable housing for lower-income workers.43 Straus responded to liberal reformer Julia Dolan’s query about the eligibility of people on relief for public housing by insisting that “we must not confuse the housing problem with the relief problem.” Straus hoped that the relief problem was temporary, while he recognized that the “housing problem will be with us for a long time.” He contended that the USHA’s funds would best be used to house “the man who is paying his own way.” Projects would house families with incomes between $600 and $900 per year.44 According to data collected in 1939, about 13 percent of Milwaukee area families fell into the $500 to $999 income group, while the median family income was $1,740.45 In the wake of the 1937 Housing Act, Straus was trying apparently to bridge the widening gap between policy designs for working-class public housing and a housing program more narrowly targeted at the city’s poorest residents, while also dampening charges that the program redistributed resources. Straus found himself caught between competing constituencies as he sought to justify a circumscribed public housing program and ward off the threatening stigma of a two-tiered housing policy. Straus especially encountered numerous objections to “tax-exempt housing.” He first tried to dismiss this point as irrelevant: “Taxes have no more to do with it than a bull fight has to do with farming, even though they both have bulls.”46 He soon acknowledged, however, that this taxexemption constituted a significant portion of the required local contribution to public housing operating costs. Straus countered that public housing would not only stimulate private building but would result in more homes on the tax rolls.47 43

44

45

46 47

“Straus Bumps into Argument,” MJ, 29 July 1938; “Straus Urges City Get in on Federal Housing,” MS, 29 July 1938; and “What, No Milwaukee USHA?,” MJ, 28 July 1938. “Straus Bumps into Argument”; “Straus Urges City Get in on Federal Housing.” Dolan, an attorney, was active in the Women’s Court and Civic Conference. Almost 43 percent of families earned between $1,000 and $1,999. Harold M. Groves, Wayne Anderson, Harry Kahn, Louise Prober, and Hannah Westerfield, Report of the Commission on the Economic Study of Milwaukee, prepared at the request of Mayor Frank P. Zeidler (Milwaukee, 1948), 73. “What, No Milwaukee USHA?” “Straus Urges City Get in on Federal Housing”; “Straus Bumps into Argument.” After a federal loan covered 90 percent of construction costs for a project, the local community contributed $1 for every $2 from the federal government for operating costs.

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Straus may have been surprised that Socialist Mayor Daniel Hoan did not come immediately to the defense of the USHA on this issue. Recognizing the potential political impact of the tax-exempt objections to public housing, Hoan asserted: “I believe it is possible for projects to pay taxes.”48 Invoking the example of the taxpaying Garden Homes project, the Socialist administration’s post-World War I municipal cooperative, Hoan described a public housing design that fit neatly into his conception of a largely self-sustaining city of workers. For Hoan, public housing could mesh with the vision of a city guided by distributional questions, cognizant of class dynamics, and striving to retain municipal fiscal independence.49 The Garden Homes project had been a project for “respectable” workers, built before the New Deal era. But would this wide-reaching public housing program truly accommodate the city’s lower-income workers, especially African-American workers? Garden Homes was built as a project for workers of moderate means, all of whom were white. Similarly, the New Deal reform and mutualist ideals built into the Resettlement Administration’s Greendale project addressed the upper echelons of the city’s white working-class. While visiting in 1936, Eleanor Roosevelt had praised Greendale, Milwaukee’s greenbelt town, but criticized the discrimination that kept black families out of the project.50 Parklawn, despite the early proposal for a Sixth Ward site and the handful of black tenants admitted initially, largely became a project to house a middle- and lower-income segment of the city’s white working class. Public housing advocates faced difficult challenges in making public housing policy more egalitarian, both racially and economically. African-American housing activists had reason to be skeptical about the emerging housing program. The viability of a capacious public housing policy, molded by the tenets of working-class politics, was tested. Yet the ongoing shortage of decent, affordable housing and the possibility of further federal support for public housing drew labor, African-American, women’s, and liberal organizations together to champion an expanded housing program, just as property investors and the real estate industry were united to oppose or weaken this program.

48 49

50

“Straus Bumps into Argument.” Hoan’s outlook paralleled that described in Cecelia Bucki’s history of Bridgeport Socialists. “This vision of the respectable worker informed the Bridgeport SP’s program. Productivist, honest, mutualistic, family centered, male defined – as sober-minded citizens these self-conscious workingmen saw their task as bringing fairness, honesty, and social justice to the community.” Bucki, Bridgeport’s Socialist New Deal, 1915–36 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 150. Gurda, Making of Milwaukee, 289; Hoan, City Government, 262; and Alanen and Eden, Main Street Ready-Made.

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Milwaukeeans plunged into a long and contentious debate over the establishment of a housing authority, just as the first tenants began to settle into Parklawn and shortly before the United States Housing Act became law in 1937. The Housing Act sought to decentralize the federal government’s public housing efforts by working through local housing agencies. The national real estate industry and critics of New Deal innovations, realizing that passage of a housing bill was likely, pushed the measure in this direction. They expected they could better control and contain public housing at the local level than in Washington. These Milwaukee conservatives took up this challenge to obstruct public housing, adamantly opposing the formation of a housing authority. Labor and liberal groups committed to establishing an agency to advance and institutionalize the city’s public housing program worked equally hard to build support for a housing authority.51 Early backers of a housing authority included the Milwaukee CIO Council, the FTC, the Building and Construction Trades Council, Mayor Hoan and the Socialist Party, the Milwaukee Urban League, the NAACP, the League of Women Voters, and the Milwaukee Woman’s Club. Representatives and members from these groups were among the 250 delegates who gathered for a fall 1937 meeting to discuss the city’s housing problems and needs. Former Socialist city attorney Max Raskin, a close ally of organized labor who later became the CIO’s counsel and a Democratic Party reformer, helped to organize the Milwaukee Housing Council. This group generated support for public housing through speakers, pamphlets, exhibits, radio addresses, housing project tours, and conferences.52 A fall 1938 explosion in the Tenth Ward which took the life of a child raised the pitch of the groups’ demand for a housing authority. They insisted the city take action to protect and help provide for its residents through better housing.53 These groups and their leaders also continued to 51

52

53

Archival collections useful for investigating this history include: the Mayoral Papers of Daniel W. Hoan, Carl F. Zeidler, and John L. Bohn in the City of Milwaukee Archives at the Milwaukee Public Library; and the United Community Services of Greater Milwaukee Records and the Milwaukee County Industrial Union Council Records at the Milwaukee ARC. See also Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination”; and Posada, “Public Housing in Milwaukee.” Frank P. Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government: My Experience as Mayor of Milwaukee” (unpublished manuscript, 1962), chapter IV, 12–14, 16; and Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination,” 84–85, 88. The local NAACP continued to speak up on housing issues in the late 1930s and early 1940s, despite internal conflicts and periodic closures; the organization did not recover fully until the mid-1940s. Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 215–17. On the NAACP, see: Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty; and Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: New Press, 2009). Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination,” 95–96.

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experiment with ways to work together in politics, lobbying, and direct action. The Milwaukee County Conference on Social Legislation, a Popular Front group that espoused the cause of public housing, convened a meeting of 190 delegates from eighty-seven organizations in October 1938. The organizations represented at the gathering included twelve AFL unions, twenty-six CIO locals, thirteen political groups, seven unemployed workers organizations, at least six women’s groups, three church and racial groups, four peace organizations, and public housing tenants’ groups.54 When USHA administrator Straus toured Milwaukee in 1938, he expressed shock that the city had not set up a housing authority: “Milwaukee – the cradle of liberalism – a city of progressive minded citizens – and no local housing authority to help you take advantage of the Wagner-Steagall Act!”55 Straus discovered that opposition to the taxexempt status of federal low-income housing provided one potent argument against the establishment of a housing authority. The question of eligibility stood as another obstacle. Backed by the real estate and building industries, the Nonpartisan caucus on the Common Council resisted appeals to establish a housing authority. These aldermen studied, delayed, and obstructed action on the housing authority. They sought to exact a guarantee that any public housing built would serve only the city’s poorest residents and not burden Milwaukee taxpayers. Such an approach, of course, sought to sever later-1930s public housing from a history of municipal-level social democratic reforms and proposals designed to address the needs of a broadly defined working-class constituency. This demand for strict means testing while also waving off taxpayer support set out an almost impossible combination for a city housing authority, absent significant and sustained federal funding. The Nonpartisan caucus, which had maintained strong ties to the real estate industry, found the issue of public housing and complaints against Parklawn an effective weapon in their long-standing battle against the Socialists in municipal politics. The Socialists’ sponsorship of the Garden Homes project and enthusiasm for Greendale, Hoan’s close identification with Parklawn, and Raskin’s leadership in the Milwaukee Housing Council made these connections evident. The city’s major newspapers 54

55

“Proceedings of the Milwaukee County Conference on Progressive Social Legislation,” and Invitation, 9 October 1938, folio “Correspondence, 1938 Sept.-Dec.,” box 2, Milwaukee County Industrial Union Council Records [hereafter Milwaukee CIO Council Records], Milwaukee ARC. The Milwaukee County Conference on Social Legislation probably was a forerunner or local affiliate of the Wisconsin Conference of Social Legislation. “What, No Milwaukee USHA?”

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joined the Nonpartisans in this assault on public housing and the Socialists. The waning power of the Socialists in the late 1930s, resulting in Hoan’s surprise 1940 defeat by conservative Carl Zeidler, suggested the utility of this strategy.56 Immediately after Hoan’s defeat, the Real Estate Board proposed that private real estate brokers, rather than the city’s real estate agent, be given control over the sales of city-owned lots. Conservatives, locally and nationally, were beginning to regain their footing in the closing years of the 1930s.57 Late-1938 Common Council hearings on the housing authority drew a large slate of public housing supporters and a smaller but vocal roster of opponents. Along with Hoan, speakers from the CIO, the FTC, the building trades, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the NAACP, public housing tenants’ groups, and various social welfare organizations called for the formation of a housing authority. Leaders from the United Taxpayers Association and the Rooming House Keepers Stabilization Committee were among those who spoke against the authority and public housing. The Common Council, recognizing the political volatility of this issue, avoided a direct vote against the establishment of a housing authority. The proposal that they passed along contained restrictions that were designed to provoke USHA disapproval.58 Public housing supporters and Hoan, increasingly at odds with the Nonpartisan aldermen, were outraged by the Council action. The CIO newspaper responded angrily: The aldermen “rode ruthlessly over the demands of the city’s population, of the trade unions – AFL, CIO, and Railroad – of the merchants, and sunk the Housing Authority on the bottom of Lake Michigan.” The CIO charged that these city leaders who torpedoed the authority had been “instructed by the Association of Commerce, the big real estate operators and bankers.”59 While the CIO may have overstated its position, the lines of conflict were drawn starkly. Milwaukee’s public housing projects, despite their limitations, stood as concrete symbols of the power the labor-left coalition held in the city and nationally. Members of this coalition hoped that the housing

56

57

58 59

Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination,” 77–83, 86–101; Frederick L. Olson, “The Milwaukee Socialists, 1897–1941” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1952); and Gurda, Making of Milwaukee , 300–06. “Council’s Eyes on Parklawn,” MJ, 2 May 1940; Gurda, Making of Milwaukee, 302–06; David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 323–62. Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination,” 99–101. “Council Buries Housing,” CIO News of Wisconsin, 19 December 1938; Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 22–23; Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination,” 100–01; and Posada, “Public Housing in Milwaukee,” 83–88.

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authority might further the cause of public housing in the city and mitigate the power – both political and ideological – of the private real estate industry. The labor-left coalition’s early housing victories were modest. For the city’s business and real estate leaders, New Deal critics, and other conservatives, however, the politics of public housing echoed the challenges to private enterprise stemming from the city’s Socialist administrations and, more generally, Depression-era working-class politics. The scope and power of the growing 1930s labor movement proved most threatening to these leaders as they battled the newly organizing CIO unions and resurgent AFL unions. The consolidation of the New Deal coalition and the salience of class politics were evident especially in the 1936 elections. During 1937 and 1938, conservatives fought local public housing projects and the federal Housing Act during the same period they witnessed a flurry of sit-down strikes that idled factories and other workplaces. Over twentyfive sit-down strikes were carried out in Milwaukee during these peak years of prewar labor conflict. While neither the Housing Act nor the local housing projects could count as unqualified victories for the laborleft coalition, 1930s housing politics and the sit-down strikes challenged the primacy of private property and the preeminence of the private sector. These workplace and housing policy conflicts, amid the political turmoil of the period, heightened conservatives’ concerns about the organizational and institutional muscle of the urban working class. Would public housing – or “political housing” as conservative critics dubbed it – strengthen working-class power in the city?60 As the debates over public housing and the housing authority carried over into the World War II years, the wartime emergency, the severe housing shortage, and the growth of the city’s black working class further recast housing politics. New workers arrived in the city as defense production geared up; these new arrivals joined the ranks of those seeking decent, affordable housing. The continued shortfall in housing production made this search difficult for workers, hurt defense production, and even threatened to deprive the city of war contracts. Encouraging Milwaukee home owners to share rooms or convert houses into extra apartments, the state director for federal housing programs declared: “You can’t give a man a park bench for a home and at the same time expect him to do a good,

60

Darryl Holter, “Sit-Down Strikes in Milwaukee, 1937–1938,” Milwaukee History 9:2 (Summer 1986): 58–64; Henry Kraus, The Many and the Few: A Chronicle of the Dynamic Auto Workers (1947; 2d ed., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 291–360; and Radford, Modern Housing for America.

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efficient job.”61 African-American residents and newcomers to the city’s near-north neighborhoods, of course, faced the grimmest prospects of finding decent housing.62 Wartime housing pressures led to the creation of Milwaukee’s War Housing Center in late 1942. A housing committee composed largely of builders was named by Mayor John L. Bohn (Carl Zeidler’s successor). The new center would coordinate the placement of tenants in private housing, encourage the conversion of dwellings into extra apartments and rooms, and serve as the liaison to the National Housing Agency. The center adopted the slogan “Help House the Man Behind the Man Behind the Gun.” In pitching its mission to support the defense emergency, the center’s slogan suggested how solutions to the housing crunch might preserve the traditional gender hierarchy within the industrial workplace and the city. In a similar way, the Milwaukee Journal framed the options facing the city: “The only way to increase production – besides putting more women to work – is to get more men, and more men need housing.”63 Progress on the housing front could serve culturally conservative ends. Given the role played by the private housing industry, wartime housing might even serve conservative political and economic ends. Builder Frank Kirkpatrick, who was appointed War Housing Center director, soon discovered that the wartime housing needs were too severe to be met solely by converting existing houses and apartments into smaller units or coordinating the private housing market. But Kirkpatrick initially rejected creation of a housing authority.64 In late 1943, he appeared to ease

61

62

63

64

“War Workers’ Homes Needed Badly in City”; and “More Housing for War Workers Is Big Job Here,” MJ, 23 May 1943. See also the account by Agnes Zeidler (wife of future mayor Frank Zeidler) of the wartime housing shortage. Agnes Zeidler, Interview by Kathy Borkowski, 12 March 1942, Milwaukee, Wisconsin Women during World War II Oral History Project, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. “More Negroes Flock to City,” MJ, 7 March 1943; “Housing Pleas in Circulation,” MJ, 30 June 1944; Paul Geib, “From Mississippi to Milwaukee: A Case Study of Southern Black Migration to Milwaukee, 1940–1970” Journal of Negro History 83:4 (Autumn 1998): 229–48; and Trotter, Black Milwaukee. Also at issue during the war was the housing and treatment of temporary workers from the Caribbean. “Housing Our Barbadian Workers,” MJ, 9 September 1944. See also: James N. Gregory, “The Second Great Migration: A Historical Overview,” in African American Urban History since World War II, eds. Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 19–38. “Housing for Workers Coming Here Vital to Keep War Material Rolling,” MJ, 24 October 1943. On war housing centers in other cities, see Roger W. Lotchin, The Bad City in the Good War: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Diego (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 219–21. “Housing Post to Kirkpatrick: Builder Named Manager of New Center for Aid of War Workers,” MJ, 18 November 1942; and Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination,” 117–22. For an example of Kirkpatrick’s reports about the city’s housing shortage and the

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back from his unqualified opposition to a housing authority, saying that he could support a federally funded program to house the city’s lowest-income residents rather than accept more Parklawn-style projects. He soon again, however, reiterated his opposition.65 Likewise, the Milwaukee Real Estate Board, the Savings and Loan League, the Landlords Association, and the Home Builders Association continued to organize and speak out against public housing.66 The severity of the housing shortage, however, convinced other public housing opponents to begin questioning or to shift their positions. Most notably, Mayor Bohn modified his long-held commitment to the real estate interests and antagonism to public housing. Before becoming acting mayor in 1942, Bohn had been a realtor and served as a Nonpartisan Alderman from the Twenty-third Ward. He had been an outspoken opponent of public housing, but reassessed his stance during the war. He became increasingly concerned about the effect of the housing shortage on wartime production, as well as the impact of slums on property values throughout the city. Bohn also began to see the political value of housing as a wartime unity issue; it would enable him to court the support of liberal and labor groups as the 1944 city elections approached. He now was willing to consider a role for the public sector in housing, especially for the Sixth Ward. The pressures of wartime production and unity also nudged the Milwaukee Journal in the direction of accepting a narrowly defined lowincome housing program, especially for the Sixth Ward or “Negro housing.” Wartime urgency was reshaping the city’s housing politics.67 During the war, support for the housing authority and a local public housing program rose to a new pitch. Organized labor – and the CIO in particular – played a crucial role. The FTC continued to advocate for public housing, although their voice was muted as a result of the

65

66

67

work of the War Housing Center, see Frank Kirkpatrick to Mayor John L. Bohn, 2 and 8 March 1943, folio “Housing, Rents, and Real Estate (1943),” Bohn Papers, MPL. “Negro Housing Relief Sought: Sixth Ward Jam Scored,” MJ, 3 November 1943; “Housing Law Change Asked: Council Group Action,” MJ, 18 January 1944; Frank Kirkpatrick to Louise A. Root (Milwaukee County Community Fund), 29 December 1943, and Kirkpatrick to Philip Klutznick (National Housing Agency), 27 December 1943, both in folio “Housing Committees (Dec 1933 – Sept 1945),” box 20, UCSGM Records, Milwaukee ARC; and Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination,” 122. Lenard mistakes Kirkpatrick’s earlier qualification regarding low-income housing as a reversal on the housing authority; he continued to oppose any public housing program that merged “economic and political powers.” Posada, “Public Housing in Milwaukee,” 95–96; Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination,”124; “Housing Body Here Opposed,” MJ, 16 January 1944; and “Housing Law Change Asked.” Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination,” 114, 126; “Ex-Mayor, Bohn, Dead,” MJ, 20 April 1955; and Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 40–41. See also Richard S. Davis, “Bohn Expects Authority Will Uplift Housing,” MJ, 18 April 1944.

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Socialists’ diminished presence and the rise of a more moderate leadership in Milwaukee’s and Wisconsin’s AFL unions. The Milwaukee CIO and its member unions now took the lead for organized workers and for a laborleft coalition. The CIO issued regular calls for better housing and responded to a series of tragic events, including the 1943 Sixth Ward fire and health concerns. The first two items on the Milwaukee CIO’s priority list, submitted to the Mayor’s 1943 Post-War Planning Conference, pertained to housing. The CIO Council kept pressure on Milwaukee officials and elected representatives in Washington throughout the war.68 The CIO’s efforts on housing were tied closely to interracial work, including the organization of the Milwaukee Interracial Labor Relations Council.69 This work against racism in the city and segregation in housing built on earlier antidiscrimination steps and dovetailed with the initiatives of the national CIO. The national CIO Committee to Abolish Racial Discrimination encouraged all CIO Councils to set up local antidiscrimination campaigns. In concert with the CIO Housing Committee, the group denounced the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ efforts to kill public housing, to countenance housing discrimination, and to back a privately driven urban redevelopment program. The national committee called on city CIO councils and CIO unions to work on behalf of public housing as a part of its joint antidiscrimination and housing agendas. Condemning the real estate interests, the Milwaukee CIO called for improved Sixth Ward housing while mobilizing its members to press for a housing authority and an ample public housing program.70

68

69

70

Milwaukee County Industrial Union Council to Mayor John L. Bohn, 4 November 1943, folio 2, box 4, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC; “CIO, Others Give Postwar Plans to Mayor’s Committee,” CIO News (Local 248 ed.), 15 November 1943; Darryl Holter, “Sources of CIO Success: The New Deal Years in Milwaukee,” Labor History 29:2 (Spring 1988): 224; and Pifer, City at War, 33–34. See also: Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 186, 193–94; Parson, Making a Better World, 15–16, 33–40, 63–66; and Sarah Jo Peterson, “The Politics of Land Use and Housing in World War II Michigan: Building Bombers and Communities” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2002). Program for the Interracial Committee of the Urban League and C.I.O., ca. April 1943, folio 4, box 3, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC; and Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 187–88. “Report of George L-P Weaver, National CIO Committee to Abolish Racial Discrimination,” 20 March 1944, folio 4, box 4, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC; and Minutes of Meeting of National CIO Committee to Abolish Racial Discrimination, 20 March 1944, folio 4, box 4, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC. Weaver also was a member of the CIO’s Housing Committee. To warn local CIO Councils, the committee pointed especially to the real estate lobby’s anti-public housing work in Washington, D.C. See: Howard Gillette, Jr.,

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Left-led unions, such as United Auto Workers Local 248, took this work a step farther by challenging racial inequalities in unions, workplaces, everyday life, and housing. This heightened attention to discrimination and racism, although undermined frequently by white leaders’ and rank-and-file members’ persistent racial prejudices, would influence the postwar agenda of many labor, left, and liberal organizations. The growing rift between anticommunist liberals and the antifascist left, especially after the close of the war, would punctuate the distinction between moderate efforts to promote racial tolerance in public life and aggressive attacks on patterns of deep-seated racism that regularly disadvantaged African Americans while securing white privilege in almost every sphere of private and public life. While initiatives to advance and celebrate tolerance would produce results that liberal leaders could point to with pride, the limits of this approach would become apparent in postwar conflicts over public housing and urban development.71 The Milwaukee Urban League (MUL) played an especially active role advocating reform in wartime housing and employment policy. The MUL surveyed housing in the Sixth and Tenth Wards, trying to sway the Real Estate Board and the Common Council to help improve conditions. The MUL also held meetings on housing issues for its own constituents while remaining active in coalition work to advance the prospects for public housing.72 The newly formed Sixth Ward Better Housing

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Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 147–50; and William Robert Barnes, “The Origins of Urban Renewal: The Public Housing Controversy and the Emergence of a Redevelopment Program in the District of Columbia, 1942–1949” (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1977). On the CIO’s Committee to Abolish Racial Discrimination and wartime racial agenda, see: Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 156–60. On Local 248, see Stephen Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin”: The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900–1950 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992). On differences over race within the midcentury CIO and labor movement, especially between non-Communists and Communists, see: Zieger, The CIO, 158–61; Eric Arnesen, “No ‘Grave Danger’: Black Anticommunism, the Communist Party, and the Race Question,” Labor 3:4 (2006): 13–52; and David M. Lewis-Colman, Race Against Liberalism: Black Workers and the UAW in Detroit (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008). On white working-class racism and the limits to labor’s racial egalitarian claims, see especially David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 199–244. “Problem of Negro Housing Aired,” MS, 17 October 1943; “City Housing Action Talked: Agree to Have Authority Established for Aid in Sixth Ward Housing Needs,” MJ, 30 July 1943; Grover, “All Things to Black Folks,” 79–90; Geib, “From Mississippi to Milwaukee,” 233–35; Jack Dougherty, More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

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Community Club became another important wartime voice for an enhanced public-sector role in housing. This group studied the housing conditions African Americans faced in the Sixth Ward, educated the public and civic leaders about these conditions, and helped to mobilize Sixth Ward residents and allied organizations around a program of public housing. In particular, the group called for the removal of uninhabitable buildings in the Sixth Ward and the construction of a “housing project similar to those at Parklawn and Greendale.” All of this required that the city first set up the housing authority.73 Established leaders in Milwaukee’s African-American community and working-class blacks united behind these demands, spurred on by earlier housing battles and by wartime petitions for inclusion in the city’s economy and polity. Wartime housing politics tended to unite working-class and middle-class blacks, since both groups faced the consequences of residential segregation and the extreme housing shortage in near-North Side neighborhoods. Finally, coalition work on this issue, especially with organized labor, was facilitated by the increasingly prominent role of the black working-class in the workplace and in the city.74 Female activists provided leadership and women’s groups rallied their members for the housing authority battle. From the Servicemen’s Wives Club, to the Women’s Court and Civic Conference, to the League of Women Voters (LWV), to a wide range of religious and welfare groups, to labor and African-American organizations, women’s involvement as members and leaders both carried on a history of engagement in housing issues and charted the way for wartime and early postwar leadership.75

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2004), 23–24. The Milwaukee Urban League engaged a wide range of social and public issues. On changes in the League elsewhere, see Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty. The interracial Sixth Ward Better Housing Community Club appears to have been formed during a meeting at the MUL headquarters. Sixth Ward Better Housing Community Club, Statement of Purpose, ca. 5 March 1943, folio “Housing (1942–1943),” Bohn Papers, MPL. The committee that signed the initial statement included: Rev. David Wilcox, Mrs. Pressley De Wese, Mrs. Erin Washington, Mrs. Vasaline Meriwether, Mr. Ernest Bland, and Mrs. Karrianna Lampkins. Others involved were Bernice Copeland Lindsay and Josephine Prasser. Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 25–26; Grover, “‘All Things to Black Folks,’” 88–89; and “Negro Housing Plea to Board,” MJ, 28 September 1943. Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 185–88. See also Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 167–98. Laberge, “Seeking a Place to Stand,” 55–115; and Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination,” 122–24. On women’s involvement in late 1930s public housing disputes, see, “Housing Authority Sabotaged” (editorial), New Milwaukee Leader, 22 November 1938, also cited in Posada, “Public Housing in Milwaukee,” 87. On earlier women’s urban reform activities, see: Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Maureen

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In studies of local wartime conditions, the LWV examined the city’s “slum housing,” tabulating the social costs of inattention to the city’s housing crisis. The League lobbied Common Council members, arguing that the Wisconsin Housing Authority Act required a city to form a housing authority if it lacked safe and sanitary housing. The LWV also served as a catalyst for the Mayor’s Post-War Planning Conference in late 1943, encouraging organizations to place the need for a housing authority at the top of the recommendation lists they submitted.76 In 1943, the LWV hosted a meeting for representatives from eighteen organizations that included many of the city’s most active women’s, labor, African-American, welfare, and religious groups. This gathering spurred the formation of the Joint Action Committee for Better Housing (JACBH), a group that took a lead on housing issues for much of the 1940s. The initial roster of JACBH members included: the LWV; Milwaukee Woman’s Club; Milwaukee Junior Woman’s Club; Milwaukee CIO; Wisconsin Conference on Social Legislation; Upper Third Street Advancement Association; Milwaukee Urban League; Booker T. Washington YMCA; YWCA Negro Department; NAACP; Milwaukee County Council of Churches; Milwaukee Council of Church Women; and Council of Social Agencies.77 Other groups soon joined the JACBH, including the Sixth Ward Better Housing Community Club, the Interracial Federation, the National Order of St. Luke, the Council of Jewish Women, the American Association of University Women, Catholic Social Welfare, and the Association of Catholic Women.78 The

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A. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). “A Story from Milwaukee County (of Women’s Housing Report),” ca. 1945, file “League Reports,” box II:469, Manuscript Division, League of Women Voters Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. “Ask Fast City Housing Action,” MS, 26 October 1943; and “Women Urge Housing Plan: Mention 6th Ward,” MJ, 28 October 1943. On recommendations submitted to the Mayor’s conference, see also: “CIO, Others Give Postwar Plans to Mayor’s Committee”; and Report of the Steering Committee of the Mayor’s Post-War Planning Conference,” ca. January 1944, folio “Community Planning Committee, Nov. 1940 – Dec. 1943,” box 12, UCSGM Records, Milwaukee ARC. “Housing Board Created Here,” ca. 1943, newspaper clipping in folio “Housing Committees (Dec 1933 – Sept 1945),” box 20, UCSGM Records, Milwaukee ARC; and “A Story from Milwaukee County (of Women’s Housing Report).” Posada, “Public Housing in Milwaukee,” 94; Laberge, “Seeking a Place to Stand,” 66–69; Grover, “All Things to Black Folks,” 88; and Milwaukee County League of Women Voters to Councilmen of the City of Milwaukee, ca. 1943, folio “Housing Authority (current file),” Bohn Papers, MPL. See also: draft in folio 3, box 14, League of Women Voters of Greater Milwaukee Records, Milwaukee ARC. The precise membership is difficult to determine. Many of the service and social organizations that joined the JACBH were funded in part by the Milwaukee County Community Fund and Council of Social Agencies. This organization issued a strong statement of support for the Housing

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groups in this assemblage ranged widely, from active membership organizations to foundering branches of national organizations to advocacy groups to service agencies. Working-class and middle-class activists, black and white advocates, and male and female reformers – including Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish women – came together around housing in the JACBH. The breadth of this collection (including its interfaith dimension) reflected, in part, a wartime “culture of unity” that celebrated American pluralism. But the JACBH’s persistent work on the divisive housing issue underscores that this coalition represented more than a project in civic consensus-building. Combining the “respectability” of middle-class civic groups such as the LWV or the Council of Churches with the numerical power and militant reputation of a working-class group such as the CIO, the JACBH’s efforts would help tip the balance in favor of the city’s housing authority. While on the one hand this JACBH-headed assemblage foreshadowed the postwar coalition in which the center of gravity shifted from groups that had insisted on a broad working-class housing program to a set of anticommunist liberal organizations willing to bargain for a more limited program, it also can be seen as emblematic of a wartime labor-left politics and a participatory impulse that supported an expanding public sector and increased state authority.79 Genevieve Hambley served as the first chairperson of the JACBH. While certainly not unprecedented, the selection of a woman to head this mixedgender midcentury organization was notable. Hambley, a graduate of Queens College in New York who had studied economics and government, had been involved in housing issues in South Bend, Indiana. After moving to Milwaukee and joining the LWV and the American Association of University Women, she quickly became a local housing expert and outspoken advocate for public housing. In 1940 she began a careful investigation of housing conditions for the College Club.80 One

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Authority in 1943. Mackey Wells to Common Council of the City of Milwaukee, 2 November 1943, folio “Common Council,” Bohn Papers, MPL. “Housing Unit Setup Urged,” MS, 13 January 1944; “Housing Law Change Asked,” MJ, 18 January 1944; and Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination,” 125; Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 185–86. On the wartime “culture of unity” and postwar anticommunist liberalism and pluralism, see especially: Shana Bernstein, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 60–137; and Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 103–59. On wartime mass participation, see James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Laberge, “Seeking a Place to Stand,” 66, 179–81; Posada, “Public Housing in Milwaukee,” 93–94; Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 37–38; and

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contemporary observer described her as extraordinarily diligent, “barb tongue[d],” and “afraid of no one.” She was “powerful and self-assured, trumpeting her convictions concerning public housing in every dusty corner of the City Hall, and County Court House, as well as in Washington.”81 While the fight for the housing authority never was a single-handed venture, Hambley’s organizing, expertise, and persistence were formidable. Pressure from the increasingly well-organized pro-public housing organizations, as well as the chronic wartime housing shortage, forced the city to take action on the proposed housing authority. On January 24, 1944 the Milwaukee Common Council voted to establish the stillcontroversial housing authority. The Council had been swayed by growing public support for an enhanced government role in housing, as well as by consequential shifts in city leaders’ positions. The Milwaukee Journal’s acceptance of a limited public housing program and Mayor Bohn’s backing of the authority likely proved important.82 Bohn’s new position on this issue appears to have paid off politically. During the winter and spring mayoral campaign, he featured the housing issue prominently in his candidacy and drew support from many groups and individuals engaged in the push for the housing authority. Several key leaders in Milwaukee CIO and AFL unions signed a statement backing Bohn’s election. Outlining reasons for support, the statement listed housing concerns immediately after the more general wartime priorities of unity and defense production. The United Labor Committee (ULC), the local CIO and AFL’s joint political action group during this period, did not officially endorse Bohn or any other candidate. But soon before Election Day the mayor appointed the ULC’s chairman to the newly formed housing authority. Peter Schoemann, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council and a school board member, had been recommended by the AFL and CIO as a labor representative for the authority. His appointment acknowledged the crucial role that labor had

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Genevieve B. Hambley to Mayor Carl Zeidler, 28 February 1940, folio 3, box 16, Zeidler Papers, MPL. Hambley served on Mayor Bohn’s Post-War Planning Committee. Milwaukee Post-War Planning Organization membership list, ca. 1943, folio “Post-War Planning,” Bohn Papers, MPL. She also challenged gender conventions of the era by frequently using her first name rather than her husband’s first name in official communications (that is, Genevieve Hambley, not Mrs. William Hambley). Posada, “Public Housing in Milwaukee,” 93. “Housing Unit Setup Urged”; “Housing Law Change Asked” ; “Housing Authority Won After Years’ Struggle with CIO in Key Role,” CIO News (Wisconsin ed.), 31 January 1944; Common Council, City of Milwaukee, Journal of Proceedings, file 78409, 24 January 1944, City Records Center, Milwaukee; Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination,” 124–25.

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played in organizing on this issue. The moderately conservative Bohn tacitly recognized labor’s claim to a position on the board and, at the same time, may have boosted his mayoral campaign.83 Schoemann’s nomination by the two labor federations and his selection by Bohn point to some of the opportunities and challenges organized workers faced near the end of the war. As a leader of the Milwaukee Plumbers and Gasfitters Local 75 and the Building and Construction Trades Council, he had a direct interest in housing and construction projects. Carpenters, plumbers, bricklayers, and others in the building trades had been hit hard by the Great Depression and the wartime shortages. Schoemann and other building trades’ leaders were eager to get housing and other construction projects under way, whether publicly- or privately financed. Known in the community as “Mr. Everything,” he may simply have wanted to be involved in important local issues. At the same time, Schoemann helped to redirect the FTC politically and organizationally. He was a member of the ascendant moderate faction in the FTC and sought to put distance between AFL unions and the city’s Socialist past. Yet he did not simply move the FTC to the right or remove it from politics. His efforts with the wartime ULC, which entailed working politically with the CIO unions he had denounced a few years earlier when the CIO and AFL split, demonstrated instead his more general concern that labor retain its voice in politics. Schoemann’s work to establish a strong public housing program, on the one hand, measures out the distance between local real estate interests and the positions adopted even by working-class moderates. Disagreements between AFL leaders such as Schoemann and CIO leaders especially active in housing issues, on the other hand, would become more pronounced once the war drew to a close.84

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“On Mayor Bohn,” CIO News (Wisconsin, ed.), 6 March 1944; “Labor Group Backs Bohn,” MJ, 2 March 1944; “10 Civic, Labor Heads Urge Bohn’s Election,” MS, 3 March 1944; “Bohn Pledges House Action,” MJ, 26 March 1944; “Postwar Plan, Housing Head Bohn Program,” MJ, 18 April 1944; Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination,” 125. The ULC (which included AFL, CIO, and railroad unions) was formed in 1940. Thomas W. Gavett, Development of the Labor Movement in Milwaukee (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 175. Schoemann would go on to become national president of the Plumbers’ Union, or the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipefitting Industry of the United States and Canada. Gavett, Development of the Labor Movement in Milwaukee, 163–64; Robert W. Ozanne, The Labor Movement in Wisconsin: A History (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1984), 107, 109, 114, 247; Grace Palladino, Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits: A Century of Building Trades History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 136. On the building trades in St. Louis, see Deborah Jane Henry, “Structures of Exclusion: Black Labor and the Building Trades in St. Louis, 1917–1966,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2002). On earlier AFL politics, see Julie Greene, Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881–1917 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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In addition to Schoemann, Bohn appointed four other members to the independent authority. The Reverend Cecil Fisher, the Authority’s only African-American member, was a former NAACP president and a juvenile probation officer with a record of involvement in Sixth Ward housing issues. He arrived in Milwaukee in 1927 to accept a call to St. Mark’s AME Church, regarded by many as the city’s most prominent black church in the 1940s.85 The architect Leigh Hunt, who chaired the agency, sat on the city’s Inter-Racial Relations Committee, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Plan Association, and the Milwaukee Real Estate Board. Of the five commissioners, Hunt was the least favorably disposed toward public housing. Leon Gurda, the city building inspector, had a great deal of experience in housing and slum clearance issues, including building code enforcement demolition. He proved to be a strong backer of public housing, having seen the challenges that many city residents faced in finding decent housing and recognizing the need for rebuilding after demolition. Finally, Frances Blount had long been active in housing issues. A former college teacher and dean, Blount was a leader in the League of Women Voters and other civic groups.86 The first executive director of the Housing Authority was Rudolph Nedved, who had experience working with federal housing programs. He served until 1946 and was replaced by Richard W. E. Perrin. Perrin had been trained as a draftsman and studied to be an architect at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Extension Division. Before becoming the director, he also had been employed as an architectural planner by the Housing Authority.87

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Founded in 1869, St. Mark’s defined itself by black middle-class respectability, shunning emotionalism and shouting in its worship services. Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 31, 218, 224 n43; “St. Mark’s Burns Mortgage,” ca. 1957, Folio “St. Mark’s A.M.E. Church Programs, Newsletters, Brochures, etc.,” Cecil A. Fisher Papers, Milwaukee ARC; and Paul H. Geenen, Milwaukee’s Bronzeville, 1900–1950 (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2006), 8, 26–27. During the 1930s Fisher had been appointed “Colored Social Worker and Probation Officer,” a strategic position in which he could help to secure county and city relief and work for black residents. On Fisher, including his role in a 1930s NAACP leadership fight, see: Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 106, 160, 215–17; “This Is Your Life” typescript, Juneau Fidelity Temple No. 247, 1963, Folio “Contents of White Notebook: ‘This Is Your Life Rev. Cecil A. Fisher’ 1963,” Fisher Papers, Milwaukee ARC. The Common Council approved these appointments to the Housing Authority. Mayor John L. Bohn to the Milwaukee Common Council, 1 May 1944, folio “1945 Housing,” Bohn Papers, MPL; Posada, “Public Housing in Milwaukee,” 100–02; and Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination,” 125–26. On Hunt’s position, see for instance “Housing Chairman against Federal Aid in Blight War Here,” MJ, 9 November 1944. On Leon Gurda, see McCarthy, Making Milwaukee Mightier, 88–90, 103–06. Nedved resigned to begin work with the county on housing issues. Posada, “Public Housing in Milwaukee,” 102–03; Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 37; and Richard W. E. Perrin “Biographical Abstract,” Biographical Files, Richard W. E. Perrin Papers, Series 079, Department of City Development, City of Milwaukee Archives, MPL.

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fi g u r e 2 . 2 Scene of “blight” from the area of the proposed Sixth Ward public housing project at the end of World War II. This photograph was used in the City of Milwaukee’s annual report to demonstrate the need for better housing, rebuilding, and redevelopment in this neighborhood. Milwaukee Common Council, Annual Report to the Citizens of Milwaukee, 1945 (Milwaukee, 1946). Photograph by Fred R. Stanger, “Hillside Project,” 4 February 1946, photo no. 1030, Milwaukee Housing Authority photograph archive. Reproduced by permission of the Public Information Division, City of Milwaukee, and the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee.

Just after the Housing Authority was established, a great deal of attention centered on a proposed Sixth Ward housing project and the need for improved housing in the center city district (see Figure 2.2). Groups that had worked hard for approval of the Housing Authority rallied around the case for a 144-unit low-income housing project designated for war workers in the Sixth Ward. The Sixth Ward Better Housing Community Club, the CIO, the Joint Action Committee for Better Housing, and other allies had urged the city to secure this wartime defense housing project, often referred to as the “Negro housing” project. The close of the war, however, meant an end to the defense housing program and the Sixth Ward housing project was short-circuited. In the postwar years, these plans again would be taken up by this coalition. Their persistent organizing and the clear need for better housing would

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result eventually in the Hillside Terrace project’s construction and a pivotal contest over public housing at the start of the 1950s.88 Milwaukee Journal writer Richard Davis’s spring 1944 series of articles on housing conditions and possible remedies also threw a spotlight on the Sixth Ward, particularly the housing conditions of Milwaukee’s AfricanAmerican residents. Published shortly after the Housing Authority began operation, Davis’s investigation made a strong case for a housing program targeted to address those facing the greatest hardships and the most miserable living conditions. While also examining other locales in the city, his attention to the near-North Side reinforced the political demands that now topped many housing groups’ agendas. These articles also paralleled the Journal’s and the Mayor’s wartime shifts in support of a geographically- and racially bounded low-income public housing program. The proposed “Negro housing” project became a priority issue on which many of these players in the public housing debate now concurred, even if their reasons for doing so ran the spectrum from political conviction to charity to worries about declining property values. The racial attitudes and prescriptions accompanying these divergent reasons for backing Sixth Ward housing ranged widely: from calls for racial justice that underlay designs for interracial public housing; to paternalistic plans for housing that would aid the city’s poor; to appeals aimed to incite racial prejudices that then further constricted public housing in an already racially divided urban landscape.89

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Milwaukee Common Council, Annual Report, 1945, 46; “Women Urge Housing Steps,” MJ, 2 May 1944; “Letters Boost Housing Step,” MJ, 30 May 1944; “Housing Need Is Described: CIO Official Says That Building Industry Has Been Remiss,” MJ, 23 June 1944; “CIO Supports Housing Plan,” CIO News (Wisconsin ed.), 6 November 1944, 8; “Must Grab Housing Offer,” Wisconsin CIO News, 20 November 1944; Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 186, 212–13. On wartime defense housing and race, see: Margaret Crawford, “Daily Life on the Home Front: Women, Blacks, and the Struggle for Public Housing,” in World War II and the American Dream: How Wartime Building Changed a Nation, ed. Donald Albrecht (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 90–143; and Todd M. Michney, “Constrained Communities: Black Cleveland’s Experience with World War II Public Housing,” Journal of Social History 40:4 (2007): 933–56. On investigations of New York neighborhoods, see Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 83–101. Many of Davis’s articles focused on black housing in the Sixth Ward: “Blighted Area Tenants ‘Share’ Huts with Rats: Squalor, Filth Is Disclosed in Visit to Sixth Ward Houses,” MJ, 12 April 1944; “Sixth Ward Hovel Death Adds to Tenants’ Misery”; “Home? Negro Youths Prefer an Institution,” MJ, 14 April 1944; and “6th Ward Houses Bring Big Returns to Owners,” MJ, 23 April 1944. Other articles addressed public officials’ positions and housing policy questions: “Housing Peril Stirs Officials Here at Last,” MJ, 16 April 1944; “Bohn Expects Authority Will Uplift Housing,” MJ, 18 April 1944; and “Urges House Projects Be on Big Scale,” MJ, 19 May 1944. One piece alerted readers to poor housing conditions in other areas of the city: “Blight Spreads Widely in This ‘City of

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Public housing opponents continued to agitate against municipal, state, or federal intervention in the real estate market. They also labeled any changes that might have altered the city’s racial housing patterns as misguided and dangerous. The Milwaukee Real Estate Board’s secretary John J. Roache responded especially harshly to Journal reporter Davis’s sympathetic depiction of black Sixth Ward residents and the hurdles they encountered in finding affordable and acceptable housing. Roache’s frustration at this point, late in the war years, reflected perhaps more than dismay with Davis’s articles. He may have also perceived that the Journal’s growing acceptance of public housing as a viable path, Bohn’s seeming defection from the fold, and mounting criticism of the real estate industry for its unceasing opposition to public housing all indicated trouble ahead for the anti-public housing camp. Roache reacted against Davis’s articles by acknowledging implicitly the poor conditions in the Sixth Ward but then by laying blame at the doors of the people who occupied these deteriorating dwellings. He complained, according to Davis’s report, that “some Negro people in the Sixth Ward throw garbage out of windows, rip off baseboards in their houses for firewood, and generally hasten the ruin of the houses in which they live.” Incensed by what he viewed as Davis’s attack on Sixth Ward landlords and the real estate industry rather than the tenants, Roache concluded, “If you put those people into a mansion, they would turn it into a hovel in six months.” According to Roache and his allies, neither economic redistribution achieved through public action nor efforts to reform the slum environment would solve what he portrayed as dysfunctional behavior in the Sixth Ward.90 Meyer Adelman, Milwaukee CIO secretary-treasurer and Steelworkers district director, wrote a scathing response to Roache’s comments and placed the public housing skirmish squarely in the context of the global war. “The obvious contempt expressed by you . . . towards those forced to live in sub-standard houses, especially the Negro people, can only spring from a person who puts his own financial interests above the interests of the people and the nation.” In the midst of a war “being fought over the issue of human dignity,” Adelman argued, Roache’s narrow self-interest and divisive comments hindered the drive for unity. Just as labor activist Joe Ellis had lashed out against the real estate interests’ greed in response to the Sixth Ward fire the previous year, Adelman took the opportunity to rededicate the CIO to the homefront battle against bad housing and slum conditions. He asserted that public action on housing, in contrast to a market shaped solely by the principles of private property, would further

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Homes,’” MJ, 21 April 1944. Davis’s wife also was involved in local housing reform efforts. “Bohn Expects Authority Will Uplift Housing.”

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the goals of racial and economic egalitarianism and strengthen the arsenal for democracy.91 The founding of the Housing Authority also reignited arguments about the purpose of public housing, the role of the private housing market, the reach of this new agency, and the relationship between housing and redevelopment. The protracted housing shortage, locally and nationally, as well as the realization that reconversion to a postwar society was imminent, lent urgency to these policy disputes. Housing and redevelopment, which had been debated repeatedly during the war, would remain high on the national agenda in the early postwar years. Land developers were eager to put the tools for large-scale private redevelopment in place. New Dealers wedded to public housing hoped that these policy initiatives could extend their agenda. Conservatives targeted public housing as a key policy to attack in their ploy for political resurgence. And a collection of moderate liberals believed that public housing, private construction, and redevelopment work could provide a foundation for the growth of the postwar economy and metropolitan area. To sort out these issues, City Attorney Walter J. Mattison solicited opinions from organizations in the area. An outspoken supporter of an aggressive, privately driven redevelopment program, Mattison sought these responses especially to advance state legislative actions that would assist local initiatives.92 The varied responses to his inquiry make clear that questions about housing and redevelopment policies and their implementation were not simply technical or legal matters; they remained highly charged political issues. The divide between organizations was wide, from the JACBH on the one side to the chapter of the National Association of Home Builders on the other.93 Somewhere in between, the position articulated by the Citizens’ Committee on Housing presented both a compromise on housing and a nascent attachment of redevelopment and housing to growth politics. These debates previewed the postwar reconfigurations of local urban policy and of the city’s political culture. The JACBH enthusiastically advanced the cause of the Housing Authority and public housing, reiterating many of its points from earlier

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Meyer Adelman, Milwaukee County Industrial Union Council, to John J. Roache, Milwaukee Real Estate Board, 21 April 1944, folio 4, box 4, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC. Roache, of course, was not the only one to express such sentiments. For a reaction to similar wartime prejudices about “slum dwellers” in public housing, see “Who Said that $15 Tenants Are Bums?,” Public Housing Progress 9:1 (January 1943), 4. “Curb Blight, City Is Urged: Mattison Favors a Local Authority for Action by Private Enterprise,” MJ, 6 February 1944. “Housing Ideas Differ Widely,” MJ, 28 January 1945.

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in the debate. Armed with statistics and stories about the wartime housing crunch and predictions about the postwar shortage, the JACBH lobbied for quick action, including construction of a housing project in Milwaukee’s Sixth Ward and projects to meet the anticipated needs of returning veterans. “[A]ll housing projects and the redevelopment of blighted areas,” they insisted, should fall under the purview of the Housing Authority.94 The JACBH insisted that the agency should be active and flexible, with resources necessary to respond to immediate and longerterm housing needs. Countering those who sought to restrict the Housing Authority procedurally, the JACBH asserted that a simple Common Council majority, rather than a proposed three-fourths rule, should prevail on housing issues. They also disagreed with a proposed rule that the rate of public housing construction should be restricted to 1 percent or less of the rate of private housing construction. The Housing Authority should not be constrained arbitrarily, they argued, in meeting the city’s housing needs. Most importantly, the Housing Authority would be a public entity. According the JACBH, by removing “this vital problem from the uncertainties of private enterprise” Milwaukee could begin taking action on its housing crisis and “discharge its responsibility for the welfare of its citizens.” In this way, public housing could address not only the current crisis, but would be planned to make the city a more stable and secure place. Private enterprise should cooperate with the government in housing and redevelopment projects, but could not be left with unfettered responsibility for this vital resource that affected the city and its residents.95 The real estate, building, financial, and business community responses to the city attorney’s questions in early 1945 indicated considerable unity. Groups such as the Milwaukee Real Estate Board and the Savings and Loan League of Milwaukee, as well as larger umbrella organizations including the Milwaukee Advertising Club and the Milwaukee Junior 94

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Genevieve B. Hambley, Joint Action Committee for Better Housing, to City Attorney, 12 January 1945, in Milwaukee Speaks on Housing and Blight Elimination, folio “Housing 1945,” Bohn Papers, MPL. Hambley to City Attorney, 12 January 1945, in Milwaukee Speaks. See also the JACBH’s effort to lobby aldermen to augment the Housing Authority’s budget: Genevieve Hambley (JACBH) letter to friends, 4 September 1945, folio “Housing Committees (Dec 1933-Sept 1945),” box 20, UCSGM Records, Milwaukee ARC. The JACBH hit a number of other points in its statement, including: 1) a prescient concern that public housing would become the lower rung of a two-tiered housing policy; 2) worries that racial prejudice would tarnish a low-income Sixth Ward project; 3) an appeal that public housing could be deployed as a preventative measure, against the “crime, disease and delinquency”; 4) and an argument that public housing could help the city to “restore its tax base.” On two-tiered housing and social policies, see: Radford, Modern Housing for America, 191–98; and Theda Skocpol, Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

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Chamber of Commerce, coalesced around a program of minimal public housing and maximum private-sector leadership in blight elimination. Milwaukee builder and former War Housing Center director Frank Kirkpatrick – now hired as a consultant by the Milwaukee Real Estate Board, the Wisconsin Mortgage Bankers Association, and the National Home Builders Association – also sought to confine the role of the city’s public housing program. The Junior Chamber claimed that the wartime shortage had been exaggerated. And especially after the war, public housing would be unnecessary. Instead, the usual channels of local “relief” would be sufficient to meet any legitimate needs in postwar Milwaukee. The Milwaukee Advertising Club warned that a far-reaching public housing program threatened the city and its residents socially and financially by attracting “additional indigents and paupers to our city” and taking “additional property off of the taxrolls” which, in turn, would “increase the burden on the property remaining on the taxrolls.”96 Fear of dependent outsiders and of increased taxes fed these suspicions of public housing. The local chapter of the National Association of Home Builders cautioned that the city’s Housing Authority should “resist the pressure and dominance of federal agencies.” This was not an argument based simply in localism. The association’s complaint underscored a larger political argument against public housing. In their appeal to taxpayers and citizens, the group warned: We hold that the ownership and management by men in government, of houses in which citizens live, tends to create a bloc of voters who, to insure and expand their parasitic economic status, will bring about political domination of productive citizens, with increased burdens of taxes and oppressive laws.97

96

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“Housing Ideas Differ Widely”; Frank Kirkpatrick, Inc. to City Attorney, 2 January 1945, in Milwaukee Speaks; Robert G. Walsh, Milwaukee Junior Chamber of Commerce, to City Attorney, 20 January 1948, in Milwaukee Speaks; Fritz W. Beck, Milwaukee Real Estate Board, to Walter J. Mattison, City Attorney, 14 February 1945, in Milwaukee Speaks; and Earl A. Tetting, Committee on Housing, Milwaukee Advertising Club, to City Attorney, 15 January 1945, in Milwaukee Speaks. See also: Building Owners’ and Managers’ Association of Milwaukee to Common Council of City of Milwaukee, 13 February 1945; Edwin Zedler, Affiliated Taxpayers Committee, to City Attorney, 24 January 1945; and Glen A. Wilson, Property Owner’s Bureau, to City Attorney, 18 January 1945; all in folio “Housing 1945,” Bohn Papers, MPL. “Resolution,” Milwaukee Chapter, National Association of Home Builders of the U.S. to Mayor John L. Bohn and the Common Council of the City of Milwaukee, 30 October 1944, folio “Housing 1945,” Bohn Papers, MPL (emphasis added). On claims that public housing projects might cultivate a liberal or radical voting bloc, see: Kristin Szylvian Bailey, “Defense Housing in Greater Pittsburgh, 1945–1955,” Pittsburgh History 73:1 (Spring 1990): 16–28; and Szylvian, “The Federal Housing Program during World War II,” 129.

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Milwaukee builders and other conservatives, who had worked throughout the 1930s to defeat municipal Socialists and to curb the labor-liberal coalition, viewed public housing as a vehicle that their political opponents could use to build power. Public housing, a policy initiative they expected would mobilize a “bloc of voters,” threatened their hopes for a marketbased and antistatist postwar political order. They feared especially that Milwaukee’s workers and liberal allies would solidify their connection to federal-level New Dealers through both the process of policy implementation and the ensuing physical presence of public housing. Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, of course, had been keenly aware of the political implications of its policy work; crafting and building the base at the local level was a crucial New Deal dynamic.98 Public housing activists, during the campaign for the 1937 Housing Act and in subsequent battles, also had stressed the politics of housing. In Milwaukee, the fight to establish the Housing Authority and define a local public housing program – led by labor, liberal, African-American, and women’s groups – heightened conservative fears that an expansive housing policy would shape the city’s political culture.99 Many of these sweeping denunciations of public housing rested on assumptions that private action and private enterprise marked the boundaries of American political culture. A Junior Chamber of Commerce spokesman wrote: “[Public housing] runs counter to the wishes of American citizens for complete independence, privacy and desire to encourage thrift and reduce taxation charges.”100 Arguing against the direct efforts of government in “this essentially private enterprise field,” he continued with the claim that such artifice “can only be done at the expense of the self-respecting taxpayer, and through the destruction of fundamental American principles of private enterprise.”101 This pitch aimed to rally taxpayers and homeowners, as well as committed conservatives, against public housing. Just as public housing advocates’ proposals spoke powerfully to the dire housing shortage while also 98

99

100

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Cohen, Making a New Deal; and David Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Catherine Bauer, “Now, At Last: Housing – The Meaning of the Wagner-Steagall Act,” New Republic, 8 September 1937, 119–21; von Hoffman, “The End of the Dream”; Henderson, “Local Deals and the New Deal State”; and Radford, Modern Housing for America. Robert G. Walsh, Milwaukee Junior Chamber of Commerce, to City Attorney, 20 January 1945, in Milwaukee Speaks. Ibid. Although corporate leaders at the national level promoted the term “free enterprise” over “private enterprise,” in local political culture the two coexisted. Wall, Inventing the “American Way,” 6–7.

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resonating with the local socialist legacy and the national New Deal spirit, these anti-public housing arguments carried weight in a city that prized home ownership for a relatively wide swath of the population. This defense of private property also shared common ground with one set of wartime discourses that invoked private interests to muster American sacrifice and patriotism.102 The Junior Chamber and its allies, united against a public role in housing construction and management, extolled the efficiency and efficacy of the private market while also warning of its vulnerabilities at this end-of-war juncture. These business and civic organizations were not arguing simply for a pure, laissez-faire capitalism. They recognized the benefits of land use regulations such as zoning and urged a supporting role for local government in redevelopment. According to their plans, however, the Board of Public Land Commissioners (BPLC), rather than the Housing Authority, should help to carry out this work.103 The Milwaukee Metropolitan Plan Association – which included the City Club, the Mayor’s Advisory Council, the Downtown Association, the Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce, the Milwaukee Civic Alliance, the Milwaukee Harbor and Rivers Association, the Milwaukee Junior Chamber of Commerce, the Milwaukee Real Estate Board, the State Association of Wisconsin Architects, and the Wisconsin Bankers Association Group Eight – argued to strictly limit the work of the Housing Authority and leave redevelopment activities to the BPLC.104 Despite its roots in the Socialist city planning impetus, the locally oriented BPLC had become an agency with well-established ties to real estate and business interests. The Housing Authority, established after a long battle begun during the New Deal’s

102

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Robert B. Westbrook, Why We Fought: Forging American Obligations in World War II (Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2004), 39–91; and Mark H. Leff, “The Politics of Sacrifice on the American Home Front in World War II,” Journal of American History 77:4 (March 1991): 1296–318. Wartime discourses included, of course, powerful crosscurrents of social and economic egalitarianism, as well as self- and group-interest. See: John W. Jeffries, Wartime America: The World War II Home Front (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996); Lotchin, The Bad City in the Good War; Sparrow, Warfare State, 119–59. On the BPLC’s complicated history, see: Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination”; and McCarthy, Making Milwaukee Mightier. On land use regulation politics, see Patricia Burgess, Planning for the Private Interest: Land Use Controls and Residential Patterns in Columbus, Ohio, 1900–1970 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994). Phelps Wyman, Milwaukee Metropolitan Plan Association, to Office of the City Attorney, 25 January 1945, in Milwaukee Speaks; and “Housing Ideas Differ Widely.” See also National Association of Home Builders of the U.S. to the Mayor and the Common Council, 3 February 1945, in Milwaukee Speaks. For a similar contest between local housing and land use agencies, see: William R. Barnes, “A National Controversy in Miniature: The District of Columbia Struggle over Public Housing and Redevelopment, 1943–46,” Prologue 9:2 (Summer 1977): 91–104; and Barnes, “The Origins of Urban Renewal.”

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crest, was an independent agency with administrative and funding ties to the federal government – a New Deal foothold on the local landscape.105 The Housing Authority, then, presented a complex of interlocking challenges: a policy challenge through its promotion of public housing; a procedural challenge to the rules of land use and redevelopment; an economic challenge to the prerogatives of private property; and a political challenge in the form of a strengthened labor-liberal coalition. The Citizen’s Committee on Housing, a relatively broad but apparently short-lived coalition, incorporated elements of conservative and liberal positions on slum clearance and low-cost housing. Most importantly, this group pointed to growth politics as a cornerstone for postwar urban policy. While tilted toward business and real estate interests, the Citizens’ Committee included a notable mixture of conservative, professional, liberal, and civic organizations: Milwaukee Junior Chamber of Commerce; General Contractors’ Association of Milwaukee; Master Builders Association of Wisconsin; National Association of Home Builders; Milwaukee Real Estate Board; American Institute of Real Estate Appraisers; Property Owners Bureau; Mortgage Bankers Association; Savings and Loan League of Wisconsin; American Legion; American Institute of Architects; Milwaukee Building and Construction Trades Council; Milwaukee Urban League; Catholic Charities; Wisconsin Federation of Women’s Clubs; and the YMCA. A number of groups in the Citizens’ Committee also participated in coalitions that leaned to the right; others played a role in alliances that tilted leftward. The Citizens’ Committee sought to balance these diverse organizations’ interests by suggesting a tightly defined program of public action that promised benefits for the city as a whole. They proposed that government use the tool of eminent domain and tap into the public purse to assemble and then sell land to private developers at a price that would allow for profits. But this should “under no circumstances . . . be considered as subsidy to developers of new housing.” This use of public power and resources instead “must be considered, and definitely is, the price of blighted residential clearance and as such is a city-wide improvement.”106 By emphasizing benefits for both the metropolitan area and an amorphously defined public, rather than for specific areas or specific constituencies, this argument anticipated the 105

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Philip J. Funigiello, The Challenge to Urban Liberalism: Federal-City Relations during World War II (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978); and Theda Skocpol and Edwin Amenta, “Redefining the New Deal: World War II and the Development of Social Provision in the United States,” in Social Policy in the United States, 167–208. On federallocal dynamics, see also David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). “Preamble,” Citizens’ Committee on Housing, 2 February 1945, in Milwaukee Speaks.

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abstract geographic and social dimensions of postwar growth politics.107 The Citizens’ Committee on Housing acknowledged the wartime housing shortage, “particularly in those areas with a large percentage of immigrant workers.” But they opposed public housing “built and maintained indefinitely at the expense of taxpayers.” The committee also imagined a redevelopment program in which “blighted” areas would be obtained, assembled, and sold to private developers by the Board of Public Land Commissioners. These positions undoubtedly pleased the real estate, property owner, and building organizations on this committee. But how did they keep more liberal or even moderate organizations on board, including those who also joined with pro-public housing groups? Especially appealing might have been the committee’s vision for a high-wage, fullemployment, postwar economy in which citizens, “regardless of race and creed,” shared the opportunity for enhanced consumer purchasing power. Even labor interests, “largely organized and supported by government,” found a place in this proto-pluralist scheme. Rejecting the more combative politics of redistribution – “there is no place for housing any group at the expense of others” – the committee presumed that the government and private interests would mobilize for economic growth and consensus. Aside from the exceptional low-cost rent subsidies for people with “physical infirmities” or “temporary unemployment,” the group claimed that a growing “free economy,” and not the public sector, would make adequate housing available to all. A step away from the ideals of the laissez-faire marketplace, this argument defined housing as a widely obtainable market commodity in a growth economy which rendered its public provision unnecessary.108 The carefully modulated position outlined by the Citizens’ Committee on Housing underscores the political and ideological instability of these mid-decade years. While the statement’s writers hoped to curb and even quash the public housing program, they were eager at this particular moment to keep a somewhat unwieldy coalition together. In order to do so, the committee’s statement accommodated and even made concessions to the member groups’ varied ideological perspectives and stances on housing and public action. Position statements such as these, conceived

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On business and civic leaders’ planning discourses, see: Robert B. Fairbanks, For the City as a Whole: Planning, Politics, and the Public Interest in Dallas, Texas, 1900–1965 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998); and Roger W. Lotchin, “World War II and Urban California: City Planning and the Transformation Hypothesis,” Pacific Historical Review 62:2 (May 1993): 143–71. See also Andrew M. Shanken, 194x: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Citizens’ Committee on Housing, “Preamble,” 2 February 1945, in Milwaukee Speaks.

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and crafted out of immediate strategic concerns, further loosened ideological moorings. The 1930s and early 1940s were, indeed, a time of policy experimentation and political possibility. Groups across the political and social spectrum attempted to seize the initiative and strengthen their hand to forge the postwar city. Public housing advocates and detractors viewed the politics of wartime housing with a glance backward and a look ahead, interpreting the legacies and prospects of the New Deal in the postwar city. Housing and redevelopment policy, then, were filtered through not only the wartime emergency and immediate concerns, but through the past and future of New Deal liberalism. These contests over policies, institutions, and power in the wake of the New Deal and in the face of wartime urgencies helped to set the stage for postwar urban challenges.109 How had Milwaukee’s political culture changed because of these late 1930s and wartime battles over Parklawn and the housing authority? Throughout these controversies, Milwaukeeans brushed up against fundamental questions about the local political economy and urban democracy. On the one side, proponents of a capacious public housing program hoped to build projects and empower an agency to guide the city along a path of lasting public involvement for egalitarian ends. The widely acknowledged New Deal-era need to better house workers and low-income residents, the wartime shortage, and tragedies such as those in the Sixth Ward during 1943 fueled the call for a broad housing program. Some, but certainly not all, backers of this working-class politics imagined that these new institutions might tackle economic and racial inequalities in the city. At the other end, public housing opponents sought to prevent any government involvement in what they viewed as the private real estate market. While they may have been willing to accept public assistance in the form of mortgage subsidies, these private-market adherents and fierce adversaries of workingclass politics fought to block the beachhead institutions of a more extensive public sector. They sought to suppress the wave of public initiatives that had emerged in the 1930s and during the war. Between these positions, of course, stood many Milwaukeeans who supported a limited public housing 109

On wartime policy-making and changes in political culture, see: Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); Funigiello, The Challenge to Urban Liberalism; William Issel, “New Deal and Wartime Origins of San Francisco’s Postwar Political Culture: The Case of Growth Politics and Policy,” in The Way We Really Were: The Golden State in the Second Great War, ed. Roger W. Lotchin (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 68–92; Ira Katznelson and Bruce Pietrykowski, “Rebuilding the American State: Evidence from the 1940s,” Studies in American Political Development 5 (Fall 1991): 301–39; Leff, “The Politics of Sacrifice on the American Home Front in World War II”; and Andrew A. Workman, “Creating the National War Labor Board: Franklin Roosevelt and the Politics of State Building in the Early 1940s,” Journal of Policy History 12:2 (2000): 233–64.

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program, questioned the merits of expanded public involvement, or remained uncommitted. Importantly, some civic and business leaders who earlier had opposed public housing now moved to accept the establishment of new housing projects and a housing authority. Mayor Bohn and the Milwaukee Journal may not have welcomed the New Deal legacy of public housing, but they were convinced of the need for such a program amid the wartime emergency. The Citizens’ Committee on Housing pointed to the potential that growth politics held in bridging the divide between groups that opposed and supported public housing approaches. A wartime culture of consensus and visions for a renewed postwar society offered a chance to reconfigure this political terrain. While many observers speculated that wartime events and arrangements would be ephemeral, the impact of these shifts in housing politics endured. Early-1940s debates about authority over housing and development policy, as well as the longer-standing conflicts over the legitimacy of private interests and public action, framed how Milwaukeeans perceived and spoke about these crucial issues and political choices more generally. The establishment of institutions such as Parklawn and the housing authority imprinted public housing on the urban landscape. Likewise, the collections of people and organizations that came together around housing and development issues remained in flux but were molded by these earlier experiences. Rather than conclusive policy victories or defeats, the building of Parklawn and the creation of the Housing Authority stood as way-stations in the continuing policy battles that pitted working-class politics against conservative politics. Likewise, the 1930s and early-1940s debates demonstrated that race – the patterns and practices of racism, as well as struggles for racial egalitarianism – would never be far from the surface during housing controversies and in the remaking of the city’s political culture. Controversies over public housing and development persisted into the postwar period.110 Late-wartime disputes over development and housing, both private and public, contributed to the formation of a midcentury growth politics. This emerging growth politics, in turn, touched diverse aspects of urban life as Milwaukeeans debated the priorities and purpose of the postwar city.

110

On authority, legitimacy, and institutional change, see: Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search of American Political Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 124–29; Gail Radford, “From Municipal Socialism to Public Authorities: Institutional Factors in the Shaping of American Public Enterprise,” Journal of American History 90:3 (December 2003): 863–90; and Sparrow, Warfare State. On 1940s slum clearance debates and political reconfigurations, see also: Joseph Heathcott, “The City Quietly Remade: National Programs and Local Agendas in the Movement to Clear the Slums, 1942–1952,” Journal of Urban History 34:2 (January 2008): 221–42.

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Local growth politics took shape especially in the midst of clashes with working-class politics. Along with housing and development, disputes involving labor’s vision for the city and fiscal policy became crucibles for this volatile political culture. Even a series of wartime bouts over pettygambling and urban leisure were charged by the contentious history of working-class and growth politics. Postwar democracy was remade amid these varied contests over social and economic policy, leisure, power, and the city itself.

CHAPTER

3

Wartime Gambling, Working-Class Leisure, and Urban Reform: “Why Do Our Boys Have to Fight If We Can’t Play Bingo?”

On a sweltering summer evening in the middle of World War II, Milwaukee “bingo rebels” challenged the district attorney. James J. Kerwin had vowed to stop all gambling, including policy games, raffles, pinball, and bingo. An estimated 2,000 bingo players assembled at three big bingo halls: the Futuristic Ballroom, the Riverview Rink, and the South Side Turn Hall. While almost twice this number of players would have been drawn to these VFW-sponsored games on a regular night, the players this evening openly defied the D.A.’s orders as they sat ready with their bingo cards and chips. Hundreds of onlookers gathered outside the halls to witness and possibly support this resistance.1 As the boisterous bingo crowds – mostly working-class, female, and white – started playing, the police entered the halls. Players in the Futuristic Ballroom taunted and jeered the police as they attempted to take the names of winners. The crowd booed after officers instructed the bingo operator to report to police headquarters on Monday morning. Helen Thrall, whose painting contractor husband won $5, reacted angrily to the raid. “Then tell me, why do our boys have to fight if we can’t play bingo?” Ruth Feldt, a war plant foundry worker who won $2, argued that as a mother she was entitled to a few hours of bingo. When asked by a police officer to identify herself, she retorted “I am the mother of three children and have adopted a fourth.”2 These “bingo rebels,” as they were dubbed by the local newspaper, insisted that they had sacrificed enough by sending their husbands

1

2

“Order Posts’ Officers to Face Quiz on Bingo: Games Played Again Sunday Night,” Milwaukee Journal [hereafter MJ], 21 June 1943. “Police Nab Bingo ‘Rebels,’” Milwaukee Sentinel [hereafter MS], 20 June 1943; “Bingo Played: Operators Are Told to Report,” MJ, 20 June 1943. The bingo operators believed that the likely presence of bingo players on any local jury insulted them from legal action.

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and sons to war, by raising children, and by working in defense plants. They resented the authorities’ campaign to deprive them of their “cheap amusements.” Marshaling a range of arguments, from wartime patriotism and sacrifice to motherhood, they called into question the authority of the D.A. and the legitimacy of the laws that banned bingo. This confrontation over bingo invites us to look closely at everyday urban life during the war in order to assess the contours of the city’s changing political culture.3 Controversies over gambling were not, of course, new to either the1940s city or to Milwaukee. The raid on the bingo hall fit into a long history of conflict over working-class power and culture in urban areas. In the 1930s, Milwaukee reformers and officials went after betting pools, lotteries, policy games, slot machines, pinball, and bingo. Attempts to clamp down on policy games and pinball accelerated in 1936 and 1937, coinciding with a period of sharpened class divisions in urban society. The mid-war bingo clash was one of many skirmishes over gambling in Milwaukee during the 1940s. Working-class residents sought to stake out a claim to places of recreation and retain control over their leisure-time activities, including games of chance.4 3

4

On the wartime working class, see: Gary Gerstle, “The Working Class Goes to War,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, eds. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 105–27; and George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). On wartime political culture, see: James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Robert B. Westbrook, Why We Fought: Forging American Obligations in World War II (Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2004). On Milwaukee gambling and working-class recreation, see: Paul-Thomas Ferguson, “Leisure Pursuits in Ethnic Milwaukee, 1830–1930” (Ph.D. diss., Marquette University, 2005); Norman Gill, Data on Negro Population, Housing, Unemployment, Gambling (Milwaukee: Municipal Reference Library, 1940); Sidney L. Harring, Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865–1915 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 183–200; Elizabeth Jozwiak, “Bottoms Up: The Socialist Fight for the Workingman’s Saloon,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 90:2 (Winter 2006–2007): 12–23; Jonathan Kasparek, “Void in Wisconsin,” Wisconsin Magazine of History (Autumn 2006): 36–47; and Dan Ritsche, The Evolution of Legalized Gambling in Wisconsin (Madison: State of Wisconsin, Legislative Reference Bureau, 2000). On gambling and risk, especially in working-class culture, see: Ann Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in 19th-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Mark H. Haller, “Policy Gambling, Entertainment, and the Emergence of Black Politics: Chicago from 1900 to 1940,” Journal of Social History 24:4 (Summer 1991): 719–39; David Hochfelder, “‘Where the Common People Could Speculate’: The Ticker, Bucket Shops, and the Origins of Popular Participation in Financial Markets, 1880–1920,” Journal of American History 93:2 (September 2006), 335–58; E. E. LeMasters, Blue-Collar Aristocrats: Life-Styles in a Working-Class Tavern (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 129–32; Victoria W. Wolcott, “The Culture of the Informal Economy: Numbers Runners in Inter-War Detroit,” Radical History Review 69 (1997): 46–75; and Irving Kenneth Zola, “Observations on Gambling in a Lower-Class Setting,” Social

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Upper- and middle-class antigambling reformers and civic boosters strove to regulate wartime working-class culture and, in many cases, joined this to the goal of generating and managing a modern metropolis. Critics of bingo, drawing on moral reform traditions, campaigned against activities that they believed corrupted working-class residents and their neighborhoods. As in the late nineteenth-century and earlier twentieth-century city, reformers’ campaigns coalesced when the urban working-class was especially noisy or noticeable.5 At the same time, many of these 1940s critics pitched their attack on bingo to the metropolis of the future. Reformers’ and authorities’ analyses of the dangers of petty gambling and of workingclass culture rested on assumptions about how to remake the city into a more orderly, productive, and efficient place. They viewed bingo and other elements of working-class culture as vestiges of an “outmoded” and disorderly city, inimical to modern metropolitan rationality. The defense of bingo in the Futuristic Ballroom, along with efforts to protect small-stakes gambling on street corners and in taverns, points to a vital yet varied and fragmented working-class culture in the 1940s city. By defending not only the games but the physical spaces in which these activities occurred, working-class residents challenged reformers’ authority to manage working-class leisure and access to places they had made their own. The resistance could be hidden, mundane, or overt. Thousands scorned authorities’ and reformers’ attempts to shut down the games simply by continuing to play; some stood up to police officers; others challenged public officials’ campaigns to clamp down on gambling. Rather than accept reformers’ contentions that bingo, pinball, or policy games were the residue of a corrupt or outmoded city, many Milwaukeeans defended these as legitimate pastimes and well-deserved hours of recreation. Important elements of working-class politics –

5

Problems 10:4 (Spring 1963): 353–61. See also: Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Viking, 2003); Mark H. Haller, “The Changing Structure of American Gambling in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Social Issues 35:3 (Summer 1979): 87–114; David G. Schwartz, Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling (New York: Gotham Books, 2006); and Bryant Simon, Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). On reformers and conflicts with working-class cultures, see: Peter C. Baldwin, Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850–1930 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999); Themis Chronopoulos, “Morality, Social Disorder, and the Working-Class in Times Square, 1892–1954,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 30:1 (2011): 1–19; Lisa Keller, Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York and London (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); and Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

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including the ideal of equal access, the drive for autonomy, and the exercise of power in the city – found expression in these moments of resistance. Working-class residents’ experienced and imagined city – glimpsed in their confrontation with the D.A. over bingo and in their responses to other midcentury cultural conflicts – stood at odds to the city advocated by moral reformers and civic boosters.6 This history of petty gambling, while outlining patterns of workingclass politics in the midcentury city, also underscores that working-class culture was neither monolithic nor unchanging. Views about petty gambling varied widely. While many working-class Milwaukeeans defended bingo, pinball, or policy, others strove to rid the city of one or all of these games. Religious or moral convictions, personal experience and family travails, and complex notions of respectability or uplift led some to oppose, some to defend, and some to remain indifferent about these games of chance. Emerging ideas about addiction and illness, concerning especially gambling and alcohol abuse, also helped to shape these controversies. Institutional affiliations, as well as belief and ethnicity, could be powerful influences. Many Catholic and a number of Lutheran churches sponsored bingo games, raising money to support their parishes and congregations. Members of other religious perspectives, including Methodists, helped to fill the ranks of the opposition to bingo and games of chance. Political leaders and working-class organizations also might sway or mobilize opinion. Although playing almost no direct role in the 1940s gambling fights, Socialists’ and labor organizations’ traditional defense of working-class leisure in dance halls, taverns, and neighborhoods helped to shape the language and terms of resistance in this later cultural dispute.7

6

7

For theoretical grounding and concrete examples see: James Epstein, “Spatial Practices/ Democratic Vistas,” Social History 24:3 (October 1999): 294–310; Douglas E. Foley, “Does the Working Class Have a Culture in the Anthropological Sense?” Cultural Anthropology 4:2 (May 1989): 137–62; John R. Parkinson, Democracy and Public Space: The Physical Sites of Democratic Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994); and E. P. Thompson, “The Patricians and the Plebs,” in Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1993), 16–96. On competing conceptions and cultures of modernity in the city, see Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007). Lears, Something for Nothing, 243–49; Alan Petigny, The Permissive Society: America, 1941–1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 25–32; Lori Rotskoff, Love on the Rocks: Men, Women, and Alcohol in Post-World War II America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 61–86. On Socialists’ and labor’s earlier defense of working-class leisure spaces, see: Sidney L. Harring, “The Police Institution as a Class Question: Milwaukee Socialists and the Police, 1900–1915,” Science and Society XLVI:2 (Summer 1982): 211–16; and Jozwiak, “Bottoms Up.”

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Adding to the complexity, however, some Socialists and labor activists emphasized instead personal or collective discipline in the face of temptations to gamble away hard-earned wages. By noting these conflicting and complex notions of morality, the history of bingo, pinball, and policy controversies highlights the cultural fault lines that contributed to the formation of the midcentury urban working class. Cheap amusements in Milwaukee and other cities also took place on an urban landscape divided geographically and spatially along lines of race and gender. As a result, working-class culture was notably segmented: from the streets of the city’s black neighborhoods where policy games were organized; to the white working-class taverns where men played pinball; to the bingo halls and church basements frequented especially by white women. The wartime context of these conflicts had the paradoxical effect of both reinforcing the lines of division and strengthening the points of unity. Men and women of all races and classes heeded calls to pull together and sacrifice for the war effort. As cities geared up for around-the-clock defense production, they developed around-the-clock recreation and commerce. One young woman who came to Milwaukee in 1942 to work recalled that the jam-packed movie theaters “ran all night.”8 While many workers enjoyed the bustle of this midcentury city, others were annoyed by the noise and disruption. A defense worker, commenting on a city proposal to hang signs in the windows of night-shift workers warning neighbors to be quiet, complained about street peddlers: “I usually get to bed at about 7:15 am and at about 9 or 9:30 am I hear strawberries or apples and potatoes, not one but two or three men yelling.” He continued: “It’s very hard to try to fall asleep again . . . then another peddler comes along.”9 Photographs, contemporary accounts, memoirs, and oral histories document 1940s cities – especially boomtowns and production centers – as noisy, crowded, and even frenetic places, with people traveling to and from work, gathering in public places, playing, and living. The twenty-four-hour pace and crowding of wartime production centers both heightened tensions and created common experiences. Wartime changes and wartime concerns permeated everyday life.10

8

9

10

Dorothy Zmuda, Interview by Kathy Borkowski, Stevens Point, Wisconsin, 16 June 1992, Wisconsin Women during World War II Oral History Project, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin [hereafter WHS]. Jos. Voyer, 24 June 1942, folio “Complaints (1942),” John L. Bohn Papers, Series 081, Office of the Mayor, City of Milwaukee Archives, Milwaukee Public Library [hereafter Bohn Papers, MPL]. Perry R. Duis, “No Time for Privacy: World War II and Chicago’s Families,” in The War in American Culture, 30; Robert J. Havighurst and H. Gerthon Morgan, The Social History of a War-Boom Community (New York: Longmans, Green, and Company,

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During the war years, a racially diverse working class of women and men converged on the city. As the early signs of wartime mobilization and renewed economic activity became apparent, the African-American community in Milwaukee and other urban centers burgeoned and became more vocal. Black workers began to demand fair hiring for wartime production jobs; recent migrants and longer-term residents alike sought steady employment and better working conditions. The black middle class and especially the rapidly growing black working class claimed a place in urban politics and society while facing persistent racism.11 Women entered the paid workforce in greater numbers, with some moving into jobs that traditionally had been reserved for men. In 1944, about 100,000 Milwaukee-area women were employed in war production and another 70,000 in other forms of wage work. Female manufacturing employment tripled during the war. Women also assumed more of a public presence in the city, including admission to places of leisure such as bingo halls, taverns, and theaters. So while the wartime working-class grew in size and visibility, especially as AfricanAmerican and female workers claimed their place in local factories and the city, the fracture lines also became more pronounced. These wartime changes fueled prejudices and anxieties among workers and others in the city. But these boundaries and divisions also would become a priority for the many individuals and organizations aiming to make a

11

1951); Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Roger W. Lotchin, The Bad City and the Good War: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Diego (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). See also: Alexander Saxton, Bright Web in the Darkness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1958; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Citizen’s Governmental Research Bureau, Milwaukee’s Negro Community (Milwaukee: Council of Social Agencies, 1946); Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–45 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); and Paul Geib, “From Mississippi to Milwaukee: A Case Study of the Southern Black Migration to Milwaukee, 1940–1970,” Journal of Negro History 83:4 (Fall 1998): 229– 48. See also: Laurie B. Green, Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2007); and Kimberley L. Phillips, AlabamaNorth: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915–45 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). On racial conflict over recreation and popular culture in the 1940s city, see: Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Eileen Boris, “‘You Wouldn’t Want One of ‘Em Dancing with Your Wife’: Racialized Bodies on the Job in World War II,” American Quarterly 50:1 (March 1998): 77–108; and Victoria W. Wolcott, Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

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more egalitarian urban society. Both centrifugal and centripetal forces propelled this history of working-class cultures.12 These disputes unfolded on the heels of the Great Depression, in the wake of fervent working-class organizing, in the midst of wartime uncertainty, during a period of local and national political turmoil, and at a time when widespread fears of a renewed postwar depression coexisted with promises of postwar abundance. The anxieties and hopes of this tumultuous period were woven into these gambling controversies which, in turn, point to a larger process of midcentury class formation and capitalist development. In these post-Depression wartime years, the project of “relegitimizing capitalism” was carried out with urgency. This entailed a political as well as an intellectual project of reestablishing business and conservative power and securing market perspectives in American institutions and culture.13 Working-class power and culture, associated with labor’s power and New Deal or Socialist alternatives in Milwaukee, presented an obstacle. Wartime gambling disputes, while most directly tied to conflicts over cultural practices and the control over leisure, also raised questions about the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate, or rational and irrational, capitalist practices. What was acceptable risk?

12

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“More Women in War Plants,” MJ, 3 September 1944; “Women Seek Work in New Shell Factory,” MJ, 17 June 1942; “30,000 Women in City Needed for War Jobs,” MJ, 9 October 1942; “Girl ‘Cabbies’ Here to Stay,” MJ, 27 December 1942; Richard L. Pifer, A City at War: Milwaukee Labor during World War II (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2003); and William F. Thompson, The History of Wisconsin, Volume VI: Continuity and Change, 1940–1965 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1988), 94. See also: Elaine Tyler May, “Rosie the Riveter Gets Married,” in The War in American Culture, 128–43; Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); and Megan Taylor Shockley, We, Too, Are Americans: African American Women in Detroit and Richmond, 1940–1954 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). On fragmentation and unity within working-class cultures, see: Elizabeth Faue, “Gender, Class, and History” and David Roediger, “‘More Than Two Things’: The State of the Art of Labor History”; both in New Working-Class Studies, eds. John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2005), 19–31, 32–41. On the widespread anxieties and the “culture of contingency” during this period, see William S. Graebner, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991). On relegitimizing capitalism, see: Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Alan Brinkley, “World War II and American Liberalism,” in The War in American Culture, 320; Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); and Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).

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What should be defined as productive risk? Playing the stock market and playing pinball for prizes were, quite obviously, different activities. But attention that reformers and authorities drew to issues of risk in petty gambling and recreation also exposed to examination contested assumptions about a productive economy and culture. These debates evoked broad midcentury anxieties and engaged contests about urban culture and the political economy.14 U.S. involvement in World War II also placed the themes of sacrifice and patriotism at the center of public discourse. While scholars and commentators note that the politics of sacrifice or patriotism tended to reinforce conservative currents in American society and politics, the experience of wartime Milwaukee suggests that sacrifice and unity were mobilized at different times to bolster conservative, reform, or working-class politics.15 Gambling opponents sought to define requirements of the modern city by fusing the language of midcentury middle-class morality to the powerful rhetoric of wartime patriotism and sacrifice. Reformers contended that working-class leisure, especially these games of chance, betrayed a lack of discipline and sacrifice. Working-class Milwaukeeans, including the bingo rebels, asserted that their wartime sacrifices at work and at home entitled them to these inexpensive pastimes in public places of their choosing, just as those with greater wealth could afford to entertain themselves in their spacious homes and private clubs. The 1940s initiated an era of renewed social turmoil. Reformers and authorities, who reacted to an assertive and boisterous working-class culture that they feared imperiled the social and political order, sought to make and manage what they believed to be a more moral, purposeful, and modern city. In their antigambling campaigns they deemed working-class amusements and working-class culture more generally as “outmoded.” The reformers saw these practices as signs of a disorderly city. According to reformers’ diagnoses, this disorder extended to the geography of the

14

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The historian Jackson Lears argues that gambling controversies are “never about gambling alone” and are “always freighted with larger cultural issues.” Lears, “Playing With Money,” Wilson Quarterly 29 (1995): 7. Ann Fabian suggests that gambling serves as a “negative analogue,” drawing a line between appropriate capitalist speculation and irrational or illegitimate practices. Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops, 4–5. See also: Steve Fraser, Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005); Hochfelder, “Where the Common People Could Speculate”; and Wolcott, “The Culture of the Informal Economy,” 61–62. On risk and class, see Gunther Peck, “Manly Gambles: The Politics of Risk on the Comstock Lode, 1860–1880,” Journal of Social History 26:4 (Summer 1993): 701–23. Mark H. Leff, “The Politics of Sacrifice on the American Home Front in World War II,” Journal of American History 77:4 (March 1991): 1296–318; and Westbrook, Why We Fought, 39–65, 67–91.

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city, marking particular sites or entire neighborhoods as dangerously chaotic or anachronistic, and threatened the metropolis as a whole. Such judgments meshed with other initiatives during this period in which reformers aligned with growth proponents both to decry decay and blight and to make the city more efficient and productive. Working-class Milwaukeeans and their allies in these episodes, on the other hand, sought to defend the working-class city. Reformers’ initiatives would restrict, first and foremost, the risks they took in their leisure time and how they decided to have fun. But this dispute extended beyond the effects of petty gambling in people’s everyday lives to a contest over the democratic order imagined for the city. The bingo rebels and others hoped to fashion an urban order that ensured autonomy in leisure and access to the places they choose to spend their time when not working. These arguments for access and autonomy in recreation reinforced a working-class politics that upheld these as precepts for urban life more generally. These wartime confrontations over working-class leisure contributed to the complex development of midcentury growth politics and working-class politics. They also provide a vantage point from which to view this process in the wartime city.16 On the threshold of World War II, policy games became a target of antigambling efforts in Milwaukee. A relatively inexpensive lottery or numbers game, policy took hold in many urban black communities around the time of the Great Migration. Policy writers, or runners, went door-to-door, visited taverns and pool halls, or waited on street corners to collect bets. In order to play, a bettor selected three numbers which then were written on a ticket. Each bet cost about a nickel. After the tickets were gathered, the operator drew numbers out of a “wheel.” As the Milwaukee Journal explained to readers: “If the three numbers selected appear in one row of 12 the players win, 100 to 1 [odds].”17 By 1940, four to five policy wheels operated in Milwaukee’s neighborhoods just north of downtown.18 16

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18

Carl Smith argues that “the central intellectual drama in the consideration of the nature of disorder is the struggle of imagination to explain what is inexplicable, troubling, or threatening.” Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Disbelief: The Great Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 6. “War on Policy Set Back by Judge Runge’s Ruling: Police Raid Held Illegal,” MJ, 12 March 1940. “Policy Wheels Whirl Again; One Is Added: Five Now Running in Sixth Ward which Had Only Four Before,” MJ, 1 Feb 1940. For descriptions of Milwaukee policy games, see: William Albert Vick, “From Walnut Street to No Street: Milwaukee’s Afro-American Businesses, 1945–1967” (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1993), 68–69; Thomas P. Imse, “The Negro Community in Milwaukee” (M.A. thesis, Marquette University, 1942), 40; Keith Robert Schmitz, “Milwaukee and Its Black Community, 1930–1942” (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1979), 49;

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African-American and white players from all sections of Milwaukee took part in these games. Residents of the Sixth Ward and the surrounding neighborhoods, however, appear to have played more frequently. These areas and their residents became the focal point for reformers’ intense scrutiny.19 One study approximated that three-quarters of black men played policy games daily. Accounts of policy and arrest records indicate that both men and women participated regularly in policy games. Although newspapers and reformers likely inflated the numbers, these chronicles suggest that policy was a part of the neighborhood’s everyday culture.20 Policy players and runners inhabited the by-ways, street corners, and crowded sidewalks, including those of the vibrant Walnut Street area – the heart of the city’s black business and cultural district that ran through the Sixth Ward.21 Policy’s critics – who ranged from moral reformers to urban boosters and modernizers to ambitious politicians to law enforcement officials to black community leaders focused on a middle-class version of racial uplift – recognized and spotlighted the games’ social geography. Some critics, both white and black, were sympathetic to difficulties African-American residents faced in a northern city and truly were concerned about the personal and social ill-effects of unbridled gambling. Another set of critics summoned a full catalogue of racist complaints to attack policy and the Sixth Ward. Other critics fell between these approaches, speaking about policy as a criminal and corrupting influence on those who played it, on the neighborhoods where it was concentrated, and on the city as a whole. By stigmatizing policy as the most onerous of petty gambling endeavors in the

19 20 21

and Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 202, 206. On the nineteenth-century origins of policy, see Ann Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops, 136–50. On policy and numbers in other northern and industrial cities, see: St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1945; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 470–494; Davarian L. Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, The Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 45–51; Shane White, Stephen Garton, Stephen Robertson, and Graham White, Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem between the Wars (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Wolcott, “The Culture of the Informal Economy.” Imse, “The Negro Community in Milwaukee,” 40. Gill, Data on Negro Population, Housing, Unemployment, Gambling. Citizens’ Governmental Research Bureau, Milwaukee’s Negro Community; Geib, “From Mississippi to Milwaukee”; Michael Ross Grover, “‘All Things to Black Folks’: A History of the Milwaukee Urban League, 1919–1980” (M.A. thesis, University of WisconsinMilwaukee, 1994); E. R. Krumbiegel, Observations on Housing Conditions in Milwaukee’s Sixth Ward: A Report to the Mayor and Common Council (Milwaukee: Commissioner of Health, 1944); H. Yuan Tien, ed., Milwaukee Metropolitan Area Fact Book: 1940, 1950, and 1960 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962); Trotter, Black Milwaukee; and Vick, “From Walnut Street to No Street.”

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city, comparing it unfavorably to pinball and bingo, all of these critics heightened the racial and class associations of the game, its location, and its players. In particular, this assault on policy games linked perceptions of vice to negative images of black working-class neighborhoods. In the heat of this debate, policy became a sign of the presumed depravity, and even criminality, of the city’s black working class and of the Sixth Ward area. To generate a modern city and “good citizens,” reformers of all stripes, but especially moralizers and modernizers, would seek to eradicate policy and the disorderly aspects of urban culture it represented. White upper- and middle-class women’s reform groups led the charge against policy games. These included the Milwaukee Woman’s Club, which had a history of involvement in city beautification and recreation programs, and the Women’s Court and Civic Conference (WCCC), which aimed to clean up the courts and other public institutions.22 They were joined by religious leaders (mostly Protestant) and some middle-class African Americans. This effort also gained the support of public officials who championed moral reform or their own political futures. The conservative Carl Zeidler’s victory in the spring 1940 mayoral election over the long-time socialist Mayor Daniel Hoan gave gambling opponents further encouragement. Carl Zeidler, known as Milwaukee’s “Singing Mayor” and brother of future Mayor Frank Zeidler (siblings with decidedly divergent politics), had helped to push for a ban on pinball machines when he was assistant city attorney in the late 1930s.23 Soon after his

22

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The Milwaukee Woman’s Club, an offshoot of the East Side Suffrage Association, was founded in 1916. The Women’s Court and Civic Conference, established in 1922, was designed to coordinate women’s organizations’ efforts and aid in reform. See Minutes of WCCC Board meeting, 11 April 1940, folio “Minutes–Regular Meetings, Meetings of the Board of Directors, Treasurer’s Report, 1937–1942,” Box 1, Women’s Court and Civic Conference Records [hereafter WCCC Records], Milwaukee Area Research Center, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries’ Archives [hereafter Milwaukee ARC]; BayrdStill, Milwaukee: The History of a City (Madison: State Historical Society, 1948), 388, 536, 557; Elizabeth A. Jozwiak, “‘The City for the People’: Milwaukee’s Municipal Recreation and the Socialists, 1890–1917” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1997); and Marie Anne Laberge, “‘Seeking a Place to Stand’: Political Power and Activism among Wisconsin Women, 1945–1963” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1995). See also: Lisa Krissoff Boehm, “Urban Activism through a Gendered Lens,” Journal of Urban History 32:6 (September 2006): 927–36; Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of a Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Patriotic songs were central to Carl Zeidler’s campaign strategy. Robert W. Wells, This Is Milwaukee (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1970), 223–25. The city ordinance barring pinball machines went into effect in 1937. Gill, Data on Negro Population, Housing, Unemployment, and Gambling.

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election, the mayor met with a committee from the Woman’s Club to discuss gambling and policy games.24 Joseph R. McCarthy, the new judge of the Tenth Judicial Circuit and future U.S. senator, even played a small role in this episode. Despite his personal penchant for high-stakes gambling, McCarthy came down hard on policy in the fall of 1940 while hearing an appeal in Milwaukee. He sustained a policy runner’s conviction and increased the penalty. The judge earned praise from the Journal for his tough stance against policy and for his “plain talk.” McCarthy, having made his move from the Democratic to the Republican Party and anticipating a run for higher office, may have been concerned especially about Carl Zeidler’s popularity and prospects for a statewide campaign.25 Milwaukee’s police (led by Chief Joseph T. Kluchesky), the district attorney, and other officials joined the campaign against policy. Foreshadowing the offensive against crime syndicates and gambling bosses that would capture national headlines at the close of the decade, local officials warned that the “policy racket” opened the door to out-of-town organized crime; it jeopardized cash-strapped local residents while benefitting the “big shots.” District Attorney Herbert J. Steffes (Kerwin’s predecessor), who had been appointed initially by Governor Philip LaFollette and won election as a Progressive in 1938 and again in 1940, railed against the secrecy of policy operations and complained that they fostered deception and distrust. He also sought to draw distinctions between policy and bingo. “In policy the numbers are drawn in secrecy by the big shots surrounded by their henchmen and not out in the open as in bingo,” he asserted.26 Later calling policy a “voodoo numbers racket,” Steffes

24

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26

“Zeidler Plans ‘Policy’ Move: Mayor to Confer Shortly with Police Chief over Sixth Ward Racket,” MJ, 1 May 1940; “Clubwomen Put War on Policy to Zeidler,” Milwaukee Evening Post, 1 May 1940. The Milwaukee Evening Post and the renamed Milwaukee Post [hereafter MP], were successors to the Socialist Milwaukee Leader; the newspaper no longer retained party ties. “How to Stop Gambling,” MJ, 23 October 1940. McCarthy ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat for district attorney in 1936 and captured the nonpartisan judicial post in 1939. Arthur Herman, Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator (New York: Free Press, 2000), 25–27; David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: The Free Press, 1983), 18–30; and Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), 26–43. “War on Policy Set Back by Judge Runge’s Ruling.” See also: “Charges Steffes Condones Bingo: Brennan, Democratic Candidate, Says Incumbent Refuses to Uphold Law,” MP, 24 October 1940; “Nebel Favors ‘Legal Bingo’: Progressive Candidate for Prosecutor Says ‘Good’ Games Shouldn’t Suffer,” MJ, 26 Oct 1940; “Police Report a Bingo Game: Veterans’ New Enterprise Is Brought to Steffes Just After a Happy Night,” MJ, 6 Nov 1940. Contrary to Steffes’ claims, independent policy writers who worked for a variety of different wheels and attended daily drawings may have been a partial check on operators’

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maintained that the “aura of the game of policy is distinctly criminal.”27 While some antigambling reformers would disagree with these distinctions between policy and bingo by insisting on the danger and immorality inherent to all games of chance, most reformers and authorities echoed his characterization of policy as a distinctively dishonest racket and a dangerous game. Late in 1940, the Milwaukee Woman’s Club sponsored a well-attended forum on gambling that featured attacks on policy games. “Gambling – A Challenge to Milwaukee Officialdom,” held at the stylish Hotel Medford, began with a wide-ranging conversation about gambling. But discussion at the meeting soon gravitated toward policy in the Sixth Ward. While bingo and other forms of petty gambling drew some notice, participants spotlighted the “evils” of policy games that they perceived as endemic in the city’s African-American wards. In accord with the forum’s title, attendees criticized officials’ vice strategy. Club leaders castigated the police for going after the policy writers and players rather than the operators, the “big shots.”28 The conference organizers also noted with dismay that the district attorney failed to attend the gathering. Although he was busy prosecuting a murder case, the reformers hoped he might pay more attention to gambling at this important juncture. A few weeks after the forum, the Protestant-based Milwaukee Council of Churches held a follow-up meeting with Mayor Carl Zeidler to nudge local officials and the police along and to ensure that leading citizens would support an aggressive assault on gambling in the city.29 Some antigambling reformers, while acknowledging the challenges African Americans confronted regulary in Milwaukee, stressed the dangers that policy games posed for the players’ welfare and for the moral health of the community. Inez B. Barr, who headed the Milwaukee Woman’s Club’s committee on gambling, feared that the money spent on policy games drew down already limited household budgets for food, milk, clothing, and

27 28

29

chicanery. Vick, “From Walnut Street to No Street,” 69. On midcentury antigambling campaigns, including the Kefauver Commission, see Schwartz, Roll the Bones, 386. “Steffes Will Adhere to Policy on Bingo,” MS, 18 April 1942. “Airing for Bingo’s Dirty Linen: Seidler, Kluchesky and Steffes to Talk at Symposium,” MP, 28 Nov 1940; “Women to Pry Lid off Gambling at Officials’ Talkfest: Kluchesky, Steffes, and Jennings to Appear,” MS, 28 Nov 1940; “‘Third Degree for 5¢ Policy?’: Women’s Club Seek Special Investigation,” Wisconsin Enterprise-Blade, 7 December 1940. On the disagreement between the Woman’s Club and the police, see “Chief, Women Express Views about ‘Policy’: Report Is They Differed on How to Stamp out Evil Here,” MJ, 15 March 1940. “Keep Gambling Down, Is Demand of Groups Here: Ministers’ Plea Calls on Steffes,” MJ, 4 Dec 1940. A minister commented that it was good to have a mayor who opposes gambling.

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shelter. A white woman who had volunteered frequently in the Sixth Ward, supported the Scottsboro Defense Committee, and worked with black middle-class leaders through the Milwaukee Urban League (MUL), Barr demonstrated an understanding of the financial and material challenges that many working-class African Americans faced. She also sought to guide and to regulate the activities of Sixth Ward residents.30 Barr and others, including established African-American leaders, bemoaned especially the influence policy operators had on the district’s young people. They complained that young working-class African Americans flouted authority. Drawing a connection between policy games and juvenile delinquency, she was “horrified at the utter contempt shown for the law by many of the young people of the sixth ward.” Barr observed that “the gamblers are their heroes.”31 Reformers’ concern that policy games and other types of gambling corrupted young people fueled growing anxieties about wartime and postwar juvenile delinquency. While disruptions caused by the emerging wartime economy did indeed affect adolescents’ lives, the persistence of warnings about gambling and youth – and about juvenile delinquency more generally – suggest that these concerns tapped into broader fears about urban disorder and race during this time.32 30

31

32

Barr’s example, as well as that of Josephine Prasser, reminds us that women involved in middle-class groups brought diverse perspectives to this work. Prasser was raised in a Socialist family, active in the American League Against War and Fascism, joined and soon quit the Communist Party (a member for about eight months, possibly in 1936 or 1937), and volunteered as a social worker in the Sixth Ward. Joe Trotter points out that Barr and Prasser’s focus on gambling in the Sixth Ward “demonstrated how persons sympathetic toward blacks in some areas of the city’s life could be insensitive or hostile in another.” Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 202; “Negro Leaders Call for Work to Kill Policy: Argue Numbers Game Is No Worse Than Bingo,” MJ, 16 December 1940. On Prasser’s sympathetic condescension toward working-class blacks in public housing, see Josephine Prasser to Richard Perrin, Milwaukee Housing Authority Director, 27 October 1948, folio 5, Box 180, Carl F. and Frank P. Zeidler Papers, Office of the Mayor, City of Milwaukee Archives, MPL. “Policy Decision Stirs Comment: Attitude of Judge Runge Is Deplored by Woman Leader,” MJ, 13 March 1940. See also Rev. Cecil Fisher’s observations about black youth, economic hardship, and policy games in: Milwaukee Metropolitan Crime Prevention Commission, minutes, ca. 1942, folio “C,” Bohn Papers, MPL. On concerns about delinquency during the later 1940s in Milwaukee, see Joe Austin, “‘The Worst Wave of Sex Orgies in Milwaukee History’: Public Scandal, Non-violence and Interracial Teenage Romances in 1948,” presentation at the Organization of American Historians’ annual meeting, 22 April 2012, Milwaukee; and Jason L. Hostutler, “Kids, Cops, and Beboppers: Milwaukee’s Post WWII Battle with Juvenile Delinquency,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 93:1 (Autumn 2009): 14–27. On juvenile delinquency, see: James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), 82–86; and Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay, Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942). For evidence

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), while assessing the potential for wartime urban and racial unrest, kept tabs on the behavior of black youth in Milwaukee. “A number of incidents have occurred in the Sixth Ward of Milwaukee . . . mainly involving youthful Negroes who are said frequently [to] band together in a crowd of from three hundred to four hundred, especially on weekends, and cause considerable commotion by yelling and shouting and forcing people off the sidewalks.” Although the police had apparently diffused these gatherings, the report concluded with an informant’s warning that if “these individuals decided to roam the streets in white residential areas, trouble might ensue.”33 Fears of an increasingly disorderly population of black youth, found in both Barr’s criticisms of policy operations and the FBI’s alarmist report, were reflected as well in reformers’ determination to gain greater control over these black working-class places and their intensified campaign against gambling and other perceived vices in the city.34 Black middle-class leaders and black workers responded in a variety of ways to the barrage of antigambling rhetoric and the arrests of petty gamblers. They often defended their neighbors and neighborhoods. Many black middle-class leaders hoped for the eventual elimination of policy games and they were reluctant to recognize policy games as inexpensive entertainment. But they also reasoned that people gambled or worked as runners for sound economic reasons, arguing that low-income African Americans were driven to play numbers games and other forms of gambling out of economic desperation. Job discrimination, housing restrictions, and poverty forced working-class African Americans to turn to policy to supplement their income. The continued hardships of the Great Depression hanging over African-American communities during the first years of the 1940s may have helped to temper black middle-class disdain

33

34

that public alarm about juvenile delinquency was overblown, see Gretchen Elizabeth Knapp, “Home Front Maneuvers: Civilian Mobilization and Social Problem-Solving in Western New York during World War II” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 1994), 354–98. See also Kate Bradley, “Juvenile Delinquency and the Public Sphere: Exploring Local and National Discourse in England, c. 1940–69,” Social History 37:1 (February 2012): 19–35. Robert A. Hill, ed., The FBI’s Racon: Racial Conditions in the United States during World War II (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), 165. Milwaukee middle-class leaders from the Urban League and the NAACP sought to gain seats on the committee appointed to study juvenile delinquency. Earle H. Gray, NAACP, to Acting Mayor John L. Bohn, 9 July 1943, and William V. Kelley, Milwaukee Urban League, to Acting Mayor John L. Bohn, folio “Negroes (1943),” Bohn Papers, MPL. On the presence of black and Latino youth in the wartime city, along with the fears this raised, see: Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot; Kelley, Race Rebels, 55–75, 161–81; and Eduardo Obregón Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

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for policy and numbers games. At a mid-December NAACP rally held at Liberty Hall in the Sixth Ward, speakers responded directly to the criticisms put forward at the Woman’s Club symposium. About seventyfive men and women, plus a half dozen plain-clothes police officers, listened to these appeals for fair treatment.35 Emmett Reed, Jr., an undertaker and NAACP leader who criticized the Woman’s Club for failing to send a representative to the rally, claimed that “200 Negroes were working policy wheels today rather than go on relief.” These comments by Reed and others at the meeting were spurred on by criticism from outside groups. They also were in line with a grassroots turn taken by the NAACP and MUL during the late 1930s and 1940s, as these organizations and their leaders began to devote resources to the serious issues that working-class African Americans faced.36 African-American attorney James Dorsey, who defended clients brought into court on policy charges, also linked black gambling to unemployment and racism. “Give us jobs and policy will disappear . . . Just eliminate some of the race discrimination so we can work as other people do, and our folks will quit resorting to their penny gambling on numbers tickets.”37 Dorsey, a leader in Milwaukee’s black community and an NAACP activist who had arrived in 1928 from Montana by way of Minneapolis and St. Paul, recently lost a close contest to become Sixth Ward alderman. He was defeated in the spring 1940 election by Fred P. Meyers, a white candidate endorsed by the Farmer-Labor Progressive federation. In a primary field of twenty-two candidates vying to succeed the outgoing Sixth Ward alderman Samuel Soref, Dorsey and Meyers took spots one and two respectively, but Meyers won in the subsequent election. This was a campaign in which the controversial policy issue continued to surface. Dorsey recalls that opponents circulated handbills accusing him of being backed by “Chicago gangsters,” referring to the role he played defending policy clients. Dorsey’s strong showing in the primary and general election suggests, however, that his involvement in policy cases may have gained him support, especially among black working-class voters. While Dorsey and Reed offered verbal and even legal defenses for 35

36

37

“Negro Leaders Call for Work to Kill Policy”; and Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). “Negroes Ask Even Break on Gambling: Blame Discrimination for ‘Policy’ Evil; Plead for Jobs,” MP, 16 December 1940. On the 1930s and 1940s class politics of the NAACP and Urban League, see: Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), 32–58; and Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: New Press, 2009). “Jobs Held Best Way to Ban Policy Games,” MS, 16 December 1940.

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policy and petty gambling, neither advocated for working-class citizens’ unrestricted access to these cheap amusements. Instead, they portrayed policy as an undesirable but understandable response to the economic strife that stemmed in large part from racial discrimination in the city.38 Working-class African Americans defending policy echoed arguments that linked economic hardship and racial discrimination. When pressed to explain why they worked for the policy operations or played the games, they emphasized that these games fit into economic survival strategies. The work and winnings of petty gambling were potential sources of earnings in a city with restricted economic choices for black workers and residents. Mary Baker, arrested in a policy raid in the spring of 1940, pleaded with the judge. Recently ill, Baker “temporarily” had become a policy writer in order to earn enough to pay her rent. Baker, who added that her husband was a World War I veteran, found a receptive audience for her claims of economic need and patriotic citizenship. Judge Carl Runge criticized the tactics of the district attorney and police, giving Baker only a suspended sentence and advising her to stay away from policy operations.39 Remembering struggles to get by in the 1930s, other black working-class residents also recognized policy as an economic tool; some worked as policy writers to scrape by during hard times.40 Although evidence from working-class Milwaukeeans is limited, their stories, along with middleclass observations and the apparently widespread participation in policy games during this period, suggest that many defended policy as both income and recreation in the context of racial discrimination and separation. Policy apparently served as a modest source of additional income – or the hope of additional income – available in the informal economy for unemployed and underemployed black workers. Some people earned

38

39

40

Dorsey was born in Missoula, Montana of African-American/German parents and attended the Montana State University Law School. “Policy Wheels Whirl Again”; “Negro Leaders Call for Work to Kill Policy”; Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 202–03, 206, 210, 215–17; and Schmitz, “Milwaukee and Its Black Community.” In reporting on the case and Baker’s suspended sentence, the newspaper inferred that she had elicited the judge’s leniency through her sexual wiles. But the judge’s decision was consistent with his ongoing disagreements with law enforcement officials and his belief that “gambling is natural.” In the same series of trials, Runge threw one case out of court and gave another defendant only a $10 fine. “War on Policy Set Back by Judge Runge’s Ruling.” Edward Wood, Interview by Rosie McDuffy, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 16 April 1992, Finding Jobs Oral History Project, Wisconsin Black Historical Society and WHS. William “Blue” Jenkins, a leader in Racine’s labor and black communities, described gambling as a high-stakes operation but then recalled that many people who were “not making very much money” in this industrial city just south of Milwaukee engaged in smallstakes numbers games. William “Blue” Jenkins, Interview by George H. Roeder, Racine, Wisconsin, 3 and 29 January 1974, transcript p. 94, WHS.

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pocket cash as numbers runners, while others held out hope for winnings, even if meager. Strategies for economic survival and autonomy that had figured prominently in working-class communities throughout the Great Depression continued to be important in early 1940s black communities.41 Economic hardships for Milwaukee’s African-American residents certainly had not ended with the close of the 1930s. In 1940, the official unemployment rate for black men topped 29 percent, compared to a 13 percent rate for all men. The 1940 unemployment rate for black women exceeded 30 percent, while it dipped to under 10 percent for all women in the city. Relief statistics also testify to continued racial disparity and adversity. About 21 percent of Milwaukee’s black residents were employed in public works jobs, even though fewer than 6 percent of all Milwaukeeans were employed in public works jobs as of 1940.42 Defense mobilization, U.S. involvement in the war, and armed forces recruitment quickly cut white unemployment in the early months of the decade. High unemployment rates for black workers in Milwaukee and elsewhere lasted longer, prompting African Americans at the local and national levels to press for fair treatment in the defense economy and in wartime society. During times of economic hardship, policy operators sometimes attained a status as community leaders, charitable givers, and bankers. Despite frequent mainstream condemnations, Milwaukee’s biggest policy operator Clinton (Joe) Harris was remembered by African-American minister and public servant Cecil Fisher as a benefactor for black Milwaukee. Harris came to the aid of local organizations and institutions, including churches; he assisted many working-class African Americans during the 1930s and 1904s. He also mediated disputes while holding “court” in his tavern (the “711 Club”). In Milwaukee and other cities, where black poverty and severe unemployment persisted despite defense mobilization, policy played an economic, institutional, and cultural role that helped to confer legitimacy on the games within the community.43

41

42

43

Richard W. Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It: Building Black Community in Detroit, 1915–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 116–19; Wolcott, “The Culture of the Informal Economy,” 46–75. Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 153. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 16th Census of the Population, Vol. II: Characteristics of the Population (Washington D.C., Government Printing Office, 1943). On Sixth Ward health and welfare needs in 1940, see Metta Bean (Director, Social Service Department) to Rev. Andrew Gladstone Finnie (Social Planning Committee, Community Fund), 7 November 1940, folio “Community Planning Committee, 1940, Nov.-1943, Dec.,” box 12, United Community Services of Greater Milwaukee [hereafter UCSGM], Milwaukee ARC. Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 206; “Ask Goodland to End Policy Racket Here,” MJ, 28 October 1945; Paul H. Geenen, Milwaukee’s Bronzeville, 1900–1950 (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2006), 9, 19; and Vick, “From Walnut Street to No Street.” On the

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While black middle-class leaders acknowledged that tough economic conditions and petty gambling went hand-in-hand, they also distanced themselves from these games by presenting a vision for a reformed city that would do away with the need for such activities in the informal economy. Emmett Reed and James Dorsey had made this point. The Rev. B. G. Gordon called for more jobs and improved housing for working-class African Americans in order to diminish the appeal of policy and other forms of gambling. He also was quick to note the class dimensions of petty gambling: The “better class of people” did not play policy.44 Cecil Fisher, despite his appreciation for the role played by the “policy king” Joe Harris, reiterated this point a year later in a statement before the Metropolitan Crime Prevention Commission. He emphasized that policy appealed to lower-class African Americans: “Negroes are poor, and it always has been true that the person of meager means is more likely to risk what little he has in lottery.”45 This lukewarm defense elided discussion of the more legitimate risks, as well as respectable amusements, that were available to middle- and upper-class people.46 Fisher’s and Gordon’s comments on policy navigated both the growing class tensions within the city’s African-American community and the racial tensions within the city-at-large. Whereas housing politics tended to unite classes within the black community in a city the size of Milwaukee, since almost all felt directly the effects of residential discrimination, gambling politics sharpened the class distinctions. Middle-class blacks such as Gordon and Fisher made a point of distancing themselves from what they interpreted as lower- or working-class behavior. Policy games were risky, irrational pursuits exacerbated by the very real problems black workers faced. Urban middle-class blacks in Milwaukee and in other cities tagged recent working-class migrants as the people involved in vice. While

44 45

46

role of policy and numbers games in building black political power and financing AfricanAmerican cultural endeavors, see: Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes; Haller, “Policy Gambling, Entertainment, and the Emergence of Black Politics”; and Wolcott, “The Culture of the Informal Economy.” In Harlem, white gangsters’ control of numbers operations by the 1930s meant that money flowed out of the community rather than circulating. White, et al., Playing the Numbers. See also Gunner Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1944), 330–31, 1267. “Negro Leaders Call for Work to Kill Policy.” Metropolitan Crime Prevention Commission, Minutes, ca. 20 January 1942, Folio “C,” Bohn Papers, MPL. Black leaders’ positions on policy games paralleled those in other cities. Detroit’s black clergy and middle-class leadership had shifted from outright condemnation to apology and justification, due largely to the Depression’s hardships. Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It, 117. On distinctions made between legitimate and illegitimate risk, see Hochfelder, “Where the Common People Could Speculate.”

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Urban League and NAACP activists in the 1940s paid heed to black working-class concerns, these organizations continued to dedicate themselves to the task of acculturating recent migrants and other working-class African Americans. Their goal of uplift and respectability for the community meant bringing working-class blacks into a world of middle-class values. Both propriety and strategy guided this mission. Such an approach raised the banner of middle-class respectability to confront white racist claims of racial and moral inferiority.47 But Fisher also joined with other middle-class and working-class blacks to call for more and better jobs for Milwaukee’s black population. Economic gains could help improve people’s lives, curb policy games, and draw the community closer to the ideals of respectability. Was policy solely a response, whether flawed or not, to rational concerns about economic survival and opportunity? Or did these games, along with other types of petty gambling, provide affordable leisure for people with few material resources? Did these games of chance also tap into an alternative moral economy, eschewing efficiency, ideals of economic rationality, and the managerial ethos? Opponents and even some mild apologists portrayed policy as an illegitimate and inherently irrational activity, to be done away with immediately through law enforcement or gradually through enhanced economic opportunities. But others disagreed. Most significantly, the widespread popularity of these “nickel games” suggests that many Milwaukeeans viewed policy as legitimate and sound recreation. While policy may have not conformed to the criteria of purposeful pursuits that pointed the way to middle- or upper-class respectability and discipline or reformers’ notions of a modern city, these games fit within a culture and history of working-class leisure. Just as dance halls, working-class saloons, and the practice of “Blue Mondays” had irked earlier generations of middle-class reformers and modernizers, policy games and other forms of petty gambling drew their attention in the 1940s. These antigambling campaigns sought to sharpen the lines in the 47

On class divisions, see especially Trotter, Black Milwaukee. He points out that earlier tensions between new migrants and older residents had reflected class divisions; by the 1930s and 1940s, the black working class also divided along the axis of recent and earlier migrants (217–18). See also: Jack Dougherty, More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Geib, “From Mississippi to Milwaukee”; and Grover, “All Things to Black Folks.” On racial uplift, respectability, and intraracial class tensions, see: Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Wolcott, Remaking Respectability. Tensions between a black elite and workers over housing policy in a larger city are examined in Preston H. Smith II, Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Chicago (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

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modern city between legitimate and illegitimate pastimes, purposeful and aimless activities, and productive and wasteful endeavors. The early focus on policy games in this wave of reform put race at the forefront of reformers’ and modernizers’ inspection of working-class culture and politics. Fears and perceptions of urban danger rooted in white racism would prove especially important for the political culture of the period. Reformers and boosters also used the language of race to draw contrasts between the outmoded city and the modern metropolis.48 Policy drew a following, of course, because of people’s attraction to games of chance. While all forms of gambling and risk-taking, from betting on numbers to betting on stocks, threatened to jeopardize family or individual finances, people found amusement and entertainment in these games of chance. Civil Court Runge – a thorn in the side of those who battled gambling because of his acquittals and light sentences meted out to policy offenders – highlighted the similarities between policy games and stock market trading. He not only questioned the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate speculation, but argued that “gambling is human nature.” Likening life itself to a gamble, Runge continued: “If the courts had to send all gamblers to jail, there would not be enough courts in the land to hear the testimony.”49 The judge’s pragmatism and countenance of the gambling “instinct” stood in stark contrast to either the emerging language of addiction and illness or reformers’ moral and economic condemnations of petty gambling. The antigambling forces offered a vision of a managed or rational city of self-controlled citizens, in which efficiency would trump entertainment and vice. Runge, on the other hand, depicted petty gambling as an inevitable and acceptable dimension of human activity, rather than as irresponsible behavior or a distortion of everyday life. He suggested that officials who tried to eliminate all gambling from the city would force their discipline into citizens’ homes and over people’s daily lives. For many working-class defenders of these cheap amusements, this dispute over petty gambling was not a question of what practices would lead to a modern or efficient city but an issue of autonomy and control over leisure. Runge and the reformers, however, both reinforced the notion that working-class African Americans were the most likely to engage in petty gambling and perpetuated the prejudice that they were “backward.” As a result, reformers marked black policy as the most insidious form of

48

49

On the managerial ethos and gambling, see: Lears, Something for Nothing, 229–71. See also: Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops; and Wolcott, “The Culture of the Informal Economy.” “Two Acquitted as Judge Has Kind Word for Gambling,” MS, 12 March 1940. See also “War on Policy Set Back by Judge Runge’s Ruling.”

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gambling in the city. The judge, contending that gambling was “natural . . . especially among colored people,” appears to have invoked a widely circulating image of working-class African Americans as more impulsive and less rational. In his partial vindication of defendants, Runge also situated black policy players as obstacles to the making of a modern city.50 African-American leaders challenged the racial perceptions and prejudices that drove much of this policy debate. They questioned the legitimacy of the assault on the Sixth Ward and its residents. Just as Judge Runge and others had noted the kinship between policy and the stock market, black leaders maintained that other forms of petty gambling, including pinball and bingo, resembled policy in scale and the level of risk involved. Lillie Mae Hall, a representative of the Independent Order of St. Luke, teased out the racial implications of the official focus on policy: “There’s no more harm in playing policy than in playing bingo, but the money in the one case goes into a colored man’s pocket. Let’s really have one law for all, not just one for the Sixth ward . . .”51 Black winnings and profits, as well as leisure, deserved fair treatment. Hall, an active member of St. Mark’s AME Church, took a further swipe at the racist underpinnings of reformers’ and officials’ concern about policy by protesting that time-consuming bingo games, not policy, had cut into attendance for the evening meetings of her women’s club at church. Bingo, more than numbers games, impeded civic participation.52 At the end of 1940, the African-American Wisconsin Enterprise-Blade protested the almost year-long anti-policy campaign that had painted policy and the Sixth Ward as dangerous, derelict, and criminal. Decrying civic reformers’ crusade against policy, the Blade asked: “Why is policy singled out as the one and only vice in the city? Why resort to barbarism to convict a policy player with a two cent ticket or, for that matter, an operator with a purse of a few dollars?”53 Why should policy be excoriated while bingo and other types of petty gambling proliferated? More was at stake, the Blade writer recognized. This attack on working-class leisure and a modest chance for economic gain, as Lillie Mae Hall stressed, was an assault on Milwaukee’s black residents and their neighborhoods. Antigambling reformers and city officials had defined policy as a danger to individuals and to the city; the Sixth Ward was labeled as the place 50

51

52 53

“Two Acquitted as Judge Has Kind Word for Gambling”; and Lears, Something for Nothing, 201–15. “Jobs Held Best Way to Ban Policy Games.” See also “Negroes Ask Even Break on Gambling.” “Negro Leaders Call for Work to Kill Policy.” “Third Degree for 5¢ Policy?”; Schmitz, “Milwaukee and Its Black Community, 1930– 1942,” 49; and Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 202.

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where those dangers festered. Despite the varieties of petty gambling evident in the city, despite the mixture of white and black gamblers, despite the widespread geography of gambling in the city, and despite the presence of black and white residents in the Sixth Ward, both policy games and the Sixth Ward were branded and marked racially. The people, the practice, and the place elicited greater scrutiny, policing, and reform. These perceptions of the Sixth Ward fed fear and helped to solidify impressions and images of urban blight.54 A rapid rise in the number of gambling arrests in subsequent years suggests that officials and the police embraced the challenge to toughenup on vice in the city. Gambling arrests in Milwaukee almost tripled between 1942 and 1943 (see Table 3.1). The disproportionately high number of African Americans charged indicates that policy games came under especially intense investigation. Black Milwaukeeans accounted for over half of the arrests on gambling charges from 1942 to 1944, despite making up less than two percent of the city’s population. The number of people booked for vagrancy, while possibly pointing to a general trend of disciplining perceived disorder in the wartime city, also climbed due to increased vigilance about gambling. Police reportedly used vagrancy charges to haul in street-corner policy runners and players, as well as those who had no visible means of income. In 1940, 589 adults were arrested for vagrancy; that figure rose to 762 adults and 20 minors in 1945 (the count for minors was unreported in 1940). Again, a disproportionate number of people arrested as vagrants, over 13 percent, were African Americans.55 Despite white Milwaukeeans’ high levels of

54

55

On racialized images of urban fear, disorder, and decline, see Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1993); and Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). On the Blade editor and outspoken critic of racist stereotypes, who was dubbed the “Mayor of Bronzeville” in 1945, see Genevieve G. McBride and Stephen R. Byers, “The First Mayor of Black Milwaukee: J. Anthony Josey,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 91:2 (Winter 2007–08): 2–15. Milwaukee Common Council, Municipal Activities of Milwaukee for 1940 (Milwaukee: Municipal Reference Library, 1941), 109; Milwaukee Common Council, Annual Report to the Citizens of Milwaukee, 1945 (Milwaukee: Municipal Reference Library, 1946), 91; and Citizens’ Governmental Research Bureau, Milwaukee’s Negro Community (Milwaukee: Council of Social Agencies, 1946). On the police strategy of charging policy suspects with vagrancy (being “vagged”), see “Asserts Policy War Hindered: Prosecutor’s Staff Refuses to Issue Vagrancy Writs, Says Police Chief,” MJ, 5 July 1939; and “Police Chief, Steffes in Clash over Policy,” MJ, 16 January 1941. On the use of vagrancy laws to discipline nineteenth-century workers, see David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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t a b l e 3 . 1 Milwaukee Police Department Arrests for Gambling and Vagrancy, by Race, 1942–1944 Year Total Gambling Arrests Black Gambling Arrests Percent Black Gambling Arrests Total Vagrancy Arrests Black Vagrancy Arrests Percent Black Vagrancy Arrests

1942

1943

1944

Total

97 52 53.6% 757 61 8.1%

268 128 47.8% 621 78 12.6%

128 83 64.8% 818 154 18.8%

493 263 53.3% 2,196 293 13.3%

Source: Citizen’s Governmental Research Bureau, Milwaukee’s Negro Community (1946), 55.

participation in other forms of petty gambling such as bingo and pinball, the rate of arrests of black Milwaukeeans indicates that the police concentrated on policy in African-American neighborhoods. These raciallyskewed arrest rates also resembled national figures for this period.56 Police action and arrests followed from both vigorous antigambling campaigns and the heightened visibility of a rapidly changing AfricanAmerican community as workers moved to the city seeking jobs. Although the Milwaukee Journal reported a decline in policy games by mid-1942 – attributing this drop to Sixth Ward residents’ increased earnings, gainful employment, and duty in the armed services – the arrest numbers continued to climb.57 The steady increase in gambling and vagrancy arrests also complicates the picture of ever-widening prosperity in the wartime economy and assumptions that this trend would wipe away petty gambling. Black workers were the last group to benefit from wartime production. When they did benefit, their prospects remained uncertain.

56

57

Nationally in 1941, 43 percent of those arrested on gambling charges were African American. This rate rose to 53 percent in 1943 and to 57 percent in 1945. Vagrancy arrests also hit African Americans disproportionately, though less than gambling arrests. In 1941, about 20 percent of those arrested as vagrants were African American; 26 percent in 1943; and 24 percent in 1945. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports for the United States and Its Possessions, Vol. XII: No. 4; Fourth Quarterly Bulletin, 1941 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942), 209; FBI, Uniform Crime Reports, Vol. XIV: No. 2; Annual Bulletin, 1943 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1944), 96; and FBI, Uniform Crime Reports, Vol. XVI: No. 2; Annual Bulletin, 1945 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1946), 119. “‘Policy’ Racket Curbed by War,” MJ, 26 July 1942. The Journal estimated that “60% of the Negroes who made up the organization of policy ‘writers’ have entered the service.” By the end of the war, however, the newspaper reported both an increase in the number of policy games and inflation in the amounts for each bet (rising from penny and nickel to dollar games). Operators, facing a labor shortage, did double-duty as runners. “War Swells Policy Games,” MJ, 21 January 1945.

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But interest in policy also was about more than economics, for both the players and their opponents. Officials’ and reformers’ concerns about wartime order, exaggerated by anxieties about black working-class culture, drew their attention to Sixth Ward policy games and shaped both the gambling debate and people’s encounters with the law. These black working-class neighborhoods soon would become focal points for urban redevelopment and renewal projects. Racial and class prejudices saturated these discourses about gambling and urban disorder. Another form of petty gambling, pinball and slot machines, took center stage in city debates soon after the United States joined the fight against the Axis powers. In early 1942, the Milwaukee Woman’s Club renewed a campaign to eliminate pinball games by publicizing a list of machines registered with the Internal Revenue Service and operating in the Milwaukee area. The Club sought to bring the city into compliance with state antigambling laws and the 1937 anti-pinball ordinance that Mayor Carl Zeidler had championed as assistant city attorney. Efforts to control and eliminate pinball at the very beginning of the 1940s had centered briefly on the Sixth Ward and might have been prompted especially by the appearance of machines that resembled but skirted specifications for those banned in the late 1930s. Although limiting pinball games had been an objective for reformers in previous years, this mid-World War II campaign launched a more aggressive phase of the attack that also built on the anti-policy initiatives. The Woman’s Club was soon joined by the Milwaukee County League of Women Voters, the Junior Woman’s Club, the WCCC, Protestant clergy in the Milwaukee Ministerial Association, the Milwaukee Journal, Mayor Carl Zeidler, and others in a campaign that focused especially on the working-class taverns and clubs that housed these machines. As was the case for the anti-policy campaign, this local initiative also fit a national pattern of wartime urban reform.58 Pinball opponents were angered especially by the Milwaukee Common Council’s actions on this issue during the spring of 1942. The Common Council had backed off from a resolution requesting enforcement of the 58

“Women Seek Action on Slot Machine List,” MJ, 3 February 1942; “Enforce Law on Pinball, League Urges,” MP, 4 February 1942; Minutes of the WCCC meeting, 18 March 1942, folio “Minutes, 1937–1942,” Box 1, WCCC Records, Milwaukee ARC; Correspondence in folio “Common Council,” Bohn Papers, MPL; Correspondence in folio “Common Council, 1942,” Bohn Papers, MPL; “Comeback of Pinball Is Vetoed by Mayor: Council Told Its Action Is Inconsistent, Full of Peril to City’s Morals and Pocketbooks,” MJ, 10 April 1942; “Bump Games Invade City; Deny Pay-Off,” MJ, 4 Dec 1940; Gill, Data on Negro Population, Housing, Unemployment, Gambling; Kasparek, “Void in Wisconsin,” 41–42; Wells, This Is Milwaukee, 223–24. See also Scrapbooks #6 and 7, Milwaukee Woman’s Club, mss-1780, Milwaukee County Historical Society, Milwaukee.

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pinball ban. Public reaction to a strengthened pinball ban persuaded a majority of the aldermen to consider licensing and taxing pinball machines as games of “skill.” Backed by pinball players, tavern owners, and pinball machine distributors, the Common Council voted eighteen to seven to regulate rather than outlaw pinball.59 Opponents of pinball responded by rejecting any official sanction which would allow the “‘pinball racket’ to mulct the citizens of Milwaukee by preying upon human frailty and gullibility.”60 Pinball, they argued, posed a danger to the city’s residents, especially its youth and its poorer residents. It also threatened the city’s reputation as an orderly and law-abiding metropolis. Milwaukee stood vulnerable to the “gambling syndicates,” opponents argued. Mayor Zeidler vetoed the ordinance to license the machines. His veto message touched on many of the reformers’ themes, including the dangers to the city’s image: “All this good work, the good name of Milwaukee, can be swept overboard in the twinkling of an eye through passage of [this] ordinance . . . which unquestionably would open the door to gambling syndicates operating under the cloak of protection provided benevolently by the legislative body of this city.” This veto was Carl Zeidler’s last act before leaving office in the middle of his term to join the Navy. His ship was lost at sea during the war.61 The Common Council overrode his veto by a margin of eighteen to eight. Aldermen from white working-class wards especially challenged the mayor’s and reformers’ anti-pinball crusade. Aldermen opposing the prohibition, who opted instead for the licensing and regulation of pinball, contended that they were acting in accord with their constituents’ appeals. Alderman Matt Mueller from the South-Side Eighth Ward, for instance, reported that he had received many requests from “working people in my ward,” especially those who were not members of private clubs or legion posts and wanted to be able to play pinball in taverns.62 This pattern held up in a series of spring 1942 votes regarding pinball: a March deferral of the pinball ban; an April proposal to license and regulate pinball; and the 59

60

61

62

“Mayor Says He’ll Veto Council Vote for Pinball: Aldermen Adopt New City Ordinance Reopening the Door to Coin Machines, Barring Slots,” MJ, 7 April 1942. Milwaukee Metropolitan Commission on Crime Prevention, Minutes, 13 April 1942, Folio “Crime Prevention, 1942,” Bohn Papers, MPL; “Pinball Pros, Cons and Lots Else Talked,” MJ 19 March 1942; “Pinball Pinions,” MJ, 20 March 1942; “Pin License Law Approved,” MJ, 3 April 1942. “Comeback of Pinball Is Vetoed by Mayor”; and John Gurda, The Making of Milwaukee (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 1999), 310. “This Is Last Day for Pinball: Chief of Police Says He’ll Act,” MJ, 10 March 1942. See also: “Pinball to Return: Zeidler Ban Upset,” MJ, 5 May 1942; “Pinball Alliance,” MJ, 5 May 1942; “Pinball Veto Overridden: Aldermen Put End to Ban by 18 to 8 Ballot,” MS, 5 May 1942.

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May override of Mayor Zeidler’s veto of the licensing proposal. Aldermen from the white working-class and largely Catholic South Side voted consistently to preserve pinball. On the near North Side of the city, most of the Common Council members from white working-class districts voted in favor of pinball. While the pro-pinball vote was concentrated generally in these older sections of town, the alderman in the northernmost Ninth Ward also backed pinball. This was a ward with a relatively high percentage of skilled workers and only a moderate share of white-collar workers. Aldermen from wealthier and newer white middle-class wards in the city sided with the antigambling forces. An exception was found, however, in the Sixth and Tenth Wards, home to most of the city’s African-American residents, where earlier attacks on policy games and pinball may have moved aldermen’s votes into the anti-pinball column. Fred Meyers’s narrow victory in the 1940 Sixth Ward alderman’s race could be credited in part to his mobilization of antigambling forces and denunciations of James Dorsey’s role in defending policy and other gambling clients. Some Sixth and Tenth Ward residents also might have reasoned that the antigambling prohibitions aimed at policy ought to be applied to pinball in equal measure. These battles and the politics of race certainly played an important role in all petty gambling disputes, but more generally the 1942 pinball vote matched the pattern of class evident in the city’s geography.63 These early 1942 debates about the legality and legitimacy of pinball generated a great deal of controversy. In part, the issue pitted the financial interests of tavern owners (including the mayor’s cousin) and pinball machine operators against the reform agendas of antigambling activists, civic boosters, and some religious organizations. Pinball players also joined the fray in great numbers. Over 700 supporters and opponents of pinball jammed the Common Council chambers, hoping to influence the aldermen’s votes.64 Especially notable were the hundreds of telegrams and 63

64

Aldermen from the following wards offered consistent support for pinball, voting for each of the three spring 1942 measures: 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 24, and, 27. Aldermen from this next set of wards backed two out of the three measures: 1, 2, 3, 7, 20, 21, and 25. “Pinball to Return”; “Mayor Says He’ll Veto Council Vote for Pinball”; “Chief of Police Says He’ll Act”; Common Council, Municipal Activities of Milwaukee for 1940 (Milwaukee: Municipal Reference Library, 1941), 8; Milwaukee County Community Fund and Council of Social Agencies, Census Tract Facts: A Handbook of Basic Social Data of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin (Milwaukee: Statistical Research Department, 1945); United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 16th Census of the United States, 1940: Population and Housing Statistics for Census Tracts, Milwaukee, Wis. (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1942); and 1950 United States Census of Population, Census Tract Statistics: Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Adjacent Area (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952). “Redraft of Pinball Ordinance Asked: Amendments to Bill Are Made Freely; 700 Jam Public Hearing on Controversial Measure,” MS, 20 March 1942.

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letters that working-class Milwaukeeans sent to the mayor, many expressing an assertive working-class culture. As the mayor was about to sign an order requiring the removal of pinball and other coin-operated machines, telegrams started pouring into his office. “Messengers staged an all day parade into Mayor Zeidler’s office . . . delivering more than 500 telegrams” – most from citizens who defended pinball. A photograph in the Journal showed the mayor’s desk covered with telegrams.65 Distributors and pinball operators, a handful of whom ran sizable businesses, wrote some of the messages. Another set of telegrams arrived from tavern keepers, most of whom were small proprietors tied closely to the working-class cultural life in the city.66 But the bulk of telegrams were sent by pinball players and tavern patrons from the city’s working-class neighborhoods. An expansive class sentiment animated many of the telegrams addressed to the Mayor, as protesters asserted their right to control both particular places and their activities in these city spaces. Describing taverns as “working man’s clubs” or “poor man’s clubs,” those challenging the pinball ban emphasized the public character of these gathering places; their doors were open to working people. Although these were by no means new labels for taverns, the descriptions made sense to many in the midcentury city. Some especially objected to an intrusion into the “working man’s club house” when wartime entertainment for workers’ was limited already. In lobbying to keep pinball machines in taverns, these Milwaukeeans mobilized a language of class as they had done and would do again on shop floors and in public places in order to gain more control and autonomy in their working lives and their leisure time.67 Many defined the working-class character of pinball and taverns by comparing these places with other sites in the city. Johnny Lopseich contrasted the politically conservative and semiprivate American Legion posts with working-class taverns and reasoned that “[if] Legionnaires can have 65

66

67

“Pinball Protests to Mayor Tardy,” MS, 4 March 1942; “Pinball Ban Starts Protests Rolling In Upon the Mayor,” MJ, 4 March 1942. Folio “Pin Ball,” Bohn Papers, MPL. On the political strength and activities of tavern keepers in 1930s and 1940s Milwaukee, see Arthur S. Janik Papers, Milwaukee ARC. Jozwiak, “Bottoms Up”; Ferguson, “Leisure Pursuits in Ethnic Milwaukee,” 75–105; Jon M. Kingsdale, “The ‘Poor Man’s Club’: Social Functions of the Working Class Saloon,” American Quarterly 25 (1973): 472–89; Boyd Ellsworth Macrory, “A Sociological Analysis of the Role and Functions of the Tavern in the Community,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1950); David Halle, America’s Working Man: Work, Home, and Politics among Blue-Collar Property Owners (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Harring, Policing a Class Society, 149–82; LeMasters, Blue-Collar Aristocrats; Madelon Powers, Faces along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will.

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pin ball machines in their posts, why not in public places.” Lopseich claimed these taverns as urban public spaces for working-class leisure. Norma Appet made a similar appeal for fairness across class lines, arguing: “We would like to have pinball machines as long as club houses have slot machines.”68 Others did the same, as they compared working-class taverns to the city’s large “fraternal and charitable” organizations in which various forms of petty gambling were permitted. They stressed the tavern’s character as a public place that allowed unrestricted working-class access and control over activities within that space. Some of the large “fraternal and charitable” organizations and clubs such as the American Legion, of course, included working-class members.69 Skilled workers and longerterm residents were the most likely working-class Milwaukeeans to be found in these halls, as well as in taverns. Semiskilled workers and laborers, many of whom were younger or newer residents, relied more heavily on the taverns. Many working-class organizations, including AFL and CIO locals, also depended upon taverns as public places to gather, meet, and socialize. While reformers sought to redirect and manage the midcentury urban order, workers defending pinball stressed fairness, access, and autonomy, welded together by an articulation of class dynamics in the city. In their claims to these “public places” and everyday recreation, these pinball advocates outlined the priorities of a workingclass political culture in the city.70 For many workers, pinball was a relatively cheap and easy way to have fun. A game generally cost a nickel. Prizes included extra games, a bottle of beer, cigars, a couple of war savings coupons, or pocket change (as low as a couple of nickels). The description of a summer 1943 raid on “payoff” pinball machines illustrates the setting. A group of undercover deputy sheriffs and investigators from the district attorney’s office, “dressed as workers,” entered the taverns to play pinball. The account underscores

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Folio “Pin Ball,” Bohn Papers, MPL. On white, working-class men in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fraternal organizations, see Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Mark A. Swiencicki, “Consuming Brotherhood: Men’s Culture, Style and Recreation as Consumer Culture, 1880–1930,” Journal of Social History 31 (1998): 773–808. On veterans, see Mark D. Van Ells, To Hear Only Thunder Again: America’s World War II Veterans Come Home (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001). This was one way that “public” and “private” distinctions were made and contested in the midcentury city. On space and power, as well as public/private distinctions, see: Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 75 (1988): 9–39; Deutsch, Women and the City; and David Scobey, “Anatomy of the Promenade: the Politics of Bourgeois Sociability in Nineteenth-Century New York.” Social History 17 (1992): 203–27.

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that “they were indistinguishable from any other group of war plant workers, who might be relaxing after a week of toil.”71 The investigators ordered drinks and waited to play the popular pinball games. Eventually they took their turn at the pinball machines and began spending their nickels. They hoped to win a prize that would provide evidence of an illegal “payoff” machine. After winning and disclosing their identities, the deputies seized the machines. Fellow patrons jeered the investigators.72 In another raid, police dressed in “slacks, sports shirts and bright blue baseball caps, and carried a softball for further effect.” An officer who won $4.70 on his fourth pinball game bought 70 cents worth of drinks for everyone in the tavern. “A couple of fellows who got a free drink slapped me on the back and told me I was a swell guy. But when I showed my badge a little later I was called a ‘yellow rat.’” At another tavern the clandestine cop “spent $4.50 before he got a winning score and was paid four nickels. . .”73 These raid reports emphasize the working-class character of these taverns, while also revealing officials’ perceptions of these places and the people who frequented them. Further, the narratives offer a glimpse of the tavern patrons’ reactions to these intrusions into what they saw as their places of leisure. Working-class patrons viewed the officials as interlopers and questioned the legitimacy of these raids. Widespread support for pinball does not mean that all working-class Milwaukeeans opposed the elimination of these machines from taverns. Religious prohibitions against gambling or drinking influenced some workers’ views about taverns and pinball. Others had experienced the financial, psychological, or physical debilitation of intoxication and gambling. Working-class organizations played only a minor role in these debates, but they were divided and often ambivalent. AFL unions appear generally to have opposed bans on pinball. One CIO official’s antigambling message mirrored the rhetoric of the wartime no-strike pledge by evoking the ideals of wartime patriotism, sacrifice, and discipline; taverns and gambling diverted time and resources from the war effort. More specifically, he argued that gambling had been especially harmful to the younger union members who wasted their money and were unable to buy war bonds. He also remarked, however, that authorities should go after gambling in private clubs and fraternal halls rather than targeting the taverns frequented by his fellow union members. While Milwaukee Socialists had long supported working-class taverns and public recreation

71 72 73

“30 Pinball Machines Seized by Raiders; 15 Face Warrants,” MS, 7 June 1943. Ibid. “Pinball Writs Cite Owners: Three Named Following Seizures by Police in Soft Ball Attire,” MJ, 14 June 1943.

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open to all, two Socialist candidates during this period (including Carl’s brother Frank Zeidler, a gubernatorial candidate) announced their opposition to commercial bingo and slot machines. As in the CIO statement, however, their stress on commercial bingo and slot machines rather than pinball machines and charity bingo suggests that they sought to avoid a direct attack on smaller-stakes games that were popular working-class activities. Nevertheless, this constellation of positions on petty gambling shows the complexity and fractures of working-class culture and politics.74 Tensions regarding gender roles and changes in gender relations also became evident in these debates. While some nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century saloons accommodated women and families, especially in German and Eastern European neighborhoods, these spaces had become decidedly more gender segregated. Working-class taverns and pinball had become the province of men.75 Wartime pressures and changes, however, blurred some of these distinctions. Ambiguity and confusion about gender boundaries in the wartime city, in turn, emerged amid the discussions and disputes over pinball. During the war, greater numbers of women worked in taverns. Tavern owners and labor unions set aside bans against women’s employment as bartenders. Some family-owned establishments were managed by women whose husbands or fathers were in the military.76 Taverns

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“A Thankful Housewife” to Mayor Carl Zeidler and “A Grateful Mother” to Mayor Carl Zeidler, 12 March 1942, folio “Pin Ball,” Bohn Papers, MPL; Helen Jawarski to Mayor Zeidler, 26 March 1942, folio “J,” Bohn Papers, MPL; and Rotskoff, Love on the Rocks. On labor and working-class organizations, see: “Action on Pinball Vote Is Deferred,” MS, 25 July 1942; and “Church Representatives and Member of the CIO among Those Who Call Prosecutor,” MJ, 15 April 1943. On wartime sacrifice, see: Andrew E. Kersten, Labor’s Home Front: The American Federation of Labor during World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 1–40; Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Leff, “The Politics of Sacrifice.” Frank Zeidler’s case against slot machines also challenged the argument that gambling income would help revive the poorer areas; he instead proposed public works programs to boost employment. “Promise War on Bingo, Slots,” MJ, 22 August 1942. See also: Jozwiak, “Bottoms Up”; Jozwiak, “The City of the People”; and Frederick I. Olson, “The Milwaukee Socialists, 1897–1941” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1952), 99. Ferguson, “Leisure Pursuits in Ethnic Milwaukee,” 75–105; Powers, Faces along the Bar, 26–47. On controversies over women serving liquor in the 1930s and later, see Dorothy Sue Cobble, “‘Drawing the Line’: The Construction of a Gendered Work Force in the Food Service Industry,” in Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, ed. Ava Baron (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 216–42. Barriers against female bartenders were reestablished as the war came to a close: Edith Carroll, “Barmaids Come Back,” New York Times Magazine, 18 March 1945; “Bartenders Union Resolution,” in Proceedings of the Sixty-Fifth Convention of the Minnesota State Federation of Labor, Hibbing, 1947, 110. On Goesaert v. Cleary (1948), a Supreme Court case which upheld Michigan’s ban against female bartenders, see Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right

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also became important sites of working-class women’s leisure and socializing, as wartime industries and other workplaces employed more women and homefront moral prohibitions eased or were challenged.77 Rose Kaminski, a crane operator from the working-class South Side, recalled how she and her friends made the rounds of neighborhood taverns on their way to the downtown V-J Day celebration.78 Pinball also attracted male and female players. Irene Teska, a South-Sider who enjoyed playing pinball machines, argued that women and men needed relaxation from wartime work in taverns. Mrs. L. Leitch concurred: “Why take the pinball machine out of taverns – only amusement a defense worker has.” Florian Kusch, on behalf of his wife, wrote: “The pinball machine is a good pastime for me and a recreation, my wife also plays to an extent and enjoys it very much.”79 As these appeals indicate, both male and female working-class Milwaukeeans claimed access to these public places and to games such as pinball. More frequently, however, these leisure places and practices, as well as the controversies that reformers and boosters stirred up, reinforced gender boundaries and separation during leisure time. Neither taverns nor the activities that took place inside them were transformed suddenly into mixed-gender establishments during the war. As in many workplaces, women’s occasional and sometimes visible presence in taverns and other public places was contested.80 Many working-class men laced their defense of pinball with claims to taverns as masculine sites and to the games as men’s activities. Women, some suggested, had their place instead in bingo halls and church basements. Rather than attempt to broaden the constituency backing pinball in this 1942 political fight, Frank Risch launched his plea for pinball games with an unambiguous statement of a

77

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79 80

to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 173, 357. A photograph of a bar in Richmond, California depicts the gender dynamics of wartime taverns; a sign in this mixed-gender bar proclaimed: “Attention Ladies! – Unescorted Women must remain without escorts.” Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, photograph preceding page 143, 174; and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, “Traditions from Home: African Americans in Wartime Richmond, California,” in The War in American Culture, 263–83. Rose Kaminski, Interview by Kathy Borkowski, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 9 March 1992, Wisconsin Women during World War II Oral History Project. Folio “Pin Ball,” Bohn Papers, MPL. Working-class taverns need not be romanticized as arenas of social equality in order to recognize them as sites in which social and cultural boundaries were challenged. See, for instance: George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993). On wartime concerns about girls and young women frequenting taverns and other “suspect” places, see Knapp, “Home Maneuvers,” 378–91.

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gender division in cheap amusements. “Bingo for women – pin ball machines for us men.”81 For Risch and others who hoped to save pinball from the reform movement, which itself was propelled in large part by prominent women’s groups, this cause may have become a rallying point for preserving and defining wartime working-class masculinity. During a time when gender boundaries were strained in workplaces and city streets and when the icon of “fighting men” may have made some men on the homefront especially insecure, working-class men’s access to taverns and to pinball games served as a rallying point for the defense of masculinity and control over recreation.82 The many people who stood up for pinball by sending telegrams to the mayor or speaking out against raids and reformers helped to define urban working-class culture. Reformers and authorities also made claims about the character of working-class culture, especially in their depictions of tavern life and the games as unproductive and dangerous anachronisms in the city. Likewise, just as the politics of race and racism continued to fragment working-class culture, so too did the fissures seen in the pinball controversy indicate important divisions within working-class life and culture. Divergent stances in defense of pinball and taverns, with one claiming them for women and men and another drawing a sharp border between men’s and women’s leisure, pointed to the tensions over gender roles and boundaries within American culture and working-class culture specifically in a 1940s city. Rapid changes reshaping wartime workplaces, sites of leisure, neighborhoods, and homes – prompted by the powerful demand for labor, furthered by women’s efforts to gain entrance to public places or popular activities, and forestalled along the way by reactions to these changes – also molded this controversy and tempered the power of midcentury working-class action to preserve access to petty gambling. At the same time, working-class Milwaukeeans made clear that they resented intrusions into their places and activities of recreation. Such challenges to middle- and upper-class reformers’ assaults on tavern culture and pinball not only demonstrated the vibrancy of working-class politics in the city, but also influenced indirectly the emerging politics of growth. Charges leveled against pinball as an immoral and damaging game of chance were, of course, the reformers’ main ammunition. But in the heat of the antigambling campaign, taverns and pinball also became part of the 81 82

Folio “Pin Ball,” Bohn Papers, MPL. On working-class masculinities see: Craig Heron, “Boys Will Be Boys: Working-Class Masculinities in the Age of Mass Production,” International Labor and Working-Class History 69 (Spring 2006): 6–34; Steve Meyer, “Rough Manhood: The Aggressive and Confrontational Shop Culture of the U.S. Auto Workers during World War II,” Journal of Social History 36:1 (2002): 125–47; and Peck, “Manly Gambles.”

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popular lexicon used to identify and portray blighted neighborhoods. Along with policy, bingo, and other cheap amusements, they were seen as signs of an unproductive, disorderly, and even dangerous urban environment that reformers and later advocates of growth politics disparaged as they sought to regenerate the midcentury city. An early plan for the city’s first redevelopment project, for instance, included a detailed map that catalogued the area’s taverns.83 Whereas the drive to eliminate policy operations tied these reform efforts especially to white fears of black working-class culture, the pinball and tavern fight connected concerns about urban disorder to white working-class culture. In particular, this campaign focused on white working-class men, highlighted by the undercover officers’ efforts to dress the part when they infiltrated taverns. But the instability of wartime gender boundaries likely heightened the anxieties expressed by reformers and by pinball defenders. This dispute, while seemingly of less consequence than conflicts over housing or municipal finances, sheds light on wartime cultural dynamics that stimulated both working-class political culture and a collection of reform efforts that had begun to herald the modern, productive city. Conflicts over leisure in the wartime city also could be found in bingo halls. As in other parts of the country, bingo made its appearance as mass entertainment in Milwaukee during the Great Depression. The games spread rapidly from church basements and private clubs to large public halls. Like movies and radio, bingo proved to be a popular and inexpensive form of entertainment and sociability for working-class people. One reporter wrote condescendingly: “anybody with ears and eyes and 35 cents could play three cards all evening long, always with the imperishable hope that next time it would be his (or her) voice that would utter the glad cry of ‘Bingo.’”84 Early games were held in Jefferson Hall, Germania Hall, the Pilgrim Club, Bahn Frei Hall, the Paris Ballroom, and the South Side Turn Hall. Catholic, Lutheran, and veterans’ groups appear to have been main beneficiaries of these games. The games were found especially in working-class neighborhoods throughout the city, located generally where public transportation made travel convenient.85 The north-side Bahn Frei Hall, a gathering place for socialists and the German working-class earlier in the century, became the center of 83

84

85

See for instance, Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee, The Redevelopment Plan for the Lower Third Ward, UR Wis. 1–1, 15 February 1955 [draft copy located in the files of the Milwaukee Housing Authority]. “Close of Bingo Era Near, Say Those in Know,” MS, 10 June 1943. On the history of bingo and controversies in later decades, see: Schwartz, Roll the Bones, 376–80; and Petigny, The Permissive Society, 60–63. “Close of Bingo Era Near.”

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controversy at the close of the 1930s.86 Charles W. Trampe, a movie theater proprietor and president of Film Service, Inc., joined with other theater managers to initiate a suit charging that commercial bingo games violated Wisconsin’s antigambling laws. In addition to key targets such as the Bahn Frei games, Trampe tried to stop games in locations such as the American Luther Association hall, an organization with ties to conservative Lutheran synods. Attorney Max Raskin, a Socialist who had served as city attorney and became legal counsel for the Milwaukee CIO, represented the bingo operators. As one observer noted, Trampe “was wrought up because the hall was being packed almost nightly with bingo fans, who were, of course, neglecting their double features.”87 Bingo had become a popular form of entertainment. The State Supreme Court ruled that the bingo games, even if run by religious or charitable organizations, constituted illegal gambling. Bingo players at a Bahn Frei matinee game booed the decision.88 As in disputes over pinball and policy, many Milwaukeeans sneered at reformers’ and officials’ attacks on bingo and refused to recognize the legitimacy of efforts to close down this avenue for entertainment. Games continued throughout the city and thousands of Milwaukeeans kept on playing. Bingo operators and players defied court decisions, bolstered by the knowledge that some area officials hedged and questioned the law against bingo. Milwaukee’s Catholic Archbishop, for instance, had responded to earlier concerns about bingo by prohibiting cash prizes but not banning the bingo games themselves. Catholic churches running bingo

86

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88

On the Bahn Frei Hall’s history, see Jozwiak, “The City for the People,” 78. Bahn Frei can be translated “independent path.” “Bingo Headed Back to Hall: Revival of Game Planned as Bahn Frei Is Leased to GAR Drum Corps,” MJ, 20 October 1940; “Steffes Won’t Move against Charity Bingo,” MS, 5 May 1940; “Church Association Named in Lawsuit to Halt Bingo Play,” MJ (final), 1 May 1940; “Church Group Bingo Assailed: Luther Association Chiefs to Consider Action After Writ Is Sought,” ca. 2 May 1940, “Gambling” newsclipping microfiche, Legislative Reference Bureau, City Hall, Milwaukee; and “Petition Is Filed to Halt Bingo Playing in Hall,” MS, 2 May 1940. The American Luther Association hall (1113 W. State St.) housed both bingo games and bowling lanes. In addition to Trampe’s objections, a group of pastors from the conservative Wisconsin and Missouri Synods petitioned to stop bingo in this hall. Doug Schmidt, They Came to Bowl: How Milwaukee Became America’s Tenpin Capital (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2007), 221; and “ALA Officers to Act on Bingo,” MP, 6 December 1940. On the decision and appeal, see “Bingo Played Still in Spite of High Court,” MJ, 17 January 1940; “All Public Bingo Banned” (editorial), MJ, 17 January 1940; “Bingo Play Is Handed Death Blow by Court,” MS, 13 March 1940; “Steffes Won’t Move against Charity Bingo”; State ex. Rel. Trampe, Respondent, v. Multerer and others, Defendants: Zrimsek and another, Appellants. 234 Wis. 50 (1940); and Kasparek, “Void in Wisconsin,” 43–44.

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games awarded instead “merchandise certificates”; these prizes could be taken to participating stores and exchanged for merchandise or cash. District Attorney Herbert Steffes announced that he would not issue warrants for bingo operators or players.89 His contention that bingo was not gambling hinged in large part on a distinction he drew between bingo and policy games. Despite the size and frequency of many bingo games, he portrayed the former as benign and the latter as a “racket” run by “big shots.” A defense attorney in a policy case, who argued that his client was singled out because his “face is black,” asked Steffes if “there was one law for the Negro policy players and one for the Athletic club, the Elks club and the eagles club and the various bingo clubs.” Steffes responded: “You cannot whitewash policy by comparing it to bingo.”90 Steffes and other authorities further racialized what they saw as criminal policy games by stressing the games’ location in the city’s black wards. Bingo, on the other hand, was played in places such as the GermanAmerican Bahn Frei hall, white churches, and lodges. Praising the character of the places that housed bingo, Steffes asserted: “The atmosphere of our clubhouses and churches is distinctly civic and moral.”91 These civic places would foster good working-class citizens. Steffes also made a claim for the similarities between working-class bingo games and upper-class women’s bridge parties. The D.A. maintained that if bingo games were to be considered criminal, so too should be “women’s bridge clubs, door prizes at luncheons, benefits bazaars and picnics.”92 Racial distinctions between policy and bingo and class comparisons between bridge and bingo mapped out the terrain of illegitimate and legitimate leisure. Less than a year after the courts closed the games at Bahn Frei Hall, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) Fife and Drum Corps inaugurated a

89

90 91

92

“Merchants on South Side Moaning as Bingo Rages,” MJ, 7 June 1939; “Steffes Won’t Move against Charity Bingo”; “Chief Is Silent after Steffes’ ‘No’ on Bingo,” MJ, 6 Nov 1939. Benjamin J. Miller, attorney for the business and theater owners opposed to largescale bingo, condemned Steffes’ refusal to issue warrants: “I think Mr. Steffes set a rather dangerous precedent when he put the halo of innocence on gambling conducted for religious and charitable purposes . . . Milwaukee county could raise money for county relief by holding a little Irish Sweepstakes.” See also “Won’t Attack Charity Bingo, Steffes States,” MJ, 5 May 1940; “Charges Steffes Condones Bingo”; “Nebel Favors ‘Legal Bingo’”; and “Police Report a Bingo Game.” “War on Policy Set Back by Judge Runge’s Ruling” (emphasis added). “Steffes Will Adhere to Policy on Bingo”; “Steffes Won’t Move against Charity Bingo”; and “Won’t Attack Charity Bingo, Steffes States.” “Steffes Will Adhere to Policy on Bingo.” Explaining his support for bingo, Steffes stated: “I have not emasculated my office by seeking to indict a whole community . . .” By implication, upper- and middle-class reformers who tried to close down bingo emasculated themselves and threatened to do the same to the government. See also “Won’t Attack Charity Bingo, Steffes States.”

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new set of “charitable” games at that site. When questioned about the ban on bingo games, the GAR spokesman pointed to the many games being run throughout the city.93 Up to a thousand players showed up for the opening night of the new games, filling every available spot in the hall. After a welcoming speech by the state GAR secretary and a performance by the fife and drum corps, the games began. “It was a mighty busy scene, what with ushers running around selling bingo cards, and hawkers selling beer and pop, and youngsters galloping up and down the hallways when they were not engrossed in the latest Superman series.” The newspaper report continued: “A good many of the players were women, and some of them grimly puffed at cigarettes as they plunked down their corn kernels on their cards.” The men in the hall “chewed at cigars or puffed pipes, and soon a haze of smoke settled over the rows of players.” The game broke up at midnight, with prizes for the evening totaling about $300.94 In Milwaukee’s South Side working-class neighborhoods, home to many of the city’s Polish and Eastern European workers, bingo games also drew thousands of players. Churches and other organizations sponsoring bingo blanketed the neighborhood with flyers advertising the games. “One householder recently collected, during a week, dodgers advertising more than 20 bingo games at that many different churches.” As a result of the games’ popularity, a drugstore owner lamented the loss of evening shoppers. “Now no one comes in at night, no one buys anything. From 7:30 to 11 at night the streets are deserted. Everyone is playing bingo.” A dry-goods merchant counted “eight churches, all sponsoring bingo games, within three miles of my store.” The storeowner reckoned that on some nights “at least 10,000 persons were playing bingo at games in those churches.” These business owners recognized that the South Side was not alone in being deluged by bingo, but they believed that their neighborhood hosted the most games. Possibly as a concession to swingshift workers, as well as others free during the middle of the day, matinee bingo also took hold.95 While games varied in size, some of the wartime games sponsored by churches and religious groups, PTAs, veterans’ posts, and other civic groups attracted very large crowds. Owners of movie theaters had good reason to be concerned about their clientele. The Futuristic Ballroom operator calculated that he had “presided over about 6,000,000 man hours and woman hours of bingo” from 1939 to 1943. Overall estimates 93 94 95

“Bingo Headed Back to Hall.” “Big Bingo Comes Back, Hitched to Patriotism,” MJ, 23 October 1940. “Merchants on South Side Moaning as Bingo Rages.”

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of the number of bingo players in the city ranged from 75,000 (about 13 percent of the population) to 180,000 (about 30 percent of the population). Using the lower estimate, one observer extrapolated that, if the average player attended bingo games two times per week, the city could boast “a total weekly attendance of 150,000, and annual attendance of [over] 7,500,000.”96 The Transport Company, trying to figure out adequate levels of bus and street car service during these tumultuous wartime years, reported that bingo was played in about forty different locations. Half of those sites scheduled bingo three or four days a week, with afternoon and evening sessions. At one hall, up to five extra city buses had to be put into service when the games let out.97 Judging from descriptions of the games, locations of play, and the addresses and occupations of winners as reported by the police and the newspapers, most of the players appear to have been working-class Milwaukeeans. Most were people of limited means who spoke about bingo as a cheap amusement. One small business owner in 1939, frustrated by a loss of customers due to these games, described the bingo players as “people on relief and a lot on WPA.”98 And most players were women, accounting for possibly three-quarters or more of the bingo players. Descriptions of the games during this period indicate that women working in defense industries, women at home with children, and older women gathered in large numbers in the bingo halls. The operator of the Futuristic games insisted that many players in his hall were women with “boys in the service, and bingo takes their minds off their troubles.” Observers on the South Side and other working-class neighborhoods agreed that women filled these halls. A drugstore clerk commented, “My mother and her friends go to a bingo game every night of the week . . . and now they are starting to go afternoons.”99 A photo essay – titled “This Is Bingo! 75,000 Play It Here!” – that filled the back page of a Milwaukee Sentinel issue shortly before the district attorney’s summer raid pictured twice as many women as men. Although never an exclusively female domain, white working-class women staked a claim to these places of leisure and sociability in the city (see Figure 3.1).100 96

97 98 99 100

“Close of Bingo Era Near.” The games at the Futuristic Ballroom, on the northern edge of downtown (624 N. 2nd St.), were run by the Corp. Henry Schafer VFW Post No. 23. The Nowak-Plunkett VFW Post No. 920 operated the Riverview Rink and Ballroom (1420 E. North Av.) games. “Bingo Players Crowd Trolleys during Rush Hours, Is Report,” MJ, 22 November 1942. “Merchants on South Side Moaning as Bingo Rages.” “Close of Bingo Era Near”; and “Merchants on South Side Moaning as Bingo Rages.” “This Is Bingo! 75,000 Play It Here,” MS, 10 June 1943, 8. On working-class women’s sociability and bingo in Britain, see Rachael Dixey, “A Means to Get out of the House: Working-Class Women, Leisure and Bingo,” in Women in Cities:

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fi g u r e 3 . 1 Milwaukee bingo players, just a few days before the showdown with the district attorney. These two photographs are from a full-page collection of bingo images. “This Is Bingo! 75,000 Play It Here!,” Milwaukee Sentinel, 10 June 1943, 8. ©2012 Journal Sentinel, Inc., reproduced with permission.

Opponents of bingo – including moral reformers, the new D.A. (James Kerwin), and midcentury urban boosters such as the Milwaukee Journal – advanced arguments about the dangers gambling posed for individuals, families, the city, and a nation at war. One line of attack against bingo and other forms of petty gambling decried the time and resources players squandered during the wartime emergency. In doing so, they articulated very real fears about the war, emphasized citizens’ obligations, and spoke Gender and the Urban Environment, eds. Jo Little, Linda Peake, and Pat Richardson (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 117–132.

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the language of patriotic sacrifice.101 Women should abandon the bingo halls and contribute instead to the war effort as volunteers, as workers in the defense plants, and as mothers. Their bingo money could be better spent on war bonds. Officials also complained that travel to and from the games put a heavy strain on an already overtaxed bus and streetcar system – a system that should give priority to transporting defense plant workers to and from their jobs. In other words, good citizens would not spend time and resources on frivolous and even wasteful pursuits in the midst of a global war.102 Anxieties about domesticity, delinquency, sexuality, and the urban order also fueled the critics’ complaints. They sounded an alarm that bingo and other sorts of gambling caused parents to neglect their children. Gambling tempted parents and tainted the city’s youth. According to these critics, petty gambling had a pervasive and corrosive affect among the city’s working-class parents and children. Irma Loebe, a member of the Methodist Women’s Society of Christian Service wrote: “The slot machines have undoubtedly been a bad influence on our youth especially, and if the bingo playing women stayed home to care for their families, conditions in the home might be improved.”103 Such rhetoric tapped into fears about juvenile delinquency, while overlooking the difficulties working-class mothers faced in finding adequate child care or time for recreation even as they helped to fill the wartime demand for increased industrial production. Authorities, reformers, and other commentators pointed to a number of causes for wartime delinquency, but working mothers were the primary scapegoats. Objections to working-class mothers’ leisure and labors played into growing concerns about the moral lives of teenage girls and anxieties about domestic and civic disorder.104

101 102

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Leff, “The Politics of Sacrifice”; and Sparrow, Warfare State. Study Committee on Staggered Hours and Transportation, Report on Public Transportation: Milwaukee Metropolitan Area (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Council of Defense, 1943); “Bingo Players Crowd Trolleys.” “Church Body and Taverns Laud Kerwin,” MJ, 16 April 1943. On criticisms of female gamblers, see Lears, Something for Nothing, 246. “Juvenile Crime Wave Blamed on ‘Doorkey Children’: ‘Waifs of War’ Roam as Their Mothers Work,” MS 6 September 1942; Charissa Keup, “Delinquency, Sex, and Milwaukee Girls during the Second World War,” Milwaukee County History 1:4 (Fall 2010): 75–80; Austin, “The Worst Wave of Sex Orgies”; Hostutler, “Kids, Cops, and Beboppers”; Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage, 24–41; Knapp, “Home Front Maneuvers”; and Eric C. Schneider, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 54–58. On wartime child care, see: Susan E. Riley, “Caring for Rosie’s Children: Federal Child Care Policies in the World War II Era,” Polity XXVI:4 (Summer 1994): 655–75; and William M. Tuttle, Jr., “Daddy’s Gone to War”: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 69–90. See also Emilie Stoltzfus, Citizen,

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The labels “victory girls,” “good-time Charlottes,” and “khaki-wacky girls” – focusing on the girls and young women who hung around military bases, USO halls, hotel lobbies, taverns, and street corners to meet and date service men – evoked wartime worries about juvenile delinquency and uncontrolled female sexuality. Milwaukee’s Council of Social Agencies established a Committee on Juvenile Problems (also referred to as the Committee on the Alleged Increase in Juvenile Problems) during the war. Although the committee was unable to document a dramatic increase in wartime juvenile delinquency, corroborating a larger body of evidence that indicates a modest rise at most, its 1943 report surmised that the seeds had been planted for future trouble. In an analysis of boys’ and girls’ delinquency, the report alleged that a mother’s time away from home whether at work or recreation, defined as maternal negligence, hit girls harder than boys.105 The Milwaukee Journal told the story of 16-year-old Susan, who had been caught cavorting with sailors in Milwaukee. Susan’s mother and stepfather worked in factories; the report ventured that “the evidence indicates that Susan was neglected, perhaps because of the mother’s job.”106 A 1943 Readers’ Digest piece titled “Trouble on the Street Corners” built on these themes, placing the blame for perceived increases in girls’ “delinquency” on mothers. After dismissing servicemen from responsibility, since men will be men, the article continued that the “hard fact is that most girls go astray because their mothers are too busy or

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Mother, Worker: Debating Public Responsibility for Child Care after the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Committee on Juvenile Problems, “Summary of Contacts with Social Agencies,” 16 September 1943, folio “Juvenile Problems and Youth Centers Committee, 1943– 1961,” box 21, UCSGM, Milwaukee ARC. See also Committee on the Alleged Increase in Juvenile Problems in Milwaukee County, “Conclusions and Recommendations,” 14 March 1944, folio “Juvenile Problems and Youth Centers Committee, 1943–1961,” box 21, UCSGM, Milwaukee ARC (note the committee’s title change, adding the words “Alleged Increase”); and Wanda Waters to WCCC Board, 9 June 1946, folio “Minutes – Meeting of the Board of Directors, 1942–47,” box 1, WCCC Records, Milwaukee ARC. For reports suggesting that the problem was less severe than claimed, see “Police Note Decline in Delinquency of Minors: Only 5 Girls Arrested over Weekend; Parents Enter Picture,” MS, 5 July 1943; and “Juvenile Arrests Increase, But Situation ‘Not Alarming,’” MS, 1 August 1944. On charges of “maternal neglect” and juvenile delinquency, see: Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women during World War II (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 95; Gilbert, Cycle of Outrage, 32–33; and Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 74. See also: Marilyn E. Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality during World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2008); and Meghan K. Winchell, Good Girls, Good Food, Good Fun: The Story of USO Hostesses during World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). “Peril of Erring Girls Arouses Milwaukeeans: Juvenile Court Heads Alarmed by Increasing Delinquency; Blame Mothers’ Neglect,” MJ, 2 July 1943.

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indifferent to keep them out of trouble.” The author continued, these working mothers who “[are] proudly winning the war on the production line, are losing it on the home front.” In short, activities such as bingo and wartime jobs that drew mothers away from their domestic responsibilities were seen to endanger daughters, the home, and the city itself.107 Along with these concerns about domesticity, charges of irresponsibility, wastefulness, and irrelevance shaped critics’ denunciations of bingo. In mid-1942, the Milwaukee Journal probed these themes in a story about a matinee bingo game. The report began: “It was something of a spectacle, in the midst of war, to see 2,000 hands, expert at knitting and weaving and sewing, waving idly over sets of worn, greasy cards in quest of numbers to win a prize. The war seemed far away, and the long tables in another place only a few blocks away, where other women were rolling bandages, seemed a distant dream.”108 Written at a time when the toll of the war was apparent but the outcome unclear, bingo-playing women were taken to task for their lapse in wartime sacrifice. Although many of the players may have been taking in the bingo game on a day off or just before their night shift, the Journal was quick to reprimand them. The Journal sketched a moral geography of the wartime city, with patriotic middle- and upper-class volunteers in one hall and irresponsible working-class women in the bingo halls. Female duty and order stood in contrast to female negligence and disorder.109 This seemingly muted attack on bingo contrasted the irrelevance of working-class leisure with the purposeful priorities of the

107

108

109

Eleanor Lake, “Trouble on the Street Corners,” Readers Digest 42:253 (May 1943): 44. See also: “Children without Morals,” Time, 5 October 1942, 24; Knapp, “Home Front Maneuvers,” 378–91; and Regina G. Kunzel, Fallen Girls, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 144–65. The WCCC turned again to taverns in 1944, petitioning the Common Council to prohibit children under the age of 18 from entering and restricting 18- to 21-year-olds from entering unless accompanied by a parent or guardian. The group argued that this measure would curb juvenile delinquency “which is to some extent caused by the carelessness of many parents in not providing better atmosphere of recreation for their children than that of loitering in a tavern while the parents become intoxicated.” WCCC Board of Directors, Minutes, 10 February 1944, folio “Minutes – Meetings of the Board of Directors, 192–47,” box 1, WCCC Records, Milwaukee ARC. “Snatch Hours to Play Bingo,” MJ, 6 August 1942. On charges of irresponsibility, wastefulness, and irrelevance, see Lears, Something for Nothing, 247–48. Alan Clive argues: “Social differences hobbled civilian defense, many lower-class people shying away from joining the Red Cross of [Office of Civil Defense]-sponsored units, because the leadership of such groups usually was restricted to the community elite.” Clive, State of War: Michigan in World War II (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979), 91. See the description of upper-class women’s contributions in Marc Scott Miller, The Irony of Victory: World War II and Lowell, Massachusetts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 130–31.

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day. Such working-class distractions, the newspaper insinuated, were detrimental to the city’s war effort and its future. The presumed dangers of this irresponsibility and irrelevance foreshadowed arguments that the Journal and a new coalition of metropolitan reformers would formulate in the early postwar years.110 Gambling – whether policy games, pinball, or bingo – undercut the imagined order of a rational and efficient city. For these metropolitan reformers, people engaged in these cheap amusements exhibited traits of personal inefficiency. At the same time, the presence of petty gambling in the city was both a symptom and cause of a wider social inefficiency. Just as these working-class games were portrayed as distracting and dangerous to the war effort and to the effective functioning of a wartime society, the practices and politics of the working-class city would be seen as dangerously irrelevant to the making of a modern postwar city. Signs of an “outmoded” city – the “worn, greasy” bingo cards as artifacts of the working-class city – served as the counterpoint to visions of urban growth and productivity. A few years later, images of militant unionism, pay-as-you-go city financing, and blighted neighborhoods would be set against depictions of economic growth and liberal pluralism to distinguish the “worn out” working-class city from the modern city. While these conflicts over the 1940s city would move far beyond the bingo halls, the city that had been formed by working-class politics and occupied the center of these gambling debates became the target for an emerging growth politics. Critics also warned that gambling threatened both individuals and the entire urban environment by paving the way for criminals and racketeers. In contrast to District Attorney Steffes’s distinction between legitimate bingo games and illegitimate policy operations, the more thorough-going antigamblers maintained that both bingo and policy fit the bill as illegal and dangerous activities. A 1943 Milwaukee Journal editorial elaborated: “Bingo, regardless of the auspices under which it is played, is in many respects like the notorious ‘numbers’ racket. . . . The first evil of bingo is in what it does to those who play it.” The gambling “instinct,” inherent in 110

The newspaper was not a neutral force in these debates or efforts to remake the city. Letters or statements in defense of bingo, pinball, and policy games appeared in the newspaper, but the Journal’s pages were tilted to the position of the antigambling forces. When the Journal sent its reporters to cover gambling events it considered illicit or illegal, players who resented the newspaper would interrupt the games to point out the presence of a Journal reporter. While the Milwaukee Sentinel and other Milwaukee press also played a role in this issue, the Journal took the lead – as it would in postwar contests about the city’s direction. “Crowd School to Play Bingo,” MJ, 11 April 1942; “Gambling Is Feature,” MJ, 15 September 1947. On newspapers as agents in the making of political culture, see Philip J. Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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games of chance, clouded an individual’s ability to think and behave rationally; it fed the lowest passions, rather than fostering self-control and rationality. While this alone might have constituted sufficient grounds to rid the city of these games, the Journal continued that if “uncontrolled,” such gambling “may lead to gang rivalries and even to bloodshed.”111 A racialized image of the criminal dangers assumed to accompany all gambling, highlighted in the Journal’s reference to policy games, reinforced bingo’s critics’ mission to avert a future of urban disorder. They hoped to steer the city away from danger and deterioration. The official attack on bingo games heated up after Steffes became a municipal court judge, allowing the Republican Governor Walter Goodland to appoint Kerwin as the new district attorney. Kerwin launched an assault against bingo and slot machines in Milwaukee just two weeks after taking the post in the spring of 1943.112 This campaign against Milwaukee bingo was an opening wedge in Goodland’s statewide initiative, culminating in the passage of the 1945 “Thomson Anti-Gambling Law.”113 Kerwin announced plans to squelch bingo and slot machines by summoning the police chief. He mockingly rebuked an appeal forwarded by two state legislators who defended charitable games on the grounds that the women playing bingo were “nice people who like an opportunity to get together and discuss their sons in the service.” Kerwin countered that he would reverse his position only if the legislature changed the laws.114 By the summer of 1943, the D.A. ordered Milwaukee’s big bingo games closed. Bingo players responded to this offensive and to reformers’ alarm as they had to earlier antigambling campaigns. Thousands of Milwaukeeans climbed on buses and streetcars or walked to their favorite bingo halls. Defenders of bingo wanted an inexpensive way to relax, whether from work in the defense plants, from volunteer work, or from caring for 111

112

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114

“‘Charity’ Bingo Again” (editorial), MJ, 22 May 1943. On critics’ perceptions about the dangers gambling posed to rationality and self-control, see Lears, Something for Nothing, 244–47. “War Declared by Dist. Atty. Kerwin Against ‘All’ Slot Machines and Bingo,” MJ, 14 April 1943. Wisconsin’s Republican Party had begun a comeback at the state level in the 1938 election but was divided throughout the war. The antigambling initiative fit with Goodland’s reform agenda for both the state and his Republican Party. He called the 1945 antigambling legislation the “biggest achievement of my career.” Though various forms of gambling remained contested following passage of the bill, it was not until a series of amendments to the state constitution passed by wide margins in the 1960s and 1970s that charitable bingo and raffles became unquestionably legal. Thompson, The History of Wisconsin, 274–75, 401–66, 488–90 [quote on p. 488]; Richard Holy, The Control of Gambling in Wisconsin, Informational Bulletin 156 (Madison: Wisconsin Legislative Reference Library, 1956); and Kasparek, “Void in Wisconsin.” “War Declared by Dist. Atty. Kerwin Against ‘All’ Slot Machines and Bingo.”

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children. The more than 2,000 bingo players who congregated in halls around the city in June of 1943, despite Kerwin’s orders to cease, testified to the strength of working-class cultures in the Milwaukee and the vitality of a vision for the mid-twentieth-century city that eschewed the reformers’ wartime order and the priorities of an emerging growth politics. And on the Sunday evening following Kerwin’s raid, the bingo turn-out was up again to regular levels. The Riverview Rink alone counted a record crowd of 2,480 players. These women and men simply wanted to play bingo and they neither accepted the critics’ arguments nor recognized their authority to close the games.115 The bingo rebels who resisted Kerwin also defended their wartime record. At a time when “Rosie the Riveters” were celebrated for traversing traditional gender boundaries in order to help win the war (while also being warned not to wander too far or for too long), the bingo players asserted their entitlement to these games by stressing the wartime duties they fulfilled and the sacrifices they made. As mothers and wives, they cared for children and husbands. Some sent their husbands, sons, and brothers to war. As workers, many contributed to the war effort in factories, offices, and other workplaces. And as urban citizens and consumers, they pitched in to save scarce resources, cope with rationing, and buy war bonds. They declared that their contributions to the war effort and their sacrifices in this wartime city, individually and collectively, allowed them a few hours of leisure in the places where they could enjoy this modest pastime.116 Helen Thrall’s rejoinder – “Why do our boys have to fight if we can’t play bingo?” – illuminates more than a chapter in the history of bingo.117 Emboldened to flout official dictates because of the long-standing divisions over legitimate and illegitimate gambling, empowered in their claims to this piece of the working-class city they occupied during bingo matinee and evening games, and entitled by their wartime contributions, the bingo rebels protested the district attorney’s incursion. Their dissent mirrored criticisms that the CIO and other working-class organizations mounted 115 116

117

“Order Posts’ Officers to Face Quiz on Bingo.” May, “Rosie the Riveter Gets Married,” 128–43. On the formation of a postwar working-class women’s culture, see Shelley Nickles, “More Is Better: Mass Consumption, Gender, and Class Identity in Postwar America,” American Quarterly 54:4 (December 2002): 581–622. One letter writer expressing mild opposition to petty gambling suggested that Kerwin reconsider his priorities. Instead of battling bingo, he should attack price-ceiling violations: “[W]e’ve got a war on and a price war also. Let’s do the most important thing with our time and money.” Charles Boeshaar, “Letters to the Editor,” MS, 11 June 1943; and Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 179–220. “Bingo Played.” See also “Police Nab Bingo ‘Rebels.’”

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against business and upper-class opponents at this midpoint in the war. An early 1943 CIO cartoon, for instance, satirized upper- and middle-class condemnations of working-class life. In the cartoon, four proper upperclass women, playing bridge with noses in the air, bemoaned the “loafers in war factories” (see Figure 3.2).118 The content and tone of Helen Thrall’s response, issued in a hall filled with bingo players, joined a chorus of working-class claims to everyday autonomy and to power in the city’s broader political and social life.119 Wartime working-class Milwaukeeans spent their leisure hours poring over bingo cards, hoping that luck would allow them to drop a kernel of corn on the next number called. They also played pinball and policy, hoping to win a small prize or a few dollars. These cheap amusements constituted one aspect of midcentury urban working-class culture, as people traveled from their homes and workplaces to play and socialize in bingo halls, taverns, and street corners around the city. Reformers, modernizers, and officials also devoted many hours to these games, aiming to wipe out petty gambling and leisure-time activities that they considered detrimental or dangerous. These games, they believed, represented obstacles to the regeneration of the metropolis. Working-class men and women defended their recreation. Such conflicts contributed to the remaking of urban political culture and the changing meaning of postwar democracy, especially as the abstract demands of metropolitan productivity and modernization were set up against expectations for access and autonomy in urban life. The bingo rebels’ 1943 protest and other gambling controversies point to the contested terrain of culture and power in the city. These wartime gambling conflicts and a range of other 1940s episodes pitted working-class politics against the culture of an emerging growth politics, charting a path to the city’s postwar political culture in which the goals of efficiency and productivity pushed aside not only cheap amusements but also an emerging social egalitarian agenda. Likewise, the campaign to rid the city of policy games painted the Sixth Ward as a criminally tainted black district while putting the city’s expanding black working class under increased scrutiny. The racial divisions reinforced by this campaign – along with the continued effects

118

119

Cartoon, CIO News (Wisconsin ed.), 29 March 1943, 7. On the moral ambiguities of reform, see also the meeting minutes of the WCCC, in which members were encouraged to attend a hearing about the “Pin Ball Machine Ordinance.” Immediately following was a reminder about the next WCCC card party. Minutes of the WCCC meeting, 18 March 1942, folio “Minutes, 1937–1942,” Box 1,WCCC Records, Milwaukee ARC. See Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight; and Chantal Mouffe, “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?,” Social Research 66:3 (Fall 1999): 745–58.

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fi g u r e 3 . 2 Cartoon of upper-class women playing bridge while complaining about war workers. Working-class Milwaukeeans often referred to upper-class women’s bridge playing when they criticized reformers’ assaults on working-class gambling and leisure. CIO News (Wisconsin ed.), 29 March 1943, 7. Reproduced by permission of the Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.

of racism and racial politics in neighborhoods, workplaces, and everyday life – shaped how Milwaukeeans saw their city and understood its geography. These wartime clashes over bingo, pinball, and policy games, along with disputes over housing, public finances, and labor’s power in the city, recast the city and postwar urban democracy.

CHAPTER

4

A Militant CIO Vision for City Democracy: Power, Security, and Egalitarianism

As World War II drew to a close, workers at the Milwaukee-area AllisChalmers plant took up a collection for their employer. They gathered 600 pennies to defray the cost of the steam used to blow the factory whistles when Japan surrendered. After four years of battle, as well as long hours and skipped holidays in a plant that had supplied the war effort (including the Manhattan Project), these United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 248 members resented the company’s “matter-of-fact” plans for its V-J Day observance. Factory whistles and a voluntary unpaid holiday fell short on this “momentous occasion.” As would become increasingly clear over the following months, the company had profited handsomely from wartime arrangements. The workers complained that Allis-Chalmers should commemorate the war effort and the Allied victory more generously, starting with a paid holiday for all employees. Concluding its report on the workers’ six-hundred penny charity drive for Allis-Chalmers, the Wisconsin CIO News noted irreverently: “It has not yet been learned whether this amount covered the cost of steam so carelessly expended.”1 These CIO members had arrived at this end-of-war crossroads ready to challenge their employer over past sacrifices and future directions for Milwaukee. Workers throughout the city and nation cheered the close of the war, pausing briefly before moving onto the postwar world. Celebrations began quickly as word of the victory spread. Many people headed straight to public gathering places. Downtown districts in cities were mobbed. Rose Kaminski, a South Side Milwaukee crane operator whose husband served in the Navy, remembered joining relatives to head downtown. Stopping off 1

“Workers Pay A-C for Steam Used to Blow A-C Whistles,” Wisconsin CIO News (State Edition), 17 August 1945. The company later responded by shutting the plant for a twoday, unpaid holiday.

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fi g u r e 4 . 1 Wisconsin Avenue V-J Day celebration held on 15 August 1945, marking the end of the war. Dennis Wierzba (photographer), “West Wisconsin Avenue and North Third Street, V-J Day Celebration Downtown,” 1945, Dennis Wierzba Negatives, 1941–1957, box 2, folder 2, University of WisconsinMilwaukee manuscript collection 121, UW Milwaukee Digital Collections: uwmmss12100168. Reproduced by permission of the Archives Department, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, Milwaukee.

at “jam packed” neighborhood taverns, they edged their way toward the city center. “The nearer you got to Wisconsin Avenue the more jammed it was. . . . You could not even drive three or four feet and you’d stop and people would get out of the cars, kiss one another, yelling and hollering.” Gene Gutkowski, who grew up on Milwaukee’s North Side amid the adversity of the Great Depression, squeezed off the bus to navigate the crowds “coming from all parts of the city.” By the height of the celebration, a quarter-of-a-million people had gathered downtown to greet the close of World War II (see Figure 4.1).2 They congregated on Wisconsin

2

Rose Kaminski, Interview by Kathy Borkowski, 9 March 1992, Milwaukee, Wisconsin Women during World War II Oral History Project [hereafter WW-WWII Oral History], Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin [hereafter WHS]; Gene Gutkowski, Interview by Kathy Borkowski, 26 March 1992, Milwaukee, WW-WWII Oral History, WHS; and Michael E. Stevens, ed. Women Remember the War, 1941–1945 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1993), 10–24, 134–36, 138. See also: photographs of

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Avenue, just as millions made their way to New York’s Times Square and other city centers. Along with the evident elation and apparent unity of these celebrations, a welter of anxieties, conflicting aspirations, and divisions marked postwar society. The Academy Award-winning 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives captured the blend of celebration and anxiety, as well as melancholy and hope, of this early postwar moment. Anxiety and contention were pronounced in urban industrial centers such as Milwaukee. Wisconsin Avenue, the city’s neighborhoods, housing projects, taverns, bingo halls, bowling alleys, factories, union halls, and polling places were sites of numerous wartime and postwar conflicts and debates. Late-1930s and wartime disputes over public policy and workplace relations shaped these divisions. A persistent housing shortage and tensions over workingclass leisure added to the friction of this era. Now on the edge of the postwar world, people in Milwaukee and communities across the country anticipated their next steps and the future of urban life.3 At the close of World War II, the militant CIO became a significant voice for working-class politics in the industrial city, especially as it aimed to bring a quest for power, security, and egalitarianism into the postwar world. This chapter, after exploring mid-1940s anxieties and aspirations, concentrates on two episodes during early postwar years to illustrate the possibilities and limits of the CIO’s militancy in the civic arena and to examine the way in which its efforts helped to sculpt the discourses of working-class politics. The first postwar Labor Day parade following on the heels of V-J Day gave the CIO an opportunity to link the theme of wartime sacrifice to a vision of postwar security, while also serving as a forum to proclaim labor’s presence and power in the postwar city. The language of egalitarianism also was on display in the parade, but the Labor Day celebration revealed fissures that subverted this goal and sapped working-class strength. A second event took place the following spring in

3

V-J Day celebrations on Wisconsin Avenue in the Dennis Wierzba Negatives, 1941–1957, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee manuscript collection 121, UW Milwaukee Digital Collections; and Dorothy Zmuda, Interview by Kathy Borkowski, 16 June 1992, Stevens Point, WI, WW-WWII Oral History, WHS. The Best Years of Our Lives, directed by William Wyler, RKO Radio Pictures, 1946; John Bodnar, Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 99–101, 128–29. On anxieties and expectations, see: William S. Graebner, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991); Laura McEnaney, “Nightmares on Elm Street: Demobilizing in Chicago, 1945–1953,” Journal of American History 92:4 (March 2006): 1265–99; and Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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the city’s bowling alleys. In this early postwar period, the CIO organized a racially integrated bowling tournament to defy the American Bowling Congress’s “whites only” policies. These games underlined the possibilities of the CIO’s egalitarianism, while also indicating its limitations, as organized labor again demonstrated its role beyond the workplace and sought to open access to working-class recreation. In each case, the CIO’s project to build power, ensure security, and advance egalitarian principles fueled internal tensions and provoked opponents’ ire; but it also charted a course for working-class politics in the city. An overwhelming spring 1946 strike vote by UAW Local 248 and labor involvement in the fall elections raised hopes for further change. But the reaction proved swift and powerful, as local and national business leaders, conservatives, and anticommunist liberals mobilized to challenge labor’s political and workplace power.4 Fears that the conversion from a wartime to a peacetime economy would result in soaring unemployment and a resumption of the Depression weighed heavily on the shoulders of working-class Milwaukeeans. Many people remembered the effects of the post-World War I economic downturn. The mayor of Milwaukee worried that uncontrolled inflation might set off a depression similar to that experienced after World War I “in which thousands of businesses will fail and millions of workers will be laid off.”5 Memories of business and government attacks on organized labor in the wake of World War I, concerns about workers’ continued employment, and efforts to sustain wartime membership gains prompted labor organizations to pay attention to reconversion issues before the war ended. The early push

4

5

On organized labor in midcentury Milwaukee and histories of important workplace conflicts, see: Stephen Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin”: The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900–1950 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Richard L. Pifer, A City at War: Milwaukee Labor during World War II (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2003); Darryl Holter, ed., Workers and Unions in Wisconsin: A Labor History Anthology (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1999); Thomas Gavett, Development of the Labor Movement in Milwaukee (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965); and Robert W. Ozanne, The Labor Movement in Wisconsin: A History (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1984). Other studies offering insights into 1940s labor and urban political culture include: David M. Anderson, “The Battle for Main Street, U.S.A.: Welfare Capitalism, Boosterism, and Labor Militancy in the Industrial Heartland, 1895–1963” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2002); Rosemary Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Joshua B Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: Free Press, 2000); and Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). John L. Bohn, “Statement by the Mayor Endorsing Grocer-Consumer Anti-Inflation Campaign,” 17 July 1945, folio “Statements by Mayor, 1945,” John L. Bohn Papers, Series 081, Office of the Mayor, City of Milwaukee Archives, Milwaukee Public Library [hereafter Bohn Papers, MPL].

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for reconversion planning at the local and national levels, including the establishment of postwar planning committees in many cities, also provided the impetus for organizations’ efforts to weigh postwar priorities and design initiatives. An increase in lay-offs as wartime production slowed kept reconversion on labor’s front burner. Just as the war ended, A.O. Smith laid off about 6,000 workers in order to make the switch to peace-time production; other factories devoted to wartime production simply shut their doors, never to reopen. The threat of joblessness and a hostile economy, as well as a general feeling of insecurity, prompted workers to crowd union meetings and anticipate public action in the first days and weeks after World War II.6 The people in line at Milwaukee’s Unemployment Compensation office in late August of 1945 told similar stories, highlighting concerns about postwar employment prospects. Almost 8,000 workers, a reported increase of 540 percent in just one week, waited to claim jobless benefits. Workers of all stripes faced unemployment: “Standing in line are gray-haired women, World War II vets, wives of servicemen, men with large families.”7 UAW members from the Seaman Body Plant had been unemployed for eighteen months earlier in the war as the company converted to defense production. Now they faced another period without work as the company switched over to peacetime production. Nicholas Profilio, a repairman with Seaman Body for eighteen years, voiced a widely held reaction to postwar unemployment. “This is a fine ‘how-dye-do’ for the fellows who stuck to the job throughout the war. But it’ll be much worse if the situation isn’t cleared up by the time our boys get home.” Jerry Caluccio, who had served the merchant marine on the liberty ships in the North Atlantic, also faced an uncertain future after being dropped from the payroll at Signal Battery Company.8 Signal was closing for good. Workers in Milwaukee were distressed by uncertainty and worry. Would previous work experience or even military experience afford any measure of security? The imminent demobilization and return of thousands of soldiers who also would be in need of jobs raised the stakes for these workers. 6

7 8

On factory closings and layoffs, see Pifer, City at War, 154–56. On the impact of the Depression following World War I, especially on labor, see: Dana Frank, Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). On post-World War II reconversion planning and labor, see: Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1995), 227–64; Andrew E. Kersten, Labor’s Home Front: The American Federation of Labor during World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 189–222; Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). “The Job Mirage,” Wisconsin CIO News, 24 August 1945. “We Want Jobs!,” Wisconsin CIO News, 31 August 1945. The newspaper used these stories to promote the CIO’s planned Labor Day events.

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Women in the unemployment line fretted about their prospects for postwar employment, recognizing their particular vulnerabilities in the postwar job market. Pauline Criplean, a widow, had worked in the photographic darkroom at A.O. Smith. She was laid off on V-J Day and needed to find work soon. She sought a job in a laundry, work traditionally occupied by women, but worried that the employers “don’t want old ladies like me now.” She continued: “Sure I want to work . . . [but] I guess I’m too old, and too fat!” Geraldine Carter, mother of eight children and wife of a disabled World War I veteran, had been let go by Signal Battery in early August. An African-American woman seeking work, she faced both gender and racial discrimination during this period of reconversion. “At Schlitz brewery I was rejected but two white girls behind me in the line were taken.” This left her to take work as a domestic. She earned less than half her pay at Signal Battery, an income insufficient to support her family.9 While some women looked forward to the possibility of exiting from the paid workforce after their husbands or fathers returned from the war, many relied on this source of income. Postwar inflation would make this an even more acutely felt need for many working-class women. One woman with fifteen years of experience at Seaman lamented losing her job. “There are lots of other women like myself who prefer to work in the plant and help our husbands buy the bacon.” She continued, “Anyone who says women are anxious to go back to housework after the war is all wet – at least that goes for a lot of women I know.” Surveys and public opinion polls reflected conflicting views about women’s claim on these jobs, especially in the face of more widespread unemployment at the close of the war, but many women did indeed aspire to stay in the paid workforce despite official and social pressures to “go back to housework.”10 In response to mounting unemployment, the reconversion committee of the Milwaukee CIO Council (formally known as the Milwaukee County Industrial Union Council) worked through the summer of 1945 to develop a program for protecting jobs and living standards. A meeting for all 9

10

“We Want Jobs!” See also: Nellie Wilson, Interview by J. M. Dombeck, 3, 17 August 1989, Women of Wisconsin Labor Oral History Project, WHS; Patty Loew, “The Back of the Homefront: Black and American Indian Women in Wisconsin during World War II,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 82:2 (Winter 1998–1999): 83–103; and Gretchen LemkeSantangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 124–30. “We Want Jobs!” This worker’s husband, who worked at Seaman as a grinder, had seventeen years seniority. See also Pifer, City at War, 123–51; and Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988; rev. ed. New York: Basic Books, 2008), 58–88. On working women’s efforts to retain jobs in the postwar period, see Nancy F. Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935–1975 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).

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Milwaukee-area CIO union officers and executive board members was planned for the evening just before V-J Day in UAW Local 248’s club rooms. Citing estimates that as many as 30,000 area workers might be unemployed in the very immediate postwar period, CIO leaders recognized the enormous strain such dislocations would place on its members and the organization. Working-class neighborhoods and the city would be hit hard.11 The CIO’s Meyer Adelman, speaking on radio station WTMJ, quoted government projections that the nationwide unemployment number might reach eight million by the spring (this excluded returning servicemen). He predicted that by the end of the year 50,000 to 60,000 Milwaukeeans would be without work. Interpreting these statistics and anxieties, a CIO editorial opined: “After fifteen years of tough conditions – ten years of unemployment and depression and nearly five years of terrible war – the people look to the government for security.”12 Working-class memories of wartime and Depression-era hardships, as well as hopes kindled by the New Deal and union militancy, shaped these sentiments. Public demonstrations of labor’s power, including a good turnout for the first postwar Labor Day, would “dramatize the needs of the workers for jobs, security, and a productive era of peace.” While Adelman also stressed the links between production and consumption, arguing that high levels of employment and good wages would sustain purchasing power, his was by no means an argument that labor and corporate interests might find common ground in an expanding consumer society. For Adelman and other CIO activists, labor and business stood at odds with one another and each would use its resources to remake the postwar industrial city.13 Aiming to rally its members behind a platform of full employment and working-class security in the postwar economy, the CIO sought to demonstrate its power publicly in order to counter the enhanced social standing that business had attained over the course of the war. Many employers 11

12

13

Robert Buse, Milwaukee CIO Council President, to Officers of CIO Local Unions, 26 July 1945, folio 5, box 5, Milwaukee County Industrial Union Council Records [hereafter Milwaukee CIO Council Records], Milwaukee Area Research Center, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries’ Archives [hereafter Milwaukee ARC]; Robert Buse, President Milwaukee CIO Council, to All Local Union Presidents, Secretaries, Council Delegates, and International Representatives, 20 August 1945, folio 5, box 5, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC. See also “Heil Company Incites Workers to Strike,” Wisconsin CIO News, 7 Sept 1945, 7. “The Job Mirage”; “Milwaukee CIO Will Lead Fight for Jobs Here, Adelman Tells Radio Audience,” Wisconsin CIO News, 31 August 1945. “Milwaukee CIO Will Lead Fight for Jobs Here.” On the politics of consumption, see: Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 62–165; and Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 179–261.

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had built up substantial profits during the United States’ tenure as the “arsenal of democracy.” Big firms had benefitted disproportionately from wartime production due to economies of scale; the government awarded large-scale defense contracts to large companies, rather than coordinate the activities of many small firms. End-of-the-war and early postwar shifts in production and layoffs also threatened to play to management’s advantage. During the transition from wartime to postwar industrial relations, the typically slow responses of the overworked War Labor Board or the National Labor Relations Board benefitted large-scale of employers over organized labor; businesses often could outlast cash-strapped workers, even in cases in which the union eventually secured a favorable ruling. Union leaders and activists worried that end-of-the-war layoffs might give management and political conservatives the upper hand in postwar labor negotiations and political conflicts. While the cultural legitimacy and economic influence of big business had declined dramatically during the depths of the Great Depression and continued to flounder throughout the 1930s, business rebounded especially during the war. In addition to its leadership in wartime production, concerted public relations efforts by individual firms and business associations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the Committee for Economic Development had an impact. The shape of the postwar order, now on the horizon, remained contested between labor and business.14 The unmatched strike wave of 1945–1946, which swept over Milwaukee and the nation, was an especially visible sign of early postwar upheaval. Word of labor turmoil filled the Milwaukee newspapers. Talk of strikes and labor unrest in industrial America could be heard around the city, fostering pride, disdain, fear, and hope. About 175,000 UAW members began a 113-day strike against General Motors in November 1945. Other major labor actions involved 750,000 steelworkers, 200,000 14

John Gurda, “Profits and Patriotism: Milwaukee Industry in World War II,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 78:1 (August 1994): 24–34; and Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin,” 152–53. On the reconstructed business reputation, as well as profits and tax benefits, see: Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II (New York: Random House, 2012); Mark R. Wilson, “The Advantages of Obscurity: World War II Tax Carryback Provisions and the Normalization of Corporate Welfare,” in What’s Good for Business: Business and American Politics since World War II, eds. Kim Phillips-Fein and Julian E. Zelizer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 16–44; and Andrew Workman, “Manufacturing Power: The Organizational Revival of the National Association of Manufacturers, 1941–1945,” Business History Review 72:2 (1998): 279–317. On the labor boards, see: James B. Atleson, Labor in the Wartime State: Labor Relations and Law during World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 196–217.

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electrical workers, 260,000 packinghouse workers, 280,000 locomotive engineers and trainmen, 400,000 coal miners, and 15,000 Great Lakes maritime workers. Teachers, janitors, municipal workers, and transit workers also took to the picket lines. In the peak year 1946, 4.6 million workers walked out in almost 5,000 strikes throughout the nation. Union members and supporters carried out general strikes in Pittsburgh, Oakland, Houston, Rochester (NY), and other cities. Public opinion teetered between support for labor and support for management during these early postwar months, but often tipped in labor’s favor.15 Milwaukee-area strikes increased in number during the final years of the war and grew in intensity with the close of the war (see Table 1.3). Between 1944 and 1945, “worker days idle” – the cumulative number of work days missed because of the conflicts – jumped more than ten-fold from 23,605 to 298,000. In 1946, this number increased again to 367,000. Over 15,000 workers were involved in strikes in 1945. The tally of workers out on strike reached a postwar high of 16,700 in 1946, surpassed just slightly by the 1939 count. Many of these postwar strikes were protracted disputes at large workplaces. The 329-day strike by UAW Local 248 at Allis-Chalmers, involving initially about eleven thousand workers, shook the metropolitan area and gained national notoriety. Other strikes in the Milwaukee area during the first years after World War II involved public utility workers (Gas Company), telephone workers (Bell), steel workers (Chain-Belt), battery workers (Globe Union), and fabricated metal workers (Geuder, Paeschke & Frey). Later strikes by packinghouse and brewery workers kept labor conflict visible in the city. While a wide range of AFL and CIO unions entered into this flurry of postwar labor turmoil, the more militant challenges and claims arose from a core within the Milwaukee CIO. As these unions and leaders articulated a vision for working-class power in the city and began to take action, they sparked vigorous opposition from the city’s business and other civic leaders.16 15

16

On local coverage of national strike activity, see almost any issue of the daily newspapers during this period. On the postwar strike wave and general strikes, see especially: George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 99–154; David L. Hardisky, “The Rochester General Strike of 1946” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1983); Labor Research Association, Labor Fact Book 8 (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 152–61; Chris Rhomberg, No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 96–119; Irving Richter, Labor’s Struggles, 1945–1950: A Participant’s View (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 47–67; Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 34–46; Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 212–27. Research Clearinghouse of Milwaukee, Milwaukee County, City, Suburbs: A Statistical History of the Community (1950), 73; Darryl Holter, “Milwaukee Labor after World War

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For many in the labor movement, especially those in the CIO, the postwar future held open the possibility of renewed organizing and working-class power. The seemingly innocuous steam-whistle satire at Allis-Chalmers, for instance, allowed union members both to deride the company and to indicate their aspiration for labor’s increased power and control in the workplace. Henry Kraus, labor activist, intellectual, and author of The Many and the Few: A Chronicle of the Dynamic Auto Workers (1947), penned a prologue to his dramatic account of the 1937 sit-down strike at General Motors in Flint, Michigan. Written during the early postwar era, Kraus titled his prologue “1936–1946: A Historic Parallel.” The war had drawn everyone into the international conflict, interrupting the organizing that animated the sit-down strikes and the rapid rise of the CIO just a decade earlier. But the war also had given labor unions a chance to demonstrate their contributions. In Kraus’ estimation, “The essential lineup remains today pretty much the same as it was in 1936.” He continued, “the end of the war reopened the old conflict as labor, fresh from its unprecedented accomplishment during the emergency, found itself faced by a fundamental challenge.”17 Just as workers in 1936 found themselves on the cusp of a contentious organizing campaign, Kraus believed that the postwar workingclass might initiate another surge of organizing to strengthen working-class power. Even organized labor’s opponents, Kraus proclaimed, had to recognize its “new power.”18 While Kraus’s hopes for organized labor’s ability to direct postwar society would soon be dampened, he recognized this as a likely moment of contest and change. Similarly, the UAW Local 248 members who took up the steamwhistle collection and many of the Milwaukee CIO Council’s most active leaders of the early postwar period represented a militant wing of organized labor. They viewed the end of the war as a hinge in history – a time to

17

18

II,” Milwaukee History 22: 3/4 (Autumn/Winter 1999): 95–108; Pifer, City at War, 87–122, 157; and Chapter 1. Henry Kraus, The Many and the Few: A Chronicle of the Dynamic Auto Workers (1947; 2nd. ed., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), xxv. He readily acknowledged this history as a political project: “This book frankly takes its stand in the continuing contest through seeking to assist the working people in acquiring a ‘sense of strength and direction and purpose’” (xxvi). Kraus, an expert on medieval art and architecture, had a long history in labor and left politics, including stints as a labor newspaper editor and as a wartime shipyard worker. “Henry Kraus, Labor Historian and Writer on European Art, 89,” New York Times, 1 February 1995; Nelson Lichtenstein, “Henry Kraus,” in H-Labor, 21 February 1995, archived at www.h-net.msu.edu; and Ruth Milkman, “Henry Kraus, Heroes of Unwritten Story: The UAW, 1934–39,” Contention 4:3 (Spring 1995): 71–75. In contrast, see Katherine Archibald, Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity, new intro. Eric Arnesen and Alex Lichtenstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). Ibid., xxix.

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organize and assert labor’s leadership in the workplace, the city, and society. Militant unionism in the 1940s was driven, in part, by left-wing activists, including Communists. Most of these radical activists were dedicated organizers who had helped to build powerful unions. Most acted out of a primary allegiance to the labor movement, but some did indeed place their party and political convictions first. Allegations of their affiliations with the Communist Party and Popular Front organizations, whether unfounded or true, would become the focus of both in-house battles in the labor movement and sustained attacks on organized labor and progressive groups in just a short time.19 But labor militancy also meant much more than this. Militant and radical currents had a long history in an industrial city such as Milwaukee. The contentious “labor question,” which had animated public deliberations since the late nineteenth century, posed a dilemma: Could democracy and industrial capitalism be reconciled, especially as the size of workplaces grew and employers’ power increased? The Wagner Act and New Deal labor relations, along with wartime arrangements, had brought a degree of resolution, or even complacency, to this contest. But a sizable and vocal cohort of labor activists throughout 1940s industrial America viewed postwar reconversion as a time to test labor’s new-found strength and an opportunity to extend labor’s reach. Could organized labor revive the more radical strains of industrial democracy and move well beyond the factory walls to play an ever greater role in the city and the nation? Could unions such as UAW Local 248 not only fortify the shop floor control they had won through an aggressive grievance and steward system but also expand workers’ power in the city? Or would conservatives, bolstered by passage of the Wisconsin Employment Peace Act of 1939 (the “Little TaftHartley”), as well wartime industrial profits and the rehabilitation of business’s reputation, turn the city and labor relations in a direction that favored management? At this particular moment in the history of the

19

Gavett, Development of the Labor Movement in Milwaukee, 176–97; Stephen Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin.” See also: Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Colleen Doody, Detroit’s Cold War: The Origins of Postwar Conservatism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 19–45; Steve Rosswurm, “Introduction: An Overview and Preliminary Assessment of the CIO’s Expelled Unions,” in The CIO’s Left-Led Unions, ed. Rosswurm (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 1–17; Ellen Schrecker, “Labor and the Cold War: The Legacy of McCarthyism,” in American Labor and the Cold War: Grassroots Politics and Postwar Political Culture, eds. Robert W. Cherny, William Issel, and Kieran Walsh Taylor (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 7–24; Shelton Stromquist, ed., Labor’s Cold War: Local Politics in a Global Context (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); and Zieger, The CIO.

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industrial city, especially after the tumult of the Depression and the uncertainty of the war, labor’s efforts to legitimize and extend urban workingclass power and to establish security for workers and their families were ambitious goals. The sharp distinction drawn sometimes between a “bread-and-butter” job-conscious unionism and a radical community unionism obscures the far-reaching nature of the effort to attain employment security and workplace dignity. Security would soon be cast in the mold of the postwar consumer economy and the Cold War. But militant labor’s efforts to make workers’ lives more secure and stable, which were connected closely to campaigns aimed at building working-class power, need to be understood in the context of this particular time. Security in the 1945-era industrial city did not carry the same meaning as security in a 1950s-era metropolis. Rather than being read as the building block for an inevitable Cold War consumerism, the CIO’s drive for power and security constituted a culture of opposition and alternative path for city democracy that, in turn, influenced the path of growth politics.20 Popular thoughts about security in the mid-1940s were shaped as well by the ideas broadcast in Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 and 1944 State of the Union Addresses. The 1941 address, positioned between the New Deal experience and the United States’ imminent direct involvement in the escalating global crisis, featured FDR’s “four freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. The 1944 speech, given as the end of the war was in sight, outlined a postwar agenda around what FDR titled the Second Bill of Rights. This ambitious platform called for an extension of citizenship rights to include a 20

On Milwaukee’s earlier labor militancy, see: Aims McGuinness, “The Revolution Begins Here: Milwaukee and the History of Socialism” and Eric Fure-Slocum, “Milwaukee Labor and Urban Democracy,” both in Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past, eds. Margo Anderson and Victor Greene (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). On militant 1940s unionism, see: Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin”; Pifer, City at War, 87–122; Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Midwest; Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight; and Charles Williams, “Reconsidering CIO Political Culture: Briggs Local 212 and the Sources of Militancy in the Early UAW,” Labor 7:4 (Winter 2010): 17–43. See also: Freeman, Working-Class New York; and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Class Politics and the State during World War II,” International Labor and Working-Class History 58 (Fall 2000): 261–74. On contests over industrial democracy, see: Nelson Lichtenstein and Howell John Harris, eds., Industrial Democracy in America: The Ambiguous Promise (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Wall, Inventing the “American Way”, 34–62. On workers, liberalism, and consumption, see: Cohen, Consumers’ Republic, 100–91; Kathleen G. Donohue, Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); and Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of a Consumer Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

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decent job and home, as well as food, clothing, medical care, social welfare, and education. Joining especially the freedoms from fear and want, while stitching together the anxieties and aspirations of both the New Deal and the war, the president sought to define a new standard for security. FDR’s 1944 clarion neither ignited a constitutional revolution nor did it initiate an extensive program of postwar social policy initiatives (aside from the targeted G.I. Bill). But it did help to reinforce and legitimize working-class politics during this crucial period of transition to the postwar world. Much as New Deal-era policies, especially the Wagner Act, had energized CIO organizing in the 1930s, this capacious notion of postwar security sketched out by the Second Bill of Rights gave labor unions – especially the CIO – and allied groups a foundation for claims to power and legitimacy in the mid-1940s city. This rendering of security spoke to the fears of a renewed Depression in the postwar years, to the demands for full employment policies, and to the potential for a strong working-class presence in the city.21 Organized labor hoped to take part in a growing postwar economy. Nobody favored, although many feared, a resumption of the Great Depression at the close of the war. But militant unionism did challenge central tenets of the emerging urban growth politics. On the level of policy, militants favored redistribution and economic planning as a means toward postwar growth and greater equality. Many mainstream liberal and conservative proponents of growth politics, in contrast, eschewed these sorts of approaches. They argued that growth alone could raise everyone’s standard of living. Market-based measures to enhance economic efficiency and boost productivity, in the views of these growth advocates, would better serve this end. The 1947 battle between downtown interests and the CIO over a proposed parade ordinance restricting access to Wisconsin Avenue illustrates how this drive for efficiency shaped urban conflicts. And 21

Cass R. Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever (New York: Basic Books, 2004); President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “State of the Union Message to Congress,” Washington, D.C., 11 January 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/ address_text.html; David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 469–70, 784–88; and Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 20–63. On the Four Freedoms, see also: James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Business (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 41–47; and Robert B. Westbrook, Why We Fought: Forging American Obligations in World War II (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2004), 39–65. On the G.I. Bill, see Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, The G. I. Bill: A New Deal for Veterans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Other provisions in the Second Bill of Rights aimed to secure a decent living for farmers and protect against monopolies.

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just as the “cheap amusements” of working-class culture were seen as a blight impinging not only urban virtue but efficiency, militant labor’s demands for planning, redistributional policies, and egalitarian practices were depicted as the antithesis of a more efficient order. This push for efficiency and growth also paved the way for a narrowed political arena. Matters that militant unionists considered fair game for vigorous political debate and contest – from labor relations, to the uses of public space, to municipal policy – were redefined as administrative and technical issues in the lexicon of growth politics. Rather than broad participation, growth advocates cast their vote for a city democracy guided by administrators and business leaders hewing to the demands of efficiency. Coupled to this administrative inclination of growth politics was a pluralist conception of metropolitan and national life. Developing during the war years and early postwar period, this incipient “common sense” of the political order had a complex relationship to working-class politics and militant unionism. On the one hand, pluralists viewed society as a collection of organized interests. A smoothly functioning pluralism relied on an assumed consensus, rather than conflict over fundamental values. As they imagined, this should be a political process in which all interests could be heard and “legitimate” interests could be accommodated. The 1951 Labor Day parade, in which labor marched as just one of many interests in the city, showcased this type of pluralism. This image of diverse interest groups concurring about basic social arrangements, which infused growth politics, stood in sharp contrast to 1940s labor militants’ depiction of a society divided by class, in which the relations between organized labor and organized capital would remain antagonistic. The distinction between these views of the city and its political process sharpened as the war drew to a close, straining the claims of pluralism. Most importantly, the big industrial firms that profited disproportionately from the war economy – many of which employed workers organized by CIO unions – now strove to rehabilitate their public reputations after the lows of the Depression. Militant CIO unions that also had expanded in the wartime economy were now ready at the close of the war to confront these employers. But the pluralism promoted by proponents of growth politics could have contradictory consequences within this history and in some ways even helped smooth the path for the class-based organizing favored by militant labor. Versions of wartime pluralism, for instance, promoted interethnic unity. These built on a New Deal-era Americanism that lowered barriers separating second and third generation immigrants, especially those of different European ethnic groups. In the 1940s, the CIO expanded on the “culture of unity” that had been key to its successes in the 1930s. Within the armed services, unions, workplaces, and the city, as well

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as in cultural forms such as wartime movies, immigrants and their descendants were defined as “Americans” rather than being identified first as members of distinct immigrant communities. Many unions with ethnically and racially diverse memberships exited the war expecting more of a voice in city and national matters; labor and its members gained a tighter hold on citizenship. With claims of entitlement springing from a wartime culture of sacrifice, they demanded a share of postwar rewards. At times this pluralism transcended racial lines, animating especially the demands of black workers who had served during the war. Often, however, this midcentury pluralism resulted in an even sharper line being drawn between white and black residents of the metropolis. Whites who earlier had been classified as immigrant workers sought to claim the privileges of whiteness. In short, pluralism would prove to be a crucial ingredient to postwar democracy, but its impact was complex and contingent.22 Divisions in the city that called into question the social and ideological basis for pluralism stemmed from many sources, but the emerging conflict between working class politics and growth politics helps to make sense of critical antagonisms, anxieties, and aspirations as Milwaukeeans faced the postwar future. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the AFL and the Social Democrats had aligned and briefly took the reins of city government (see Chapter 1). Despite considerable opposition, this labor-socialist coalition put its mark on municipal policy and helped to form a working-class politics that reconfigured the city’s political culture during the first half of

22

On interests, liberalism, growth, and pluralism, see: Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs?: Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961); David Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Alan Wolfe, American’s Impasse: The Rise and Fall of the Politics of Growth (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 24–32. On cultures of unity, Americanism, and pluralism, see: Shana Bernstein, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth Century Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Robert L. Fleegler, “‘Forget All Differences until the Forces of Freedom Are Triumphant’: The World War IIEra Quest for Ethnic and Religious Tolerance,” Journal of American Ethnic History 27:2 (Winter 2008): 59–84; Gary Gerstle, “The Working Class Goes to War,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, eds. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 105–27; Nelson Lichtenstein, “The Making of the Postwar Working Class: Cultural Pluralism and Social Structure in World War II,” Historian 51 (1988): 42–63; and Wall, “Inventing the American Way.” On white workers’ racialized Americanism, see especially: Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 129–76; and David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

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the century. This strand of working-class politics continued to play a role in civic conflicts from the 1930s to the 1950s, often but not always locked in battle with growth politics. Milwaukee’s militant CIO during the middle years of the 1940s hammered out elements of a working-class politics that challenged but also shaped growth politics. Just as a “militant minority” had spurred labor activism in earlier eras, the militant wing of industrial unionism constituted an important base for working-class politics in the midcentury city. Although not dominant numerically, the leaders and members of these CIO unions exercised considerable influence in the wartime and early postwar city. They cultivated an assertive and defiant working-class presence in the city, inciting other union members and allies to action while widening rifts with skeptics and opponents both inside and outside of the labor movement. They provoked especially strong reactions from employers and conservative leaders; much of the anger directed against the militant CIO, of course, stemmed from fights and grudges. This militant minority’s work could be observed in many arenas of midcentury city life – from workplace disputes, to housing and development issues, to questions about social provision and urban policy, to contests over working-class leisure and culture. The militants called for greater workers’ control and autonomy, the enactment of rank-and-file democracy, unhindered access to public places, and the development of public policies and programs to benefit a wide swath of the working class. Labor’s militant leadership quickly became the target of intense attacks, but labor stayed active locally. This was made clear, for instance, in labor’s combative defense of public space during the 1947 Wisconsin Avenue parade ordinance controversy, which occurred shortly after militant activists in the Milwaukee CIO Council and UAW Local 248 had been critically undermined. Unionists still saw organized labor as a power to be contended with, in the workplace and the city.23 Voices of labor militancy were heard in many union halls during the 1940s, but UAW Local 248 and the Milwaukee CIO Council were notable for their level of engagement and for the ambitious vision of city democracy they presented. Key leaders in these groups displayed impressive organizational skills and brought a range of political and personal experiences to the table. Most importantly, they were deeply invested in the

23

On the “militant minority,” see: David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 2; and Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 177. On the diminished impact of the still larger AFL, see Darryl Holter, “Sources of CIO Success: The New Deal Years in Milwaukee,” Labor History 29:2 (Spring 1998): 223–24.

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project of building strong working-class organizations that, they hoped, would have the power to shape life inside and outside the workplace. Meyer Adelman, born in Poland, had been a business agent with the AFL’s Cooks and Pastry Cooks Union in Chicago. He joined the CIO’s Steel Workers Organizing Committee in 1937, continuing to work in the Great Lakes region. As an organizer for the Fansteel sitdown strike, Adelman was arrested and jailed after a lengthy police pursuit. He then helped organize the steel fabricating industry in Milwaukee and eventually became both the District 32 director for the United Steelworkers and secretary-treasurer of the Milwaukee CIO Council. Harold Christoffel, who was the child of Swiss immigrants and schooled at an early age in socialist and radical politics, grew up in Milwaukee. His family struggled to make ends meet after his father’s early death. The teenage Christoffel became an electrical apprentice at Allis-Chalmers in 1929, where he soon chalked up his first organizing experiences by bringing together apprentices and then the electrical shops. He was instrumental in forming an industrial union at Allis-Chalmers, helping to found the CIO-affiliated UAW Local 248. As first president of this powerful and militant local, Christoffel also assumed the presidency of the newly formed Milwaukee CIO Council in 1937 when he was just twenty-five years old. Robert Buse, who took over when Christoffel left for the Army in 1944, brought his involvement with the 1930s Farm Holiday Association to bear during his time as a labor leader. All three of these leaders, who worked closely with radical and left-wing activists during the 1930s and 1940s, would later be attacked as fellow-travelers or as members of the Communist Party. These and other leaders who had organized Milwaukee’s industrial unions also helped CIO unions and the CIO Council extend their reach into politics, policy debates, recreation, and the city’s associational life. Internal divisions and struggles within particular unions and central labor body, of course, prevented any single voice from speaking for all of organized labor. But late-wartime and early postwar episodes also point to a coherent militant CIO vision.24 24

“Meyer Adelman Dies in Milwaukee,” Pittsburgh Press, 17 April 1948; George Patterson, “Draft of Autobiography,” book #1, 156–66, folio 6, box 6, George Patterson Papers, Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, Illinois; Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin,” 4–15, 148; Holter, “Sources of CIO Success,” 207–11; Sigmund Diamond, “On the Road to Camelot,” Labor History 21:2 (1980), 280. On central labor bodies and “metropolitan unionism, see: Stuart Eimer, “From Business Unionism to Social Movement Unionism: The Case of the AFL-CIO Milwaukee County Labor Council,” Labor Studies Journal 24 (Summer 1999): 63–81; and Colin Gordon, “The Lost City of Solidarity: Metropolitan Unionism in Historical Perspective,” Politics and Society 27:4 (December 1999): 561–85. The Fansteel strike led to a 1939 Supreme Court decision that would undercut the sitdown strategy.

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This militant CIO working-class politics took shape around three main goals: power, security, and egalitarianism. First, the CIO aimed to establish itself as a force in city life, the workplace, and the world. Recognizing power and conflict as essential elements of politics, the CIO sought to build and demonstrate its organizational clout on the urban landscape in order to advance its vision for the postwar city. Second, security became a core concept for labor activists. But security did not mean inertia, nor did it mean a narrow unionism focused solely on wages and the status quo. Rather, this was an ambitious security that meant achieving workingclass access to housing, jobs, and urban places for leisure or political expression. More often than not, this security also required an activist state. The CIO confronted the prerogatives of private capital and sought a greater public role in directing the economy, as evidenced in housing battles and in the early postwar demands for full employment. Fears about the return of economic depression at the end of the war and hopes for secure employment occupied the CIO at the local and national levels. Third, the CIO’s antidiscrimination ventures and a more far-reaching egalitarianism briefly moved the challenges of urban racism to a top spot on the postwar agenda. Black and white union activists rallied against racial discrimination and inequalities in housing, in workplaces, in bowling alleys, and in other public spaces. In some cases, union leaders and members made halting steps to recognize gender inequalities. But these initiatives were limited by the persistence of white racism and male privilege within the labor movement and in the city more generally. A history of formal and informal exclusion of black workers and women from unions and from better jobs in workplaces, as well as the more widespread practices of racial and gender discrimination in American society (often codified through policy and enforced through intimidation and violence), subverted these efforts to define labor as an engine for egalitarianism.25 25

On racism in Milwaukee-area unions and workplaces, as well as the CIO’s efforts to address inequalities, see: Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 147–95; and Paul Geib, “From Mississippi to Milwaukee: A Case Study of the Southern Black Migration to Milwaukee, 1940–1970,” Journal of Negro History 83:4 (Fall 1998): 229–48. On hate strikes, see Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 69–95. On racism and egalitarianism in labor unions and labor-led coalitions, see: Eric Arnesen, “Up from Exclusion: Black and White Workers, Race, and the State of Labor History,” Reviews in American History 26:1 (March 1998): 146–74; Paul Frymer, Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Roger Horowitz, Negro and White, Unite and Fight!”: A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930–1990 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 75:3 (December 1988): 786–811; David Lewis-Colman, Race against Liberalism:

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Along with internal tensions and disputes, CIO unions faced ongoing opposition from the outside. If the militant CIO leaders encountered racism within their ranks, opposition to their efforts to lower or remove racial barriers was felt even more acutely from outside institutions and organizations (for example, the real estate industry) that both disagreed with the CIO’s stance and refused to accept the group as a legitimate player in the civic arena. Likewise, business and conservative groups touting the values of the market bristled at the CIO’s advocacy of a postwar political economy that featured assurances of working-class security and extensive public action. Over the course of the late-1930s and the war years, industrialists, business leaders, political conservatives, and other opponents had recognized the CIO’s increasing role and power in the city. In the inaugural 1943 issue of the Downtown Merchantman, for instance, the Downtown Association spoke of the need to counteract the CIO’s “far reaching influence” over local issues by amplifying business’s voice in politics.26 The stakes were raised in the early postwar years when attacks on Communists, radicals, and militants became more pervasive and damaging. In particular, an early postwar strike by UAW Local 248 at AllisChalmers and the 1946 elections intensified anticommunist politics locally and nationally. These developments undermined the CIO’s platform of power, security, and egalitarianism which, in turn, recast the contest between postwar working-class politics and the ascendant growth politics. Just two weeks after the V-J Day celebrations downtown, Labor Day in 1945 provided a forum for the Milwaukee CIO to declare its presence in the city, broadcast its agenda, and display its power. Milwaukee CIO Council secretary-treasurer Meyer Adelman called on members to make this “the most significant Labor Day in history.”27 The Milwaukee CIO made plans for a big parade through the city and a rally. To reach its

26

27

Black Workers and the UAW in Detroit (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Roediger, Working toward Whiteness; and James Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). On gender inequities and egalitarianism, see: Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). Milwaukee Downtown Association, “Dollars Have No Vote,” Downtown Merchantman 1:1 (15 March 1943), in folio “D,” Bohn Papers, MPL. “CIO to Hold Huge Labor Day Rally on Labor Day,” Wisconsin CIO News, 17 August 1945. On Labor Days more generally, see Michael Kazin and Steven J. Ross, “America’s Labor Day: The Dilemma of a Workers’ Celebration,” Journal of American History 78 (1992): 1294–323.

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ambitious goal of a twenty-thousand-person turnout, the CIO council expected to distribute over thirty thousand leaflets and take to the airwaves to reach union members and their families. Planners also hoped to enlist labor’s supporters and allies, including farm, civic, and veterans’ organizations.28 Publicity aimed to boost turnout included posters placed in shop windows (especially in the heavily unionized South Side), advertisements printed in the Milwaukee Journal’s popular “Green Sheet,” and a sound truck sent around to address workers during their lunch breaks. To spur interest in the parade, the organizing committee suggested offering a prize to the local union with the highest percentage of its membership marching in the parade. The CIO’s leadership also proposed that two people, paid by contributions from local unions, should be assigned to full-time organizing for the event. The CIO’s turnout goal was not out of reason. Large numbers of union members had attended recent events, including ten thousand people at a union picnic earlier that summer in Pleasant Valley Park (on the western edge of the working-class South Side, just south of West Allis). Billed as a family event, the picnic had featured food, dancing, games, an amateur show, and war bonds as prizes. The parade would pick up on similar social, patriotic, and political themes, but cast these in the light of the postwar world.29 Local CIO leaders contended that the size and visibility of the Labor Day gathering would be an indication of workers’ anger over employment cutbacks in these early stages of peacetime reconversion. “Reports have been pouring in from dozens of Local Unions,” the CIO News commented, “that workers are indignant over the mass layoffs and the unwillingness of most companies to act quickly on reconversion problems.” Locals from the United Automobile Workers, the United Steelworkers, the United Electrical Workers, and the State, County and Municipal 28

29

“CIO to Hold Huge Labor Day Rally on Labor Day.” On the efforts to organize supporters, see for instance Hy Cohen, Milwaukee CIO Council Executive Assistant, to Otto Reiss, Wisconsin Federation of German-American Societies, 17 August 1945, folio 5, box 5, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC. Labor Day Parade Committee minutes, ca. 21 August 1945, folio 5, box 5, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC; Motion, ca. August 1945, folio 5, box 5, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC. The Milwaukee Journal’s “Green Sheet” was a popular four-page insert that included human interest and humorous stories, regular columns, comics, puzzles, and word games. A “Dear Joe” column was added during the war after the newspaper learned that thousands of Milwaukeeans were sending copies of the “Green Sheet” to friends and relatives in the Armed Services. Will C. Conrad, et al., The Milwaukee Journal: The First Eighty Years (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 116–18. On the picnic: Hy Cohen, Executive Assistant, to Milwaukee War Price and Rationing Board, 20 July 1945, folio 5, box 5, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC; County CIO Picnic flyer, ca. June 1945, folio 4, box 10, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC.

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Workers especially stressed concerns about economic turmoil and called for local and national policies that would provide for postwar security.30 Neither the timing nor the geography of the CIO’s Labor Day march and rally were accidental. As in some other industrial cities, early postwar Labor Day celebrations revived, even if just briefly, the practice of using this holiday to demonstrate working-class power in the city and to announce labor’s political agenda. For the Milwaukee CIO, the Labor Day that stood at the threshold of the postwar era offered such an opportunity. The CIO aimed to march thousands of union members down Wisconsin Avenue, past tens of thousands of supporters and spectators. Members and supporters would then assemble at Juneau Park, a popular lakeside gathering place named for city founder Solomon Juneau.31 By claiming these prominent places at the center of the city – these sites of significance – the CIO intended to make its presence felt and its collective power visible. Further, by invoking symbols of wartime sacrifice and patriotism throughout the parade and rally, the CIO staked out a place for militant unionism at the center of American political culture. Harry Virgil, chair of the planning committee, clearly saw the Labor Day events as a strategy for legitimacy and power in the postwar city. “This demonstration,” he underscored, “has the same purpose behind it that a general strike would have in a period when labor was called upon to use that weapon to protect its interests.”32 Such claims echoed Henry Kraus’ observations about labor’s insurgency in the wake of World War II. With this parade and other early postwar actions, labor sought to grab the initiative and begin to shape a course for the postwar city. In the early afternoon on Labor Day, union members and leaders gathered on the edge of Milwaukee’s downtown just west of the Public Library. Beginning at 2:00 p.m., the marchers headed east along Wisconsin Avenue and ended at the Lincoln Memorial Bridge (see Figure 4.2). The parade, led by UAW Local 75, the Army and Navy Union Drum Corps, and flags, also included floats, five bands, and contingent after contingent of union members. All of the Milwaukee area CIO unions participated. An

30

31

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“Thousands to Call for Jobs in Labor Day Protest Rally,” Wisconsin CIO News, 24 August 1945. Kazin and Ross, “America’s Labor Day,” 1320; John Gurda, The Making of Milwaukee (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 1999), 23–38, 316. “CIO to Hold Huge Labor Day Rally on Labor Day.” On postwar labor’s militant action see: Holter, “Milwaukee Labor after World War II”; Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin”; and Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight. On such sites in the city, see John R. Parkinson, Democracy and Public Space: The Physical Sites of Democratic Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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fi g u r e 4 . 2 The Milwaukee CIO’s 1945 Labor Day parade led by the UAW Local 75 contingent, marching down Wisconsin Avenue. Edmund Eisenscher (photographer), “Milwaukee Labor Day Parade on Wisconsin Avenue,” 3 September 1945, Milwaukee, Edmund Eisenscher Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. Image no. WHS-3214. Reproduced by permission of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO and the Wisconsin Historical Society.

estimated eighty-five hundred to ten thousand people marched in the parade, with another sixty thousand people lining the streets to watch the parade. The turn-out far exceeded the CIO’s stated goal. The CIO rally that followed later in afternoon drew about five thousand union members and friends who remained to hear speeches, eat, and mingle in Juneau Park. The AFL also held a rally that day, with about five thousand people gathered in Washington Park for music, games, and speeches.33

33

Hy Cohen, Executive Assistant, to John W. Polcyn, Chief of Police, 1 September 1945, folio 1, box 6, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC; Robert Buse, President Milwaukee CIO Council, to Local Union Presidents, Secretaries, Council Delegates, and International Representatives, 20 August 1945, folio 5, box 5, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC; Hy Cohen to Jerome Dretzka, Commissioner of the Milwaukee County Park System, 29 August 1945, folio 5, box 5, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC; Minutes of the Milwaukee County Industrial Union Council, 5 September 1945, Folio 1, Box 6, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC; “Labor Is on the March, CIO Tells Public on Labor Day,” Wisconsin CIO News, 7 September 1945; and “Parade, Rallies Mark Holiday,” Milwaukee Journal [hereafter MJ], 4 September 1945.

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The CIO parade mobilized young and old union members, some who had spent the first half of the 1940s on the homefront and others who had been on the front lines. The UAW Local 248 contingent, for instance, included workers hired by Allis-Chalmers during the war for defense projects, other members who had served in the armed forces, and longtime union activists. Local 248 and other unions pointed especially to the recently returned soldiers in the parade. While veterans had been affected deeply by their experience in battle or on the supply lines, their new identities as veterans did not translate into disavowals of union loyalties. Some unionists, for instance, who continued to receive union newspapers and correspond with fellow union members while in the armed forces, returned from the war with a strong working-class allegiance and heightened postwar political expectations. They carried these sentiments into renewed working-class claims in the workplace, the city, and the nation.34 Also taking part in the parade were mainstays of the labor movement, such as devoted Local 248 member Stanley Korade. Croatian by birth, he had been active in revolutionary movements in his homeland and involved with the union since its early days at Allis-Chalmers. Father of two daughters and a son who served in the U.S. Navy, Korade had regularly attended union meetings and events for many years and now served as a committeeman.35 Korade and his fellow workers walked down Wisconsin Avenue behind American flags that Local 248 members had purchased at the beginning of the war to fly at the Allis-Chalmers plant. Such symbols of wartime patriotism were tied closely to a history of defense production, to workers’ claims about their sacrifice, and to anxieties and expectations about the postwar period. Making reference to the wartime no-strike pledge and wartime production achievements, while also expressing anxiety about postwar unemployment and economic turmoil, one sign read: “We Kept Our Pledge–Is Our Payoff a Layoff?” CIO members

34

35

See, for instance: letters from CIO members in the armed forces in folio “General Correspondence, 1943,” box 2, UAW Local 248 Records, Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan [hereafter Reuther Library]; and Rubin Kaufman (State, County and Municipal Workers of America-CIO) to Milwaukee Common Council, 29 November 1945, file 83460, City Records Center, City Hall, Milwaukee. See also: Jennifer Brooks, “Unexpected Foes: World War II Veterans and Labor in the Postwar South,” Labor 7:2 (Summer 2010): 27–52; and Shelton Stromquist, Solidarity and Survival: An Oral History of Iowa Labor in the Twentieth Century (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 155–56. Korade was hit by an electric switch car near his home and died a few days after Labor Day. “Veteran Committeeman Dies Tragically,” Wisconsin CIO News, 7 September 1945; “They’re Still Talking about Labor Day in Milwaukee,” Wisconsin CIO News, 14 September 1945.

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expected that postwar society, both public-sector and private-sector, should be structured to acknowledge and compensate workers for their wartime sacrifices and sweat. Messages in the parade made clear that militant union members understood reconversion as a time not only for vigorous government action but also for a private sector that would be responsive to labor’s needs. One marcher demanded “End the Sit-Down of Industry,” while another exclaimed “See Here, Private Enterprise, We Want Jobs.” These and other marchers placed responsibility on the private sector, demanding employment rather than a replay of the severe economic retrenchment that had followed the previous global war. These words also highlighted the intense distrust between organized labor and management. Summing up labor’s message, one Local 248 marcher proclaimed, “This ought to give the big boys an answer.” Using language with a strong populist cast, CIO members and leaders contrasted an era of wartime sacrifice with a postwar city of sharply conflicting interests. For the militant CIO, an organized working class would have to stand up to selfish private interests.36 UAW Local 75 set a pace for the parade by connecting closely the anxieties of reconversion with the demand for postwar security and full employment. Members of Local 75 worked at the Seaman Body Plant, a company that had retooled from truck and auto to aircraft-related production during the war. Seaman Body workers had experienced a lengthy layoff period when the plant had converted to defense production. They especially were eager to see the transition to peacetime economy run smoothly. Their float, appearing early in the parade, collapsed the popular memories of World War I’s aftermath and the Great Depression with a replica of a gigantic apple topped by a sign proclaiming “World War I – A National Disgrace.” Reminding parade marchers and spectators of preNew Deal days at the start of the Depression – a time of private sector failure and government inaction – this symbol of economic struggle and uncertainty lent urgency to the question spelled out on a banner: “Are we coming back to 60 million jobs or must we also sell apples?” Marching with a unit of the Army and Navy Union (a long-time veterans’ organization), Local 75 member Roy Webb emphasized “[t]hat we as veterans, are not separate from our local union.” Veterans and workers called for jobs and security as entitlements of postwar citizenship. United Steel Workers (USWA) Local 1527 from Chain Belt also tied the wartime experiences of

36

“Jobs – Not Apples, Milwaukee Workers Demand,” Wisconsin CIO News, 7 September 1945; and “They’re Still Talking about Labor Day in Milwaukee.” Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 135–63; and Williams, “Reconsidering CIO Political Culture.”

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the “soldier in the field” to those of the “soldier in the factory,” championing “Jobs for All Servicemen.” Anxieties about postwar economic turmoil and demands for economic security brought together wartime workers and working-class veterans.37 Responding to fears of a renewed depression, real and anticipated job loss during the period of reconversion, rising costs that eroded purchasing power, and a growing attraction to Keynesian economics, the national CIO placed full employment and security at the center of its end-of-the-war agenda. In particular, the national CIO’s widely publicized reconversion proposal calling for “sixty million jobs” provided a foundation for attention to postwar security and full employment. This demand for broad public action spoke to workers returning from the armed forces and to those who had entered or remained in factories and other workplaces during the war.38 A parade honoring the armed forces, the Allies, and homefront workers for the global military victory would also serve as the forum to advance “full employment, adequate security of jobs, decent housing in which to live and adequate social security . . .” as the program to ensure victory at home.39 The sacrifice and unity of the wartime effort justified these ambitious postwar policies. But the scale of wartime mobilization also had shown what American society might be capable of in peacetime: “To the last minute in the war we mobilized an all-out effort for production for victory.” CIO leaders continued, “We must continue the same all-out effort for production for peace.”40 The Allied victory, to

37 38

39

40

“Jobs – Not Apples, Milwaukee Workers Demand”; and Pifer, City at War, 13. On the CIO’s postwar agenda, including full employment, see: CIO, Final Proceedings of the Seventh Constitutional Convention of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (1944); Walter P. Reuther, “Reuther Challenges ‘Our Fear of Abundance,’” New York Times Magazine, 16 September 1945, 8, 32–35; Zieger, The CIO; Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 558–72; Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995). See also: Brinkley, End of Reform; Cohen, Consumers’ Republic, 114–29; and Alonzo Hamby, Beyond the New Deal: Harry S. Truman and American Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 3–28, 53–85. “CIO Hails V-J Day,” Wisconsin CIO News, 17 August 1945. This issue of the newspaper printed a letter signed by leaders of the Milwaukee CIO Council (Robert Buse and Meyer Adelman) and the Wisconsin CIO Council (Thomas White and Mel Heinritz) accompanied by a detailed chronology of the CIO’s wartime activities (including politics, production, and community work). “CIO Hails V-J Day.” On the languages of wartime sacrifice and unity, see: Lary May, “Making the American Consensus: The Narrative of Conversion and Subversion in World War II Films,” in The War in American Culture, 71–102; Gerstle, “The Working Class Goes to War”; Mark H. Leff, “The Politics of Sacrifice on the Home front in World War II,” Journal of American History 77:4 (March 1991): 1296–318; and Westbrook, Why We Fought, 39–91.

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which union members had made key contributions, opened the way to a postwar world in which organized labor’s voice and proposals merited attention. Much as the Allis-Chalmers workers contributing to the steam fund had turned the wartime politics of sacrifice into a postwar call to arms, CIO leaders anticipating the parade claimed a place for labor in shaping the city and the nation. The parade’s focus on postwar economic anxieties and security also gave CIO activists a platform from which to address opponents. Advance publicity for the parade included responses to civic and business leaders who the CIO claimed had ignored or slighted the economic and political hurdles workers faced during this transition. Wisconsin’s Republican Senator Alexander Wiley, for instance, had tried to dismiss the severity of postwar unemployment by saying that only “old folks, teen age youngsters, and married women” would lose jobs and most would do so voluntarily. For the CIO, this severely understated the problem. By late August thousands of workers stood on line seeking work, including plenty of people from each of the three groups Wiley had dismissed. The parade and subsequent organizing put pressure on political leaders and Congress to take action on full employment proposals.41 The anticipated parade and political action also aimed to counter the many resources and arguments that business leaders were marshaling against a range of public policies, including economic controls, planning, and full employment. In an emergency meeting of USWA District 32 in Milwaukee, Meyer Adelman stressed the importance of political organizing during the reconversion period. Railing against companies that anticipated exploiting the shift to peacetime production to cut wages, lay off workers, and smash unions, Adelman called for a vigorous endorsement of full employment and the rest of the CIO’s six-point program for reconversion and economic security, which included a minimum wage increase, unemployment compensation, and a guaranteed annual wage.42 At the rally following the parade, Adelman reiterated these points, taking aim at Fourth District Congressman Thaddeus Wasielewski, who opposed the full employment bill and spoke against an extension of unemployment insurance during reconversion. He outlined his vision for the CIO’s political role: “To us political action means mobilizing manpower and womanpower around issues that mean something to workers, to small 41 42

“The Job Mirage”; “We Want Jobs!” “Steel Unions Mobilize to Win Jobs and Security,” Wisconsin CIO News, 31 August 1945; “Milwaukee CIO Will Lead Fight for Jobs Here”; “The Job Mirage.” See also: Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise; Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Zieger, The CIO, 212–27.

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businessmen, to farmers, to the community as a whole. We want full employment, an annual wage, security, day nurseries, [and] better schools.”43 Likewise, Jack Kroll, assistant to CIO-PAC head Sidney Hillman, urged a late-August gathering of state and local activists at Milwaukee’s Pfister Hotel to take on the nitty-gritty work of precinct level politics to further labor’s agenda of jobs and security. He charged that business and conservative groups were engaged in a propaganda war “to establish in our minds the thought that full employment is impossible in America in peacetime.” He continued, “[t]he CIO refuses to accept this philosophy and holds to the position that if we can plan for full employment during wartime, America is rich enough to give full employment for everyone who wants to work for it.”44 For the CIO, then, this period immediately following V-J Day marked a time to put the spotlight on re-emerging conflicts in American society and to take on those forces and interests that threatened their vision of how postwar society might be structured. From the recent history of wartime sacrifice and unity (however partial or incomplete) to victory over the Axis, labor and its allies now had to attend to the contested postwar order. Labor organizers and activists faced the task of shifting from the wartime language of sacrifice and unity to a peacetime language of expectation and conflict. Writers for the Wisconsin CIO News distilled this political shift in their Labor Day publicity: “The day which rightfully should be used as a celebration of the nation’s greatest military victory over world fascism which could have not been possible without the all-out effort of American labor, has, instead, been turned into a sober affair, where thousands of jobless workers will make demands for jobs, decent wages, and a chance for a secure and peaceful life.”45 In this parade, the CIO aimed to demonstrate a record of wartime sacrifice while also making known its power in the city. The working-class politics that was on parade during this first postwar Labor Day featured vigorous public initiatives designed to provide security for workers and their families. A parade intended to convey unity and solidarity also can become a setting to witness tensions and fragmentation. Most marchers in this parade, whether veterans or homefront workers, appear to have been white men. But women and African Americans also were present. The particular roles they played in the parade, however, suggest the limits of 43 44

45

“Labor Is on the March, CIO Tells Public on Labor Day.” “State PAC Goes Into Action,” Wisconsin CIO News, 31 August 1945. On the CIO-PAC, see: James Caldwell Foster, The Union Politic: The CIO Political Action Committee (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1975); William H. Riker, “The CIO in Politics, 1936–1946” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1948); and Zieger, The CIO, 181–88. “Thousands to Demand Jobs on Labor Day,” Wisconsin CIO News, 31 August 1945.

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the CIO’s midcentury egalitarianism. While CIO newspapers and other organizational publications printed stories and surveys about women hoping to hold onto the production jobs or other posts they had obtained during the war, women in the parade were placed frequently in supporting roles and overshadowed by men who were featured as workers and veterans. Women in the USWA Local 1527 contingent, for instance, were characterized as servicemen’s wives accompanied by children – evoking images of labor families that had sacrificed during the war – despite the recent experience of wartime female production workers at Chain Belt. For instance, Rose Kaminski, who just a couple of weeks earlier had spent V-J Day celebrating in downtown Milwaukee, had run a crane at Chain Belt to help produce barrels for howitzers. But such contributions received scant notice in the parade. UAW Local 75’s Women’s Auxiliary marched beside the union and veterans’ units, “showing how union wives organize to fight labor’s battles on the community scene.”46 In this transition to a postwar society, such women would indeed play an important part in the CIO’s anti-inflation and consumer campaigns. On the one hand, this broad CIO agenda that embraced community and consumption issues, along with workplace and political contests, evinced a vital and wide-reaching labor movement. On the other hand, the narrowly defined gender roles displayed at this early postwar juncture constrained the CIO’s egalitarian message and strategy. For instance, labor’s icons of male virility and female domesticity resembled those adopted by business leaders to promote urban development, pointing to a cultural language that organized labor and organized capital shared in the postwar city. Further, where did women fit in calls for full employment?47

46

47

“They’re Still Talking about Labor Day in Milwaukee.” On women’s production work, see: Pifer, City at War, 123–51; Stevens, Women Remember the War, 9–48; Kaminski interview, WW-WWII Oral History, WHS; and Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Gender Segregation by Sex during World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). See also “Women Want to Work after the War, Gov’t Survey Shows,” Wisconsin CIO News, 10 August 1945. On the anti-inflation campaigns and women’s roles, see: Marie Anne Laberge, “‘Seeking a Place to Stand’: Political Power and Activism Among Wisconsin Women, 1945–1963” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1995), 116–61; “Mass Meeting to Save Price Control, Sept. 14,” Wisconsin CIO News 7 Sept 1945, 2; “Keep Controls Labor Urges,” Wisconsin CIO News 24 Aug 1945, 3; and “Why There Is No Meat: 2200 Milwaukee Workers Join Picket Lines to Get Living Wage,” Wisconsin CIO, 18 January 1946. See also: “Controls: 1918 and Now,” MJ, 27 October 1945, 4; Steven Kalgaard Ashby, “Shattered Dreams: The American Working Class and the Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1949” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1993), Chapter 8; and Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics, 179–261. On labor’s masculine imagery and women’s marginalization, see: Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle; and Alice Kessler-Harris, Gendering Labor History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).

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A group of mothers and children in the parade, marching along with nursery school teachers, advocated for wartime child care facilities to remain open during the postwar period. These nurseries had been founded during the war as a result of the Lanham Act. Despite Milwaukee’s slow start in addressing working-class mothers’ child care needs, these centers had enabled many women with younger children to enter the paid workforce and contribute to wartime production. One of the nurseries featured in the CIO News shortly before the parade was the interracial Tenth Street School in the Sixth Ward. The CIO described it as a place that fosters democracy and tolerance: “Every working mother has a right to expect this type of low-cost care for her child. Every man in uniform deserves the right to this protection for his children.”48 So while the nursery school parade contingent itself reinforced the image of women as mothers for whom domestic duties were primary (that is, men did not join this contingent as fathers), the policies advocated here suggested alternative routes. Continuation of child care would represent an extension of New Dealstyle social programs into the postwar era and, in the case of the Tenth Street School, would provide an institutional anchor for racial egalitarianism. Even more directly, access to these nursery schools would allow women with small children to take on postwar jobs. In this case, then, while the nursery advocates in the parade were labeled as mothers, their demand for child care also spoke to their status as workers or potential workers. Men, of course, could be cast in the parade solely as workers, unionists, or veterans. For women in the parade, their past or future identities as workers had to be tied to, or was in a sense dependent upon, their roles as mothers or wives.49 In addition to being presented as mothers, wives, and auxiliary members, women and girls were exhibited in the parade as objects of beauty and entertainment for those watching from the sidelines. Majorettes and color guard units, possibly daughters of union members, made their way down Wisconsin Avenue. USWA Local 2181 wheeled a crane and shovel, on loan from one of the businesses that employed these workers, down Wisconsin Avenue. Inside the shovel sat a “pretty girl” adorned with the

48 49

“Act Now – To Save Our Nurseries,” Wisconsin CIO News, 24 August 1945, 5. “Jobs – Not Apples, Milwaukee Workers Demand”; “Act Now – To Save Our Nurseries”; “Nursery School Must Become an Integral Part of Our School System,” Wisconsin CIO News, 7 Sept 1945, 7. Fees at the Tenth Street School had jumped from fifty cents to seventy-five cents per day as funds had gotten tighter. On child care, see: Susan E. Riley, “Caring for Rosie’s Children: Federal Child Care Policies in the World War II Era,” Polity 26:4 (Summer 1994): 655–75; and Emilie Stoltzfus, Citizen, Mother, Worker: Debating Public Responsibility for Child Care after the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

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sign “Labor, Management Agree – Here’s the Product You Can See.”50 Whereas female defense workers such as Kaminski had operated cranes inside factories producing weapons for the battlefront, the parade presented women in ways that conformed to a depiction of femininity tied to domestic and sexual roles but allowing little space for seeing women as workers. Such appeals to a conservative gender hierarchy, which had co-existed uneasily with strains of wartime egalitarianism, both undermined the class militancy evident in other facets of the Labor Day event and belied women’s recent experience as employees in the workplace and members of the union. Over the next few years, businesses and unions pushed women out of the waged workplace, especially those jobs that women had gained access to during the war. At the same time, anticommunism intensified and labor militancy or cultural experimentation became dangerous politically and personally. In the midst of these changes, the possibility of identifying oneself as a female worker and a union activist became more difficult, even though women soon reentered the waged workforce and some women strove to claim a place inside industrial unions.51 Also on display in the parade was a complex mixture of racial egalitarianism, black solidarity, and white racism. Just as the parade planners sought to garner support from veterans and the public by making recently returned servicemen visible in the parade, the CIO aimed to underscore its commitment to racial equality and stem antagonisms between white and black workers by highlighting black workers’ and residents’ inclusion in the ranks. Black industrial employment had increased notably during the war. Now African-American unionists and supporters had a pronounced, if limited, place in the Labor Day parade. The Milwaukee CIO played a prominent role throughout the 1940s in challenges to racial divisions and white racism in the city. Principle and strategic considerations guided many of these actions. The left-wing UAW Local 248 led many of these efforts, but numerous CIO leaders and members participated in the various campaigns: from confronting residential segregation in public and private housing; to organizing the Milwaukee Scottsboro Defense Committee in 1937; to fighting 50 51

“They’re Still Talking about Labor Day in Milwaukee.” Daniel Horowitz, “Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America,” American Quarterly 48:1 (March 1996): 1–42; May, Homeward Bound; Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement; and Dennis A. Deslippe, “Rights, Not Roses”: Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945–80 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 19–34. After Chain Belt, Rose Kaminski took a job at Harnischfeger, where she worked until 1946 and then again from 1950 to 1981. Stevens, Women Remember the War, 146.

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discriminatory hiring practices during the war; to advocating for a local Fair Employment Practices Committee. Some of the CIO’s work in Milwaukee built on the agendas of Popular Front organizations such as the National Negro Congress or took cues from national labor committees and groups such as the national CIO Committee to Abolish Racial Discrimination. Much of the work was defined and carried out by local coalitions, including the CIO-organized Interracial Labor Relations Council and the Joint Action Committee for Better Housing.52 And much of this work stemmed from close attention to local incidents and conditions. The CIO Council, Local 248, and other CIO leaders responded to specific racial conflicts and ongoing patterns of unfair treatment toward African-American workers. For instance, Local 248 activists questioned the higher prices black workers were charged for beer in taverns where CIO members gathered. Bartenders claimed they had to cover the cost of throwing out beer glasses that had been used by black customers. Local 248 took on this issue, refusing to meet where black and white union members were treated differently.53 The CIO also acted when they perceived that employers, realtors, or other opponents were exploiting white racist sentiments to achieve conservative ends in Milwaukee or to break up local Popular Front coalitions. Labor leaders rightly understood these as battles for white and black workers’ loyalties, for position in the city, and for egalitarian principles in not just the workplace and political arenas but in Milwaukee’s neighborhoods, streets, and places of leisure. The geography of race in the city served, in part, to define black participation in the parade. While some black unionists may have marched with their unions or veterans’ units, the African-American parade participants receiving the most attention walked together as the “Sixth Ward Contingent.” Likewise, a group of African-American children watching the parade, wearing stickers with the slogan “60 Million Jobs,” were identified in the CIO News as “children from the Sixth Ward.” In contrast,

52

53

Trotter, Black Milwaukee, chaps. 5, 6; Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin,” 124–26; Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin, Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 229–30; “Plan to Help Negroes Adopted at Labor Rally,” MJ, 14 June 1943; and Program for the Interracial Committee of the Urban League and C.I.O., ca. April 1943, folio 4, box 3, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC. On the Interracial Labor Relations Council, see: William V. Kelley (Urban League) to Meyer Adelman (Milwaukee CIO), 8 April 1943; “V Mass Meeting” flyer, 13 June 1943; and Invitation to Mass Meeting, 3 June 1943 - all in folio 3, box 4, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC. See also: Erik S. Gellman, Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); and Zieger, The CIO, 155–60. Harold Christoffel, Interview by Dale E. Trelevan, 27 January 1982, Nashota, WI, Wisconsin Labor Oral History Project, WHS.

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white children pictured in the same issue of the newspaper escaped specific racial or spatial labels. This close association of urban space and race – in which “Sixth Ward Contingent” equaled “black marchers” and Sixth Ward children meant African-American kids – was not without some grounding. It reflected important elements, albeit in a summary fashion, of the way that residential segregation shaped the city. The use of these labels also echoed popular perceptions of race in the city. Although the CIO News celebrated the presence of both black and white children in the Labor Day festivities, the newspaper’s accounts of the day repeated a familiar formula of inclusion and separation that was embedded in the parade itself. The racial egalitarianism that characterized this event both incorporated black unionists, their families, and other African-American allies into the parade and it marked their participation as distinctive.54 The CIO News described the black men, women, children, union members, veterans, small business owners, and professionals gathered for the parade as a “community on the march,” echoing the familiar phrase of industrial unionism “labor on the march.” Members of the Sixth Ward contingent carried signs that proclaimed many of the same themes articulated by other working-class city residents. Wartime sacrifices and accomplishments, including military service and involvement in bond drives, were linked closely to postwar expectations: “Our Daddies Helped Lick Hitler and Tojo, Give Us A Square Deal.” Black workers also raised numerous local issues, including the dire need for better and more housing in the Sixth Ward and surrounding districts, as well as other older working-class wards. National issues received considerable attention. African-American marchers advocated the long-sought elimination of poll taxes, which would enable black voters to exercise political power throughout the country. Demands of “jobs for all” could be read as an endorsement of both organized labor’s full employment plank and African-American activists’ wartime and postwar campaigns to open up good jobs to black workers. The CIO, black union activists, the NAACP, and the Urban League had been at the forefront of efforts to secure a local fair employment practices ordinance and to aid the national FEPC. These efforts continued in the postwar period. Many of the signs that black workers carried reiterated the demands raised by the March on 54

Joe Trotter notes the significant racial dynamics in this parade. Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 175; “Jobs – Not Apples, Milwaukee Workers Demand”; photographs in “The CIO on the March,” Wisconsin CIO News, 7 September 1945; and Genevieve G. McBride and Stephen R. Byers, “The First Mayor of Black Milwaukee: J. Anthony Josey,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 91:2 (Winter 2007–08): 10. See also Joseph Heathcott, “Black Archipelago: Politics and Civic Life in the Jim Crow City,” Journal of Social History 38:3 (Spring 2005): 718, 725–26.

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Washington Movement, the Double Victory campaign, and other wartime organizing campaigns, translating these into postwar expectations.55 In many respects then, the CIO’s and black marchers’ agendas meshed closely. The racial egalitarianism that local CIO activists trumpeted led to black inclusion in these Labor Day festivities, both a programmatic and a physical presence. For many African-American workers and allies, the CIO’s militant unionism appeared to be a viable strategy for stability and security in the midcentury city. The power of industrial unionism and the principle of racial egalitarianism, even if applied unevenly and tarnished by white racism within the labor movement, offered working-class black activists a path forward. However, the simultaneous separation and inclusion of African-American workers in the parade’s Sixth Ward contingent highlighted the complex interplay of class solidarity and racial separation in the 1940s city. The separate “Sixth Ward contingent” can be read as evidence of racial segregation, with the parade operating as a microcosm of the city’s racial dynamics. The inclusion and relatively high profile of black workers in the parade, on the other hand, demonstrates the prospects for a multiracial labor activism. At the same time, the racially distinct parade contingent might indicate the attraction of “race first” strategies. For black participants in this overwhelmingly white event, racial solidarity may have

55

“The CIO on the March”; Edward Levinson, Labor on the March (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938; reprint, Ithaca: ILR Press, 1995); Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 162–75, 199; “Jobs – Not Apples”; “Milwaukee Man Is First Bond Buyer in Drive,” Chicago Defender, 5 February 1944; “Honor Plaque Is Dedicated: ‘Bluejacket’ Negro Band Plays as Roll Bearing 850 Names Is Unveiled,” ca. 1945, newsclipping on Reel 3, Milwaukee Urban League microfilm, Milwaukee ARC. On wartime and postwar employment discrimination battles, see also: Andrew Edmund Kersten, Race, Jobs, and the War: The FEPC in the Midwest, 1941–46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 31, 69–72, 141; “Stop Race Discrimination, Big Munitions Firms Told,” MJ, 13 April 1942; correspondence and reports in folio “Allis Chalmers,” box 72, and folios “Harnischfeger,” and “Heil,” box 81, Committee on Fair Employment Practices (Record Group 228), Region 6, National Archives, Great Lakes Region, Chicago; “New Drive Opened for Permanent FEPC,” Wisconsin CIO News, 4 January 1946, 3; “Attend Parley to Save FEPC,” Wisconsin CIO News, 18 January 1946; “Asks for City Law on FEP,” MJ 5 March 1946, 4; “1946 Political Action Program,” Wisconsin CIO News, 26 April 1946; “Strong FEPC Ordinance Needed People Tell Council,” Wisconsin CIO News, 10 May 1946, 1; and “FEP Bill Passed by Milwaukee Council,” Wisconsin CIO News, 17 May 1946, 8. See also: Henry Lee Moon, Balance of Power: The Negro Vote (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1948), 132–73; Richard M. Dalfiume, “The ‘Forgotten Years’ of the Negro Revolution,” Journal of American History 55:1 (June 1968): 90–106; Christopher S. Parker, Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle against White Supremacy in the South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Kevin M. Schultz, “The FEPC and the Legacy of the Labor-Based Civil Rights Movement of the 1940s,” Labor History 49:1 (February 2008): 71–92; and Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008).

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offered some level of physical and social protection, especially in the context of a city and labor movement in which the dangers of white racism were ever-present. A race-based politics also held out the hope of building institutional and political power within the labor movement and the city that, in turn, might reap benefits of full employment and access to employment. This simultaneous inclusion and separation of African-American workers in the parade, read in conjunction with both the CIO’s larger antidiscrimination agenda and the mobilization of Milwaukee’s AfricanAmerican community on a range of labor and urban issues, delineates the possibilities and limitations of militant labor’s racial egalitarianism.56 Yet this compromised demand for racial egalitarianism, tied to a vision of working-class power and security in the city, stood in contrast to the diminished role that the CIO would play six year later in the 1951 Labor Day parade down Wisconsin Avenue. Along with the 1945 Labor Day parade, the CIO sought to display and enact its vision for postwar Milwaukee, especially the place of egalitarian principles in working-class politics, in the city’s bowling alleys. CIO unions were involved, of course, in a wide range of leisure activities. Local 248, for instance, sponsored a stamp collectors’ club and held dances and card parties in its recreation hall most weekends.57 Sports, along with other forms of leisure, had long occupied a place in union culture. In part, these were a natural extension of friendships and shared interests springing from workplace and neighborhood ties. But labor-sponsored teams and leagues also were a strategic challenge to the company-sponsored teams that had been a tactic of welfare capitalism. Organized labor and companies vied for workers’ loyalties inside and outside the workplace. Entering the postwar period, many unions recognized the need to intensify these

56

57

On black working-class organizing, racial solidarity, and interracialism, see: Michael K. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); William P. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 151–80; Clarence Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936–75 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); Lewis-Colman, Race against Liberalism; Daniel Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1978–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and Andor Skotnes, A New Deal for All? Race and Class Struggles in Depression Era Baltimore (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). On racial divisions in labor and working-class culture, see: Nelson, Divided We Stand; Frymer, Black and Blue; Roediger, Working toward Whiteness; and Patrick Jones, The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 9–31. “Are You a Stamp Collector,” Wisconsin CIO News; 15 March 1946; Advertisement for “Club 248” (Local 248’s Recreation Center, 8111 W. Greenfield Avenue) in Wisconsin CIO News, 15 March 1946, 6.

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extracurricular efforts, both to win workers’ allegiance and to secure more firmly their legitimacy as a major voice in society and politics. Victor Ziegler, president of United Electrical Workers’ Local 1131 at the Louis Allis plant, noted that postwar unions would need to function “at a higher level than ever before.” He continued, “If we are to win the struggle on the bargaining front and the bigger struggle on the political front, we’ve got to have a greater number of active participants in union affairs.”58 Committees involved in a range of political, social, and leisure pursuits would be crucial to this expansion and to the project of developing a cohort of secondary leaders. This also provided the impetus behind the idea of the “lighted union hall,” featured especially in the work of the UAW’s recreation department. Labor leaders at the national and local levels recognized that conflict lay ahead, just as business leaders and conservatives looked expectantly at the early postwar years as a time to claim a larger role in directing American society. Leaders and activists in militant CIO unions, in particular, championed a capacious social unionism. This looked like a moment when organized labor could claim a leading role in shaping American society. Divergent approaches to attain this postwar role divided CIO leaders. Some national-level labor leaders contended that organized labor could become a major voice in the postwar political economy by building on the gains and model of wartime corporatism. This approach, which called for a powerful national leadership and a quiescent rank-and-file, gained traction especially after conservative victories in the 1946 elections. A different path to social unionism was blazed by CIO activists at the local level. These unionists hoped that a working-class politics committed to egalitarianism, security, and democratic participation in all aspects of city life could strengthen labor’s public legitimacy and enable it to steer the postwar order. Aside from workplace issues, midcentury housing controversies proved to be an important arena for labor to articulate these aspirations and build this type of politics. Leisure activities were another. Bowling gave the CIO an opportunity to put racial egalitarianism front and center in an activity that engaged the rank-and-file.59

58

59

“Badger CIO Roundup,” Wisconsin CIO News, 15 March 1946, 7. On welfare capitalism and contested loyalties in the 1930s, see Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 159– 211. For the postwar period, see also Sanford M. Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism since the New Deal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). On the “lighted union hall” and social, or civic, unionism, see: Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise, 108–57; Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Midwest; and Alan Derickson, “Health Security for All?: Social Unionism and Universal Health Insurance, 1935– 1958,” Journal of American History 80:4 (March 1994): 1333–356. On national-local

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Bowling was a popular sport in working-class Milwaukee, a city known to many as “America’s Tenpin Capital.” Milwaukee may have held the distinction as the city with the most bowlers per capita. In the early twentieth century, bowling often was associated with the overwhelmingly male and working-class world of saloons. But during the decades of Prohibition and the Depression, the game became a widely accepted recreational activity and even a sport in its own right. Bowling leagues, which had sprung up during the 1930s, were organized by ethnic and religious organizations, employers, and unions. By the midcentury years, over twenty million Americans bowled. It had now gained a middle-class following – attracting both men and women – and had spread to the suburbs. The urban bowling alley, nevertheless, maintained a strong connection to working-class culture throughout the 1940s. It was a place to gather, share a beer, and play with fellow workers and neighbors. The sport also, of course, would continue to carry strong working-class connotations in depictions of twentieth-century American popular culture.60 Like most leisure activities, bowling was tightly segregated. In bowling’s case, racial separation was enforced by the American Bowling Congress (ABC), an organization that standardized the rules for competitive bowling, certified players’ rankings, and regulated equipment for this growing game. Founded in 1895 in New York City, the ABC eventually set up its headquarters in Milwaukee. It became the main body to sanction leagues and tournaments, which made compliance with ABC rules important for alleys that hoped to attract players regularly and cash in on the increasingly lucrative league play. Bowlers had an incentive to participate in ABCsanctioned leagues and tournaments; this was how their scores would be

60

dynamics in the CIO, see Nelson Lichtenstein, “From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, eds. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 122–52. Doug Schmidt, They Came to Bowl: How Milwaukee Became America’s Tenpin Capital (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2007); Paul-Thomas Ferguson, “Leisure Pursuits in Ethnic Milwaukee, 1830–1930” (Ph.D. diss., Marquette University, 2005), 130–34; and Steven A. Riess, City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 76–81. On working-class leisure and bowling, see also: Robert Bruno, Steelworker Alley: How Class Works in Youngstown (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1999), 49–61; and Peter Rachleff, “The Dynamics of ‘Americanization’: The Croatian Fraternal Union between the Wars, 1920s-30s,” in Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience, eds. Eric Arnesen, Julie Greene, and Bruce Laurie (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 357. See the observation that “approximately 75% of the members of bowling leagues in Minneapolis are also member of labor unions.” That percentage may have been even higher in Milwaukee. Minutes of meeting, Minneapolis Area Committee for Fair Play in Bowling, 3 November 1947, folio “Minneapolis Regional Bowling Comm., 1947–1949,” box 3, William Oliver Papers, Reuther Library.

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recognized and ranked by the national association. By the mid-twentieth century, the ABC had a firm grip on how people bowled and how bowling alleys operated.61 In 1916, the ABC’s annual convention amended the group’s constitution to restrict membership and participation in ABC sanctioned play to “white males only.” The newly founded Women’s International Bowling Congress (WIBC), a parallel organization for female bowlers, also instituted strict racial restrictions. Under the guidance provided by the ABC and the WIBC, white men and women could bowl in the same alleys and sometimes played together, especially as family play increased. But league and tournament games were gender-segregated, separating out male and female competitive play. Most alley owners, acting to comply fully with ABC and WIBC rules and avoid the risk of losing the governing bodies’ sanction, shut out “nonwhite bowlers” even during the hours of nonleague play. This exclusion, of course, also reflected the alley owners’ racial prejudices and their perceptions about white customers’ racism. Such perceptions were not unfounded, pointing to a sharp segregation in bowling alleys that persisted with only limited enforcement. Hence, mixed-race league bowling was both banned officially but almost unthinkable for many bowlers and alley owners.62 As was the case for a segregated society more generally, black and other “nonwhite” bowlers had limited options of where to play; those few alleys that opened their doors were generally of lower quality. Black bowlers in Milwaukee probably frequented alleys found on and around Walnut Street in the Sixth Ward, the center of midcentury African-American cultural life. One bowling alley on the near-South Side, however, also opened its doors to black bowlers. Johnny Geldon’s South Side Arcade hosted the Bronzeville Classic. The alley sponsored a league for black men on Sunday mornings, while black women played on Saturday afternoons. Other venues for the growing Bronzeville Bowling Association would include the Sport Bowl alleys on North Avenue and Century Hall, for a contest between the Bronzeville All-Stars and the Milwaukee Industrial 800 League.63 61 62

63

Schmidt, They Came to Bowl, 43–47. Arthur Gelb, “Bowling Congress of ‘Whites Only’ Faces Ban throughout the State,” New York Times, 19 January 1950; Lewis-Colman, Race against Liberalism, 20–21; and Schmidt, They Came to Bowl, 149–50. On segregated recreation, see also Victoria W. Wolcott, Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). “Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” Chicago Defender, 10 November 1945, 11A; V. C. Bevenue, “Milwaukee News,” Chicago Defender, 22 December 1945, 9; V. C. Bevenue, “Milwaukee News,” Chicago Defender, 23 February 1946, 11; Schmidt, They Came to Bowl, 152–53, 229; William Albert Vick, “From Walnut Street to No Street: Milwaukee’s Afro-American Businesses, 1945–1967” (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1993).

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Milwaukee’s Bronzeville Bowling Association affiliated with the National Bowling Association, formerly the National Negro Bowling Association (NNBA), in early 1946. The NNBA was created in 1939 by African-American bowlers, with strong backing by black union activists. The group, dedicated to the principles of democracy and sportsmanship, aimed to promote bowling among African Americans, organize competitive play, and advocate for equality. The NNBA’s first national tournament was open to men only, but the second competition was open to women as well. An earlier challenge to the ABC and WIBC policies of racial exclusion was launched in Hawaii in 1936 when alley owners sought to make an exception to the whites-only clause in “outlying possessions.” Later, the Japanese American Citizens League mounted a direct protest to the exclusion of Asian-American and other nonwhite bowlers. Other organizations that joined the charge against the ABC included the B’nai B’rith, the Catholic Youth Organization, the NAACP, the UAW, and other CIO unions. Many local organizations also expressed their objections and sought ways to reverse the discriminatory practices in bowling. While some groups took a cautious approach, leery of alienating white members and moderate allies, others sought immediate reversal of the ABC’s policy. Detroit’s left-wing UAW Local 600, with a substantial African-American membership employed at Ford’s River Rouge plant, decided to boycott ABC leagues during the last years of World War II. They tried but failed to convince the UAW’s executive board to go along with the strategy. By the end of the war, the discriminatory clauses in the ABC’s constitution had attracted the attention of a number of civil rights, labor, and left-leaning organizations, especially in the urban industrial north.64 Opposition to the ABC’s discriminatory policy intensified in these cities during and soon after World War II as black workers continued arriving to find jobs in industrial workplaces. Many of these industries had been organized recently by CIO unions. While a broad coalition of organizations and political and community leaders would come together eventually to defy the ABC’s discrimination in bowling, industrial unions frequently 64

V. C. Bevenue, “Milwaukee News,” Chicago Defender, 19 January 1946, 10; V. C. Bevenue, “Milwaukee,” Chicago Defender, 29 December 1945, 9; Patricia L. Dooley, “Jim Crow Strikes Again: The African American Press Campaign against Segregation in Bowling during World War II,” Journal of African American History 97:3 (Summer 2012): 270–90; Alexandra Epstein, “National Bowling Association,” in Organizing Black America: An Encyclopedia of African American Associations, ed. Nina Mjagkij (New York: Garland Publishing, 2001), 425–26; Lewis-Colman, Race against Liberalism, 33–34; Schmidt, They Came to Bowl, 149–55; John C. Walter and James H. Rigali, “The Integration of the American Bowling Congress: The Buffalo Experience,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 29:2 (July 2005): 7–43. The NNBA was renamed the National Bowling Association in 1944.

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took the lead and became catalysts at the local and national levels. Most probably did so responding to black workers’ insistence that this issue be addressed, as was the case in Detroit. This, of course, was also the dynamic behind CIO unions’ attention to employment discrimination. Black workers began demanding fair treatment in employment and recreation. Some CIO leaders also viewed this as a strategic issue that could help to solidify black workers’ loyalties to an interracial union. Others understood this as a matter of justice. In the spring of 1946, Milwaukee’s bowling alleys became a focus for the CIO’s ambitious midcentury efforts to enact a more capacious urban democracy. The local CIO Council organized a full-scale bowling tournament to protest directly the American Bowling Congress’s “white males only” policy. Much of the CIO’s and the public’s attention centered on the ABC’s racially exclusive stance, but the tournament organizers also pointed to the restrictions that women faced in tournaments. As the Wisconsin CIO News’s bowling columnist Dick Stoll wrote, “The ABC’s exclusion of women and Negroes from recognition as eligible contestants in open competition reflects an attitude that is bigoted, dogmatic and discriminatory and entirely out of harmony with democratic principles.”65 Over five hundred teams – about 2,500 bowlers in total – took part in the competition. The roster included seventy-five teams from the United Automobile Workers’ Local 248 (Allis-Chalmers), fifty from UAW Local 75 (Seaman Body), thirty from the United Steel Workers of America Local 1114 (Harnischfeger), and twenty-five from the United Electrical Workers’ Local 1111 (Allen-Bradley). In a show of organizational pride and unity, the UAW regional director Joseph Mattson, accompanied by state and city CIO leaders, rolled the first balls of the tournament. The opening round of the competition included a pair of African-American steelworkers “who came through with the third highest score for doubles.”66 This was actually the “second annual CIO Handicap Bowling Tournament,” but it generated considerable attention because of the CIO’s open defiance of the ABC’s “whites only” policy. With entry fees set at five dollars for teams, two dollars for doubles, and one dollar for singles, the CIO “invited both Negro and White players to participate in the tournament on an equal basis” to compete for prizes.67 Male and 65 66

67

Dick Stoll, “Down Your Alley,” Wisconsin CIO News, 29 March 1946. “Huge CIO Bowling Tourney off to Flying Start without ABC’s Sanction – and Jim Crow Policies,” Wisconsin CIO News, 22 March 1946; “CIO Bowling Tourney Is On!,” Wisconsin CIO News, 15 March 1946. See also William F. Thompson, The History of Wisconsin, Volume VI: Continuity and Change, 1940–1965 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1988), 328–29. “CIO Bowling Tourney Is On!”

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female bowlers competed in separate men’s and women’s divisions, but within the same tournament. While the ABC appeared at first to offer “verbal assurance” that it would not penalize players in this competition, the association refused subsequently to accept the CIO’s violation of its constitution. As a result, the CIO was forced to quickly recruit and train score markers who could officiate the competition. By taking part in this tournament, CIO bowlers, whether competing in teams or individually, risked being barred from future ABC-sanctioned play and endangered their chances of being listed in ABC rankings. These threats made by the national body were indeed substantial disincentives for serious bowlers. But CIO bowlers went ahead with the tournament.68 While CIO members headed to the bowling alley primarily to have fun, by participating in defiance of ABC rules they also indicated support for the CIO’s postwar agenda. By organizing this competition, the CIO underscored both its commitment to racial egalitarianism and its ambitious institutional goals. The CIO aimed, of course, to build power, especially in the workplace. That alone was an ambitious task. But in its midcentury vision of workingclass politics, the CIO also strove to establish itself as an influential player in the everyday life of the city. Policies and practices affecting recreation and leisure were fair game for organized labor. The CIO tournament was played in full or in part at Vliet Street Recreation, located at 2513 West Vliet Street. This was located in a denselypopulated district (more than twice the city average), with a large workingclass population made up especially of operatives and factory workers. The area right around the alley was still overwhelmingly white but adjacent to areas of the Sixth and Tenth Wards that were home to rapidly growing African-American populations. The ten-lane bowling alley sat near the western edge of the Second Ward, within easy reach of at least four major streetcar lines. Two bus lines were just three blocks away. As a transit crossroads, both black and white working-class Milwaukeeans would have passed daily through the neighborhood. Many workers also might have transferred back and forth between the north-south and the east-west streetcar lines at this point. Whether on the buses and streetcars passing through this area, or on the streets around the Vliet Street Recreation Center, or even some of the commercial establishments along the main thoroughfares, black and white Milwaukeeans experienced regular encounters in this district. While some interracial contact suggests familiarity, some likely caused friction. In any case, within the walls of Vliet Street Recreation

68

“Huge CIO Bowling Tourney off to Flying Start without ABC’s Sanction”; Stoll, “Down Your Alley”; and Lewis-Colman, Race against Liberalism, 20–21.

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Center in the spring of 1946, organized contact and cooperation between white and black workers became politically charged.69 In its extensive coverage of the tournament, the Wisconsin CIO News attacked both the ABC’s Jim Crow policies and its unwarranted control over working-class recreation. CIO bowling writer Dick Stoll articulated many of these arguments against racism and monopoly power in his “Down Your Alley” column. He decried “the ABC’s contention that the Negro is not naturally attracted to bowling,” pointing to the example of black bowlers on UAW Local 575’s Team Number 5.70 The ban against integrated play compared badly with the recent change in professional baseball after the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson for the 1946 season. This left bowling and the ABC’s ban as a conspicuous next target. Stoll lashed out especially at the ABC “despots” for their exclusionary policies that flew in the face of the “culture of unity” that the midcentury CIO still sought to build, even if inconsistently, in workplaces and in the industrial city. Especially galling to the CIO was the power that a private organization such as the ABC held in determining how and where city residents, including CIO members and their families, could spend their leisure time. “The ABC stranglehold and monopolistic policy-making concessions of a sport as popular as bowling cannot go unchallenged,” Stoll exhorted.71 He and other CIO leaders moved easily between the language of racial egalitarianism and antimonopoly politics, proposing to invoke the Sherman Anti-Trust Act against the ABC and its discriminatory policies. The bowling alley had become the site of a contest for power, as the CIO advanced a two-prong strategy consisting of the racially integrated tournament and the group’s threatened use of antimonopoly legislation. The first line of attack presented an organized alternative to the presumed power of the ABC, whereas the second threatened to bring the power of the state to bear against the ABC. The structure of the tournament and the thrust of the CIO’s coverage indicated local activists’ claim that labor, rather than the ABC, held greater legitimacy in helping to organize working-class leisure and neighborhood life. The tournament and the experience of bowling together would help to acculturate CIO members to an imagined future of

69

70 71

Before 1930, the Vliet Street Recreation Center had been called Hoyer’s Recreation Parlor. “CIO Bowling Tourney Is On!”; Schmidt, They Came to Bowl, 228; H. Yuan Tien, Milwaukee Metropolitan Area Fact Book: 1940, 1950, and 1960 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), 188–92; and The Transit Co., Transit Guide: Milwaukee Metropolitan Area (1946), in folio “x-y-z, 1946,” Bohn Papers, MPL. Stoll, “Down Your Alley.” Ibid. On the “culture of unity,” see: Cohen, Making a New Deal; Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996).

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black-white interaction and integrated recreation. This stood in stark contrast to the practices and polices promoted by the ABC. At the same time, the CIO’s invocation of antimonopoly politics highlighted this as part of a more general attack on concentrated power in postwar society and the city. Labor sought to come to grips with this power, using the means of the state and the legal system in its campaign. If left unchallenged, the ABC and other private powers threatened to undermine the local CIO’s position and capacious vision for a vital and organized working-class presence in the city. Just as the CIO sought and exercised power in the workplace, in politics, and in neighborhood disputes, the labor organization’s bowling protest aimed to keep working-class politics at the center of city life.72 The CIO tournament confronted the ABC’s presumed prerogative to enforce the “white males only” clause. The egalitarian ideals embodied in this event were, of course, realized imperfectly and contradicted frequently within the close quarters of the Vliet Street lanes or on the sidewalks, streetcars, and buses leading to the CIO tournament. The limits of the CIO’s gender egalitarianism were, in some ways, most striking although hardly unexpected in mid-twentieth-century American society. While initial descriptions suggested that an attack on the ABC’s exclusion of women from the competitive arena would accompany the campaign against racial exclusion, female bowlers received little coverage in the CIO’s tournament accounts. They also appear to have played a minor role at best in the competition. The bulk of attention was directed against racial exclusion. But white racism’s insidious and pervasive hold within working-class culture meant that while white and black union members may have bowled side-byside, they did not necessarily play in a state of equality, nor did all participants put aside the animosities and prejudices barely under the surface. Race no doubt shaped the competition and a multitude of mundane interactions between players. Some, if not all, of the teams with African-American bowlers were exclusively black teams, including UAW Local 575’s team number 5. While most teams in the tournament were made up of union members from a single local, the members of the black Bronzeville All-Star team (also known as the Bronzeville Bombers),

72

Milwaukee CIO Council Resolution Condemning Jim Crow in Bowling, 20 March 1946, folio 4, box 10, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC; “CIO Resolution against Jim Crow in Bowling,” Wisconsin CIO News, 22 March 1946; and “Huge CIO Bowling Tourney off to Flying Start without ABC’s Sanction.” On the tournament’s conclusion, see “Results of CIO Bowling Tournament,” Wisconsin CIO News, 10 May 1946; and “Reward for the Winners,” Wisconsin CIO News, 17 May 1946, 2. A photograph (May 17 article) shows the CIO’s Hy Cohen presenting a trophy at the UE Local 1131 meeting, with one thousand members in attendance.

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fi g u r e 4 . 3 Bronzeville All-Star bowling team at the Wisconsin CIO tournament, 1946. Participation by all-black teams in defiance of the American Bowling Congress’s “whites only” policy speaks to both the possibilities and the limits of the Milwaukee CIO’s racial egalitarianism. Edmund Eisenscher (photographer), “Bronzeville All-Star Bowling Team,” 1946, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Edmund Eisenscher Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. Image no. WHS-3042. Reproduced by permission of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO and the Wisconsin Historical Society.

which competed in the CIO’s 1946 games and again 1947, worked at different plants and belonged to different unions (see Figure 4.3).73 Just as the separate “Sixth Ward contingent” in the 1945 Labor Day parade raised questions about the racial politics of participation, the incorporation of racially defined teams in the tournament pointed to the complex landscape of racial egalitarianism. Was this separation the result of an explicit or implicit “race first” strategy, a way for black bowlers to exert power and display pride in the confines of this “culture of unity” tournament? Was it evidence of a truncated inclusiveness in which white 73

Jones, Selma of the North, 9–31; and Roediger, Working toward Whiteness. On all-black teams, see: Stoll, “Down Your Alley”; photo of captain for Local 575’s “all-Negro” team in “CIO Team Captains,” Wisconsin CIO News, 12 April 1946, 2; and Nellie Wilson, “Bronzeville Bombers Bowlers,” Milwaukee History 22 (Autumn-Winter 1999): 122. In addition to Figure 4.3, see Edmund Eisenscher (photographer), “Bronzeville Bombers Bowling Team,” 5 April 1947, Milwaukee, Image # WHi-3049, Eisenscher Papers, WHS: www.wisconsinhistory.org/whi/fullimage.asp?id=3049.

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members’ willingness to challenge tournament rules did not extend to accepting black bowlers as teammates? Or was it the result of racial segregation in workplaces and neighborhoods carried over into the bowling alley? Did competition between separate white and black teams help to lower barriers, foster “race pride,” or do both? How many teams were truly integrated? To what extent did individual white and black bowlers embrace, reject, or ignore the Wisconsin CIO News’s story about the tournament? Despite these important qualifications, the tournament was notable for the direct advocacy of egalitarian principles in the face of deep divisions in the 1940s city and defense of local working-class control in the face of ABC threats. The tournament, which generated widespread participation, articulated publicly the political goals of the CIO leadership and demonstrated the backing given by many rank-and-file union members, both white and black, to this agenda. The experience of black and white workers bowling alongside one another in direct defiance of discriminatory codes complicates the history of the postwar working class, organized labor, and race. While many white bowlers neglected or refused to carry this fight against segregation into their neighborhoods and homes, the CIO tournament provides a counterpoint to the abundant evidence of white racism fracturing the midcentury urban working class. By bowling together in this tournament, the Milwaukee CIO and its members sought to open an arena of public recreation to equal access and to loosen the ABC’s grip over everyday life. Advancing its controversial postwar agenda while also building organizationally, the CIO hoped to demonstrate its ability to enact a vision of urban democracy in the city. To a degree, the Milwaukee CIO succeeded. The organization took control of the game and CIO members bowled together, even if the practices of racism continued to shape play and life both inside and outside the alley.74 The tournament also was a strand of the emerging northern civil rights movement in which the labor movement, its working-class members, and allies played an important role.75 In the world of bowling, 74

75

In his influential analysis of postwar American society, Robert Putnam pays insufficient attention to the history of conflict that might have undermined the organizational and political bases for social capital and collective ties. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); and Corey Robin, “Missing the Point,” Dissent 48:2 (Spring 2001): 108–11. On the emerging civil rights movement in Milwaukee and elsewhere, see: Jack Dougherty, More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Jones, Selma of the North; Kevin David Smith, “‘In God We Trust’: Religion, the Cold War, and Civil Rights in Milwaukee, 1947–1963” (Ph.D. diss, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1999);

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the Milwaukee tournament contributed to an incipient national campaign that would bring together civil rights groups, a variety of liberal and religious organizations, and the CIO to bring about a change in ABC policy. In conjunction with the 1946 tournament, the Milwaukee CIO passed an antidiscrimination resolution directed at the ABC’s convention in Buffalo, pressed the Milwaukee Bowling Association to forward a resolution, and encouraged the national CIO to speak out at the ABC’s meeting. The Milwaukee CIO continued its efforts at the local, state, and national levels in 1947 and beyond.76 Campaigns against racially restricted bowling picked up momentum in a number of other cities, including Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Minneapolis, St. Paul, New York, and Buffalo. The UAW executive board, although resistant to militant locals’ earlier efforts to challenge the ABC, instructed its Fair Practices Department to address discrimination in bowling and in 1947 helped to organize the National Committee for Fair Play in Bowling. Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey and golfer Betty Hicks were selected as co-chairs. Like the Americans for Democratic Action, which was formed the same year and shared many key members (including Humphrey and the UAW’s Walter Reuther), the Fair Play Committee spoke strongly against racial discrimination but generally eschewed confrontational tactics and radical politics. Proponents of integrated bowling also invoked anticommunism, arguing that blatant discrimination was “meat for Communists . . . . Picket lines at tournament alleys will be joined by subversives bent on making trouble.” Pressure at the national level, along with a set of legal strategies and continued efforts in cities such as Milwaukee, succeeded eventually. The

76

Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Jennifer A. Delton, Making Minnesota Liberal: Civil Rights and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); and Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty. “County CIO Will Protest ABC Action on Negroes,” MJ, 21 March 1946; “MBA to Fight Bias Clause at ABC Convention.” Wisconsin CIO News, 29 March 1946. On protests at the ABC’s Buffalo tournament see: “Negroes Picketing ABC; Protest Their Exclusion,” MJ, 15 March 1946; “Sports & Democracy,” Wisconsin CIO News, 24 January 1947; “State CIO Bowling Tournament Starts Mar. 1,” Wisconsin CIO News, 24 January 1947; “UAW Protests Ban of Chinese Bowler in State Tournament,” Wisconsin CIO News, 24 January 1947; “Locals Receive CIO Bowling Tourney News,” Wisconsin CIO News, 31 January 1947; “Milw. CIO Bowling Tourney to Start April 19,” Wisconsin CIO News, 14 March 1947; “ABC Discrimination Policy Hit,” Wisconsin CIO News, 4 April 1947; Robert Buse to Glenn M. Clarke, 19 September 1947, folio “County Council 1947,” box 3, UAW Local 248 Papers, Reuther Library; and Minutes of Milwaukee CIO Council, 21 September 1949, folio “Milwaukee County Industrial Union Council CIO (1949),” box 3, UAW Local 248 Papers, Reuther Library.

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ABC reversed its ban on interracial bowling in May of 1950 and the WIBC followed just a month later.77 The CIO’s bowling tournament, as well as the Labor Day parade right after V-J Day, underscored militant labor’s ambition to carve out a broad role for unions in the midcentury city. Their vision of a city driven by working-class politics included a racially egalitarian notion – albeit limited – of working-class access to recreation, housing, jobs, and public places. In their response to early postwar anxieties and their quest for security, CIO leaders and members recognized clearly that organized power was essential. They had worked to build and exercise that power during the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. They hoped and anticipated that the postwar city, both inside and outside the workplace, could be shaped, in large part, by labor’s agenda. Their opponents, on the other hand, feared this possibility and mobilized to undercut and contain working-class power and politics. A set of early postwar clashes with lasting consequences began on the picket line and in a heated congressional election. Business challenges to labor’s power, conservative assaults on the Left, and the politics of anticommunism would limit the range of political discourse and weaken organized labor’s base in the city. Just as the Milwaukee CIO’s interracial bowling tournament was gearing up in the spring of 1946, UAW Local 248 and Allis-Chalmers were taking 77

Quote from Father Carow of New York’s Fair Play in Bowling Committee in R. G. Lynch, “ABC Is Not Only Intolerant but Unwise,” Journal, 14 March 1949, folio “Milwaukee Regional Bowling Comm.,” box 3, William Oliver Papers, Reuther Library. See also: Minutes of Meeting, Minneapolis Area Committee for Fair Play in Bowling, 3 November 1947; and Hubert H. Humphrey to William Oliver, 12 November 1947 - both in folio “Minneapolis Regional Bowling Comm., 1947–1949,” Box 3, William Oliver Papers, Reuther Library. And see: “Bowling Tourney Opens in Protest,” New York Times, 13 February 1949, S1; “CIO Hits ABC Discrimination,” Chicago Defender, 29 October 1949; Gelb “Bowling Congress of ‘Whites Only’ Faces Ban”; “Three Legal Actions Ask Ban on the American Bowling Congress Because of Discrimination,” Chicago Defender, 4 February 1950, 17; “ABC Drops Racial Ban in Bowling,” Chicago Defender, 20 May 1950, 1; “WIBC Drops Racial Clause in Its By-Laws,” Chicago Defender, 17 June 1950, 18; Dooley, “Jim Crow Strikes Again,” 285–86; Lewis-Colman, Race against Liberalism, 33– 34, 48–49; Timothy N. Thurber, The Politics of Equality: Hubert H. Humphrey and the African American Freedom Struggle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 50–51; and Walter and Rigali, “The Integration of the American Bowling Congress.” For later Milwaukee activity – including the local Fair Play in Bowling Committee, controversy over renting the Auditorium to the ABC, and activities by the Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations and the Wisconsin Governor’s Commission on Human Rights – see: Minutes, Board of the Milwaukee Jewish Council, 7 February 1950, frame 294, Milwaukee Jewish Council Microfilm, WHS; Minutes, Law and Legislative Committee, 23 November 1949, frame 514, Milwaukee Jewish Council Microfilm, WHS; “Invite Bowlers to New Arena,” MJ, 11 August 1949; “Milwaukee Bars ABC,” Chicago Defender, 30 July 1949; “ABC Is Rights Group Target,” MJ, 14 October 1949; and “Wisconsin Hits ABC on White Male Ruling,” Chicago Defender, 21 January 1950, 16.

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steps toward a strike that would last almost a year. On April 29, 1946, Local 248 leaders and members marched from Allis-Chalmers to the state fairgrounds, where they voted 8,091 to 251 in favor of a strike. Local 248 called the strike over wages, grievance procedures, and union security in what they recognized as a conflict-ridden workplace. Allis-Chalmers wanted to reverse earlier union gains, especially those achieved during the war, which the company defined as restricting management rights. According to the union, the company’s bargaining position “would virtually eliminate union security” and undermine Local 248’s ability to maintain its powerful shopfloor presence in the massive West Allis plant. The union had long been a driving force for militant, left-wing unionism in the Milwaukee and Wisconsin CIO Councils. As was the case earlier when Local 248 members had chided the company over its stingy V-J observance, labor activists and other workers at Allis-Chalmers recognized that the union’s and the company’s visions for the postwar order diverged. The union and the company soon became embroiled in a brutal conflict with important consequences within and beyond the walls of the workplace. During the strike, the union found itself under relentless attack by a company that had enjoyed substantial wartime profits and tax benefits. Allis-Chalmers was eager to use its local and national clout at this point to break the union’s workplace and political power. The outcome of this battle significantly diminished the position of militant unionism in the city and helped to set a trajectory for the domestic Cold War in American politics (see Figure 4.4).78 Anticommunism, of course, had been part of the political culture before and during the war. But over the course of this eleven-month postwar strike, and during the 1946 elections that took place in the midst of the labor turmoil, the company and its allies in business and politics fought Local 248 and its leaders with an aggressive anticommunist campaign. Charges that Communists controlled the union were initiated by the company and then publicized relentlessly by the Milwaukee Sentinel and broadcast by congressional committees. The Sentinel launched a daily series during the fall of 1946, written under the pen name John Sentinel and supported by

78

In early March, Local 248 members voted by a greater than ten-to-one margin to “strike if necessary.” By the end of April support for a strike had grown and the margin rose to over thirty-to-one. See “A-C Workers Vote 5200 to 447 to Strike if Necessary,” Wisconsin CIO News, 15 March 1947, 3; Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin,” 150, 152, 158; Ann N. Stachewicz, “From ‘Disorderly Women’ to ‘Little Girls’: Gender, Class, and Conflict in the Allis-Chalmers Strike of 1946–1947” (M.A. thesis, University of WisconsinMilwaukee, 2006); Holter, “Milwaukee Labor after World War II”; and Gavett, Development of the Labor Movement in Milwaukee, 176–97. Meyer’s book, the authoritative analysis of Local 248 and strike activity at Allis-Chalmers, presents a convincing account of Local 248’s militancy.

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fi g u r e 4 . 4 UAW Local 248 strike parade held on the fifth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor (1946), during the union’s eleven-month strike against Allis-Chalmers. Edmund Eisenscher (photographer), “Allis Chalmers Strike Parade,” 7 December 1946, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Edmund Eisenscher Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. Image no. WHS-3052. Reproduced by permission of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO and the Wisconsin Historical Society.

researchers on the Allis-Chalmers payroll. The articles claimed that the strike had been orchestrated by a Communist clique in Local 248 and the Milwaukee CIO Council. According to the Sentinel, Communists controlled much of the city and state labor movements, threatening to spread their ideology unless stopped immediately. As the strike wore on and picket-line conflicts escalated, the House Un-American Activities Committee and the U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor, on which both John Kennedy and Richard Nixon served, began investigating Communist influence in Local 248. The House Education and Labor Committee also had begun drafting the Taft-Hartley bill in order to roll back labor’s gains achieved as a result of the Wagner Act. Management at Allis-Chalmers eagerly lent support to the committee’s initiatives.79

79

John Sentinel, “Stalin over Wisconsin: Reds Aim for Control in Our State,” Milwaukee Sentinel, 23 September 1946; Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin,” 168–70, 186, 201, passim; Julian L. Stockley, “‘Red Purge’: The 1946–1947 Strike at Allis-Chalmers,” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 76 (1988): 17– 31; Diamond, “On the Road to Camelot,” 279–90; and Gavett, Development of the Labor Movement in Milwaukee, 176–97. On labor and anticommunism, see: Cherny,

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During the strike, many of the militant unionists who had founded and built the Milwaukee CIO and the Wisconsin CIO came under assault. Soon after the close of the strike in late-March, the company served notice on ninety-seven of Local 248’s officers and shopfloor leaders that they had been dismissed. The group included two union presidents, Harold Christoffel and Robert Buse. Later that fall, the national UAW executive board followed Walter Reuther’s recommendation and appointed an outside administrator to run the local. Local 248’s strength, severely weakened in the workplace, also was diluted on the CIO Council and in city labor politics. In the midst of the strike, anticommunist CIO activists had wrenched control of the local CIO council away from militant leaders who had guided the labor body for much of its life. These new leaders would become important players in local Cold War liberal politics. Meyer Adelman, who had been a catalyst for the Milwaukee CIO’s involvement in housing and other political issues, lost his position in the state and the city CIO councils as well as with the Steelworkers. These sustained attacks, along with labor-left defeats at the national level, muted the voice of militant unionism and the CIO council in the local political culture.80

80

Issel, and Taylor, eds., American Labor and the Cold War; Jennifer Luff, Commonsense Anticommunism: Labor and Civil Liberties between the World Wars (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998); and Stromquist, Labor’s Cold War. On the historiography of communism and the Communist Party in the United States, with important references for labor and the Cold War, see: John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, “The Historiography of American Communism: An Unsettled Field,” Labour History Review 68:1 (April 2003): 61–78; and Bryan D. Palmer, “Rethinking the Historiography of United States Communism,” American Communist History 2:2 (2003): 139–73. Working-class anticommunism, which played a role in this and other disputes, developed out of a varied set of roots, including: religious beliefs, Catholic labor activism, antagonism between Socialists and Communists, tensions between craft and industrial unionism, and the languages of Americanism and nationalism. Steven M. Avella, In the Richness of the Earth: A History of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, 1834–1958 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2002), 718–29; Doody, Detroit’s Cold War; William Issel, “‘A Stern Struggle’: Catholic Activism and San Francisco Labor, 1934–1958,” in American Labor and the Cold War, 154–76; Matthew Pehl, “‘Apostles of Fascism,’ ‘Communist Clergy,’ and the UAW: Political Ideology and Working-Class Religion in Detroit, 1919–1945,” Journal of American History 99:2 (September 2012): 440–65; and Charles Williams, “Americanism and Anti-Communism: The UAW and Repressive Liberalism before the Red Scare,” Labor History 53:4 (November 2012): 495–515. When Taft-Hartley came before the House, Kennedy voted against it; he also voted to sustain Truman’s unsuccessful veto. Nixon supported the bill. See also Lichtenstein, State of the Union, 114–22. “Leftists’ Rule Broken by Vote in CIO Council,” MJ, 5 December 1946; “Right Wing Captures Control of State CIO in a Bitter Fight,” MJ, 16 December 1946; Ozanne, Labor Movement in Wisconsin, 89–94; Gavett, Development of the Labor Movement in Milwaukee, 185–90; Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin,” 173–74, 207–13. On the UAW, see: Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945–1968 (Ithaca:

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While a core of Local 248 leaders and CIO Council activists had indeed been schooled in the politics of the Popular Front and, in a few cases, were members of the Communist Party, they were first and foremost industrial unionists.81 They sought to build powerful organizations that could exert control in the workplace and speak on behalf of workers in city affairs. An effective grievance and shop steward system anchored Local 248’s broadbased organizational militancy. Anticommunist union activists, on the other hand, saw the strike as a juncture to steer labor away from what they viewed as the distracting and destructive politics of the Popular Front and CIO Communism. UAW leader Walter Reuther expressed this in his assessment of the strike: “We lost because there were people in positions of leadership in that local who put their loyalties outside of their union, outside the rank and file and outside of their country.”82 For Reuther, left-wing ideology had put the local union movement in peril. Most importantly, the company viewed this postwar conflict as a time to retake control of the shopfloor. And political conservatives seized upon this upheaval as an opportunity to undercut labor’s power in public life. As historian Stephen Meyer argues, “Using their significant economic and political power, Allis-Chalmers officials mobilized conservative workers, public opinion, and local and national authorities and engineered the purge of labor’s left.”83 In the end, the clash resulted in a diminished union, stronger management, and greater prominence for both anticommunist liberals and conservatives in the city. In the midst of the Allis-Chalmers strike and the turmoil of postwar reconversion, the 1946 congressional elections pitted the militant Edmund Bobrowicz against the anticommunist incumbent Thaddeus Wasielewski for the Democratic Party’s Fourth District endorsement. In this heated contest between two Polish, South Side candidates, the electorate split largely along class lines. Bobrowicz was an organizer for the left-wing Fur and Leather Workers Union (CIO) and “disciple of Leo Krzycki” (the

81

82

83

Cornell University Press, 1995); Martin Halpern, UAW Politics in the Cold War Era (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 173–83; and Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit. Eric Arnesen argues against the contention that Communists’ marginalization narrowed progressive possibilities, especially for civil rights. Arnesen, “Civil Rights and the Cold War at Home: Postwar Activism, Anticommunism, and the Decline of the Left,” American Communist History 11:1 (April 2012): 5–44. Meyer, after working through the assertions of Local 248 leaders’ communism, concludes that the evidence is ambiguous and that this misses the more important aspect of their leadership. He emphasizes instead the leaders’ commitment to basic union issues and their strong base of rank-and-file support. Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin,” 1–15, passim. Reuther quoted in Ozanne, Labor Movement in Wisconsin, 99; Gavett, Development of the Labor Movement in Milwaukee, 197. Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin,” 222–23.

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Polish socialist and AFL union leader who went on to serve as alderman from the Fourteenth Ward and became one of the early CIO organizers). Bobrowicz campaigned to extend the New Deal and vigorously championed organized labor, while also voicing a conciliatory foreign policy toward the Soviet Union. He advocated a continuation of the wartime alliance and challenged the direction of the emerging Cold War. Wasielewski, who had voted recently against a number of key labor issues and had become the subject of CIO criticism, defended his record as a Democratic congressman on domestic issues. In his foreign policy stance, he stressed the need for the U.S. to counter Soviet power; he decried the Soviet Union’s heavy-handed role in Poland and its increasing control over Eastern Europe.84 As the campaign progressed, serious international concerns escalated. The use of red-baiting tactics also proliferated. With his prolabor record and union support – especially from the CIO – already well-established, Bobrowicz attracted working-class campaign volunteers and voters (see Figure 4.5). Wasielewski drew support mainly from middle-class voters, many of whom viewed foreign policy as a priority and responded to the growing fears of Soviet expansion. Bobrowicz’s politics won out in the primary. In the general election, however, Wasielewski’s red-baiting charges convinced anticommunist Democratic Party leaders to withhold support from Bobrowicz. Wasielewski ran as an independent. Of the two, Bobrowicz again racked up the larger vote total. But the Republican candidate John Brophy came out on top, contributing to the Republicans’ congressional sweep in that election. During the 1946 race, Republican Joseph McCarthy (Wisconsin) also began to understand the political utility of anticommunism (observing especially the contentious Fourth District race) as he first won his seat in the U. S. Senate.85 84

85

Robert D. Ubriaco Jr., “Choosing Sides: Restructuring the Political Landscape in Milwaukee’s Polish Community, 1945–1948,” Milwaukee History 22:2 (Summer 1999): 78–98; Robert Ubriaco Jr., “Bread and Butter Politics or Foreign Policy Concerns?: Class versus Ethnicity in the Midwestern Polish American Community during the 1946 Congressional Elections,” Polish American Studies 51:2 (Autumn 1994): 5–32; Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin,” 163–85; Donald Pienkos, “The Polish Americans in Milwaukee Politics,” in Ethnic Politics in Urban America: The Polish Experience in Four Cities, ed. Angela T. Pienkos (Chicago: Polish American Historical Association, 1978), 66–91; and Eugene Miller, “Leo Krzycki – Polish American Labor Leader,” Polish American Studies 33:2 (1976): 52–64. Brophy held the Fourth District seat for one term, losing to the Democrat Clement Zablocki in 1948. McCarthy’s election to the Senate in 1946 has been the subject of considerable debate. Some early analysts claimed that organized labor and the CIO in particular threw the election to McCarthy by not supporting Robert LaFollette in the Republican primary. Other historians have noted correctly, however, that Wisconsin did not allow voters to cross over in party primaries. Further, the CIO was concerned primarily

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fi g u r e 4 . 5 Political work for the Democratic candidate Edmund Bobrowicz during the 1946 campaign, carried out by members of UAW Local 75 Auxiliary in the CIO office. Edmund Eisenscher (photographer), “Campaign Mailing,” October 1946, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Edmund Eisenscher Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. Image no. WHS-41260. Reproduced by permission of Wisconsin AFL-CIO and the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Where did Milwaukee labor, especially the militant CIO, stand in the wake of the strike and the first postwar congressional election? Attacks on Local 248 and early postwar red-baiting fueled the frenzy of anticommunism nationally, contributing to the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act and other defeats for labor and the left throughout the remainder of the 1940s. Moderate unionists took control of the Milwaukee CIO Council, of Local 248, and other formerly militant unions. As Local 248’s Harold Christoffel later remarked: “What we lived in [was] so different – that with its candidates in the local Democratic primaries (including Bobrowicz), as well as building a New Deal Democratic Party in the state. See: David M. Oshinsky, Senator Joseph McCarthy and the American Labor Movement (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976); Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin,” 163–85; Ozanne, Labor Movement in Wisconsin, 143–46; Richard Hamilton, Class and Politics in the United States (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1972), 112–18; and Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967). On 1946 and postwar congressional campaigns nationally, see: James Boylan, The New Deal Coalition and the Election of 1946 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981); and Jonathan Bell, The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

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McCarthyism wall was a very solid wall.” He lamented the loss of militant unionism: “it’s hard to believe how we lived before and the freedom of organization and the enthusiasm that we had of going forward.” Christoffel referred, in part, to the troubles he faced directly. He spent three years in prison, charged with perjuring himself before a congressional committee. But his comment also pointed to the dramatic shift that dimmed militant labor’s workplace, political, and cultural vision.86 These and other conflicts during the second half of the 1940s, including a sustained multifront assault on militant labor and the national CIO’s purge of left-wing unions, recast the role of organized labor and the urban working class in American political culture. Labor’s power in the city declined and the scope of labor’s power in the workplace narrowed. Organized labor became more bureaucratized and focused on wages and benefit packages; these often promised greater security tied to higher standards of living, more consumption, and increased productivity. For workers in many unionized sectors of the economy, incomes rose steadily during the era of postwar expansion. These new levels of economic security enabled some workers – primarily white – to move to the suburbs and step into the middle class. The egalitarianism advanced by the CIO, however compromised, now confronted the thorny challenge of a widening suburban-urban racial separation. Unlike the security and egalitarianism built on public commitments that the CIO had envisioned earlier, this postwar order moved toward a privatized set of arrangements defined increasingly by growth politics. Labor tightened its ties, especially during the 1948 election, to the Democratic Party’s Fair Deal and Cold War agendas. Although many different voices continued to speak for labor at the local and national levels, anticommunist liberalism prevailed at a time when growth politics gained a foothold over working-class politics.87 86

87

Christoffel interview, tape 4, side 1, Wisconsin Labor Oral History Project. See also: “‘Exposé of A-C Reds Told NAM,” Milwaukee Sentinel, 5 December 1947; Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin,” 215–17, 220–31; Richter, Labor’s Struggles, 68–133; and Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 184–87. On labor and the Cold War in other cities, see: Doody, Detroit’s Cold War; Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 177–223; Lisa Kannenberg, “Putting the ‘I’ before ‘UE’: Labor’s Cold War in Schenectady-GE,” in Labor’s Cold War, 137–62; and Shane White, “Popular Anticommunism and the UE in Evansville, Indiana,” in American Labor and the Cold War, 141–53. On conservative and business attacks on labor, see: Marc Dixon, “Limiting Labor: Business Political Mobilization and Union Setback in the States,” Journal of Policy History 19:3 (2007): 313–44; Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise; Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, eds., The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); Lawrence Richards, Union-Free America: Workers and Antiunion Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008). On labor’s

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Milwaukee’s postwar labor and working-class history points to ongoing contests. The CIO and AFL remained active in metropolitan issues. In policy controversies over housing and development, for instance, labor promoted expanded public initiatives. Labor demanded continued access to urban spaces, as in the 1947 parade ordinance fight, and raised its voice in city debates. The language of class – informed by sources as diverse as the city’s socialist legacy, militant industrial unionism, and day-to-day experience in urban working-class neighborhoods – continued to infuse Milwaukee’s political culture, even if in more muted tones. Outbursts of labor militancy appeared in workplaces and on the city’s streets during events such as the 1947 Gas Company and Telephone Workers strikes and the 1953 Brewery Workers strike. Postwar election results suggest that working-class voters straddled anticommunist liberalism and class politics. But the militant CIO’s vision for a city democracy that featured both working-class security and an egalitarian culture depended upon labor’s regular exercise of power in the workplace and the larger community. In the postwar reaction, that power had been undercut.88

88

changing priorities, see: Lichtenstein, “From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining”; and Klein, For All These Rights. On labor and politics, see: Daniel DiSalvio, “The Politics of a Party Faction: The Liberal-Labor Alliance in the Democratic Party, 1948–1972,” Journal of Policy History 22:3 (2010): 269–99; Richard Oestreicher, “The Rules of the Game: Class Politics in Twentieth-Century America,” in Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894–1994: The Labor-Liberal Alliance, Kevin Boyle, ed., (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 19–50; and Caleb Southworth and Judith Stepan-Norris, “The Geography of Class in an Industrial American City: Connections between Workplace and Neighborhood Politics,” Social Forces 50:3 (2003): 319–47. On postwar consumption and living standards, see: Cohen, Consumers’ Republic; and Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics. Holter, “Milwaukee Labor after World War II”; Richard Ayers Givens, “The Milwaukee Brewery Strike of 1953” (M.S. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1954); Gavett, Development of the Labor Movement in Milwaukee, 198–99; and Ozanne, Labor Movement in Wisconsin, 72–77, 94–101.

CHAPTER

5

Debt, Growth, and Democracy in the Early Postwar City: Planning a City without Class

Nicknaming his city “Dear Old Lady Thrift,” Milwaukee Journal writer Richard Davis chastised city leaders for failing to build a “great city.” His unflattering portrait pictured post-World War II Milwaukee as a “plump and smiling city . . . [sitting] in complacent shabbiness on the west shore of Lake Michigan like a wealthy old lady in black alpaca taking her ease on the beach.” He continued, “All her slips are showing, but she doesn’t mind a bit.”1 Reprinted in the newspaper two weeks before voters went to the polls to decide if the city would reverse its debt-free policy to finance postwar development, Davis’s essay warned that Milwaukee was a chaotic and inefficient metropolis in danger of falling behind.2 Her thriftiness bordered on stinginess, her complacency slipped into indolence, and her neglected femininity bespoke disorder. Davis contended that the city leaders’ frugality – rooted in a local tradition of cautious municipal fiscal policies, a mismatch of big city problems with small town attitudes, and a general public indifference – threatened the postwar city. Davis’s attention was drawn to Milwaukee’s downtown. He poked fun at it as “possibly the least pretentious business district in all of urban America,” a city without class. “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.” He concluded his report of downtown decline with the warning that “blight is spreading rapidly.”3 Business and civic leaders in Milwaukee, as well as

1

2 3

Richard S. Davis, “Milwaukee: Old Lady Thrift,” in Our Fair City, ed. Robert S. Allen (New York: Vanguard Press, 1947), 189, 191. “Not So Fair Is America’s Fair City,” Milwaukee Journal [hereafter MJ], 16 March 1947. Davis, “Milwaukee: Old Lady Thrift,” 192.

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commentators in other cities, shared Davis’ anxiety about postwar urban decline, fearing that their “outmoded” city would stand in the way of progress. Davis’s association of an unkempt “Old Lady Thrift” and the unfulfilled prospect of an “imposing” downtown prompted his call to action: Spend money, stem the city’s chaos and blight, and build a modern, classy city.4 Anxious that Milwaukee had fallen into a state of neglect and warning that the inefficient, “outmoded” city would impede postwar economic growth, business and civic leaders deployed a range of associated metaphors and images to depict the city’s condition. One analysis pictured the city as Rip van Milwaukee, out-of-date and unable to confront the present or the future. An article titled “Milwaukee Needs a Bath,” on the other hand, pointed to the dirt and disarray of the city by conjuring up the image of undisciplined youth: “Like a reluctant little boy who has half-heartedly scrubbed his face, it has shining checks, but there are black rings around its eyes and its neck is dirty.” Unless the city was given a good scrubbing, the accumulated “grime and neglect” would lead to “disease and crime.” Milwaukee leaders and residents should be especially concerned about the disheartening reception the unwashed city presented returning veterans.5 Milwaukee was not alone in being characterized as an outmoded, inefficient, or disorderly metropolis. The edited collection in which Davis’s essay first appeared surveyed seventeen postwar urban areas. Philadelphia was described as “a tired old roue, who bores you with tales of the past while dozing in the present and fumbling with the future.” Birmingham’s “civic anemia,” Boston’s “inertia,” Detroit’s stamp as the “city of conflict”: these and other accounts of urban

4

5

On fears of urban decline, see: Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of US Cities (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1993); Joseph Heathcott, “The City Quietly Remade: National Programs and Local Agendas in the Movement to Clear the Slums, 1942–1952,” Journal of Urban History 34:2 (January 2008): 221–42; Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Amanda I, Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Jon C. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940–1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). Beauregard notes that the intensifying discourse about decline in the 1940s continued to be mixed with notes of optimism about the city’s future. See also Colin Gordon, “Blighting the Way: Urban Renewal, Economic Development, and the Elusive Definition of Blight,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 31:2 (January 2004): 305–37. “Milwaukee Needs a Bath,” Government Service League, April 1947, 7. See also: “Rip van Milwaukee,” unnamed newspaper cartoon, 13 March 1947, folio “Bond Issues,” John L. Bohn Papers, Series 081, Office of the Mayor, City of Milwaukee Archives, Milwaukee Public Library [hereafter Bohn Papers, MPL].

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schizophrenia, paradox, limitations, corruption, and contention sounded a chorus of distress about the postwar city.6 Mabel Walker of the Tax Institute began a speech before the Municipal Finance Officers Association by labeling the American city “obsolescent” and “outmoded.” A modern, future-oriented city “is struggling to evolve, but it is held back by the dead carcass of the past.”7 The prominent planner Mel Scott evoked the image of a San Francisco neighborhood’s junk shops and their “dusty confusion” to encourage redevelopment initiatives. “Amid the cast-off paraphernalia from thousands of households, one finds an occasional ‘antique’ . . . but all the rest speaks of a disenchanted yesterday and it is as outmoded as the hand-me-down dwellings in the surrounding blocks.”8 Throughout the nation, perceptions about the dilapidated condition of the city engendered broader debates about postwar urban visions and policies. Paralleling the anxieties over petty gambling in wartime Milwaukee or fears about militant labor politics at the close of the war, postwar diagnoses of urban decline and prescriptions for regeneration prompted conflict while reshaping the city’s political culture. As civic leaders and city dwellers turned their attention to the appearance, infrastructure, and prospects of the postwar metropolis, they also deliberated and fought about public financing. Most importantly, contests over urban priorities and financing were crucibles for early postwar growth politics, as members of shifting political coalitions sought to justify and persuade others to support the projects and policies that fit their favored designs for the postwar city. Drawn into the fray were policies that ran counter to the aims of growth politics. The debt-free policies of Milwaukee’s Socialists, a staple for working-class politics in this city, became a target for growth proponents. These debates, which became forums for contrasting visions about how cities work, proved crucial to the reconfiguration of urban political culture in the postwar years. How should postwar Milwaukeeans rebuild the city and regenerate urban life? How should they pay for the postwar city development? How would they make a democratic city? 6

7

8

Allen, ed., Our Fair City, 36, 59, 99, 148. See also Sam Shulsky, “The Financial Plight of Our Cities,” American Mercury 66:289 (January 1948): 17–24. Biological and medical metaphors about midcentury urban conditions abounded. Commentators frequently described the city as a patient suffering from clogged arteries (major roads), a diseased heart (the downtown district), or cancer (blight). Mabel L. Walker, “Factors Affecting Municipal Revenues,” Municipal Finance 20:1 (August 1947): 15. Mel Scott, “Western Addition District Redevelopment Study,” San Francisco Planning Commission, 26 November 1947, 12, Environmental Design Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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The controversy over municipal debt in Milwaukee underscores both the turbulence of that particular city’s midcentury history and the complexity of fiscal policy in the early postwar United States. At the federal level, wartime increases in public debt, funding for a restrained New Deal agenda, the expansion of the income tax, and Keynesian macroeconomic strategies (however unevenly instituted) altered the fiscal and political landscape.9 Many midcentury cities and states also pushed new initiatives for development and public financing, expanding their borrowing to pay for postwar reconstruction projects. State and local general obligation bond issues rose from $613 million in 1945 to $4.65 billion in 1960.10 Local variation persisted, however, indicating that local conditions and disagreements about the merits of debt financing played a significant role in this history. Between 1945 and 1958 in the urban Midwest, for instance, Chicago’s long-term municipal debt increased by 418 percent and Cleveland’s by 166 percent. Minneapolis and St. Louis, on the other

9

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W. Elliot Brownlee, “Tax Regimes, National Crisis, and State-Building in America,” in Funding the Modern American State, 1941–1995: The Rise and Fall of the Era of Easy Finance, ed. W. Elliot Brownlee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 72–101; Robert M. Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 17–42; Dennis S. Ippolito, Why Budgets Matter: Budget Policy and American Politics (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 124–62; Carolyn C. Jones, “Mass-Based Income Taxation: Creating a Tax-Paying Culture, 1940–1952,” in Funding the Modern American State, 107–47; Cathie Jo Martin, “American Business and the Taxing State: Alliances for Growth in the Postwar Period,” in Funding the Modern American State, 353–406; Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933–1956 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Bartholomew H. Sparrow, From the Outside In: World War II and the American State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 97–160; James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 119–59; and Julian E. Zelizer, Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, and the State, 1945–1975 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 147–76. George H. Hempel, The Postwar Quality of State and Local Debt (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1971), 150; Robert B. Fairbanks, For the City as a Whole: Planning, Politics, and the Public Interest in Dallas, Texas, 1900–1965 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 184–86; Owen D. Gutfreund, Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Eric H. Monkkonen, The Local State: Public Money and American Cities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Alberta M. Sbargia, Debt Wish: Entrepreneurial Cities, U.S. Federalism, and Economic Development (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996); and Teaford, Rough Road to Renaissance, 67–81. In addition to the steep rise in general obligation bonds, state and local government units accelerated their use of revenue bonds, housing authority issues, and various instruments of short-term debt. Total debt at the local and state government levels, including special taxing districts, rose from $15.7 million in 1946 to $36.2 million in 1954. Cushman McGee, “The Debt of Metropolitan Areas in the United States,” in Financing Metropolitan Government, Tax Institute (Princeton: Tax Institute, Inc., 1955), 126.

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hand, increased their long-term debt by only 3 percent and 8 percent, respectively.11 Behind this upward but uneven trajectory of postwar indebtedness lay specific histories of debate over the magnitude and meaning of public debt. These histories, which do not fit neatly into the conservative-liberal political spectrum, illuminate critical tensions that drove city politics during the 1940s. The unexpected lines of battle in many of these controversies remind us also about the pastness of the past, calling for close analysis of the cultural and political context and of the shifting meanings of debt, independence, growth, and democracy. In Milwaukee, the contest over postwar municipal financing recast both fiscal policy and local political alignments. The city’s leaders and residents had long prided themselves on a pay-as-you-go policy, a tradition that had been championed by Milwaukee’s Socialists and civic reform organizations.12 Pay-as-you-go policies, of course, had been part of the nineteenthcentury urban landscape in the United States. These policies, appealing particularly to immigrant and working-class constituencies, were pitted against urban boosters’ ambitious improvement programs that threatened to strap city residents and taxpayers to a cycle of debt. In Milwaukee, frugal fiscal policies stemmed in part from the overlapping Germanimmigrant and socialist political cultures. But by the 1920s and especially by the 1940s, the meaning of this local approach to a debt-free policy had shifted.13 Milwaukee’s Socialist administration, committed to placing the city on a cash basis in order to eliminate the expense and the constraints imposed on public action by a regimen of interest payments, both established an amortization fund in 1923 and curtailed the use of general 11

12

13

Teaford, Rough Road to Renaissance, 72. Also see postwar issues of Municipal Finance for ongoing discussions about national patterns and local approaches. Douglas E. Booth, “Municipal Socialism and City Government Reform: The Milwaukee Experience, 1910–1940,” Journal of Urban History 12 (1985): 56; Daniel W. Hoan, City Government: The Record of the Milwaukee Experiment (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936), 123–73; Frederick I. Olson, “The Milwaukee Socialists, 1897–1941” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1952), 577; Anthony M. Orum, City-Building in America (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995); Bayrd Still, Milwaukee: The History of a City (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1948), 539–42. The Socialist Mayor Daniel Hoan and his advisor Thomas Duncan had been the main force behind the city’s debt-free policy, but they were joined by good-government reformers such as Leo Tiefenthaler of the City Club. Frank P. Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government: My Experience as Mayor of Milwaukee” (unpublished manuscript, 1962), 22–23. Terrence J. McDonald, The Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy: Socioeconomic Change and Political Culture in San Francisco, 1890–1906 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 135–43; Monkkonen, Local State; and Robin Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–1872 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). On ethnicity and local political cultures, see Kathleen Neils Conzen, “Mainstreams and Side Channels: The Localization of Immigrant Cultures,” Journal of American Ethnic History 11:1 (Fall 1991): 5–20.

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obligation bonds for capital improvements after 1932. City officials defined their effort to stop issuing general obligation bonds as Milwaukee’s “progress out of bondage.”14 This was, they believed, a path to public autonomy. The city reduced its debt over the course of the 1930s and declared itself debt-free by 1944.15 The debate over a 1947 debt referendum – which asked voters “Shall the city issue bonds for a program of public improvements?” – marked a turning point in this history. Proponents and their adversaries recognized that passage of this referendum, although stopping short of a commitment to specific programs, would set the city on a different policy course and realign its political culture away from working-class politics and toward postwar growth politics (see Figure 5.1).16 In the summer of 1946, city and community leaders staged a monthlong celebration for Milwaukee’s one-hundredth birthday. Planning for the Centurama had begun before U.S. involvement in the war and picked up again as the war wound down. City leaders solicited ideas from a wide range of civic, labor, and business groups. The festivities entailed dozens of performances and pageants, nightly fireworks, and a carnival midway. Big attractions included the comedian and singer Eddie Cantor, Hermann Goering’s field car, an air show by the pilot Chuck Yeager, and an impressively large “panorama of nationalities” marching in the Centurama parade.17 Centurama organizers hoped that the festival would showcase

14 15

16

17

Still, Milwaukee, 540. William H. Wendt, “Milwaukee’s Debt Reduced in 1936,” Daily Bond Buyer, 26 December 1936; Hoan, City Government; Ernest Clough to Mayor Bohn, 8 January 1944, folio “Public Finance Report 1928 to ‘60,” box 55, City Club of Milwaukee Records, Milwaukee Area Research Center, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries’ Archives [hereafter Milwaukee ARC]. See also Municipal Reference Library, ed., Municipal Activities of Milwaukee for 1940: Annual Consolidated Report of the Common Council (Milwaukee, 1941), 20–21, 74. Milwaukee Board of Election Commissioners, Nineteenth Biennial Report of the Board of Election Commissioners of the City of Milwaukee (Milwaukee, 1947); “Urges Public Ballot on City Bond Issuance: 1948 Corporation Sires a Move to Bring Financing Question to Voters Apr. 1,” MJ, 12 January 1947; “City Bond Referendum to Go on Ballot Apr. 1,” MJ, 21 January 1947; “Shall Milwaukee Issue Bonds to Finance Improvements,” MJ, 16 March 1947; “Wanted: A Balanced Budget,” Business Week, 22 February 1947; Frank P. Zeidler, “Comments in Response to Bertil Hanson’s A Report on the Politics of Milwaukee” (Cambridge: Joint Center for Urban Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, 1961), 1. For the argument that budgets and budget decisions were moments to imagine and shape a political culture, see Jonathan Kahn, Budgeting Democracy: State Building and Citizenship in America, 1890–1928 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), x, 2. John Gurda, “The Milwaukee Centurama of 1946,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 90:1 (Autumn 2006): 50–51; folio “Centurama Program,” Bohn Papers, MPL; folio “Organization Committee, 1945,” Bohn Papers, MPL; folio “Minutes of Committee

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fi g u r e 5 . 1 Milwaukee at a crossroads? Editorial cartoon portraying the bond referendum as a modernization program. R. A. Lewis (cartoonist), Milwaukee Journal, 16 March 1947, V1; found in “Promotion” folio, John L. Bohn Papers, Series 081, Office of the Mayor, City of Milwaukee Archives, Milwaukee Public Library. Courtesy of the Milwaukee Public Library. ©2012 Journal Sentinel, Inc., reproduced with permission.

a united metropolis as it entered its second century. When assembling an account of Milwaukee’s history, they avoided controversial issues. Recognizing, for instance, that Milwaukee’s pay-as-you-go fiscal policy was becoming quickly the subject of public debate, parade planners scratched a proposed “Debt-Free in 1943” float and substituted it with a display of religion in Milwaukee.18 The Centurama emblem sported a vigorous and modern masculinity (see Figure 5.2). A muscular, futuristic male silhouette both honored the past and pointed to the future; the slogan “Saluting Yesterday . . . Challenging Tomorrow” drove home this message. Planners had stressed the need for a “forward-looking” image. A clean skyline outlined in the background, offset by the rising City Hall tower in the foreground, suggested a city capable of retaining the best of its past as it

18

Meetings,” Bohn Papers, MPL; Unnamed folio [Centurama committee minutes, 1946], Bohn Papers, MPL. “Parade Ideas” list, folio “Parade Program,” Bohn Papers. Despite the slogan “debt-free in 1943,” Milwaukee attained its goal in 1944, despite this float’s name.

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fi g u r e 5 . 2 Emblem used for the Centurama, Milwaukee’s centennial celebration (1946). From “Promotion” folio, John L. Bohn Papers, Series 081, Office of the Mayor, City of Milwaukee Archives, Milwaukee Public Library. Reproduced by permission of the Milwaukee Public Library.

rebuilt an energetic, modern city.19 The historical narrative produced for the event, although more guarded, also reflected optimism about the prospects for the future city. “The modern Milwaukee is deceptive in appearance. The blight in the downtown area, the absence of adequate civic facilities . . . might lead an innocent observer to conclude that it is equally backward in its thinking and activity generally. Milwaukeeans,

19

Centurama Emblem, ca. 1946, folio “Promotion,” Bohn Papers, MPL; Slogan Contest Instructions, Unnamed folio, Bohn Papers, MPL. Instructions for the Centurama slogan contest encouraged entrants to consider using the word “forward” in submissions. On planning the modern city, see: Andrew M. Shanken, 194x: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 9.

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again, know how this is not true.”20 Forward-looking and forwardthinking people would remake the city. The Centurama proved to be a limited success, at best. Attendance fell short of planners’ ambitious goals and the event ran a deficit. Unlike the sleek purposefulness illustrated by the emblem, the Centurama festivities appeared disjointed and aimless. Critics charged the organizers with poor planning and mismanagement; they also complained that the festival had been overly commercialized.21 Despite initial efforts to bring a wide spectrum of community leaders into the planning, this early postwar event relied heavily on the work of seasoned civic and business leaders. The Centurama also suffered from internal and community divisions, encountered in the midst of organizing and during the festival itself. Social and political tensions within the city, especially between working-class Milwaukeeans and business leaders, troubled the event. In the parade committee, for instance, representatives from organized labor and business fought over the prospect of nonunion musicians filling the parade ranks. Organizers decided initially not to pay musicians in the parade, but labor representatives pressured them to hire union musicians. In planning the program, Centurama organizers recognized the need to acknowledge labor’s place in Milwaukee’s history. But they hoped to tone down the immediacy of political conflict by stripping the specificity out of a dramatic rendition of labor’s contribution to the city, ruling that “no names are to be mentioned after 1900.” Restrictions such as these threatened to wash out memories of the actual conflicts in organized labor’s struggle for power locally. The Milwaukee CIO Council, in particular, sought to retain

20

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Phil Drotning, Milwaukee: A Salute to Yesterday and Today (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Centurama, 1946), 5. By late 1946, after the festival posted a $348,700 deficit out of a budget exceeding $600,000, Centurama organizers and Mayor Bohn found themselves under attack. Critics noted excessive staff salaries and expense accounts. “Centurama Audit Tells Where $628,725 Went,” MJ, 1 December 1946; and Walter Schmidt, Letter to the Editor, MJ, 26 November 1946. Wanda Waters, who had headed up Centurama Women’s Committee, compared the spending of the “highly paid directors” to the meager budget of the women’s committee. “We had to pay sitters to stay with our children while we worked. We had to pay cab fares. Any time we tried to get money from them they refused. We had $3,000 in our budget and we spent only a little over $2,000.” “Fete Expenses Irk Volunteer,” MJ, 2 December 1946. Another critic voiced his disapproval by playing on the festival theme and emblem: “The degrading spectacle of the defunct Centurama fiasco, now more than ever in public contempt, should be a specter pointing in two directions: To a past recording the defeat of a well conceived, high minded and dignified objective which, in proper hands could have augured well; and to a future unsullied by the sordid attempts at commercialization of the city’s good repute.” Arthur J. Patek, Letter to the editor, MJ, 3 December 1946.

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control over its message and memories by refusing to fold its summer activities into the Centurama calendar.22 More significantly, the bitter workplace conflict between AllisChalmers and UAW Local 248 that had begun in the spring of 1946 edged its way into the big Centurama parade. Inviting the Allis-Chalmers management to participate in the parade, festival planners offered the company sympathy for its “current situation” in the midst of the strike and encouraged the company to take a spot near the beginning of the parade.23 As the Allis-Chalmers parade floats passed, however, they “were greeted with boohs and catcalls from thousands of spectators lining the Avenue.”24 The ideal of the Centurama, represented by the singular

22

23

24

Minutes, Parade Committee, 23 May 1946 and 29 June 1946, folio “Minutes of Committee Meetings,” Bohn Papers, MPL; and J. F. Effinger, Promotion Department, to Charles Larson, 11 July 1946, folio “AFL Agreement for High School Bands to Participate in Parade,” Bohn Papers, MPL. CIO representative Hy Cohen rejected a proposal to recognize labor’s historic contributions to Milwaukee with a half-hour radio program; he said that “his Board did not consider the radio program sufficient . . . .” The Federated Trades Council, on the other hand, canceled its usual Labor Day picnic and replaced it with a radio program on the history of organized labor in Milwaukee. Efforts to sponsor a joint CIO/AFL Labor Day celebration as part of the summer’s festivities failed. The Milwaukee County CIO instead put on a program at the state fair park that featured motorcycle races and speeches by labor and political leaders, including the national UAW’s R. J. Thomas and the Democratic congressional candidates (Edmund Bobrowicz and Andrew Biemiller). Up to ten thousand people gathered for the CIO event. Throughout their discussions with labor representatives, Centurama organizers sought to insulate the event from controversial issues and insisted that they refrain from partisanship. The CIO’s Labor Day event, in contrast, highlighted labor’s overtly political role. Minutes, Labor Committee, 18 April 1946, 21 June 1946, 17 July 1946, 24 July 1946, and 30 July 1946, Unnamed folio, Bohn Papers, MPL; Minutes, Civic Committee, 1 July 1946, Unnamed folio, Bohn Papers, MPL; Centurama Committee Reports and Recommendations, 25 April 1946, Notebook of Minutes, Bohn Papers, MPL; folio “Labor Committee,” Bohn Papers, MPL. During the summer of 1946, UAW Local 248 and the Milwaukee CIO sponsored numerous parades and rallies that provided alternative images of the city’s past and future. Photo, Wisconsin CIO News, 12 July 1946, 1; “Mass Price Control Rallies July 19,” Wisconsin CIO News, 19 July 1946, 2; “Milwaukee CIO Picnic Huge Affair,” Wisconsin CIO News, 2 August 1946; “Labor Groups Hear Leaders: CIO, AFL Programs,” MJ, 3 September 1946; and “Close to 10,000 at Milwaukee CIO Affair,” Wisconsin CIO News, 6 September 1946. J. F. Effinger, Promotion Department, to W.A. Roberts, Vice President, Allis-Chalmers Mfg. Company, 24 May 1946, folio “‘Parade Idea’ List Recipients,” Bohn Papers, MPL; W. A. Roberts, Allis-Chalmers, to Mayor John L. Bohn, 21 May 1946, folio “Parade Participation (Local-Milwaukee),” Bohn Papers, MPL; Official Centurama Parade Program, folio “Parade Program,” Bohn Papers, MPL; “City’s Parade Ardor Survives Rain Chill,” “Prosperity, Lawn Tramplers Came with Sunday’s Parade,” MJ, 15 July 1946; and “Tens of Thousands Dare Drizzle and Watch the Centurama Parade Uncoil for Miles,” MJ, 15 July 1946. “Centurama Sidelights,” Daily Picket (Local 248 Strike Publication), 16 July 1946, MPL; and Wisconsin CIO News (Local 248 edition), 19 July 1946, 1. The union claimed that radio announcers for the parade avoided mentioning the controversial Allis-Chalmers

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forward-looking icon in the emblem, stood in tension with the messy and often divisive politics of everyday life in the midcentury city.25 Responding both to mounting complaints about missed opportunities for postwar development and to allegations of ineffective organizing for the city’s anniversary celebration, an influential group of Milwaukee business and civic leaders coalesced to redirect local initiatives. In particular, a loose collection of business-led organizations that included the 1948 Corporation, the Downtown Association, the Milwaukee Advertising Club, the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and the city’s two daily newspapers set out on a full-scale campaign to promote the debt referendum. They advertised the measure as the route to a “modern” downtown and metropolis. These organizations, composed of overlapping memberships, brought together a large cohort of business and civic leaders from financial institutions, large-scale retail, the professions, and real estate. The campaign also involved prominent industrial leaders, although the largest Milwaukee manufacturers were preoccupied by their confrontations with militant unions in the early postwar years. The city’s older and more established industrial and commercial group, the Milwaukee Association of Commerce, came aboard only late in the campaign. As a result, this dispute over postwar financing and development signaled a way-station in the transfer of the city’s economic leadership from the German-American industrialists who had guided the business community since its early days to a cohort of midcentury corporate, retail, and professional leaders.26

25

26

float. Available records show no evidence of a parade invitation sent to UAW Local 248 to balance that given to the company. On the strike, see Stephen Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin”: The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900–1950 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992). Parade and festival organizational records, including those about committee structures, indicate the tensions along axes of race, gender, class, and geography present in the early postwar city. Minutes, Colored or Racial Committee, 14 May 1946 and 26 June 1946, Unnamed folio, Bohn Papers, MPL; Memorandum, Centurama Beauty Queen, 17 July 1946, folio “Queen Entries,” Bohn Papers, MPL; Memorandum from G. Meldman, 1 July 1946, folio “Women’s Pageant,” Bohn Papers, MPL; Mrs. Boris Volgovskoy to Mr. James F. Effinger, 28 May 1946, folio “Parade Participation (Local-Milwaukee),” Bohn papers, MPL; and Minutes, Suburban Committee, 15 May 1946, folio “Minutes of Committee Meetings,” Bohn Papers, MPL. The Downtown Association, organized in 1936 with about 50 members, grew to 204 members by 1951. Large-scale retail executives played a leading role in the organization, but members included theater owners, real estate investors, bankers, and professionals working in Milwaukee’s downtown district. Leaders of the group included Richard Herzfeld (president, Boston Store), Charles Zadok (general manager, Gimbels), Joseph Deglman (merchandise manager, Boston Store), and David A. Herman (advertising director, Gimbels). Zadok and Herzfeld took a lead also in the 1948 Corporation. Perry

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The Milwaukee Journal and the Milwaukee Sentinel gave the debt issue extensive coverage and used their editorial pages to persuade readers to vote “yes” on the referendum. For the Journal, the leading media force behind this campaign, this position marked a change from just five years earlier when the newspaper had publicly called for a debt-free metropolis. Now the Journal’s publisher (and later president) Irwin Maier played a central role in the formation and direction of the 1948 Corporation; Journal business manager Donald Abert also was active in the group. As a news outlet, a civic leader, and an organizational actor, the Journal especially brought its considerable resources to the pro-debt side of the issue.27 Along with the Journal, the 1948 Corporation provided the major impetus for the debt referendum. An offshoot of the recently founded Greater Milwaukee Committee, the 1948 Corporation was established in 1945 by a powerful collection of business and civic leaders. Officers of the 1948 Corporation at the beginning of the debt campaign were: Harold J. Fitzgerald, president of the Fox Wisconsin Amusement Corporation; Chester O. Wanvig, president of Globe-Union Inc. (automotive storage batteries and roller skates); Charles Zadok, vice president with the Gimbel Brothers department store; Carl Penner, treasurer of Reilly, Penner and Benton (certified public accountants); and Walter Kasten, president of First Wisconsin National Bank. While the group’s directors drew from the leadership of the city’s established heavy industries, the 1948

27

G. Anderson, a University of Wisconsin graduate with experience in business and government, began as the Downtown Association’s executive secretary in 1943. “A Spiritual Leadership,” MJ, 2 September 1951; Frederick I. Olson, “City Expansion and Suburban Spread: Settlements and Governments in Milwaukee County,” in Trading Post to Metropolis: Milwaukee County’s First 150 Years, ed. Ralph M. Aderman (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 1987), 80–84; and Orum, City-Building in America, 135–36. On the Association of Commerce, see “A. of C. Favors Bonds for City Improvements,” Milwaukee Sentinel [hereafter MS], 2 March 1947. On postwar planning and economic change, see Board of Public Land Commissioners, City Planning Division, Industrial Trends in the Milwaukee Area: An Analysis of Manufacturing as the Economic Base in Planning for Milwaukee (October 1945). See also: Lizabeth Cohen, “Buying into Downtown Revival: The Centrality of Retail to Postwar Urban Renewal in American Cities,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 611 (May 2007): 82–95; Robert Lewis, “The Changing Fortunes of American Central-City Manufacturing, 1870–1950,” Journal of Urban History 28:5 (July 2002): 573–98. Milwaukee Journal and the City Club of Milwaukee, How to Make Milwaukee a Better Community in Which to Live (Milwaukee: The Journal Company, 1942); Will C. Conrad, Kathleen F. Wilson, and Dale Wilson, The Milwaukee Journal: The First Eighty Years (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 168–69. In later-life reflections on the work of the 1948 Corporation, Maier said “We put on a hell of a promotion campaign to move those projects off dead center.” See “Maier, Journal and Civic Leader, Dies at 95,” MJ, 29 August 1994.

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Corporation helped to propel a group of men from the banking and financial sector, large-scale retail, emerging industries, media, and services to the center of local affairs. With one-hundred thousand dollars in its treasury and a focus on a metropolitan development agenda that aimed to address perceived shortcomings of the past, the group looked beyond the rushed planning for the city’s one-hundredth birthday to the upcoming commemoration of Wisconsin’s centennial in 1948. The newly formed 1948 Corporation set this next centennial as a deadline, aiming to put Milwaukee’s “master plan” in place and to initiate a “series of community improvements.” Their priorities encompassed a north-south highway, expanded parking, an outdoor stadium, an indoor sports arena, a museum, a rebuilt zoo, a downtown war memorial, and a redeveloped Civic Center.28 To prepare its plans for the postwar metropolis, the 1948 Corporation hired Maynard Meyer. As a professional planner and architect, Meyer brought training, skill, and energy to this task. A Milwaukeean by birth, Meyer believed that he had transcended the parochialism of day-to-day politics. He had studied architecture and city planning at Yale University, where he also later taught. At the Cranbrook Academy, he briefly studied

28

Contrary to the chronology presented in most accounts of the 1948 Corporation, the 150member Greater Milwaukee Committee both preceded and later carried on the work of the 1948 Corporation. “The 1948 Corporation: A Statement of Its Purposes and Objectives,” 22 October 1945, folio “The 1948 Corporation-Misc.,” box 25, Richard W. E. Perrin Papers, Series 079, Department of City Development, City of Milwaukee Archives, MPL [hereafter Perrin Papers, MPL]; Norman Gill and Paula Lynagh, “Debt Free Idea Loses Allure,” National Municipal Review 36 (1947): 240–45, 265; Membership List, 14 May 1947, folio “1948 Corporation-Misc.,” Perrin Papers, MPL; “1948 Corporation,” Bohn Papers, MPL; “Head of 1948 Group Wants Bonds Issued,” MJ, 29 January 1947; “Build Now, 1948 Leaders Urge City,” MS, 29 January 1947; “‘Help Us Plan for City,’ Plea,” MJ, 19 March 1946; John M. McCarthy, Making Milwaukee Mightier: Planning and the Politics of Growth, 1910–1960 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), 125– 26; John Gurda, The Making of Milwaukee (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 1999), 346–49; Orum, City-Building in America, 134–35; Jack Norman, “Congenial Milwaukee: A Segregated City,” in Unequal Partnerships: The Political Economy of Urban Redevelopment in Postwar America, ed. Gregory D. Squires (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 178–201; and Joel Rast, “Governing the Regimeless City: The Frank Zeidler Administration in Milwaukee, 1948–1960,” Urban Affairs Review 42:1 (September 2006): 85–86. On business leaders’ roles in urban policy, see: Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs?: Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961); William Issel, “Business Power and Political Culture in San Francisco, 1900–1940,” Journal of Urban History 16 (1989): 52–77; and C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), 100–106, 250–54. On urban regime theory, which accords a prominent role to resource-rich business leaders in shaping the urban agenda, see especially Clarence N. Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989).

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urban design with Eliel Saarinen. Before returning to Milwaukee in 1946, Meyer worked for architectural firms in Antwerp and New York City, helped to prepare New Haven’s Master Plan, and was decorated as a U.S. Naval officer.29 Meyer’s role as planner for the 1948 Corporation placed him in a pivotal position. Commissioned to prepare the “Central Area Plan,” Meyer tied together the 1948 Corporation’s institutional power with his expertise as a planner. This combination of corporate power and professional expertise, Meyer and the group claimed, established their authority to direct the city’s planning agenda. They contended that Milwaukee’s official planning bodies – the city’s Board of Public Land Commissioners and the county’s Regional Planning Department – lacked both the resources and the unencumbered vision that large-scale comprehensive planning required. The 1948 Corporation believed that it alone could mobilize the necessary resources, plan rationally, and persuade diverse constituencies to follow its plans. These private-sector leaders and professionals claimed the civic authority to guide Milwaukee’s development.30 Some civic and business leaders who had a long-standing role in planning and development endeavors took offense at the 1948 Corporation’s presumptive style. Lawrence E. Peterson of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Plan Association complained to the president of the 1948 Corporation: “While it is true that Master Plan activities have not progressed with the speed of a Hollywood superproduction, it must not be forgotten that a substantial quantity of planning work has already been done.” He continued, “This should not be ignored by super salesmen in their generally effective although sometimes ridiculous play on public emotions.” Peterson invited the 1948 Corporation to cooperate not only with the

29

30

Maynard Meyer, n.d., biographical files, Wisconsin Architectural Archive, MPL. On New Haven’s Master Plan and redevelopment, see: Dahl, Who Governs?; and Douglas W. Rae, City: Urbanism and Its End (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Meyer to Frank Casey, 30 October 1946, folio “Central Area Plan,” Perrin Papers, MPL. On the planning profession and the development of planning knowledge, see: M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983); Cliff Ellis, “Professional Conflict over Urban Form: The Case of Urban Freeways, 1930 to 1970,” in Planning the Twentieth-Century City, eds. Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 262–79; Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 346–70; Joseph Heathcott, “‘The Whole City Is Our Laboratory’: Harland Bartholomew and the Production of Urban Knowledge,” Journal of Planning History 4:4 (November 2005): 322–55; and Shanken, 194x. On expertise, policy development, and state building at the federal level, see Brian Balogh, “Reorganizing the Organizational Synthesis: Federal-Professional Relations in Modern America,” Studies in American Political Development 5 (Spring 1991): 119–72.

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Metropolitan Plan Association, but with planning officials in the city and the county.31 The ambition and self-assurance that Meyer and the 1948 Corporation displayed were evident also in draft plans envisaging a new Metropolitan Administrative Building – a “keynote” to the redeveloped Civic Center. This new home to a consolidated city-county government, Meyer wrote, must be a “modern multi-story office building” placed midway between and dominating the existing city hall and county courthouse. This proposal for the Metropolitan Administrative Building not only drew an imposing new physical structure into plans for a revitalized civic center, but Meyer and the 1948 Corporation imagined a new organizational structure for local government that elevated rational administration in the modern urban landscape. Proclaiming their expertise in designing the proper physical and administrative structure for the city, Meyer and the 1948 Corporation presumed to crowd out the messy conflicts of past and present politics by assigning them to the sidelines in the postwar metropolis.32 Meyer and the 1948 Corporation founded their approach to metropolitan development on a principle of “modern civic aggressiveness.” Meyer used the phrase to encapsulate the master plan he had prepared for the group. The corporate leaders, in turn, highlighted these ideas in their publicity. The 1948 Corporation and Meyer understood their work as a forward-looking project to reframe Milwaukeeans’ thinking about the city and to rebuild the city. “A new trend of ‘thinking’ must be created,” Meyer argued, “away from negative ultra-conservativism [sic] and toward a positive planned-action campaign to instigate an awakening of modern civic aggressiveness.”33 This attack on Milwaukee’s recent past, for Meyer and many in the 1948 Corporation, constituted a celebration of modernist planning. The dismissal of past public administration, planning, and thinking also must have carried strong associations for many in the 1948 Corporation as they acted on their designs to leave behind the city’s socialist legacies and the working-class politics that they had battled throughout the first half of the twentieth century. These politics and policies were now thrown into the wastebasket of outworn ways and

31

32 33

Lawrence E. Peterson to Harold Fitzgerald, 28 February 1946, folio “City Planning, 1945– 1946,” box 32, City Club Records, Milwaukee ARC. Central Area Plan Report, 15 July 1947, folio “Central Area Plan,” Perrin Papers, MPL. “Proposed Central Area Plan for Milwaukee,” 15 July 1947, p.35, folio “Central Area Plan,” Perrin Papers, MPL; “Summary Report on a Proposed Central Area Plan for the City of Milwaukee,” n.d., folio “1948 Corporation-Misc.,” Perrin Papers, MPL; “Outline Master Plan for Downtown Area,” MJ, 19 October 1947; “Stage by Stage City to Be Remade,” MS, 19 October 1947.

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jumbled together with a yesteryear characterized by (without any evident sense of irony) “negative ultra-conservativism.” Confidence in their vision, energy, and authority to shape the future animated the 1948 Corporation’s postwar work. In a striking contrast to “Old Lady Thrift,” the 1948 Corporation’s program of “modern civic aggressiveness” extolled the principles of efficiency and rational planning, while also accentuating the efficacy of masculine and business power in shaping the early postwar city. Fastened to claims of professional expertise and private-sector authority in the postwar order, this approach to city regeneration challenged images of a disorderly city of the past. Echoing the attacks on bingo and other forms of petty gambling, these initiatives aimed to fend off the culture, politics, and social landscape of the working-class city. At the same time, this planning agenda – embedded in a broader, nascent political culture – reasserted a conventional gender hierarchy. Anchored in “modern civic aggressiveness,” this early postwar development program yoked city rebuilding to male prowess and female domesticity and consumption. Advertisements promoting downtown shopping along Milwaukee’s “Magnificent Mile,” a product of the central city development plan, celebrated white middle-class women as model shoppers. Such depictions of female shopping in Milwaukee and elsewhere, of course, drew on marketing specialists’ earlier attention to women’s pivotal role in downtown retail.34 But this gendering of city development and consumption also derived from the social turmoil of the war years and the immediate postwar period. Many working-class women had contested their exclusion from wartime industrial workplaces, leisure spots, and other arenas of urban public life. “Modern civic aggressiveness” tapped into a set of discourses about the postwar urban order that challenged not only “Old Lady Thrift” but also rebuked the bingo rebels and the Rosie the Riveters. The arguments and explanations mobilized by the 1948 Corporation, situated in the language and images of conservative gender relations and corporate power, proved to be effective tools to both modernize the city and tame social relations in the city. “Modern civic aggressiveness” would chart a path away from a disorderly, outmoded city.35

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“Up and Down the Magnificent Mile,” MJ, 2 September 1951; Isenberg, Downtown America, 78–202; Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003); and Amy E. Menzer, “Exhibiting Philadelphia’s ‘Vital Center’: Negotiating Environmental and Civic Reform in a Popular Postwar Planning Vision,” Radical History Review 74 (1999): 112–36. On the complex and contradictory impact of the war on women, gender roles, and gender relations, including both women’s wartime and postwar “public” roles and the reestablishment of male authority and female domesticity within the context of a postwar

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The class implications of the 1948 Corporation’s program surfaced especially in the 1947 debt referendum debate. The 1948 Corporation members regarded the rejection of Milwaukee’s pay-as-you-go traditions as the first step on their agenda for postwar improvements. They believed that the funds available from the city’s permanent improvement fund, $3.8 million per year by their account, would be insufficient. In calling for the debt measure, the 1948 Corporation emphasized that the “need for public improvements is so urgent that the earliest possible expression of the people is necessary.”36 Coalition partner Perry G. Anderson, secretary of the Downtown Association, had argued before the Milwaukee Real Estate Board that all of Milwaukee “should be constituted as one huge development corporation.”37 Citing improvements deferred over the course of the depression and war years, along with anxieties over declining land values, referendum proponents described the downtown and the city as outmoded, blighted, congested, and “run down at the heels.”38 Their campaign logo, devised by the Milwaukee Journal, pictured Milwaukee as a turtle stuck on its back, proclaiming “Turn Me Over in ‘47.” Publicists who circulated lapel pins and buttons with an illustration of the overturned turtle explained the symbol: “Milwaukee has been ‘on its back’ for years. . . . The buttons, as worn by many Milwaukeeans, will mean that the citizenry want the city to get off its back. They want public officials and civic organizations to turn the old turtle over.”39 This was a curious logo. Even if turned right-side up, the turtle would remain a turtle, plodding rather than nimble. Nevertheless, the logo became a widespread symbol for this effort to scrap the city’s pay-as-you-go policy. Just before

36

37 38 39

“traditional family,” see: Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Dennis A. Deslippe, “Rights, Not Roses”: Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945–80 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Daniel Horowitz, “Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America,” American Quarterly 48:1 (March 1996): 1–42; Carolyn C. Jones, “Split Incomes and Separate Spheres: Tax Law and Gender Roles in the 1940s,” Law and History Review 6 (1988): 259–310; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); and Sylvie Murray, The Progressive Housewife: Community Activism in Suburban Queens, 1945–1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). “Urges Public Ballot on City Bond Issuance”; “Common Council Should O.K. Referendum on Bonds,” MJ, 13 January 1947. “Urges Unified City Planning,” MJ, 15 March 1946. “City Warned: Float Loan or Sink!” MS, 13 March 1946. “Milwaukee: ‘Turn Me Over’ Buttons for Citizens Who Want Action,” MJ, 4 March 1947. See photograph in “Turn Me Over in ‘47 Turtle Becomes Lapel Pin,” MJ, 28 February 1947.

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election day, the Junior Chamber of Commerce sponsored a torchlight parade in support of the measure. The parade featured 300 torches and a 200-pound stuffed turtle (on loan from the public museum). Over 100 small-sized live turtles inscribed with the “Turn Me Over in ‘47" slogan were distributed to children along the route.40 The postwar reconstruction projects that debt proponents promoted to advance this measure matched most of the items that the 1948 Corporation sought to write into Milwaukee’s Master Plan: rebuilt downtown streets and bridges, off-street parking, an outdoor stadium, a new zoo, an expanded civic center on the west side of the downtown (including an arena), and a war memorial on the east side. The north-south axis of their plans included an expressway running from the airport south of the city to the downtown and suburbs to the north.41 Although rarely mapped out concretely, these proposals fit into an abstract design of the metropolitan area. This blueprint was ordered functionally, patterned for economic growth, centered on a downtown business district linked to expanding suburbs, positioned to compete with urban areas nationally, and dependent on a program of debt. This simplified map of the city conveyed the political, economic, and demographic aspects of the metropolis that these leaders and development backers considered most important. Such planning served to connect and coordinate political and economic power in the city. Advocates embraced these measures, in the words of the geographer Edward Soja, with a “rhythm played to the legitimizing beat of market forces.”42

40

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“Torches, Turtles Enliven JCC Bond March,” MJ, 29 March 1947; “JCC Turtles Can Be Pets,” MJ, 28 March 1947; “Torch Parade Plan Detailed,” MJ 26 March 1947; “Parade Slated to Aid Bonds,” MJ, 13 March 1947. Jerry Mason, “Fighting the Postwar Blues,” This Week Magazine: Milwaukee Journal Supplement, 30 March 1947; folio “Central Area Plan,” Perrin Papers, MPL; folio “Milwaukee – Master Plan,” Perrin Papers, MPL; Milwaukee Board of Public Land Commissioners, Rehabilitation Study of the Central Business Area (Milwaukee, 1945); Milwaukee Board of Public Land Commissioners, Master Plan for the City of Milwaukee (Milwaukee, 1947). Edward W. Soja, “Taking Los Angeles Apart: Some Fragments of a Critical Human Geography,” Environment and Planning D 4 (1986): 266. See also Joseph Heathcott and Máire Agnes Murphy, “Corridors of Flight, Zones of Renewal: Industry, Planning, and Policy in the Making of Metropolitan St. Louis, 1940–1980,” Journal of Urban History 31:2 (January 2005): 151–89; and John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). On downtown and corporate center rebuilding plans in other cities, see: Carl Abbott, “Five Strategies for Downtown: Policy Discourse and Planning Since 1943,” in Planning the Twentieth-Century American City, 404–27; Isenberg, Downtown America; John H. Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); and Teaford, Rough Road to Renaissance.

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By advocating debt financing, these business and civic leaders contended that future generations of Milwaukeeans, who later would benefit from the improvements, should pay “their share.” Francis Casey, executive director of the 1948 Corporation, said that he saw “no reason why the 1948 taxpayer should be forced to pay the cost of the entire improvement for the future.”43 Funding improvements with bond issues – projecting payments into the future – made this possible. The conservative City Attorney Walter J. Mattison, an enthusiastic supporter of the measure, pronounced that “If Milwaukee wants to keep pace with modern cities, it must . . . let future taxpayers carry their just share for projects that benefit them.”44 Whether intentionally or not, this approach obscured the language of class, bypassing arguments over whom, or which neighborhoods, should shoulder the costs of downtown improvements. But in the context of the midcentury city, this “classless” argument was itself fully invested in the politics of class. During the politically charged early postwar years, fault lines in the metropolis ruptured frequently. Class-based conflicts – ranging from the protracted Allis-Chalmers strike and other labor disputes to postwar inflation protests to ongoing skirmishes over working-class culture – underlined these tensions.45 If posed directly, controversies over downtown and metropolitan improvements – who decides, who pays, and who benefits – could have readily fueled class discord. But the 1948 Corporation and its allies sought to deflect conflict over benefits and payments by locating the debate in an amorphous future rather than locating it within the concrete geography and contested politics of the present or recent past. Taxpayers, undefined temporally and spatially, became the imagined constituency in the Corporation’s literature, rather than Milwaukeeans attached to distinct classes, neighborhoods, and workplaces (see Figure 5.3). Debt-financing patrons offered up an abstract but vigorous image of a modern Milwaukee populated by residents undifferentiated by class or location and devoid of political conflict. And the new funds would help to make the classier metropolis that debt proponents envisioned. This discourse recast the “common sense” of how city politics worked, nudging aside the politics of class while legitimizing the politics of growth.46 43 44

45

46

“‘48 Preview, Wins Support,” MS, 20 March 1946. “Official of City Boosts Bonds,” MJ, 15 March 1946. See also “Bonds Would Reduce Taxes,” MS, 20 January 1947. On Mattison, see Frank Zeidler, Interview by John R. Johannes, 9 December 1993, transcript summary, 3, Wisconsin Politics Oral History Project, Special Collections, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. On the Allis-Chalmers strike and class divisions in the early postwar years, see: Chapter 4; and Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin.” For analyses of power in discourse and hegemony, see: Miguel A. Cabrera, Postsocial History: An Introduction, trans. Marie McMahon (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004); Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, The Future of Class in History: What’s Left of the

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fi g u r e 5 . 3 Who should pay for city projects and improvements? Present residents or future taxpayers? Excerpt from pro-referendum advertisement titled “Milwaukee Must Have Permanent Improvements – Why Not Enjoy Them Now and Spread the Costs?” The advertisement, sponsored by the Improve Milwaukee NOW Committee, appeared in the Milwaukee Journal, 19 February 1947, and the Milwaukee Sentinel, 20 February 1947. Found in “Bond Issues” folio, John L. Bohn Papers, Series 081, Office of the Mayor, City of Milwaukee Archives, Milwaukee Public Library. Reproduced by permission of the Milwaukee Public Library and the Greater Milwaukee Committee.

Frank Zeidler headed the referendum opposition. The future-mayor played a pivotal role in organizing the Keep Milwaukee Debt Free Committee and spoke throughout the city about the perils of debt. Samuel Nissenbaum, a Democratic Party activist, and George Helberg, a Bay View Civic League officer, served as secretary and treasurer of the new antidebt organization. Zeidler, a German Lutheran who grew up in the ethnically diverse West-Side Merrill Park neighborhood, was raising a family in a North-Side working-class neighborhood. He had been active in the Socialist Party since he was a young adult in the early 1930s and became a frequent candidate for elective office. In 1941 he won a seat on the Milwaukee school board. As a surveyor, Zeidler had gained valuable experience on housing and urban development issues while working on the New Deal Greendale project on the outskirts of Milwaukee.47 Throughout his public life, he remained a careful student of city

47

Social? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 139–76; and Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). “Group to Fight ‘Yes’ on Bonds,” MJ, 1 March 1947; “‘No’ on Bonds Balks Future,” MS, 1 March 1947; and “Form New Group to Oppose Bonds,” MJ, 8 March 1947. Frank Zeidler, born in 1912, was the brother of the political conservative Carl Zeidler, who defeated the long-time Socialist Mayor Daniel Hoan in 1940. Frank Zeidler had endorsed

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government and urban development. Significantly, this debt campaign and his subsequent mayoral campaign presented Zeidler and his close allies with a three-fold challenge: first, holding together the strands of a local movement that in earlier decades had united organized labor and reformers with the Socialist Party; second, translating a Socialist agenda into the language of postwar liberalism; and third, working alongside a faction of antitax activists who opposed the debt measure on antistatist grounds. Competing against the Nonpartisans, a coalition of conservative-tomoderate Democrats and Republicans, Milwaukee’s Socialists had mobilized a base of working-class voters and middle-class reformers around an agenda that fused good-government principles with broad working-class and labor goals. Assessing a record of partial accomplishments and stalled initiatives, historians debate the significance of Socialist politics in Milwaukee and other cities during the first half of the twentieth century. In a classic but historically unsatisfying formulation, scholars have concentrated on the question of whether the municipal Socialists were reformers or radicals. Were the efforts of the “Sewer Socialists” akin to those of middle-class reformers and progressives? Or did Milwaukee’s Socialists push beyond the limits of middle-class reform to further a radical agenda? In order to move beyond this “reform-revolution” debate, historians might be better served by investigating and interpreting the creation and continuing influence of Socialist political structures, policies, and political cultures. In addition to mobilizing a broad, multiethnic working-class constituency (building beyond the party’s German roots in the city), Milwaukee Socialists often espoused distinctive policies that challenged the prerogatives of organized capital. And they did so with a sharply defined approach to politics. As Frank Zeidler observed, Milwaukee Socialists pressed for change by joining labor organizing with electoral and legislative action as they “[spoke] in terms of class differences between workers and capitalists.”48

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Hoan in that election. As noted earlier, Carl Zeidler left the city in 1942, before the end of his term, to serve in the Naval Reserve; he was killed at sea. Frank Zeidler’s first elected position was as county surveyor (1938). Gurda, Making of Milwaukee, 303–06, 310, 336–37; Alan J. Borsuk, “Mayor Served the ‘Public Welfare,’” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 8 July 2006; McCarthy, Making Milwaukee Mightier, 102–03, 129–32; and Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government.” Frank Zeidler, “Catholicism and Political Life in Milwaukee,” in Milwaukee Catholicism: Essays on Church and Community, ed. Steven M. Avella (Milwaukee: Knights of Columbus, 1991), 42. In his introduction to a history of Milwaukee Socialists, Zeidler emphasized that he did not consider the term “Sewer Socialists” derogatory, although it was intended as such by “Socialist theoreticians.” He believed that the Milwaukee Socialists managed to win elections and succeeded at practical politics while also remaining committed to the ideals of socialism and good government. See the introduction in Elmer

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By the mid-1940s, municipal Socialist politics lacked a significant institutional presence. In particular, the previously close alliance between the Socialists and the Federated Trades Council (FTC) had disintegrated by the late 1930s. The New Deal Democratic Party, especially nationally but increasingly locally, claimed the allegiance of organized labor. Prominent FTC leaders such as Jacob Friedrick and Socialist luminaries such as Daniel Hoan moved to the Democratic Party. But legacies of Socialist policies and patterns of municipal politics – narratives of local history and public life – persisted. Working-class politics remained a force in this city. In particular, Zeidler’s discourse of urban politics and democracy made sense in Milwaukee’s working-class wards as he fought to preserve the Socialistinitiated debt-free policy. Frank Zeidler also sought to define postwar “liberalism” by aligning it with the city’s tradition of a pragmatic, democratic socialism. This committed Socialist would later highlight his effort by titling his mayoral memoir “A Liberal in City Government.” In this early postwar period, the term “liberalism” remained contested. Many Democrats, Republicans, Progressives, and Socialists claimed the term. Describing the turmoil of liberal politics, Zeidler wrote: “The liberal movement in Milwaukee thus split between Socialists, former Progressives, and liberal Democrats. While the liberal Democrats were being active in the Democratic Party, the conservative Democrats still held most of the public offices . . . .”49 Contending that Milwaukee’s liberal heritage and its prospects hinged on the referendum’s defeat, Zeidler set his version of liberalism squarely in the language of class. This political narrative inscribed Milwaukee’s pay-as-you-go policies with a specific and resonant local meaning. Some debt foes, of course, sought merely to limit public spending. But the predominant pay-as-you-go campaign, as articulated by Zeidler, upheld

49

Axel Beck, The Sewer Socialists: A History of the Socialist Party of Wisconsin, 1897–1940 (Fennimore, Wisconsin: Westburg Associates Publishers, 1982). On the historiography of Milwaukee Socialists, see: Eric Fure-Slocum, “Milwaukee Labor and Urban Democracy,” and Aims McGuinness, “The Revolution Begins Here: Milwaukee and the History of Socialism,” both in Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past, eds. Margo Anderson and Victor Greene (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 48–106. In addition to citations in Chapter 1, see: Booth, “Municipal Socialism and City Government Reform”; Elizabeth A. Jozwiak, “‘The City of the People’: Milwaukee’s Municipal Recreation and the Socialists, 1890–1917” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1997); and Olson, “The Milwaukee Socialists, 1897–1941.” On municipal socialists and labor, see: Cecelia Bucki, Bridgeport’s Socialist New Deal, 1915–36 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); and Shelton Stromquist, “Claiming Political Space: Workers, Municipal Socialism, and the Reconstruction of Local Democracy in a Transnational Perspective,” in Workers across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History, ed. Leon Fink (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 303–28. Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” 31–32.

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public autonomy in the face of private interests while also imagining an expanded state that could ameliorate the inequities and hardships caused or left unaddressed by the market.50 Zeidler based his opposition to the debt measure on a belief in local fiscal independence and commitment to a strategy of municipal flexibility. He labeled the measure a “raid to capture control of the city’s financial policy,” asserting that the city’s pay-as-you-go policy enabled it to remain free of debt to the financial industry. The sale of bonds would “make every businessman and every taxpayer, every workingman and every renter, pay tribute to the investment bankers.”51 Boasting that Milwaukee’s debt-free status irritated “financial houses around America,” Zeidler cautioned against returning to “the period of the depression when the banks squeezed the city.”52 He sought to preserve and reinforce this measure of public autonomy that earlier generations of Socialist city leaders had endeavored to secure. Documenting that most of the business leaders supporting the referendum had moved to the suburbs, Zeidler wondered aloud why the city should sell bonds and carry the debt for projects that disproportionately benefitted their downtown businesses. He noted that 60 percent of the 1948 Corporation’s directors lived outside the city, as did the heads of other pro-debt organizations. Those who still lived in the city, including the group’s officers Walter Kasten and Carl Penner, resided in the “silkstocking” Eighteenth Ward. The “people of the City of Milwaukee,” Zeidler charged, “are faced with a raid on their treasury organized largely by suburban residents.” How might suburban residents react, Zeidler asked scornfully, if Milwaukeeans formed a “Put-the-Suburbs-in-Debt” committee? Opponents of the debt measure argued that many of the anticipated downtown improvements spotlighted in the advocates’ publicity were projects that the downtown businesses had neglected to undertake on their own in recent years. Now these business leaders were pressing the city and its residents to shoulder the cost of these projects. The “burden of city debt will fall most heavily” on working-class taxpayers even though the debt 50

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Ibid., 28, 45–51; McGuinness, “The Revolution Begins Here”; and John Buenker, “Cream City Electoral Politics: A Play in Four Acts,” in Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past, 17–47. On liberalism, see also: Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Kevin Boyle, ed., Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894–1994: The Labor-Liberal Alliance (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998). “Keep Milwaukee Debt-Free,” folio “City Planning 1946–47,” box 32, City Club Records, Milwaukee ARC (emphasis in original); “‘No’ Says Zeidler, Because We’ll Get More by Staying on a Pay as We Go Basis,” MJ, 16 March 1947; “Bond Debate Is Broadcast,” MJ, 24 March 1947. Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” 21, 24. Likewise, the local Socialist Party decried the profits that “brokers and banking groups” stood to make from bond sales and transactions. “Socialists Oppose Plan,” MJ, 14 January 1947.

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coalition lacked adequate working-class representation, Zeidler contended. The Downtown Association, of course, lacked any working-class membership. The Milwaukee Building and Construction Trades Council (BCTC), was the only labor or working-class organization on the 1948 Corporation’s roster of directors. The BCTC, eager to secure new projects that could provide jobs for its members, spoke up for the debt measure. The group appears, however, to have played a minor role at most in the deliberations of the 1948 Corporation. Instead, as Zeidler alleged, corporate leaders living in the suburban reaches of the city drove this metropolitan debt initiative.53 Zeidler and the Keep Milwaukee Debt Free Committee advised the city to reject policies that would bind scarce resources to an inflexible schedule of debt payments. Instead of borrowing money, the city could use its twentyfive million dollars in cash reserves for public works and improvements. Over the course of ten years, the city would have a projected ninety-three million dollars to use, twice the statutory debt limit.54 This opposition to a new era of debt financing was bolstered by the 1,000-member South Division Civic Association, an organization of small business owners and homeowners from the heavily working-class South Side. By retaining its budgetary flexibility and independence, the city and its residents could avoid higher taxes to cover the expense of bond payments and the city could position itself to respond in times of economic hardship. With its independence intact, Zeidler reasoned, the city could act to address working-class citizens’ needs by hiring unemployed workers, forgiving unpaid taxes, or avoiding cutbacks in municipal services. Working-class homeowners, including those affiliated with the South Division Civic Association, viewed the equity they held in their homes as a means to a modest level of economic security. The cushion made possible by local independence might help them ride out difficult economic times. New obligations to pay off municipal debt threatened to undermine this security.55 53

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Zeidler to Milwaukee Common Council, 17 February 1947, folio “City Planning 1946– 1947,” box 32, City Club Records, Milwaukee ARC; “Most 1948 Corporation Heads Not Milwaukeeans,” Milwaukee Times [hereafter MT], 27 February 1947. A photograph of Milwaukee Advertising club leaders sporting “Turn Me Over in ‘47” buttons lists only suburban addresses. “Turn Me Over in ‘47 Turtle Becomes Lapel Pin.” On the building trades, see Grace Palladino, Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits: A Century of Building Trades History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). “‘No’ Says Zeidler, Because We’ll Get More by Staying on a Pay as We Go Basis”; and Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” 22. The ten-year figure of $93 million in cash reserves included the existing $25 million plus another $68 million that Zeidler estimated would accumulate. “‘Blank Check’ Issue of Bonds Assailed by Civic Association,” MT, 27 February 1947; “Favors ‘No’ Vote,” MJ, 28 March 1947. On suburban Los Angeles working-class homeowners’ displeasure with a cycle of debt-financed improvements for which they incurred a greater financial burden, see Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the

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Worries about debt and financial entanglements that might tie the city’s hands were reinforced by the dire circumstances of the Great Depression just a few years earlier. Industrial Milwaukee had been hit hard. The number of wage earners in the city plummeted to almost half in just four years, decreasing from 94,873 in 1929 to 55,856 in 1933. That figure rose only slightly by 1939 to 61,672, remaining one-third below the employment level of a decade earlier. Foreclosure rates shot up, reaching more than 30 percent in Milwaukee County.56 Municipal fiscal policies that curbed debt, while unable to stem private sector job loss, allowed the city to keep city workers employed and assist many citizens who were delinquent in paying their property taxes, while also keeping Milwaukee afloat. But the city did more to help sustain employment and enable some residents to ride out the economic crisis. To avoid default, the city issued more than fourteen million dollars worth of “baby bonds,” notes secured by delinquent tax certificates that holders could use to pay city obligations (taxes, permit fees, and so forth) or redeem at hundreds of Milwaukee stores and professional offices. Many city employees were paid with baby bonds. Former Socialist City Attorney Max Raskin later wrote that the baby bond program had been established “to the dismay of bankers, large merchants, and editorial writers.”57 The baby bonds had created a currency of IOU’s circulating within

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Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 135–56. On Milwaukee homeowners’ earlier economic strategies, see Roger D. Simon, The City Building Process: Housing and Services in New Milwaukee Neighborhoods, 1880–1910, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1996). The number of Milwaukee wage earners had increased to 108,372 by 1947. Milwaukee Board of Public Land Commissioners, Manufacturing in Milwaukee City, Milwaukee County, and the Milwaukee Industrial Area, Wisconsin, The North Central Division of the United States: 1919–1939 Compared with 1947 (Milwaukee, 1950); Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 180–83; McCarthy, Making Milwaukee Mightier, 103–05; and Still, Milwaukee, 479–85. Max Raskin, “Milwaukee and Its Baby Bonds,” Milwaukee History 8 (1985): 10; Hoan, City Government, 166–73; “List of Merchants and Professional Men Who Will Accept Baby Bonds,” folio 9, box 2, Daniel W. Hoan Mayoral Papers, MPL; “Tough Problems Face City,” MJ, 12 April 1936; “Taxpayers’ Group Will Fight Hoan,” Capitol Times, 28 July 1933; Still, Milwaukee, 540–41. Max Raskin described the operation of the baby bonds: “If a taxpayer ran a grocery store and accepted baby bonds for the sale of goods, the taxpayer could bring the baby bonds to the city treasurer’s office to pay taxes, permit fees and any other obligations owed the city” (Raskin 4). After bigger businesses, department stores, and large banks had refused to accept the baby bonds, smaller businesses understood that their willingness to take these city notes might boost their sales. Hoan recounted, “All who lined up were placed on an honor list, which was circulated among city employees who quickly switched their patronage to these friendly merchants” (Hoan 168). The baby bond strategy had an additional redistributive effect, since the city used this opportunity to go after larger businesses and landowners who were delinquent in paying taxes (Hoan 171). These bonds were issued in one hundred dollar and ten dollar denominations at a 5 percent interest rate and in five dollar and one dollar denominations at zero

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the city, rather than deepening the city’s dependence on outside financial institutions. While certainly not a long-term solution for city finances, in the short run this public measure had allowed a critical core of Milwaukee workers to secure their jobs or homes.58 This pursuit of security, rather than disclosing a story of working-class conservatism, points to an urban working-class politics that sought to restructure the market and the state to meet distressed residents’ needs and aspirations in a particular historical moment. Just as the family wage, homeowning, or patterns of consumption are not inherently liberal, conservative, or radical, the political meaning of particular fiscal policies must be interpreted contextually.59 The city’s Depression-era baby bonds program exemplifies how working-class political culture configured municipal policy. Milwaukee’s baby bond program rested on a foundation of local working-class political power and public action. It was geared to override the presumed rules of the marketplace and to mitigate both deepening municipal dependence and workers’ insecurity in the face of financial hardship. In contrast, the 1947 referendum proponents’ package of bond sales, long-term debt, and metropolitan development would tighten the city’s ties to a national, private-sector system of municipal finance. This, in turn, would diminish workers’ political power to influence the local state and attenuate the city’s power to navigate or regulate the market. Debt for development might weaken economic security, political autonomy, and democratic accountability. With these interrelated themes of municipal autonomy and workingclass security, Zeidler also touched on widely held fears of an impending economic downturn. Predictions that demobilization from the latest war would reignite economic turmoil, set against memories of unemployment following the Great War and the hardship of the Great Depression, formed

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interest. “Since the delinquent taxes were charged 10% interest, the difference in interest rates resulted in a profit for the city.” By the close of the Depression, the city posted a gain of $1,572,203 from the baby bonds program. Milwaukee Common Council, Municipal Activities of Milwaukee for 1940 (Milwaukee: Municipal Reference Library, 1941), 24. L. G. Meisenheimer, “Milwaukee’s Finances from One War to Another,” Municipal Finance 15 (1943): 4–10; and Booth, “Municipal Socialism and City Government Reform,” 69. See also Max Raskin, Interview by Barbara Morford, Waukesha, Wisconsin, 31 December 1981, Tape 2, Side 2, Wisconsin Labor Oral History Project, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin [hereafter WHS]. On the challenge of ascribing political meaning, see: Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); David Steigerwald, “All Hail the Republic of Choice: Consumer Theory as Contemporary Thought,” Journal of American History 93:2 (September 2006): 385–403; cf. John Bodnar, “Immigration, Kinship, and the Rise of Working-Class Realism in Industrial America,” Journal of Social History 14 (1980): 45–65.

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the political responses of many worker-class voters and others.60 The themes of independence and security, harkening back even to the workingclass republicanism of the nineteenth century, also continued to influence urban political culture. Coupled with the New Deal-era experience of an expanding welfare state, these ideals kindled a vision of the city’s relationship to the larger political economy that clashed with assumptions and values underlying growth politics. Conflicts over these values and assumptions, in turn, posed fundamental questions about the character of postwar liberalism. Would it be a liberalism that favored local political autonomy and economic security for workers or a liberalism that placed its stock in productivity and economic efficiency? Would these goals be attained by a politics of distribution or growth? While the choices posed were often more muddied, these alternatives drove the debt debate.61 Accompanying his call for municipal independence and flexibility to meet working-class needs, Zeidler’s arguments evoked a geography and politics of class in the midcentury city. He viewed the city as an assemblage of working-class and middle-class neighborhoods; urban politics constituted the democratic process of negotiating and dividing resources among these neighborhoods. In this rendering of the urban political economy, municipal efficiency contributed to distributive democracy. Unlike the growth advocates who described efficiency solely as a consequence of market rationality, Zeidler and other debt opponents saw efficiency as an issue of governance and politics.62 An antidebt editorial that chastised referendum backers’ depiction of Milwaukee as a “tired old man” drew readers’ attention to the city’s noteworthy record of employing people and delivering services. “[T]his doddering old town, which is debt free, hasn’t 60

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Andrew E. Kersten, Labor’s Home Front: The American Federation during World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 189–222; and Steven Kalgaard Ashby, “Shattered Dreams: The American Working Class and the Origins of the Cold War, 1945– 1949” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1993). While heeding Daniel Rodgers’ warning about the interpretive limits of republicanism, especially labor republicanism and producerism, historians should recognize also that fragments of these modes of discourse continued to affect working-class life and political controversy well into the 1930s and 1940s. Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: the Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79 (1992): 11–38; Gary Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government”; Richard M. Bernard, “Milwaukee: The Death and Life of a Midwestern Metropolis,” in Snowbelt Cities: Metropolitan Politics in the Northeast and Midwest Since World War II, ed. Bernard (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 171–73; and Martin J. Schiesl, The Politics of Efficiency: Municipal Administration and Reform in America, 1800–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 124–27.

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yet missed paying salaries of teachers, policemen or firemen nor had it quit hauling rubbish and refuse because the exchequer had pooped out and blithely let it plunge back into the old days of Dave Rose and carefree debt.”63 An efficient city government provided services and facilitated a fair division of resources. Zeidler and his allies believed that the everyday lives of working people and the vitality of their neighborhoods, rather than aggregate economic growth or the accumulation of metropolitan amenities, should be used to gauge the city’s health and accomplishments.64 Suburbanization combined with the politics of growth to threaten this urban order. Suburban residents had withdrawn from the urban polity yet continued to claim financial benefits from the city. Zeidler’s accusation that the debt campaign constituted a “raid” on Milwaukee by wealthy suburbanites who were concerned only with the downtown or broad metropolitan area development punctuated these complaints. Milwaukee’s suburbs, of course, were more varied than this charge suggested, ranging from the wealthy bedroom-community of Shorewood to the working-class factory-town of West Allis. But the economic and political divisions between the city and the rapidly growing, affluent suburban areas of the midcentury metropolis were increasingly evident. From 1940 to 1950, Milwaukee’s suburbs grew at a rate four times faster than the city itself. Zeidler was on the mark in his forecasts that this separation would contribute to the city’s later financial and political troubles.65 Rejecting downtown leaders’ model of growth based on city-center investments and metropolitan development, Zeidler and his allies contended that the city should expand its boundaries through an aggressive 63

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“Injection of Bonditis,” Times, 27 March 1947. David Rose, the turn-of-the-century mayor, was infamous for his corrupt administration. He was ousted by the Socialists in 1910. Gurda, Making of Milwaukee, 199–211. The history of neighborhood politics is replete with progressive reform and conservative reaction, including racial exclusion and violence. See, for instance: Arnold R. Hirsch, “Massive Resistance in the Urban North: Trumbull Park, Chicago, 1953–1966,” Journal of American History 82 (1995): 522–50; Seligman, Block by Block; Robert A. Slayton, Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Bernard, “Milwaukee: The Death and Life of a Midwestern Metropolis,” table A3; Donald J. Curran, Metropolitan Financing: The Milwaukee Experience, 1920–1970 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973); Richard W. Cutler, Greater Milwaukee’s Growing Pains, 1950–2000: An Insider’s View (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 2001); Judith Kenny, Deanna Benson, and David Bump, “Beyond the ‘Zone of Workingmen’s Homes,’” Wisconsin Geographer 21 (2006): 15– 40; and Orum, City-Building in America, 117–40. See also: Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

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program of annexation. They proposed that Milwaukee pick up on the project begun by earlier Socialists (but interrupted by the Depression) to spread out while consolidating the city and suburbs politically. In the early years of Zeidler’s tenure as mayor, the city would almost double in size through annexations, until it could no longer break the “iron ring” of surrounding suburbs.66 To steady its financial and political position, Zeidler insisted, the city needed to expand geographically and absorb new housing and industries located on the periphery. The city could not provide services for suburbanites who worked in the city or benefitted in other ways from their association or proximity without also making them a part of the tax base and the polity. The city and the suburbs, the workingclass wards and the downtown, threatened to stand at cross-purposes. This was the political and social fragmentation that most concerned Zeidler and his allies, rather than the physical signs of downtown wear-and-tear that most alarmed the 1948 Corporation and the Downtown Association. Annexation, Zeidler averred, would address metropolitan fragmentation by welding the parts into one polity. The questions of who pays, who benefits, and who decides would be bounded by a defined political and spatial order. Annexation would facilitate a politics in which efficient and just decisions about the distribution and payment for resources and services could be made accountably in the public arena. Zeidler sought to articulate this pay-as-you-go position (a local Socialist legacy) in the context of postwar liberalism; but he and the Keep Milwaukee Debt Free Committee also aligned themselves with voters who opposed the bond referendum on the grounds of fiscal caution or conservatism. The South Division Civic Association included some members who intended mainly to keep taxes low. The liabilities incurred through an aggressive bonding and development program, they argued, would put pressure on city leaders to raise taxes. William Pieplow, a savings and loan official who chaired the Civic Association’s planning 66

Joel Rast, “Annexation Policy in Milwaukee: An Historical Institutionalist Approach,” Polity 39:1 (January 2007): 55–78; Arnold Fleischmann, “The Territorial Expansion of Milwaukee: Historical Lessons for Contemporary Urban Policy and Research,” Journal of Urban History 14 (1988): 147–76; McCarthy, Making Milwaukee Mightier; and Lorne A. Platt, “Planning Ideology and Geographic Thought in the Early Twentieth Century: Charles Whitnall’s Progressive Era Park Designs for Socialist Milwaukee,” Journal of Urban History 36:6 (2010): 771–91. On other regions, see: Amy Bridges, Morning Glories: Municipal Reform in the Southwest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 19), 152–56; and Charles E. Connerly, “‘One Great City’ or Colonial Economy?: Explaining Birmingham’s Annexation Struggles, 1945–1990,” Journal of Urban History 26:1 (November 1999): 44–73. Zeidler also pursued annexation to decentralize the city, motivated by both garden city ideals and atomic-age civil defense. McCarthy, Making Milwaukee Mightier, 168–98; and Michael Quinn Dudley, “Sprawl as Strategy: City Planners Face the Bomb,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 21:1 (Fall 2001): 52–63.

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committee, stressed this point. A few years later as a leading detractor of public housing, he and Zeidler would square off against one another. In contrast, he and Zeidler found themselves on the same side during this contest. Pieplow raised concerns especially that these business leaders living in suburban enclaves would entangle the city in unnecessary financial obligations in order to build projects that disproportionately benefitted the few. This would result in higher taxes for property owners and homeowners who lived in Milwaukee.67 Zeidler and Pieplow, the former pressing for an engaged public sector and fair distribution of taxes and the latter exhorting restricted state and low taxes, found common ground in their rejection of the 1948 Corporation’s referendum and vision for the metropolis. For Zeidler, however, this tacit alliance may have hampered his effort to argue for the relevance of municipal socialism to the remaking of postwar liberalism. The nexus between taxes and public provision, which lay at the heart of a battle over public housing, would become unhinged by the end of the 1940s.68

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“‘Blank Check’ Issue of Bonds Assailed by Civic Association”; “Snow Removal, Bond Vote Will Get Scrutiny of Civic Association Here,” MT, 6 February 1947. Pieplow appears to have agreed in 1947 with Zeidler and others about the city’s need for more housing. He stopped short of endorsing any solution. The shifting position of the Milwaukee Board of Realtors in this controversy further illustrates the uncertain ground of the local political culture during this period. Early in the debt debate, the Realtors announced their support for the referendum, but added six stipulations. The group was concerned especially that the demand for building supplies and labor would be stretched to the detriment of private builders. They also urged that county residents pay for city projects that offered benefits beyond its boundaries. Finally, the Realtors insisted that the eventual cost of the debtfunded projects be covered in part by sources other than real estate taxes. By the end of March, the Realtors tipped to the debt opposition side. “Realtors O.K. ‘Yes’ on Bonds,” MS, 26 February 1947; “Realtor Board Opposes Bond,” MJ, 22 March 1947. On limited-state, low-tax politics, see: Julian E. Zelizer, “The Uneasy Relationship: Democracy, Taxation, and State Building Since the New Deal,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, eds. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 276–300; David T. Beito, Taxpayers in Revolt: Tax Resistance during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); and Molly C. Michelmore, Tax and Spend: The Welfare State, Tax Politics, and the Limits of American Liberalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). In the early 1930s, low-tax advocates and Socialists battled over a tax-reduction referendum (Beito, 22–24). In his 1933 pamphlet Taxes and Tax Dodgers, Daniel Hoan addressed this important contrast between socialists’ fair-tax argument and conservatives’ low-tax position. Hoan recognized that working-class residents’ limited ability to shoulder taxes required fiscal restraint, while he also upheld the “serviceability of organized government.” To meet this challenge, he called for “Not lower taxes, but fairer taxes.” Bucki stresses that municipal socialists countered low-tax arguments and built working-class support by preserving or expanding government services and opening public decisions, especially over public finance, to greater democratic accountability. Cecelia F. Bucki, “The Workers’ State: Municipal Policy, Class, and Taxes in the Early Depression,” in Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-

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The pro-debt position adopted by the two city-wide AFL bodies, the BCTC and the FTC, spotlights further the changing political landscape in the city. In earlier decades, the Milwaukee AFL and the Socialists stood side-by-side on important municipal issues and in political action. A close association with the FTC, in particular, and organizing in working-class neighborhoods had been at the heart of Socialist power in the city in the early decades of the twentieth century – what early Socialist organizers referred to as the “Milwaukee idea.” While some AFL unions and their members stuck with the “pay-as-you-go” approach during the 1947 controversy, the BCTC and the FTC officially endorsed a yes vote for the referendum. The BCTC’s president Peter Schoemann and the FTC’s general secretary Frank Ranney built support for the referendum by appearing at meetings around the city and speaking on the radio (including WTMJ, the Milwaukee Journal’s station). Schoemann teamed up with the past president of the Women’s Advertising Club and the industrial relations director at the Falk Corporation to promote the measure. His earlier advocacy for Milwaukee’s public housing program and his service on the recently formed housing authority helped to harness the debt and housing issues together, but jobs and city modernization figured prominently in the pitch.69 Ranney, trying to persuade the sixty-five thousand FTC members living in the city to vote “yes,” pointed to the jobs that a debt-funded program of improvements might create. “It will help assure constant employment, first in building the improvements and then in maintaining them.”70 Although jobs and housing stood at the forefront of their concerns, both leaders placed themselves behind an agenda of growth. The summer immediately after the debt debate, Ranney and Schoemann were at the center of an attempt to keep socialist principles out of the Wisconsin State Federation of Labor’s (WSFL) platform. Like the FTC, the WSFL had been aligned closely with the Socialists in earlier decades. But as

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Class Experience, eds. Eric Arnesen, Julie Greene, and Bruce Laurie (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 125–49; and Bucki, Bridgeport’s Socialist New Deal, 143–52. “Bond Issue Plan Given FTC Vote,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 13 February 1947; “Favor Bonds, County AFL Members Told,” MS, 9 February 1947; “AFL in Favor of City Bonds,” MJ, 9 February 1947; “Trades Group Favors Bonds,” MJ, 14 February 1947; “Leaders Say City Must Vote Bonds, Modernize,” MS, 15 February 1947; “Building Trades Council Backs City Bond Program,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 20 February 20, 1947; “Bond Plan Adoption Is Boosted,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 6 March 1947; “Make Milwaukee Mightier,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 13 March 1947; “Electricians Local 494 Backs Up ‘Yes’ Vote for Bonds,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 20 March 1947; “‘Yes’ for Progress” cartoon, Milwaukee Labor Press, 20 March 1947; “Referendum on Bonds to Boost Vote,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 27 March 1947; “All Those in Favor” cartoon, Milwaukee Labor Press, 27 March 1947 “Tells Labor’s Stand,” MJ, 23 March 1947; and “Plea via Mail for ‘Yes’ Vote,” MJ, 29 March 1947. See Chapter 2 on Schoemann. “Favor Bonds, County AFL Members Told.”

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more conservative and politically cautious AFL leaders gained power within these bodies, and as the New Deal paved the way for both Socialists (including Daniel Hoan) and trade unionists to move into the Democratic Party, the WSFL’s organizational culture that had been constructed on socialist aims now stood on shakier ground. In particular, Schoemann and Ranney guarded against the reinstatement of platform planks that called for collective and public ownership of utilities, essential services, and natural monopolies. This stance represented a reaction, in part, to the CIO’s vision for city democracy and helped to draw the boundaries for a privately oriented Cold War politics. These planks had been removed quietly by the WSFL’s 1946 annual convention; a debate to restore these planks generated a heated exchange during the 1947 convention. Support for the antisocialist effort came from the building trades generally and from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), one of the unions that publicly backed the debt referendum. The IBEW, along with other unions, had encountered practical and legal challenges in organizing public workers and then pressing municipallyowned utilities for higher wages. Schoemann’s membership on the Housing Authority board also draws attention to the institutional contrast between public authorities (increasingly prevalent since the 1930s) and strategies of public ownership (increasingly marginalized since the 1930s). Unlike municipally owned services and utilities, institutions that Socialists had imagined as democratically controlled and funded through local taxes and direct income, administratively independent bodies such as Milwaukee’s Housing Authority depended on federal funds and debt financing while they also circumscribed democratic oversight and accountability. Schoemann’s experience as a Housing Authority commissioner may have reinforced his political and institutional disapproval of public ownership.71 71

Wisconsin State Federation of Labor, Proceedings of the Fifty-fourth Annual Convention, Superior Wisconsin, 19–23 August 1946, pp. 4, 117–19; WSFL, Proceedings of the Fiftyfifth Annual Convention, Green Bay, Wisconsin, 18–22 August 1947, pp. 138–55; Robert W. Ozanne, The Labor Movement in Wisconsin: A History (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1984), 113–15; David Sigman, Interview by Dale E. Treleven, Shorewood, Wisconsin and Laguna Hills, California, 11 December 1981 and 1 March 1982, Tape 4, Side 2, Wisconsin Labor Oral History Project, WHS; and “Electricians Local 494 Backs Up ‘Yes’ Vote for Bonds,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 20 March 1947. The 1946 convention replaced the public ownership planks with a measure calling for the conservation of natural resources for “the benefit of all people” in Wisconsin. On the AFL and local politics, see also McGuinness, “The Revolution Begins Here”; and Buenker, “Cream City Electoral Politics.” Wisconsin law in the 1940s made public-sector organizing difficult. On public authorities, see especially Gail Radford, “From Municipal Ownership to Public Authorities: Institutional Factors in the Shaping of American Public Enterprise,” Journal of American History 90:3 (December 2003): 863–90.

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Despite the antisocialists’ increasing influence in the WSFL, delegates to the 1947 convention split over the issue. The 1948 convention voted to restore the planks dealing with municipal ownership of utilities and nationalization of natural monopolies, while leaving out a more sweeping call for the “collective ownership by the people of all means of production and distribution.”72 Support for the WSFL’s Socialist legacy – expressed in different circumstances as a principled stand, strategic consideration, or nostalgia – could be found especially in the AFL’s remaining industrial unions, the federal labor unions, and in other unions such as the Fire Fighters that benefitted from existence of a strong public sector. But the antisocialism evident in the AFL’s building trades (Schoemann’s base) and among close allies such as the Teamsters (Ranney’s background and affiliation) could not be ignored. On the one hand, this particular battle over the WSFL’s platform reveals the persistence of Socialist ideals in the local labor movement. On the other hand, the ascendance of antisocialist leaders, active in both internal labor politics and municipal policy debates, along with the diminished role of industrial-style unions in the FTC, illuminates the dominant trajectory of the local AFL.73 In electoral politics during these early postwar years, the FTC and BCTC leaders charted different paths, but both led away from the Milwaukee AFL’s past ties to the Socialists. During the controversial 1946 Fourth Congressional District race, the FTC’s Ranney supported John Brophy, an ex-Socialist who had just moved from the Progressive Party into the Republican Party. He favored Brophy over the left-wing challenger Edmund Bobrowicz, the Democratic primary winner, or the incumbent Thaddeus Wasielewski, the Democrat who ran as an independent in the general election. Ranney rejected Bobrowicz’s radicalism and objected to Wasielewski’s support for the antilabor War Labor Disputes Act. The FTC leader also tried but was frustrated in an attempt to organize labor votes for Senator Robert La Follette’s 1946 reelection battle. La Follette, a long-time friend of labor, moved from the disbanded Progressive Party to the Republican Party, hoping that Progressives and reformers would gather to remake the Republican Party into a 72

73

WSFL, Proceedings of the Fifty-sixth Annual Convention, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, 16–20 August 1948, pp. 4, 236–38; WSFL, Proceedings of the Fifty-fifth Annual Convention, 155; Ozanne, Labor Movement in Wisconsin, 114–15. WSFL, Proceedings of the Fifty-fifth Annual Convention, 138–55; Ozanne, Labor Movement in Wisconsin, 66, 113–15. On the continuing debate over these preamble planks, which had begun in 1942, see WSFL, Proceedings of the Fifty-eighth Annual Convention, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, 21–25 August 1950, pp. 117–19, 290. In this stage of the debate, Ranney especially stressed the “system of free business and free labor.” The public ownership planks lived on, even if feebly, until the 1958 merger of the Wisconsin AFL and CIO.

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home for liberals. But few followed. As was the plight of the Socialists, the Progressive Party’s base began crumbling in the face of New Deal politics and programs which drew labor activists and liberals to the national Democratic Party. La Follette, up against Joseph McCarthy in the Republican primary, did not survive to run for reelection.74 The BCTC’s Schoemann, a labor conservative and Catholic trade unionist, had worked in the 1930s to distance the AFL from both the Socialists and CIO labor militants. He continued this effort in the 1940s, helping to craft the AFL’s role in the postwar Democratic Party. In the 1946 Senate primary contest, Schoemann was unwilling to follow La Follette into the Republican Party. Given La Follette’s past support for labor, he counseled that labor organizations withhold endorsement for any candidate in the Senate primaries. After La Follette had been ousted from the Senate race by McCarthy, however, Schoemann led the United Labor Committee (ULC) to aid the Democratic candidate Howard J. McMurray. Throughout the fall campaign, the ULC and the AFL worked to discredit left-wing candidates, as the local AFL newspaper also kept tabs on the ongoing battle within the CIO to “purge reds.”75 Postwar AFL leaders and members, of course, did not follow a single route through the thicket and confusion of postwar politics and public life. WSFL leader George Haberman, an iron worker and public employee, voiced a distrust of partisan affiliations that echoed AFL traditions of voluntarism. His leadership rival Jacob Friedrick, a Machinist, had severed his close affiliation with the Socialists in 1941, arguing that it had ceased to

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Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin,” 164, 178, 184; David M. Oshinsky, Senator Joseph McCarthy and the American Labor Movement (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976), 16–17; Darryl Holter, “Milwaukee Labor after World War II,” Milwaukee History 22:3–4 (Autumn-Winter 1999): 98–103; Buenker, “Cream City Electoral Politics”; William F. Thompson, The History of Wisconsin, Volume VI: Continuity and Change, 1940–1965 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1988), 439–66. The War Labor Disputes Act, or Smith-Connally Act, restricted strike activity in wartime production plants and instituted a waiting period between strike votes and walkouts in other plants. See Andrew Kersten, Labor’s Home Front, 48, 57; Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 170, 180–81. Sigman, Interview, Tape 3, Side 2, Wisconsin Labor Oral History; “Join in Drive on Bobrowicz,” newspaper article, “Clippings, 1936–1974” microfilm reel, Robert E. Tehan Papers, WHS; “Rumbles of Purge Heard: CIO Pinks Face Battle,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 5 September 1946; “CIO Group Votes Down Move for Purge of Reds,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 19 September 1946; “Urge Full Vote on Tuesday: Hold Ballot Action Vital for Labor,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 31 October 1946; “Numerous LaborBacked Candidates Are Swamped; Hoan, Green Defeated,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 7 November 1946; Oshinsky, Senator Joseph McCarthy and the American Labor Movement, 17–18; and Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin.” During this campaign, occurring in the midst of the Allis Chalmers strike, the United Labor Committee supported all the major Democratic nominees except for Edmund Bobrowicz. See Chapter 4.

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be a viable player politically; he moved into the Democratic Party. For Ranney and Schoemann, municipal socialism and international communism stood out as discernible dangers in this postwar journey that also involved encounters with conservatives who sought to curtail labor’s power. The battle over Taft-Hartley loomed. The 1946 election losses and the controversy over the Allis-Chalmers strike (that carried on until the spring of 1947) may have given further impetus for these AFL leaders to use the debt campaign to chart an antisocialist, liberal growth position on the debt issue. The 1947 debt debate presented an opportunity for Ranney and Schoemann to reposition the AFL in the city’s public life, drawing it away from a Socialist past and placing it closer to a growth politics advanced by the 1948 Corporation.76 As the referendum vote drew near, the 1948 Corporation and its allies who were leading the campaign to secure debt financing organized the Improve Milwaukee Now Committee (IMNC). The creation of the IMNC indicated business leaders’ recognition of the need to build cross-class alliances to pass the referendum. But the 1948 Corporation remained firmly in control, with its president Harold Fitzgerald heading up the new committee. The IMNC listed 110 East Wisconsin Avenue as the address for its headquarters, the same as that of the 1948 Corporation.77 The pro-debt campaign, dominated by downtown business groups aiming to modernize metropolitan Milwaukee, sought to bring on board a number of individuals from liberal, veterans, women’s, labor, and neighborhood groups for this growth politics initiative. The new committee began broadening support for the measure by highlighting debt financing as a tool to improve city services, rather than just pointing to physical improvements. The members publicized especially

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Thomas W. Gavett, Development of the Labor Movement in Milwaukee (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 174–75; Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin”; Ozanne, Labor Movement in Wisconsin, 108–17; John D. Pomfret, “Jacob F. Friedrick in 1954,” in Workers and Unions in Wisconsin: A Labor History Anthology, ed. Darryl Holter (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1999), 214–15. See also Marilynn Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 185–208. On earlier AFL political strategies, see Julie Greene, Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881–1917 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). On the local AFL’s response to Taft-Hartley, see: “Labor Foes’ Ouster Demanded at Parley,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 21 August 1947; and “Authorize Fund to Fight Foes of Labor at Polls; Ballot Battle Is Planned,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 28 August 1947. The WSFL discussed their opposition to Taft-Hartley during the same annual meeting that they debated the public ownership planks. “Ask Approval for City Bonds,” MJ, 6 February 1947; “64 Join Fight for Bond Issue,” MJ, 17 February 1947; “Bond Campaign Pushed by 65,” MS, 18 February 1947; 1948 Corporation Membership list, folio “The 1948 Corporation-Misc.,” Perrin Papers, MPL.

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the city’s slow response to a big snowstorm in late January as a reason to vote for the referendum. Images of a snowbound Milwaukee made their way from the city’s newspapers into the literature of the IMNC. Like garbage and ash collection, snow removal was organized and carried out on a ward-by-ward basis. Critics complained that the old equipment Milwaukee still used because of its “penny-pinching” ways and the politics of ward-based services added up to a poorly run city. Advancing the charge that “Last week – we were imprisoned by a snowstorm – but we were sentenced years ago,” the Committee argued that debt financing would allow the city to overcome future inconveniences with “modern snow removal equipment.”78 Building on the newly adopted rallying cry of improved public services, the pro-debt forces hammered away at the blizzard’s cost to Milwaukee businesses on this “lost week end,” estimated at seventy-five million dollars. Inadequate snow-removal services cost the city by leaving commercial and business districts buried. And as reported in Business Week, the city’s promise to purchase additional snow-clearing equipment failed to mollify critics. The referendum backers used this winter-time opportunity to enjoin that Milwaukee “needs a complete rehabilitation.”79 More importantly, the IMNC sought to strengthen the pro-debt campaign by conceding that the housing shortage should be the city’s priority, the first need to receive concerted attention and action. While estimates of the postwar shortage varied, groups across the political and social spectrum agreed that Milwaukee faced a significant challenge in housing the many families and individuals who were doubled-up or squeezed into inadequate shelter. The Housing Expediter from the regional office in Chicago, for instance, estimated conservatively “a minimum immediate demand for 21,267 family dwelling units.”80 Shortly after the IMNC’s founding – with a membership roster that included prominent housing advocates such as Genevieve Hambley of the Joint Action Committee for Better Housing (JACBH) – the group stated publicly that bond issues for 78

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“Milwaukee’s Lost Week End,” ca. February 1947, folio “Bond Issues,” Bohn Papers, MPL; “Ask Approval for City Bonds”; “A Sentinel Editorial,” MS, 2 February 1947; “Straight Talk to Milwaukee,” MJ, 3 February 1947. See also Herbert A. Goetsch, “From Bridge Wars to Sewer Wars: Contributions by Public Works to Milwaukee’s Urban Experience,” Milwaukee History 20:4 (Winter 1997): 136–37. “Wanted: An Unbalanced Budget,” Business Week, 22 February 1947, 26. The national magazine gave credit for the debt campaign to the Greater Milwaukee Committee, the 1948 Corporation, and the IMNC, but failed to recognize the three organizations’ common roots. Office of the Housing Expediter, Region III, “Preliminary Analysis of Housing Market and Land and Public Services in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” January 1947, Bohn Papers, MPL; and Chapter 6.

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“permanent municipal improvements” would be held off until “the housing shortage is overcome.”81 Responding to this insistence on housing as the city’s priority, a number of additional labor (CIO and AFL), veterans, women’s, civil rights, and other civic organizations agreed to support the referendum, though with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The American Veterans’ Committee and the Milwaukee Joint Veterans’ Housing Council, for instance, declared that their support for the debt measure hinged on this housing bargain. They sought a commitment from the 1948 Corporation and the IMNC on a specific number of rental units that would be built as soon as financing became available.82 The JACBH served as an important bridge between housing and debt politics, although its vision of postwar development differed markedly from that of the 1948 Corporation. This coalition of women’s, labor, African-American, religious, and community organizations – including the Milwaukee League of Women Voters, the CIO Council, and the Urban League – had come together during the last months of the protracted fight to establish the Housing Authority in Milwaukee. The group, with a slightly expanded and altered membership, continued its work on Milwaukee’s housing crisis in the postwar years.83 Genevieve Hambley, an

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“64 Join Fight for Bond Issue”; “Housing First, Bond Promise,” MJ, 3 March 1947. “AVC Council Favors Bonds: ‘But Only if Veterans’ Housing Comes First,’ Letter Warns,” MJ, 28 March 1947. On the housing-first consensus, see also “Shall Milwaukee Issue Bonds to Finance Its Improvements?,” MJ, 16 March 1947. Echoing Zeidler’s call for a unified polity, the American Veterans Committee also advocated county-wide consolidation, in order to make local taxation and finances fairer. “Unite County, Is AVC’s Plea,” MJ, 7 February 1947. On the coalition politics in 1940s St. Louis, see Heathcott, “The City Quietly Remade.” Marie Anne Laberge, “‘Seeking a Place to Stand’: Political Power and Activism Among Wisconsin Women, 1945–1963” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1995), 66–81; Vivian P. Lenard, “From Progressivism to Procrastination: The Fight for the Creation of a Permanent Housing Authority for the City of Milwaukee, 1933–1945” (M.S. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1967), 123–26; and Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915– 1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 185–86. Following creation of the Housing Authority (1944), the JACBH – with the motto “Good Homes in Good Neighborhoods: America’s No. 1 Need” – supported low-income public housing, an extensive veterans’ housing program, rent control, and other measures to alleviate the housing shortage. At the time of the debt controversy, the JACBH’s membership roster included many of the organizations on the 1943 list: the Milwaukee County League of Women Voters, the American Association of University Women, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Milwaukee Woman’s Club, the Milwaukee Council of Church Women, the Council of Churches, the YWCA, the Booker T. Washington YMCA, the Milwaukee Urban League, the NAACP, the National Order of St. Luke, the Upper 3rd Street Commercial Association, the Wisconsin State Conference of Social Legislation (later the Wisconsin Conference for Social Legislation), and the Milwaukee CIO. Groups signing on after 1943 included: the Milwaukee Woman’s Service Club, the Wisconsin Home

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important player on Milwaukee housing issues since at least 1940, chaired the JACBH until 1948. In addition to her roles in the JACBH and the League of Women Voters, she served as a delegate to the Mayor’s PostWar Planning Committee, where she worked with a wide range of city leaders. Unlike the 1948 Corporation, the JACBH brought together female and male, black and white, and working-class and middle-class members. Like the 1948 Corporation, the JACBH was organized during a pivotal period when city dwellers’ attention had begun to shift from the global war to planning for a postwar world and metropolis.84 Shortly after the Housing Authority had been established, local real estate and politically conservative groups sought to confine the work of the new agency. The JACBH had vigorously defended the Housing Authority, stressing that the city and the authority should act rather than wait for the federal government. Compiling studies, stories, and projections about the wartime and postwar housing shortages, the JACBH stipulated that a strong public response embracing veterans’ housing and low-income housing, especially for African-American residents segregated in the Sixth Ward and surrounding precincts, was essential.85 The group maintained that local government should take the lead, aided by the federal government and in cooperation with, but not controlled by, private enterprise. Emphasizing the immediacy of housing needs for veterans and the Sixth Ward, the JACBH expressed frustration over planners’ claims that the preparation of the city’s Master Plan must take precedence. Seeking to clear the way for a slum clearance program driven by housing needs, the JACBH chastised planners for delays in responding to these needs. They also decried the “selfish hypocrisy” of homeowners who ignored the

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Economics Association, the Interracial Federation, the Come-Back Club, and the Wisconsin Anti-Tuberculosis Association. By 1948, the Americans for Democratic Action had joined. Catholic Social Welfare and the Association of Catholic Women were among the groups that appear to have left the coalition between 1943 and 1948. JACBH to Common Council, 26 April 1947, folio “Urban Redevelopment Coordination Committee 1947,” Bohn Papers, MPL; JACBH letterhead, 16 May 1948 and 26 October 1948, folio 1, box 119, Carl F. and Frank P. Zeidler Papers, Office of the Mayor, City of Milwaukee Archives [hereafter Zeidler Papers], MPL. Milwaukee Post-War Planning Organization membership list, ca.1943, folio “Post-War Planning,” Bohn Papers, MPL; and Laberge, “Seeking a Place to Stand,” 66–81. Nora Reith, another League of Women Voters leader and active in housing issues since the 1930s, replaced Hambley as JACBH chairperson after she moved away from Milwaukee. Reith’s involvement in housing issues went back at least to 1934, when she was appointed to the Advisory Committee for the Parklawn project by the Public Works Administration. Edmund H. Hoben to Mayor Carl Zeidler, 24 October 1941, and Housing Notes, 28 October 1941, folio 3, box 16, Zeidler Papers, MPL. Hambley also had headed up the League of Women Voters’ Economic Welfare and Housing Committee. Trotter, Black Milwaukee; and Chapter 2.

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sacrifices of veterans and the “faulty functioning of our economic system in home building.”86 The 1948 Corporation and the JACBH agreed that the early postwar years required action. The city needed rebuilding. They disagreed on the means and purposes of this rebuilding. For the 1948 Corporation, a program of center city development, involving the downtown itself and the downtown in relation to the metropolitan region, took priority. Slum clearance or blight elimination was viewed as tool for this larger renewal program. For the JACBH, low-income public housing and affordable housing for veterans topped the postwar agenda; slum clearance should serve housing. As the national housing activist and planning educator Catherine Bauer would write later in her analysis of the 1949 Housing Act, “housers” viewed redevelopment as a way to “provide everyone with a decent home in a decent neighborhood” while planners “saw redevelopment as a means toward more rational and efficient organization of central areas.”87 The divergent priorities of these Milwaukee planners and housing reformers came together, however, during the contest over the 1947 debt referendum. The IMNC summoned both the business-led development groups, headed by the 1948 Corporation, and the liberal housing reformers, gathered by the JACBH. In this deal, the 1948 Corporation not only gained the backing of labor and liberal reform organizations that had worked to unite Milwaukeeans across racial, gender, and class lines, but had managed to graft the housing issue onto the debt measure, thereby beginning to assuage a widespread concern of the midcentury city. The JACBH and allied groups, deeply committed to addressing the acute housing crisis in early postwar Milwaukee, gained the concession that

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“Action Group Blasts Planning Commission for Housing Delays,” Wisconsin CIO News, 29 March 1946; JACBH in Milwaukee Speaks on Housing and Blight Elimination, folio “Housing 1945,” Bohn Papers, MPL. Catherine Bauer, “Redevelopment: A Misfit in the Fifties,” in The Future of Cities and Urban Redevelopment, ed. Coleman Woodbury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 9. Bauer called the 1949 Housing Act “a kind of shotgun marriage between the housers and the planners,” contending that confusion over urban redevelopment in the early postwar years resulted in part from the contradictions embedded in this legislation. See also Chapter 7. On the wartime and postwar tensions between housing and redevelopment, see: William R. Barnes, “A National Controversy in Miniature: The District of Columbia Struggle over Public Housing and Redevelopment, 1943–1946,” Prologue 9 (1977): 91–104; John F. Bauman, “The Paradox of Post-War Urban Planning: Downtown Revitalization versus Decent Housing for All,” in Two Centuries of American Planning, ed. Daniel Schaffer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 231–64; and Joel Schwartz, The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993).

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resources and clout would be devoted to their cause.88 A strategic political and ideological move in the debt campaign to structure a growth-oriented, classless, and depoliticized urban future, this bargain linked the metropolitan renewal and housing agendas while also helping to steer the course for postwar urban policy and political culture in Milwaukee. Moreover, the IMNC and the 1948 Corporation sought to woo the faction of fiscally conservative debt opponents by arguing that improvements could be had without increased taxes. “If we pay for these improvements with BONDS, taxes will NOT have to be raised.”89 This organized effort, then, attempted to mobilize a wide range of voters behind the growth agenda. On the eve of the vote, the Milwaukee Journal reiterated the urgency of the measure. Pitching the referendum one last time as a wake-up call to City Hall, the newspaper opined: “Milwaukee is sick to death of the blight, shabbiness, and the whistle-stop look of the inner city.” The city “ought to look the part” of a “city as strong and fine as this one.”90 The Milwaukee Sentinel echoed these sentiments in its last-minute plea, contending that a “no” vote would lead the city down a path of urban decay and disorder. Defeat of the referendum, according to the Sentinel’s William Norris, would be a vote for slums and blight, for crime and juvenile delinquency, for dirt and congestion, for low property values and public service cuts. A yes vote, in contrast, would help to regenerate the city – physically, socially, and politically.91 The debt referendum prevailed on April 1, 1947, with 56.9 percent of the 94,965 votes cast in favor of the measure.92 Slightly less than onethird of Milwaukee’s eligible voters made their way to the polls for this election, a relatively high turnout for a 1940s nonmayoral spring election. One report asserted, “The bond referendum, in which voters will decide the future financial policy of the city, was credited with bringing out the big Milwaukee vote.”93 Proponents and opponents of the 88

89

90 91 92

93

This is not to argue that these liberal and labor groups had not lobbied previously for extra resources, including bond sales, to address the housing crisis. During the previous spring, the CIO contended that the city’s debt-free status did workers little good if the housing crisis remained unaddressed. “Out of Debt – So What,” Wisconsin CIO News, 5 April 1946. Improve Milwaukee Now Committee advertisement, “To Milwaukee Taxpayers: Your ‘YES’ on the Bond referendum WILL NOT RAISE TAXES,” 26 March 1947, folio “Bond Issues – March 31, 1946 – August 28, 1947,” Bohn Papers, MPL. “Milwaukee: Vote ‘Yes’ Unless You Want the City to Stay Asleep,” MJ, 31 March 1947. William A. Norris, “Vote ‘Yes’ or Face Crime and Slums,” MS, 1 April 1947. Milwaukee Board of Election Commissioners, Nineteenth Biennial Report. See also: “Election at a Glance,” MS, 2 April 1947; “Voters Give Mandate to Improve City,” MS, 3 April 1947; and “Favor Bonds for Financing Improvements,” MJ, 3 April 1947. “Vote Turnout Here Doubled,” MJ, 2 April 1947; and “Bond Issue Spurs Heavy Vote in City,” MS, 2 April 1947. Comparing the vote total to that of previous off-year spring elections, the Journal argued that interest in the bond referendum and a daylight saving time measure helped boost the vote totals.

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measure used phone banks, radio spots, mailings, and speakers to turn out voters.94 Passage of the debt referendum came at a hefty price. Ringing up a bill of $36,172, debt promoters had outspent pay-as-yougo defenders by a ratio of 250 to 1. Fundraising in support of the referendum was boosted by a fifteen thousand dollar contribution from the 1948 Corporation to the IMNC. The Keep Milwaukee Debt Free committee raised and spent a paltry $145.60, with the largest contributions coming from former Mayor Daniel W. Hoan ($36) and Frank Zeidler ($20). Reflecting on the disparity of resources and the importance of the press as a political resource in this contest, Zeidler recalled that “[w]e had to fight high speed rotary printing presses of two metropolitan dailies with a mimeograph machine.”95 Debt partisans also benefitted from the city’s history of approving referenda. Of the 111 referenda offered since 1900, only eight had been defeated.96 Despite the relatively decisive win for the “yes” camp, the referendum vote shed light on significant divisions in the city. Milwaukee’s wealthiest district, the Eighteenth Ward, gave the debt measure strong support with almost 72 percent voting yes (see Map 1.1 and Table 5.1, appendix). Calculating the referendum vote as a percentage of all registered voters, to help account for both the one-third of Milwaukeeans who voted and the rest who did not, the Eighteenth Ward topped the list with about one-quarter of the ward’s registered voters backing the referendum and less than 10 percent voting “no.” This northernmost lakeside ward, home to two 1948 Corporation officers who lived in the city, had Milwaukee’s highest percentage of white-collar workers (33.6 percent) and the highest average house values ($16,136). Within the city, this was the ward most likely to house the executives, managers, and shoppers that the downtown development plans favored. The Eighteenth Ward also bordered and closely resembled the suburban communities that Zeidler criticized during the campaign. Other wards that ranked high in the percentage of yes votes, even if mixed economically, contained the city’s wealthier and more white-collar districts.97

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96 97

“Both Sides Use Phones in Pleas for Bond Votes,” MJ, 31 March 1947; “Plea Via Mail for ‘Yes’ Vote.” Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” 24, 27. See also “Tell Expenses in Bond Drive,” MJ, 5 April 1947. As this campaign drew to a close, Zeidler also faced the personal trauma of his youngest child contracting influenzal meningitis. She was treated and recovered. “Voters Liberal in Approving of Bond Issues,” MJ, 27 March 1947. Census tracts within pro-referendum wards were economically varied; some contained low-income residents and conspicuous pockets of upscale voters. This was the case for the northern lakeside Third and First Wards. Milwaukee Board of Election Commissioners, Nineteenth Biennial Report; Milwaukee Board of Election Commissioners, Twentieth Biennial Report of the Board of Election Commissioners of the City of Milwaukee (Milwaukee, 1949); “Election at a Glance”; H. Yuan Tien, ed., Milwaukee Metropolitan Area Fact Book: 1940, 1950, and 1960 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962);

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No votes outweighed yes votes in only three of Milwaukee’s twentyseven wards – all South-Side working-class neighborhoods (the Eleventh, Seventeenth, and Twenty-fourth Wards). Given the striking imbalance of resources of the debt campaign, however, those districts in which the referendum prevailed but the opponents managed to build a sizeable antidebt constituency merit further scrutiny. The referendum met appreciable opposition in working-class and low-income districts on both the South and North sides. Each of the eight wards with the greatest percentages of voters opposing the debt measure (ranging from 52.4 to 49.4 percent) fit this profile. Likewise, six of the seven wards with the largest percentage of registered voters opposing the referendum had a 60 percentor-greater working-class population. The South-Side Fourteenth Ward, with two-thirds of its labor force defined as working-class, rated the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 16th Census of the United States, 1940: Population and Housing Statistics for Census Tracts, Milwaukee, Wis (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1942); U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1950 United States Census of Population, Census Tract Statistics: Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Adjacent Area (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1952); U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1950 United States Census of Housing: Block Statistics, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1952); Milwaukee County Community Fund and Council of Social Agencies, Census Tract Facts: A Handbook of Basic Social Data of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin (Milwaukee: Statistical Research Department, 1945); and Milwaukee Board of Public Land Commissioners, Evidences of Blight in the City of Milwaukee, by Census Tracts (Milwaukee, 1946), figure 10. See also: J. Morgan Kousser, “Ecological Regression and the Analysis of Past Politics,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4 (1973): 250; and James J. Connolly, The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900–1925 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 204. An electoral analysis based on the percentage of votes received out of the total registered voters (according to the Board of Election Commissioners) helps to account for turnout as a political factor. While percentages based on the number of all eligible voters would be preferable, these figures are available only for census years. To match ward-level electoral data and census tract demographic and housing data, I created a ward designation for each Milwaukee census tract in the 1940 and 1950 enumerations by using census tract maps overlaid with ward boundaries (see Map 1.1). In many cases, census tract boundaries fit neatly into ward boundaries. In other areas, census tracts cross ward boundaries; in these, ward designations have been assigned by determining which ward encompassed the largest portion of a census tract, while also taking into account physical boundaries. Milwaukee had twenty-seven wards with one hundred fifty-three census tracts in 1940 and one hundred sixty tracts in 1950. This analysis is limited also by the data in census reports. For instance, occupational categories capture only one dimension of workplace experience and only one aspect of class formation. Nevertheless, these data enable us to make relative distinctions between wards along the axis of class. Occupational variables in this analysis have been calculated as a percentage of the total labor force, by census tract, before being converted into ward-area data (see Table 5.2, appendix). Other variables from the census examined in this analysis include: median school years completed for persons twenty-five years or older; average value, owner-occupied dwelling units; median rent, renter-occupied dwelling units; percentage of dwelling units owner occupied; and percentage of units with mechanical refrigeration.

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strongest no vote on the referendum when turnout is factored in; more than 18 percent of the district’s registered voters made their way to the polling place to oppose the measure.98 A more comprehensive analysis of the debt measure votes and occupational data for all twenty-seven wards corroborates the argument that class politics helped to shape the outcome of the spring 1947 contest (see Tables 5.2 and 5.3, appendix).99 The relationship between the size of a ward’s white-collar population and the strength of the yes vote on the referendum, for instance, is especially notable and significant, indicating substantial white-collar backing for the debt measure. In contrast, a ward’s proportion of skilled workers offers the best explanation of the vote against the debt measure, suggesting that skilled workers as a group voted against the debt measure. Many of these were perhaps members of the building trades and skilled workers’ unions affiliated with the FTC, despite the position adopted by newly ascendant leaders of the central labor body. These South- and North-Side working-class wards, home to many union members, proved receptive to Zeidler’s message about public autonomy and his entreaties to the political culture of the working-class city. His arguments, as against those put forth by labor and liberal groups in the IMNC, still made sense to many working class Milwaukeeans. And at this moment in the postwar city, appeals to a conservative homeowner politics – privileging low-tax, property-value arguments – played an ambiguous and limited role. Homeowning skilled workers and homeowning white-collar workers opposed one another over the issue of municipal debt. Class experience still framed how different homeowners viewed the 98

99

The weakest yes and no votes (as a percentage of registered voters), resulting especially from low turnouts, were found in the Sixth Ward. Racially mixed but home to many of the city’s African-American residents (83 percent in 1940), this district just north of downtown also had the lowest percentage of white-collar workers. Despite promises by the IMNC to make housing a priority and begin addressing the Sixth Ward’s severe shortage, both the pro- and anti-debt campaigners failed apparently to bring voters to the polls. See also Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 176. Table 5.3 (appendix), presenting the coefficients of determination and the regression coefficients, estimates both how well and how much specific class variables (occupational data, in this case) helped to explain the referendum vote. The ecological fallacy points to the problem of relying upon the regression results of aggregated data, especially when attempting to ascribe average characteristics of the aggregate to an individual or subgroup. In this particular case, the regression analysis reinforces an interpretation drawn from a combination of qualitative sources and a basic statistical analysis of the voting and demographic data. Margo Anderson, Kirk Jeffrey, Benjamin Bayer, and Paul Roback offered valuable advice on this and other issues regarding quantitative methods. On ecological regression and the ecological fallacy, in addition to Kousser, see R. Darcy and Richard C. Rohrs, A Guide to Quantitative History (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995), 219–32; and Gary King, Ori Rosen, and Martin Abba Tanner, eds., Ecological Inference: New Methodological Strategies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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local political economy. In short, the city’s skilled workers, many of whom were union members and homeowners, rallied to defend a pay-as-you-go policy that retained its association to the midcentury working-class city. These skilled workers decided to follow Zeidler’s lead opposing a change in Milwaukee’s fiscal policies, even though many labor unions (especially AFL) backed the debt referendum. Many operatives and laborers, however, apparently stayed away from the polls during this election. Unlike the skilled workers, these workers did not turn out to vote against the measure; but they also did not respond to the well-funded efforts to mobilize their votes for the measure.100 These results, along with the referendum’s relatively poor showing and depressed turnout in the city’s lower-income districts such as the Sixth Ward, bespeak the limitations to the alliance between the IMNC and liberal, labor, and civil rights organizations. While the leadership ties formed between liberals and business leaders both curbed the financial and organizational resources available to the debt measure’s opponents and provided a foundation for future growth-oriented coalitions, such connections did not translate into a broad grassroots base that would erase the politics of class. White-collar and skilled workers’ opposing stances on this vote point out that the debt referendum controversy built upon class divisions and even fueled the politics of class in the early postwar city, complicating the 1948 Corporation’s objective to create a classless but classy metropolis.101 100

101

The white-collar population (Whtclr) accounted for approximately 45 percent of the difference in the yes vote for the referendum across wards. The regression coefficient for the yes vote and the white-collar population (.30) suggests moderate to strong whitecollar support for the measure. An estimated 64 percent of the variation in the no vote across wards could be attributed to the variation in the skilled-worker population (WcCrft), the upper tier of the working class. The regression coefficient (.83) indicates that skilled workers disproportionately voted no. Membership and sign-in lists, sites of union gatherings, and neighborhood descriptions provide evidence of the concentration of AFL and CIO union members in South- and North-Side wards. See reports of meetings in the files of the Milwaukee County Industrial Union Council Records, Milwaukee ARC. See also: Milwaukee Department of City Development, South Side Neighborhood Historic Resources Survey: Final Report (Milwaukee, 1987); Robert D. Ubriaco, Jr., “Bread and Butter Politics or Foreign Policy Concerns?: Class versus Ethnicity in the Midwestern Polish American Community during the 1946 Congressional Elections,” Polish American Studies 51 (1994): 5–32; and Frank Zeidler, “Milwaukee’s South Side: A Historical Look,” Milwaukee History 8 (1985): 56–84. Neither immigration nor ethnicity appears to have been a critical variable in this vote. Homeownership (an ambiguous variable in regressions for the debt referendum) did not appear to act independently of class in 1947. In later conflicts, however, homeownership and homeowner politics became more important. See the following discussion of the relationships of the 1947 and 1948 votes to a range of variables, including housing costs, education, and consumption. These reinforce this line of analysis.

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Despite debt advocates’ efforts to establish growth politics as the basis for a classless city, the 1947 vote attested to the persistence of class politics in Milwaukee. The dispute between business leaders and organized labor over a proposed ordinance to restrict downtown parades and demonstrations (see Introduction), occurring just a few months after the debt vote, indicates that deeply etched lines of conflict continued to shape the city and its political culture. Likewise, the 1948 municipal election demonstrated that the early postwar metropolis, far from being the incubator of a classless society, still fostered a politics forged by class. Frank Zeidler’s political success in this 1948 mayoral election, after his reelection to the school board in 1947, built upon and amplified the politics of the debt referendum vote. The outspoken opponent of the 1948 Corporation and its allies survived a crowded primary field of at least 15 mayoral candidates. Zeidler ran as the candidate of the recently formed Municipal Enterprise Committee. In the general election, Zeidler opposed the nominally nonpartisan Henry Reuss. A “Harvard-educated liberal and member of an old Milwaukee banking family,” Reuss had returned to the city in 1946 after military service.102 He enjoyed the backing of a wide range of influential Milwaukeeans, including enthusiastic support from the Journal’s Richard Davis (“Old Lady Thrift” writer). As a postwar liberal reformer, Reuss – along with Milwaukeeans Robert Tehan (author of Wisconsin’s redevelopment legislation), Andrew Biemiller (member of Congress and the Truman administration), and others – would help to reconstruct Wisconsin’s Democratic Party along the lines of the national party. The 1948 mayoral campaign thrust two divergent visions of postwar liberalism before voters: Zeidler’s class-based liberalism versus Reuss’s incipient growth liberalism.103 A critical debate dividing these liberals of different stripes was that over bonds. The spring 1948 ballot, in addition to the mayoral contest, asked voters to decide on six bonding proposals. Zeidler, on the heels of the 1947 referendum, gave his nod to the low-cost housing and blight elimination bond issues; if the city was to use debt financing, it should be allocated only to these highest priorities. Other projects should be conducted on a pay-as102 103

Lorin Peterson, The Day of the Mugwump (New York: Random House, 1961), 225. Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” 28–98; Henry S. Reuss, When Government Was Good: Memories of a Life in Politics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 26–29, 34–35; Buenker, “Cream City Electoral Politics”; Thompson, The History of Wisconsin, Volume VI, 562–63; Richard Carlton Haney, “A History of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin Since World War Two” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1970); and Henry Reuss, Interview by Catherine Coberly, 1982, Wisconsin Democratic Party Oral History Project, WHS. Henry Reuss was elected to Congress in 1954. The Municipal Enterprise Committee later became the Public Enterprise Committee.

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you-go basis. Reuss, on the other hand, favored approval of all six bond measures, including those for street improvements and expressways. Amid this debate, the candidates also voiced disagreement about the causes of and potential solutions to the continued housing shortage. Reuss blamed sluggish construction on the housing code and on the inefficiencies of the building industry. He believed that large-scale organization in privatesector construction would enable the industry to build rental housing for lower-income people. Zeidler focused instead on the private sector’s persistent shortcomings in producing affordable housing. He advocated government grants for housing and decried the contention that private builders alone, whatever their size or scale, could be expected to provide a sufficient supply of low-cost housing.104 The city’s major newspapers opposed Zeidler, aggressively attacking him as a Socialist – an affiliation he never denied. Backed by organized labor, the remnants of the Socialist Party, and many Milwaukeeans who identified themselves as liberals, Zeidler beat Reuss with a tally of 124,024 to 97,277. He garnered 56 percent of the votes in an election that attracted 75 percent of the registered voters to the polls (see Figure 5.4). The results magnified the voting patterns of the 1947 debt referendum. Zeidler’s liberalism, rooted firmly in the city’s working-class politics, resonated in Milwaukee’s working-class wards and brought people out to the polls. Reuss’s liberalism, driven in part by growth politics, captured the city’s white-collar districts. The Tenth Ward, with about 65 percent of its labor force defined as working-class, gave Zeidler his widest margin: he received an overwhelming 69 percent of the ward’s vote (see Table 5.4, appendix). When the vote for Zeidler is calculated as a percentage of all registered voters, the Tenth Ward also headed the list, with 51 percent for Zeidler. In the ranking of support for the debt referendum the previous year, the Tenth Ward came in as the second-lowest, with less than 14 percent of registered voters backing the measure. Moreover, each of the ten wards that gave Zeidler greater than 60 percent of the vote in 1948 fit the profile of a working-class North or South-Side neighborhood. Conversely, wellto-do white-collar wards that had supported the debt measure in 1947 now opposed Zeidler’s mayoralty bid with the greatest intensity. The Eighteenth Ward, near the lead in its backing for the debt measure, gave Zeidler his lowest return: just 29 percent of votes cast, or slightly more than 21 percent of all registered voters. As in the 1947 vote, northern

104

“Candidates for Mayor Agree on Many Points, Women Voters Discover,” MJ, 29 February 1948; Richard S. Davis, “Milwaukee’s New Socialist Mayor,” Progressive (June 1948): 24–26; Reuss, When Government Was Good, 28; Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” 40–47, 66–91.

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fi g u r e 5 . 4 Frank Zeidler’s inauguration as mayor. Zeidler (left) pictured with outgoing Mayor John L. Bohn (center) and City Clerk Stanley Witkowski (right) on April 20, 1948. In his address, Zeidler stressed the need for public housing, planning, and preparedness in the atomic age. The photographer is probably Tony Neuman. See “Zeidler on Job,” MS, 21 April 1948. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Photo Archives. ©2012 Journal Sentinel, Inc., reproduced with permission.

lakeside districts accompanied by those bordering suburban Wauwatosa, ranked among the top areas of support for Reuss.105 The relationship between the mayoral election’s outcome and the workforce profile of voters underscores the tenacity of class politics in Milwaukee at the same time that the outlines of an emergent growth politics were becoming apparent (Table 5.5, appendix). White-collar districts united behind Reuss. Wards with greater proportions of skilled 105

Milwaukee Board of Election Commissioners, Twentieth Biennial Report; Tien, Milwaukee Metropolitan Area Fact Book; Bureau of the Census, 1950 United States Census of Population . . . Milwaukee; Bureau of the Census, 1950 United States Census of Housing . . . Milwaukee; Bertil Hanson, A Report on the Politics of Milwaukee (Cambridge: Joint Center for Urban Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, 1961); Bernard, “Milwaukee: The Life and Death of a Midwestern Metropolis,” 171–72; and Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” 73–94. Zeidler was reelected mayor in 1952 with an overwhelming 72 percent of the vote and in 1956 with 56 percent. He decided not to run for a fourth term in 1960.

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workers and operatives were decisive to Zeidler’s victory. His ability both to keep the upper tier of Milwaukee’s working class in his column and to mobilize operatives, the city’s large pool of factory workers, paved the way for his victory (see Table 5.6, appendix).106 Strongholds for both AFL and CIO workers helped to put Zeidler in office. Wards that both offered notable resistance to the 1947 debt measure and gave strong support to Zeidler in 1948 also tended to be areas of strength for the Socialist Mayor Daniel Hoan in the 1930s and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1936, 1940, and 1944 elections. The wards in the South-Side Fourth Congressional District scored some of the higher percentages for Edmund Bobrowicz, the left-wing Democratic candidate in the threecornered 1946 U.S. House of Representatives race. Although each of these candidates emerged from, developed, or played to different dimensions of working-class political culture (sometimes in tension or even opposition to one another), each had mobilized a language of class to build support in these wards. These contests reinforced strongholds of working-class politics in the city. In contrast, the wards offering the strongest support for the debt measure and for Reuss fell well below the citywide levels of support for Hoan, FDR, and Bobrowicz in the earlier elections.107 The postwar working-class, a portion of which had resisted the 1947 referendum for debt financing, went on to back Zeidler as its candidate for mayor. These votes illustrated and, indeed, temporarily intensified class divisions that challenged the very premise of classlessness animating postwar growth politics. This dynamic highlights tensions within the city’s political culture that proved important to the remaking of postwar growth politics. Architects of a modern, efficient, orderly metropolis coalescing around the principles of growth encountered numerous setbacks in the early postwar period. The debt referendum, labor’s opposition to a proposed ordinance against downtown parades, and Zeidler’s 1948 election, for example, demonstrated the challenge of cobbling together a consensus on growth politics in Milwaukee. The 1948 Corporation, its successors, and its allies, however, would continue to confront and seek to efface the working-class city. Campaigns to replace “outmoded” city politics,

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Together in a multiple regression, the skilled worker and operative variables help to explain 87 percent of the 1948 Zeidler vote (see Table 5.6, appendix). Sarah C. Ettenheim, How Milwaukee Voted: 1848–1980 (Milwaukee: Department of Governmental Affairs, University Extension, University of Wisconsin, 1980); Ubriaco, “Bread and Butter Politics or Foreign Policy Concerns?”; Milwaukee Board of Election Commissioners, Nineteenth Biennial Report; and Twentieth Biennial Report. See Introduction and Chapter 4.

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practices, and physical structures played a major part in their efforts to place growth-oriented efficiency and productivity at the forefront of city life and politics. The 1947 victory of the debt referendum had reversed the city’s fiscal policy and initiated a program of downtown development. Housing groups that had joined the pro-debt campaign, hoping to boost Milwaukee’s commitment to low-income and veterans’ housing, were soon disappointed about the direction of development plans. On the heels of the referendum vote, the JACBH and allies such as the American Veterans Committee (AVC) called for the 1948 Corporation to use its technical and political resources to secure more housing in Milwaukee. Using a target figure set a few days earlier by the Joint Veterans’ Housing Council, the AVC argued that Milwaukee needed an additional fifteen thousand affordable dwelling units by the end of the decade, two-thirds of which would have to be provided by the public sector. “The AVC, in supporting you and your Improve Milwaukee Now Committee in its successful campaign to secure a ‘Yes’ vote, always has felt that the primary immediate concern of our community is for housing.” Frank Zeidler, the 1948 Corporation’s principle foe, also urged the group to “declare itself on whether it gave priority in the improvement program to ‘slum clearance and housing.’” The 1948 Corporation executive director Francis Casey failed to respond, however, to these pleas.108 Instead, the growth-oriented group’s statements of priorities following passage of the referendum placed housing far down on its list. And when housing was acknowledged as a pressing concern, some debt proponents contended that any postponement in large-scale development projects to aid housing could be justified only to allow time for private market adjustments. Rather than directing public money to alleviate either immediate or longer-term housing crises, a delay for the sake of private housing would serve to ease the unusually high postwar demand for materials and labor in the building industry. The IMNC was dissolved right after the vote and the earlier attention to housing as a public good, which had been central to the debt campaign’s coalition-building effort, began to wane.109

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“Push Housing, AVC’s Advice: Veterans Group Asks 1948 Corporation to Assure 15,000 Units,” MJ, 4 April 1947; and “Veterans Ask 15,000 Homes,” [MJ], 8 April 1947, “Housing” newsclipping microfiche, Legislative Reference Bureau, City Hall, Milwaukee [hereafter LRB]. The JACBH and Mayor Bohn asked the Common Council to place housing and blight elimination at the top of its agenda for postwar rebuilding. “Slum Clearance Priority Is Urged,” MJ, 18 April 1947, “City Planning” newsclipping microfiche, LRB. “Start Is Urged by 1948 Corp.,” MJ, 3 April 1947; “Push Housing, AVC’s Advice” ; and “Mayor Right in Urging Wider Analysis of City Blight,” MJ, 24 April 1947.

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Six months after the debt vote, the 1948 Corporation’s newly released Central Area Plan betrayed the limited influence housing reformers held in fashioning the development agenda. The 1948 Corporation’s plan, a blueprint that would have a significant impact on postwar Milwaukee, focused almost exclusively on the city’s commercial downtown and paid little attention to housing. Most significantly, the plan sketched in a few downtown apartments but lacked the lower-cost housing that the JACBH and its member organizations had expected. High land and construction costs ensured that these downtown units would leave middle- and lower-income housing needs unmet. Similarly, the 1948 Corporation’s progress report for “Greater Milwaukee’s Improvement Program,” issued at the beginning of the centennial year, slighted housing. Despite the explicit or implied promises in the spring of 1947, affordable housing was neither central nor integral to the 1948 Corporation’s vision of the postwar city. Unlike the JACBH and debt opponents such as Frank Zeidler, all of whom placed public housing at the center of their redevelopment plans, the 1948 Corporation now viewed housing as a competing item on the political agenda and a competing activity for scarce construction materials and labor. The housing priorities sustained by the JACBH and its allies and advanced presumably by the IMNC were absent from the 1948 Corporation’s “planned action campaign of modern civic aggressiveness.”110 Likewise, when imagining the organizational apparatus needed to push forward the plans for Milwaukee’s renewal in the wake of the debt vote, the 1948 Corporation drew back from the consensus-building strategy embodied in the structure of the IMNC. The 1948 Corporation sought instead to direct the process and aims of regeneration, proposing the Milwaukee Regional Planning and Reconstruction Council as a “sparkplug” for metropolitan improvements. While claiming that this new body should be a citizen group made up of a “cross-section” of organizations involved in planning for Milwaukee’s development, the 1948 Corporation intended to retain tight control over the process by reserving the right to select those who would serve. Of the fifteen people named in the initial

110

“Outline Master Plan for Downtown Area,” MJ, 19 October 1947; “Stage by Stage City to Be Remade,” and “1948 Plan Seeks to Free City’s Central Area Traffic Arteries of Congestion,” in MS, 19 October 1947; “Greater Milwaukee Improvement Program,” ca. January 1948, folio “The 1948 Corporation-Misc.,” Perrin Papers, MPL. At the close of Milwaukee’s centennial year, the 1948 Corporation became again the Greater Milwaukee Committee. The name change did not alter its development priorities. In a list of civic projects, the group mentioned housing only in reference to a $3.5 million veterans housing bond issue approved recently. Greater Milwaukee Committee, “It Can Be Done!: Civic Progress Report,” (December 1948), Pamphlets Collection, WHS.

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proposal, nine were directly affiliated with the 1948 Corporation (three executive committee members, four on the board of directors, and two committee members). Other proposed council members included men from the Downtown Association, the Real Estate Board, the Association of Commerce, the Metropolitan Milwaukee War Memorial, and the Junior Chamber of Commerce. The one spot set aside for a woman was assigned to the League of Women Voters, yet the 1948 Corporation held onto the power to pick the representative. This imagined “cross section,” then, was limited to those organizations and individuals closely aligned with the 1948 Corporation’s agenda.111 The broad-based IMNC that had proved crucial to the passage of the debt referendum did not result in a more participatory urban policy-making process or help to constitute a deliberative forum for consensus-building. Especially in light of subsequent events and alignments, it represented another step, however halting, toward the consolidation of growth politics in the postwar metropolis. By 1949, a couple of years after reversing its fiscal policy, Milwaukee’s long-term debt stood at $5,771,000. This figure represented a marked increase in Milwaukee’s indebtedness, but the city still registered a longterm debt far below that of other Midwestern urban areas. St. Louis’s and Minneapolis’s long-term indebtedness, for instance, reached totals six and ten times greater, respectively, than that of Milwaukee. For cities with populations ranging from one-half to one million, Milwaukee’s debt fell well below that of others. Even when accounting for all cities containing populations from one-quarter to one million, Milwaukee still sat at the bottom of the list in 1949.112 During the early 1950s, Mayor Frank Zeidler continued to argue against long-term debt; he maintained that projects ought to be paid for with cash or shorter-term loans. While Zeidler opened the door to ten-year bond issues, the Greater Milwaukee Committee (the 1948 Corporation’s successor) pushed for twenty-year issues.113 By the end of the 1950s, however, the pressure to finance projects through longterm debt had worn away the opposition. In 1958, Milwaukee’s long-term 111

112

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“Milwaukee Regional Planning and Reconstruction Council,” ca. 1947, folio “Wisconsin, Milwaukee (Regional Planning and Reconstruction Council),” Perrin Papers, MPL; and List of 1948 Corporation Leadership and Committees, 14 May 1947, folio “The 1948 Corporation,” Perrin Papers, MPL. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce, Compendium of City Government Finances in 1949 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1950), 63–64. See also Teaford, Rough Road to Renaissance, 67–81. An exception to these measures was Washington D.C., a federally controlled city. See Howard Gillette, Jr., Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). See, for instance, correspondence in folio 5 “Bond Financing, 1948–1953,” box 39, Zeidler Papers, MPL.

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debt rang up at $112,859,000, a greater-than eighteen-fold increase since 1949. It now surpassed peer cities (populations of one-half to one million) such as St. Louis, Minneapolis, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, and Boston. Milwaukee’s long-term indebtedness in 1958 was almost double that of Indianapolis, its closest rival for the bottom spot on the list just nine years earlier.114 By 1960, Milwaukee was paying $12,863,694 in annual interest and principal on its debt.115 This increase in public debt occurred, of course, alongside a dramatic rise in personal and corporate indebtedness during these decades. The rapid growth of the postwar “consumer’s republic” depended, in part, on the expansion of commercial and personal credit. Middle-class Americans found themselves at the center of these changes that, in turn, transformed urban and suburban communities. The increased ownership of modern mechanical refrigerators in Milwaukee, as families upgraded from iceboxes, illustrates this change. In 1940, fewer than half of the city’s households had modern refrigerators. By 1950, more than 87 percent of households owned this big-ticket item (see Table 1.4). The ability to buy consumer items such as refrigerators depended on a growing economy as well as greater access to and acceptance of credit. As these numbers suggest, working-class Milwaukeeans’ purchases of modern refrigerators fit into a larger pattern of working-class Americans elevating their thresholds for consumption and personal debt. Despite these material gains, workers tempered their consumption and reliance on credit (especially longer-term arrangements) throughout these earlier postwar years, in the face of continued economic uncertainty brought about by job insecurity, low wages, interrupted production schedules, and strikes. Working-class and middle-class consumption continued to differ in magnitude and character. These consumers’ differing attitudes toward personal debt likely influenced their perspectives, especially as citizens, about public debt. While many people had come to accept debt as a means to make purchases, to finance metropolitan improvements, or stimulate the national economy, plenty of room remained for disagreements over the degree and practice of personal credit and public debt policies. As was the case for metropolitan growth politics in the midst of the debt referendum campaign, visions of abundance and a classless society drove the burgeoning consumerism of

114

115

Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce, Compendium of City Government Finances in 1958 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1959), 96. Hanson, A Report on the Politics of Milwaukee, vi-3. Milwaukee’s 1960 debt weighed in at $161,266,000; long-term debt accounted for $157,332,000 of that total. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce, City Finances in 1960 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1961), 40.

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this period while class tensions and divisions still shaped the postwar culture.116 The 1948 Corporation and, later, the Greater Milwaukee Committee led the way to the municipal government’s expanded fiscal involvement, yet limited political authority, in metropolitan development. For these corporate leaders, the city itself was a valuable ally and tool for carrying out plans to regenerate and rebuild the metropolitan area. Rather than inveigh against state intrusion, the Greater Milwaukee Committee and like-minded leaders championed a very specific extension of state capacity. In their postwar reconfiguration, the public sector’s power to provide financing was coupled with private sector designs and initiatives. Although Zeidler and others, including public-housing defenders, would continue to offer a strikingly different vision for public-sector action, the shift in policy and political culture toward growth politics, aided by the debt referendum, began to subsume a working-class vision of public life and urban democracy. In these efforts to say goodbye to Old Lady Thrift, the presumed imperatives of growth increasingly defined the boundaries of democracy and the criteria for assembling a postwar urban agenda.117

116

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U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 16th Census of the United States, 1940 . . . Milwaukee, 63; 1950 United States Census of Population . . . Milwaukee, 46; and Research Clearinghouse of Milwaukee, Milwaukee County, City, Suburbs, Today and Yesterday: A Statistical History of the Community (Milwaukee, 1950), 12, 20, 55. On early postwar working-class ambivalence toward debt, see “Out of Debt – So What,” Wisconsin CIO News, 5 April 1946; and Robert Bruno, Steelworker Alley: How Class Works in Youngstown (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 80–97. On personal debt and consumer culture, see: Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic, 123–24, 160–61; Lendol Calder, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 262–303; Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); and Shelley Nickles, “More Is Better: Mass Consumption, Gender, and Class Identity in Postwar America,” American Quarterly 54:4 (December 2002): 581–622. See also Roland Marchand, “Visions of Classlessness, Quests for Dominion: American Popular Culture, 1945–1960,” in Reshaping America: Society and Institutions, 1945–1960, eds. Robert H. Bremner and Gary W. Reichard (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), 163–90. Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” 49–51. The story of federal taxation parallels, in part, this story of local fiscal policy. The 1940s witnessed a change from “class” to “mass taxation.” The view of “taxation as an instrument to mobilize class interests” was replaced by a tax regime founded in “growthmanship.” Brownlee, “Tax Regimes, National Crisis, and State-Building in America,” in Funding the Modern American State, 93–96; Michelmore, Tax and Spend; and Sparrow, Warfare State, 119–59, 243–47.

CHAPTER

6

Housing the Postwar City: Crowding, Race, and Policy

The close of the Second World War intensified a housing shortage that Milwaukeeans had endured since the 1930s. The anticipated return of thousands of veterans and a sluggish construction industry fed fears of an impending crisis. In the summer and early fall of 1945, only one hundred homes had been completed in the Milwaukee metropolitan area. The approaching winter weather would delay housing construction even further. Due to the enormous material demands of the wartime economy and the quick reconversion to a peacetime economy, Milwaukeeans and others throughout the country faced shortages of lumber, bricks, concrete blocks, and other building supplies. A spokesman for the Wisconsin Retail Lumberman’s association claimed that more than 360 million board feet of lumber – almost one year’s yield from all of Wisconsin’s forests – had been diverted to building atomic bomb plants in the final years of the war. He continued, “[t]he atomic bomb shortened the war and we can be glad the lumber went where it did, even if we couldn’t get a few boards to patch the roof.” Labor shortages in the building trades and supply bottlenecks also slowed construction schedules. Rental housing, expected to be in greatest demand, was especially short.1 1

“Many Hunt Homes: Builders Hampered,” Milwaukee Journal [hereafter MJ], 28 October 1945. On the housing shortage and policy, see: “Can Building Trade Meet Housing Plan?,” Christian Science Monitor, 16 February 1946; “Whyatt Quits over Policy,” MJ, 5 December 1946; Roger Biles, The Fate of Cities: Urban America and the Federal Government, 1945–2000 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 18–39; Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 209–33; Laura McEnaney, “Nightmares on Elm Street: Demobilizing in Chicago, 1945–1953,” Journal of American History 92:4 (March 2006): 1265–91; and Don Parson, Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 75–102.

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Civic leaders feared an “explosive” situation as more people arrived in Milwaukee after their wartime duties. By October 1945, only about 7 percent of the area’s estimated eighty thousand servicemen and servicewomen had returned.2 As more people arrived, veterans and others seeking homes crowded into the Milwaukee Journal building every weekday at noon and on Saturday nights to be the first to see the classified advertisements.3 African-American veterans and residents, of course, faced an even more difficult challenge in finding a decent home in the postwar city.4 Several housing officials stressed the immediate need for low- and moderate-cost rental housing, since few veterans and others hit by the housing shortage expected to buy a house in the near future. A 1946 Census Bureau survey estimated that only 14 percent of Milwaukee veterans could reasonably afford to rent adequate housing and only 5 percent could manage payments to buy a house.5 As late as mid-1947, the Housing Authority director bemoaned the city’s extraordinarily low vacancy rate of 0.4 percent, far below the 5 percent rate which was considered normal.6 Even the moving van companies and utilities reported a dramatic drop in business on the first “moving day” (May 1) after the war.7 As in cities across the country, many Milwaukeeans were forced to share already cramped quarters with relatives or friends. Stories of

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6

7

“Many Hunt Homes.” Ibid. On veterans and housing, see also Mark D. Van Ells, To Hear Only Thunder Again: America’s World War II Veterans Come Home (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001). Paul Geib, “From Mississippi to Milwaukee: A Case Study of Southern Black Migration to Milwaukee, 1940–1970” Journal of Negro History 83:4 (Autumn 1998): 229–48. See also: O’Brien Boldt (Philadelphia City Planning Commission), “Veterans’ Housing Problems,” presented at the NAACP Annual Conference, 26 June 1946, Frames 714–18, Microfilm Reel 11, Part 1, Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1981); and Housing and Home Finance Agency, The Housing of Negro Veterans: The Housing Plans and Living Arrangements in 32 Areas (Washington, D.C., January 1948). Frank L. Greenya (Chairman of the Milwaukee Red Cross’s Home Service), “Statement on Housing,” ca., 1946, folio “Temporary Housing, 1947,” John L. Bohn Papers, Series 081, Office of the Mayor, City of Milwaukee Archives, Milwaukee Public Library [hereafter Bohn Papers, MPL]; U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Summary Report of Veterans’ Housing Surveys Made from July 1946 through September 1946,” 18 March 1947, 7 (copy available in folio “Temporary Housing, 1947,” Bohn Papers, MPL). According to this survey, the median Milwaukee veteran could afford $46 in monthly rent or payments for a $6,700 house. See also: Shepard A. Magidson, “The Need for Public Housing . . . ,” Milwaukee Housing Authority Training Course, 5 March 1951 (copy available at the Milwaukee Department of City Development); “Eviction Cases Swamp Courts: 100 Are Heard Weekly,” MJ, 9 September 1945; and “Veterans Seeking Homes Find the Going Rugged,” MJ, 17 March 1946. “Housing Effort Still Lags Far Behind Needs,” MJ, 27 July 1947; Van Ells, To Hear Only Thunder Again, 215. “‘Moving Day,’ but No Moves,” MJ, 1 May 1946.

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returning veterans and their families crowding in with family or strangers became common fare in local newspapers. For instance, three married couples (parents, their two grown daughters and veteran husbands) shared a three-room apartment, using roll-away beds in the living room and the kitchen-dinette to accommodate everyone. Staggered working hours in a department store, butcher shop, and tavern allowed them a bit more room for meals. One of the veterans in the household complained, “I had more room than this in the army.”8 In early 1947 the regional Office of the Housing Expediter, reiterating the call for more lower- and moderate-cost rental housing, estimated that 12,420 veteran families and 8,850 nonveteran families were living “doubled-up.”9 Another veteran and his family (daughters 2, 4, and 6 years old) stationed themselves downtown on Wisconsin Avenue and held signs pleading for housing. The youngest child’s sign read: “I’m Barbara – Age 2 – Mommie, Daddie and us kids won’t have a place to sleep next month.”10 Many veterans and other Milwaukee families, when unable to find adequate housing for an entire family, were forced to live separately. A veteran returning from duty in the South Pacific deplored the uncertainty he faced both in securing work and in finding a home for his family. He and his wife had a room in a friend’s house while his daughter and son, a veteran as well, roomed in neighborhoods scattered around the city. He also argued that the Office of Price Administration (OPA) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) ought to act more aggressively in local markets in order to address these difficulties.11 A South Side veteran charged that business leaders were obstructing the construction of Quonset huts to ease the shortage. He asked, “Which merits first consideration, the objections of these businessmen’s groups or the needs of the veterans for housing?”12 Even Rudolph Nedved, the city’s first Housing Authority director, told of his troubles in the Milwaukee housing market at the close of the war. Unable to find a house, he roomed at the YMCA during the week and commuted to see his family on weekends.13 The difficulties and frustration generated by the postwar housing shortage were captured by a “weekly box score” published by the Red Cross

8 9

10 11 12

13

“Tiny Three Room Apartment Is Home for Three Families,” MJ, 3 March 1946. Office of the Housing Expediter, Region III, Preliminary Analysis of the Housing Market and Land and Public Services in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (January 1947), 31. See also “Add Housing, County Asked,” MJ, 1 April 1947. “They Want a Home” (photograph), Milwaukee Sentinel [hereafter MS], 25 August 1946. Robert D. Van Neida, “For Federal Housing” [letter to the editor], MJ 23 September 1946. Lawrence L. Jenrich, “We Veterans Need Housing” [letter to the editor], MJ, 22 March 1946. “The Housing Director, Too, Would Like to Find a Home,” MJ, 18 November 1945.

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t a b l e 6 . 1 Red Cross Housing Bureau Report, 16 June 1947 Total applications Total placements Applications previous week Placements previous week Applications for city housing City housing units planned City housing units provided to date

18,970 4,543 148 53 8,650 929 559

Source: “Home, Sweet Home (But Try to Find One!),” Milwaukee Sentinel, 16 June 1947, 4.

Housing Bureau. A mid-1947 report illustrated that demand for private housing outstripped supply by about four to one; for publicly provided housing, that ratio rose to about fifteen to one (see Table 6.1).14 Even with double-counting, since some of those seeking city housing also applied for private housing through the Red Cross bureau, the imbalance of supply and demand evident in these reports documented the predicament that workingclass Milwaukeeans and others encountered. On the job, in political life, and at home, working-class city dwellers faced turmoil and insecurity in these early postwar years. Weekly tallies, reports generated by public and private groups, running commentaries about the need for shelter, and the visible evidence of temporary lodgings – even pressed up against the civic center – confirmed that the solution to Milwaukee’s housing woes remained elusive (see Figure 6.1). The housing shortage, particularly worries about decent housing for veterans, rose to the top of the agenda in the crowded 1948 mayoral primary and main election contest (see Figure 6.2). Concern about the housing shortage generated numerous proposals for temporary housing. Private builders sought public subsidies to build temporary housing for veterans.15 Relatives and friends of those seeking housing were encouraged to continue “doubling-up” for the short-term. Homeowners and landlords were urged to rent rooms and make spaces available for veterans and their families. Plans to house veterans included proposals to convert unused storefronts, vacant schools, and under-used public buildings, including the former North Milwaukee City Hall.16 Even 14 15

16

“Home, Sweet Home (But Try to Find One!),” MS, 16 June 1947. “New Housing Offers Studied: Two Builders’ Proposals for Temporary Units Draw Interest,” MJ, 16 December 1946. Builders sought tax breaks, subsidies for land costs, and private-public partnerships. “Walter M. Swietlik (Commissioner of Public Works) to Frank J. Harder (City Real Estate Agent), “Conversion of a Portion of Former North Milwaukee City Hall . . .,” 6 May 1946, folio “School for Veterans,” Bohn Papers, MPL; and “Three Vacant City Schools to House Vets,” MS, 9 January 1946; “Two More Schools to House Veterans,” MJ, 13

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fi g u r e 6 . 1 Temporary housing project adjoining Milwaukee’s Civic Center. These projects, a response to the post-World War II housing shortage, remained a prominent part of Milwaukee’s landscape into the early 1950s. Fred R. Stanger (photographer), “Civic Center,” 25 April 1950, photo no. 12405, Milwaukee Housing Authority photograph archive. Reproduced by permission of the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee.

the city’s thirty-five election booths were suggested as possible dwellings for veterans. Walter H. Gaedke, secretary of Milwaukee’s election commission, responded that although the booths had stoves, election workers regularly complained the structures were too cold on Election Day in November. He questioned whether the booths would be habitable during Milwaukee’s long, cold winters.17 Both the city and the county pitched in to provide emergency housing, although officials frequently disagreed over lines of responsibility and the best use of resources. The county and city sparred over postwar plans for the prisoner-of-war barracks standing on the Billy Mitchell airfield.

17

January 1946; Photograph of converted State Street School, MJ, 1 May 1946; “Schoolhouse Dwellings Are Haven, Not Heaven,” MJ, 11 November 1946; and Richard W. E. Perrin, “Current and Projected Program of the Housing Authority,” Milwaukee public housing training course, 12 March 1951, 2–4, Milwaukee Department of City Development files, Milwaukee. See also McEnaney, “Nightmares on Elm Street.” “Election Booth Housing,” MJ, 8 November 1945.

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fi g u r e 6 . 2 The city’s housing shortage, especially for veterans, was a top issue in Milwaukee’s crowded 1948 primary and the subsequent race for the mayor’s office. R. A. Lewis (cartoonist), Milwaukee Journal, 28 February 1948, 1. ©2012 Journal Sentinel, Inc., reproduced with permission.

Criticizing the county board for holding up the use of these barracks to house veterans, Alderman Milton McGuire stated: “It seems to me the board is more interested in promoting an airport than it is in trying to meet America’s biggest current problem.” Given the importance metropolitan leaders throughout the country placed on airport development, this petition to use barracks that had confined the wartime enemy indicates not only the severity of the postwar housing crunch, but also the intense pressures local officials felt to address this problem.18

18

“Delay in Housing Is Laid to Boards,” MJ, 12 April 1946; “County Snags Barracks Plan for Veterans,” MJ, 26 March 1946. Greg Hise, “The Airplane and the Garden City: Regional Transformations during World War II,” in World War II and the American Dream: How Wartime Building Changed a Nation, ed. Donald Albrecht (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 144–83.

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The Milwaukee County Parks Commission oversaw an extensive temporary housing program for veterans and their families. The Veterans’ Housing Program, which continued until 1955, provided shelter (of varying degrees of quality and comfort) for five thousand people. During its decade of operation, the Veterans’ Housing Program secured approximately 900 trailers and oversaw the construction of 765 prefabricated houses – manufactured by Goodyear and later by the local Harnischfeger Corporation. County parks were turned into sites for much of this temporary housing. The County hired the former director of Milwaukee’s Housing Authority to coordinate its program to build longer-term housing for sale or rental to veterans, hoping to accommodate five hundred families on land previously used for war production and sold by the War Assets Corporation.19 Early in 1946, the Federal Public Housing Authority gave the city eighty-five Quonset huts, designed to house 170 veterans’ families. Most of these homes for “quonsettlers” were located in Milwaukee’s South Side; a handful were planned for the Sixth Ward. The challenge of making these structures into homes was captured by the title of a feature story, “Round Backed Residents of Quonset Town Have Warm Hearts and a Few Warm Stoves.”20 Through the auspices of the city and federal governments, a total of 850 temporary barracks and Quonset huts, along with 100 prefabricated houses, were secured to help ease the shortage. The prefabricated houses were raised on tax-delinquent properties and, as demountable structures, could later be removed and used elsewhere.21

19

20

21

Eleven sites were designated for the Veterans’ Housing Program. The Parks Commission took charge of the program in December 1946. “350 Trailers for Veterans,” MJ, 17 December 1946; “County Oks Millions for GI Housing Plan,” MS, 23 August 1946; Harry H. Anderson, “Recreation, Entertainment, and Open Space: Park Traditions of Milwaukee County,” in Trading Post to Metropolis: Milwaukee County’s First 150 Years, ed. Ralph M. Aderman (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 1987), 300; and John Gurda, The Making of Milwaukee (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 1999), 322. On trailers, prefabricated homes, and industrialized housing, see: Andrew Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 202–16; Peter S. Reed, “Enlisting Modernism,” in World War II and the American Dream, 2–41; and Allan D. Wallis, Wheel Estate: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 83–123. “Approve Site for Quonsets,” MS, 14 March 1946; “New Housing Funds Sought,” MS, 15 March 1946. For an account of life in the Quonset huts, see: “Round Backed Residents of Quonset Town Have Warm Hearts and a Few Warm Stoves,” MJ, ca. December 1946, newsclipping in folio “Temporary Housing, 1947,” Bohn Papers, MPL. Robert M. Beckley, “The Effects of Federal Programs on Housing and the Quality of Life: The Milwaukee Case” in Milwaukee’s Economy: Market Forces, Community Problems and Federal Policies, eds. John P. Blair and Ronald S. Edari (Chicago: Federal Reserve

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Milwaukee’s public housing program involved both veterans’ and lowincome housing projects. The city built three veterans’ housing projects at the end of the 1940s: Northlawn, Southlawn, and Berryland (see Map 2.1). In the summer of 1947, the Common Council responded to pressure from the Joint Veterans’ Housing Council and other housing proponents that recommended formation of a special committee to expedite its veterans’ housing program.22 Hoping initially to build 4,200 rental units, costing an estimated $31.5 million, the Council proposed a special committee composed of representatives from city offices that dealt with housing, real estate, planning, and legal concerns.23 The committee was charged with resolving disputes that held up the veterans’ housing program, including the thorny issue of project siting. The Housing Authority and other city leaders advocated that veterans’ housing be built on the outskirts of the city, especially on land the city might annex.24 Construction of the 247-unit Northlawn and the 331-unit Southlawn veterans’ housing projects began in September 1948, just a few months after voters had approved financing and chosen Frank Zeidler as their new mayor in the spring election (see Figure 6.3). The 391-unit Berryland project, the third veterans’ housing project, was begun in 1949 and completed in 1950. An innovative financing plan for these projects, in which the city contributed one-third as equity and Housing

22

23

24

Bank of Chicago, 1978), 145; and “Nine Hundred Units, Housing Total for Year: Rate Is below Average,” MJ, 27 October 1946. “Resolution to provide for the alleviation of the housing shortage by providing for the construction of low-rent permanent housing units,” 12 May 1947, folio “City Planning, 1946–1947(A),” box 32, City Club of Milwaukee, Milwaukee Area Research Center, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries’ Archives [hereafter Milwaukee ARC]. See also Resolution and JACBH “Report of the Chairman for the Year May 1946-May 1947,” 23 May 1947, folio 1, box 9, Milwaukee County Industrial Union Council Records [hereafter Milwaukee CIO Council Records], Milwaukee ARC. On veterans’ housing, see also: Lawrence J. Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 236–49. These included representatives of the City Real Estate Agent, Controller, City Attorney, Housing Authority, Building Inspector, City Planner, and the Common Council’s Buildings and Grounds committee. “Plan Program for Housing,” MS, 17 June 1947; and “Home Building Study Ordered Up,” MJ, 25 June 1947. “Plan Program for Housing.” Henry Reuss, speaking for the American Veterans Committee and the Joint Veterans’ Housing Council, supported the Housing Authority plans. City Attorney Walter J. Mattison, an outspoken proponent of the debt referendum earlier in 1947, argued for the consolidation of the veterans’ housing and blight elimination. On housing and annexation during the Bohn administration, see: “City’s Annexation Drive Seeks New, Vacant Land,” MJ, 16 March 1947; and “Milwaukee: Bohn Sound on Plan to Annex for Sake of More Housing,” MJ, 25 August 1947. On annexation, housing, and redevelopment during the Zeidler administration, see especially: John M. McCarthy, Making Milwaukee Mightier: Planning and the Politics of Growth, 1910–1960 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009); and Joel Rast, “Annexation Policy in Milwaukee: An Historical Institutionalist Policy,” Polity 39:1 (January 2007): 55–78.

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fi g u r e 6 . 3 Southlawn, one of Milwaukee’s permanent veterans’ housing projects, under construction in 1949. Fred R. Stanger (photographer), “Southlawn Project,” 4 May 1949, photo no. 9993, Milwaukee Housing Authority photograph archive. Reproduced by permission of the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee.

Authority bonds were used to cover the other two-thirds of the cost, became known nationally as the “Milwaukee Plan.”25 The first family moved into Northlawn on April 11, 1949; this veteran, along with his wife, five-year-old son, and mother, had been evicted from their previous home so that the building could be demolished for commercial construction.26 .

25

26

Program for Ground Breaking Ceremonies at Northlawn, 9 September 1948, and Program for Ground Breaking Ceremonies at Southlawn, folio 8, box 179, Carl F. and Frank P. Zeidler Papers, Office of the Mayor, City of Milwaukee Archives, Milwaukee Public Library [hereafter Zeidler Papers, MPL]; Milwaukee Common Council, Milwaukee Annual Report, 1948 (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Public Library, 1949), 52–53; Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee, Public Housing in Milwaukee, 2d ed. (Milwaukee, 1953); Frank J. Polidori, “Financing of Low Rent and Veterans Housing Projects,” Milwaukee public housing training course, 19 March 1951, 3, Milwaukee Department of City Development files. See also “$50 Apartments for Vets a Reality in Milwaukee,” Chicago Daily News, 23 March 1949. Milwaukee Common Council, Roads to a Better Milwaukee: 1950 Report of 1949 Activities (Milwaukee: 1950), 52–53; Richard W. E. Perrin (Housing Authority) to Mayor Frank P. Zeidler, 8 April 1949, folio 8, box 179, Zeidler Papers, MPL.

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Milwaukee’s Hillside Terrace had been in the planning stages for years. This low-income public housing project was proposed originally as a defense housing project for African-American workers in the Sixth Ward. The plans were shelved as the war drew to a close. Sixth Ward residents, housing reformers, and public officials revived the project as the pressures of the postwar housing shortage worsened, especially for black renters.27 The housing project also fit into plans for Sixth Ward slum clearance. Scrutiny of the Sixth Ward in numerous planning studies during the 1930s, the war years, and the early postwar period fixed the “blighted” label onto the district (see Figure 2.2). These studies of “blight” – measuring housing stock (age, condition, value, and cost), population density, public health, poverty and public assistance, criminal activity, and juvenile delinquency – acknowledged that living conditions were difficult, and even abysmal, for some district residents.28 For others, of course, this also was home. Despite the poor condition and age of housing in this “blighted” district, Sixth Ward housing prices continued to rise. In a 1946 auction of residential properties, a duplex that sold for $1,000 in 1944 now went for $3,900. The building, divided into three rental units, included a $12-a-month upstairs apartment with no bathroom. A seven-unit apartment building on West Vliet Street, dating from 1890, sold for $8,400. Just three years earlier its price was $4,650.29 For many Milwaukeeans, 27

28

29

“Sixth Ward Housing Inches Ahead,” Wisconsin CIO News, 28 March 1947; “Sees Progress on Housing Project for the 6th Ward,” Chicago Bee 29 September 1946; JACBH to Common Council, 26 April 1947, file 46–3052, City Records Center, City Hall, Milwaukee [hereafter City Records Center]. E. R. Krumbiegel, Commissioner of Health, Observations on Housing Conditions in Milwaukee’s Sixth Ward (Milwaukee: 1944); J. J. Brust, Housing Survey in the Sixth and Tenth Wards (Milwaukee: Board of Public Land Commissioners, 1944); Milwaukee Department of Health, Area “A” Statistics (March 1946); Milwaukee Board of Public Land Commissioners, Milwaukee Environmental Survey 1946: District 1 (April 1946); Milwaukee Board of Public Land Commissioners, Evidences of Blight in the City of Milwaukee by Census Tracts (Milwaukee, 1946); Richard S. Davis, “Blight Linked to Offenses in Ward Survey: Study of Arrests Here Shows Cost of Slums Is Reflected in Police Protection Figures,” MJ, 26 January 1947; Milwaukee Board of Public Land Commissioners, Evidences of Blight in the City of Milwaukee by Census Tracts, 1950 (Milwaukee, 1953); and the many images of “blight” and dilapidated housing in the photograph archive of the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee. On the proliferation of local planning studies during this time, see Thomas W. Hanchett, “Federal Incentives and the Growth of Local Planning, 1941–1948,” Journal of the American Planning Association 60:2 (Spring 1994): 197–208. “Prices Climb in Blight Area,” MJ, 23 September 1946. African Americans bid on these houses in the auction, but were not among the final buyers. On housing conditions and segregation, see: Citizen’s Governmental Research Bureau, Milwaukee’s Negro Community (Milwaukee: Council of Social Agencies, 1946), 24–28; Leo C. Talsky, “Real Estate, Race, and Revenue: A Milwaukee Case Study” (M.S. thesis, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, 1967); Charles Vaeth, “Milwaukee Negro Residential

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a program to clear out dilapidated buildings and erect affordable public housing appeared to be a reasonable response to these conditions. Designation as the city’s principal “blighted” area, however, simultaneously reinforced racial stereotypes and prejudices, slanting popular perceptions of the ward’s residents and its new public housing project.30 Although the Sixth Ward itself was neither exclusively black nor was it the only ward in which African Americans lived, it was widely identified as the city’s “black ward.” As noted earlier, the size and concentration of the Sixth Ward’s African-American population continued to grow after the war and into the following decades. For black veterans and nonveterans alike, restrictive covenants, threats of violence, racially skewed public policies, and discriminatory real estate practices in a tight housing market made the overcrowded Sixth-Ward area one of the few housing options available. The proportion of “non-white” residents in selected Sixth Ward census tracts illustrates the extent of that concentration. In Milwaukee’s census tract 20, “non-whites” accounted for 67 percent of the population in 1940 and 80 percent in 1950. In census tract 30, that figure rose from 53 percent to 79 percent over the course of the decade. And in census tract 29, a corner of which crossed into the Tenth Ward, the “non-white” population jumped from 50 percent to 77 percent of the ward’s total. In both 1940 and 1950, African Americans reportedly made up more than 99.5 percent of the “non-white” population in these tracts. While a good deal of this change in racial composition can be accounted for by the in-migration of black workers, some white residents were moving out. During this time,

30

Segregation” (unpublished manuscript, Milwaukee Public Library, ca. 1948); and Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 178–80. On the profitability of rentals, see “6th Ward Houses Bring Big Returns to Owners,” MJ, 23 April 1944. The Urban League and allies organized neighborhood cleanup committees, in part, to counter these perceptions. “Negroes Start Area Cleanup,” MJ, 7 April 1946; Michael Ross Grover, “‘All Things to Black Folks’: A History of the Milwaukee Urban League, 1919–1980” (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1994), 93–99; and Marie Anne Laberge, “‘Seeking a Place to Stand’: Political Power and Activism among Wisconsin Women, 1945–1963” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1995), 88–95. On responses to perceptions about criminal activity, see “Petition Called Racial Stigma: Police Check Signers,” MJ, 12 April 1947; “Crime in the Sixth Ward” [letter to the editor signed by Rev. W. J. G. McLin, William Kelley, Andrew Reneau, and Mary Louise Renfro], MJ, 21 April 1947. Sixth Ward resident J. Anthony Josey objected to the Ward’s identification as a blighted neighborhood in his letter to the editor, “For the Negro Home Owner,” MJ, 3 August 1949. See also: Genevieve G. McBride and Stephen R. Byers, “The First Mayor of Black Milwaukee: J. Anthony Josey,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 91:2 (Winter 2007– 08): 2–15; and Jack Dougherty, More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 51–64.

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the boundaries of the city’s main black neighborhood also extended slowly beyond the Sixth and Tenth Wards, especially to the northwest.31 Delays in planning and building frustrated those who had pressed for completion of the Sixth Ward public housing project. Conflicts over bureaucratic authority, as in other cities, stalled progress. In Milwaukee, the Housing Authority, the Board of Public Land Commissioners, and the Common Council’s Buildings and Grounds Committee tussled over the housing and redevelopment agendas. Others blamed the leadership change at the Housing Authority, mistakes in advertising for construction bids, or the glacial pace of federal action. Shifting priorities at the local and federal levels over the course of the war and in the early postwar years contributed to this fitful schedule.32 The Sixth Ward project also was held up because the anticipated cost of the project exceeded federal guidelines. Under the limits imposed by the 1937 Housing Act, individual units could cost up to $5,000; the Sixth Ward project called for an estimated $7,460 per unit. Milwaukee officials sought administrative and legislative relief from these restrictions in order to finance the excess costs with $750,000 from local funds. Legislation offered by the recently elected Senator Joseph McCarthy proposed lifting

31

32

Census tract 21 saw an increase from 49 percent “non-white” to 69 percent. H. Yuan Tien, ed. Milwaukee Metropolitan Fact Book: 1940, 1950 and 1960 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), 179; Krumbiegel, Observations on Housing Conditions in Milwaukee’s Sixth Ward, 15; Paul Edward Geib, “The Late Great Migration: A Case Study of Southern Black Migration to Milwaukee, 1940–1970” (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, 1993), 2, 124; Jack Dougherty, “African Americans, Civil Rights, and Race-Making in Milwaukee,” in Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past, eds. Margo Anderson and Victor Greene (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 137–39; and Trotter, Black Milwaukee. On segregation in industrial cities, see: Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009); Amanda I. Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). On race and the “reinvention of the spatial order,” see James Hanlon, “Unsightly Urban Menaces and the Rescaling of Residential Segregation in the United States,” Journal of Urban History 37:5 (September 2011): 732–56. Richard Perrin took over from Rudolph Nedved in 1946. Richard Perrin, Biographical Abstract, Biographical Files, Wisconsin Architectural Archive. “Acts to Speed Slum Project,” MJ, 31 March 1947; “Error in Getting Bids Delays Ward Project,” MJ, 16 October 1947; and “Project Error ‘Cost $77,000,’” MJ, 23 December 1947. On postwar public housing and redevelopment, see also: John F. Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920–1974 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); and Lawrence J. Vale, Reclaiming Public Housing: A Half Century of Struggle in Three Public Neighborhoods (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

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this limit to allow cities to finance a portion of their housing projects. At a Washington D.C. hearing, city officials stressed that they sought this provision in order to carry out a project in a “Negro area” in the “worst slum district in the city.” Milwaukee was one of the few cities expected to make use of this provision. The city’s low debt level, a byproduct of the socialist-backed pay-as-you-go policy, combined with the recently approved bond financing abilities, placed Milwaukee in an unusual position to help pay for low-income housing. Other cities were less likely to underwrite housing and slum clearance projects, banking instead on the prospect of new federal programs.33 Senator McCarthy called the Milwaukee proposal “refreshing.” McCarthy and Republican allies in Congress, including the Speaker of the House and the chair of the House Committee on Banking and Currency (crucial to housing legislation), were pleased to see a city asking to use its own funds rather than relying entirely on federal funds. They neglected to note, however, that this local flexibility resulted in part from past socialist policies.34 While McCarthy might have found the Hillside project palatable because it targeted the city’s poor and marginal inhabitants, reflecting his understanding of public housing as “poor relief,” he especially used this occasion to emphasize conservative disdain for federal financing of a broad public housing program.35 The Milwaukee officials and housing advocates who hoped to jump-start the Hillside project 33

34 35

Richard Perrin quoted in “Action Seen on Slum Plea,” MJ, 16 June 1947. “Blight Fund Action Snags: Council Approves Sixth Ward Plan,” MS, 15 April 1947; “Slum Proposal Wins Support,” MJ, 23 April 1947; Frank P. Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government: My Experience as Mayor of Milwaukee” (unpublished manuscript, 1962), chapter IV, 55; Milwaukee Common Council, Milwaukee Annual Report, 1947 (Milwaukee: Municipal Reference Library, 1948), 43; and Leigh Hunt, Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee to Common Council, City of Milwaukee, 17 January 1949, 13, folio “Comprehensive Report to C.C.,” Richard W. E. Perrin Papers, Series 079, Department of City Development, City of Milwaukee Archives, Milwaukee Public Library [hereafter Perrin Papers, MPL]. See also: “Study Slated on Bonds for Slum Housing,” MJ, 25 March 1947; “Housing Bond Idea Reshaped,” MJ, 10 April 1947; “O.K. Housing Finance Plan,” MS, 22 April 1947; and “City Steps up Project in 6th,” MS, ca. 23 March 1947 in “Housing” newsclipping microfiche, Legislative Reference Bureau, City Hall, Milwaukee [hereafter LRB]. “Action Seen on Slum Plea”; and “Slum Proposal Wins Support.” McCarthy’s sponsorship of this bill is especially ironic given the political and legislative history of the 1937 Housing Act. Radford argues that the restrictive cost-limitation amendment was one of the most significant obstacles to public housing becoming a broad-based program. Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 190. See also: D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 15–34; and Alexander von Hoffman, “The End of the Dream: The Political Struggle of America’s Public Housers,” Journal of Planning History 4:3 (August 2005): 222–53.

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interpreted the provision differently. They were eager to use available federal funds to implement local plans while also backing broader legislation (that is, the Taft-Ellender-Wagner bill) that would expand the role and commitment of the federal government to public housing and urban redevelopment. Their plea was not for limited government, but for both increased federal help and local flexibility. In the meantime, passage of the amendment to the housing act enabled the city to move ahead with the Sixth Ward project, using a federal grant of $1,786,000 and its own $750,000.36 The Joint Action Committee for Better Housing (JACBH), however, warned that this amendment, proposed by an opponent such as McCarthy, might be a “devious way to kill public housing” if it resulted in an abdication of federal financing.37 And indeed, this early collaboration stood in contrast to the conflict that erupted between McCarthy and local public housing advocates just a few months later. After years of effort, city leaders broke ground for the Hillside project in January 1948, making this the nation’s first post-World War II lowincome housing project (see Figure 6.4). Families began moving into Hillside’s 133 units in late 1948; by mid-1949 the first phase of the project had been completed (see Figure 6.5). The remaining ninety-nine units were constructed and fully occupied by the spring of 1950. The city’s next lowincome public housing venture, the 726-unit Westlawn project, built between 1950 and 1952, was the city’s first Title III project built under the auspices of the 1949 Housing Act.38 While the Hillside project primarily housed African-American families, about 15 percent of the residents were white. Hillside, it turns out, was more mixed racially than the city’s veterans housing projects. At the time, no black families lived in the Northlawn project and only one black family resided at Southlawn.39

36 37

38

39

“Slum Project Bill Advances,” MJ, 18 June 1947. JACBH – July Report, 20 July 1947, folio 3, box 9, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC. “Blight Project Earth Turned,” MJ, 8 January 1948; “Hillside Units Done, Rented,” MJ, 3 May 1950; and Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee, Public Housing in Milwaukee, 31. See also: “Statement by Mayor John L. Bohn on Seventh and Galena Housing Project,” 8 January 1948; “Sixth Ward Housing Project,” 17 March 1947; and [three-page description of the Sixth Ward Project, WIS-2–1], n.d. – all in folio 5, box 180, Zeidler Papers, MPL. On public housing built under the 1949 Housing Act, see: Alexander von Hoffman, “A Study in Contradictions: The Origins and Legacy of the Housing Act of 1949,” Housing Policy Debate 11:2 (2000): 299–326; and Chapter 7. Milwaukee Common Council, Roads to a Better Milwaukee, 52. A letter to the editor in the wake of the Greenfield trailer incident (discussed later in this chapter) interjected: “When white people moved into the Hillside project, no one said a word about it. So let’s be fair with everyone.” “What about Hillside?,” MJ, 14 July 1949. On the segregation and veterans’ housing projects, see: Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and

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fi g u r e 6 . 4 Construction of the Hillside Terrace low-income housing project, 5 May 1949. “Remember When” series, Digital Collections, RW 2251, Frank P. Zeidler Humanities Room, Milwaukee Public Library. Reproduced by permission of the Milwaukee Public Library.

The city’s focus on the housing shortage and the construction of these low-income and veterans’ housing projects in the early postwar years was due in part to the leadership of key officials in the housing authority and mayor’s office, especially after the election of Frank Zeidler in 1948. But the ongoing advocacy and organizing efforts of a collection of women’s, veterans’, black, and labor groups proved to be pivotal. Although Milwaukee’s public housing program would stall in the 1950s, this early burst of activity on a critical postwar issue and the reactions it provoked affected both policy and the city’s political culture.40

40

Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster, 79–84. See also Arnold R. Hirsch, “‘Containment’ on the Home Front: Race and Federal Housing Policy from the New Deal to the Cold War,” Journal of Urban History 26:2 (2000): 158–89. Joel Rast, “Governing the Regimeless City: The Frank Zeidler Administration in Milwaukee, 1948–1960,” Urban Affairs Review 42:1 (September 2006): 81–112; and Phyllis M. Santacroce, “Rediscovering the Role of the State: Housing Policy and Practice in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1900–1970” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2009), 71–120.

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fi g u r e 6 . 5 Woman and two children exiting an apartment at the recently occupied Hillside Terrace housing project. Fred R. Stanger (photographer), “Hillside Terrace Housing Project, Wis-2–1, in Sixth Ward of City,” 10 December 1949, photo no. 11521, Milwaukee Housing Authority photograph archive. Reproduced by permission of the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee.

At the close of the war, the labor-liberal coalition of organizations that had fought for the Housing Authority and a stepped-up wartime public housing program began to address the city’s postwar housing emergency. Housing concerns, of course, were integral to the postwar controversy over Milwaukee’s public debt policy. For public housing advocates, the severe housing shortage for veterans and nonveterans presented an opportunity to mobilize wide support. The broad coalition of women’s, labor, African-American, religious, welfare, and civic groups, often acting under the umbrella of the JACBH, castigated public officials’ postwar priorities and argued that the housing crisis deserved more attention. JACBH leader Genevieve Hambley, weighing the significance of the housing shortage relative to the city’s Centurama centennial celebration or a proposed art gallery in the Allis home, reported: “some of our city officials can not yet recognize that the fundamental and the most urgent

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problem in Milwaukee is HOUSING – not the Centurama nor especially the Allis home.”41 In a letter to the mayor, Hambley stressed that the city’s response to the housing crisis must be urgent and far-reaching, linking an ambitious public housing agenda to a program of redevelopment. “We must plan boldly and immediately for the rehabilitation” of the Sixth Ward and other areas.42 As the JACBH and allied groups would contend in the midst of the 1947 debt debate, especially after the creation of the Improve Milwaukee Now Committee, Milwaukee’s housing needs topped all other metropolitan concerns and required substantial public action. Hambley and JACBH members argued that the local and federal governments, through agencies such as the Milwaukee Housing Authority, should adopt an ambitious, long-term housing program. The “antiquated” private building industry, they asserted, failed to acknowledge the challenge of meeting veterans’ and low-income residents’ needs.43 Building on its earlier advocacy, the JACBH gave strong support for the Housing Authority’s claim to jurisdiction, versus that of the Board of Public Land Commissioners, in lowincome public housing, veterans’ housing, and blight elimination. Hambley believed that this move would both give the city program a clearer direction and speed up the city’s response to the many dimensions of the housing crisis.44 The JACBH also pressed for temporary housing for veterans, approving the city’s use of public land for this venture and condemning “those property owners who are living in fine homes and

41

42 43

44

Genevieve Hambley, “Joint Action Committee for Better Housing – Report,” June-July 1946, folio “Temporary Housing, 1947,” Bohn Papers, MPL. See also: “Housing for 12,000 Urged by 28 Groups,” unidentified newsclipping in folio “Housing Veterans, 4200,” Bohn Papers, MPL; “Report of the Joint Action Committee for Better Housing, 24 May 1946, folio 2, box 7, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC; and “Negro Housing Plea Is Issued,” MJ, 5 December 1946. See also Hambley’s talk before the Milwaukee League of Women Voters (as Housing Committee chair) in “Women Urge Housing Move,” MJ, 25 May 1946. On the JACBH, see also Chapters 2 and 5. “Bohn Prodded on Slowness in Curbing Blight,” MJ, 12 April 1946. “Slum Clearance Priority Is Urged,” MJ, 18 April 1947; JACBH to Common Council, Building and Grounds, Committee, 17 September 1947, file 47–1602, City Records Center; Genevieve B. Hambley (JACBH) to Alderman Ed Hansen, 29 July 1947, folio “Housing Veterans, 4200 Units,” Bohn Papers, MPL. Referring to a Twentieth Century Fund research report, Hambley labeled the building industry as in “the horse-and-buggy stage of development.” See also “Action Group Blasts Planning Commission for Housing Delays,” Wisconsin CIO News, 29 March 1946. “Win Support for Authority,” MJ, 1 May 1946; and “Give Us Some Authority, Housing Body Demands,” MJ, 30 April 1946. Hambley backed the recommendation to turn over Parklawn to the Housing Authority. Genevieve Hambley (JACBH) to Milwaukee Common Council, 2 July 1946, folio “Parklawn, 1946,” Bohn Papers, MPL. On the Board of Public Land Commissioners, see McCarthy, Making Milwaukee Mightier.

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are protesting against temporary shelter being erected in their neighborhood to house returning veterans.”45 Women’s groups and female leaders helped to keep the JACBH at the forefront on housing issues. The JACBH’s Hambley and her fellow Milwaukee League of Women Voters’ members put a heavy emphasis on housing issues in the early postwar years. Other women’s groups participating in the JACBH at this time included the American Association of University Women, the Milwaukee Council of Church Women, the Council of Jewish Women, the YWCA, the Milwaukee Woman’s Club, and later the Women’s Trade Union League. Women from a range of other organizations affiliated with the JACBH, including the NAACP and the Milwaukee Urban League, also took up housing issues. Women’s leadership and organized presence on housing issues in the 1930s and 1940s built on Progressive-era urban reform and foreshadowed the gender-based activism that would emerge in the 1960s. In the shorter-term, women’s concerted involvement in these issues, which often entailed building bridges across class lines and between races, both sustained and raised the profile of housing issues in the postwar city.46 Veterans groups in the city, from the liberal American Veterans Committee (AVC) to the conservative American Legion, worked hard to provide more and better housing for their constituency. While the 45 46

“Action Group Blasts Planning Commission for Housing Delays.” Laberge, “Seeking a Place to Stand,” 66–100, 179–81; “Questions by Hearers, Rivals Enliven Candidates’ Forums,” MJ, 1946, in scrapbooks, volume 3, 1946, League of Women Voters of Greater Milwaukee Records, Milwaukee ARC; “How Candidates for Mayor Stand on Bonds, Housing and Blight,” MJ, 29 January 1948; “Two Forums Stir Interest: Housing Is Big Topic,” MJ, 24 March 1948; “Council Aspirants Favor Blight War, GI Housing,” MS, 7 March 1948; “City Housing Plans Argued,” MJ, 17 May 1948; “Women Voters Study Problem of Housing,” MS, 14 September 1947; and miscellaneous newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, volume 4, 1947–1948, League of Women Voters of Greater Milwaukee Records, Milwaukee ARC; Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 37–38. The League of Women Voters emphasized housing issues in its candidate forums, voter education initiatives, and lobbying efforts. League members served as the first three leaders of the JACBH. Hambley gave up her post after moving to Michigan in 1948. On organizational ties to the JACBH, see: Report of President at the Annual Meeting of the Federation of Jewish Women’s Organizations, 12 June 1951, Frame 123, reel 1, Federation of Jewish Women’s Organizations of Milwaukee Records, microfilm edition, Milwaukee ARC; Minutes of the Milwaukee NAACP Executive Meeting, 12 August 1948, folio 15, box 2, Milwaukee NAACP Records, Milwaukee ARC; and Minutes of the Women’s Trade Union League meeting, 28 August 1950, folio 13, box 1, Milwaukee Women’s Trade Union League Papers, Milwaukee ARC. Women’s groups outside the JACBH also took an interest in housing issues. See the discussion of housing legislation in the Meeting minutes, 17 October 1945, folio “Minutes – Regular Meetings, 1942–47,” box 2, Women’s Court and Civic Conference Records, Milwaukee ARC. See also: Sylvie Murray, The Progressive Housewife: Community Activism in Suburban Queens, 1945–1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).

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American Veterans of World War II (Amvets) worked independently on housing issues, most groups worked with other veterans’ organizations or a variety of civic, community, and national groups to advance the cause of housing. Whether working together through the Joint Veterans’ Housing Council, in coalition with the JACBH, or individually, these groups recognized that the political clout of veterans in the early postwar city was formidable. The AVC, for instance, demanded that business leaders and public officials at the city and federal levels pitch in to deal with the housing shortage, using their political and organizational resources. William Hambley, the husband of Genevieve Hambley, was one AVC member who spoke out on these issues. The local AVC clashed especially with real estate and building interests in its calls for an ambitious public housing program for veterans and low-income Milwaukeeans.47 While the AVC’s housing politics dovetailed with liberal and labor demands for an ambitious public housing program, the American Legion appeared torn between its conservative legacy and the pull of veterans’ unmet housing needs. Legion leaders’ work with the Red Cross Housing Bureau supplied indisputable evidence of the housing shortage. In order to reconcile their ideological commitments and the glaring needs of veterans, Legionnaires combined biting critiques of the private housing industry with conservative arguments against long-term government involvement; they also assigned blame for housing difficulties to organized labor and pernicious corruption in the industry.48 Legionnaire Clem Kalvelage, while stating his support for both public housing and the private real estate industry, faulted especially workers who had migrated to Milwaukee for wartime jobs. He 47

48

“Veterans Here Rap End of Building Bans,” MJ, 17 December 1946; “Veterans Ask 15,000 Homes,” MJ, 8 April 1947; “Add Housing, County Asked”; “Push Housing, AVC’s Advice: Veteran Group Asks 1948 Corporation to Assure 15,000 Units,” MJ, 4 April 1947; “AVC Expands Housing Pleas: Turns to Congressmen,” MJ, 1 March 1946; “Praise, Attack Housing Okay,” MJ, 29 September 1947; “Sixth Ward Housing Inches Along,” Wisconsin CIO News, 28 March 1947; and Van Ells, To Hear Only Thunder Again, 209–43. The AVC also suggested how veterans’ housing tenants and buyers should be selected: the first available units should be assigned to veterans who in this tight housing market were living separately from their children or wives; next on the list were the veterans in crowded conditions or forced to move frequently. The AVC recommended formation of an appeals board, composed of representatives from the various veterans groups and the Red Cross, to help allocate this housing. “Methods of selecting tenants for city housing units,” American Veterans Committee, Milwaukee Chapter, 19 February 1946, folio “Veterans Housing Selection Committee, 1946,” Bohn Papers, MPL. “Sift Housing Plaints, Plea: John Doe Quiz Asked as Veterans Accuse Some Builders,” MJ, 20 September 1947. Arthur Marcus, a local member of the American Legion’s national housing committee, said that “while most builders are all right, there are too many sprinkled among them who work just inside or just outside of the law.” See also: “Housing Ills Aired at Rally,” MJ, 23 April 1947; and “Tell Legion’s Housing Aim: National Leader Here,” MJ, 21 September 1947.

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argued that newcomers, a disproportionate number of whom were African American, put excessive pressure on a housing market that shortchanged veterans.49 African-American organizations and leaders focused on the postwar housing shortage to press for the needs of black veterans as well as the long-standing housing deficiencies that Milwaukee’s black residents had endured. After the proposed wartime housing project in the Sixth Ward had been scratched prior to Hillside, groups that advocated better housing in this area tried to push the city to take action. The Milwaukee Urban League, the NAACP, the Sixth Ward Better Housing Club, black churches and clergy, African-American candidates, community newspapers, the Negro Businessmen’s League, and interracial organizations such as the Renters League made the city’s housing crisis a defining political issue. According to one report of early postwar housing frustrations, “Hundreds of Milwaukee Negroes living in the slum areas are reported to be making plans to march on the city hall.” Throughout these early postwar years, African-American organizations and residents used direct action, lobbying, and informal pressure to demand better (and more affordable) private housing in segregated areas, access to housing outside these boundaries, and an expansive public housing program. The CIO continued to be an important ally on these issues for black workers.50 The Milwaukee CIO placed the postwar housing crisis near the top of its agenda, working both in a coalition with other groups through the JACBH and on its own. CIO Council secretary Glenn Clarke called for fast

49

50

“Many Hunt Homes.” Arthur Marcus blamed the housing shortage on workers brought in for wartime production. U.S. Congress, Hearings before the Joint Committee on Housing: Proceedings at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 80th Cong., 1st sess., 10 November 1947, 2418. “Dorsey Forces Issue on Housing Delay,” 5 May 1946, unidentified newspaper clipping, folio 7, box 1, James W. Dorsey Papers, Milwaukee County Historical Society; “‘Hit Problems’ Bohn Is Told: Challenged on Housing, Slum Problems and Fiscal Program,” MJ, 10 April 1946; JACBH, “Report of the Chairman for the Year May 1946 – May 1947,” 23, May 1947, folio 1, box 9, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC; Scrapbooks, 1920–1949, reel 1, Milwaukee Urban League Records, Milwaukee ARC; Executive Board minutes, 13 November 1947, 12 August 1948, and 17 February 1949, folio 15, box 2, NAACP Milwaukee Chapter Records, Milwaukee ARC; Regular meeting minutes, 22 January 1948, folio 3, box 5, NAACP Milwaukee Chapter Records, Milwaukee ARC; “Activities for the Milwaukee Branch of the NAACP for 1948–49, folio 2, box 6, NAACP Milwaukee Chapter Records, Milwaukee ARC; “Sixth Ward Housing Inches Along”; Renters League of Milwaukee County, correspondence and petition, 30 October 1947, file 47–1932, City Records Center; miscellaneous articles in Milwaukee Globe (1948–1949) and Milwaukee Sepian (1951); Grover, “All Things to Black Folks,” 90–91; and Kevin D. Smith, “‘In God We Trust’: Religion, the Cold War, and Civil Rights in Milwaukee, 1947–1963” (Ph.D. diss., University of WisconsinMadison, 1999).

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action by the public sector to make up for private industry’s failings, telling the Common Council that if “something isn’t done – and soon – there will be a catastrophe.”51 Spurred on by local conditions, the CIO Council was encouraged by the national CIO and international unions, especially the United Auto Workers, to organize for low-income and veterans’ housing. Individual unions and the CIO council put pressure on local, state, and federal officials and candidates to respond to the shortage and to create a more equitable set of housing policies and possibilities for workers, veterans, and other low- and moderate-income people.52 CIO veterans from Milwaukee and around Wisconsin called for a special session of the state legislature to address veterans’ housing and employment problems. Through its newspaper and in meetings for members and the public, the CIO helped to build working-class Milwaukeeans’ support for public housing projects.53

51 52

53

“Housing Effort Still Lags Far behind Needs.” In addition to local housing issues, the Milwaukee CIO participated in housing events coordinated by the national CIO. See, for instance, “Field Kit for ‘Fight for Housing Day,’” 25 June 1947, folio 2, box 9, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC. On housing as a CIO priority nationally, see: Memorandum from Meyer Bernstein (CIO Veterans Representative), regarding 1948 CIO Portland convention action on veterans, 30 November 1948, folio “CIO Veterans’ Committee,” box 32, United Steel Workers of America, District 31 Records, Chicago Historical Society; Congress of Industrial Organizations, Daily Proceedings of the Eighth Constitutional Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey, 18 November 1946, 34–36; CIO, Final Proceedings of the Ninth Constitutional Convention, Boston, 13–17 October 1947, 110–16, 222–23; CIO, 1948 Proceedings of the Tenth Constitutional Convention, Portland, Oregon, 22–26 November 1948, 129–33, 397–400; UAW-CIO, Proceedings, Twelfth Constitutional Convention, Milwaukee, 10–15 July 1949, 15–16, 54–60. On legislative and political initiatives, see: William G. Nicholas, Director of UAW-CIO Housing Department, to Hy Cohen, Milwaukee County Industrial Council, 5 January 1946, folio 3, box 6, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC; Communication from John Brophy (Director, Industrial Union Councils) regarding establishment of local Emergency Veterans Housing Committees, 6 April 1946, folio 1, box 7, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC; Memo from Jack Kroll to CIO Political Action Committees, 12 June 1947, folio 2, box 9, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC; Communication from CIO Housing Committee regarding Taft-Ellender-Wagner Bill, 13 April 1948, folio 2, box 11, CIO Housing Committee (Leo Goodman) Papers, Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan [hereafter Reuther Library]; and “Milwaukee County CIO-PAC Candidate Questionnaire,” folio 5, box 11, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC. On labor’s housing politics in postwar New York, see: Hilary Ann Botein, “‘Solid Testimony of Labor’s Present Status’: Unions and Housing in Postwar New York City” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2005); and Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000), 105–24. “CIO Vets to March on Capitol: Will Demand Special Session to Handle Urgent Veteran Problems,” Wisconsin CIO News, 8 March 1946; “Housing Plan Benefits Cited,” MJ, 11 December 1945.

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Just as the war ended, the CIO alerted its members to the attack underway against public housing by “powerful private real estate interests.” Citing the end of the war and building-material shortages, these real estate groups lobbied against continued attention to planning for the Sixth Ward project. The CIO warned that any delay threatened both the housing project and “Milwaukee’s whole slum clearance program which was won only after many years of hard fighting by labor and other civicminded groups.”54 The program that the CIO promoted would clear areas of deteriorating private housing in order to build public housing – not simply to turn the area over to private developers. As progress on the Sixth Ward project continued to limp along, the CIO, along with representatives from the JACBH and organizations such as the Milwaukee Interracial Federation and the AVC, pressed the city to move forward rather than wait for the federal government to act.55 Along with both its criticisms of the real estate industry and its vigorous support for public housing, the Milwaukee CIO entered the postwar era with an ambitious but short-lived plan to create a labor community. On Labor Day of 1945, Milwaukee CIO secretary Meyer Adelman announced that the group was contemplating the purchase and development of Greendale. The New Deal “greenbelt town” just southwest of Milwaukee had opened in 1938 and become home to many workingclass families, including that of UAW Local 248 President Robert Buse.56 The CIO had begun preliminary discussions with Greendale’s federal manager, proposing to expand the village tenfold, from 637 to 6,000 homes. Adelman, who had been one of the CIO’s earliest organizers in Wisconsin, said the “project would be primarily for CIO union members.” About half or more of the homes would be reserved for union members and the rest opened to the general public. He imagined a CIO-published village newspaper, a radio station, and stores that were either cooperatives

54

55

56

“Public Housing in Danger,” Wisconsin CIO News, 14 September 1945. For a satirical account of the housing crisis, see “It’s the Cats,” Wisconsin CIO News, 14 September 1945. “Sixth Ward Housing Inches Along.” Forty to fifty people, mostly public housing advocates, attended this hearing by the Common Council’s Building and Grounds Committee. “Buy, Expand Greendale Is Goal of CIO: Labor Group Hopes to Have 6,000 Living Units, Half for Its Own Members,” MJ, 4 September 1945; and Robert Buse, Interview by Dale E. Treleven, Greenfield, Wisconsin, 4 February 1982, Wisconsin Labor Oral History Project, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin [hereafter WHS]. For background on Greendale, see: Ronald Wildermuth, “Greendale’s Federal Years, 1938–1952” (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1968); Arnold R. Alanen and Joseph A. Eden, Main Street Ready-Made: The New Deal Community of Greendale, Wisconsin (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1987); and Gurda, Making of Milwaukee, 288–89.

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or owned by the village corporation. Although these plans never moved beyond the proposal stage, the breadth of this Labor Day design illustrates how CIO leaders such as Adelman imagined their power and possibilities in the postwar city. They believed that the close of the war might lead to a period in which organized labor could build its institutional strength and exert its power in the workplace and community. Labor and its allies might shape the city and urban policy.57 The AFL, although less vocal and far-reaching in approach, also viewed housing as a key postwar issue. The federation addressed the difficulties that its members and others faced in finding homes, including low-cost housing. Questioning the ability of the private sector to do the heavy lifting to solve the postwar housing shortage, the AFL called for public action at the local and federal levels (see Figure 6.6). The AFL sought to protect and boost employment for its building trades members, while also guarding the trades themselves from a flood of “half-baked mechanics under a speedup apprenticeship program” that had been proposed to lessen labor shortages in building and construction.58 AFL leaders, along with representatives of the CIO and independent unions, also participated in a fledgling effort to build cooperative housing for workers. Max Raskin, former city attorney and ally of organized labor who was on a path of political realignment from the Socialist Party to the Democratic Organizing Committee, helped to bring together about fifty labor representatives. Patterning their effort on the Socialists’ post-World War I Garden Homes project, the Milwaukee Mutual Housing Association suggested teaming up with the city to build affordable housing for workers. For the AFL, such an effort recalled earlier decades in the twentieth century when they had played a pivotal role in building and sustaining the Socialist base in city politics. Although this

57

58

“Buy, Expand Greendale Is Goal of CIO”; and “City Owned Churches Hit: CIO’s Greendale Scheme Draws Fire,” MJ, 5 September 1945. Adelman’s early announcement of the plan suggested that the village corporation would own church properties; religious institutions would be supported by taxes and ministers would earn “a guaranteed annual wage, just as labor wants a guaranteed wage.” Local religious leaders objected to this as an infringement on religious freedom. On later Greendale controversies, see: “Hits at Funds for Greendale,” MJ, 1 August 1949; “Vote Ordered at Greendale,” MJ, 3 August 1949; and “Ballots Spurn Legion Group at Greendale,” MJ, 24 August 1949. See also Jeanne Anderson Posada, “Public Housing in Milwaukee: A Case Study in Administration” (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1947), 69–76. “Building Tr. Go ‘All-Out’ for Housing,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 23 January 1947; Wisconsin State Federation of Labor, Proceedings of the Fifty-fourth Annual Convention, Superior, Wisconsin, 19–23 August 1946, 210–12; and Wisconsin State Federation of Labor, Proceedings of the Fifty-fifth Annual Convention, Green Bay, Wisconsin, 18–22 August 1947, 251–52, 332–33. On AFL support for low-cost housing, see “Housing Effort Still Lags Far behind Needs,” MJ, 27 July 1947.

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fi g u r e 6 . 6 Labor, liberal, civil rights, women’s, and veterans’ groups supporting public housing measures such as the Taft-Ellender-Wagner bill doubted the ability of the private sector to provide adequate, affordable shelter. Don Chilcote (cartoonist), “Try That ‘Breakfast of Champs!’” Milwaukee Labor Press, 24 April 1947, 1. Appeared originally in the Chicago Sun, 1947. Courtesy of the Milwaukee Labor Press. ©2012 Chicago Sun-Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express permission is prohibited.

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post-World War II cooperative housing plan stalled, as had the CIO’s labor community proposal, the attempt to establish labor-sponsored, nonmarket housing for workers indicates the wide range of political and policy possibilities alive in the early postwar city.59 The alternatives to the private market advanced by these groups point to the volatility and politically charged character of early postwar housing debates. Nonmarket proposals, including public housing for low-income people and veterans, generated both considerable support and increasing resistance. Contemporary accounts, academic studies, and social histories make clear that many supporters and opponents understood early postwar nonmarket housing possibilities as a political challenge. Some viewed this challenge with hope, while others feared it. Building on earlier characterizations of public housing as “political housing,” postwar participants and observers viewed public housing and other nonmarket proposals as political in two respects. First, the housing proposals themselves contested, to varying degrees, the private sector’s ideological and economic prerogatives in the provision of housing. Second, some proponents believed that the experience of living in public housing might cultivate residents’ democratic consciousness while also fostering a politics that counter-balanced the weight of market values and the principles of growth. Two early postwar studies of public housing, one by the left-wing and labor activist Henry Kraus and the other by the sociologist Robert K. Merton, also suggested that the experience of living in public housing might have broader political ramifications. But these outcomes were contingent on both internal dynamics and outside influences. In a West Coast instance, labor activist Henry Kraus wrote about the democratic, interracial, working-class political culture that flourished briefly in a San Pedro housing project. Kraus described the grassroots militancy and collective purpose that developed as he and others, along with local labor, organized the Channel Heights defense project. Residents’ experience living in this community formed the basis for collective action not only within the project, evident especially in demands for democratic self-management, but also beyond, as seen in their support for a left-liberal agenda as the war

59

Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 82–83; and “Vote Parley to Slash City Housing Bids,” MJ, 2 July 1948. On other cooperative housing efforts, see: “Vets Organize for Housing Co-op,” MS, ca. 1946 (from newspaper clippings in Perrin Papers, MPL); “Veterans Cooperative Association,” ca. 1946, folio 3, box 7, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC; “Co-op Housing Merger Eyed,” MJ, 12 June 1946; “Co-op Plan Is Adopted for Homes,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 28 August 1947, 22; and “Plan a Co-op for Housing: Seek Mixed Races,” MJ, 11 June 1950. See also Andrew E. Kersten, Labor’s Home Front: The American Federation of Labor during World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 189–222.

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drew to a close. Postwar anxieties and reaction, however, undercut the foundation of the project’s democratic culture. Attacks from the political right and from anticommunist liberals, playing especially on racial fears and raising charges of radicalism, proved effective in dampening residents’ collective identity.60 Merton and his colleagues reached similar, albeit qualified, conclusions, observing that public projects could produce divergent political and civic outcomes. Residents’ experience in public housing might spur collective action, contribute to the formation of a more politicized working class, and whet their appetites for democratically run projects. On the other hand, housing projects might become bureaucratically managed sites that squelched community involvement. While Merton designed this comparative examination of the “Craftown” and “Hilltown” projects as a means to understand the dynamics of opportunity, choice, and social relations, the contingent political outcomes apparent in this and related studies underscore the turmoil of postwar public housing contests.61 Just as the early postwar strike wave raised the possibility – or specter – that a militant working-class political culture might take hold in industrial cities, a public housing policy aimed at a broad working-class constituency might carry the seeds of a political culture that ran counter to conservative and growth politics. Republican activists in the Pittsburgh area, for instance, raised this possibility when they warned that defense projects populated by CIO members would solidify bases of support for a labor-backed Democratic Party. In Milwaukee and elsewhere, conservative critics of nonmarket housing objected that public housing constituted political housing – a setting that would politicize its residents, thereby strengthening labor-liberal politics both institutionally

60

61

Henry Kraus, In the City Was a Garden: A Housing Project Chronicle (New York: Renaissance Press, 1951). See also: J. S. Fuerst, When Public Housing Was Paradise: Building Community in Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005); and Parson, Making a Better World, 53, 61–62, 69, 96–97. See the discussion of Merton in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, “A Meaning for Turner’s Frontier: Democracy in the Old Northwest,” in Turner and the Sociology of the Frontier, eds. Richard Hofstadter and Seymour Martin Lipset (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 124–27, 145–46. On “Craftown” and “Hilltown,” see Robert K. Merton, Patricia S. West, and Marie Jahoda, Patterns of Social Life: Explorations in the Sociology of Housing (1948; reprint, New York: Columbia University, Bureau of Applied Social Research, 1951). See also Robert K. Merton, On Social Structure and Science, ed. and introduced by Piotr Sztompka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 157–58, 199. Portions of the study were used in Marie Jahoda and Patricia Salter West, “Race Relations in Public Housing,” Journal of Social Issues 7:1–2 (1951): 132–39. My interpretation of these studies, especially the suggestion that Kraus’s and Merton’s studies corroborate one another, is not one with which the authors would likely have concurred.

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and ideologically. Public housing and other nonmarket proposals met increasing resistance because they clashed with property owners’ immediate economic interests, but also because of feared political consequences. Conservatives’ and growth proponents’ assaults on public housing sought to limit public resources and subdue a political discourse that bolstered working-class politics in the city.62 For public housing detractors and champions of a “free market” in real estate, the postwar housing shortage posed a dilemma. Given the pressing need for homes, could the government’s direct role be limited or even eliminated in the near future? How might market conservatives argue credibly that private sector supply would soon catch up with the urgent demand?63 Private home construction accelerated rapidly, of course, in the postwar years. Mortgage loans held by savings and loan associations in Milwaukee County rose from $69,933,412 at the end of 1946 to $85,509,010 at the end of 1947, a 22 percent increase. The total value of residential building permits in the city increased from $9,136,721 in 1945 to $25,250,443 in 1948. The number of new housing units built in Milwaukee County, which also included new suburban growth, jumped from 1,950 in 1945 to 4,501 in 1946. This count of units constructed per year remained approximately the same until 1949, when it reached 5,624, and then leapt to more than ten thousand in 1950.64 This private sector activity was aided substantially, however, by two large-scale public programs: first, the FHA mortgage insurance program, which had been created in the 1930s to stabilize the banking industry; and

62

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64

Kristin Szylvian Bailey, “Defense Housing in Greater Pittsburgh, 1945–1955,” Pittsburgh History 73:1 (Spring 1990): 16–28. In Pittsburgh defense housing, anticommunist conservatives sought to prevent mutual ownership or co-op plans. Builders voiced such concerns at a Milwaukee meeting of the National Association of Home Builders’ slum clearance and urban redevelopment committee that included representatives from twenty cities. “Builders Rap U.S. Housing: Many of Nation Assert Private Enterprise Can Handle the Job,” MJ, 2 December 1946. See also David M. P. Freund, “Marketing the Free Market: State Intervention and the Politics of Prosperity in Metropolitan America,” in The New Suburban History, eds. Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 11–32. The mortgage totals do not include loans for homes financed by savings and loan institutions located in other counties on the outskirts of the Milwaukee metropolitan area. Savings and Loan Association Department of Wisconsin, “Abstract of Condition of Savings and Loan Associations,” Abstracts 34-B and 34-C for period 31 December 1946 to 31 December 1947, in series “Reports Made by Member Banks on Local Financial Conditions,” Records of the Federal Home Loan bank Board (Record Group 195), National Archives, College Park, MD. The value and increase in Milwaukee county suburban permits paralleled those in the city for this period. Research Clearinghouse of Milwaukee, Milwaukee County, City, Suburbs, Today and Yesterday: A Statistical History of the Community (Milwaukee, 1950), 57, 58; and Milwaukee Public Library, Milwaukee City and County: A Statistical History (Milwaukee, 1958), 13.

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second, the Veterans Administration (VA) mortgage guarantees, created under the G. I. bill to ease the return of World War II veterans. These initiatives, which used public funds to lessen the real estate industry’s risk in the “free market,” drew the support of groups such as the National Association of Real Estate Boards, the U.S. Savings and Loan League, and the National Association of Home Builders. Each of these groups vigorously opposed public housing. Over the next couple of decades, these subsidy programs and the overall expansion of the economy would contribute significantly to increased home ownership and suburban growth. In the shorter-term, however, the demand for housing and especially for lower-cost rental units far outpaced supply. The shortage persisted and the interest in housing policy intensified. Mindful of the precedents of the New Deal and wartime experiments (including the housing projects built or planned for war industry workers), conservatives fought to avert a larger public role in the construction and control of housing while also backing public subsidies and payments that overwhelmingly benefitted suburbs and the home building industry.65 Conservatives and real estate industry leaders vigorously rejected claims that the housing shortage required an expanded public housing program. They frequently pointed to public missteps in peacetime readjustment, charging that wartime and early postwar regulations created supply bottlenecks and slowed housing construction. The removal of these regulations and freer rein for the market, they asserted, would solve the building materials shortage. Along with supply problems, labor costs and availability affected the rate of construction. Real estate and building industry leaders especially accused organized labor of impeding construction. Conservatives attacked labor broadly and on many fronts: craft unions’ regulation of the work site and work force; strikes by building trades workers; union racketeering; and labor disturbances in the building-supply or related industries. They also objected more generally to the power of labor unions in American society and politics, claiming that this bloc subverted the efficiency and effectiveness of the market. In these attacks 65

Public subsidies and policies benefitting new suburbs and larger-scale real estate development included tax breaks for developers and homeowners, highway construction, land use planning, and regulation. Owen D. Gutfreund, Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Thomas W. Hanchett, “The Other ‘Subsidized Housing’: Federal Aid to Suburbanization, 1940s to 1960s,” in From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America, eds. John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Szylvian (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2000), 163–79; and Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). On the National Association of Home Builders public housing opposition, see “Slum Report Hits at Public Housing,” MJ, 4 December 1946.

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on labor, conservative commentators and politicians frequently neglected the political and strategic differences between industrial and craft unions. Representative Fred Hartley’s announcement that the House Education and Labor Committee would investigate building trades unions followed immediately on the heels of his interrogation of Harold Christoffel and Robert Buse, both of the militant industrial union UAW Local 248. Despite the range of types of unions, labor became the target. At the same time, while craft and industrial unions faced numerous institutional and ideological barriers to postwar solidarity, attacks such as these helped to identify common enemies and made room for occasional common cause. Truman’s 1948 campaign, heavily dependent upon the urban working-class vote, benefitted as labor coalesced in response to conservative assaults.66 A 1947–1948 joint congressional committee, given the charge of investigating the post-World War II housing shortage, served instead as a tool to discredit liberal public housing policies and became a platform for conservative attacks on organized labor. First-term Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, prior to solidifying his reputation as an anticommunist crusader, used his position as committee vice chairman to steer these hearings for the benefit of the real estate industry and the “modern” building industry. During hearings in cities across the country, McCarthy regularly favored real estate industry witnesses and often badgered labor and propublic housing representatives. The hearings aimed to stall public housing by postponing action on the Taft-Ellender-Wagner (T-E-W) housing bill and narrowing the scope of public housing policy. This national platform especially gave McCarthy the opportunity to advance the claim that public housing failed to address the needs of lowest-income portions of the population because moderate-income people, who ought to be buying or renting private-sector housing, were allowed to take undue advantage of this program. According to McCarthy, modern mass-produced and prefabricated housing (manufactured by industries that had contributed funds to his election), rather than public housing, ought to be the means to ease the housing shortage for all but the very lowest-income groups. With these hearings, the young senator endeavored to shape the national discourse

66

“Claim Unions Stall Housing: Probe Is Planned,” MJ, 8 June 1947. On conservatism and postwar political culture, see: Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); and Lawrence Richards, Union-Free America: Workers and Antiunion Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 38–61. On the 1948 election, see Gary A. Donaldson, Truman Defeats Dewey (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999).

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about the housing shortage and public housing, while also honing the rhetorical style that he would deploy famously in postwar anticommunist campaigns.67 During hearings in Milwaukee, McCarthy tried to undermine groups that had been active supporters of public housing and critics of his tactical effort to forestall congressional action. He especially attacked JACBH head Genevieve Hambley, grilling her on provisions in the T-E-W housing bill and trying to trap her in inconsistencies about which income groups might benefit from public housing. Hambley frustrated McCarthy’s tactics, however, and proved to be a careful student of the bill and of Milwaukee’s housing history. She was particularly incensed by McCarthy’s “political opportunism” on this issue and his favoritism toward the real estate lobby and the building industry, giving representatives of civic and labor organizations insufficient time. Their time would have been even shorter had McCarthy’s plane not been grounded. Hambley charged that the joint committee’s hearings had served only to delay needed legislation and placed the Republican Party on the wrong side of the issue.68 Peter Schoemann, the Building and Construction Trades Council president and Housing Authority member, began his testimony defensively. Recognizing the direction these hearings might take, he expressed concern about this “open session on labor,” during which charges were “made at random without any basis in fact.” Some who

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The committee held hearings in thirty-three cities. Richard O. Davies, Housing Reform during the Truman Administration (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966), 68– 71; Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 89–105; David M. Oshinsky, Senator Joseph McCarthy and the American Labor Movement (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976), 71–80; Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: Free Press, 1983); and Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), 133–51. McCarthy prevented the moderate Republican Senator Charles Tobey, who was sympathetic to public housing, from heading the joint committee. On the CIO’s reaction to McCarthy’s final report (authored separately) and their attempts to rally support for the T-E-W housing bill, see Walter P. Reuther (CIO Housing Committee Chair) and John Brophy to International Presidents, Industrial Union Councils and Legislative Representatives, 13 April 1948, folio 2, box 11, CIO Housing Committee (Leo Goodman) Papers, Reuther Library. U.S. Congress, Hearings before the Joint Committee on Housing . . . Milwaukee, 2458– 466; and Laberge, “Seeking a Place to Stand,” 72. Hambley concluded her report: “[McCarthy] is one of those mainly responsible for the long and unpardonable delay in getting housing legislation . . . .” Genevieve Hambley handwritten report on Joint Committee Hearings, ca. 1948, folio 3, box 14, League of Women Voters of Greater Milwaukee Records, Milwaukee ARC. The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, a JACBH affiliate, publicly criticized McCarthy’s approach to housing politics. “Women Hit at McCarthy,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 4 September 1947.

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heard Schoemann’s statement likely understood it as a defense against the committee’s open season on labor. McCarthy cut in, denying that any of this was his intent. He claimed he was engaged only in a tough-minded mission to gather information.69 Milwaukee Builders Association spokesman Francis Schroedel, who had proposed a Sixteenth Ward private housing project for black tenants at the end of the war, pinned blame for the lack of affordable housing on labor costs, as well as taxes and inflated building supply expenses.70 Arthur Marcus, a leader of the American Legion in the Midwest, argued that building supplies should be kept in this country rather than being shipped overseas. Marcus then turned his attention to labor. Hearkening back to the American Legion’s antiradical politics following the previous World War, he exclaimed: “I would like to point the finger straight at the thing that is stopping us in getting the homes built . . . we can go back over the last few years and point to many strikes.” Marcus then took aim at UAW Local 248, complaining that the 1946–1947 Allis-Chalmers strike had stopped the manufacture of machinery needed to produce cement. He insisted that “we are suffering today because of that one strike alone.”71 As noted, the American Legion’s post-World War II stance on housing defies easy pigeonholing. The group recognized the severity of the housing shortage, discussed openly the shortcomings of the market, and joined with liberal housing reformers to demand a public response to veterans’ housing needs. But Legionnaires also teamed up with conservatives to block a more expansive public housing program. And groups such as the Home Builders and the Legion united in their attacks on labor as a villain in the housing shortage. Labor power that was marshaled to raise wages, stop production, and shape policy stood as a target for postwar conservatives who sought to counteract the midcentury coalition of organized labor and liberal groups.72 Real estate industry representatives and conservatives worked to limit the extent of public housing and to narrow its political base by insisting that eligibility be restricted to the city’s poorest residents. Picking up arguments that been aired during the wartime Housing Authority debate and directly confronting labor-liberal proposals that the city’s public

69 70

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U.S. Congress, Hearings before the Joint Committee on Housing . . . Milwaukee, 2397. Ibid., 2375–380; and Oshinsky, Senator Joseph McCarthy and the American Labor Movement, 75. U.S. Congress, Hearings before the Joint Committee on Housing . . . Milwaukee, 2418. Baxandall and Ewen, Picture Windows, 97. McCarthy, who recognized the potential for support from more conservative construction workers, held discussions with national building trades leaders. Oshinsky, Senator Joseph McCarthy and the American Labor Movement, 76–77.

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housing program should serve a broad swath of the urban working class, conservatives strove to impose strict income limits. The Milwaukee County Property Owners Association, for instance, passed a resolution that “no housing project be undertaken by our government . . . unless such project be limited solely and exclusively to low-cost housing.” Like McCarthy, they envisioned this as housing for the destitute – as asylums for people who were too poor to participate in the private housing market – and not as fixtures of everyday living for the urban working class.73 Senator McCarthy expanded on this position in early 1949 as he rejected Milwaukee Housing Authority director Richard Perrin’s proposal to raise the income ceiling for prospective public housing tenants in the Hillside project. Arguing that Milwaukeeans and others faced “not one housing problem, but . . . two distinctly separate housing problems,” McCarthy insisted that only the city’s poorest residents should be served by a tightly circumscribed public housing program.74 Within this argument, McCarthy both conveyed concern for the city’s lowest-income residents and raised fears about the effect of poor people on the city. He threatened to vigorously oppose “spending one cent of taxpayers’ money if those people whose housing need is the most desperate are barred from living in taxpayer-supported housing.” The move to raise the income ceiling, he implied, was a slap in the face to the city’s poorest residents and ought to trouble those striving to aid or provide charity to the poor. But McCarthy’s effort to house only the city’s poorest residents also appealed to civic and business groups that favored slum clearance, especially as a vehicle for large-scale urban redevelopment. For McCarthy, the justification for the public provision of housing “lies in the fact that when this group of very low income families . . . are left to completely shift for themselves, they often create slum areas in the city which serve to breed crime and juvenile delinquency and are a financial burden on the city from the standpoint of police and fire protection.”75 In short, taxpayers could come out ahead by clearing away the slums and stemming the moral, social, and fiscal dangers posed by an inadequately sheltered poor population. Finally, McCarthy sharply distinguished this group of dependent 73

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Milwaukee County Property Owners Association to Legislators, 22 May 1947, folio “Housing Veterans, 4200 Units,” Bohn Papers, MPL. Senator Joe McCarthy to Richard Perrin, 10 January 1949, folio “Joseph McCarthy, Miscellaneous papers, 1929–1954,” SC2040, WHS. The Housing Authority had proposed raising the maximum income from $2,045 to $2,400 for a family with up to two minor dependents. In veterans’ projects the ceiling was $4,200. “Hillside Rent Plea Defended: Housing Authority Hits Back at McCarthy in Row over Incomes,” MJ, 18 January 1949; and Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 109–11. On McCarthy and Perrin, see also Santacroce, “Rediscovering the Role of the State,” 105–13. Senator Joe McCarthy to Richard Perrin, 10 January 1949.

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poor residents from the “middle and lower-middle income group . . . the average working men and women who are the heart of America.” He postulated that this “vast group of wage earners neither wants nor needs government-owned and operated and taxpayer-supported housing (‘public housing’).” These were the “salesmen, the clerks, the storekeepers, the office workers, the teachers, the machinists, the carpenters.” In place of a politics in which workers rallied to support public housing, McCarthy aimed to define a classless group of conservative, cost-conscious, middle Americans who would be served by indirect subsidies, including loan guarantees to bring down the cost of mortgages in the private market.76 Perrin and the JACBH responded to McCarthy’s charges, insisting that his plan would confine the Housing Authority to the business of “building poor houses.”77 In a letter to McCarthy, Perrin argued against segregating “into one economic ghetto a single stratum of society.” He worried about turning public housing into a stigmatized institution: “We disagree that public housing must be regarded as an institution for the infirm and the incompetent.”78 Supporters imagined a more prominent place for public housing in urban society and hoped that a larger portion of the community could be served by public housing. By opening up to a wider spectrum of residents, public housing could better accommodate the economic uncertainties that characterized life for much of the urban working class. The loss of a job, a long strike, a medical emergency, or some other misfortune could easily turn a comfortable working-class existence into one of hardship. While a segment of the postwar white working-class would indeed go on to achieve unprecedented levels of prosperity and stability in the following decades, many 1940s-era Milwaukeeans backed public housing and other policies with a keen understanding of the economic pressures and

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Ibid. See also: Baxandall and Ewen, Picture Windows, 87–116; David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 176–240; Mel Scott, American City Planning since 1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 415–29; and Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects, 237–41. Echoing McCarthy’s argument, Nineteenth Ward alderman Irving G. Rahn declared that public housing should amount to little more than second-class, emergency housing. Challenging Housing Authority efforts to raise the standards for the Sixth Ward housing project, Rahn groused, “I don’t see why we should build a big development like this . . . for people who are used to living substandard, in one room or something.” Rahn’s comments appear to have referred especially to low-income African-American residents in the Sixth Ward. “Act to Obtain Housing Aids: Push Slum Clearance,” MJ, 21 September 1949; and Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 144–45. Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 109. “Hillside Rent Plea Defended.” The Housing Authority unanimously approved Perrin’s letter to McCarthy.

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turmoil that workers had long faced and continued to endure.79 In the midst of this tussle with McCarthy over early postwar projects, Perrin also anticipated an institutional dilemma that public housing advocates would face in later years. By following McCarthy’s course and narrowing severely the pool of potential residents – or constituents – public housing would become ever more marginalized socially and politically.80 Perrin produced instead a plan for a sharp increase in Milwaukee’s public housing program which especially would have displeased McCarthy and a range of public housing opponents. He proposed a program that would reach a total of 7,260 units over the next five years. Designed to meet the rehousing needs for all affected by the city’s proposed slum clearance program, an expanded public housing program with higher income ceilings could provide public housing for not only the lowest-income families but also those who worked for modest wages.81 Another approach conservatives took to narrow the scope of postwar public housing programs built on a line of argument elaborated during the war. While acknowledging a short-term role for the public sector in the housing market, they argued that public housing should be constricted to temporary or emergency housing – especially for veterans. American Legion leader Clem Kalvelage, who chaired the Red Cross housing committee and would remain a vocal advocate for veterans’ housing, sought the backing of conservatives as he called for the city to help set up temporary structures to assist veterans and their families. Trailers on public land and prefabricated housing were two of the options Kalvelage recommended. While Milwaukeeans of almost all political stripes backed temporary housing as a means to tackle the shortage in the immediate future, conservatives and the real estate industry hoped this move might forestall a permanent place for public housing.82 But just a few years later, 79

80

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On stability and instability in working-class life, see: Stephen Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin”: The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900–1950 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992); and George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). See especially Catherine Bauer, “The Dreary Deadlock of Public Housing,” Architectural Forum 106:5 (May 1957): 140–42, 219, 221. Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee to the Common Council, 17 January 1949, folio “Comprehensive Report to C.C., 1–17–49,” Perrin Papers, MPL; Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 111–13; and “Urge 90 Million Housing Plan to Give City 7,260 Rental Units,” MJ, 16 January 1949. More immediately, the Housing Authority was looking for a way to rehouse fourteen families displaced by the Hillside project who earned slightly above the income ceiling for the project. “Many Hunt Homes”; “Housing Aids Stand Pat,” MS, 11 December 1945; and “Buy 1,000 Units, Is Plea in Shelter Crisis Here,” MJ, 11 December 1945. By the end of 1945, Kalvelage estimated that Milwaukee was short eighteen thousand homes. He criticized the Common Council and the city for bringing in only one hundred demountable houses; the

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the debate shifted as calls for temporary housing were pushed aside by blueprints for permanent housing. The point of contention, as before, centered on the public versus private sector’s role in providing housing. Shortly after Frank Zeidler took office as mayor in 1948, Lewis Stocking of the Affiliated Taxpayers Committee warned that public housing loomed as a major political issue for Milwaukee.83 Conservative strategies and attacks sought to undermine public housing policy and weaken the coalition of labor and liberal groups for whom the housing crisis loomed large. Cold War anticommunism linked to the antipublic housing agenda became a powerful tool to reshape the policy debate and recast the city’s political culture. But charges of Red influence became more than a blunt weapon deployed by conservatives, as liberals sought to define an anticommunist politics of their own and distance themselves from political radicals. Suspicions of Communist infiltration strained the pro-public housing coalition in Milwaukee even before the 1946–1947 strike at Allis-Chalmers brought the postwar Red Scare to the city’s front pages. Genevieve Hambley of the JACBH, for instance, castigated the Communists for attending an April 1946 housing meeting with the mayor: “Twice we have told the Communists that we did not want them on our committee because we could not then keep our organization strong.” She continued, “There must have been a leak in our own organization about this meeting and I intend to find out who talked.”84 Sigmund Eisenscher, the Communist activist in attendance, responded in a letter to the editor: “Mrs. Hambley’s red baiting will endear her to the reactionary real estate operators and tax conscious corporations who are the most bitter enemies of a better housing program.” He warned that Hambley’s “gratuitous venture into the witch hunting field will certainly not help to gain better housing.”85 A short time later, Hambley found herself on the receiving end of such charges and began legal action against builder Frank Kirkpatrick, who she claimed had slandered her as a Communist or fellow traveler. As evident on a range of postwar domestic issues, including

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city should borrow money to bring in five to ten times as many units and give priority to the housing needs of veterans. Minutes, Joint Meeting of Supervisors of Milwaukee County with the Aldermen, Called for the Purpose of Discussing Housing Situation, 30 April 1948, 5, folio 7, box 180, Zeidler Papers, MPL. In this same meeting, Kalvelage said the “time is past” for temporary housing; permanent housing and private builders’ ready access to building materials should be a priority. When it came to support for the city’s role in veterans’ housing, however, Zeidler counted Kalvelage among his important allies. Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 122. “Communist Attends,” MJ, 10 April 1946. Sigmund Eisenscher, “Communists and Housing” [letter to the editor], MJ, 13 April 1946. Eisenscher was a Communist Party activist and candidate for governor in 1946.

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housing, the complex politics of anticommunism often stymied expanded public action.86 Just as anticommunist politics cut across conservative and liberal lines as the Cold War intensified, racial politics played an integral role in the metropolitan area and often were at the root of varied responses to housing conflicts. The vigorous civil rights organizing carried out by some AfricanAmerican organizations and left-wing industrial unionists during this time came under close scrutiny as charges of political radicalism and communist ties were leveled against activists. White and black racial liberals, increasingly explicit about their anticommunist politics, became more visible publicly. While generally rejecting the rapid changes in social relations or the reallocation of resources that activists on the left advocated, racial liberals imagined an enhanced public role, even if often modest, to weaken racial barriers, provide individual opportunity for mobility, and stem both radical and racist impulses in a pluralist postwar society. These changes, they argued, would lead to a fairer society and help to secure a more stable society. Many of the material and cultural bases of white privilege, however, would remain untouched. Some black and white conservatives also spoke out against the effects of racial segregation and discrimination in the city. More often, however, white conservatives either ignored racial issues or used a mixture of economic (for example, property values), moral (for example, crime and delinquency), and explicitly racist arguments to minimize the state’s role and reinforce the walls of racial segregation in the city. While each of these political currents shaped the postwar city, racial liberalism would prove especially potent as it fused with the language of growth politics.87 A 1949 confrontation in a veterans’ trailer park between white residents and a newly arrived African-American family focused Milwaukeeans’ attention on the issues of residence, race, and radicalism. The conflict especially gave anticommunist racial liberals an opening to advance a 86

87

Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 76–77. See also: Parson, Making a Better World; Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998); and Landon R.Y Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). On racial politics, in addition to earlier citations, see: Wendell Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and James Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). On race and conservatism, see especially: Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). On white privilege, see: Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold Story of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005); and David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

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moderate agenda of tolerance. In the tight wartime and postwar housing markets, trailer parks served as temporary housing for thousands of production workers and for veterans throughout the United States. A record sixty thousand trailers were manufactured in 1947. Milwaukee County, in order to ease the postwar housing crunch for veterans, set aside forty-five acres on the western edge of the city. The crowded Greenfield Trailer Camp, home to about 1800 people living in 500 trailers (designed originally for 358 trailers), was the largest in the metropolitan area.88 Albert J. Sanders, an African-American navy veteran and shipyard worker, and his wife Rogelia Sanders moved from Florida to Milwaukee. With their two young children and Albert’s mother, they searched for a place to live so that Albert could enroll as a student at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. His enrollment was contingent upon his finding housing. Squeezed by the postwar housing shortage, the Sanders family purchased a trailer and secured a place in the Greenfield Trailer Camp with the help of the veterans’ housing coordinator. As owners of a trailer in the Greenfield camp, a status shared by only 15 percent of the residents, the Sanders family challenged both the barrier of residential segregation and the expectation – stemming from the larger patterns of residence and tenure in the city – that cast African Americans as renters and whites as homeowners.89 88

89

The camp was run by the Park Commission as a part of Milwaukee County’s veterans’ housing program. A 1949 report documented overcrowding in this and other camps. Milwaukee County Survey of Social Welfare and Health Services, “Findings and Recommendations on Housing: Residential – Trailers Camps – Lake and Stream Sites,” May 1949, pp. 6–11, folio “Survey: Reports 34–36 – 1949, July,” box 54, United Community Services of Greater Milwaukee, Milwaukee ARC. Due to the urgency of the housing shortage, local officials were lenient in enforcing health and sanitary regulations. The camp had just one toilet/urinal for every twenty-one residents and one shower for every thirty-two people. Overcrowding contributed to a number of health problems, including an outbreak of whooping cough. “Backs Town Health Care,” MJ, 8 July 1949. On the challenges of life in another Milwaukee-area trailer park, see “Trailers Sleep Night Workers” [letter], MJ, 9 June 1947. See also Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks, 195–216. Albert, age twenty-nine, had been born in the Philippines and come to the United States at the end of the 1930s. Rogelia, age twenty-seven, was from Tampa, Florida. William V. Kelley, Executive Secretary of the Milwaukee Urban League to Lester Granger, National Urban League, 12 July 1949, folio “Milwaukee Incident, 1949,” box 33, series 1, part 1, National Urban League Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. [hereafter National Urban League Papers, LOC]; “Ousted Negro Family Decides to Return to Trailer Campsite,” MJ, 8 July 1949; “We’ll Sweat It Out Again Today at 85: Showers Will Only Add to Humidity,” MS, 7 July 1949; Milwaukee Mayor’s Commission on Human Rights, The Greenfield Trailer Camp Incident (1949); William F. Thompson, The History of Wisconsin, Volume VI: Continuity and Change, 1940–1965 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1988), 334–36; Smith, “In

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A few months before the Sanders’s referral to the Greenfield camp, Milwaukee county officials had been questioned by local civil rights and community groups attempting to open more places for black veterans in the area’s trailer camps. As of April 1949, only twenty-three trailers and trailer sites had been designated for black families, all in the Sixth Ward. The remaining 1,631 sites were set aside for white veterans. The county coordinator defended this policy of racial segregation, saying that “he would not take the responsibility for a riot if a Colored family were sent into another area.”90 Placement of the Sanders family in the previously allwhite Greenfield camp may have been a response to civil rights advocates’ lobbying. On a hot July day the Sanders family pulled in with “one of the nicest looking trailers in the camp.”91 A small group of white residents, bolstered by the county’s earlier segregation policies, soon began circulating a petition that read “The Negro should not be permitted in a white camp.” White children taunted the Sanders children as they played outside their trailer, telling them to leave and teasing “We don’t want to play with you.”92 By that evening, about seventy people had signed the petition and between 125 to 200 white residents met to demand the Sanders’s ouster. Gathering around the trailer, some in the mob threatened the family: “If you stay here, we’ll break up your car. We’ll hurt you and your wife and your children, too.”93 Another group of white residents, however, defended the Sanders family. Rogelia Sanders remarked that during this difficult time, two women in the camp had been “awfully nice,” telling her “We want you to stay.” Others argued directly with the camp’s segregationists and would soon begin a counter-petition drive.94 Less than twelve hours after driving into the camp, despite the sheriff’s promises of protection, the Sanders family left out of fear for their safety. They slept in their car overnight at the nearby Greenfield Park.

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God We Trust,” 291–94; and Steven M. Avella, In the Richness of the Earth: A History of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, 1843–1958 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2002), 634–35. On homeownership and whiteness, see Roediger, Working toward Whiteness, 157–77. Summary of Report Submitted to Executive Committee,” 19 April 1949, folio 7B “League of Women Voters of Milwaukee, 1949–1951,” box 313, League of Women Voters of Milwaukee Records, Miscellaneous Collection 211, MPL. Kelley to Granger, 12 July 1949, National Urban League Papers, LOC; “We’ll Sweat It Out Again Today at 85.” “Ousted Negro Family Decides to Return to Trailer Campsite.” Ibid.; Thompson, History of Wisconsin, 334; and Kelley to Granger, 12 July 1949, National Urban League Papers, LOC. “Ousted Negro Family Decides to Return to Trailer Campsite.” See also caption with photographs: “A Negro and His Family,” MJ, 8 July 1949, 1L; and “Scenes at Troubled Greenfield Camp,” MJ, 9 July 1949.

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Early the next morning, African-American and white leaders from local civic, civil rights, and religious organizations responded. William Kelley, executive secretary of the Milwaukee Urban League and president of the Milwaukee Interracial Federation, called the meeting. Those attending represented the CIO, the AFL, the Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations, the Governor’s Commission on Human Rights, the Catholic Church, the Milwaukee Ministerial Alliance, B’nai B’rith, the NAACP, the American Legion, and the Milwaukee School of Engineering. Headed by black and white professionals (especially lawyers), long-time civil rights advocates, religious leaders committed to racial justice and human rights, and anticommunist liberals and labor leaders (but excluding radicals who, just a few years earlier, shaped labor’s political and community agenda), this group helped to steer the city’s liberal antidiscrimination agenda.95 Meeting in the offices of the Catholic Herald-Citizen, the group decided on two courses of action. First, they would urge the district attorney and the sheriff to take legal action against both the petition signers and the group that had organized the anti-Sanders mob. Second, they would try to convince the Sanders family to move back into the trailer camp and then would sponsor meetings at the camp to educate and persuade residents. Accompanied by squad cars, motorcycle police, and members of the Mayor’s Commission on Human Rights, the Sanders family returned to the Greenfield camp on Friday afternoon.96 Six sheriff’s deputies guarded the trailer after the family had moved in again. At a tense outdoor meeting

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Thompson, History of Wisconsin, 335; “Negro Family ‘Back Home’ at Tense Greenfield,” MS, 9 July 1949; and “Ousted Negro Family Decides to Return to Trailer Campsite.” Overlapping affiliations of those attending this meeting indicated a tightly woven coalition of groups active in civil rights. Among the participants were Attorney Bruno Bitker (Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations and Governor’s Commission on Human Rights), Father Franklyn J. Kennedy (Mayor’s and Governor’s Commissions), and Father Claude H. Heithaus, SJ (Mayor’s Commission and Marquette University professor). Black professionals in attendance included the attorneys Theodore Coggs (NAACP), George Brawley (NAACP), and James Dorsey (Governor’s Commission on Human Rights and long-time NAACP activist). Bitker was active also in the liberal anticommunist Democratic Organizing Committee, intent on reforming Wisconsin’s party along national lines. Bruno Bitker, Interview by Catherine Coberly, 5 March 1983, Wisconsin Democratic Party Oral History Project, tape 10, WHS; and Thompson, History of Wisconsin, 566–72. Heithaus and Kennedy were deeply involved in antidiscrimination work and Kennedy had charted an anticommunist, Catholic labor position as editor of the Catholic-Herald-Citizen. Smith, “In God We Trust,” 275–324; Avella, In the Richness of the Earth, 632–35. On Catholic liberals’ interracialism versus white parishioners’ defense of neighborhood boundaries, see John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). “Negro Family Back in Trailer, Escorted Back by Sheriff’s Deputies,” MJ (Final), 8 July 1949.

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set up by the Interracial Federation that same evening, 400 residents listened to arguments for and against racial integration while sixty-five deputies stood guard. The crowd was divided and noisy. The largely working-class crowd greeted speakers with both applause and jeers. Those who denounced the ill-treatment the Sanders family had endured included members of the mayor’s and governor’s human rights commissions, Catholic and Protestant clergy, veterans’ groups, the CIO Council’s Glenn Clarke, and the AFL’s Otto Jirikowicz. They labeled the camp residents’ racist acts as unAmerican, a betrayal of Christianity, and illegal.97 Four camp residents led the effort to oust the Sanders family and declare a segregated camp. Sensing that many attending this first meeting opposed residential integration, they called for a vote. Some women in the crowd, referring to the Sanders family, yelled “Throw ‘em out.” One speaker, much like the anti-public housing agitators who disparaged black migration to the city, played on prejudices that even more black families might move into the camp. If one black family was allowed to stay, he contended, “Next week we’ll have two Negro families and the week after four.” Another speaker asked this crowd of veterans why postwar housing should be integrated if the armed services had been segregated.98 The Urban League’s Kelley judged that the segregation forces had stronger support at this first meeting, in part because those who backed the Sanders family or remained neutral had stayed away. He reported that the “rabble” reacted to the segregationists’ talks with “rebel yells” and applause, using “the strongest language against the moving in of the Sanders family.”99 In the next days the momentum of the controversy shifted, as both the popular appeals and the legal strategies weakened the segregationists’ support. Camp residents organizing around the ideals of racial tolerance and integration helped to turn events. A group of veterans in the camp had begun a counter-petition on Friday, encouraging the Sanders family to

97

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“Negroes Stay at Camp after Unruly Meeting,” MJ 9 July 1949; “Negro Family ‘Back Home’ at Tense Greenfield”; Thompson, History of Wisconsin, 335. Speakers against racial prejudice included Father Heithaus, Father Kennedy, the Rev. Norman Ream of the Milwaukee Ministerial Association, Christ T. Seraphim of the American Legion, Bitker of the Mayor’s Commission on Human Rights, Clarke of the CIO Council, and Jirikowicz of the AFL. “Negroes Stay at Camp after Unruly Meeting”; “Scenes at Troubled Greenfield Camp”; Thompson, History of Wisconsin, 335. Kelley to Granger, 12 July 1949. Kelley noted that the pro-integration organizers, “following an idealistic democratic pattern,” may have given segregationist “agitators” too much leeway by allowing use of the loudspeakers. On white Southern migrants, see James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

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stay.100 On Saturday, representatives of the mayor’s commission met with leaders of the two opposing residents’ groups, each declaring they represented the majority of camp residents. The racial integration forces were gaining ground, having attained support in the camp as well as backing from the Interracial Federation, the mayor’s and governor’s commissions, labor unions, church officials, and others. Some camp residents were prepared to testify against the leaders of the mob that had threatened the Sanders family. At a quieter Saturday night camp gathering that drew about one hundred people, anti-Sanders speakers found themselves the target of hecklers.101 Advocates for integration also pursued their legal strategy. The district attorney hesitated initially to act against the mob leaders, but a telegram from civil rights leaders reprinted in the press urging arrest warrants for disorderly conduct appears to have tipped the balance.102 Fearing legal action or arrest, eight leaders of the segregation campaign reversed course. Meeting with the district attorney, the sheriff, members of the mayor’s and governor’s human rights commissions, and Albert Sanders, the camp rebels apologized, stressing their ignorance of the law and now professing the family’s right to live in the camp. An early leader of the faction, conceded: “After I knew of the laws, I decided Sanders had the right and I realized we did an injustice.” Another anti-Sanders activist explained that her initial reaction stemmed from inexperience and ignorance: “She and many of the other women in the camp had never lived with Negroes before and were afraid.” Father Claude H. Heithaus instructed the group to “do your best to build up good neighborliness for the Sanders family.” The group pledged to help the family. The Sanders’ reentry to the camp, however, was not easy. Rogelia Sanders was hospitalized for “nervousness and tension” as a result of the protests.103

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“Ousted Negro Family Decides to Return to Trailer Campsite”; and “Greenfield Vets Quarrel: Who’s Boss Here?,” MJ, 10 July 1949. Civic and camp leaders generally defended the Sanders family by using the language of racial tolerance and justice, but one camp leader suggested setting up a system of segregation within the camp. “Groups Argue in Camp Row,” MJ, 10 July 1949; Kelley to Granger, 12 July 1949, National Urban League Papers, LOC. A battle between veterans groups in the camp also might have contributed to this conflict. Leaders of the group supporting the Sanders family, the Veteran’s Organization of Greenfield Trailer Camp, had been elected four months earlier. The anti-Sanders group, the Veterans Emergency Committee, sought new elections. “Greenfield Vets Quarrel.” Kelley to Granger, 12 July 1949, National Urban League Papers, LOC. “Apologies End Outburst of Racial Row in Camp,” MJ, 12 July 1949; “Trailerites’ Apologies End Strife at Camp,” MS, 13 July 1949; “Wife Stricken in Vet Trailer Park Tension,” MS 12 July 1949. The district attorney warned the camp rebels: “You are here by the grace of an invitation rather than the patrol wagon.”

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The camp residents’ apologies, while possibly genuine, also played into upper- and middle-class prejudices about workers. Self-deprecating remarks about their own ignorance and parochialism appealed to these class biases, as the leaders of the anti-Sanders faction tried to make amends before a gathering that included lawyers and professionals who headed civil rights and civic organizations. Insufficient knowledge of the law and a lack of experience in interracial living, the camp rebels confessed, had prevented them from understanding the Sanders’ situation or rights. Such apologies, however, failed to acknowledge the deeply held racism voiced just a few days earlier. Likewise, the ease with which these apologies were accepted, in order to resolve this specific conflict, overlooked the deeply entrenched racism that framed housing practices and controversies in this and other cities. The requests for forgiveness also belied the camp residents’ likely recognition of crumbling official support for their obstinacy in efforts to enforce racial segregation and exclusion. While earlier county policies had encouraged trailer-park segregation, these camp residents now faced not only neighbors who opposed their agenda but law enforcement officials and civic leaders who demanded they back down. During this period, these veterans also might have taken note of the changes at the national level, including Truman’s order the previous year to desegregate the armed forces. While they certainly could have fallen back on (and likely did in other settings) numerous examples from other cities where white neighborhoods fortified the front lines of racial segregation through protective associations and violence, frequently with tacit official approval, the Sanders’s opponents now found themselves squeezed locally between a moral argument, public disapproval, and a legal threat. Retreating instead behind this caricature of working-class narrowmindedness, the residents’ contrition helped to get them off the hook.104 One leader, a recent migrant from New Jersey, described his change of heart during the incident: “A lot of gripes [about sanitary conditions in the camp] came to a head. I was angry. I didn’t realize that the Sanders had a right to be there. . . . After I got to thinking it over, I realized how wrong I was. I feel they are due an apology.”105 As this resident suggested, the 104

105

On Cold War-era armed forces desegregation, see Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 83–88. On white resistance, see: Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 146–71; Stephen Grant Meyer, As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000); and Thomas J. Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940–1964,” Journal of American History 82:2 (September 1995): 551–78. “Apologies End Outburst of Racial Row in Camp.”

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rebels’ transgressions, while reprehensible, could be wiped away through understanding, reason, and education. Speaking about the other camp residents who were changing their minds about the presence of the Sanders family, he continued: “I’ve told them that the Negroes have been free now for about 90 years, and it’s time we made them feel free.”106 In agreement, a member of the Governor’s Commission on Human Rights argued that the residents’ reversal and apology had “wiped out a short-lived blot on the good name of the state of Wisconsin.”107 Immediately after this resolution, the mayor’s commission produced a pamphlet on The Milwaukee Greenfield Incident. Designed to stress the decisiveness of the commission and allied groups in this case, the pamphlet was distributed to civic and “intergroup” agencies throughout Milwaukee and the country.108 Cold War politics helped shape the liberal coalition that came together in this incident, but a more explicit expression of anticommunism highlighted the growing anxieties and political constraints of these years. Along with their apology, the repentant segregationists sought to insulate their earlier behavior against charges of political extremism. One veteran stressed that he was neither a Communist nor a “Ku Kluxer.” He continued, “I’m just a plain American citizen who happened to let a few things go to my head that weren’t so.”109 Mapping the outer boundaries of the emerging postwar political culture and pegging himself as neither a leftwing nor a right-wing radical, this veteran portrayed himself as an average American who could be redeemed. The limits of acceptable political discussion had been marked during the Interracial Federation’s first public meeting in the trailer park, soon after the controversy began. At the gathering, integrationists, segregationists, camp residents, and outsiders stepped up to use the microphone. All had a voice in the debate. But Josephine Norstrand, identified as a Communist Party activist, never made it to the microphone. She was executive secretary of the Wisconsin Civil Rights Congress, a Popular Front organization concerned with the issues under discussion. Norstrand was stopped by the attorney Bruno Bitker, a member of the mayor’s human rights

106 107 108

109

Ibid. Ibid.; quoted also in Thompson, History of Wisconsin, 336. On the pamphlet and the commission, see General Meeting Minutes, 13 July 1949, Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations and Executive Committee Minutes, 16 July 1949, 23 August 1949, Mayor’s Commission on Human Rights, LRB. The group’s name changed at this time from the Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations to the Commission of Human Rights. In negotiations to resolve this incident, commission members also promised to improve living conditions in the camp. “Apologies End Outburst of Racial Row in Camp.”

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commission, and the sheriff’s deputies. She later was removed from the camp. In this 1949 civil rights dispute, civil liberties were extended to segregationists who had, in the opinion of some, nearly started a race riot. Such liberties were not extended, however, to a person tagged as a Communist.110 During the following week, the repentant segregationists made Norstrand and Communists into the scapegoats. They heaped blame for the Greenfield disturbance on the Communists, without any apparent objection from the district attorney, civil rights liberals, or the newspapers. Some even charged that party loyalists had stirred up the trouble at Greenfield. A leader of the campaign to keep the Sanders out of the trailer park claimed that Norstrand’s presence had intensified the crowd’s anger. Acknowledging now that the Sanders family had a right to live in the county trailer camp, he labeled Norstrand as “a woman who had no right to be there.” Regardless of Norstrand’s effectiveness or ineffectiveness as an activist, the act of labeling her as a Communist agitator unified those who earlier had been antagonists in the camp.111 These veterans understood clearly the power of anticommunist rhetoric and sentiments. In Milwaukee and elsewhere, Communists and suspected Communists had become visible targets of such Cold War charges. During the postwar strike at Allis-Chalmers, fears of radicalism and the politics of anticommunism had intensified; this served company officials’ and conservative allies’ objective to break the militant Local 248. Leading postwar liberals in Milwaukee, including public housing advocates in the JACBH and civil rights activists, followed the lead of national liberals who denounced suspected Communists. The camp residents’ use of anticommunist charges indicates their strategic awareness of how both liberals and conservatives had elevated the position of anticommunism in postwar political culture. At the same time, their response suggests how firmly

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“Negroes Stay at Camp After Unruly Meeting.” Norstrand was involved in other Popular Front organizations, including the Wisconsin Conference for Social Legislation (earlier called the Wisconsin State Conference of Social Legislation). On Norstrand, see: Thomas W. Gavett, Development of the Labor Movement in Milwaukee (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 178; and United States Congress, House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, Investigation of Communist Activities in the Milwaukee, Wis., Area: Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, 84th Cong., 1st sess., 1955. A few months after the Greenfield episode, the Wisconsin Civil Rights Congress protested the eviction of an African-American man and white woman who were married and members of the Young Progressives of America. “Pickets Come after Eviction,” MJ, 16 October 1949. “Apologies End Outburst of Racial Row in Camp”; Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations, General Meeting Minutes, 13 July 1949, LRB. Norstrand disputed these claims and the newspaper reports.

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anticommunism was now embedded in the “common sense” of public discourse. The segregationists’ defeat at Greenfield was indeed an important milestone in local antidiscrimination efforts. But this incident also outlines the restricted political space in which postwar racial liberalism was constructed and in which growth politics developed.112 The Milwaukee Journal bolstered the racial liberals’ position in its coverage and commentary about the Greenfield incident. An editorial titled “Right This Wrong to Negro Vet” decried the intolerance shown the Sanders family. The editors argued that the actions of a few park residents had “degraded” all of Milwaukee and threatened the city with being “labeled a Jim Crow town.”113 Emphasizing Albert Sanders’s ambition to further his education, while also noting his status as a trailer owner, the newspaper insisted that the family be welcomed back. If not, the protesters should be evicted. A few days later, the Journal’s editors celebrated the controversy’s outcome, praising local civic leaders for their quick response. Unlike similar incidents in other cities, the Milwaukee conflict had not escalated into a race riot. “From the first instant that the crisis arose,” the Journal remarked, “there were these two forces to combat the prejudice – firmness and democratic reasoning.”114 According to the newspaper’s account, camp residents’ reaction against the Sanders had resulted from distress over poor living conditions; they expressed their frustration through racism. Reasoned argument and a promise of improved living conditions could provide an antidote to such displays of white working-class prejudice. The Journal’s front-page editorial cartoon marking the conclusion of the conflict depicted a bald eagle atop the Greenfield Trailer Camp sign (see Figure 6.7). The eagle, inscribed with the phrase “American idea of fair play, tolerance, common sense,” towered over a scrawny crow that bore the label “Jim Crowism.” The 112

113 114

On the convergence of liberalism, civil rights, and the Cold War, see: Eric Arnesen, “Civil Rights and the Cold War at Home: Postwar Activism, Anticommunism, and the Decline of the Left,” American Communist History 11:1 (April 2012): 5–44; Manfred Berg, “Black Civil Rights and Liberal Anticommunism: The NAACP and the Early Cold War,” Journal of American History 94:1 (June 2007): 75–96; Shana Bernstein, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth Century Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 100–84; Jennifer A. Delton, Making Minnesota Liberal: Civil Rights and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights; and Doug Rossinow, Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 172–232. See also Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). “Right This Wrong to Negro Vet,” MJ, 8 July 1949. “A Miracle Has Occurred,” MJ, 13 July 1949. The editors also complimented Albert and Rogelia Sanders for maintaining calm in the face of threats.

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fi g u r e 6 . 7 The Milwaukee Journal celebrates the resolution of the Greenfield trailer camp incident, after racial segregationists backed down on their demand that the Sanders family not be allowed to live in the veterans trailer camp. R. A. Lewis (cartoonist), Milwaukee Journal, 14 July 1949, M1. ©2012 Journal Sentinel, Inc., reproduced with permission.

caption – “the eagle still rules the roost” – suggested that the threat of racial prejudice had been vanquished.115 While much had been gained by civil and human rights activists’ swift action within and outside the camp, the optimism following this episode understated or even elided the racial discrimination and deep-seated racism woven into the fabric of residential patterns and power relations in the postwar city. Future conflicts over housing, in particular, demonstrated that a local consensus for racial egalitarianism or even against “Jim Crowism” eluded the city. But a blend of limited racial tolerance, urban boosterism, and growth politics offered up by the Journal and the key players in the Greenfield incident 115

“The Eagle Still Rules the Roost” [editorial cartoon], MJ, 14 July 1949.

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helped to define the contours of an influential postwar political culture at this late-1940s juncture. Two events following closely on the heels of Greenfield illustrate the political and ideological turbulence at the close of the 1940s, evident especially in public controversies over housing and race. Both centered on the Sixth Ward Hillside project. The first involved public housing residents taking direct action; the second entailed a reporter’s depiction of public housing. Just weeks after the trailer park controversy, at the close of the initial summer the Hillside project was occupied, a group of fifty tenants marched downtown to protest the project manager’s dismissal. The Housing Authority had accused Julius Loving, the project’s AfricanAmerican manager, of “slovenly” record-keeping and having liquor in his apartment. Carrying placards that demanded a “Voice in Our Project,” the group made its way through the Sixth Ward, heading for City Hall. Moving through the city’s streets, the marchers pressed public and city officials to hear their complaints.116 The group of protesters – largely female, racially mixed, and black-led – put city officials on notice that the Hillside Terrace manager should not have been removed without their consent. With the mayor and other Common Council members out of town that day, the post of acting mayor fell to Sixth Ward Alderman Fred P. Meyers. The meeting between Meyers and the marchers grew heated. Although an advocate of public housing, Meyers’ views about public housing administration differed from protesters’ vision for their role in the life of the project. Hillside residents threatened that Meyers’s political future hinged on this issue, reproaching him with the title “ex-alderman.” Hillside tenant Leonard Brady exclaimed: “At the next election, don’t put an ‘X’ after Meyers’s name. Just cross it out.”117 For the residents involved in the protest, this was a political controversy over control of their homes; it was not simply a matter to be handled by the public housing bureaucracy or city officials. The evening before the march, 150 Hillside residents met in a project recreation room to plan their response to the dismissal. They urged city leaders and the Housing Authority to listen to “the opinions of the tenants,” stressing that “public sentiment will play a major role in 116

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“50 Hillside Backers of Ousted Manager in Parade, Debate,” MJ [final], 3 August 1949. Project manager Julius Loving was uncertain initially but soon resolved to fight his dismissal; he praised the protesters, saying he was “deeply grateful for the militant and unsolicited support I have received from the tenants and the general public.” “Loving to Fight for Post: Won’t Sign Resignation,” MJ, 4 August 1949; “Loving Agrees to Leave Post: Hearing to Be Canceled if Manager Signs Resignation,” MJ, 3 August 1949. “Hillside Head Won’t Fight,” MS, 4 August 1949; “50 Hillside Backers of Ousted Manager in Parade, Debate”; “Loving to Fight for Post.”

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determining the degree of cooperation within the project.”118 These working-class, public-housing residents’ demands paralleled those of workers who sought an active voice in workplace and community politics. They demanded a say in the day-to-day operation of their homes, refusing to cede control to administrators. Community leaders involved in this protest were experienced and active in a range of endeavors in Milwaukee’s Sixth Ward and African-American community. Each had built a dense network of political and community ties. Laurence Saunders, an African-American Hillside resident who served as acting chairman and spokesperson of the Hillside Terrace Tenants’ Committee, had been a candidate in 1948 for the Sixth Ward aldermanic seat. Saunders had been editor of the short-lived Milwaukee Globe, a newspaper that advertised itself as “Wisconsin’s Only Negro Newspaper” and had reported regularly on the progress of the Hillside project. In 1949 he became one of Milwaukee’s earliest black disc jockeys – Larry “Heat Wave” Saunders.119 Erma Clardy, another leader in the city hall protest, argued that the charges against Loving had been “trumped up.” A college graduate, Clardy had become the Urban League’s neighborhood secretary in 1947. She was responsible for the League’s block organizing and worked to build ties to grassroots organizations in the community. These responsibilities gave her a close-up view of black working-class residents’ everyday concerns and problems, a perspective which may have prompted her to continue support for the Hillside tenants 118

119

Hillside Terrace Tenants Committee to Mayor Frank Zeidler, 3 August 1949, folio “Sixth Ward – Hillside Project, 1948–1949,” Box 180, Zeidler Papers, MPL; “Loving Agrees to Leave Post.” The first meeting was called by the Hillside Tenants Council, a group initiated by the Housing Authority to provide advice on a limited range of internal issues. The group apparently sought to broaden its mission, defining now a role in governing the project. Hillside Terrace Tenants Committee to Mayor Frank Zeidler, 3 August 1949; “50 Hillside Backers of Ousted Manager in Parade, Debate”; “Loving Agrees to Leave Post”; Mary Ellen Shadd, ed., Negro Business Directory of the State of Wisconsin, 1950–1951 (1950), 53, 65; Board of Election Commissioners, Twentieth Biennial Report of the Board of Election Commissioners of the City of Milwaukee (Milwaukee, 1949), 37; Genevieve G. McBride, “The Progress of ‘Race Men’ and ‘Colored Women’ in the Black Press in Wisconsin, 1892–1985,” in The Black Press in the Middle West, 1865– 1985, ed. Henry Lewis Suggs (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996), 340. Much of the Milwaukee Globe’s coverage of the Hillside project appeared in a regular column titled “Question Kor-Nor.” Accounts of Julius Loving’s management of the new project were largely sympathetic: “Better Think Twice,” Milwaukee Globe, 4 December 1948; and “Question Kor-Nor,” Milwaukee Globe, 18 December 1948. On Saunders’s stint as a disc jockey and radio host on WEXT, see: Larry “Heat Wave” Saunders, “Will This Work?,” Milwaukee Globe, 12 February 1949; and Shadd, Negro Business Directory, 1950–1951, 52. On radio and race, see Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 51–92.

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even in the face of the Urban League leadership’s disapproval. Clardy also was active in the recently reorganized Milwaukee NAACP chapter, chairing the education committee and helping to recruit new members. During the 1948 elections, she served on the mayor’s get-out-the-vote committee.120 The Rev. William J. G. McLin also played a prominent role in the Hillside tenants’ city hall protest. An African-American minister, McLin had moved to Milwaukee in 1945 to preach at St. Matthew’s CME Church, located just a block away from the Hillside project. Founded in 1918 during the first Great Migration of southern blacks to Milwaukee, St. Matthew’s grew rapidly under McLin’s leadership and welcomed an expanding population of black workers during the 1940s. The church was active on social issues and served as a meeting place for many civic groups, including those concerned about housing. McLin’s engagement with the community reached far beyond the church pews. He was active in the NAACP, as well as the YMCA, the Interracial Federation, the Metropolitan Ministerial Association, and the Ministerial Alliance. McLin also had been a formidable contender in the 1948 Sixth Ward aldermanic race. Running on a progressive platform, he had topped the field of eight candidates in the primary. But McLin lost narrowly to incumbent Fred Meyers in the general election, a result that echoed the 1940 race between Meyers and his black opponent, James Dorsey.121 Deeply involved in the political, organizational, and cultural 120

121

“Loving to Fight for Post” and “50 Hillside Backers of Ousted Manager in Parade, Debate.” Clardy intimated that Loving’s dismissal resulted from a patronage dispute. On Clardy, see: “New Neighborhood Secretary Dynamic,” newsclipping, ca. April 1947, Milwaukee Urban League Scrapbooks, 1920–1949, Reel 3, Milwaukee Urban League microfilm, Milwaukee ARC; Minutes of the Board of Directors, 18 November 1949, Frames 463–64, Reel 1, Milwaukee Urban League microfilm, Milwaukee ARC; Minutes of the Executive Board meeting, 17 July 1947, folio 15, box 2, Milwaukee NAACP records, Milwaukee ARC; NAACP meeting minutes, 20 November 1947, folio 3, box 5, NAACP papers, Milwaukee ARC; “Vote Pluggers Meet, Adjourn,” MJ, 19 December 1947; and Press Release, 19 December 1947, Folio “1947, Be American – Vote Committee,” Bohn Papers, MPL. See also: Grover, “All Things to Black Folks,” 92–109; Laberge, “Seeking a Place to Stand,” 88–96, 112; Erica L. Metcalfe, “‘Future Political Actors’: The Milwaukee NAACP Youth Council’s Early Fight for Identity,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 95:1 (Autumn 2011): 14–25; and Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: New Press, 2009). Born in Mason, TN, McLin attended CME-affiliated Lane College in Jackson, TN, and received his M.A. from the University of Michigan in 1937. “Reverend W.J.G. McLinn [sic] Called an Irresponsible Carpetbagger by Alderman Meyers (6th),” Milwaukee Globe 26 February 1949. See also: “Rev. McLin’s Sermon Creates Consternation, ‘Message Was Misunderstood’ He Says,” Milwaukee Globe 22 January 1949; NAACP Membership Reports, 1947 and 1948, Folio 14, Box 3, NAACP Papers, Milwaukee ARC; Contact list, n.d., Folio 6, Box 2, Milwaukee NAACP, Milwaukee ARC; McLin’s

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life of the Hillside neighborhood and the wider community, Saunders, McLin, and Clardy stood just outside the inner circle of Milwaukee’s established black leadership. These three leaders played instead the crucial role of a “militant minority,” a politicized and experienced local leadership that galvanized working-class African Americans and whites in Hillside to push for greater control over their living conditions.122 The Housing Authority, as an independent agency insulated from the pressures of direct democracy, sought to deflect the residents’ grievances. The agency had been established just five years earlier, of course, after a long fight led by a coalition of left and liberal grassroots organizations,

122

1948 Statement of Qualifications and Questionnaire submitted to the Milwaukee County CIO-PAC, Folio 5, Box 11, Milwaukee CIO Council Records, Milwaukee ARC; Renters League’s correspondence and resolution submitted to the Common Council calling for the Sixth Ward Housing project, 30 October 1947, file 47–1923, Common Council Records, City Records Center; Shadd, ed. Negro Directory of the State of Wisconsin (1950), 19, 29; Smith, “In God We Trust,” 311–17; and Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 129–30. The close 1948 election resulted in part from deep divisions in the ward. Precincts 6, 8, 9, 10, and 15, all within areas of two-thirds or greater black population, gave McLin more than triple Meyers’ vote. McLin also won precincts 5 and 11. Board of Election Commissioners, Twentieth Biennial Report, 37, 82; Election Commissioners, “Sixth Ward Election Precinct Boundary Map” (1948); U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1950 United States Census of Population, Census Tract Statistics: Milwaukee Wisconsin and Adjacent Area (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1952). On the CME and the black church, see: Milton C. Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 89, 105–07; Kimberley L. Phillips, “Making a Church Home: African-American Migrants, Religion, and Working-Class Activism,” in Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience, eds. Eric Arnesen, Julie Greene, and Bruce Laurie (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 230–56; and Karl Ellis Johnson, “‘Trouble Won’t Last’: Black Church Activism in Postwar Philadelphia,” in African American Urban History since World War II, eds. Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 245–62. The term “militant minority” describes a catalytic core of leaders tied to the rank-and-file. See David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). On the city’s established black leadership, see: Dougherty, More Than One Struggle; and Grover, “All Things to Black Folks.” Housing Authority Board member Rev. Cecil Fisher, for instance, tried to insulate this controversy from public scrutiny: “Ouster to Get Public Airing,” MJ, 12 August 1949; “This Is Your Life” typescript, Juneau Fidelity Temple No. 247, 1963, Folio “Contents of White Notebook: ‘This Is Your Life Rev. Cecil A. Fisher’ 1963,” Fisher Papers, Milwaukee ARC; and Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 106, 160, 215–17. On the black elite and housing, see Preston H. Smith II, Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). On the early civil rights movement and black urban community dynamics, see: Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Clarence Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936–75 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); and Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008).

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many of which were motivated by an expansive understanding of direct democracy and public provision. The Authority, however, now stuck closely to administrative procedure. Housing Authority director Richard Perrin charged that the residents had violated rules governing the use of Hillside Terrace buildings, chiding them for their audacity and complaining that protest leaders had not obtained permission to use the recreation room for their meeting. The sharp contrast between the authority’s proceduralism and the protesters’ invocation of direct democracy helped to define this public housing controversy.123 The Housing Authority and the press labeled the protesters a ragtag, misinformed group of poor people. The Milwaukee Journal, as a central player in the reconstruction of the postwar city, reacted to the protesters with notable alarm. The Journal’s comments betrayed their surprise and dismay that low-income, public housing residents had acted collectively and publicly. The Journal characterized the Hillside tenants as a threat to civic order: the protesters “made charges against officials and conducted themselves more like unruly strikers than people who wished to learn facts.” The newspaper objected that the dissenting residents’ “attitude carried the assumption that they, without responsibility for Hillside, should have the chief voice in determining its policies.”124 For the Journal and other business and civic leaders in the postwar city, this incident reignited the threat of working-class militancy. These low-income Hillside residents insisted on a say in the day-to-day operation and policies of Hillside, echoing the demands of postwar strikers at Allis-Chalmers and elsewhere who sought to defend the greater control over the workplace they had secured during the war.125 Especially 123

124

125

“Loving Agrees to Leave Post.” On Perrin’s defense of organizational prerogatives and the authority’s insulation from popular control, see especially the draft of his talk written for an internal training session: Richard W. E. Perrin, “A Brief History and Background of Public Housing and Urban Redevelopment, particularly as related to the program in Milwaukee,” 19 February 1951, from the files of the Milwaukee Department of City Development (copy in author’s possession). The JACBH equivocated on this issue, noting the authority’s “managerial responsibility” while also recognizing tenants’ needs. Letter from the JACBH to the Housing Authority, 21 September 1949, Folio “Housing Authority Prior to September 1961,” Box 4, United Community Services of Greater Milwaukee, Milwaukee ARC. On public housing “management rights,” see also John F. Baranski, “Making Public Housing in San Francisco: Liberalism, Social Prejudice, and Social Activism, 1906–1976” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2004), 188–89. “The Hillside Situation” [editorial], MJ, 4 August 1949 (emphasis added). On newspapers and public housing politics, see Leonard Freedman, “Group Opposition to Public Housing” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1959), 281. On public housing tenant protest and resistance, see Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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irksome for the Journal was the way in which the tenants made their protest. Rather than engaging in quiet deliberations, the practice of politics prescribed by the ideals of postwar pluralism, the newspaper complained that the tenants behaved like “strikers” as they noisily and publicly mobilized to exercise their power. The City Hall march renewed anxieties about working-class power and democratic conduct in the city.126 The face these protesters presented might have been especially threatening to the social and political order: an interracial gathering of working-class public housing residents, with African Americans outnumbering and leading white residents. These tenants had found common ground for political action in the housing they shared. Although this episode alone did not constitute a fully articulated political agenda, it was the kind of organizing and politics that the most vociferous critics had feared would emerge from public housing when they referred to it as “political housing.” The tenants’ expression of rights and collective entitlement, demonstrated in words and action, unsettled the Journal’s editors and others who imagined a liberal, pluralist city built on a foundation of growth and productivity.127 In contrast to the confrontational politics of the City Hall march, the Journal and other civic leaders had begun to articulate a strain of midcentury racial liberalism that acknowledged the city’s growing African-American population as integral to the life of the city while also tempering demands for racial equality and justice. To explore the racial dynamics within Hillside, Journal reporter Ray McBride visited the new project’s tenants. His portrait of daily life in the project pictured black and white children playing together and parents living side-by-side, with only a few tensions marring the harmony.128 In this piece, the Journal again contributed to refashioning the city’s political culture through its telling and interpretation of local stories. Appearing in the wake of the Hillside protest and less than two months after the white mob had tried to force the Sanders family out of the Greenfield trailer

126

127

128

This fits into a history of black working-class protest, militant unionism, and upper- and middle-class reaction. See Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994). Loving contested the charges before the Housing Authority, but eventually was suspended from his job and faced eviction from his apartment. “Start Hillside Officer Probe,” MJ, 23 August 1949; “Loving Details Cause of Errors,” MJ, 27 August 1949; “Action to Evict Loving Dismissed,” MJ, 31 August 1949; and “Authority to Take Action on Loving,” MJ, 6 September 1949. Ray McBride, “Hillside Housing Project Clicks: Experiment in Race Democracy,” MJ, 9 October 1949. McBride’s article stressed racial harmony, but he noted tensions – including reports of white parents preventing their children from playing with black friends.

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park, this tale of life in the project was cast in the discourse of postwar racial liberalism.129 Depicting life in the Hillside project favorably, McBride defused rumors that African-American tenants had been destroying and “ripping up” the new housing development. Just as stories circulated that black Milwaukeeans, especially recent migrants, were ruining the Sixth Ward and threatening civic comity, rumors were whispered that “Negroes are ripping up wooden things to burn for fuel, and that some of them have ‘coal in the bathtub.’”130 McBride, however, reported a housing project in good working order, noting that the level of damage at Hillside was no different than that at the city’s overwhelmingly white veterans’ housing projects. The defects he found were minor: smudges, dirt, and litter. To counter racist misconceptions about the project and its residents, McBride continued with a tongue-in-cheek allegation: “the ‘villains’ in these not too serious matters [are] undoubtedly that bane of all housing, the American boy.”131 The article defended black tenants against vicious rumors and slander that pinned charges of irresponsible, “backward” behavior on low-income African Americans; McBride turned instead to a seemingly noncontroversial explanation that “boys will be boys.” This rhetorical move underscores one important strategy adopted by postwar racial liberals. Committed to the project of “race democracy,” McBride and others attacked prejudices rooted in notions of racial difference by reinforcing widely held beliefs about gender difference. McBride’s article offered snapshots of families living in a racially mixed Hillside Terrace building, in which three black and three white families occupied the three-bedroom apartments. One African-American family, made up of a mother and her three sons (the father was in a hospital in Alabama), paid $35 rent for a top-floor apartment. They received support from the county and the St. Vincent DePaul Society. The apartment was clean except for a few marks on the walls: the normal wear and tear from 129

130 131

McBride’s October 1949 article may have been a response to the August protest and the Loving controversy, providing a more positive picture of Hillside. Editors emphasized the thrust of McBride’s piece in a column the following day: “Prejudice Is a Vagrant,” MJ, 10 October 1949. This series also paralleled a national discourse about housing and interracialism. Morton Deutsch and Mary Evans Collins, Interracial Housing: A Psychological Evaluation of a Social Experiment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1951); Jahoda and West, “Race Relations in Public Housing”; and Daniel M. Wilner, Rosabelle Price Walkley, and Stuart W. Cook, “Residential Proximity and Intergroup Relations in Public Housing Projects,” Journal of Social Issues 8:1 (1952): 45–69. See also: Bernstein, Bridges of Reform; and Walter A. Jackson, Gunner Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). McBride, “Hillside Housing Project Clicks.” Ibid. McBride argued that completion of the playground would resolve this issue.

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living with boys. Below them lived a white family, also in a well-kept apartment. The divorced mother of three paid $25 rent out of support payments she received from her ex-husband. Described as “intolerant of intolerance,” her boys played with African-American boys and invited them up to their home. Another tenant (unidentified racially) cared for her nine-year-old granddaughter, paying $45 rent for an apartment that met the standards of “the most fastidious housewife.” She supported the family on a small income from cleaning and a monthly payment from her son in the army.132 McBride used these cases to educate readers that public housing apartments could be well-maintained by both white and black families. Mothers and grandmothers raised children responsibly, kids did their housework, and families made do with limited resources. Black and white families lived in harmony as neighbors, for the most part. McBride or another reporter might have chosen different aspects of these stories to emphasize. In a racially divided city, any sign of black/white tension might have been used to justify segregation or reinforce white stereotypes of the black working-class. But McBride “the reporter,” with a track record as an urban reformer, wrote with a commitment to interracialism. McBride also might have focused readers’ attention on the financial and family challenges that the women in Hillside faced. With limited income, these mothers and grandmothers were raising children on their own after divorce or separation due to illness. These struggles bespoke the strains and stresses that many public housing residents encountered in the tumultuous postwar city. These difficulties would become especially pronounced in later years, issuing new cultural stereotypes and barriers of social isolation for public housing advocates to battle. Whether by design or not, McBride did not include portraits of men in the project. Missing from these stories were the black adult men who did indeed live in Hillside, including the black veterans who had been denied a spot in the largely segregated veterans’ projects.133 McBride closed the article as he had opened it, with women chatting as neighbors in a laundry room. “The camaraderie between whites and Negroes was nowhere better symbolized than in the utility room” where he found two women working side-by-side at washing machines. Both spoke about an absence of racial prejudice within the Hillside Terrace 132

133

Ibid. The level of racial balance described in this building (at 1512 N. 6th Pl.) appears unusual, given the larger percentage of black families in the project. On segregation and the rising proportion of female-headed households, as well as the stigma that public housing residents faced, see: John F. Bauman, Norman P. Hummon, and Edward K. Muller, “Public Housing, Isolation, and the Urban Underclass: Philadelphia’s Richard Allen Homes, 1941–1965,” Journal of Urban History 17:3 (May 1991): 264–92; and Williams, The Politics of Public Housing.

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project. But anxieties about “the slums around it” clouded this otherwise bright picture of life in Hillside. The white woman in the laundry room spoke about her fears of what her 13-year-old daughter might encounter “venturing into the squalid areas of the 6th ward.”134 These fears, both real and imagined and often expressed in terms of race and gender, would preoccupy many urban commentators and residents in coming decades as anxieties about urban crime and danger topped the agenda.135 At this moment, however, a different future for public housing and a different story for the Sixth Ward appeared possible. McBride’s subtitle, “Experiment in Race Democracy,” conveyed the significance of the enterprise and the perceived contingency of the moment. The interactions and attitudes he observed in the laundry room and in the apartments provided evidence for encouragement. But McBride also recognized that “prejudice still stalks around the 6th ward housing development, if not inside it.”136 Would racially integrated public housing serve as a catalyst for change? Or would the prejudices and the dangers of the surrounding slum and city thwart the experiment McBride and his readers witnessed within the laundry room and the Hillside project? McBride’s buoyant racial liberalism – embodied in scenes of female, domestic, interracial concord – contrasted with the words and images Journal readers had encountered at the end of the summer when the group of black and white Hillside protesters marched to City Hall. The August crowd had sparked an angry response from the newspaper. These working-class public housing residents not only crossed racial and gender barriers by mobilizing together to demand greater control over the Hillside Project, but they behaved as noisy, insistent “strikers.” Much as the militant Local 248 strikers had fought for control in the workplace, the defiant Hillside strikers claimed control over their housing. Both groups of strikers advanced a vision of direct democracy and workingclass power that clashed with the pluralist vision of democracy and social harmony featured in McBride’s Hillside project account. These represented two distinct paths for postwar liberalism. But McBride and the Hillside protesters, despite their divergent depictions of public policy and 134

135

136

McBride, “Hillside Housing Project Clicks.” The National Association of Housing Officials’ publication conveyed the spirit of interracialism with a cover photograph of two women, one white and one black, surrounded by clean laundry; the project was depicted as an island of harmony. Leonard Nadel photograph, Journal of Housing, 8:2 (February 1951). Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of US Cities (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1993); and Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). McBride, “Hillside Housing Project Clicks.”

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life, agreed on the need for a vigorous public presence in the provision of housing. Whether this housing policy would institute corrections to the private market, entail a modest extension of the New Deal, or launch an expansive public enterprise (reflecting the range of positions found within the liberal-labor housing coalition), together they stood against an array of conservatives who strove to reestablish the preeminence of market principles in housing and other sectors of the postwar city. The gulf between, on the one side, McBride and the Hillside marchers and, on the other side, Senator McCarthy and Milwaukee County Property Owners Association, remained vast. McBride’s “laundry room” portrait of racial tolerance, used to defend and advance the city’s public housing initiatives, also countered the blatant white racism that sparked the Greenfield Trailer Park episode and that lay behind a significant vein of public housing opposition. While early postwar Milwaukee did not experience the magnitude of racial upheaval found in some other northern industrial cities – including the convulsive white-onblack public housing riots in Chicago or the proliferation of white homeowner protective associations in Detroit – the politics of race stood at the center of the city’s housing politics.137 Incidents fueled by white racism and patterns of racial segregation, as well as attempts to foster racial egalitarianism and campaigns that tapped into an emergent national discourse of racial tolerance, shaped these and subsequent postwar urban contests. In the crucible of the postwar housing crisis, racial liberalism would combine with anticommunism and growth politics to elevate tolerance, individual freedom, and productivity – rather than egalitarianism or the redistribution of power – as core principles of postwar democracy. Public housing proved to be an important arena for the formation of this political culture. The conflicts and bargains over urban policy during these early postwar years, culminating in a referendum fight over public housing in 1951, produced an agenda that gave priority to growth and productivity, placed housing and social provision at the service of a vision of privatized metropolitan-area development, and accepted the abstract goals of racial tolerance and integration. At the same time, the outcomes of these controversies increasingly cast the urban landscape and citizenship in a racial mold and repudiated working-class political culture as “outmoded” and corrupt.

137

Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto; Lionel Kimble, Jr., “Combatting the City of Neighborhoods: Housing, Employment, and Civil Rights in Chicago, 1935–1955” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 2004), 22–83; and Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis.

CHAPTER

7

Public Housing, Redevelopment, and Urban Citizenship: The 1951 Referendum Fight

Vying for the attention of city residents who waited in line to pay their taxes, public housing supporters and opponents confronted one another in Milwaukee’s City Hall. On the morning of January 9, 1951, three members of the Milwaukee County Property Owners Association and an allied group seeking to stall public housing construction entered City Hall to collect signatures for a municipal referendum. Claiming permission from the mayor, they entered the City Treasurer’s office to talk with taxpayers. After the treasurer ordered them out of his office, they began collecting signatures in the lobby. A morning’s work yielded more than one hundred signatures.1 A delegation from the Milwaukee Industrial Union Council (CIO) arrived shortly before noon to protest the proposed referendum and to challenge this petition drive in City Hall. Milwaukee CIO leader Fred Erchul argued that the petitioners had provoked a confrontation, knowing “in advance that the CIO would of necessity have to defend its stand.”2 As the anti-public housing petitioners worked to persuade taxpayers, the CIO members held signs warning “For a Better Milwaukee Don’t Sign.” A property owners’ spokesman complained that the labor union members not only disrupted and “jostled” the signature collectors, but used “vile and indecent language” in the presence of female petitioners.3 Milwaukee’s City Hall, a grand structure with an open central atrium rising eight stories, reverberated with the sounds of this contest until police removed both groups, thereby

1

2

3

“City Hall Peace Upset, Rival Factions Ousted,” Milwaukee Journal [hereafter MJ], 9 January 1951. “Court May Get Petitions Row: City Hall Disturbance Discussed by Property Owners’ Group,” MJ, 10 January 1951. Erchul was secretary of the Milwaukee CIO Council. Ibid.

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“end[ing] the tramp of marching feet and exhortations by both sides.”4 Later the same week, four women from the Milwaukee County Property Owners Association were ordered to stop collecting signatures for the referendum in City Hall and eventually were ejected from the building by the custodian. Mayor Frank Zeidler, upon hearing this news, said his instructions had been misunderstood. Although he was an outspoken proponent of Milwaukee’s public housing program, Zeidler also saw City Hall as a site for political debate and action. The petitioners should be allowed as long as they did not cause a disturbance.5 But this return to order was short-lived. This clash illustrates the intense debate over housing in postwar Milwaukee and other urban areas. On that January 1951 morning, public housing opponents were close to securing a place for their referendum on the spring ballot. Soon after, a counter-referendum backing public housing and slum clearance made its way onto the ballot. The conflicts over these competing referenda – intertwined with debates over race, redevelopment, and growth – led to a further reorientation of the city’s postwar political culture and policies. At the same time, the domestic Cold War shaped postwar housing politics, as varieties of conservative and liberal anticommunism narrowed the political space in which housing proposals were developed, debated, and enacted. Proposals for an interracial public housing program serving a broad working-class population lost ground. The spring 1951 ballot also included a referendum to extend rent control, calling for state legislation to create and administer emergency controls. Pro-public housing groups lined up in favor of this measure; labor and veterans groups joined together to form the Committee for the Extension of Rent Control. This measure passed handily, but the competing public housing and redevelopment referenda garnered the most attention in the public debate leading up to the vote.6 In short, this vigorous contest that stretched from the late4

5 6

Alderman Alfred C. Hass to Walter J. Mattison, 9 January 1951, and Harry Slater, Assistant City Attorney, to Alfred C. Hass, 9 January 1951, in folio 1 “Public Housing, 1949–1951,” box 180, Carl F. and Frank P. Zeidler Papers, Office of the Mayor, City of Milwaukee Archives, Milwaukee Public Library [hereafter Zeidler Papers, MPL]; “City Hall Peace Upset”; Alderman Alfred C. Hass to City Attorney Walter J. Mattison, regarding “Circulation of Anti-Public Housing Petition in Lobby of City Hall,” folio 25 “1950–1951, Housing – Harbor – Bridges Committee,” box 15, City Attorney Correspondence, Milwaukee City Archive, MPL; Mrs. Henry Marone to Mayor Frank P. Zeidler, and response, 12 January 1951, folio 1 “Housing Referendum (1950-Jan. 1951),” box 179, Zeidler Papers, MPL; and Frank P. Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government: My Experience as Mayor of Milwaukee” (unpublished manuscript, 1962), chapter IV, 194–95. On City Hall, see Landscape Research, Built in Milwaukee: An Architectural View of the City (Milwaukee: City of Milwaukee, 1983), 99. “Mixed Orders Oust Women,” MJ, 13 January 1951. Milwaukee Common Council, Milwaukee Annual Report of Work Done in 1951 (Milwaukee: Municipal Reference Library, 1952), 26–27. On Chicago rent control, see

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1940s to the 1951 spring ballot would help to define and bring about an increasingly racialized public housing program that became subsumed by the priorities of metropolitan development and growth. Broad public approaches to the challenge of housing the city’s working-class and lowincome residents were moved to the sidelines. This consolidation of growth politics, in turn, further displaced working-class politics. The anti-public housing measure on the ballot in 1951 was the culmination of a campaign that real estate and building industry groups had begun in earnest during 1949. As federal housing and redevelopment legislation was being debated in Congress and the prospects for its passage looked more likely after Truman’s victory and Democratic congressional gains in the 1948 elections, the national and local real estate industry directed more attention to city-level politics. Although passage of the Housing Act of 1949 was a setback for private builders and real estate industry leaders, they welcomed provisions for the public financing and initiation of slum clearance and redevelopment projects under Title I. They hoped to obstruct, however, the proposed 810,000 low-income public housing units by taking aim at the politics of public housing on the local level.7 In Milwaukee, Frank Zeidler’s 1948 election as mayor, passage of a bond issue for veterans housing, and the opening of the Hillside project and three veterans’ housing projects heightened the local real estate industry’s sense of urgency. Zeidler, an outspoken proponent of public housing, actively supported the Taft-Ellender-Wagner Housing bill and the subsequent enactment of the 1949 Housing Act. He began his term as mayor by calling for 10,000 units of new public housing.8 Realtors and builders

7

8

Wendy Plotkin, “People, Politics, and Controversy: Rent Control in Chicago after World War II,” Prologue 30 (Summer 1998): 111–23. On the 1949 Housing Act, a key Fair Deal measure that was signed by Truman on July 15, see: Lee F. Johnson, “The Housing Act of 1949 – and Your Community,” in Two-Thirds of a Nation: A Housing Program, ed. Nathan Straus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 194–209; Richard O. Davies, Housing Reform during the Truman Administration (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966); and Alexander von Hoffman, “A Study in Contradictions: The Origins and Legacy of the Housing Act of 1949,” Housing Policy Debate 11:2 (2000): 299–326. On federal housing policy, see: Roger Biles, The Fate of Cities: Urban America and the Federal Government, 1945–2000 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 15–46; and Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933–1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 105–56. The real estate industry reacted also to the 1948 Supreme Court decisions against racially restrictive residential covenants in Shelley v. Kraemer and McGhee v. Sipes. Stephen Grant Meyer, As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 92–96. “Statement by Frank P. Zeidler to House Banking and Currency Committee,” 13 May 1948, folio 6, box 180, Zeidler Papers, MPL; Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 84–88; Joel Rast, “Governing the Regimeless City: The Frank Zeidler Administration in Milwaukee, 1948–1960,” Urban Affairs Review 42:1 (September 2006): 92; and John

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understood that public housing advocates had gained an important ally in City Hall. These opponents of public housing also spurned the Milwaukee’s Housing Authority’s early 1949 recommendation for an expanded program of 7,260 public housing units over the next five years.9 Conflicts over the city’s public housing plans rested in part on widely divergent perceptions or claims about the extent of the housing crisis at the close of the 1940s. Realtors and builders argued that the upswing in building during the last years of the 1940s had alleviated the shortage, while their opponents continued to cite Red Cross figures and other indicators pointing to an ongoing crisis, especially for moderate and lower-income renters. While the late-1940s increase in building activity appears to have accommodated middle- and upper-income Milwaukeeans, houses and rental units affordable to lower-income and even lower-middle-income Milwaukeeans remained in short supply.10 But this battle over postwar housing also reflected a deep divide over policy and the city’s purpose. In April of 1949, Milwaukee Board of Realtors and the Milwaukee Builders Association began an anti-public housing publicity campaign, including a thirteen-week radio series on WMAW. Responding to an outcry generated by the announcement of this campaign, Alfred Trenkamp and Roland Teske, representing the realtors and the builders respectively, said that their information would “show that the advocates of public housing urge a continued expansion of their projects, which can only result in a socialistic trend and eventually the state domination of homeownership.”11 At an April 23, 1949 meeting sponsored by the mayor, builder and former War Housing Center director Frank Kirkpatrick decried the city’s public housing program: “It is housing paid for by men in

9

10

11

M. McCarthy, Making Milwaukee Mightier: Planning and the Politics of Growth, 1910–1960 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), 129–33. Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee to the Common Council, 17 January 1949, folio “Comprehensive Report to C. C., 1–17–49,” Richard W. E. Perrin Papers, Series 079, Department of City Development, City of Milwaukee Archives [hereafter Perrin Papers], MPL; “Urge 90 Million Housing Plan to Give City 7,260 Rental Units,” MJ, 16 January 1949; and “Realty Aides Assail City’s Housing Plan,” MJ, 17 January 1949. For arguments that the housing shortage was being met, see letters to the editor: John R. Roache (Milwaukee Board of Realtors), “No More Public Housing,” MJ, 3 August 1949; and Roland J. Teske (Milwaukee Builders Association), “Mr. Teske’s Answer,” MJ, 11 October 1949. For a contrary interpretation, see Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 114–16. “Housing Program on WMAW Draws Mayor’s Ire,” WMAW Press Release, 11 April 1949, folio 1, box 180, Zeidler Papers, MPL; “F. P. Zeidler Statement,” 9 April 1949, folio 2, box 180, Zeidler Papers, MPL; Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 117–21. At least one member of the local Real Estate Board broke from this position and refused to support the anti-public housing campaign. Harrison Saudek (realtor) to Mayor Frank P. Zeidler, 11 April 1949, folio 1, box 180, Zeidler Papers, MPL.

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government collecting taxes from productive workers, but controlled by men in bureaus who are not directly responsible to taxpayers.”12 By painting public housing as an obstacle for fair taxation and local sovereignty and by vilifying liberal bureaucrats, all while trying to appeal to Milwaukee workers and taxpayers more generally, Kirkpatrick suggested the direction that the anti-public housing discourse would take. Builders and realtors began pressing for a municipal referendum on public housing at the end of a summer filled with news of housing controversies and changes. They had witnessed passage of the 1949 Housing Act, Milwaukee’s early application for federal public housing funds, the Greenfield trailer confrontation, and the Julius Loving protest. In response to the 1949 Act, they made especially clear their opposition to public housing. But they also indicated a willingness to accept the legislation’s redevelopment provisions.13 After a brief lull during the fall months, these opponents of “political” public housing renewed calls for a referendum in late 1949. Two umbrella groups, the Milwaukee County Property Owners Association and the Affiliated Taxpayers Committee, took an active and public role in this campaign. Members of the Affiliated Taxpayers Committee included the Board of Realtors, the Milwaukee Builders Association, the Milwaukee Association of Building Owners and Managers, and the Savings and Loan League. The Property Owners Association was made up mostly of small-time landlords, but the Board of Realtors appears to have helped organize this group. The Milwaukee Association of Commerce also was a part of the Affiliated Taxpayers Committee, but began to distance itself while still voicing its opposition to public housing. Distinguishing its interests from those of builders and realtors, the Association of Commerce noted, for instance, that the Property Owners Association was “a group composed primarily of real estate men.” As this anti-public housing coalition geared up for a confrontation, some important corporate and business groups were reassessing their approach to postwar policy and politics. The anti-public housing forces’ early steps, both organizational and rhetorical, also helped to push the issues of taxes and property ownership to the center of the controversy.14

12 13

14

“Statement by Frank Kirkpatrick,” 23 April 1949, folio 2, box 180, Zeidler Papers, MPL. “City Housing Vote Is Asked: Builders Group Wants a Referendum before More Cash Is Spent,” MJ, 26 August 1949; Roland J. Teske (Milwaukee Builders Association) to Richard W. E. Perrin, 29 August 1949, and Milwaukee Builders Association Resolution, ca. August 1949, in folio 1, box 180, Zeidler Papers, MPL; and Rast, “Governing the Regimeless City,” 92. Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 150, 155, 183. Housing opponents wavered on strategy during the fall, but never relented in their disdain for the program. “Housing Poll Plea Dropped,” MJ, 20 September 1949; William C. Palfuss (realtor) to

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At a February 14, 1950 Common Council meeting attended by a crowd of five hundred, “equally divided” between the pro- and anti-public housing sides, the referendum demand again met defeat despite approval by the council’s Housing Committee.15 Aiming now at the fall 1950 elections, leaders from the Builders Association, the Board of Realtors, the Savings and Loan League, and the Property Owners Association, referring to themselves as a “citizens committee,” proposed a measure requiring a public vote to approve any new public housing project that would not pay full property taxes.16 Later that year, at an early October Common Council showdown, former Wisconsin Savings and Loan League president and antipublic housing leader William Pieplow declared: “Our resolution is aimed at stopping public housing unless it pays the same tax as any private citizen.” He augmented the property tax argument by also leveling charges of communism and socialism against the housing program.17 Further, Pieplow and Edward Plantz of the Property Owners Association sought to draw distinctions between public housing residents and average taxpayers. Condemning some public housing tenants as “absolutely immoral” people who “never saved a dollar” and as “shiftless people in Hillside,” Pieplow and Plantz praised private homeowners as people who “had to keep on

15

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Mayor Frank P. Zeidler, 1 September 1949, folio 1 box 180, Zeidler Papers, MPL; Civic Affairs Committee, Minutes, 12 February 1951, folio “1951 Minutes,” box 2, Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce Minutes, Milwaukee Area Research Center, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries’ Archives [hereafter Milwaukee ARC]. On the likely origin of the Property Owners Association and the role of the Milwaukee Real Estate Board in creating the Property Owners Bureau, designed to speak out against taxes and government costs, see “Land Owners Talk Taxation,” MJ, 24 March 1946. On realtors in housing politics in other cities, see: David McAllister, “Realtors and Racism in Working-Class Philadelphia, 1945–1970,” in African American Urban History since World War II, eds. Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 123–41; Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009). “‘That’s My Alderman!’ Proud Spectator Shouts,” MJ, 15 February 1950; “GI Housing Referendum Voted Down by Council: Crowd of 500 on Hand,” MJ, 15 February 1950; “No Housing Referendum!,” Milwaukee Sentinel [hereafter MS], 15 February 1950; Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 163–64. “Group Favors Housing Votes: Urges a Referendum on Each Project that City Proposes,” MJ, 29 August 1950; “Housing Vote to Be Asked of Aldermen,” MJ, 24 September 1950. “Housing Poll Rebuffed, Now Up to Council: Committee Hears Hot Arguments, Opposes Referendum,” MJ, 3 October 1950; “City News,” Journal of Housing 7:12 (December 1950): 427; and Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 188–91. For a preview of Pieplow’s arguments, see the paid advertisement “Government Public Housing Disastrous: Address by William Pieplow to the Security Savings and Loan Association (delivered January 24),” reprinted in MJ, 24 January 1949. On the politics of anticommunism and public housing opposition, see Don Parson, Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

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paying off their mortgages and pay full property taxes.”18 While they stopped short of outright racial slurs, those listening were well-aware that the Hillside project was identified commonly as “Negro housing.” Phrases such as “shiftless” and “immoral” were part of the racist vocabulary used especially to describe African Americans who recently had moved to the city.19 These arguments placed taxes, property ownership, racial divisions, and early Cold War anticommunism at the center of public housing debates. After the full Council turned down this third demand to place the referendum on the November ballot, the public housing opponents shifted tactics and focused on a petition drive to put their referendum up for a vote. Now calling themselves the Public Housing Referendum Committee and arguing that their campaign would protect the public’s right to a voice in this issue, they circulated petitions to collect the 32,513 signatures that guaranteed their measure a spot on the ballot.20 After a round of legal and administrative sparring over the validity of the signatures on the petitions, the Common Council on February 27, 1951 instructed the election commission to print the anti-public housing referendum on the spring ballot.21 The referendum read: That unless the electors of the City of Milwaukee shall give their approval by referendum, the City of Milwaukee shall not construct any additional housing projects, which are not subject to general property taxes at the same rate as privately owned property, and shall not authorize the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee to do so.22

The Public Housing Referendum Committee and its allies defended this opaque wording against opponents’ suspicions that the multiple negatives 18

19

20

21

22

“Housing Poll Rebuffed, Now Up to Council”; Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 189–90. Jack Dougherty, More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 51–57. Memorandum to team captains and members from Public Housing Referendum Committee, ca. January 1951, and “Get ‘Em In!,” ca. January 1951, in folio 1, box 180, Zeidler Papers, MPL. See: “Do We Have a Voice in Government” memorandum, Milwaukee County Property Owners Association, ca. December 1950; Public Housing Referendum Committee pamphlet, “Why YOU Should Sign the Petition for a Referendum on the Public Housing Question,” n.d.; and Petition to the Common Council, n.d. – all in folio “Referendum-Housing-1951,” Perrin Papers, MPL. See also: “7,500 Petition Housing Vote: ‘Shooting for 70,000,’” MJ, 14 December 1950; and Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 191–205. The Milwaukee Sentinel encouraged voters to sign the petition in “This Is for the People,” MS, 20 January 1951. “Council Votes Housing Poll: Orders Referendum on Apr. 3 Ballot following Fight on Petitions,” MJ, 28 February 1951. On the challenges launched against the petitions and the petitioners, see: “Referendum Is Issue in Three Cities, Many States,” Journal of Housing 8:2 (February 1951): 51–52; and Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” 198–201, 203–05. Board of Election Commissioners, Twenty-first Biennial Report of the Commissioners of the City of Milwaukee (1951), 217.

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in this statement were a deliberate attempt to confuse voters. A “yes” on this public housing referendum meant a vote against public housing. Further, while appearing to favor an energetic process of direct democracy, this measure appealed to a narrow understanding of urban citizenship and democratic practice that privileged both the rights of private ownership and the accompanying obligations of property tax paying.23 A broad pro-public housing coalition vigorously attacked this referendum and later backed a competing referendum. Building on earlier efforts to boost public housing, this coalition included African-American organizations, organized labor, veterans, women’s and civic organizations, religious leaders, neighborhood groups, the Democratic Party, Socialists, the mayor, and the Housing Authority director. Many of these groups had long argued that affordable housing, especially public housing, was the city’s most pressing need. And whereas political events of 1948 and 1949 had alarmed opponents of public housing, many proponents were heartened by liberal and working-class victories in local and national politics. Along with Zeidler’s 1948 election as mayor and the passage of bond measures for veterans’ housing and “blight elimination,” Democratic candidate Clement J. Zablocki unseated Republican John C. Brophy in the Fourth Congressional District. In the Fifth Congressional District, the Democratic Party reformer Andrew Biemiller, a former Socialist and labor activist, regained his seat from Republican Charles Kersten. A good share of the credit for Truman’s victory and Democratic congressional gains had been attributed to African-American support and the strong labor vote in key cities, including Milwaukee. Truman summed up the 1948 election with the quip “labor did it.” Housing, civil rights, and the cost of living, as well his Taft-Hartley veto, had helped Truman and the Democrats to shore up the backing of the urban working class. The 1949 Housing Act, although a compromise between liberal housing advocates and a more cautious administration, further raised housing reformers’ hopes that the city’s housing needs could be addressed substantially.24 23

24

Public Housing Referendum Committee, “Why YOU Should Sign the Petition for a Referendum on the Public Housing Question”; Public Housing Referendum Committee, “Study Shows Housing Referendum Easy to Understand,” 18 January 1951, folio “Report to the Senate Banking and Currency Committee – Feb. 15, 1951,” Perrin Papers, MPL; Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 186–87; “‘Grass-roots’ Opposition to Public Housing Has a ‘Canned’ Flavor,” Journal of Housing (May 1950): 158; and Marie Anne Laberge, “‘Seeking a Place to Stand’: Political Power and Activism among Wisconsin Women, 1945–1963” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1995), 78, 108. Sarah C. Ettenheim, How Milwaukee Voted, 1848–1980 (Madison: Department of Governmental Affairs, University of Wisconsin, 1980), 106, 126; William F. Thompson, The History of Wisconsin, Vol VI: Continuity and Change, 1940–1965 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1988), 436–39, 566–71, 573; and Stephen M. Leahy, The

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Alongside these renewed hopes and possibilities, however, a number of tensions and fissures hindered the pro-public housing coalition. Conservative and liberal anticommunism, early postwar attacks on organized labor, and the implosion of Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party in the 1948 election had redrawn the lines for liberal and labor involvement in housing politics. Leaders and organizations that had been at the forefront in earlier housing battles, especially those associated with the CIO’s left wing or the Popular Front, had been pushed aside or removed. Changes in the membership of the Joint Action Committee for Better Housing (JACBH), for instance, reflected these Cold War pressures; the name of the Wisconsin State Conference for Social Legislation, a Popular Front group, was scratched off the coalition’s letterhead and replaced by that of the liberal anticommunist Americans for Democratic Action.25 Racial politics and racial inequalities, so much a part of the housing landscape in the city, also strained and shaped the coalition. AfricanAmerican organizations and leaders joined forces with other pro-public housing forces and, for the most part, backed the work of the Housing Authority. The growth of Milwaukee’s African-American population, along with black activists’ intensified efforts to make their voices heard in civic, political, and cultural arenas, also helped to push racial concerns to the fore in housing debates. In the controversy over Julius Loving’s dismissal, for instance, Hillside tenants and African-American activists had protested officials’ inattention to their voices in decisions about the

25

Life of Milwaukee’s Most Popular Politician, Clement J. Zablocki: Milwaukee Politics and Congressional Foreign Policy (Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 2002). Biemiller lost in 1950; Zablocki was reelected. On Truman’s 1948 victory, due especially to the “broad urbanliberal-black-labor coalition,” see: Gary A. Donaldson, Truman Defeats Dewey (University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 184–220; and Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics 3d ed., rev. (1951; New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1965). On debates about income restrictions for public housing, see: D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Nathaniel S. Keith, Politics and the Housing Crisis since 1930 (New York: Universe Books, 1973), 90; and Lawrence J. Vale, “From Public Housing to Public-Private Housing,” Journal of the American Planning Association 78:4 (Autumn 2012): 379–402. JACBH letterhead, 29 July 1947, folio “Housing Veterans, 4200 Units,” John L. Bohn Papers, Series 081, Office of the Mayor, City of Milwaukee Archives, MPL; JACBH letterhead, 13 July 1949, folio 2, box 180, Zeidler Papers, MPL; Stephen Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin”: The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900–1950 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Robert D. Ubriaco, Jr., “Choosing Sides: Restructuring the Political Landscape in Milwaukee’s Polish Community, 1945–1948,” Milwaukee History 22:2 (Summer 1999): 78–98; Steven M. Gillon, Politics and Vision: The ADA and American Liberalism, 1947–1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Parson, Making a Better World; and Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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project’s management. As project residents, they had declared that their participation was legitimate and necessary. As Milwaukee citizens, they saw themselves as political players who should have a say in the life and direction of their community. Locally and nationally, civil rights organizations allied with labor unions (especially the CIO), community groups, and other left-wing or liberal organizations continued to attack racial discrimination and pressed for the inclusion of civil rights concerns in public policy decisions. While efforts to tackle residential segregation or equal access to public housing fell short and while these alliances often were made weaker, especially in the midst of the domestic Cold War, many of these groups and leaders continued to argue for increased attention to housing and spoke out against public housing practices that contradicted principles of racial justice.26 Shortly after the Hillside and veterans’ projects had opened, the Milwaukee Urban League challenged racial segregation in housing projects. League activists and others had hoped that black wartime sacrifices might add to their calls for fairer housing. The Urban League charged that African-American veterans were directed mainly to the low-income Hillside project in the Sixth Ward and excluded from the veterans’ housing projects in which white veterans found housing. By 1951, Hillside housed 232 families, 70 percent of which were veterans’ families. African Americans accounted for more than 81 percent of the project’s residents. Parklawn, the 1930s PWA low-income project for which the Milwaukee Housing Authority became manager in 1950, still housed just six black families. The city’s veterans’ projects, home to almost one thousand families, accommodated only four African-American families.27 In the

26

27

On the NAACP’s and Urban League’s work, see: “Activities of the Milwaukee Branch of the NAACP for 1948–49,” ca. 1949, folio 2, box 6, NAACP, Milwaukee Branch, Records, Milwaukee ARC; and Executive Committee Minutes, 15 January 1951, folio 15, box 2, NAACP, Milwaukee Branch, Records, Milwaukee ARC; Michael Ross Grover, “‘All Things to Black Folks’: A History of the Milwaukee Urban League, 1919–1980 (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1994); and Dougherty, More Than One Struggle. See also: Shana Bernstein, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008). Veterans were given priority in low-income projects. The three veterans’ projects were Northlawn, Southlawn, and Berryland. Minutes, Board of Directors, Milwaukee Urban League, 15 December 1949, frames 466–67, reel 1, Milwaukee Urban League microfilm, Milwaukee ARC; Minutes, 19 January 1950, frame 470 and 19 May 1950, frame 486, reel 1, Milwaukee Urban League, Milwaukee ARC; and Grover, “‘All Things to Black Folks,’” 90. Public housing residency and race data are found in Richard Perrin (Housing Authority Director), “More About Public Housing,” 10 March 1951, pp. 2–3, folio 2, box 179, Zeidler Papers, MPL. Wartime contributions had been recognized in an earlier Sixth Ward

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postwar city where the title of “veteran” carried great weight, AfricanAmerican residents who had served in the armed forces found their wartime contributions undervalued. Protests conducted by these veterans, the Urban League, and Hillside residents built on the long-standing grievances against the constricted housing options that black Milwaukeeans faced. These practices evident in the city’s housing projects and racial geography, along with the responses of those seeking change, would shape the housing coalition and public housing politics. When the real estate industry escalated its attack on public housing, labor and liberal reform groups slowly began to respond. Following the spring 1949 announcement of the realtors’ and builders’ publicity campaign, but prior to the launch of the anti-public housing referendum effort, a variety of pro-housing groups rallied behind the mayor. A diverse collection of labor unions and women’s organizations, including the AFL’s Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 9, the Independent Union of Milwaukee Taxicab Drivers and Employees, the recently reorganized Milwaukee branch of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), and the Women’s Court and Civic Conference, backed the city’s planned public housing program.28 The JACBH, suffering from both the loss of long-time leader Genevieve Hambley (she moved to Michigan in 1948) and the League of Women Voters’ (LWV) increasing uncertainty about its participation in the coalition, appeared reluctant at first to join the battle. Despite its history as a leading advocate of public housing, the JACBH curiously declined an invitation to participate in radio broadcasts because of fears that it might become identified “as a committee concerned primarily with ‘public housing.’” Mayor Zeidler noted that the JACBH was “diminishing in strength” at this early stage of the referendum fight. As member groups and allies mobilized and widened support over the next months, however, the JACBH and the League would jump back into the fray.29

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parade along Walnut Street that honored “850 men and women from the neighborhood . . . serving in the armed services.” See “Honor Plaque Is Dedicated: ‘Bluejacket’ Negro Band Plays as Roll Bearing 850 Names Is Unveiled,” unidentified newspaper article, n.d., reel 3, Milwaukee Urban League, Milwaukee ARC. See correspondence from: Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 9 (AFL), 12 April 1949; Women’s Court and Civic Conference, 19 April 1949; Independent Union of Milwaukee Taxicab Drivers and Employees, 19 April 1949; and WTUL, 19 September 1949 – all in folio 1, box 180, Zeidler Paper, MPL. Mrs. A. Lutter (JACBH) to Folke Peterson, Secretary to the Mayor, 13 July 1949, folio 2, box 180, Zeidler Papers, MPL; Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 124; Nora Reith to Mrs. Earnest Clough (President, Milwaukee LWV), ca. March 1951, folio 3, box 14, League of Women Voters of Greater Milwaukee Records, Milwaukee ARC; and Letter to Mrs. Strauss, n.d., folio 7B, box 313, League of Women Voters, Milwaukee,

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By 1950, when the anti-public housing forces renewed their campaign for a referendum, labor and liberal groups promoting public housing aligned with advocates for veterans housing. Both sets of groups turned out in force to prevent the private sector from squeezing out public action. In February and again in October, the JACBH, the LWV, the Milwaukee Woman’s Club, the Democratic Organizing Committee, the AFL, the CIO, a number of individual unions (including the Brewery Workers, the United Steelworkers of America, and the United Electrical Workers), the American Legion, the American Veterans Committee (AVC), and others persuaded the Common Council to keep the anti-housing measure off the election ballot.30 At the February meeting, said to have pulled in the “largest crowd to attend a common council meeting in many years,” AFL organizer Otto Jirikowic cheered on Alderman Erwin Zillman’s condemnation of the referendum to stall veterans’ housing: “That’s my alderman! . . . Attaboy Erv.” These groups, as well as a number of religious leaders (including Fr. Claude H. Heithaus and the Methodist Rev. Ensworth Reisner) and ethnic organizations (including the Pulaski Council), began discussing the formation of a citizens’ group committed to the defense of public housing and slum clearance.31 The opposition’s move to start circulating referendum petitions in late 1950 intensified the conflict and spurred groups backing public housing to both mobilize their membership and address the wider public. The WTUL and the AVC urged their members and others not to sign the petitions.32 Many AFL and CIO unions began organizing against the anti-public housing forces. Unions such as the AFL’s Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 494 passed resolutions.33 CIO official William

30

31

32

33

Miscellaneous Collection, MPL. Marie Laberge suggests that the LWV pulled back from the JACBH as housing issues became increasingly racialized. Laberge, “Seeking a Place to Stand,” 74–75, 78–81. Hambley, whose daughter still lived in Milwaukee, followed the referenda controversy from a distance but kept in the background because of an ongoing libel suit against builder Frank Kirkpatrick. Genevieve Hambley (Birmingham, MI) to Mayor Zeidler, 31 January 1951, folio 2, box 179, Zeidler Papers, MPL. “‘That’s My Alderman!’ Proud Spectator Shouts.” See also Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 157–60, 190. On the October meeting, see: “Housing Poll Rebuffed, Now up to Council”; and “City News,” Journal of Housing (December 1950): 427. “Housing Vote to Be Asked of Aldermen”; Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 159–60, 187; Kevin D. Smith, “‘In God We Trust’: Religion, the Cold War, and Civil Rights in Milwaukee, 1947–1963” (Ph.D. diss., University of WisconsinMadison, 1999). Minutes of the WTUL, 27 November 1950, folio 13, box 1, Women’s Trade Union League Papers [hereafter WTUL Papers], Milwaukee ARC; Minutes of the WTUL, 22 January 1951, folio 13, box 1, WTUL Papers, Milwaukee ARC; “Move to Block Housing Vote,” MJ, 12 January 1951. “Public Housing Vote Is Likely,” MJ, 19 January 1951.

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Abbott warned members against the petitions, saying, “If anti-housing petitioners come around to your house and ask you to sign away homes for Milwaukee, be careful.”34 The Milwaukee CIO Council reaffirmed its support for the Housing Authority and its opposition to the petitions. A Council resolution concluded: “we urge our CIO membership to oppose the weasel-worded petition now in circulation, and urge our membership to support public housing in every way possible, and that we continue our fight to bring decent homes to the great city of Milwaukee.”35 Delegates to the CIO Council agreed to take this back to their locals and organize around this issue.36 These and other critics of the anti-public housing referendum followed the lead of Mayor Zeidler, hammering away at the politics and motivations of the sponsors. In response to earlier efforts to paralyze the city’s public housing program, they launched scathing attacks on Edward Plantz and the Milwaukee County Property Owners Association. As he had in the 1947 debt controversy, Zeidler pointed out that many of the leading opponents were not residents of the city. He accused Plantz: “you, as a suburban resident, have placed yourself squarely among the enemies of progress in the City of Milwaukee.”37 Lewis Stocking of the Affiliated Taxpayers and resident of affluent Fox Point also became the subject of Zeidler’s wrath, tagged as the “chief advocate of the suburban real estate interests who [has] done more to cause the deterioration of the central portions of Milwaukee than the small property owners.” Continuing his indictment of Plantz, of the Property Owners Association, and of the realtors, Zeidler charged further that these outside interests demonstrated “an anti-labor attitude, an opposition to community redevelopment, a tendency to create division and ill-will between tenants and landlords, and an evidence of support for profiteering and inflation.” CIO and American Legion representatives in an unlikely convergence of interests, along with others who favored more low-income and low-cost veterans’ housing in the city, reiterated accusations that the leadership of this

34

35

36

37

“Attack Anti-Housing Petition Drive as ‘Dirty Tactics,’” Wisconsin CIO News, 1 December 1950. “Milwaukee County CIO Housing Resolution,” Wisconsin CIO News, 15 December 1950. Minutes of Milwaukee County Industrial Council, CIO, 6 December 1950 and 20 December 1950, folio “Milwaukee County Council CIO,” box 4, UAW Local 248 Records, Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan [hereafter Reuther Library]. Mayor Frank P. Zeidler to Edward Clune Plantz (Milwaukee County Property Owners Association), 15 September 1950, folio “Blight Elimination (1950–1952),” box 119, Zeidler Papers, MPL.

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campaign to subvert Milwaukee’s housing policy were wealthy suburbanites eager to benefit themselves at the expense of the urban dwellers.38 Allegations of greed and civic irresponsibility were echoed by a wide range of housing reformers, including working-class and middle-class women. Alice Holz, who gained early experience on the Socialist Milwaukee Leader and now served as a leader of both the WTUL and the AFL’s Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 9, condemned “this scurrilous attempt by real estate operators, who themselves are subsidized by government funds, to maintain a scarcity of homes for people in our community who can not pay the inflated and outrageous prices charged by these operators for homes and rental dwellings.”39 Helping to lead the LWV’s attack on the referendum in comments before the Common Council’s housing committee, Lucille Krug excoriated the “unscrupulous” antihousing organizers, a term to which realtors and their allies objected. Krug continued: “The small group of men who are responsible for it have no real concern for the people or the welfare of democracy.”40 Holz and Krug charged that the private housing interests posed a peril both for workingclass Milwaukeeans’ access to decent homes and for local democracy. Likewise, Mayor Zeidler pitched the controversy primarily as a contest between the real estate industry (many residing in the suburbs) and the city’s working class. Would the city, using federal aid, be allowed to provide housing for “low income workers” or would the “real estate builders” hoard federal subsidies?41 Referring to the city’s tight housing market for renters and buyers of modest means, Zeidler sought to mobilize working-class voters: “The real estate lobby said nothing of the fact that it could not, did not, and has not provided housing for low income industrial workers at a price they can afford to pay.” He continued, appealing to industrial workers and others concerned about the city’s economic health, “. . . the lobby was attacking the industrial strength and stability of the community by insisting on the continuance of poor housing and short supply for the industrial employee.”42 The city’s strength and stability, its 38

39

40

41 42

Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 157, 185; “Attack Anti-Housing Petition Drive as ‘Dirty Tactics’”; and Zeidler to Plantz, 15 September 1950. Alice Holz (WTUL) to Alderman Alfred C. Hass (Common Council Housing Committee), 23 January 1951, folio 4, box 1,WTUL Papers, Milwaukee ARC; and Darryl Holter, ed., Workers and Unions in Wisconsin: A Labor History Anthology (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1999), 127, 178–79, 182–83. Copy of Mrs. Krug’s Remarks to the Housing and Finance Committee of the Common Council, 19 March 1951, folio 7D, box 214, Krug Speeches – Miscellaneous Collection, MPL; Laberge, “Seeking a Place to Stand,” 80–81; and “Council Votes Housing Poll.” “Public Housing Vote Is Likely.” See also Zeidler to Plantz, 15 September 1950. Draft statement regarding petition, n.d., folio 1, box 180, Zeidler Papers, MPL. These charges were restated in a resident’s letter to the Public Housing Referendum

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progress, could be measured by the well-being of its citizens. Good housing that was affordable for industrial workers, as well as the employment that would result from construction and maintenance, were essential to the well-being of a sizable and critical portion of the city’s population. Workers’ welfare and backing stood at the center of this politics. Opponents of public housing, Zeidler believed, would prevent the city from progressing. He also reminded listeners of veterans’ ongoing housing difficulties, contending that the “real estate lobby also forgot its obligation to the veteran of World War II.”43 Housing for Milwaukee’s veterans and working-class citizens, often the same people, would enable the city to meet its responsibilities and build a stronger postwar city. While these arguments did not acknowledge the substantial barriers of segregation that black workers faced as a result of both real estate interests’ discriminatory actions and the racism of white Milwaukeeans more generally, Zeidler and others aimed to expose the campaign against public housing as an attack on working-class Milwaukee. Public housing supporters accused the antihousing group of deception and of betraying the local political process. By phrasing the anti-public housing referendum in an intentionally confusing manner, what the AFL and CIO termed as “weasel wording,” these local leaders had taken their cue from the national real estate industry. Speaking about the anti-public housing petitions, the CIO’s Abbott observed: “The wording is amazing, for it is so outrageously misleading that the voter is likely to vote against his intention. Even more amazing is the fact that petitions with almost identical wording have been circulating throughout most American cities.”44 This subterfuge would benefit not only local economic interests but national interests as well. While Abbott’s opponents appealed to localism by raising the specter of federal control through public housing, Abbott now suggested that local autonomy and the democratic process were being compromised by national, private sector interests.

43

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Committee: “I’ll bet your group is almost one hundred per cent realtors and businessmen who at the very moment are chiseling people of the Milwaukee area . . . .” C.A. Kukuvich to Public Housing Referendum Committee, 22 January 1951, folio 1, box 179, Zeidler Papers, MPL. Draft statement regarding petition, n.d., folio 1, box 180, Zeidler Papers, MPL. On the economic benefits, see: Zeidler to Ray Weisbrod, Executive Director of the Milwaukee Association of Commerce, 9 February 1950, and Zeidler to the Milwaukee Builders Association, 10 February 1950, in folio 1 “Housing Referendum (1950 – Jan. 1951),” box 179, Zeidler Papers, MPL. William Abbott (CIO) “Referendum on Housing” [letter to the editor], MJ, 8 January 1951; “Public Housing,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 25 January 1951; and “‘Grass-roots’ Opposition to Public Housing Has a ‘Canned’ Flavor,” 158.

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Abbott and other public housing advocates pressed this complaint. Referring to the promoters of the referendum as “profit-hungry wolves” who will use “any dirty tactic to make money off their unfortunate tenants,” Abbott charged that the local leaders were “hooked up with the real estate lobby, the group whose representatives say ‘Democracy stinks.’” In this he was reminding the public of a notorious and widely circulated statement made by Herbert Nelson of the National Association of Real Estate Boards: “I do not believe in democracy. I think it stinks. I don’t think anybody but direct taxpayers should be allowed to vote. I don’t believe women should be allowed to vote at all.”45 Abbott urged a broad collection of public housing backers, including those Nelson had denounced directly, to defend local democracy from this national hazard. Likewise, Zeidler called on fellow Milwaukeeans to resist the anti-public housing campaign or what he defined as the “local phase of a national effort of the Real-Estate-Builder-Banker interests to subvert the will of the people as expressed in the [1949 Housing Act].” Well-financed by a profitable real estate industry, this attempt to quash public housing would have to be opposed by a coalition of labor, veterans, religious, women’s, welfare, and civic groups. In addition to mobilizing area groups, Zeidler brought this complaint to national labor leaders and mayors in other cities. He also requested that Congress resume its earlier investigations of the real estate lobby.46

45

46

“Attack Anti-Housing Petition Drive as ‘Dirty Tactics’”; Straus, Two-Thirds of a Nation, 256. Nelson’s comments had been made public by the 1950 hearings of the House Select Committee on Lobbying Activities. Mayor Frank Zeidler, typed statement, n.d., and draft statement regarding petition, n.d., folio 1, box 180, Zeidler Papers, MPL. See also: “National Group in Background of Housing Dispute” and “Milwaukee Paper Exposed How Outsiders ‘Helped’ Organize Fight Against Public Housing,” both in Citizens’ Anti-Slum Committee, Referendum News, ca. 1951, folio “Referendum – Housing – 1951,” Perrin Papers, MPL. The Socialist Party referred to the property owners’ group as a “cell” of the national real estate lobby. “Move to Block Housing Vote.” On Zeidler’s broader efforts, see: Mayor Frank Zeidler to Senator Burnett Maybank, telegram, 27 January 1951; Mayor Zeidler to David Lawrence (President, U.S. Conference of Mayors), telegram, ca. 27 January 1951; Senator Alexander Wiley to Francis A. Henson (UAW), 5 February 1951; Representative Frank Buchanan to Mayor Frank Zeidler, 5 February 1951; and Mayor Frank Zeidler to Representative Frank Buchanan, 13 February 1951 – all in folio 2, box 179, Zeidler Papers, MPL. See also Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” 199–201. Anti-public housing publicity collected from other cities can be found in: folio “Report to the Senate Banking and Currency Committee – Feb. 15, 1951,” Perrin Papers, MPL; and folio 1, box 180, Zeidler Papers, MPL. On the congressional committee that examined the housing lobby, chaired by Frank Buchanan (PA) and terminated at the close of the 81st Congress, see: U.S. Congress, Hearings before the House Select Committee of Lobbying Activities, 81st Cong., 2d sess., 1950; and Leo Goodman, “What Makes the Real Estate Lobby Tick?,” Journal of Housing 7:12 (December 1950): 423–27.

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The anti-public housing referendum drive was indeed part of the welldocumented campaign to block public housing throughout the country, carried out by the National Association of Real Estate Boards, the National Association of Home Builders, the U.S. Savings and Loan League, and allied organizations. National organizations provided “kits” with press releases, editorials, speeches, advertisements, research, and other materials that local groups could use to defeat public housing. They also lobbied and pressured influential national groups to reverse their support for public housing and, hence, force local chapters to pull back. The National Association of Home Builders, for instance, targeted the delegates to the American Legion’s 1950 annual convention, hoping to push the national and local American Legions out of the public housing camp. This national context, however, tells only part of the story. The local conflicts – which played out in particular places, each with a particular political culture – engaged people to think concretely about how public housing projects recently built or in the planning stages fit their cities. While influenced by national trends and changes, these contests played out in distinctive ways in particular cities and reconfigured perceptions about public housing, taxes, ownership, redevelopment, and urban citizenship.47 As the battle over petitions to certify the anti-public housing measure mounted, public housing advocates discussed a counter-referendum and took steps to organize a coalition designed specifically for this referenda fight. The alternative ballot measure and the newly developed coalition, both in name and in substance, suggested a strategic shift to an emphasis on slum clearance over public housing. While the groups involved had viewed public housing and slum clearance as linked closely, most had been clear that decent and affordable housing was their primary concern. This newer emphasis on slum clearance opened an avenue to court business and 47

Telegram from Lee F. Johnson, Executive Vice President, National Housing Conference to Mayor Frank Zeidler, 28 March 1951, folio 2 “Housing Referendum (February – April 1951),” box 179, Zeidler Papers, MPL. After reviewing the anti-public housing material from Milwaukee, Johnson concluded that “Your opposition is doing [a] more intelligent job than in other cities.” On the Legion, see “American Legion,” Journal of Housing (August 1950): 267. On the anti-public housing campaign, see also: Lee F. Johnson, “Housing: A 1950 Tragedy,” Survey (December 1950): 551–55; Straus, Two-Thirds of a Nation, 275–80; “‘Grass-roots’ Opposition to Public Housing Has a ‘Canned’ Flavor,” 158–60; “‘Canned Campaign’ to Kill Public Housing Continues,” Journal of Housing (January 1951): 9–10; “Savings and Loan ‘Kit,’” Journal of Housing (August 1950): 267; Davies, Housing Reform During the Truman Administration, 126–30; Leonard Freedman, “Group Opposition to Public Housing” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1959); and Sylvie Murray, The Progressive Housewife: Community Activism in Suburban Queens, 1945–1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 49–52.

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civic groups that had instead put slum clearance and redevelopment at the top of their wish list. Housing organizations remained at the helm throughout much of the 1951 referenda fight, but they began to attract crucial support and neutralized doubts coming from various quarters, enabling them in turn to chip away at the strength of the “anti-housers” in the last months of the fight. In the end, however, this strategy would tip the balance so that redevelopment emerged dominant over housing on the urban policy agenda. The Citizens’ Anti-Slum Committee (CASC) was formed in early 1951, soon after the City Hall confrontation between CIO and antihousing petitioners. A number of public housing supporters – including the renamed Public Enterprise Committee, which had backed Zeidler in his 1948 mayoral election – appear to have called for the creation of the CASC. This temporary organization would bring together civic, labor, veterans’, and small business groups to oppose the antihousing referendum. Despite the conspicuous absence of the phrase “public housing” from its title, the organization consisted primarily of those who had worked since the late 1930s to secure a Housing Authority and enact a vigorous housing program in Milwaukee. These individual groups and the JACBH played an active and public part in the escalating referenda fight. For instance, soon after the CASC was established, the JACBH helped to organize a speakers bureau to attend meetings of various civic, religious, and labor groups. But in the last two months before Milwaukeeans cast ballots on the housing measures, the CASC took the leading role.48 The list of CASC officers included business leaders, middle- and upperclass reformers, religious leaders, veterans, union activists, AfricanAmerican leaders, and civic notables. Henry L. Nunn, a retired industrialist, chaired the group; Rev. Reisner of the prominent First Methodist Church served as vice-chairman. Milwaukee-area attorneys, the head of Marquette’s dentistry department, the director of the Wisconsin Heart Association, and the wife of Milwaukee Journal writer Richard Davis also participated. The composition of the CASC indicates an effort to broaden the public housing constituency by tying together those concerned about slum clearance, redevelopment, and public housing more closely. To a degree, the makeup of the group defied liberal and conservative boundaries while it also brought together people and organizations with access 48

“Move to Block Housing Vote”; “Public Housing Vote Is Likely”; Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 206. For examples of individual groups’ educational efforts and endorsements, see: Meeting minutes, 17 January 1951, box 2, Women’s Court and Civic Conference Records, Milwaukee ARC; Women’s Court and Civic Conference to Mayor Frank Zeidler, 5 March 1951, and LWV of Milwaukee to members of the Common Council, 7 March 1951, in folio 2, box 179, Zeidler Papers, MPL.

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to power at the local, state, and national levels. The ranks of the CASC, however, were filled by those who had worked long and hard to advance and preserve public housing. LWV activists, JACBH members, AVC and American Legion representatives, black clergy such as Rev. McLin, NAACP and Urban League members, and labor activists carried out the work of the committee. Key positions in the CASC, including those of secretary, treasurer, and executive secretary, were held by CIO, AFL, and AVC representatives, respectively.49 So while emphasis on an extended cross-class strategy became increasingly apparent, AFL and CIO unions remained at the center of efforts to defend public housing and slum clearance. Labor carried out this work through their financial contributions, member education, organizing, and leadership in the campaign. The FTC and the Milwaukee CIO Council advised union members to make sure they were registered and then to vote “no” on the antihousing referendum. The CIO newspaper’s editor remarked that CIO and AFL were working together to a “major degree for the first time on the housing question.” While the two central bodies and their member unions certainly had worked side-by-side on earlier efforts, this alliance in the wake of postwar political turmoil and organizational purges indicates how important Milwaukee’s AFL and CIO considered these issues. The labor councils also encouraged locals to put their voices and resources behind the cause. Many locals – including the AFL’s American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, District Council 48, and the International Brotherhood of Firemen and Oilers, Local 125 – publicly announced their position. Likewise, numerous CIO unions responded to the Milwaukee CIO’s calls to mobilize members for the public housing cause and contribute to the CASC. Labor organizations donating money included: United Automobile Workers Local 75, $500; UAW Local 75 Auxiliary No. 2, $10; UAW Local 575, $15; UAW Local 115, $10; UAW Local 756, $10; United Steelworkers of America Local 1173, $25; USA Local 1114, $25; Brewery Workers Local 9, $300; United Packinghouse Workers of America Local 50, $25; Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Local 174-S, $10; and the Wisconsin CIO Council, $250. Notably absent from this list, and from the housing debate more generally at this time, was UAW Local 248. A mainstay of labor activism and public action just a few years earlier, this formerly militant union had been weakened considerably after 1947. Despite this gap, labor’s organizational role in the housing fight was crucial and 49

Smith, “‘In God We Trust,’” 84–85; and “Committee Seeks Slum Clearance,” Referendum News, ca. 1951, folio “Referendum – Housing – 1951,” Perrin Papers, MPL. This newspaper was a CASC publication.

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complemented the efforts of many civic and veterans’ groups, as well as individual donors, to sustain the CASC.50 In the weeks before the vote, the CASC, the JACBH, and allied organizations campaigned vigorously. Although the pro-public housing side had less in their coffers than the anti-public housing forces – $5,007 versus $9,437 – they had a strong network of organizations and resources to tap. CASC representatives spoke to about one hundred fifty groups, including union and community meetings, urging a no vote on the anti-public housing measure.51 Just before the vote, for instance, CASC speaker and black attorney James Dorsey, who had a long history of involvement in housing issues, addressed a gathering at the Urban League headquarters. He warned that “unless you vote ‘No’ you may find yourself housed in the street.”52 The CASC and its allies organized tenants, distributed thirty-five thousand postcards, made three thousand telephone contacts, placed newspaper advertisements and radio spots, supplied articles to neighborhood and ethnic newspapers (including the Polish Kuryer Polski), printed fact-sheets and flyers, and joined a television debate. The group also proposed a mass meeting in front of City Hall just before Election Day, tried to secure television spots during wrestling match intermissions, arranged a tour for the Women’s Service Club to compare slum areas and public housing, and 50

51

52

“Be Sure You Are Registered,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 15 March 1951; Minutes of the Milwaukee County Industrial Council, CIO, 21 March 1951, folio “Milwaukee County Council CIO,” box 7, UAW Local 248 Records, Reuther Library; “Public Housing Vote Is Likely”; Press Release, AFSCME, Milwaukee County District Council 48, 2 February 1951, and Walter H. Schmidt, International Brotherhood of Firemen and Oilers, to Mayor Frank P. Zeidler, 6 February 1951, both in folio 2, box 179, Zeidler Papers, MPL; Minutes of the Milwaukee County Industrial Council, CIO, 7 March 1951, folio “Milwaukee County Council CIO,” box 7, UAW Local 248 Records, Reuther Library; “Ask Milwaukee CIO Locals Contribute in Public Housing Fight,” Wisconsin CIO News, 16 February 1951; “Brewers Give $300 to Housing Fight,” Wisconsin CIO News, 23 February 1951; and “State CIO Meets, Acts on Wages, Housing, Rents,” Wisconsin CIO News, 23 February 1951. On educational efforts, see “Public Housing – A Social Project,” Wisconsin CIO News, 9 February 1951 and 16 February 1951. See also Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000), 105–24. Henry L. Nunn (Citizens’ Anti-Slum Committee) to Members and Friends, 24 May 1951, folio 4, box 1, WTUL Papers, Milwaukee ARC; Minutes of the Milwaukee County Industrial Council, CIO, 21 March 1951; Minutes, 26 February 1951, folio 13, box 1, WTUL Papers, Milwaukee ARC. On fundraising, see: Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 212; and Anti-Slum Committee Minutes, 14 March 1951, folio 2, box 179, Zeidler Papers, MPL. One anonymous donor contributed $1,500 to the pro-housing side. “Vital Housing Referendum Forum Meets at Urban League,” Milwaukee Sepian, 3 April 1951. A story on the same page of the newspaper, about a family of nine in desperate need of a home, gave credence to this warning. The family – eleven-year residents of the city, the father employed in a foundry, and members of St. Marks AME Church – most recently had lived in one room. “Family of Nine Homeless,” Milwaukee Sepian, 3 April 1951.

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planned to distribute pro-public housing and slum clearance literature outside the local home show. The CASC focused on reaching working- and middle-class Milwaukeeans, making frequent reference to the private interests that stood behind the anti-public housing measure.53 The CASC also published and distributed one hundred twenty-five thousand copies of the Referendum News, a four-page newspaper that ran the headline: “For Housing Progress Defeat Ballot Trick.” In addition to lauding organizations and individuals leading the fight for public housing, the newspaper carried stories and photographs depicting the hardships families faced due to the continued housing shortage, the dangers and costs of slum areas, the difficulties of life in a trailer camp, and the benefits of public housing. The Referendum News also printed photographs and brief profiles of six public housing residents, testifying “Public Housing Is Wonderful!” The lead story in the paper, “‘No’ Vote Assures Projects U.S. Cash Ready for City Pending Voters’ Decision,” hit hard at the anti-public housing referendum’s sponsors: “Prodded by the national real estate lobby, a group of self-interested local realtors and profiteers are challenging Milwaukee’s progress . . . .” The CASC sought to influence a broad and diverse range of voters and shape how they thought about progress and the city’s prospects.54 In the last weeks of the referendum fight, the CASC, the JACBH, and others also sought to convince voters to approve an alternative referendum. Crafted to counter, or at least mitigate, the impact of the anti-public housing referendum, this measure reminded voters that the city stood to lose federal funds for both public housing and slum clearance.55 As the formation of the CASC had strengthened the organizational ties between housing and slum clearance advocates, the new ballot measure joined these issues politically before the wider electorate. The referendum asked: Shall slum clearance housing projects be built with federal funds under the 1949 Federal Housing Act irrespective of any other resolution or act?56

This measure enabled public housing backers to promote a course for future action, rather than to defend solely against cuts or restrictions in 53

54

55

56

Anti-Slum Committee Minutes, 14 March 1951; and Henry L. Nunn (CASC) to Members and Friends, 24 May 1951, folio 4, box 1, WTUL Papers, Milwaukee ARC. On CASC pamphlets, see: “Public Housing, A Social Project: 101 Questions and Answers on Milwaukee’s Housing Program,” ca. 1951, folio “Referendum – Housing – 1951,” Perrin Papers, MPL. Nunn (CASC) to Members and Friends, 24 May 1951; and Citizens’ Anti-Slum Committee, Referendum News, ca. 1951. Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 207–08. The new referendum was introduced by Fifth Ward Alderman Mathias Schimenz. Board of Election Commissioners, Twenty-first Biennial Report, 218.

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housing. As the language of the measure indicated, however, public housing would become defined increasingly by the politics of slum clearance and redevelopment. Links between redevelopment, or slum clearance, and public housing were evident, of course, in earlier New Deal and Fair Deal housing initiatives. These policies had been joined intellectually and practically in federal legislation in 1937 and 1949, as well as in numerous other proposals at the local and national levels. The 1945 debate over the powers of Milwaukee’s new Housing Authority, in large part, hinged on the degree and character of this relationship. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Milwaukee’s working-class housing advocates and middle-class liberal reformers had viewed housing and slum clearance policies as intertwined elements of a program for urban regeneration and development. But affordable and decent housing for workers and other lower-income Milwaukeeans had been their priority. Slum clearance could serve the purpose of improving housing. In local and national urban policy-making, questions about the mix and priority of these elements remained contested. While the Housing Acts of 1937 and 1949 established guidelines for this debate, policymakers and activists enjoyed greater flexibility both in implementation and then in imagining future directions for housing legislation. And this debate remained a thoroughly political process, subject to considerations of principles, strategy, and power.57 Lower-income residents in areas targeted for rebuilding expressed a strong preference for a housing and redevelopment program driven by

57

On the contested relationship between housing and redevelopment, see: Senator Robert F. Wagner to Paul U. Kellogg (Survey Graphic), 10 October 1947, Reel 53, (microfilm 256), part 1, Survey Associates Records, University Publications of America; Housing and Home Finance Agency, The Relationship Between Slum Clearance & Urban Redevelopment and Low-Rent Public Housing (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1950) [emphasis in title]. Planners from seven cities reflected on housing and redevelopment in “Is Public Housing Needed for Urban Redevelopment?,” American City 63:11 (November 1948): 84–87. See also: John F. Bauman, “The Paradox of PostWar Urban Planning: Downtown Revitalization versus Decent Housing for All,” in Two Centuries of American Planning, ed. Daniel Schaffer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 231–64; Peter H. Henderson, “Local Deals and the New Deal State: Implementing Federal Public Housing in Baltimore, 1933–1968” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1993), 343–84; William Issel, Church and State in the City: Catholics and Politics in Twentieth-Century San Francisco (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), 149–172; Alexander von Hoffman, “The End of the Dream: The Political Struggle of America’s Public Housers,” Journal of Planning History 4:3 (August 2005): 222–53; and Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 253–98. On the politics of 1940s rebuilding, see especially Joseph Heathcott, “The City Quietly Remade: National Programs and Local Agendas in the Movement to Clear the Slums, 1942–1954,” Journal of Urban History 34:2 (January 2008): 221–42.

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public action rather than private ventures. Not surprisingly, housing was their priority. A 1949 survey of a South Side neighborhood (defined officially as blighted) indicated relatively strong support for public housing and public action followed by a tepid endorsement of slum clearance initiatives. This study had been prompted by Nora Reith of the JACBH, who connected city leaders frustrated by the progress of housing and redevelopment efforts to Coleman Woodbury, the director of the recently initiated national Urban Redevelopment Study. Willard Downing, professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who later would become executive director of Milwaukee’s Redevelopment Authority, helped to carry out the survey. Of the approximately three hundred residents interviewed for the study by Downing’s students, more than 80 percent saw either no need or a limited scope for redevelopment. Only 12 percent responded that the neighborhood needed complete rebuilding. On the other hand, when residents were asked about the best approach to redevelopment, almost half said they favored a process by which the city first would purchase and clear the land and then build lowrent or veterans’ housing. This group far outweighed neighborhood respondents who thought the city should either play no part in redevelopment or turn over the cleared land to private developers. Most importantly, public housing and public initiative figured prominently in neighborhood residents’ conception of postwar urban policy. Neither redevelopment alone nor a redevelopment strategy directed by the private sector captured grassroots support in this survey. This thinking at the neighborhood level echoed widespread support for public action on housing made evident in national polls.58

58

The Urban Redevelopment Survey was overseen by the Public Administration Clearing House. William L. Slayton and Richard Dewey, “Urban Redevelopment and the Urbanite,” in The Future of Cities and Urban Redevelopment, ed. Coleman Woodbury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 377–79, 386–410, 419–25; Board of Public Land Commissioners, “Opinion Survey of Milwaukee Neighborhoods,” 1949, Legislative Reference Bureau, Milwaukee City Hall; Memo on blight and redevelopment studies and sample survey instruments, ca. 1949, folio “City Planning, 1949–50,” box 33, City Club of Milwaukee Papers, Milwaukee ARC; Mel Scott, American City Planning since 1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 479,489; City of Milwaukee, “Common Council Housing Survey” (September 1949); Redevelopment Coordinating Committee, Blight Elimination and Urban Redevelopment in Milwaukee (Milwaukee, June 1948), copy available from the Milwaukee Department of City Development; Mrs. Allen F. Reith to Coleman Woodbury, 2 November 1948 (and attached Urban Redevelopment Study press release), folio “Blight Elimination (1948),” box 119, Zeidler Papers, MPL; and John F. Baranski, “Making Public Housing in San Francisco: Liberalism, Social Prejudice, and Social Activism, 1906–1976” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2004), 210. See also Gregory J. Crowley, The Politics of Place: Contentious Urban Redevelopment in Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 42–89.

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Among the arguments Milwaukee public housing advocates marshaled during the closing days of the referenda fight, however, those addressing the prospects of the city’s slum clearance and redevelopment initiatives proved pivotal. They highlighted the language of the second referendum, which linked public housing to the city’s program of urban redevelopment. For some individuals and groups, including many working-class organizations that persisted in backing a broad-based public housing program, this argument was largely strategic and did not reflect a policy shift. For others, including many middle-class reformers and Housing Authority officials who sought to redevelop the city while also providing housing, this approach fit both strategic and substantive policy considerations. Milwaukee Housing Authority Director Richard Perrin led the assault. A supporter of public housing who had skirmished with the Board of Public Land Commissioners for control of the city’s redevelopment program, he was vilified by opponents in the 1951 contest as an antidemocratic monarch (see Figure 7.1). Perrin hoped to advance the city’s housing and redevelopment agendas by stressing especially that “[i]f federal housing aid is lost, blight elimination, slum clearance, and other redevelopment activities will grind to a halt.” He contended that the city’s future depended on a joint housing and redevelopment approach to urban policy, adding that “[a]ttacks on public housing are attacks on civic projects and civic progress.” Strategically, he and others presented housing and redevelopment as a unified package in order to blunt the organized public-housing opposition and to win the support of downtown and metropolitan business and civic leaders in this 1951 fight.59 By the end of the war, key downtown and metropolitan leaders had begun to acknowledge a role for public housing, albeit supplementary, if it would help to propel a large-scale program of urban redevelopment. Now in the midst of the 1951 battle, taking place in the wake of both the 1947 debt controversy and the 1949 Housing Act, these and other business and civic leaders hoped to open the way for an era of urban development, 59

Richard W. E. Perrin, “Civic Projects Endangered if Federal Housing Aid Lost,” 15 March 1951, Milwaukee Department of City Development Archives; “Housing Vote Could End All Federal Help,” MJ, 23 January 1951; Richard W. E. Perrin to Mayor Frank P. Zeidler, 17 January 1951, folio 1 “Housing Referendum (1950 – Jan. 1951),” box 179, Zeidler Papers, MPL; and Perrin’s responses to 15 questions submitted by the LWV, addressed to the Common Council, 26 March 1951, folio 2 “Housing Referendum (Feb. – April 1951),” box 179, Zeidler Papers, MPL. See letters in support of public housing addressed to Mayor Zeidler, in: folio 1 “Housing Referendum (1950 – Jan., 1951),” box 179, Zeidler Papers, MPL. See also Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” 181–212. On opponents who referred to “Boss Perrin,” see the Public Housing Referendum Committee’s flyers: “It’s Your Money” and “Don’t Let Anyone Take Away Your Right to Vote!!,” ca. 1951, folio “Referendum -Housing – 1951,” Perrin Papers, MPL.

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fi g u r e 7 . 1 During the 1951 referenda fight, opponents of public housing vilified Milwaukee Housing Authority director Richard W. E. Perrin. By depicting Perrin as a monarch, they suggested that the Housing Authority and its methods, as well as those who had worked to keep the anti-public housing measure off the ballot, were undemocratic. Public Housing Referendum Committee flyer, folio “Referendum – Housing – 1951,” Richard W. E. Perrin Papers, Series 079, Department of City Development, City of Milwaukee Archives, Milwaukee Public Library. Reproduced by permission of the Milwaukee Public Library.

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especially one in which public powers and funds could aid private development. The Milwaukee Journal, continuing to act as a leading metropolitan booster, stressed that an effective program of slum clearance and city development required defeat of the anti-public housing measure. Pointing to the joint housing and redevelopment provisions of the 1949 Housing Act, the Journal earlier had noted that slum clearance areas accommodating public housing could serve other purposes as well: The “cleared land will also open areas for private development and will bring greater tax returns to the city.”60 Just before Election Day the Journal advised voters to support the pro-public housing referendum. While the Journal was careful to maintain distance between itself and the leading public housing forces, including Zeidler, the newspaper’s editorial page declared that the combined housing and redevelopment programs would propel the “drive to rebuild the city.”61 Public housing was tied ever more closely to plans for private development and economic growth. This alignment built on the deal struck four years earlier between public housing and redevelopment advocates during the debt referendum fight. The pro-debt coalition made up of downtown and metropolitan business and civic leaders, including heads of financial institutions, retail businesses, and the two major newspapers, had argued that the city should begin issuing bonds for a program of public improvements. To boost support for the measure, debt proponents had agreed to hold off on a program of public improvements until the postwar housing shortage had been addressed sufficiently and eased. This concession mollified many of the labor, women, veteran, and civic activists, as well as Democratic Party reformers, who had been pressing local and federal officials to address the housing shortage. These pro-public housing groups, which often had sided with the leaders and groups at the core of the opposition to municipal debt financing (including Zeidler and many former Socialists), joined in 1947 with debt advocates in the Improve Milwaukee Now Committee. The Greater Milwaukee Committee and the Downtown Association, animating forces behind the prodevelopment Improve Milwaukee Now group, were both notably absent in the 1951 debates. These metropolitan development groups may have decided to remain in the background to avoid

60

61

“Housing Referendum Unwise” [editorial], MJ, 11 February 1950 (emphasis in original); and Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” 162. “Milwaukee: You Can Defeat Enemies of City Progress if You Will Vote,” MJ, 1 April 1951. See also “Milwaukee: Redevelopment and Slum Clearance Need More Citizen Action,” MJ, 13 January 1951. The Journal criticized Zeidler and his allies for their demand that the Public Housing Referendum Committee disclose its supporters and for their attacks on the national Real Estate Lobby. Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 206.

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alienating conservative and real estate groups, all adamantly opposed to public housing. These could be important allies in future development disputes. But the Journal, a close ally of these influential business and corporate leaders throughout these years, articulated their positions on the city’s future development. The unwieldy but effective 1947 pro-debt alliance had begun to draw the housing and urban redevelopment agendas and constituencies together under the umbrella of growth politics. The 1951 housing battle took this a step farther, making growth politics the bond of consensus and a new measure of success.62 Although city development concerns cut across partisan lines, this tightening alignment between elements of the public housing and the progrowth coalitions was evidenced as well in the city’s reforming Democratic Party. Key players in the Democratic Organizing Committee (DOC), the reform movement that sought to build a liberal anticommunist Democratic Party in Wisconsin, were active in early redevelopment initiatives. Housing advocate and future Mayor Henry W. Maier commended the city’s business leaders for being “on record for blight clearance, to improve the community as a whole.”63 Earlier, the Milwaukee-area state legislator Robert Tehan had authored Wisconsin’s redevelopment provisions. Future Congressman Henry Reuss, who had opposed Zeidler in the 1948 mayoral campaign, was a founder of the Urban Redevelopment Corporation. He was among the first to try to use Wisconsin’s redevelopment laws in proposing the Red Arrow housing and redevelopment plan in 1947. Although neighborhood protests defeated the plan, with Tehan’s mother among those residents objecting to it, the roles of these local political operatives in these and similar projects reinforced the link between housing and redevelopment in the ascendant DOC.64 These

62

63 64

On the debt debate, see Chapter 5. On growth politics and redevelopment elsewhere (along with earlier citations), see: Robert B. Fairbanks, For the City as a Whole: Planning, Politics, and the Public Interest in Dallas, Texas, 1900–1956 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998); John H. Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Jon C. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940–1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Joel Schwartz, The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993); and Zipp, Manhattan Projects. “Housing Poll Rebuffed, Now Up to Council.” On the Red Arrow controversy, see especially: “Fourth Warders Seethe over Proposal to Raze Their Homes,” MJ 9, September 1947; “Reuss Tells Fine Points of Red Arrow Housing,” MJ, 10 September 1947; “Bill He Helped Raise to Law May Raze the Home of Tehan,” MJ, 10 September 1947; and “Red Arrow Housing Stirs Bitter Wrangle,” MJ, 25 September 1947. On the DOC and Democratic reformers, see: Interviews with Julia Bogholt, Bruno Bitker, Henry Maier, and Henry Reuss in Wisconsin Democratic Party Oral History Project, 1982–1986, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin; Alexander Shashko, “‘Shoe Leather and Perspiration’: Grassroots Liberalism and the

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changes and the debt compromise helped to move liberal and labor advocates for public housing into the fold with prodevelopment leaders. In the 1951 debate, housing and redevelopment were incorporated even more closely to advance the politics of growth. Real estate leaders working to block public housing understood the threat posed by this tightening alliance between housing and redevelopment supporters. Property Owners Association leader Edward Plantz insisted that the anti-public housing referendum would not have any impact on the city’s redevelopment prospects. “Blight clearance has nothing to do with public housing.” And despite provisions in housing legislation that called for public housing to serve as replacement shelter for those displaced by redevelopment projects, Plantz continued by countering that “[t]enants in blighted areas are never the type that are put into the projects.”65 Such pleas from public housing opponents in the last months of the campaign, maintaining that their measure would stop only public housing, underscored the effectiveness of fusing redevelopment and public housing in this debate.66 The growth-oriented strategy, advanced by Perrin and other housing proponents, reformulated the politics of the debate by dividing real estate conservatives from prodevelopment business and civic leaders. But this strategy, which isolated real estate conservatives, also buttressed racial and class constraints and narrowed the scope of postwar public housing. In midcentury Milwaukee, connections between public housing and slum clearance were read racially. Many of the leading groups in the public housing fight believed genuinely that these twin policies could serve as tools with which to build decent, affordable, and racially integrated housing in the city. Some housing proponents seeking to appease the critics of public housing, however, used the association between these policies to intimate that a coordinated housing and redevelopment program might reinforce Milwaukee’s existing racial boundaries. Early in the fall of 1949, a group of Common Council members stoked racial prejudices when they reacted to a proposed land purchase for rehousing in the northwest section of the city. One alderman worried that black residents of the Sixth Ward displaced by “slum clearance” might be relocated in these white middleclass neighborhoods. Richard Perrin responded indirectly to this query,

65 66

Building of the Wisconsin Democratic Party at Mid-Century,” Wisconsin Law Review (2003): 1–30; and Richard C. Haney, “The Rise of Wisconsin’s New Democrats: A Political Realignment in the Mid-Twentieth Century,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 58:2 (Winter 1974–75): 91–106. “Public Housing Vote Is Likely.” William L. Pieplow to Mayor Zeidler, 19 January 1951, folio 1 “Housing Referendum (1950 – Jan. 1951),” box 179, Zeidler Papers, MPL.

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eliding the issue of race to avoid heightening racist fears and rhetoric. He tried to reassure the alderman that “there is no thought of wholesale dumping of old neighborhoods in these replacement areas.”67 Perrin presented instead a rehousing plan in which current residents of temporary housing (including barracks), mostly white families, would be moved to replacement housing built with federal funds. Those displaced by slum clearance projects would be housed in the vacated temporary housing until replacement housing had been built in the “former” slum area. With the Hillside neighborhood as the site of the first redevelopment project on the drawing boards, this plan sought to calm white Milwaukeeans’ and the aldermen’s apprehensions that displaced lower-income Hillside residents, largely but not exclusively African American, would be relocated to areas other than the city’s black working-class neighborhoods. Such a plan would fortify the city’s existing racial geography. Perrin’s assurances, while keeping a crucial constituency on board, allowed the practices of residential segregation to remain intact.68 For African Americans and members of the labor-liberal coalition who worked for policies that they believed would result in a more just racial order, this strategic move may have dampened expectations that federallyfunded public housing might either upend the city’s racial geography or launch a broad working-class public housing program. They had hoped to use redevelopment to achieve their primary goal of building decent and fair housing that defied racial boundaries. Perrin, a racial liberal and administrator, sought to protect Milwaukee’s relatively new and fragile public housing program. While he could be a forthright advocate for racially integrated housing, Perrin and others might also have surmised that racist anxieties over African Americans moving into white neighborhoods and the increasing identification of public housing as black housing could undermine the city’s development and public housing initiatives. Perrin hoped to maintain a careful balance between housing and redevelopment while aiming for an impossible equilibrium between antithetical racial agendas. Some moderate and even some conservative Common Council members, who earlier had expressed trepidation that public housing would promote racial integration, now threw their support behind the 1951 propublic housing referendum. They hoped that a minimal housing program would advance a redevelopment program while also maintaining the city’s

67 68

“Act to Obtain Housing Aids: Push Slum Clearance,” MJ, 21 September 1949. Ibid. The temporary housing was on the southern edge of the Sixth Ward, on State Street between North 7th and 8th Streets. See also: Amanda I. Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 69–98, passim.

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racial boundaries. Recognizing the potency of this strategic compromise between such differing groups in the pro-public housing coalition, public housing detractors who generally were not found among the ranks of those challenging racism accused the Housing Authority of creating segregated housing. Perrin responded forcefully to these charges: “These crocodile tears are not at all becoming to groups which have been identified with acts whereby secretly, but very cleverly and effectively, segregation has been fostered and sponsored. . . . Public housing has been and will continue to be allocated on the basis of need regardless of the race, color, or creed of the applicant.”69 As the end of the 1951 referenda fight approached, a range of groups that earlier had differed, often quite vigorously, now found themselves awkwardly aligned: from working-class and civil rights advocates for racial justice and public housing, to racial liberals and growth advocates, to pro-redevelopment moderates and conservatives. For these groups, of course, the calculus of how redevelopment and housing fit together varied considerably and their visions for how patterns of racial segregation might be broken or strengthened diverged.70 Just as Milwaukee’s racial politics shaped the 1951 debate, this battle over public housing referenda reshaped the city’s racial politics. The lines of conflict over the referenda spilled far beyond policy debates over housing, redevelopment, and public financing to encompass questions of race and urban citizenship. Although the debate touched on the past, present, and future of all public housing, the Hillside project in the Sixth Ward, identified as the city’s “Negro housing project,” received a disproportionate amount of attention and became the target for anti-public housing forces. The existing Hillside Terrace low-income public housing project, as well as a proposed addition and a planned redevelopment project in the Hillside neighborhood, came under close scrutiny. Parklawn, which had been the focus of earlier controversies that forged the city’s anti-public housing discourse, now drew little direct notice. The new veterans’ projects received considerable mention,

69

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Richard Perrin to Mayor Zeidler, 17 January 1951, folio 1, box 179, Zeidler Papers, MPL; and Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 197. On aldermen and others who shifted positions on public housing, see: Pieplow to Zeidler, 19 January 1951; and Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 207–08. On race, public housing, and redevelopment in other industrial cities, see: John F. Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920–1974 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). On constraints imposed by federal policy, see Arnold R. Hirsch, “‘Containment’ on the Home front: Race and Federal Housing Policy from the New Deal to the Cold War,” Journal of Urban History 26:2 (January 2000): 158–89.

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but the privileged status and political clout of white veterans may have insulated these from concerted attack. Cited unremittingly by proponents and opponents, the Hillside project became the symbol, or even synecdoche, for public housing in the city. In this debate over urban policy, in which the city’s political culture was being recast, the places and people deemed “socially peripheral” in the midcentury city – black neighborhoods and the black working class – became “symbolically central.”71 Amplifying an argument made in the 1930s, public housing opponents complained that project residents did not contribute to city revenues through property taxes (see Figure 7.2). The Housing Authority’s taxexempt projects had negotiated a system of payments-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOT). Federal legislation permitted PILOT to reach a level of up to 10 percent of shelter rents. Unlike the city’s homeowners and landlords, residents of tax-exempt projects did not pay property taxes directly. Although public housing’s compensation through PILOT exceeded that taken in by the city from other tax-exempt institutions (for example, places of worship, colleges, and fraternal and benevolent associations), enemies of public housing exploited worries about lost revenue and property tax burdens. Although declining proportionally, property taxes still made up over half of the city’s revenue. Property taxes had accounted for 70 percent of Milwaukee’s revenue in 1919. In 1947 that share had declined to 59 percent, although by 1951 it had begun to rise again as property values increased. Although Milwaukee relied less heavily on property taxes than comparably sized cities, realtors, builders, savings and loan officials, and political conservatives now sought to foster resentment over property taxes. They reasoned that “tax-paying citizens,” homeowners and landlords, would rally to their side and help to undercut support for public housing in this “city of homes.”72 71

72

Historian Judith Walkowitz examines a related dynamic in City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 20. On PILOT and public housing, see: Housing and Home Finance Agency, “Explanation of ‘Payments in Lieu of Taxes’ Made by Local Housing Authorities,” ca. 1950, and Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee, “The Payment in Lieu of Taxes,” 21 February 1950, in folio “P.I.L.O.T.,” Perrin Papers, MPL; “Study Re: Payments in Lieu of Taxes,” 9 September 1949, folio “Payments in Lieu of Taxes – PILOT,” box 4, Warren Jay Vinton Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University. On tax-exempt property and public housing, see: Harold M. Groves, Wayne Anderson, Harry Kahn, Louise Prober, and Hannah Westfield, Report of the Commission on the Economic Study of Milwaukee, prepared at the request of Mayor Frank P. Zeidler (Milwaukee, 1948), 128, 133, 135–39, 147; and Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee, Annual Report for the Year 1952 (Milwaukee, 1953), 32–33. On federally subsidized housing and property taxes in later years, see George E. Peterson, et al., Property Taxes, Housing and the Cities (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Co., 1973), 73–77.

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fi g u r e 7 . 2 Anti–public housing publicity produced by the Public Housing Referendum Committee during the 1951 referenda fight. In this flyer, the committee focused its attack on “tax free government housing projects.” Source: Public Housing Referendum Committee flyer, folio “Referendum – Housing – 1951,” Richard W. E. Perrin Papers, Series 079, Department of City Development, City of Milwaukee Archives, Milwaukee Public Library. Reproduced by permission of the Milwaukee Public Library.

Anti-public housing activists tapped into wide-ranging cultural anxieties and prejudices about changes in the postwar city and world to impugn both the projects and the people in those projects. William Pieplow argued that such housing should be stopped “unless it pays the same amount as any private citizen.” He continued, “The payments in lieu of taxes which

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the projects pay are nothing but communism.”73 Pieplow condemned public housing and government control as “the rock upon which communism builds.”74 The moral character of public housing residents, because they lived in subsidized housing and paid taxes indirectly, also came under attack. “Are the able bodied citizens of this day too physically soft, morally corrupt, confused, selfish, cowardly as not to be able to provide themselves with shelter?” Drawing upon long-standing anxieties about dependency and public welfare in American political culture, as well as immediate fears about Americans’ resolve in the face of the Cold War and sustained overtones of racial prejudice, conservatives such as Pieplow sought to mark a sharp distinction between tax-paying homeowners and public housing residents.75 Public housing opponents doggedly attacked the legitimacy of what they labeled as “no-tax housing,” targeting their rhetoric and tactics to appeal to taxpayers. Allegations of “socialistic housing” and the language of anticommunism were summoned frequently in these debates. But the framers of the anti-public housing referendum had gauged, probably correctly, that the tax arguments were an even more potent tool for organizing.76 Hence, the fears of communism raised in this debate aimed largely to bolster the tax complaint. These local political arrangements reflected and refined national-level attacks on tax-exempt housing projects, including Senator Joe McCarthy’s allegations during late-1940s congressional hearings. Objecting to reformer Nathan Straus’s projection that public housing might accommodate one-third of the population, McCarthy had contended that this situation would create “such a tax burden on the remainder of the population that the middle income group would also demand public housing.” He conjectured that this would allow

73

74 75

76

“City News,” Journal of Housing (December 1950): 427; “Housing Poll Rebuffed, Now Up to Council.” “Court May Get Petitions Row.” Pieplow to Zeidler, 19 January 1951. On Cold War masculinity, see K. A. Cuordileone, “’Politics in an Age of Anxiety’: Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis in American Masculinity, 1949–1960,” Journal of American History 87:2 (September 2000): 515–45. On public housing and Red Scare rhetoric, see especially Parson, Making a Better World, 103–35. The wording of the referendum had been considered carefully. Freedman, “Group Opposition to Public Housing,” 326. See also “Home-owners Revolt against No-Tax Housing,” MS, 7 January 1951. In their charges against tax exemptions and PILOT, antipublic housing activists also contended that the principles of uniformity and universality for property taxation had been violated. See Glenn W. Fisher, The Worst Tax?: A History of the Property Tax in America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 10–11. On tax-exempt public housing and PILOT controversies, see: Henderson, “Local Deals and the New Deal State,” 346–48, 355–57; Freedman, “Group Opposition to Public Housing”; and Murray, Progressive Housewife, 38–59.

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“public housers” to achieve their “ultimate aim” of socializing all housing and bring about economic ruin: “If two-thirds of the population were housed in subsidized tax exempt projects the economy would not be able to stand it.” This state of alarm, which again anticipated the style the Wisconsin senator would use to broadcast his anticommunist crusade, invigorated conservative assaults against proposals for a broad-based, working-class public housing program.77 Public housing opponents honed these tax fears to appeal directly to homeowners’ and landlords’ economic interests and anxieties. The City Hall clash between CIO members and antipublic housing petitioners, who tried to persuade taxpayers standing in line that they should sign up against public housing, sprang from this strategy. The 1951 anti-public housing argument was cast most notably in the language of citizenship. Public housing opponents resuscitated an idea of urban citizenship rooted in private property ownership and property tax paying. This vision of urban citizenship stood in stark contrast to that proffered earlier by the labor-left proponents of a capacious public housing program and working-class politics. But this brand of citizenship would leave its mark on postwar urban political culture. The anti-public housing forces contended that public housing residents, the occupants of “no-tax” housing, failed to fulfill this property obligation of citizenship. Public housing residents’ legitimacy as city inhabitants with full rights, obligations, and entitlements to social provisions – their social citizenship – was challenged.78 Referring especially to low-income African-American Hillside residents, public housing opponents labeled project tenants as

77

78

McCarthy quoted in Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 93. See also David M. Oshinsky, Senator Joseph McCarthy and the American Labor Movement (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976), 60–86; and Chapter 6. In the public housing opponents’ hierarchy, homeowners stood at the top, followed by private renters, and finally public housing tenants. See Jo Ann E. Argersinger, “Contested Visions of American Democracy: Citizenship, Public Housing, and the International Arena,” Journal of Urban History 36:6 (2010): 796–800. On citizenship and social citizenship, see: Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Treated Like Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998); and Alice Kessler-Harris, “In the Nation’s Image: The Gendered Limits of Social Citizenship in the Depression Era,” Journal of American History 86:3 (December 1999): 1251–79. On homeownership, tax-paying, and citizenship, see: Margaret Garb, City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003),135–59; and Thomas J. Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940–1964,” Journal of American History 82:2 (September 1995): 551–78.

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dependent. Urban citizenship, in turn, was defined racially, with black public housing residents stigmatized as dependent and the least deserving of full citizenship. Such characterizations of public housing residents stood in stark contrast to depictions of white families moving to the suburbs during this time, the beneficiaries of federally subsidized mortgage programs, tax policies, and highway construction.79 The referendum controversy, then, reinforced the spatial and social barriers isolating the city’s African-American residents, both recent migrants and long-time Milwaukeeans. The Milwaukee County Property Owners Association’s Plantz, who long had opposed public housing, captured this when he conceded that Sixth Ward residents, unlike others in Milwaukee, still faced a housing shortage. He argued against responding to this need, however, contending that “[if] we put up more public housing there will just be more and more people moving up here from the south.”80 A year later Plantz was more explicit: “The only thing that has kept 10,000 – aye, 20,000 – Negroes from coming up here is the lack of housing.”81 For Plantz and others, more public housing meant more Sixth Ward housing; more Sixth Ward housing meant more black housing; and more black housing meant more black migration from the South. Many whites, and even some middle-class African Americans, feared a rapid increase in Milwaukee’s black working-class population. For many players in these early postwar debates, black working-class migration from the South represented the antithesis of the modern city. Race, crystallizing around the image of more black workers arriving in the city, demarcated the metaphorical field upon which “progress” and the “modern city” were defined. Previously, the working-class city had served as the metaphor for the “outmoded city.” By the 1950s, as evident first in the 1951 public housing controversy and then in the 1952 and 1956 mayoral contests, a class-specific understanding of race had become the central metaphor for

79

80 81

On dependency, see Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State,” Signs 19:2 (Winter 1994): 309–36. On policies and subsidies benefitting suburbs and their residents, see: David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Thomas W. Hanchett, “The Other ‘Subsidized Housing’: Federal Aid to Suburbanization, 1940s to 1960s,” in From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America, eds. John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Szylvian (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 163–79; and Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). “Public Housing Vote Is Likely.” Plantz’s 1952 statement quoted in John Gurda, The Making of Milwaukee (Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 1999), 363.

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“urban decay.” By invoking the migration of black workers from the South, the president of the Property Owners Association both kept the housing debate focused on the Sixth Ward and rejected black Milwaukeeans’ claims to urban citizenship.82 White privilege in this debate was constructed on a foundation of taxpaying, private homeownership and citizenship. Leaders of the referendum campaign enlisted a contingent of white landlords and homeowners. They assailed Milwaukee’s public housing program, mobilizing the Cold Warera discourses and practices of private enterprise and white racism to define the city and its political culture. This amalgam of political economy, racial identity, and citizenship claims helps to explain the persistence and potency of the anti-public housing leaders’ ceaseless assaults on the seemingly arcane system of payment-in-lieu-of-taxes. Joined with Cold War anticommunism, which in turn reinforced their defense of private enterprise and inflamed concerns about citizenship, the attack was indeed formidable.83 Advocates for public housing recognized the hazards of this taxpayer politics and sought to address these challenges in a number of ways. The FTC’s Otto Jirikowic spoke as a taxpayer, touting the benefits of a broad and generous housing program. “I own my home and pay taxes, too. I’m happy to pay.” He continued: “Let the people be moved into even $17,000 units. . . . I’m not jealous. It will make good families and good children.” In addition to these community-wide benefits, he also contended that better housing offered the best defense against communism.84 The AFL

82

83

84

The argument that race functioned not only as a dividing line but marked the metaphorical field on which “backwardness” and “modernity” were defined is drawn from Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). See also Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). On black migrants and attitudes toward migrants, see: Dougherty, More Than One Struggle; Paul Geib, “From Mississippi to Milwaukee: A Case Study of Southern Black Migration to Milwaukee, 1940–1970” Journal of Negro History 83:4 (Autumn 1998): 229–48; and Kimberly L. Phillips, AlabamaNorth: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915–45 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). In the 1956 mayoral campaign, Zeidler’s opponent circulated rumors that he had put up billboards in the South, inviting African Americans to move to Milwaukee. “The Shame of Milwaukee,” Time, 2 April 1956, 23; Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government,” chapter IV, 414–38; and Kevin D. Smith, “From Socialism to Racism: The Politics of Class and Identity in Postwar Milwaukee,” Michigan Historical Review 29 (Spring 2003): 86–87. On racialized citizenship and white privilege, see: Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 146–71; and David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005). “Housing Poll Rebuffed, Now Up to Council.”

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newspaper, addressing especially the portion of its members who, as skilled workers, owned a home, charged that the “Real Estate Lobby” tried to divide the city. By placing newspaper advertisements that asked “Do you want to pay the taxes on your neighbor’s home?,” real estate interests had sought to “incite rebellion of taxpayers against . . . housing projects.” Instead, the AFL and others asserted, housing projects should be supported by taxpayers and residents alike because “such projects really take the load off other taxpayers.”85 The CIO concurred that taxpayers and the city itself would benefit financially from the public housing program.86 Public housing proponents strengthened their defense against antipublic housing taxpayer politics by organizing the County Property Owners for Public Housing (CPOPH) in 1951. The very title of this group sought to establish that one could be both a property owner and a public housing supporter. With the business representative of the Bakery Workers Local 244 serving as secretary, the group advanced three main arguments. “First, slums produce extra costs; second, the available federal money comes from the taxes that are partly paid by Milwaukeeans and if not used up will be spent elsewhere; and finally, public housing projects pay more in lieu of taxes to the city than the same properties paid on taxes before.”87 In a flyer “Facts on Housing from Home Owners,” the group also contrasted the shortcomings of “private enterprise” to the advantages of “public enterprise” (a prominent phrase in Zeidler’s mayoral campaign) in providing adequate housing for all and carrying out slum clearance. “Unless public enterprise can carry on, our slums will continue to spread and the center of our city will continue to rot.” When all the costs and benefits were calculated, the group argued, homeowners, property-tax payers, and the city gained from public housing and slum clearance. Some who heard this message, however, might also have interpreted it as a call for black containment. By warning about slums spreading out from a rotting center, an area of the city that many understood to be the black section of the city, the prohousing CPOPH turned to a language of urban decline that resembled that of the anti-public housing Property Owners Association, albeit with a less explicitly antagonistic racial content. A coordinated strategy of public housing and redevelopment could, from such a perspective, prevent black residents from relocating into areas 85

86

87

“No Tax Loss in Housing,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 8 February 1951. See also: “Suggested five-minute talk for speakers on anti-public housing referendum,” ca. 1951, folio 7D, box 214, Krug Speeches – Miscellaneous Collection, MPL; and “Public Housing Pays Off,” Wisconsin CIO News, 26 January 1951. “Public Housing Pays Off”; and “Slums Cost You Money,” Wisconsin CIO News, 9 February 1951. “‘No’ Vote on Referendum,” Milwaukee Labor Press, 15 March 1951.

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fi g u r e 7 . 3 Citizens’ Anti-Slum Committee publication contrasting “slum” and Hillside project photographs to argue that the city will benefit financially from public housing and urban redevelopment. Referendum News, 3 April 1951, folio “Referendum – Housing – 1951,” Richard W. E. Perrin Papers, Series 079, Department of City Development, City of Milwaukee Archives, Milwaukee Public Library. Reproduced by permission of the Milwaukee Public Library.

defined as white neighborhoods. By elevating the interests of property owners in the prohousing coalition, this group may have helped to summon needed support especially from white property owners, while simultaneously straining a coalition in which African-American activists and groups had stood at the core.88 Further acknowledging the threat of the “no-tax housing” pitch, public housing defenders tried repeatedly to show that public housing residents paid more into the city coffers than they had as residents of dilapidated private housing. A number of advocates, including the CIO and the CASC, argued that the benefits exceeded the costs. A Referendum News photo set titled “Slum Removal Brings City Increased Revenue” contrasted dilapidated housing and the Hillside project, making the point that the project’s “in lieu” payments to the city amounted to double what had been collected earlier in taxes from the run-down housing in the area. The city also paid less for police, fire, and health services after the housing project replaced slum housing (see Figure 7.3).89 Anticipating that the “entire [public

88

89

Flyer, Milwaukee Property Owners for Public Housing, ca. 1951, folio 7D, box 214, Krug Speeches – Miscellaneous Collection, MPL; Seligman, Block by Block; Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis. “Slum Removal Brings City Increased Revenue,” Referendum News, 3 April 1951, folio “Referendum – Housing – 1951,” Perrin Papers, MPL.

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housing] program appears to be in jeopardy by reason of these attacks,” Mayor Zeidler asked the Housing Authority’s Perrin to calculate what was paid to the city before and after public housing and blight elimination. Zeidler wrote, “I am sure that you will find that any blighted area is not paying for its share of government, and that you will also find that people who are removed from blighted areas, from barracks, or from trailers, will be paying approximately as much tax under the new [PILOT] system as they paid under the old.” The mayor instructed Perrin to provide sample cases from the Northlawn, Southlawn, and Hillside projects.90 In one of a series of responses to the mayor, Perrin and the Housing Authority estimated that the city would collect 179 percent more in revenue from families in veterans’ housing than it had in taxes from those in temporary housing or doubled-up living conditions. For families in the low-income Hillside project, the city would collect 22 percent more through PILOT than it had when these families lived in “substandard dwellings.”91 In another report, the Housing Authority calculated that the average Hillside resident “formerly paid $24.68 per year in taxes as compared to $30.00 as a payment in lieu of taxes.”92 More dramatically, Perrin pointed to a Sixth Ward building that had burned down and cost three lives. The owner of this private forty-five-unit building paid only $307 per year in taxes, or less than $7 for each family.93 In contrast to the tax and moral “burdens” that housing opponents denounced, Perrin and his allies believed they demonstrated that public housing benefitted the city and its taxpayers. Despite such proof of pecuniary advantages for the city, however, Perrin recognized that the public housing battle was fought on different grounds. He concluded one report: “It will be very difficult, of course, to convince people who do not want to be convinced of this self-evident truth.”94 As Perrin feared, these cost-benefit arguments did not sway opponents. This was not a debate to be won or lost on the balance sheet. The backers of the pro-public housing initiative, taking on an opposition 90

91

92

93

94

Frank P. Zeidler to Richard W. E. Perrin, 22 December 1949, folio 1 “Public Housing, 1949–1951,” box 180, Zeidler Papers, MPL. “Public Housing Pays Off”; “Slums Cost You Money”; “No Tax Loss in Housing”; and Citizens’ Anti-Slum Committee, “Public Housing – A Sound Investment,” ca. 1951, folio 1, box 180, Zeidler Papers, MPL. Richard W. E. Perrin to Mayor Frank P. Zeidler, 27 June 1950, folio 1 “Public Housing, 1949–1951,” box 180, Zeidler Papers, MPL. Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee, “The Payment In Lieu Of Taxes.” See also “Public Housing Yields Cities More Revenue than Did Former Taxes,” Wall Street Journal, 30 January 1951. Richard W. E. Perrin, “The Case for Public Housing,” 4 February 1951, 10, folio 2 “Housing Referendum (February – April 1951),” box 179, Zeidler Papers, MPL. Perrin to Zeidler, 27 June 1950.

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now fueled by anticommunist and racialized taxpayer arguments, managed to draw together a varied collection of supporters who endeavored to put the city’s redevelopment and housing programs on track. At the heart of this new coalition were adherents of working-class politics and proponents of growth politics who backed – respectively but also contradictorily – a broad public housing program and a narrowly defined housing program that would propel Milwaukee’s redevelopment. On April 3, 1951, Milwaukeeans passed both the pro- and anti-public housing referenda. Over the next days and years, Milwaukeeans would struggle to interpret the results and implications of this perplexing outcome.95 The anti-public housing measure passed with a slim 51 percent majority, a margin of just 1,840 votes. The pro-public housing and redevelopment referendum passed by a larger 10,725-vote margin, garnering more than 56 percent of the total votes (see Tables 7.1 and 7.2, appendix). About one-third of registered Milwaukeeans voted, a solid turnout for an off-year spring election. The rent control measure also scored a victory, with 59 percent of the vote but a slightly lower number of voters weighing in on the question.96 The anti-public housing measure found its strongest support in the northwest Twenty-second and Twenty-sixth Wards, in which home values, homeownership rates, income levels, and the proportion of white-collar workers ranked among the highest in the city (see Map 1.1). Sixty-one percent of those voting in these areas favored putting the brakes on Milwaukee’s public housing program. These two northwest wards also scored the highest no votes on the pro-public housing measure. In contrast, the wards solidly backing the city’s housing and redevelopment program included those in older sections of the city with some of the worst housing conditions, greater numbers of lower-income residents, and lower homeownership rates. More than 70 percent of those voting in the Third, Fourth, and Sixth Wards marked yes for the pro-public housing referendum. These wards, areas for which public housing or redevelopment projects had been initiated or proposed, also topped the tallies for no votes (over 60 percent) on the anti-public housing measure. The pro-public housing and redevelopment measure also gained significant support in a set of older districts – the First and Eighteenth Wards – that were home to both workers and some of the city’s wealthiest residents. In addition to the Third and Fourth Wards, the

95

96

“Anti-Public-Housing, Slum Removal Referendums Both Favored as Polls: Two Measures Conflict,” MJ, 4 April 1951; and “Housing Mixup Seems Headed for Courts,” Milwaukee Sentinel, 5 April 1951. Board of Election Commissioners, Twenty-first Biennial Report, 217–19, 279; and Common Council, Milwaukee Annual Report . . . 1951, 26–27, 52–54.

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First and Eighteenth Wards had the highest yes votes as a percentage of registered voters (the Sixth Ward dropped off the list because of its lower voter turnout rate). The Eighteenth Ward, which had been the top supporter of the progrowth debt referendum in 1947, appears to have favored an aggressive urban policy that included public housing and redevelopment programs. This ward had the largest percentage of white-collar workers and the highest house values in the city, yet a homeownership rate that fell in the middle of the city’s range. The First Ward, also near those areas slated for redevelopment, contained a mix of white-collar and working-class residents. Homeownership rates in the First, Third, and Fourth Wards were the lowest in the city. Such results underscore the complex alliance forming around a linked redevelopment and public housing agenda, drawing in working-class support and appealing to renters, while also indicating the importance of corporate and downtown support for these programs. This distinction between older districts supporting public housing and redevelopment and newer areas of the city voting to quash the programs indicates a critical dimension of postwar growth politics.97 Further consideration of the referenda results points to an emerging conservative homeowner politics. This dynamic is evident through an analysis of the yes vote on the anti-public housing referendum and the no vote on the pro-public housing measure (see Tables 7.3, 7.4, and 7.5, appendix). Opposition to public housing was defined especially along the lines of homeownership. The strength of this opposition, however, was not equal for working-class and upper-middle-class homeowners. Rather, the intensity of anti-public housing sentiment increased steadily as income levels rose. Led by realtors and members of the home-building industry, middle- and upper-middle-income homeowners such as those in the rapidly developing Twenty-sixth Ward gave this anti-public housing politics its most solid backing. The increase of homeownership in Milwaukee from 32 percent in 1940 to approximately 42 percent in 1950 (or from 97

Board of Election Commissioners, Twenty-first Biennial Report; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1950 United States Census of Population, Census Tract Statistics: Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Adjacent Area (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1952); 1950 United States Census of Housing: Block Statistics, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1952). Calculating the yes vote for the pro-public housing referendum as a percentage of registered voters highlights a set of wards and constituencies that proved especially important at this juncture in the city’s history. On renter politics, see Freeman, WorkingClass New York. On the working-class character of these Eastside wards, see Thelma “Queen Tillie” Kamuchey and Jim “Rabbi” Hanley, Fractured Tales of Milwaukee’s Eastside: A True Story about the Germans, the Poles, the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, and the Greeks (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2010).

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37 to 50 percent in the county) also may have strengthened this bloc politically and socially. White-collar workers and skilled workers, labor’s elite, could be found on either side of the debate. Whereas a divide between skilled and white-collar workers’ voting patterns had been apparent in the 1947 debt vote and the 1948 mayoral race, this gap diminished noticeably in 1951. Even so, skilled workers who owned modest homes were unlikely to have constituted a major portion of the anti-public housing constituency. While civic, business, and liberal leaders had worked successfully to build a broad, cross-class alliance supporting redevelopment and public housing – much as was imagined by the Milwaukee Journal and other growth proponents – higher income homeowners were more likely to constitute the core of the opposition to public housing.98 Among other tiers of Milwaukee’s working class, the anti-public housing efforts foundered while the pro-public housing side managed to unite a broad collection of interests. Attacks on public housing found little support among factory workers or operatives. This important segment of Milwaukee’s working class, which had helped to elect Zeidler as mayor in 1948 (but did not display a strong pattern in 1947), turned down the arguments of the anti-public housing campaign. Laborers, most of whom were renters, were especially unlikely to join the anti-public housing side. This group of lower-income working-class Milwaukeeans that had weighed in less decisively during the 1947 and 1948 contests now spurned the real estate industry’s efforts to stall Milwaukee’s public housing program. African-American voters, many of whom were laborers and operatives, appear to have provided strong support for public housing, even though turnout rates in the city’s black neighborhoods fell below the city-wide average. Finally, white voters who lived near Milwaukee’s black neighborhoods, most of whom were working-class but also included wealthier First Ward residents, were less inclined to oppose public housing than those on the outer edges of the city.99 In short, laborers and upper-middle-income

98

99

In addition to the tables in the Appendix, see Chapter 5 for a discussion of the data and methodology used in these statistical analyses. Regression analyses of the “yes” anti-public housing vote and the “no” pro-public housing vote yield the clearest results; these results, in turn, corroborate nonquantitative findings. Inconclusive results for other analyses of the votes lend credence to the interpretation presented here. On homeownership rates, see Milwaukee Public Library, Milwaukee City and County: A Statistical History (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Public Library, 1958), 13. Given Milwaukee’s racial segregation and the absence of precinct-level data for midcentury referenda contests, a statistical analysis of the referenda votes comparing black and white voters remains inconclusive. White voters living near African-American districts, who appear not to have been public housing opponents, might have had a better understanding of central city housing conditions; they also were likely to encounter African Americans in their everyday lives. On white-black relations and proximity in the

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homeowners stood at opposite ends of the spectrum in this referendum fight. The CIO, AFL, and other housing advocates appear to have succeeded in keeping their membership and other working-class voters in the public housing column. At the same time, the ability of the pro-public housing referendum to tie together not only laborers, operatives, and some skilled workers, but also a portion of white-collar workers, wealthier Milwaukeeans, and business leaders, points to that coalition’s effectiveness in organizing around a combined housing and redevelopment agenda. Historical interpretations of midcentury populist impulses point to a white working-class politics that likely would have been receptive to many dimensions of the anti-public housing message, from its anticommunism to its white racism to its antitax and antigovernment appeals. The Milwaukee referendum which intended to block public housing, however, generated only limited support from white workers and their families. The opposition to public housing organized especially by the local real estate interests managed to rally some voters around the causes of taxes and homeownership. They had begun to fashion an identity politics for white, tax-paying homeowners. In comparison to the votes in the 1947 debt referendum or the 1948 mayoral election, homeownership had become by 1951 an increasingly important handle for political identity and variable for defining political alignments. But this was not a moment when working-class politics, unmoored from the New Deal order, drifted toward a working-class conservatism. Nor was it a juncture when white working-class politics broke irrevocably from the interracial coalitions that had been a part of midcentury housing politics. The core of the anti-public housing camp in 1951 was populated instead by upper- and middle-income homeowners – not working-class homeowners. Postwar conservatism found its center of gravity in these upper and middle reaches of urban society.100

100

midcentury city, see Wendell Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 51–103. Studies of racial divisions, “defensive localism,” and white working-class backlash in industrial cities include: Arnold R. Hirsch, “Massive Resistance in the Urban North: Trumball Park, Chicago, 1953–1966,” Journal of American History 82:2 (September 1995): 522–50; Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics”; Colleen Doody, Detroit’s Cold War: The Origins of Postwar Conservatism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 46–75; and James Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). On the making of populist conservatism, see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 221–42. In contrast, see: Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967); Michael Rogin, “Wallace and the Middle Class: The White Backlash in Wisconsin,” Public Opinion Quarterly 30:1 (Spring 1966): 98–108; Stephen M. Leahy, “Polish American Reaction to Civil Rights in Milwaukee, 1963 to 1965,” Polish American Studies 63:1 (Spring 2006):

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White racism and the structures of racial separation, of course, were pervasive in the city at this time. Exclusionary practices driven by appeals to homeownership certainly were ingrained in this particular debate and in the dynamics of postwar metropolitan development. Race especially played a prominent role in the anti-public housing leaders’ language of urban citizenship. They depicted the virtuous urban citizen as a homeowning, property-tax-paying, white Milwaukeean. Public housing was marked as black housing. The city’s emerging growth coalition accepted, in part, this discourse of racialized housing. With the Hillside project at the center of the debate and diminishing attention given to the possibility of racially integrated public housing outside the center city, advocacy of a tight programmatic and geographic link between downtown redevelopment and public housing resulted in the growing acceptance and approval of a racially segregated public housing program. Further, public housing became subservient to a privately driven redevelopment program and was limited by the racial rules and exclusions of the private housing market. At the top of the new policy hierarchy stood a redevelopment program that cleared the way for private investment and reinforced racial boundaries. Public housing that addressed the needs of lower-income workers, white or black, became secondary and would be constricted instead by the demands of redevelopment enterprises. The changes in political culture that had the greatest impact during this 1951 episode and during the early postwar period were twofold. First, as noted, this debate helped to consolidate a discernible middle- and uppermiddle-class homeowner conservatism. Second, this duel over public housing referenda accelerated the steady displacement of working-class politics by growth politics. At an earlier time, public housing’s most ardent opponents’ fears and supporters’ hopes conveyed an understanding of the label “political housing”: places in which an active and even militant working class might foster its collective social and political power. The public

35–56; and Kenneth Durr, Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). On upper- and middle-income homeowners’ and taxpayers’ roles in later-twentieth-century conservatism, including anti-tax movements, see: Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2005); Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Isaac William Martin, The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the Property Tax Transformed American Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); and Self, American Babylon, 316–26. See also: Molly C. Michelmore, Tax and Spend: The Welfare State, Tax Politics, and the Limits of American Liberalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); and Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).

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housing program that remained at the end of this postwar debate had been deflated, marginalized and, in large part, depoliticized. Stigmatized racially and economically, this lower plank of the nation’s two-tiered housing policy would suffer the neglect of a program with dwindling support and a vocal opposition. Likewise, while the midcentury labor-left coalition earlier had promoted a broad interracial public housing program, they now found themselves junior partners in the postwar development and housing debates. These contests had altered the city’s democratic political culture, shortening the reach of working-class politics while augmenting growth politics.101 Although on the surface the two 1951 propositions appeared irreconcilable, the results of these votes plotted the trajectory of postwar political culture and urban policy. With pro- and anti-public housing arguments essentially canceling one another out, the progrowth agenda prevailed. A constricted public housing program was overshadowed by redevelopment plans and the politics of growth. While Milwaukee’s redevelopment program faced legal and political challenges throughout the 1950s, public and private initiatives sold on the basis of growth moved ahead. Milwaukee’s public housing program languished, falling far behind that of comparable cities. Although Mayor Zeidler had proposed earlier to build ten thousand units of public housing, the city was slated to add two thousand five hundred low-income public housing units following passage of the 1949 Housing Act. Milwaukee’s housing program slowed considerably, however, after the referenda controversy; it took more than fifteen years to approach even the lower target number. Racially charged complaints about public housing as a tax burden festered, leaving projects open to future accusations of expendability and exposing public housing residents to public attacks that questioned their worth and place in the city. In Milwaukee and elsewhere, this alignment of race, public housing, nontaxpayer status, and dependency proved to be potent.102 101

102

On the two-tiered housing policy see: Catherine Bauer, “The Dreary Deadlock of Public Housing,” Architectural Forum 106:5 (May 1957): 140–42, 219, 221; and Roger Biles, “Public Housing and the Postwar Urban Renaissance, 1949–1973,” in From Tenements to the Taylor Homes, 143–62. On public housing’s constricted role in redevelopment and renewal initiatives, see (in addition to earlier citations): Richard M. Flanagan, “The Housing Act of 1954: The Sea Change in National Urban Policy,” Urban Affairs Review 33:2 (1997): 265–86; Lawrence Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); and Alexander von Hoffman, “The Lost History of Urban Renewal,” Journal of Urbanism 1:3 (November 2008): 281–301. Rast, “Governing the Regimeless City”; Robert M. Beckley, “The Effects of Federal Programs on Housing and the Quality of Life: The Milwaukee Case,” in Milwaukee’s Economy: Market Forces, Community Problems, and Federal Policies, eds. John P. Blair and Ronald S. Edari (Chicago: Federal Reserve Bank, 1978), 145–46; and

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The politics of growth had not altogether displaced challenges to the discipline of the market. Nor had racially based prejudices and constraints extinguished cries for racial understanding and equality. Nor had anticommunism and growth politics erased working-class politics. Nevertheless, this public housing debate etched racial boundaries, Cold War demands, and growth politics more firmly into the urban landscape, constraining its citizenry and narrowing policy options. Growth politics, previously locked in battle with working-class politics, now shaped redevelopment, housing, and urban policy in Milwaukee and cities across the country.103

103

Phyllis M. Santacroce, “Rediscovering the Role of the State: Housing Policy and Practice in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1900–1970” (Ph.D. diss., University of WisconsinMilwaukee, 2009), 121–84. Demands for fair housing, racial egalitarianism, and full citizenship, of course, did not cease. See, for instance: Bernice C. Lindsay, “Negro Housing in Milwaukee” [letter to the editor], MJ, 25 May 1951; Ardie A. Halyard, “Negroes Are Taxpayers” [letter to the editor], MJ, 5 June 1951; and Patrick D. Jones, The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 169–209. See also: Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). On urban redevelopment and renewal in Milwaukee, see: Roger L. Franks, “The History of Urban Renewal in Milwaukee” (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1976); Max Kurz, “The Impact of Urban Redevelopment on the Residents of the Lower Third Ward in the City of Milwaukee” (unpublished manuscript, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1961); Anthony M. Orum, City-Building in America (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995); Joel Rast, “Critical Junctures, Long-Term Processes: Urban Redevelopment in Chicago and Milwaukee, 1945–1980,” Social Science History 33:4 (Winter 2009): 393–426; Judith A. Simonsen, “The Third Ward: Symbol of Ethnic Identity,” Milwaukee History 10:2 (Summer 1987): 61–76; and Zeidler, “A Liberal in City Government.” See also: Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 153–219; and Teaford, Rough Road to Renaissance. On the “urban renewal order,” see Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Epilogue Revisiting Postwar Democracy: A City with Class

Just five months after voting on the dueling housing referenda, Milwaukee leaders and residents assembled on Wisconsin Avenue to remake Labor Day into a celebration for the “downtown modernization program.” By the mid-1950s, the Greater Milwaukee Committee (GMC), formerly the 1948 Corporation, claimed partial success in forming a consensus around their version of the productive city. In a speech commemorating the tenth anniversary of the organization, the president of the committee credited the group with unshackling public officials from “outmoded procedures” and enabling the city to “meet the dynamics of a modern and expanding economy.”1 While much work remained to be done – from lakefront development to highways to a range of urban renewal and civic building projects – the leaders of the GMC celebrated both concrete accomplishments and Milwaukeeans’ embrace of what the group touted as an “It Can Be Done” attitude. The Milwaukee Journal, invested fully in the modernization program, boasted that the GMC “has been as responsible as any other force for changing the thinking of the community . . . .”2 A shift in Milwaukee’s political culture was underway as growth politics and a postwar democratic order, tied to the logic of the market, crowded out working-class politics. Growth politics’ proponents had cleared the way for a new “common sense” about the city’s problems and prospects. The path leading up to the 1951 parade and onward was neither straight nor smooth. Advocates for growth politics intended to construct a modern, efficient metropolis by doing away with “Dear Old Lady Thrift.” They set

1

2

Greater Milwaukee Committee, Annual Report, 1955, (Milwaukee, 1955), unprocessed collection, Department of City Development, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “For a Greater Milwaukee,” in Milwaukee Marches Forward: Civic Progress Today and Tomorrow, Sunday supplement in Milwaukee Journal, 2 September 1956, 37.

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themselves against a range of antagonists who carried Milwaukee’s working-class politics into battles over housing, petty gambling, labor’s power, city finances, and redevelopment. Alliances cobbled together during each of these disputes, but especially those formed during the 1947 debt debate and the 1951 public housing controversy, drew urban liberals and conservatives into the gravitational pull of growth politics. The GMC and other growth politics proponents signaled that their achievements and future plans would help to erase class from the city’s public life. They considered class frictions and divisions to be remnants of an obsolete past, wreckage that could be cast off in a postwar era of abundance. In prescriptions for modernization and proposals for an efficient Milwaukee, the GMC and other growth advocates presumed to speak not just for the city-as-a-whole but for the entire metropolitan area. Benefits for one would be benefits for all. And in the fashion of postwar pluralism, these business and civic leaders suggested that the many different groups in the city could forego the conflicts of the past. Opinions and interests could be aired publicly and would be reconciled easily once everyone agreed about the first principles of urban life. Growth and the demands of the market, understood as the foundation of the modern metropolis, would be removed from political debate and contention. This vision of an efficient, classless metropolis driven by growth politics was itself, however, steeped in a particular idea and language of class that had emerged out of conflicts with working-class politics in the 1940s. The everyday assumption that liberal democracy and market capitalism are logically and historically joined, a belief that would animate end-of-thecentury urban neoliberalism, began to gain currency in the wake of these midcentury frictions between working-class and growth politics. The 1950s proved to be a period of economic and population growth for the Milwaukee metropolitan area and regions surrounding other industrial cities. But the abundance was not spread evenly. Cities and their remaining working-class residents started to fall behind, while the postwar democracy that the GMC and their allies imagined paid little attention to these inequities. Growth tied to market-based initiatives, rather than egalitarian policies, fit the new way of understanding the modern metropolis. Nevertheless, Milwaukee was – and would remain – a city with class.3

3

For critiques of the equation of democracy and capitalism, see: Michael Denning, “Neither Capitalist nor American: The Democracy as Social Movement,” in Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (New York: Verso, 2004), 209–26; and Alice Kessler-Harris, “Capitalism, Democracy, and the Emancipation of Belief,” Journal of American History 99:3 (December 2012): 725–40. See also Frank Zeidler interviewed in Jason DeParle, “Reforms Punish Poor, Veteran Socialist Says,” New York Times, 7 April 1999, A14.

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Milwaukee did not suddenly adopt wholesale the logic and language of growth politics. In a city with a deep history of working-class politics, the ideals of broad democratic access, local autonomy, and egalitarian distribution continued to exert an influence on policy and public opinion. Most importantly, the relative strength of organized labor in 1950s Milwaukee and Frank Zeidler’s tenure as mayor kept working-class politics and critiques of growth politics alive in the public arena. And while urban redevelopment overshadowed public housing during this period, this too was a more complex story. As in many other cities, redevelopment and renewal projects focused heavily on on downtown ventures to benefit retail, service, and finance industries. Milwaukee officials, however, also targeted some redevelopment endeavors toward the retention of manufacturing jobs and industrial development. Mayor Zeidler especially provided the impetus for these efforts, at the same time that he pursued an aggressive annexation campaign to secure the land for industrial development. Soon the surrounding suburbs put a stop to the city’s designs for annexation. Zeidler’s successor, Henry Maier, eventually changed course.4 By the 1960s, demands for change and working-class access to local resources were made especially by Milwaukee’s African-American activists and their allies. They sought to address inequities in education, employment, and housing. During the 1940s, calls for racially egalitarian policies and practices in housing, leisure, and access to city services had fueled a burst of working-class politics, driven in particular by CIO militancy and a fragile interracial coalition. But racism, of course, permeated all levels of Milwaukee society. Housing, employment, recreation, and almost all other aspects of midcentury life were structured around white privilege and discrimination against the city’s black residents. Many white proponents of working-class politics and growth politics shared in these racist practices and attitudes. Calls for racial egalitarianism during this period were indeed significant, but faced daunting obstacles. In midcentury housing disputes, including the pivotal controversies over public housing, broad-based egalitarian approaches were displaced by a constrained racial liberalism and a narrowed conception of public housing. Housing again was at the center of contention in the 1960s as grassroots activists and leaders built toward a local open housing ordinance and federal action. This organizing provoked heated reactions from

4

John M. McCarthy, Making Milwaukee Mightier: Planning and the Politics of Growth, 1910–1960 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009); and Joel Rast, “Critical Junctures, Long-Term Processes: Urban Redevelopment in Chicago and Milwaukee, 1945–1980,” Social Science History 33:4 (Winter 2009): 393–426.

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many corners, including obstruction by city leaders and outbursts of racial hatred in white neighborhoods. The main objective of the open housing movement was to break the grip of residential segregation that long had disadvantaged African Americans. This also challenged what white owners and real estate interests argued were the prerogatives of private property. Echoes of the 1940s civil rights actions could be heard in the streets and in City Hall as Milwaukee’s open housing campaign crested during the second half of the 1960s. In these two decades after the 1940s, then, the vision of the city as an engine of private economic growth had begun to crowd out, but did not eliminate, alternative visions for change, development, and democracy.5 No two cities followed the same course during the 1940s, the 1950s, and beyond. But patterns and conflicts that parallel those evident in Milwaukee can be observed in other Rust Belt cities, as well as in mixedindustrial cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. For instance, as in Milwaukee and elsewhere at the close of World War II, residents of San Francisco debated the direction of their city when they examined, discussed, and fought over housing and redevelopment policies proposed for the Western Addition neighborhood. This contest drew in business leaders, planners, and politicians, as well as members and leaders of labor, civil rights, veterans’, women’s, civic, religious, and other organizations. Many initially supported the formation of a redevelopment program to contend with the pressures of “urban blight,” housing shortages, and postwar demobilization. Disagreements over “slum clearance” and redevelopment, however, soon divided residents as they articulated divergent ideas about the city’s needs and purposes. By the early 1950s, privatist conceptions of large-scale redevelopment that aimed to modernize the Cold War-era metropolis pushed opposing notions of urban reconstruction to the edge of local political culture and policy-making. In each city, proponents of broad-based housing policies that often aspired toward egalitarian goals confronted a consolidating growth politics coalition. These and related conflicts between working-class politics and growth politics shaped postwar urban democracy. The perceptions of the city

5

Patrick D. Jones, The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Jack Dougherty, More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and Greg J. Carman, “Walls of Exclusion: The Persistence of Residential Racial Segregation in Metropolitan Milwaukee” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2010). On organizing and participation, see also Marc Simon Rodriguez, The Tejano Diaspora: Mexican Americanism and Ethnic Politics in Texas and Wisconsin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

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and the policies that prevailed were political outcomes, not simply natural or inevitable developments of the modern city.6 During the last four decades of the twentieth century as Milwaukee’s population declined, it struggled, like so many other Rust Belt cities, with the loss of decent-paying, union jobs. Manufacturing’s decline had begun earlier, but from the late 1960s to the start of the twenty-first century, bluecollar Milwaukee contracted more than three-fold. In suburban and outlying areas, however, manufacturing employment rose. By the 1970s, the majority of the metropolitan area’s manufacturing jobs were located outside the city limits. Service jobs and public-sector employment would fill some of this gap, but urban under- and unemployment rates increased. Employment and income disparities between the region’s suburbs and the city (especially the inner city) widened. At the same time, the racial dimensions of these metropolitan changes became increasingly stark. The racial and economic gulf between the city and the suburbs deepened as did the divide between white and black residents in the city itself.7 The midcentury shift in urban political culture illustrated by two Wisconsin Avenue episodes – the 1947 parade-restriction ordinance fight and the 1951 Labor Day parade – can also be seen in a comparison of books written by two Milwaukee mayors on either side to the midcentury divide. Daniel Hoan, the Socialist mayor from 1916 to 1940 who wrote City Government (1936), made the case for an expanded public sector to serve workers and average citizens. After denouncing the notion that “government exists primarily for the purpose of encouraging the accumulation of private property in the hands of a small number of people,” Hoan stressed, “Not lower taxes, but fairer taxes, should be our watchword in

6

7

William Issel, Church and State in the City: Catholics and Politics in Twentieth-Century San Francisco (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), 149–72; Don Parson, Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Jon C. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940–1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); and Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). For a reminder that urban renewal does not inevitably serve private interests to the exclusion of public purposes, see Lizabeth Cohen, “Liberalism in the Postwar City: Public and Private Power in Urban Renewal,” in Making Sense of American Liberalism, eds. J. Bell and Timothy Stanley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 135–55. Marc V. Levine, with Sandra Callaghan, The Economic State of Milwaukee: The City and the Region (Milwaukee: Center for Economic Development, 1998): www4.uwm.edu/ced/publications/milw98.cfm; Joel Rast, The Economic State of Milwaukee, 1990–2008 (Milwaukee: Center for Economic Development, 2010): www4.uwm.edu/ced/publications/milwecon_2010.pdf; Anthony M. Orum, City-Building in America (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995); and Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–45 2d ed. (1985; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 283–310.

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the fight for the better distribution of the good things of life and a decent living for all.”8 Hoan was planted firmly in the city’s working-class politics. The neoliberal Democrat John Norquist, who was the mayor at the end of the twentieth century (1988–2004), pressed for lower taxes during his term and became a proponent for New Urbanism. Because public money distorted the market, he labeled Depression-era federal aid to cities as the “original sin.” Playing on the title of Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century treatise Wealth of Nations, Norquist’s The Wealth of Cities (1998) posited that the metropolis must give priority to the free market. “Cities are essentially places and markets more than they are government entities.” He castigated the contentious politics of the past for rupturing a presumed seamlessness of the market and city productivity. Growth politics had indeed shaped the late-twentieth-century city.9 Alternatives to growth politics and neoliberal policies remain possible, but such challenges are considerable. At the close of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, for instance, some labor unions and their allies crafted new strategies for organizing and political activity. Activists reached back, learning from the social unionism and workingclass politics of earlier decades, in order to inspire broader engagement in the metropolis. Milwaukee unionists’ living wage campaigns, initiatives to organize low-wage service workers, and the formation of laborcommunity coalitions challenged the contemporary market-driven political culture and produced modest results. Often, however, the actions were defensive. The 2011 protests in response to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s assault on public-employee unions and the subsequent recall 8

9

Daniel W. Hoan, City Government: The Record of the Milwaukee Experiment (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936), 33–34. See also Cecelia F. Bucki, “The Workers’ State: Municipal Policy, Class, and Taxes in the Early Depression,” in Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience, eds. Eric Arnesen, Julie Green, and Bruce Laurie (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 134. John O. Norquist, The Wealth of Cities: Revitalizing the Centers of American Life (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998), 9, 202 (emphasis in the original), passim. An affinity between Norquist’s book and Jane Jacobs’ Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984) is noted in Judith T. Kenny and Jeffrey Zimmerman, “Constructing the ‘Genuine American City’: Neo-Traditionalism, New Urbanism, and Neo-Liberalism in the Remaking of Downtown Milwaukee,” Cultural Geographies 11:1 (2003): 91. On neoliberalism and cities, see: Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007); Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 273–328; and Jonathan Soffer, Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Henry Maier, mayor from 1960–1988, administered the 1960s-era federal programs while aligning city government with business interests. See Henry Maier, Challenge to the Cities: An Approach to the Theory of Urban Leadership (New York: Random House, 1966).

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campaigns for state legislators and the governor drew in hundreds of thousands of union members and supporters throughout the state. Milwaukee was a base of support for the statewide movement. Despite a significant setback in the recall drive, such organizing and mass mobilization hold the potential to redirect political discourse and practices. As in the 1940s, changes in political culture – which occur both incrementally and in fits and starts – stem from sustained engagement in public controversies.10 The proponents of working-class politics and growth politics, whether facing one another from opposite ends of the twentieth century or meeting on Wisconsin Avenue, presented divergent visions of the city’s problems and possibilities, as well as of postwar democracy itself. In the neoliberal city, the logic of the market defines policy, regulates urban spaces, and fashions the practices of everyday life. In the midcentury industrial city, however, working-class politics continued to challenge growth politics, limiting the reach and pervasiveness of market values. Although often messy and compromised, egalitarian notions of distribution and access confronted market-based ideals of efficiency and productivity in the contest for the postwar city. The order that emerged and led the way to the neoliberal city of the twenty-first century bore the imprint of this 1940s collision.

10

Daniel Katz and Richard A. Greenwald, eds., Labor Rising: The Past and Future of Working People in America (New York: New Press, 2012); Stephanie Luce, Fighting for a Living Wage (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2004); Immanuel Ness and Stuart Eimer, eds., Central Labor Councils and the Revival of American Unionism (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001); Peter Rachleff, “‘Rebellion to Tyrants, Democracy for Workers’: The Madison Uprising, Collective Bargaining, and the Future of the Labor Movement,” South Atlantic Quarterly 111:1 (Winter 2012): 195–204; and Kate Zernike, “Wisconsin’s Legacy of Labor Battles,” New York Times, 5 March 2011.

Appendix Tables: Referenda Votes

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Appendix

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t a b l e 5 . 1 1947 debt referendum vote, by ward.

Ward 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 All a

Yes Vote

No Vote

Yes %

No %

Yes as % of Registered Votersa

2246 1494 1464 2051 2372 1187 1700 1598 2471 1241 1430 1433 1641 1941 2189 2437 1500 3426 2330 2072 1852 2565 1598 1836 2251 3706 2025 54056

899 1132 480 834 1836 615 1428 1562 2251 981 1576 1356 1322 1901 1417 1400 1573 1345 1469 2050 1668 1762 1417 1955 2151 2860 1669 40909

71.4 56.9 75.3 71.1 56.4 65.9 54.3 50.6 52.3 55.9 47.6 51.4 55.4 50.5 60.7 63.5 48.8 71.8 61.3 50.3 52.6 59.3 53.0 48.4 51.1 56.4 54.8 56.9

28.6 43.1 24.7 28.9 43.6 34.1 45.7 49.4 47.7 44.1 52.4 48.6 44.6 49.5 39.3 36.5 51.2 28.2 38.7 49.7 47.4 40.7 47.0 51.6 48.9 43.6 45.2 43.1

19.3 14.3 19.4 19.5 23.0 11.8 13.9 16.1 17.5 13.6 15.9 17.6 16.0 18.7 20.3 18.7 17.2 24.8 20.5 16.5 16.6 19.0 15.4 15.9 16.9 20.2 20.8 17.9

No as % of Registered Votersb 7.7 10.9 6.4 7.9 17.8 6.1 11.7 15.7 15.9 10.7 17.5 16.6 12.9 18.3 13.2 10.8 18.0 9.7 12.9 16.3 15.0 13.1 13.6 17.0 16.2 15.6 17.1 13.6

Yes as % of Registered Voters = Yes Vote/Registered Voters No as % of Registered Voters= No Vote/Registered Voters Source: Milwaukee Board of Election Commissioners, Nineteenth Biennial Report of the Board of Election Commissioners of the City of Milwaukee (Milwaukee, 1947).

b

Appendix

377

t a b l e 5 . 2 Variables in the regressions of the 1947 debt referendum and 1948 mayoral election. Variable Name

Explanation and (Mean)

Yes1947

% of registered voters casting yes votes in 1947 debt referendum (.178) No1947 % of registered voters casting no votes in 1947 debt referendum (.135) Zeidler1948 % of registered voters casting votes for Zeidler in 1948 mayoral election (.417) Reuss1948 % of registered voters casting votes for Reuss in 1948 mayoral election (.322) WcCrft Craftsmen, foremen, and kindred workers as % of labor force, 1950 (.169) WcOper Operatives and kindred workers as % of labor force, 1950 (.249) WcLab Laborers as % of labor force, 1950 (.056) WhtClr Professional, technical, and kindred workers, plus managers, officials, and proprietors, as % of labor force, 1950 (.156) Sources: Milwaukee Board of Election Commissioners, Nineteenth Biennial Report of the Board of Election Commissioners of the City of Milwaukee (Milwaukee, 1947); Twentieth Biennial Report of the Board of Election Commissioners of the City of Milwaukee (Milwaukee, 1949); H. Yuan Tien, ed., Milwaukee Metropolitan Area Fact Book: 1940, 1950, and 1960 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962); U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1950 United States Census of Population, Census Tract Statistics: Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Adjacent Area (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952); 1950 United States Census of Housing: Block Statistics, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952).

Appendix

378

t a b l e 5 . 3 Two-variable regressions of Milwaukee’s 1947 debt referendum, by ward. Coefficients of determination (R2) and regression coefficients (b). Yes1947 2

Variables

R

WcCrft WcOper WcLab Whtclr

.117 .332 .229 .453

No1947 2

b

R

−.279 −.270b −.515c .303a

.637 .094 .099 .031

b .825a .183 −.432 −.101

N=27 a p