Milwaukee

Formed by three rivers and stretched along Lake Michigan, Milwaukee’s physical space served to differentiate the city from those of similar population and size. By the early 1800s, English and native-born business leaders formed Juneau Town and middle-class Germans lived in Kilbourn Town and the city’s South Side, the least desirable land, filled with primarily unskilled workers of Polish, Russian-Polish, and Bohemian extraction. Immigrants formed Milwaukee from its beginning, and home ownership was common, including among lower-paid workers; those who were well paid could afford a “Milwaukee flat.” By the mid-twentieth century, Black residents were replacing the once largely Jewish population in downtown areas, and after World War II were joined by Mexican Americans, the city’s first Spanish-speaking residents, and, later, those such as the Hmong. In the late nineteenth century, Milwaukee’s most prosperous families had moved to massive mansions on the cliffs of Lake Michigan east of the central business district, with brewers and industry leaders now remote from working-class houses. Although Milwaukee was known for its breweries, far more factory workers were employed in heavy industry by the mid-twentieth century. Its highly skilled and semiskilled workforce, along with high unionization rates, made it a solidly middle-class city in the mid-twentieth century. Labor took a key role from the late 1800s and, with socialism as a widely accepted option, created the “Milwaukee idea”—the unified coalition of labor and socialism. In the twentieth century, three socialist mayors led the city for thirty-eight years, and widespread support existed for third parties such as the Progressive party of Robert La Follette. Yet, the political process in Milwaukee varied, with support also for Wisconsin native Senator Joseph McCarthy and presidential candidate George Wallace. After the early 1920s, creation of infrastructure suffered from lack of funding, with deteriorating commercial buildings and blighted neighborhoods. Throughout the 1940s, increasing numbers of Milwaukee residents and industries moved to the suburbs, furthering the commercial decentralization that had begun at the turn of the twentieth century. The struggle to achieve Black access to affordable housing and other forms of racial bias, discrimination, and exclusion came to the forefront in the 1960s, yet with a lack of municipal redress, Milwaukee was described decades later as the most segregated city in the nation.