Milwaukee Exploring Milwaukee
Margo Anderson Unive r sit y of W isconsin – M ilwa u kee
C our tes y M il w au ke e C onve nt ion a nd V isi tor s B ur eau
Popular images of Milwaukee fostered by Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley have become so powerful that it may be difficult to believe that the producers of these programs originally chose Milwaukee precisely because of what they perceived as the city’s nondescript character. Those who pause to reflect on Milwaukee further may rightly understand it as a city representative of the midwestern rust belt, hosting a heavy manufacturing boom during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and then suffering the ravages of deindustrialization beginning in the late 1970s. Less known is Milwaukee’s unique history as a crucible of conflict between competing visions of civil, social, and economic rights. From the forced removal of Native Americans by the U.S. government to the ongoing struggle over the future of organized labor in this state, Milwaukee has been portrayed both as a prize and a potential source of peril in debates over such basic questions as the nature of slavery, the fate of capitalism, and the future of civil and workers’ rights. Even seasoned scholars may be surprised to learn the unusual extent to which these debates in Milwaukee have echoed across imperial and national borders. Over the course of events as disparate as the 8 • 2012 OAH/NCPH Annual Meeting • Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Revolutions of 1848, the Civil War, World War I, and the Great Depression, men and women in Milwaukee came to see themselves as making common cause with political actors far beyond the state capital in Madison, from Berlin, Germany, to Birmingham, Alabama. Milwaukeeans voted socialists into the city’s mayoral office on ten different occasions in the twentieth century, including during the apex of McCarthyism. Scholars and activists have only begun to explore the place of Milwaukee in the freedom struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, which included two hundred nights of youth-led protests for open housing rights from 1967–1968. Throughout this span, Milwaukeeans have frequently seen themselves as political actors on not just a national but also a global stage. If this notion seems unlikely today, the reason stems more from sitcominspired stereotypes than the lived experiences of the city over the past 150 years. The city of Milwaukee is the largest in Wisconsin, the only city in the state with a population over half a million, and currently the twenty-eighth largest city in the United States. Milwaukee is located ninety miles north of Chicago and eighty miles east of Madison. In its physical setting, the