Milwaukee

Germans arrived in Milwaukee, Wiscon­sin, decades after becoming entrenched in Cincinnati and eastern cities, drawn by its reputation as a “boom town” emerging from its frontier era, yet strategically lo­cated as a Lake Michigan port.

German settlement spread to wards One, Two, Six, and Nine throughout the city’s northwest quadrant, reaching the city limits in 1880, when German Americans made up a third of Milwaukee’s population of 115,587 and a large proportion of sur­rounding farmers. They were interspersed with Yankees and Irish on the South Side. By 1890 Milwaukee had far more native- born Germans than the long-established Cincinnati community or even Cleveland. At this time first- and second-generation Germans made up 69 percent of the popu­lation, with even greater numbers in nearby rural counties.

German Americans of various genera­tions constituted 64 percent of the 285,385 Milwaukeeans in 1900, with 68,969 born in Germany, making it the most Germanic of any American city. After a lull for decades and then a wave of Danube Swabians immigrating after World War II, native-born Germans composed 10 percent in 1990.

Political Influence

The locally active Knights of Labor (KOL), heavily subscribed by Germans, laid the foundation for what would later become the hallmark of local politics—socialism. Richard Elsner (1859-1938) came to the city from Silesia in 1880. Becoming a member of the KOL, he helped form the Brewery Workers’ Union that organized the first national boycott against a brewery and led to unionization of that industry’s workers. With half of local workers union­ized, most of them German, an 1886 strike brought in the state militia.

Milwaukee had a series of German American mayors, beginning with Ger­man-born attorney Emil Wallber in 1884. John C. Koch (1841-1907), born in Hamburg, immigrated to Milwaukee in 1854 with his Lutheran family. He rose from a job in John Pritzlaff’s hardware firm to become vice president by 1886 as the firm expanded. His ethnic back­ground made him the choice of Republi­cans to rebuild the party in the special 1893 mayoral election, which he won. Reelected, he served until 1896, improv­ing municipal services. William G. Rauschenberger (1855-1918), born in Prussia, immigrated to Milwaukee with his parents in 1860 and joined his father’s woodenware firm after finishing eight years of primary school. He entered local politics at age twenty-five as an alderman and school commissioner, then won the 1896 mayoral election as a Republican, moving into the grand new Flemish Re­naissance Revival City Hall designed by local architects Henry C. Kohn & Esser. By then, a third of councilmen were Ger­man saloonkeepers, their establishments as in other cities serving as centers of po­litical organization.

Emil Seidel (1864-1947), born in Pennsylvania of Pomeranian immigrants who moved to Milwaukee in the 1870s, helped organize the city’s Socialist move­ment in 1875. He lived in Germany from 1886 to 1892, studying woodcarving and socialism. Paving the way, Austrian-born Victor L. Berger (1860-1929) and other Socialists formed the weekly paper Vor- warts (Progress, 1906), taken over by Mil­waukee Social-Democratic Publishing in 1909. Seidel entered local politics, winning election as the first Socialist mayor from 1910 to 1912, campaigning on a platform of municipal ownership of public services to defeat the Democrat Vincerz Schoe- necker. The same year, Berger was elected to Congress.

Gerhard A. Bading (1870-1946), the son of John Bading (1824-1913), long president of the Lutheran Synod of North America, became city health commissioner in 1906 and an aggressive sanitary re­former.

Milwaukee had three German Ameri­can mayors for twenty years from 1940 to 1960. Carl Frederick Zeidler (1908-1942), born in the city of Lutheran parents, worked his way through Marquette Uni­versity to earn a law degree in 1931 and ap­pointment as assistant city attorney in 1936. He won the 1940 campaign for mayor as a nonpartisan but anti-Socialist with the slogan “Americanism and Good Government.” Pledging municipal support to the national defense program, he volun­teered for active duty in the navy in 1942 and died when his ship was hit in the South Atlantic by German U-boats.

John L. Bohn (1867-1955), the son of German Lutheran immigrants and long ac­tive in local government, became acting mayor in 1942 when Zeidler went to war. After he was elected mayor, he began to clear the slums and introduced public housing. In 1948 Frank P. Zeidler (b. 1912), Carl’s brother and a land surveyor, succeeded Bohn and remained in office until 1960. Although he could not stop suburban secession, the size of the city doubled from 1946 to 1967. The last So­cialist mayor remained politically active, running for the U.S. presidency in 1976.

Religion

Germans were religiously diverse in Mil- waukee—from freethinkers to various de­nominations of Protestants in addition to Lutherans, and Catholics and Jews.

While readily assimilating in public life, German Catholics held onto the church as a bastion of ethnic culture and language as the city emerged as a national center of German Catholicism. For a time, Germans had a nationalistic anchor with Swiss-born priest Johann Martin Henni (1805—1881) from Cincinnati, who was appointed to Milwaukee’s new episcopate in 1844. By 1860 three other German- born bishops bolstered the cause elsewhere. German-born members of the St. Raphaelsverein directly petitioned Pope Leo XIII in 1886 for their own German- language parishes with a richer, more mu­sical liturgy and many active Vereine. After lobbying in Rome to counter Irish hege­mony in America, German Catholicism gained a foothold in 1891 with advance­ment of German-speaking Swiss Friederich Katzer to the archbishopric of Milwaukee; but it was a hollow victory, as Cardinal James Gibbons proclaimed at the investi­ture, “We owe allegiance to one country, and that country is America,” dismissing the claims of Germans and other ethnici­ties for ethnic parishes. Subsequent decline of distinctly German parishes owed more to suburbanization and assimilationist trends than to an outright rejection of Ca- henslyism, a movement in the church named after the German politician Peter Paul Cahensly who visited the United States in 1883 and called for nationalistic churches so Germans would not lose their culture.

Cultural Life

Germans formed a culture parallel to the mainstream in the city they dubbed Deutsch-Athen. How ambitious it was to proclaim a “German Athens” on Lake Michigan’s Wisconsin shore except to pro­vide a magnet for immigration already at­tracted elsewhere! Milwaukee had three daily German newspapers by 1850, reflect­ing the community’s ideological diversity.

In 1849 Mathilde Franziska Anneke (1817-1884) arrived in Milwaukee. Three years later, she launched there the Deutsche Frauenzeitung (German Women’s Journal, 1852), a freethinking monthly that preached emancipation of women. That, along with lectures, made her part of the nascent women’s movement, inspiring Susan B. Anthony to fight for the right to vote. Anneke helped found the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association (1869) but devoted her attention to Milwaukee’s Tochter Institut (Daughter’s Institute, 1865) opened with Cecilia Kapp. This in­novative German girls’ school attracted na­tional attention in its eighteen years of ex­istence. Anneke also played a prominent role in the Freie Gemeinde and in the Club der Radikalen (Radical Democracy Party).

At first, after the German Revolution of 1848, many Catholic and Lutheran Mil­waukeeans considered the Turner move­ment too radical and secular; yet Germans formed the Sozialer Turnverein (Social Turn Association, 1853), the first of sev­eral, meeting at Phillips Tavern but with­out a permanent space until 1882. Mil­waukee hosted the American Turnerbund’s Normal College of the American Gymnas­tic Union, the nation’s oldest physical edu­cation school, from its 1866 founding until it moved to Indianapolis in 1907 to ex­pand.

The National German-American Teachers Association (1870) ran a training school for elementary-level educators nearby from 1878 to 1919. Germans, led by Lutherans, protested in vain Wisconsin’s 1889 nativist-inspired Bennett Law that stipulated that only schools that taught basic subjects in English met legal require­ments for school attendance, essentially squelching bilingual elementary education.

The beer culture was a hallmark of the German community. Milwaukee had 1 tavern for every 30 German households in 1860. Frederick Pabst of Milwaukee’s Phillip Best Brewing Company installed a mechanical ice machine in 1872 to expand Lagerbier production during summer months, thus becoming one of the nation’s leading breweries, producing 121,500 bar­rels annually in comparison to local com­petitor Schlitz’s 79,500. All breweries were family owned and operated. Pabst ex­panded to 40 branches throughout the country by 1893, its advertising budget ris­ing to $160,000 from $10,000 in 1878. He began buying saloons and renting them to operators in 1887.

Local brewers—over two dozen in 1856—made multiple contributions to the cultural life of the community. Valentin Blatz and his son Albert, Adam Gettelman, Frederick Miller, and Josef Schlitz formed the Milwaukee Brewers’ Benevolent Association (1869) to funnel philanthropy to organizations like Ger­man churches, the Allomania Singing So­ciety, the Infants’ Home, Liegel (gymna­sium), Mission Kindergarten, St. Rosa’s Orphanage, Turnverein Vorwarts, and the Working Peoples’ Reading Club. A 1915 survey of German American associations nationally found that Milwaukee had over 200 Vereine, the highest concentration given the city’s size.

Shaping the City Milwaukee boasted many commercial beer gardens and summer pleasure grounds. H. Kemper opened Milwaukee Garden on three acres on Fourteenth Street in 1850. Pius Dreher bought it in 1854, adding seating for 3,000, a concert and dance hall, a theater, a bowling alley, and a menagerie. The grounds were lit by gas lamps for evening use. The Miller Brewery opened a beer garden with views over the Menomonee Valley’s rolling hills. Luedde- man’s-On-The-River (1872) occupied seven acres in East Milwaukee (now Shore­wood). The Schlitz Brewing Company’s seven-acre Quentin’s Park on the North Side became popular by 1880 with its beer, music, theater, and panoramic views of the city and the bay. It had a hotel, sports fa­cilities, and a menagerie. Its concert pavil­ion seated 5,000 and had a huge dance floor. It later evolved into the Schlitz Audubon Center.

Pabst opened the Whitefish Bay Resort in 1889, a park on North Lake Drive with a Ferris wheel and other amusements to at­tract visitors from the city by streetcar. It remained open until 1914. He created an­other amusement park on the site of the Milwaukee Shooting Club in 1890, at­tracting crowds with open-air afternoon and evening concerts, a dance hall, a fun house, and a 15,000-foot roller coaster. The minor league Milwaukee Brewers began playing baseball at Borchert Field in 1902.

Despite all the privately owned plea­sure resorts, mayor Emil Wallber crusaded for state creation of the Board of Park Commissioners in 1889 with Christian Wahl, a retired Chicago industrialist, as its first head. Gustav Pabst and Louis Auer donated a small herd for a deer park in the 124-acre West or Washington Park (1891), the basis for the Milwaukee Zoo, in 1910. An equestrian statue of American Revolu­tionary War hero Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben was dedicated at the Sherman Boulevard entrance in 1921. The Emil Blatz Temple of Music was constructed there in 1938. The park boasts a monu­ment to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller with bronze life-sized standing portrait statues.

The Great War and Its Impact When Europe plunged into war in 1914, many German-born Milwaukeeans ac­tively supported Wilhelm II, while the city’s German Socialists declared pacifism and neutrality. When the United States entered the war in 1917, the Milwaukee Journal attacked the Germania-Herold for “disloyalty” and “hatred of this govern­ment.” Although Germanophobia was not as severe as in other cities in 1918, many families and societies americanized their names, and the Germania Publishing Building lost its allegorical nationalistic statue. American Protective League mem­bers enforced a ban on German-composed music. Seidel, then a city alderman, openly opposed the city’s 1917 loyalty ordinance and was arrested for an antiwar speech, while Bading enlisted in the army. Con­gress refused to seat Milwaukee socialist Victor Berger, twice elected, as he stood indicted for antiwar editorials. The war hastened the submergence of ethnic cul­ture already underway by voluntary amer­icanization.

The enactment of Prohibition on July 1, 1919, forced local brewers to fold or re­tool to produce flavored soda, “near beer,” cheese, and candy, even as it put out of business the city’s 1,980 saloons, one for every 230 residents. In the wake of the de­struction of German American culture, the Steuben Society of Milwaukee was orga­nized in 1926 “to keep alive the many noble contributions of persons of German birth and ancestry in this country.”

Blanche M. G. Linden

See also Anneke, Mathilde Franziska; Beer; Berger, Victor L.; Cahensly, Peter Paul; Kindergartners; Milwaukee Socialists; Newspaper Press, German Language in the United States; St. Raphaelsverein Zum Schutze Katholischer deutscher Auswanderer; Steuben, Friederich Wilhelm von; Steuben Society of America; World War I and German Americans

References and Further Reading

Bruce, William G., ed. History of Milwaukee: City and County. 2 vols. Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1922.

Coleman, W W Milwaukee: Das Deutsch- A then Americas. 1880.

Conzen, Kathleen Neils. Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836—1860. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1976.

Goldberg, Bettina. “The German-English Academy, the German-American Teachers’ Seminary, and the Public School System in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1857-1919.” German Influences on Education in the United States to 1917. Eds. Henry Geitz et al. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 177-192.

Gurda, John. The Making of Milwaukee. Milwaukee: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 1999.

Knoche, Carl. H. The German Immigrant Press in Milwaukee. New York: Arno Press, 1980.

Koss, Rudolf H. Milwaukee. Milwaukee: Herold, 1871.

Merrill, Peter C. German-American Artists in Early Milwaukee. Madison: Max Kade Institute, 1998.

------. German-American Urban Culture: Writers and Theaters in Early Milwaukee. Madison: Max Kade Institute, 2000.

Olson, Frederick I. The Milwaukee Socialists, 1897—1941. PhD thesis. Harvard University, 1952.

Still, Bayrd. Milwaukee: History of a City. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1948.