Dreaming of a Decentralized Metropolis: City Planning in Socialist Milwaukee

Abstract

Dreaming of a Decentralized Metropolis: City Planning in Socialist Milwaukee by John McCarthy Our cities are physically obsolete, and unfitfor the requirements ofwhat we hope soon will bemodern living. Charles Whitnall, 19341 In 1918 the women's editor of one of Milwaukee's largest daily newspapers decided to take a "tour" of the city's poorest neighborhoods and report on their conditions. Accompanied by an official from the city's health department, the editor did not have to venture far from Milwaukee's central business district on Grand Avenue to find urban poverty. Adjacent to downtown on both the Northwest and the South sides were two of the city's most conspicuous slums. The lower Third Ward, east of theMilwaukee River and just south of Grand Avenue, had already been the subject of many stories about how "the other half of the city lived. Alexander Fisher, the health inspector who accompanied the editor on her tour, found most of the housing in the Third Ward "hardly fit for beasts." In a survey of the ward conducted two years earlier, out of the 973 dwellings inspected only 80 had bathtubs, no doubt contributing to the health inspector's characterization of the Third Ward's mostly Italian inhabitants as "filthy."2 The article that followed the editor's tour beseeched Milwaukeeans to see for themselves the squalid conditions of the city's slums. "Clannish foreigners" were crowding one another out of inner-city ghettos; African Americans had replaced Jews in the Sixth Ward neighborhood centered on Seventh and Poplar; Slovaks and Greeks had "chased" the Irish from Tory Hill adjacent to downtown on the west. The family unit was in disarray: "Children run about all day while their 1This epigraph is from "Facing the Future," 1934 folder, Charles Whitnall Papers (hereafter Whitnall Papers), Milwaukee County Historical Society (hereafter MCHS), Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 2 Milwaukee Sentinel, November 26,1916, housing clipping file, Legislative Reference Bureau (hereafter LRB), Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Michigan Historical Review 32-A (Spring 2006): 33-57 ?2006 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved. 34 Michigan Historical Review mother is at work." Many of the houses were dubbed "bachelor halls, for they are inhabited by men alone trying to overcome the need of the touch of a woman's hand in homemaking." The women's editor was perhaps most concerned with overcrowding in both the Third and the Sixth wards (adjacent to downtown on the north and west). The headline of her October article warned Milwaukeeans that more than twenty-eight hundred families in the city lived in basement apartments, which mocked the city's reputation as a center of solid Germanic orderliness. The article specifically challenged Milwaukee's elite "limousine class" to drop their Sunday automobile drives in the countryside and spend at least one afternoon immersing themselves in the realities of urban poverty.3 Expos?s of this sort were common in American newspapers and magazines during the Progressive Era. The vivid imagery of Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Uves brought the slum conditions of New York's Lower East Side to a shocked nation. Journalists like Lincoln Steffens had made "muckraking" a cottage industry with tales of both urban corruption and physical decay.4 Because their middle-class audiences had very little personal experience with urban poverty, magazine articles such as these provided shock value just as assuredly as they urgendy called for reform.5 The newspaper story about Milwaukee's slums certainly fit this mold: a dramatic account of poverty and urban despair aimed at the middle and upper classes. What made the article truly distinctive, however, was not its content but its place of publication. It and others like it ran in theMilwaukee leader, the largest daily Socialist newspaper in the country. The Milwaukee leader's frequent articles on Milwaukee's slums provided more than merely tabloid reading. They regularly highlighted the reform efforts of Daniel Hoan, Milwaukee's Socialist mayor from 1916 to 1940.6 Newspaper accounts of slumlike conditions mocked Milwaukee's reputation as a city of homeowners and placed housing squarely at the center of the political agenda. In 1918 Mayor Hoan 3 Milwaukee Leader, October 3,1918, housing...