Milwaukee Mayhem: Murder and Mystery in the Cream City's First Century by Matthew J. Prigge

Abstract

Reviewed by: Milwaukee Mayhem: Murder and Mystery in the Cream City's First Century by Matthew J. Prigge Lawrence H. Larsen Matthew J. Prigge, Milwaukee Mayhem: Murder and Mystery in the Cream City's First Century. Madison: Wisconsin State Historical Society, 2015. 207 pp. $12.99. Matthew J. Prigge is a Milwaukee-based freelance author, historian, and radio personality. His fascinating and informative new book Milwaukee Mayhem: Mystery and Murder in the Cream City's First Century, covering the 1830s to 1930s, is a modern version of the Sins of the City books of the last half of the nineteenth century. These literary efforts, popular in their day but mostly forgotten now, dwelled on the unsavory side of life in the then-new urban America. The more lurid and sensational of the works described in great detail the interiors of widely patronized dance halls, taverns, and other places of amusement, giving the street addresses and warning visitors to stay away from them. Sins of the City books were considered fit for sale in religious book stores. Those for the Midwest included J. A. Dacus's and James W. Burel's 1878 A Tour of St. Louis or the Inside Life of a Great City and Harold Richard Vynne's 1892, Chicago by Day and Night: The Pleasure Seeker's Guide to the Paris of America. Like the nineteenth-century authors, Prigge accepts the proposition that urbanization inevitably has an underreported dark side: "There are few heroes and even fewer lessons to be learned. This is an incomplete history, dredged from the memory and prejudices of the times and unable to access those secrets the city wishes to keep," Prigge states. "This is a history that rides that dark and often senseless arc that slices through the daily happenings of a forgotten class of killers, liars, and crooks. This is the history of a city's one-hundred-year struggle to leave its past behind, to understand itself, and to make sense of the everyday mayhem of life in a metropolis being born" (xiv, which is incorrectly numbered and should be xvi). Prigge uses eighty-two short accounts to make his point. Some of what he calls the "orphans of history" run several pages and others only a couple paragraphs. They have such titles as "Love with a Bullet"; "Misfire"; "Dirty [End Page 63] Books"; and "The Missing Head." Many of the accounts are culled from the pages of Milwaukee newspapers, especially the Milwaukee Sentinel. The four chapters consist of eighteen entries under "Murders," seventeen under "Accidents," twenty-two under "Vice," and twenty-five under "Secrets." The various stories are not in chronological order. So, a 1928 tale is followed immediately by one from 1893, and so on. The stories range from the strange to the gruesome, as the following examples illustrate: • In 1929, a seventeen-year old high school girl was one of several people who received threatening letters. The police thought the sender an immigrant. The letters stopped, ending the matter. The note to the girl was signed, "Ed, the Bad Man."• In 1893, fift een skilled workers, trapped in a crib off the Milwaukee harbor during a Lake Michigan storm, faced possibly suffocating or opening a hatch. They opened the hatch. Water from high waves rushed in drowning fourteen workers. One escaped. • In 1871, police accepted the conclusion reached by a fortune-teller that a missing seventeen-year-old woman had been kidnapped. Eventually, her bloated body surfaced in a Milwaukee river. In the aft ermath, the city council passed an ordinance requiring fortune-tellers and other seers to have licenses in order to ply their trade. • In 1927, a nineteen-year-old woman candy store worker went on a blind date in a red car with an attractive man. A month later, police recovered her body, which did not appear to have been sexually molested. No one was ever arrested in the case. An assumption by the police that she had eloped proved wrong. • In 1892, a young switchman in a Milwaukee railroad yard left a switch open, causing the wreck of a shop train and the deaths of seven railroad workers. After only twenty minutes of...