Contesting the Postwar City: Working-Class and Growth Politics in 1940s Milwaukee by Eric Furet-Slocum (review)

The enormous changes that shook Milwaukee during World War II transformed the political culture of the city in the immediate postwar years. According to Furet-Slocum, working-class power, which formerly challenged marketplace prerogatives, gave way to growth politics, which promoted the market values of efficiency and productivity. Furet-Slocum documents his case through copious references to the secondary literature and primary sources, supplemented by quantitative analyses of referenda held in 1947 and 1951 and a key mayoral run-off election of 1948. The questions confronting this book are whether the aggregate terms working-class power and growth politics accurately reflect the major forces in the city’s postwar politics and whether the elections that Furet-Slocum analyzes demonstrate the presumed polarization.

Furet-Slocum prefaces his postwar analysis with three introductory chapters that discuss the city’s political heritage. Industrial Milwaukee was strongly unionized, and its members were divided between a militant Congress of Industrial Organizatin (cio) numbering 52,000 in the early 1950s and a more moderate American Federation of Labor (afl) with a membership of 90,000 (44). Furet-Slocum then describes the socialist fiscal policies that were predicated on pay-as-you go financing, effectively avoiding the issuance of long-term bonds and even city investment in public housing. Daniel Hoan, the long-serving socialist mayor, was defeated in 1940, and during the war, his conservative successors clashed with their working-class constituents over leisure gambling, but not over the wartime economy.

The final four chapters describe postwar politics. Within a year of the war’s end, a prolonged strike that occurred at the Allis Chalmers corporation was broken by management, resulting in the replacement of the local union’s leadership and the afl’s retreat from politics. A 1947 referendum, supported by a coalition of moderate Democrats, ended the city’s pay-as-you go policy and allowed the issuance of long-terms bonds for urban development. The following year, the mayor’s office, although nominally nonpartisan, returned to socialist hands with the election of Frank Zeidler who, although distrusting long-term bonds, presided over a publicly financed expansion of the city’s infrastructure. The blurring of economic positions was demonstrated in 1951 when Milwaukee voters passed two dueling referenda that legalized federal funding of public housing but prohibited the city government from funding it.

The quantitative analyses of the three referenda and the mayoral election, although statistically valid, rest on shaky assumptions. Can Milwaukee’s postwar politics be reduced to the conflict between working-class interests and growth politics when the city’s political landscape included conservatives who opposed government-funded development, liberals who advocated it, and socialists who preferred to avoid public debt, each position supported by its own daily newspaper (although The Leader, the socialist newspaper, ceased publication in 1941)? Can we speak of a single working-class when workers were divided between the afl and cio, within the cio, and by color? Finally, can an analysis of the 1948 mayoral run-off ignore the first round in which fifteen candidates were reduced to two finalists? Furet-Slocum has provided an extremely fine-grained account of postwar Milwaukee politics, but he has embedded it in a polarized procrustean bed.