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54 chapter three A Few False Starts At first, life for the two newlyweds was appropriately carefree. They spent the month following their wedding at Lake Bemidji in Minnesota’s North Woods enjoying a long honeymoon. Next came a move to Milwaukee, where Larson began working at the ¤rm that had expressed interest in hiring him. His interview with the partners, which had taken place shortly before his wedding day, had gone well and led to an offer, which Arthur and Florence decided he should accept. The key factors in this decision appear to have been his desire to get started in a paying job right away, the Depression-era scarcity of good job offers that made this one seem all the more valuable, Milwaukee’s proximity to their relatives, its attractive setting on the western shore of Lake Michigan, and its familiar midwestern ¶avor.1 Their choice was not unusual for highly educated South Dakotans of that day. By the 1930s, the economy of their home state and the rest of the upper Midwest had ceased creating enough jobs for aspiring professionals, who began moving eastward in search of work to such cities as Milwaukee and Chicago. The region’s steadily improving network of roads and highways also contributed to this migration by making occasional visits back home much easier.2 One other consideration that deserves mention was Larson’s interest in politics and a career in public service. Wisconsin’s population, like that of South Dakota’s, included a large number of Scandinavian Americans who would presumably have been receptive to a Larson candidacy for public of¤ce. Wisconsin also offered a very appealing political milieu to someone like him, with its strong Progressive Republican tradition that even Herbert Hoover’s ineptitude and Franklin Roosevelt’s popularity had not extinguished.3 All of these various pushes and pulls led Larson to Milwaukee and the law a few false starts 55 of¤ces of Quarles, Spence and Quarles in September 1935. The heavily urban and industrial city he and Florence had chosen embodied the newer type of midwestern community that contrasted with the older one like Sioux Falls, which tended to be much smaller and more oriented toward the needs of surrounding farmers. When he and Florence arrived in Milwaukee during the late summer of 1935, the city was the twelfth largest in the country with over half a million inhabitants but had a distinctly suburban ¶avor. Milwaukee had a welldeserved reputation as a safe, clean family town that even the Depression did not radically change. The economic crisis of the 1930s hit the city hard, however, thanks to the central role in its economic life basic manufacturing played. Approximately 40 percent of Milwaukee’s workforce during the 1930s held jobs of that kind, producing iron, steel, and durable goods, the demand for which ¶uctuated sharply in response to the health of the nation’s economy. When it hit bottom early in 1933, one-¤fth of all Milwaukee residents were receiving local relief. And when the economy began to revive, labor unrest exploded there. In 1934, Milwaukee had experienced more strikes, some 107 in all, than any other American city. They inaugurated a wave of labor organizing that over the next¤ve years would give Milwaukee one of the most heavily unionized workforces in the nation.4 The makeup of the city’s population also differed signi¤cantly from that of Sioux Falls. Milwaukee had many more residents of German ancestry than did Larson’s hometown and much greater ethnic diversity overall. The city had a very large Polish-American community and substantial numbers of residents living in ethnic enclaves who traced their ancestry to Austria, Russia, Holland, Bohemia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, Scotland, and Scandinavia. This patchwork of nationalities contrasted sharply with Sioux Falls in all but one respect: Milwaukee, like Sioux Falls, was overwhelmingly white. The city’s black community in the mid-1930s mostly lived within a single square mile on the northwest outskirts of the business district and made up less than 2 percent of Milwaukee’s population.5 Also familiar to Arthur and Florence were the city’s affordability, familycentered social life, and moral traditionalism. In those respects, Milwaukee resembled a great big small town, blessed with cheap rents, crime rates among the lowest of the major American cities, a swift and highly effective criminal justice system, and a thrifty, ¤scally responsible public sector. Among the most important community institutions were...

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