The Surprising History Behind the World's Biggest Music Festival

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Photo Credit: Dave Reid (Flickr CC)

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The activities that have come to define Summerfest—music, food and drink—are but a fraction of what the festival was intended to include and its overall mission—fun, fun, fun—is a far cry from the erudite goals of its founding.

Milwaukee already had a long festival tradition by the early 1960s, when Mayor Henry Maier, inspired by a city-wide festival he had seen on a recent trip to Munich, assembled the committee that eventually gave birth to Summerfest. Church and fraternal organization festivals were common as early as the 1850s. The German-American Day Festival in 1890 drew 100,000 people to the city and made news from coast to coast. Six years later, Milwaukee hosted the “Bazaar of All Nations,” a 10-day festival modeled on the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In 1933, the city auditorium hosted “Beer Fest” to celebrate the end of Prohibition. Mayor Dan Hoan was one of the festival hosts and downed a few of 35,000 glasses of beer drunk at the event. The carnival-style Mid-Summer Festival was the city’s first major annual celebration, hosted between 1933 and 1942 on the lakefront.

But in the post-war years, Milwaukee’s festival scene faded. By the time Maier was elected in 1960, the city was suffering from a litany of urban woes—growing racial strife, an aged Downtown and the shifting of the region’s economic base to the suburbs. Maier’s vision for a new multi-day festival for Milwaukee was a look to the future with a nod to the past—an old-world celebration that could draw international attention to a city trying to find a modern identity. After a year of planning, the Milwaukee World Festival committee announced that the event would debut on July 4, 1965 and include a film festival, Broadway plays, a jazz concert series, and an “ideas conference” featuring the world’s greatest thinkers and visionaries.

Revamping the Concept

Funding troubles sank the festival’s proposed ’65 opening. Instead, a remade version of the festival plan was rolled out for 1968. Gone were the high-minded festivities envisioned a few years prior. Led by festival director Bill Masterson, who had been the administrator of the Wisconsin State Fair since 1951, the World Festival shifted its focus from art and uplift to fun in the sun. The new vision for the festival included auto races, an air show, a barbershop quartet sing-off, and a polka and square dancing competition. Events like an outdoor cookout competition or a motorboat race were also proposed as candidates to attract corporate sponsorship to the festival.

“There is no doubt that the festival can be the single biggest economic boost Milwaukee has ever had,” Maier said in 1966, “[but] the most important thing is that the festival will bring some color, some excitement, and some stimulation to the lives of our people and of all the people who visit us.”

Maier’s view of the festival as a boon to the spirits of Milwaukee’s residents and visitors reflected the times. The city’s troubles of the early ’60s had compounded themselves by 1966 and impending loss of the Braves to Atlanta left Milwaukee feeling like a second-class city. The following summer, Milwaukee’s long-simmering racial tensions finally boiled over in an evening of fires, gunshots, and civil unrest. The riot of ’67 could have been the shock the city needed to finally begin to address its serious racial disparities. But Maier, famously tone-deaf on matters of race, found the need to repair Milwaukee’s national image most pressing. “The festival is needed more than ever before,” Maier said just two months after the riot, “to show that Milwaukee is not the city of the clenched fist the nation has been permitted to see through the narrow window of the national media. Rather it is the city of the outstretched hand of friendship and gemueltlichkeit.”

With the first-ever World Festival now set for late July 1968, the event’s backers opened a campaign to reassure potential festival-goers that the city was a safe place for all and that the festival represented wholesomeness and unity. With the announcement that the festival would feature a “youthfest” event, Masterson made clear that it would not cater to the young long-hairs who were taking dope and leading marches. “[Milwaukee] is the country’s biggest small town,” festival director Masterson said, “short on hippies and long on squares.” He also dismissed worries that civil unrest could disrupt the festival, “jokingly” telling a luncheon crowd that the open housing marches could actually be used as a “tourist attraction” during the fest.

But concerns over Milwaukee’s racial climate were indeed affecting the festival. Planners of the jazz concert series, one of the few concepts to survive from the original proposal for the event, reported that many major record labels were discouraging their artists from signing on the shows out of fears that it could present a dangerous or embarrassing situation. South Side Alderman Robert Sulkowski suggested that the big names stay home and that enough musical talent for the festival could be found locally. “If they don’t want to come to Milwaukee, we don’t want ’em,” he said. “We’ve got enough kooks coming here now.”

What to Call It?

Meanwhile, the shrinking scope of what the festival was to include prompted a reexamination of the event’s name. Still being referred to as “Milwaukee World Festival,” the event had devolved into a decidedly regional affair and some organizers were worried that such a title could mislead attendees. In January 1968, with opening day of the event less than eight month away, it was announced that the festival would be known as “Juli Spass,” German for “July Fun.”

Reaction to the name was overwhelmingly negative. The name was criticized as being too German-centric and too difficult to pronounce (yoo-lee spahs) correctly. Another name finalist, “All People’s World Festival,” was dismissed for sound too “Communist.” Other suggestions including “Smorgasbord Fest,” “Funtasia,” “Milwaukeefest,” and “Estival Festival” (Estival is a variation of the Latin word for summer) were similarly rejected. Finally, after a month of Juli Spass, the event was officially renamed “Summerfest.”

But if the festival now had a name, it still lacked an overall vision and was lagging behind schedule. A planned outdoor “history pageant” was canceled after the project was slow in coming together and a plan to incorporate the annual Schlitz Beer-sponsored Old Milwaukee Days into the fest was scrapped when Schlitz felt the new event might dilute the summertime crowds. There was also still no theme or main event for the festival and its most unique event—the “world’s largest polka party”—was hardly in keeping with Maier’s original vision of a festival that would draw the attention of the world to Milwaukee.

And still lingered the race issues. Just before the name change, festival board member George Watts resigned, citing Maier’s “lack of leadership” on civil rights. “You can’t have a world festival because, basically, we don’t have anything to be festive about,” Watts said. “The city is in turmoil and until we get some justice on civil rights, I think it’s going to stay in turmoil.”

Many shared Watts’ fear over continued unrest. That spring, Schlitz’s Old Milwaukee Days and its accompanying Great Circus Parade were canceled over worries that the huge Downtown crowds might lead to unrest. Shortly after, the U.S. Army denied Summerfest’s request to stage their carnival midway on the north of end of Maitland Airfield on the lakefront, a plot of land adjacent to the still-active Nike missile site. The Army feared that if the crowds grew agitated, the secured zone surrounding the missiles could be breached. The airfield would become the permanent home of Summerfest in 1970, after the missiles were removed.

In March, Maier finally reached out to the black community for involvement in Summerfest, urging the addition of “a series of events emphasizing the Negro cultural contributions to the nation and this community.” While the festival’s 36-member board of directors remained all-white, Maier insisted that Summerfest was the best hope the city had for healing its divides. Noting that many of the planned events still needed sponsors, he used the fear of unrest to lean on local businessmen to become Summerfest partners. “What is the price of community peace?” He asked one group of city business leaders in a Summerfest pitch. “And what is the cost of the kind of disorders we had last summer?” The festival, he said, “[is] the best available effort around which the total community can rally.”

Summerfest ’68 was not a world-class exhibition or a gathering of the nation’s best and brightest. Nor was it a unifying force that repaired an aging metropolis’ image. It was a scattered and varied collection of entertainment, cultural exhibits and carnival fun—an event that would be as unrecognizable to the festival’s idealistic forefathers as it would to its present-day devotees. The muddled style of Summerfest was repeated for 1969 but shrinking attendance led to a greater emphasis on live acts and entertainment, which quickly led to the festival as it exists today.