Mighty Milwaukee

A library shelf could easily be filled with recently published scholarly books on Milwaukee. Anyone familiar with the city's past will immediately recognize the reason: Milwaukee has a unique history as a Midwest outpost of Central Europe with socialist mayors for many decades.

The title of Making Milwaukee Mightier: Planning and the Politics of Growth 1910-1960 (published by Northern Illinois University Press) comes from a 1920s report by the city's socialist administration, urging annexation as a solution to urban problems. As local history buffs know, North Milwaukee and Granville were among the communities annexed by Milwaukee in order to give the city more living space (and a wider tax base).

For the book's author, John M. McCarthy, a history professor at Robert Morris University, annexation was one node of a larger socialist plan using conventional urban renewal strategies for unconventional ends. In 1916, Mayor Daniel Hoan called for "the spreading out of the population" to ameliorate problems of overcrowding in cramped, poorer neighborhoods. The construction of Milwaukee bungalows for modest middle class families and the extension of the county park system can all be seen as a local offshoot of the European "garden city" movement.

Some of the facts McCarthy unearths will be less familiar. Who knew that our last socialist mayor, Frank Zeidler, hoped to annex a piece of Waukesha County for a "satellite city" linked by highways to Milwaukee? Alas, the rising tide of suburbia, which saw many unincorporated districts organizing themselves against Milwaukee as self-governing villages, ultimately thwarted Zeidler's larger scheme. Making Milwaukee Mightier is thoughtful, well researched study with implications for the "new urbanism" of the new century.