Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee County Historical Society
Mathilde Anneke was a German immigrant and one of the first in Milwaukee to agitate for women’s rights.
Politically, Wisconsin was once a four-party state. Democrats and Republicans were challenged and often defeated by Progressives and Socialists in races for the governor’s mansion, Milwaukee’s city hall, seats in the U.S. Congress and scores of local offices.
That unique history, with an emphasis on how politics played out in the Cream City, is the subject of the newly opened exhibit at the Milwaukee County Historical Society. “Bigger, Better, Brighter: 150 Years of Milwaukee Politics” is a collection of artifacts and a sequence of wall panels that illustrate and narrate the city’s political direction from the first township election in 1835 through the end of the Henry Maier era in 1988.
“We’ve been thinking about a political exhibit for a while,” says curator Ben Barbera. “When Milwaukee was announced as the site of the Democratic National Convention, we decided it was time to do it.”
The wall panels are factual and informative, summarizing the background of key figures, the results of major elections and the issues—local and national—confronting the city’s mayors. The pool of voters participating in elections grew, not only from Milwaukee’s rising population but through the expansion who was able to exercise the rights of citizenship. In 1835 only white males over 21 could vote. The franchise broadened with the passage of the 19th Amendment (1920), extending suffrage to women and one of “Bigger, Better’s” subjects.
“Milwaukee was in some ways behind the nation and the rest of the state on women’s suffrage,” Barbera says. He cites the social conservatism of many recent immigrant groups as well as the city’s dominant Socialists, who directed their focus toward “workers’ rights and making life better for all Milwaukeeans,” he says, adding, “Waukesha was more a center for women’s suffrage than Milwaukee.”
One of the exhibit’s storyboards concerns Waukesha’s Theodora Winton Youmans, an early campaigner for the right of women to vote in school board elections.
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The heart of “Bigger, Better” are the artifacts, including campaign posters, banners and buttons galore representing national, state and local races through much of the 20th century. The badges of presidential winners and losers are displayed on tables under glass, including Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie, George Wallace, the Kennedys, Adlai Stevenson, GOP jokester candidate Pat Paulsen and the immortal I LIKE IKE button from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1952 campaign.
Local candidates had buttons too, including George Schultz for County Executive. Among the glut of buttons are such puzzlers as Promote Mark Schaitel (to what? who?).
The past is full of surprise for those who only know the present. Prohibition was supported by an odd couple combination of Protestant fundamentalists and women’s rights activists who blamed alcohol for social problems. In earlier times Wisconsin’s Republicans leaned liberal and Democrats tilted conservative. And in 1860 Republican Abraham Lincoln carried Wisconsin but lost the state’s biggest city, Milwaukee, to Democrat Stephen Douglas, a candidate who appeared to condone slavery.
To read more Milwaukee history, click here.
To read more stories by David Luhrssen, click here.
