The Opening of the 1948 Summer Olympics in London. Some in Milwaukee had hoped to lure these games to the city’s lakefront.
Next year’s Democratic National Convention will undoubtedly be the biggest event Milwaukee has ever hosted. It’s hard to even think of another happening that comes close in terms of national and international attention. But this was not for a total lack of trying. Milwaukee did make an abortive attempt to land what would have been one of the most highly anticipated sporting events of the 20th century when they considered bidding for the 1948 Summer Olympics.
Following the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin, which was overseen by the Nazi regime of Adolph Hitler, the Olympic went on a wartime hiatus. The 1940 games were awarded to Tokyo, then relocated to Helsinki, then cancelled altogether. The 1944 games were given to London but were also called off in the midst of the war. But in the winter of 1944, with Allied Forces making significant gains against the Axis Powers, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced tentative plans to resume the games in 1948.
As it happened, Milwaukee and Wisconsin already had some pretty big plans for 1948. The city and state had agreed to collaborate on their upcoming centennials (Milwaukee’s would be in 1946, Wisconsin’s in 1948), and by November 1944, Milwaukee Journal sports editor R.G. Lynch was promoting a plan to make the Olympic Games the centerpiece of the Centennial bash.
It had been decreed by the IOC that no nation at war would be allowed to host the games, but it seemed then that the US would be out of the war by ’48. Milwaukee would be a central location of the population centers of the Midwest and had, Lynch noted, quite successfully hosted a number of national track and field events in the past. And the games would no doubt bring a culmination to the city’s efforts—which dated back to the 1920s—building a large, multi-purpose stadium. The County Park Department had proposed a 150,000-seat, lakefront stadium in 1931, an idea that had seemed possible when New Deal cash began to flow into the city but was doomed by the outbreak of the war. Furthermore, the idea of the Summer Games being awarded to a Midwestern factory town was something the IOC took seriously. Detroit made a bid for the ’44 Games, placing third in the final IOC vote behind London and Rome.
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In December 1944, members of the Midsummer Festival Committee—the annual festival held on the lakefront grounds that would likely be the site of a potential Olympic park—met with U.S. Olympic Committee head Avery Brundage to discuss a possible bid. Brundage was plainspoken with the group, telling them that if the city was serious about a bid, they needed to start building well in advance. A 100,000-seat stadium and a 20,000-seat pool auditorium were virtual prerequisites for any reasonable bid. “You are getting into the big league when you even think about getting the games,” Brundage told them. “You ought to have a civic stadium, whether you go after the Olympics or not. Any big-league city needs a stadium.”
It was also clear that Milwaukee would have some very stiff completion in a bid for the 1948 games. The committee would be reluctant to revisit the U.S. so recently after the 1932 Los Angeles games, and the cities that had been passed over in wartime—London and Helsinki—would certainly receive preference if they were able to host. Furthermore, the likely financial constraints of what would (hopefully) be the return to a peacetime economy would require a host city to already be well-positioned in terms of event facilities—a qualification Milwaukee could not meet.
Still, the Common Council went ahead and appointed a special committee to investigate the possibility of a Milwaukee bid in December 1944. But Olympic fever among the city’s boosters was short-lived. By February 1945, the Midsummer Festival Committee announced the outline of a plan to hold a city-state centennial celebration on Milwaukee’s lakefront in the summer of ’48 (it would eventually be moved up to 1946 and dubbed “Centurama”) and stated that the Olympic Games were no longer a part of the plan. Taking Brundage’s advice to heart, the city hoped that the centennial event would be such a resounding success as to bolster the chances for a future Milwaukee Olympic bid. Such a bid would never materialize. The 1948 Games were eventually to awarded to London.
