Contesting the Postwar City: Working-Class and Growth Politics in 1940s Milwaukee

Focusing on midcentury Milwaukee, Eric Fure-Slocum charts the remaking of political culture in the industrial city. Professor Fure-Slocum shows how two contending visions of the 1940s city working-class politics and growth politics fit together uneasily and were transformed amid a series of social and policy clashes. Contests that pitted the principles of democratic access and distribution against efficiency and productivity included the hard-fought politics of housing and redevelopment, controversies over petty gambling, questions about the role of organized labor in urban life, and battles over municipal fiscal policy and autonomy. These episodes occurred during a time of rapid change in the city's working class, as African-American workers arrived to seek jobs, women temporarily advanced in workplaces, and labor unions grew. At the same time, businesses and property owners sought to reestablish legitimacy in the changing landscape. This study examines these local conflicts, showing how they forged the postwar city and laid a foundation for the neoliberal city.

Review :
Eric Fure-Slocum takes an in-depth look at the politics and public life of 1940s Milwaukee. He resurrects the history of long-forgotten struggles over public entertainment, housing shortages, and downtown modernization, and uses them to illustrate two very different visions of postwar urban development: what he calls working-class versus growth politics. Related analyses should be written for many U.S. cities, but Milwaukee is a particularly good site for such study. The city had a powerful and vibrant socialist governing tradition dating from 1910, as well as an emerging energetic business coalition committed to reshaping what it saw as an outmoded, inefficient city. Fure-Slocum has us rethink the periodization of twentieth-century urban history as he seamlessly takes us from the depression era to wartime to reconversion, showing how Milwaukeeans reshaped their city and their lives. Margo Anderson, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee In this gracefully written, deeply researched, and cleverly illustrated book, Eric Fure-Slocum breaks the traditional division between wartime and postwar, and challenges the easy assumption that growth politics and urban renewal were necessarily benign and inevitable. What counted as modern and outmoded were code words for other interests often dimly understood. Underneath the daily political headlines of bond issues and elections, Americans were defining who belonged and who didn t deserve respect. Fure-Slocum challenges the habits of mind that treat African Americans and women of all ethnic groups as marginal. In his vision of the city, race and gender politics are present from the outset, linked sharply with the politics of class, and enacted by individuals whose histories he studies and whose alliances he analyzes. Linda K. Kerber, University of Iowa, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship