Milwaukee at the Confluence: A City That Keeps Arguing
Near Milwaukee, Wisconsin
The three rivers whose meeting place Native peoples knew by a name often said to mean good land still meet here and flow into Lake Michigan. The Milwaukee, the Menomonee, and the Kinnickinnic. The city that grew from their confluence has spent two centuries arguing about who belongs in it.
The arguments have taken specific forms. The argument about whether workers have the right to an eight-hour day was settled violently at Bay View in eighteen eighty-six, and then slowly conceded over the following three decades. The argument about whether a Socialist could run a city without destroying it was settled in favor of the Socialists, and they ran it well for fifty years and left it better than they found it. The argument about whether Black residents had the right to live wherever they could afford was fought on the Sixteenth Street Viaduct in months of marches led by Father James Groppi and the NAACP Youth Council, and the law eventually changed, and the racial geography changed more slowly.
The arguments are still going. Milwaukee's residential segregation, measured by researchers, remains among the most pronounced of any American city. The manufacturing base that employed generations of immigrants, the Poles and Germans and Serbs and Scandinavians who built the South Side street by street and raised their children in duplex flats above their tenants, has contracted to a fraction of what it was. The breweries are mostly gone or owned elsewhere. The Allen-Bradley clock keeps time for a neighborhood where the factory it served has been absorbed into a global corporation.
What the city has is the lake. The lakefront, which the sewer socialists fought to keep publicly accessible, remains one of the longest stretches of publicly owned Great Lakes shoreline in the country. It is free to walk on.
The arguments will continue. The good earth is still here.
