The German City Milwaukee Became

The Germans who came to Milwaukee before the Civil War came in two waves. The first were economic migrants, tradespeople and laborers seeking work in a growing city. The second were political refugees, the Forty-Eighters, men and women who had participated in the failed democratic revolutions of eighteen forty-eight across the German states and who fled prosecution when those revolutions collapsed.

The Forty-Eighters brought with them an unusual combination: professional skills, political sophistication, and genuine commitment to the democratic ideals they had nearly died for. Milwaukee's German community by the eighteen fifties and sixties was arguably the most politically engaged immigrant community in any American city. They ran newspapers in German. They organized singing societies and athletic clubs. They opened beer gardens where the beer was incidental to the conversation, or at least where the conversation was as important as the beer.

The Germans were the largest ethnic group in Milwaukee from the city's early decades through the early twentieth century. By the early twentieth century the German community had been joined by tens of thousands of Polish and other European immigrants, but the German stamp on the city's culture was already fixed. The public institutions the Socialists built drew on German traditions of municipal governance. The beer industry was German. The neighborhood culture of debate and association was German.

World War One imposed a violent break. German-language newspapers were suppressed. Some German names were changed. Sauerkraut was renamed liberty cabbage for the duration. The cultural heritage that had taken sixty years to build was compressed into something less visible almost overnight.

The Milwaukee that emerged from the war still had the institutions. It had lost some of the language.