Contesting the Postwar City

Eric Fure-Slocum teaches History and American Studies at St Olaf College. His research and writing focuses on twentieth-century US urban and working-class history, with an interest in the shaping of American political culture and the political economy.

• Introduction: contesting democracy: working-class and growth politics in the city; 1. Milwaukee: a mid-twentieth-century working-class city; 2. New Deal legacies and wartime urgencies: housing politics, private enterprise, and public authority; 3. Wartime gambling, working-class leisure, and urban reform: 'why do our boys have to fight if we can't play bingo?'; 4. A militant CIO vision for city democracy: power, security, and egalitarianism; 5. Debt, growth, and democracy in the early postwar city; 6. Housing the postwar city: crowding, race, and policy; 7. Public housing, redevelopment, and urban citizenship: the 1951 referendum fight; Epilogue: revising postwar democracy: a city with class.

'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 US 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