Sewer Socialists and German-Americans: Milwaukee’s Opposition to WWI

Elizabeth Hoffmann, Purdue University

Germans/German-Americans’ and Sewer Socialists’ experiences during WWI provide a window for examining groups who swiftly lost the benefits full social and political inclusion as these were lost when the United States entered the war. The war-time laws and policies at the federal and local levels shifted the status of these groups from fully integrated community members who often were leaders in their city to residents contenting with many prohibitions and requirements. Identities that were connected to the United State’s wartime enemy Germany caused Germans and German-Americans in Milwaukee to be banned from many activities, prohibited from various jobs, and required to submit to restrictions on their lives. The conservative Sewer Socialists were categorized with more leftist Socialists elsewhere along with violent Anarchists in Milwaukee and elsewhere; they, too, faced new rules and laws that curtailed their activities. As a result the Germans/German-Americans and Sewer Socialists, who had once high social status and power and even municipal and cultural dominant in Milwaukee, became excluded both formally and informally from the wartime city’s power base.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 78. Memory, Law, and the Politics of Historical Narrative