Milwaukee’s Time of Terror

In smaller but still significant measure, Milwaukee also was a city of Italians. The Italian population was more complicated than the German, Polish, or Austro- Hungarian. Two waves of immigrants had come from the Italian peninsula. The first, beginning in the 1870s during a famine in southern Italy, eventually filled Milwaukee’s Third Ward. Sicilian and Italian immigrants began to replace the original Irish settlers of the Third Ward area after a disastrous 1892 fire that destroyed sixteen blocks and left 1,900 homeless.  The Italian influx brought the Third Ward the new produce district, known as Commission Row, that came to define it. This aldermanic ward was bounded on the south and the west by the elbow in the Milwaukee River and extended north into the downtown commercial district.

Many of the immigrants who settled in the Third Ward were Sicilian, not part of a unified Italian nation at the time. Others came from the southern boot of Italy. They had assimilated relatively well by the second decade of the twentieth century, and many had achieved an economic foothold as small merchants, grocers, bakers, and produce brokers. While some remained laborers in the city’s factories and foundries, this group of Italian immigrants viewed themselves as Americans.

The Bay View intersection of Bishop and Potter Avenues (indicated by an X), ca. 1906. (map in author’s collection)

The second wave of Italian immigrants, by comparison, came predominantly from central and northern Italy. They arrived later, in the waning years of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth. In the main, this contingent settled three miles south of the Third Ward along the lake, in what had been the separate township of Bay View. Many, perhaps most, found work in or around the vast rolling mill that the Illinois Steel Company operated on the southern edge of the Milwaukee harbor. This sprawling plant, with a small forest of smokestacks serving its coke-fired furnaces, lay where the land swept southeast away from the terminus of the three rivers in Lake Michigan. The harbor, rivers, and tiny Jones Island all but severed Bay View from the city. The settlement of immigrants up the low sandy hill from the steel rolling mill became known as the Italian Colony.

These newer Italian immigrants were unassimilated. They spoke in their native tongue. They subsisted at the lowest rung of American workers, where the newest immigrants often start. Life in the mill was hellish. Puddlers, working with molten iron in puddling furnaces as impurities burned off, stirred the iron into clumps weighing hundreds of pounds before a crane lifted them. For Italians, the jobs went downhill from there. Because of their skills, puddlers merited small single-family cottages among the company homes in the colony. Furnacemen and less skilled workers had to settle for cramped quarters in rooming houses.

America could not match the imaginings that had led many to leave Italy. The newcomers were isolated in an unfamiliar land, thousands of miles from family and friends whom they never again might see. Work, if available at all, offered no hope of prosperity. The company recouped in rent for company housing much of what it paid in wages, trapping the new workers economically just as their lack of English trapped them culturally. Six days of work left little time in the week to study English, walk along the lake, or seek a mate in dance halls or the neighborhood.

The Bay View Italians also were a less uniformly religious lot than those in the Third Ward. Some were openly hostile to the Roman Catholic Church or to the notion of a God. A few subscribed to anarchist theory that rejected both state and Church. If they were religious at all, though, the Bay View Italians were Catholic. These clung to the Roman Catholic Church, whether out of conviction, need of refuge from the mill, or habit from birth. The Church of the Immaculate Conception, just a few blocks west of the Italian Colony, served them—although in uneasy relation with the Irish. Together, these immigrants filled the pews on Sundays, if perhaps at a cautious distance from one another. Protestant denominations had no foothold in Bay View among the Italians.

Politically, these new Italians lay furthest apart from the Third Ward. The earlier immigrants had fled famine; no resentment of Italy, its monarchy, or its Church had moved them. The more recent émigrés were different. These had fled not for food but for freedom from monarchy, Church, or both. They found much the same in America, though. A government girding for war may have seemed ominous and menacing by reason of basic competence and stability, more so in this new country than in the old. Americans also were a doggedly religious lot. While the Church in America was not a monolith as in Italy, to the irreligious it was here an omnipresent nuisance in its many splinters. And work at the bottom rungs of churning, mechanized, smoky America dulled body and soul if it did not break them, each ten- or twelve-hour shift in the mill like the one before. Not surprisingly, the sympathies of the newcomers often lay with those who challenged the injustices of capital or promised a brighter future for the working man.

Atop that, when Italy declared war in 1915 on the side of the Allies after more than a year of entente (and decades of alignment) with Austria-Hungary and Germany, some in Bay View took this perfidy as proof of the illegitimacy of the Allied cause. In 1917, their adopted country, America, was to join against Austria, as well.

These economic, religious, and political troughs together melded into an alloy of antipathy toward Woodrow Wilson, America’s recent entry into the war, and American patriotism generally. That antipathy burned in corners of the Italian Colony.

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