Youth Culture

Adults’ alarm about new social and consumer behaviors among Milwaukee’s young people were among the first indications that a modern youth culture was gaining visibility in the city during the early twentieth century.[1] Milwaukee came to prominence as a city during a period marked by a historically high immigration flows to the U.S., and the city’s industrial expansion produced rapid urban growth. As populations from across the planet packed into the growing city, Milwaukee’s theatres, dance halls, and parks, as well as its streets, shops, and workplaces, served as dynamic social engines that tended to erode, remix, and “Americanize” traditional national, ethnic, religious, family, and regional customs, including those customs surrounding the transition period before adulthood.[2] This intermixture, transformation, and often open rejection of established cultural norms was particularly noticeable among young people in Milwaukee, who helped to collectively create what was later dubbed an “American youth culture” at the national level.[3] Until the late 1950s, the main indications of this historic cultural development came from adult push-back on its development, documenting a noticeable and enduring conflict between generations and age groups.

Many of the early cries of alarm in Milwaukee about young people originated from the efforts of Progressive reformers to make cities more “civilized” on their terms, which included a safer and more morally uplifting environment for youth in particular. Concerned about the rise and accessibility of an expanding consumer culture and its effects on urban young people, the City Club of Milwaukee’s 1914 report, “Amusements and Recreation in Milwaukee,” reflected a pointed concern about young people’s unsupervised leisure time in the evenings. The report estimated that ten million movie tickets had been sold in Milwaukee in the past year. But the reformers’ group was most alarmed about young women’s unchaperoned co-mingling with men in Milwaukee’s one hundred licensed commercial dance halls where beer and liquor were served (the report estimated 1.3 million tickets were sold), and at unregulated fraternal organizations’ fundraising dances where liquor was also served. Several fraternal dances were available most nights. At these venues, sensual “new dances” were tolerated, single young women “picked up” dates, and automobiles stood at the ready for “joy rides,” a wandering drive about the town which was likely to end at Lovers’ Lane.[4] These types of entertainments, occurring outside traditional parental supervision, were thought to allow youthful indecencies to go unchecked, and to promote moral breakdown that could be carried into adulthood and passed onto future generations. The reformers’ careful documentation reveals that adults’ moral standards of “grace and purity” were being openly challenged by young people not only in a new independence-pursuing nightlife, but in fashion, socializing, and dating customs as well.[5] Of course, traditional family, ethnic, neighborhood, and religious institutions still played a significant role in socializing Milwaukee’s young people, but the pull of mostly-unsupervised leisure among peers in shared public spaces created a common ground of experience for an increasingly gender-inclusive, age-based, working class peer culture.[6] Middle class youths would eventually follow this lead, but they struggled with a more rigorous and strict supervision from parents and elders. Middle and professional-class young people in the suburbs and surrounding counties were aware of the new possibilities in the cities but were often unable to participate until they left home for college, at least until the 1940s.

A 1920 Milwaukee Sentinel headline makes it clear that parents, teachers, and other moral and civic guardians continually lost the battles for the hearts and minds of their young wards as the mass consumer marketplace and the burgeoning youth culture that formed around it gained influence: “Immodest Stylish Gowns and Sex Dances of Today Kill Girlish Innocence.”[7] Adult worries about a new less-restrictive sexual morality and extravagant fashions among young people were almost always directed towards young women. For young men, anxieties about the mixture of mass leisure and the new culture of youth were usually expressed through claims about the growing number of threatening young seducers and criminals.[8] A Milwaukee Assistant District Attorney told the Women’s Club in 1930 that “too much money, too much leisure, and too much liberty” from parents were the causes of a juvenile “crime wave.”[9] Seven years later, the Chief of Police told a similar tale to the Sunday Morning Breakfast Club, stating that Milwaukee “cannot continue to ignore” its growing juvenile delinquency problem.[10] Broad fears of rising juvenile delinquency and immorality were early signals that young people were creating a culture of their own, to the dismay of adult authorities.[11]

Alongside the expanded access to commercial mass culture, an increasing number of young people were attending high schools.[12] High schools were much more closely monitored and guided by adults than commercial and public leisure spaces, and thus more able to successfully impose existing standards of behavior, socializing, and dress. On the other hand, students in the high school classrooms far outnumbered adults and the common experiences of going through a more or less enforced, “standardized” socialization further eroded the traditional cultural differences between various groups. Even adult-supervised activities meant to extend an alternative to peer influence—sports, school newspapers and literary magazines, scouting, clubs of various sorts—offered at least some possibilities for young people to assert and maintain their own preferences, if only in secret.[13]

In a 1926 pamphlet promoting schooling for young women, “Our High School Girls,” the Milwaukee Board of School Directors claimed that the “universal parent” role of the schools was an “established fact.” The pamphlet spent at least half of its space reassuring biological parents that high school girls received near-constant, teacher-supervised guidance and practice in “social responsibility,” “enlightened citizenship,” “personal and social hygiene,” and “the worthy use of leisure.” These “democratizing” high school activities were set against “false and extravagant standards of dress” and “political ruin and social degeneration” arising from the “widespread misuse of leisure.”[14] During the same year, the Milwaukee Journal reported on a speech by the president of the Wisconsin Teachers Association claiming that movies and “immoral literature” were prematurely promoting the “love chase” among young people.[15] Meanwhile, high school students passed notes to each other, wrote encrypted messages in yearbooks, and made plans to rendezvous after school, on weekends, or after a sporting event to smoke, drink, romance, or just hang out with friends. The (sometimes hysterical) anxieties of adult authorities about the evolving differences between parents and the youth culture in Milwaukee were probably peripheral to most young people. Mass culture venues continued to accept their money and offer places of relatively lax adult supervision. The new mobility gained by access to cars enhanced youths’ ability to find separate and private spaces of their own.

The Great Depression disrupted some of these trends and reinforced others. Milwaukee managed to avoid the worst of the Depression’s effects a bit longer than other cities, but the economic downturn eventually restricted some commercial mass leisure and automobile use.[16] On the other hand, fears that the Depression’s widespread unemployment would “ruin” a generation lent new urgency to universal high school education as a way to occupy youth until a need for their labor reappeared.[17] The Hollywood movie industry managed to stay afloat and even thrive during this period, a prosperity reflected in the almost eighty movie theatres available in Milwaukee in the 1930s.[18] Hollywood mostly reduced and smoothed over any differences between parents and young people in its stories to alleviate adult anxieties, but the movie industry also produced young stars that reflected and exemplified (and broadcast) youth styles and trends across the nation, particularly around dress, music and dance, food, courtship, and cars.[19] As adult workers took scarce jobs and state legislatures mandated longer schooling and restricted child labor, the high school student, or the “teenager,” became the national established role for those between the ages of thirteen and eighteen by the early 1940s.[20]

The violence of the Second World War, changes in parental and youth work patterns, and the lack of adult males in many households were blamed for yet another (supposed) rise in delinquency among young men and for alarming new sexual liberties among young women.[21] As a frequent weekend destination for several thousand sailors from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, Milwaukee was one among many cities in the U.S. that experienced a “V-girl” panic. Young women known variously as “Victory girls” or “Khaki Wakis” found their sympathies more drawn to young soldiers set to fight for the nation than their parents’ ideals about young feminine virtue and virginity. Sailors made dates and connections, including with teenage girls, along downtown streets before moving to taverns, dance halls, and more secluded locations. Milwaukee pastors called a meeting to prevent such “wholesale dating” as soon as it was detected.[22] Within a year, Mayor John Louis Bohn created a (yet another) committee to study delinquency in the city and set an evening curfew for youth under sixteen years old.[23]

The acceptable parameters of youthful behavior were hotly contested throughout the 1940s and 1950s, even as the marketplace continued to make a major play for teenagers’ dimes and dollars by shaping comic books, snack foods, recorded music, movies, fashions, bedroom accessories, and cars to the tastes of young people. Adult authorities followed in kind, now frequently focusing their anxieties on specific issues like teenage sex and unwed pregnancy, early marriage, reckless automobile driving, gangs, drinking and drugs, shoplifting and petty theft, and other minor legal and moral offenses facilitated by youthful autonomy. In 1946, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Crime Commission created a thirty-two page pamphlet archly titled “Here Kid, Take My Car!” to persuade county residents to remove the keys from their parked cars in order to quell youths’ temptations to “borrow” and/or steal them.[24] Within eighteen months, Mayor Frank Zeidler called an informal conference to “discuss juvenile delinquency” and subsequently created the Metropolitan Youth Commission to study, assess, and recommend changes and programs dealing with juvenile delinquency.[25]

Other developments suggest there were also “teenage” problems that Milwaukee youth culture brought into the family home. In 1958 the Milwaukee County Police Youth Advisory Council produced a booklet, part of a national “teenage rights” trend, titled “Parents and Youth Can Work Together: Standards for Youth.”[26] Although “expert” advice on raising children was nothing new in US cultural history, these sorts of documents suggest that fundamental relationships between young people and adult authorities (particularly parents) were continuing to change, and adjustments to these changes now included at least some input from youths themselves. The “Parents and Youth Can Work Together” pamphlet laid out possibilities for negotiated agreements between parents and teenagers on such things as phone usage, allowance, dating, curfew, spending, commercial recreation, television watching, and participation in household chores.[27] Implicitly, these sorts of mid-century pamphlets were a recognition that a semi-autonomous youth culture had established itself as a more or less permanent fixture in American social and cultural life, and that American families needed some assistance in recognizing, accommodating and incorporating the changes.

National and local media provided forums for teenagers—now having asserted some “rights”—to push back on the repeating panics about juvenile delinquency and the shadows it cast on young people generally. In Milwaukee, it was estimated that ninety-seven percent of teenagers obeyed parents, were respectful of adults’ authority and rules, made passing grades in high school, and did not commit crimes. Further, many were deeply involved in adult-approved school activities and sports, church organizations, civic-minded volunteering, and adult-sponsored youth governmental and leadership programs.[28] Turning to embrace “the good kids” in the mid-1950s as a part of their anti-delinquency efforts, the Metropolitan Milwaukee Youth Commission established a “Youth Recognition Week” that became an annual event for the next six years.[29] While these youth-affirming events were praised and extensively covered in the local news media, the delinquency rate reported by the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) continued to rise almost every year in the 1950s, sometimes by more than fifteen percent.[30] By 1960, an astounding number of delinquency prevention initiatives were being implement or proposed in Milwaukee and the surrounding suburbs and counties. In its last throes in early 1960s, the Youth Commission mounted a “Hard-to-Serve and Hard-to-Reach Youth” Project aimed more at Milwaukee than the county and suburbs.[31] The distinctions between the majority—who were relatively harmless, “quirky teenagers”—and the minority who were actually criminal were more or less established by this point; teenagers might be an annoyance but were not a constant threat to adult authority.[32] The arrival of the well-dressed and quick-witted Beatles in Milwaukee in 1964 was marked mostly by news reports, editorials, and letters about crowds of screaming fans and boys’ haircut fashions, rather than cries of alarm about youthful lawlessness running wild, “teenage sex orgies,” and the end of Western civilization.[33]

As Milwaukee families and city authorities came to a negotiated peace with mainstream, middle-class, youth culture, the Milwaukee Beat scene made its debut in 1958 around a coffeehouse in “a little storefront next to Riverside High School” called “The Purple Eye.”[34] The short-lived Purple Eye was followed by a number of similar beat coffeehouse/restaurants lasting into the mid-1960s. In these mostly-unnoticed spaces in Milwaukee, teenagers, college students, local poets, folk, blues, and jazz musicians, visual artists, film buffs, and others met to share an interest in new and revived art forms. “Beat” was a developing counterculture and cultivated a starkly critical view of the consumer-culture status quo (“squares”) now associated with post-war suburban family life, including the “clean teen” teenager. Beat culture was more intergenerational and was not so concerned about parental authority, since many of the early Milwaukee Beats were young adults and older.[35] Rock and roll only slowly and partially displaced jazz, folk, and blues as the common soundtrack in these East Side Beat venues by the mid-1960s. The Avant Garde (1962-1968) on the East Side and Barney’s Wayside Inn (1936-1968) on Water Street were among the few establishments that made the transition from 1950s Beats to 1960s hippies and young political activists.[36] Parks and outdoor events proved conducive to gatherings of all three groups, along with some suburban young people commuting into the city in the evenings and on weekends.

Milwaukee hippies gained public notice around 1965.[37] Although hippies found a home on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) and the East Side neighborhoods, they were not welcomed in the city by the local “straight society,” including the police. Marijuana had been established as a recreational drug in Milwaukee during the Beat era and expanded henceforth, but experimentation with psychedelics, particularly LSD, came from the West Coast, where hippie culture had solidified earlier. Milwaukee’s first “be-in” occurred in April of 1967, three months after the initial be-in in San Francisco.[38] Frequent travelers between the West Coast and Milwaukee (and several other hippie enclaves), as well as a growing “underground” press, kept new ideas, drugs, books, events, activist causes, and other countercultural developments in circulation.[39]

Milwaukee’s first “underground” newspaper, the typed and mimeographed The Advocate, appeared as early as 1961, but it lasted less than a year.[40] In 1967, Milwaukeean John Kois returned from San Francisco and with a few friends began publishing Kaleidoscope, a newspaper with local, national, and international news; advertising for clothing, music, and local nightclubs; and art related to both hippies and politicos. While Kaleidoscope was much loved among the counterculture (both locally and nationally), it was considered to be obscene and promoting radicalism by local authority figures ranging from a Brown Deer high school  principal to the John Birch Society to the Milwaukee City District Attorney. An obscenity case brought against Kaleidoscope in 1968 was decided in favor of paper by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972, after it had folded.[41] Coupled with the arrest of countercultural comedian George Carlin for obscenity in 1972, Milwaukee maintained a national reputation among youth for its enforced but somewhat outdated wholesomeness.[42]

African Americans set the stage for a new youth activism in Milwaukee during the 1960s. The Milwaukee NAACP established a Youth Council in the 1950s, but for the most part, until 1965 the Youth Council accepted the guidance of the organization’s adult leaders. The Youth Council and other youth of color were important actors in the Milwaukee school integration movement (beginning in 1963), participating in sit-ins, disruptions of board meetings, boycotts, a series of student walkouts of public schools, and the creation of Freedom Schools. After 1965, the Youth Council organized a series of marches and pickets involving the segregated Eagle’s Club (1966), including a picket lasting eleven nights outside the Wauwatosa home of a local judge. The Youth Council pickets attracted the ire of local residents who saw the youths of color as out of place in the suburbs; after nine evenings, the number of pickets approached three hundred (including members from Marquette’s Students United for Racial Equality and Young Christian Students). The number of counter-protesters reached into the thousands, including large numbers of area white youths. Eventually, Governor Warren Knowles called out the Wisconsin National Guard, and the pickets ended three nights later. But the most dramatic appearance of African American youth challenging the Milwaukee status quo were the open housing marches the Youth Council organized and staged beginning in 1967 and lasting for two hundred nights. Like the Eagle’s Club pickets before it, the housing marches were met with white resistance, including a substantial white neighborhood youth contingent. Despite the Youth Council’s and their allies’ considerable risk and heroics during the marches, Milwaukee city government failed to pass a local open housing ordinance until after Congress passed the 1968 Fair Housing Act.[43]

The size of Milwaukee’s counterculture significantly expanded during 1967 as youthful civil rights, antiwar, and women’s rights activism began to merge with the hippie counterculture. Community concerns about youthful disorder, corruption of minors, sexual debauchery, communism, lack of patriotism, and drug use fueled a long cycle of confrontations between young people and the Milwaukee Police Department that lasted well into the next decade. Some of these confrontations involved new commercial establishments catering to hippies (e.g., concert venues, nightclubs, and headshops selling drug paraphernalia); some involved political protest events; and some involved unauthorized social gatherings in the parks. Although at least three “love-ins” were successfully held during the summer of 1968, by the end of that year confrontations with police had become a point of unity among the various branches of the counterculture.[44]

The East Side continued to experience an influx of young people from suburban and rural areas looking to explore and participate in the youth counterculture. New local branches of national activist groups formed on the UWM and Marquette campuses: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the White Panthers, the Youth International Party (Yippies), several women’s groups, and a coalition of African American student groups at UWM calling for an Afro-American Cultural Center on the campus.[45] Nightly crowds gathered at Water Tower Park at the end of North Avenue near Lake Michigan. Drug busts and sweeps of the parks by the MPD increased as well, heightening the polarization between the youth counterculture and the Establishment, as mainstream authorities were known.[46] But the counterculture also built its own institutions, including an informational switchboard, a counseling hotline, a free clinic and counseling center, and a food co-op. It also initiated several iconic Milwaukee annual events, including the Brady Street Festival and what became Summerfest.[47]

Violent confrontations at antiwar events, particularly in response to the Nixon administration’s bombing of Cambodia and the student deaths at Kent State University in 1970, raised the stakes across the nation. UWM and Marquette both experienced student strikes, demonstrations, occupations and blockages of university buildings, and bomb threats. An occupation at UWM lasted close to two weeks at the end of the spring semester of 1970.[48] During the same year, enforcement of a 10 p.m. curfew at Water Tower Park initiated three nights of rioting, including a “trashing” and window smashing along Brady Street.[49]

Many of the radical student and freak organizations began to decline in the next year, replaced by more pragmatic organizations and attempts to regain some of the “love” that had originally inspired the hippies.[50] As an alternative to Water Tower Park, the Milwaukee County Parks Commission allowed concerts to be held under the bluffs across from McKinley Beach, an arrangement that lasted until 1974.[51] The Bugle replaced Kaleidoscope as the major countercultural print media.[52] As the more radical male-dominated activist organizations began to fall apart, Milwaukee’s women’s and gay liberation groups gathered strength.[53]

Although sporadic confrontations and political actions between youth and Milwaukee city authorities continued into the early 1970s, the local and national commercial mainstream selectively adopted and incorporated aspects of the youth counterculture, as it had with teenage culture before it, and the United States slowly eased out of its war in Vietnam, a major unifying issue.[54] The existence of a youth culture in itself became progressively less controversial as its appearance in the marketplaces and malls made it less “counter”; a significant portion of mainstream U.S. popular culture was produced by and for youth, and their tastes had a strong impact on the remainder. Many Baby Boomers did not relinquish their youth culture tastes when they entered adulthood, further blurring the “youth” of youth culture.[55] Unmarried coupling, rock music, and recreational pot smoking, among other once-countercultural practices, moved towards everyday acceptability. Ironically, although Milwaukee was not a major hub of national youth culture in the 1950s and early 1960s (compared to southern California cities, for instance), Milwaukee did gain a national association with the 1950s era during the nostalgia boom of the 1970s as the setting for the very popular and long-running comedies “Happy Days” and the spin-off about young women working in Milwaukee’s industries, “Laverne and Shirley.”[56]

Young people did not uniformly greet the mainstream embrace and normalization of youth culture in the 1970s as a win. “Selling out” still meant a betrayal of youthful alternatives and ideals by making commodities for the mass commercial market. The youth culture of the 1970s fragmented into various subcultures based on particular preferences, usually centered around fractures within pop/rock/dance music—heavy metal, punk, new wave, hip-hop, country and western, funk, disco, house, grunge, rave, and others—and the kinds of clothing, drugs and drinking, dancing, and commercial venues adopted by each group.[57]

Unlike punk rock in New York City or house music in Chicago, Milwaukee was not among the cities strongly identified with any of these subcultural niches. But it was not unusual to find members of several different subcultural groups out on the streets or in the clubs and concerts together. Still, Milwaukee retained a place on the national map of youth cultures, with some local bands, venues, and publications attracting national attention. For example, Milwaukee was the home of Massive, a significant “raver” publication of the 1990s. Massive began in 1993 as a “zine”—a low-tech, self-produced magazine, usually photocopied. Producing at least twenty issues into the turn of the century, Massive moved from a DIY photocopied enterprise to a full-color newsprint magazine available by subscription and sold at youth culture venues in more than fifty U.S. and Canadian cities. Massive contained interviews with promoters, DJs, fans and other people of interest within the national (and occasionally, international) rave scene. Although perhaps one in ten of its advertisements were for Milwaukee businesses or shows, the larger part were from rave record labels, venues, shows, bands, and clothing companies across the nation, with a high concentration from cities in the Midwest, such as Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.[58] In some ways, Massive was somewhat like a 1990s version of the late-1960s Kaleidoscope, with much less emphasis on politics and a much greater awareness of itself as part of a global youth culture.