Pints, Performance, and Patriots: Milwaukee’s Turners and the Formation of Citizenship

Description

The driving question behind this work is how the German Turner movement was able to find success in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. An inquiry which begat a second question – to what extent were the urban centers in nineteenth century America willing to accommodate and support what was a foreign athletic endeavor. Using Milwaukee as the case study, newspapers constituted the vast majority of the primary source material. Spanning four decades, from the 1850s to the 1890s, publications ranged from the short-lived Weekly Wisconsin (1850s) to the enduring Milwaukee Daily News (1850s-1890s). Highlighting the civic responsibilities, to coverage of the “talented performances,” and by late 1880s extolling the virtues of the sport of the new German neighbors; the coverage shaped and reflected the support of the uneasy local community. Two works by Fred E. Leonard (Pioneers of Modern Physical Training [1919] and History of Physical Education [1923]) addressed contextual segments and provided the biographical and evolutionary elements of the Turner movement on both sides of the Atlantic.
The relationship between the German Turners and the city of Milwaukee fostered not only athletics success, but an understanding of how a city and its peoples generated their collective identity through sport. Through a brief overview of the Turner movement, their struggles with national conflict, and civic responsibility I will examine how Milwaukee – although apprehensive – committed itself fully to the development and success of the American Turnverein. The scholarship in English on the development of the American Turner movement is lacking. The most significant works in the field, Metzner’s A Brief History of the American Turnerbund (1924) and Tiling’s A History of the German Element in Texas (1913) provide an admirable overview, but lack the historical context granted to current scholars. To uncover the relationship between a sport, a city, and its citizens, the Milwaukee Turnerbund sheds new light on the use of sport to overcome the fractured politics and social barriers of immigrant life in the nineteenth century United States.

Period	2019
Event title	North American Society for Sport History
Event type	Conference
Location	Boise, United States, IdahoShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International