In the winter of 1918, the city of Milwaukee faced a crisis almost exactly like our own. A highly contagious and deadly virus found its way to the city. This disease was the great influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919; and like the coronavirus pandemic today it completely upended life in our city.

What might we learn about our own moment by looking to the past? What can the history of Milwaukee's other pandemic teach us about navigating our own crisis?

From the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Department of History and the Milwaukee County Historical Society comes a new podcast about our city and its pandemics. And it's called The Healthiest City.

The Healthiest City is a production of UWM's Department of History, in partnership with the Milwaukee County Historical Society. It is produced by Chris Cantwell and the students in his "History and New Media." 

The music in this trailer is "Summit" by the Blue Dot Sessions.  

In the years after its effective response to the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic, Milwaukee became known as “the healthiest city.” But that reputation, and the public health preparedness that made it possible, wasn’t built up overnight: Milwaukee learned how to respond to a dangerous epidemic the hard way. In episode one of The Healthiest City podcast, Maddy Tabor and Olivia Hoff explore how Milwaukee’s public health policies were affected by the smallpox outbreak of 1894. 

German and Polish immigrants on Milwaukee’s South Side feared government control and saw the city’s isolation of children as a threat. Walter Kempster, the city’s public health commissioner, failed to soothe their concerns. Instead of communicating with these communities on their own terms and in their own languages, Kempster reacted to their resistance with force, provoking widespread outrage that only made matters worse. Judy Leavitt, a historian of medicine and the author of The Healthiest City, joins our hosts to discuss how Milwaukee learned lasting lessons from this devastating failure.

For more information, including photographs and documents from the era, visit https://milwaukeehistory.net/podcast/. 

In episode two of The Healthiest City podcast, hosts Bailey Green and Roman Lulloff explore how the rise of the Socialist Party in Milwaukee helped build up the city’s public health programs in the years before the 1918 flu pandemic struck. Emil Seidel was elected as the city’s first Socialist mayor in 1910, and the party captured a majority in the Common Council the same year. 

The Socialists kept their campaign promises when it came to public health, building new isolation hospitals and neighborhood clinics for children. They also built a sewer system and pressed for sanitation inspections to be conducted across the city. While Republicans and Democrats alike opposed these reforms, they were popular with the public, and they managed to continue after the Socialists’ short-lived control of city government was over. As you will hear, these changes were essential when Milwaukee and the rest of the world faced the “Spanish flu” just a few years later.

For more information, visit milwaukeehistory.net/podcast.