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Episode 2: The Healthiest City
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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.
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