Researching Henry W. Maier

Guest post by Avarie Daly

While researching Henry W. Maier for both the first tabling activity and the final re-enactment, I explored 3 places to find primary sources. The first was the UWM library digital collections, where I found videos and audio of press conferences, photos, and digitized documents. The digital collections contained Maier’s State of Emergency Proclamation, which was the foundation of my presentation, and I found an interview with an NAACP demonstrator. I originally didn’t plan on finding an interview with someone on the “opposition” of Maier’s interests, but it ended up supplementing the documents quite well and allowed me to explain the situation better than if I just used my own description.

For the re-enactment, I first visited the library to check out Maier’s autobiography. The book helped me write blog post #1. There were only physical copies available, so I had to flip through the book until I found a chapter that would possibly contain the information I was looking for. It was good for information about his mayorship, but not for details about his life. I decided to look in the physical archives to see if I could find out about his time at UWM. People in the archives suggested looking through a few of his boxes, which I did, and it was interesting to see copies of messages to other major figures in Milwaukee history, including Joe Klotsche. However, primary sources here were also limited to career-related events. I found that his autobiography was a better indicator of his personality than these official documents. I ended my archives trip by looking through UWM yearbooks from the time he supposedly attended grad school for his M.A., but there was no proof that he went there. Overall, it was still cool to see old newspaper clippings, memos, photos, and yearbooks – I even noticed that the final pages of the 1960s yearbooks contained job advertisements for big companies that I researched for my research paper on deindustrialization, like A.O. Smith and Allis Chalmers!

 

References

Maier, Henry W. The Mayor Who Made Milwaukee Famous: An Autobiography. Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1993.