Francis Swietlik, Marquette Law School, and Polish War Relief

Francis X. Sweitlik, Dean of the Marquette College of Law from 1934 to 1953, was a nationally recognized leader of the American Polish community from the early 1930’s until the 1960’s.  During World War II, he was a leading figure in the effort to provide relief for Polish refugees and prisoners of war, and his efforts extended to the provision of general humanitarian aid to the country once the war was over.  Although he initially cooperated with Poland’s post-war Communist government, once it became clear that Poland had become a satellite state of the Soviet Union, he joined the ranks of those who campaigned for the restoration of a non-Communist, democratic government in that country.

Swietlik was born in Milwaukee in 1889 to parents who had recently emigrated from Poland.  He was educated at Marquette where he earned his bachelors, masters, and law degrees.  He began the practice of law in Milwaukee in 1915, and in 1916, he joined the Marquette law faculty on a part-time basis.  He taught at the Law School while practicing law for the next seventeen years (save for the time he was in the military during World War I), and he was named Dean in the fall of 1933 when the previous Dean, Clifton Williams, resigned.

In addition to his career as a lawyer and legal educator, Swietlik was a leading member of the Polish-American community in the United States.  In 1931, he was elected Censor of the Polish National Alliance, the largest Polish fraternal group in the United States.  The Censor was one of the organization’s two highest offices — the President was the other — and was very much a policy-making position.  Swietlik held the position of Censor of the Polish National Alliance for sixteen years, but at the same time held a number of other important positions in the Polish-American community.  In 1934, he was selected as Vice-President of the Polish-American Chamber of Commerce, and that same year he also presided over the American delegation to the International Congress of Poles Abroad, held in Warsaw.  In 1939, he was also chosen as President of the Polish American Council, an organization founded to promote the preservation of Polish culture in the United States.

As a leader of the Polish-American community and the man who was generally recognized as the primary spokesmen for the Chicago Poles (which featured the largest concentration of Polish-Americans of any region of the United States), Swietlik opposed those who insisted that Poles living abroad remained citizens of Poland, which reappeared as an independent country in 1918, after having disappeared from the map of Europe more than a century earlier.

Such Polish nationals believed that expatriate Poles were first and foremost Polish citizen, regardless of where they lived, and as such they owed a duty of loyalty to the current Polish government.  For Swietlik, in contrast, American Poles were Americans first and Poles second, and while he was proud of his Polish heritage (and was fully fluent in Polish), he believed that Poles in the United States owed no special obligations to the relatively new government in Warsaw.

After the German and Soviet invasions of Poland in September 1939, Swietlik became actively involved in the cause of Polish war relief, first as a leader of the Polish National Alliance and then as the director of the Polish National Council which eventually changed its emphasis and name to Polish War Relief.  By one estimate, Swietlik raised almost $17 million dollars in the United States for humanitarian aid to Poles in Europe.

Swietlik was also a prominent defender of the foreign policy of President Franklin Roosevelt.  As a supporter of the President, Swietlik advocated American support for the Polish government in exile in London, but he also endorsed the idea of Polish-Soviet cooperation in the war with Germany.  Not all Polish-Americans agreed with Swietlik on the latter question.  Although the government in exile also embraced the idea of cooperation with the Soviet Union, a growing number of American Poles found it troubling that the United States was not only allied with a country that had invaded Poland (the U.S.S.R.) but was also unwilling to pressure it to agree to reestablish the pre-1939 border between the two countries.

As the scope of atrocities committed against Poland by the Soviet Union became known in 1944 and 1945, and as it became clear that the U.S.S.R. was not going to return to Poland any of the territory that it had seized in 1939, many American Poles broke with the President.  Swietlik, however, remained loyal to Roosevelt.  He supported FDR’s decision to run for an unprecedented third term in 1940, and he campaigned extensively for him inside the Polish community.  Swietlik also consulted personally with the President on Polish issues both before and after the 1940 election (which was, of course, won by Roosevelt).

By 1943, it was becoming apparent that Swietlik’s loyalty to Roosevelt and his polices were hurting his popularity among his fellow Polish-Americans, many of whom were increasingly hostile to what they viewed as FDR’s pro-Soviet Polish policy.  When the Polish American Congress was formed in the fall of 1944 with an agenda that was clearly hostile to the Soviet Union, Swietlik was conspicuously ignored by its founders even though he had been one of the best known Polish-Americans in the country for the past several years (and even though he was present at the organizational meeting).

Although his political influence waned after 1944, Swietlik remained committed to raising money for relief of Poland.  He travelled to Europe after V-E Day to survey the situation, and from 1945 to 1949 (when the Communist government of Poland announced that it would not accept any more humanitarian aid from the West) American Relief for Poland under his direction raised at least $3 million in aid.   Remarkably, he accomplished all of this without ever taking a leave of absence from his duties at the Law School, which usually involved teaching a full load of courses.

In the aftermath of the war he received numerous citations for his efforts on behalf of the Polish population.  He was honored by the governments of Poland, France, and Portugal (where American Relief for Poland had staged his rescue efforts after 1941), and in 1952, he was named a Knight of the Roman Catholic Order of St. Gregory by Pope Pius XII.  He was also involved with the resettlement of 120,000 postwar Polish refugees into the United States, which had been made possible by an act of Congress in 1948.  Although the organization was largely inactive after 1949, Swietlik remained president of American Relief for Poland into the late 1960’s.

In the postwar era, he also adopted a much more critical position on the Soviet Union and eventually denounced the policies of the Roosevelt administration that he had earlier supported.  He remained Dean at Marquette Law School until 1953 when he was elected to the Circuit Court of Milwaukee County.  He continued to teach at the Law School, even after his retirement from the bench at age 70 in 1959.  He died in Milwaukee in 1983.

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The Singing Mayor from Marquette Law School

Although his tenure as mayor was quite brief, Carl Frederick Zeidler (1908-1942) was one of the most colorful men ever to hold office as mayor of Milwaukee.  He was also the most important Wisconsin public official to be killed in World War II.

Zeidler was born on January 4, 1908, in Milwaukee.  His father, Michael Zeidler, had been  born in Wisconsin in 1879, and was the son of a German and Austrian immigrants.  His mother, Clare A. Zeidler, was one year younger than her husband and was also Wisconsin born.  Her father was a native of Germany while her mother was born in New York state.  Carl was the family’s first of four children.  His father operated his own barber shop.  The family was Lutheran, and, it appears, Republican.

Frank grew up in the Merrill Park section of Milwaukee and graduated from West Division High School.   He attended Marquette University, receiving his undergraduate degree with honors in 1929 and his law degree in 1931.  While at Marquette he ran the half-mile on the track team, participated in debate, played in the band, and was a member of several public speaking and singing societies.  He was also a member of the Marquette Law Review.  Upon graduation from law school, he relocated to Chicago where he practiced law until 1936, when he returned to Milwaukee to become an assistant city attorney.  In the late 1930’s he was spectacularly successful as prosecutor, winning conviction after conviction of members of the pro-Nazi Bund.  He also drafted, and successfully defended in court, the city’s first anti-pinball ordinance.

By all accounts Carl was an extremely gregarious and outgoing individual.  His golden-haired good looks and powerful baritone singing voice gave him a charismatic quality that endeared him to almost everyone he met.  He also had a penchant for joining  social and fraternal organizations. By 1940, he was reportedly a member of 25 different Milwaukee organizations ranging from the YMCA to the Knights of Pythias.  According to his younger brother Frank (himself a future Milwaukee mayor), “Carl had a drive and warmth that made him a political natural.” According to Time Magazine, Carl “gravitated toward people,” and claimed to know 50,000 Milwaukeeans by their first names.

In 1940, Carl Zeidler decided to challenge the city’s popular mayor Daniel Hoan who was seeking reelection to his seventh term.  Hoan, a socialist, had a distinguished track record of integrity and accomplishment and few initially thought that Zeidler had any chance at all. Though nominally a Republican, the 32-year old Zeidler ran as a non-partisan independent, and his candidacy was nothing like anything previously seen in a Milwaukee election, particularly during the Great Depression. In a campaign managed by a trio of young Milwaukeeans, Jim Doolittle, Harold Gauer, and Robert Bloch (the author of Psycho), Zeidler concentrated more on capturing the attention of Milwaukee voters than he did on issues that separated him from Hoan.  He regularly appeared with a five-piece band, beautiful women passing out campaign literature, an enormous American flag, and balloons that dropped from the ceiling at the end of indoor rallies.  (This practice apparently originated with the Zeidler campaign.)  Whenever possible, Zeidler would also break into song.  While his favorite song was “God Bless America,” he was just as likely to burst into “I Love You Truly,” “Irish Eyes Are Smiling,”  or some other popular song of that era.  To appeal to Milwaukee’s broad mix of ethnic groups, he also sang in five different languages.  Calling his campaign a crusade for “youth and Americanism,” he adopted the campaign slogan, “A new day for Milwaukee.”  Although he challenged Hoan to a series of debates and criticized Hoan’s rigid building code as resulting in construction moving to the suburbs, it was Zeidler’s personality, not his stand on the issues, that drove his candidacy.

The April 2, 1940 Milwaukee mayoral election resulted in a record turnout of voters.  To the surprise of many, Zeidler ousted Hoan from office by 12,000 votes, in spite of  Hoan’s nearly flawless record of success as mayor. The key to Zeidler’s success was apparently a combination of his personal charisma and votes of Republicans and conservative Democrats who still considered Hoan a dangerous “Red” even after 24 years in office during which the city had flourished and even though he had dropped the Social label in 1936 in favor of being the candidate of the Wisconsin Farmer-Labor Progressive Federation.

The race captured national attention, and the Washington Post reported Zeidler’s upset victory with the observation: “Time takes its toll even of gratitude. The people of Athens got tired of hearing Aristides called the just and the people of Milwaukee apparently got tired of Daniel Webster Hoan for no better reason. Hoan, the Socialist, had nothing to offer them but a continuation of a satisfactory status quo.”  The St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times carried the story of Zeidler’s election at the top of its front page under the headline: “Personality Kid—That’s Milwaukee’s New Blond, Baritone, Bachelor Mayor.” According to Zeidler himself, “I used nothing else than modern merchandising methods. See ’em, tell ’em, sell ’em.”  Zeidler’s election at age 32 made him the nation’s youngest mayor and a figure of national interest.

One voter that Zeidler did not convince was his deeply religious brother Frank who had become a convert to socialism in 1933 and in 1940 served as the Milwaukee County Surveyor.  The younger Zeidler supported his fellow Socialist Hoan over his brother, but after the election both Zeidler’s insisted that the election had not affected their relationship as brothers.

Now dubbed the “Singing Mayor,” Zeidler entered office on April 15 with the same flamboyance with which he had campaigned as he was sworn in before a crowd of 7,000 people in the Milwaukee Auditorium.  As mayor, he continued the good government practices of his predecessor, but he did adopt more conservative fiscal policies including a lowering of property taxes and a reduction of the city payroll.  With World War II already raging in Europe he also orchestrated the city’s efforts to prepare for what many viewed as the inevitable United States entry into the war.  In a major coup for the city, he also succeeded in convincing the American Legion to hold its 1941 convention in Milwaukee.  He also began the tradition immediately after his swearing in of flying the American flag over city hall every day.

By the second year of his term Zeidler was increasingly concerned with military matters.  In September of 1941, he had accepted an honorary appointment as a captain in the Milwaukee state guard, but the satisfaction of an honorary appointment was short-lived.  After Pearl Harbor, Zeidler became increasingly restless as mayor and grew anxious to be in combat himself.  In February of 1942, he travelled to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station north of Chicago and applied for a commission in the Naval Reserve.  He was given the rank of Lieutenant, j. g., and from mid-February on, Milwaukeeans knew that it was only a matter of time before he would resign as mayor.

In April he was called to active duty, and on April 16, just a day more than two years after his inauguration, Ziedler formally resigned.  Although most Milwaukeeans considered Zeidler a good mayor, his decision to go into the military was widely applauded as patriotic and as an appropriate example for others.  Over 20,000 people showed up to wish him goodbye when he left the city.  Common Council President John L. Bohn assumed the duties of mayor for the remainder of Zeidler’s term.

Lt. Zeidler was assigned to be the gunnery officer on the S. S. LaSalle a merchant marine vessel used to transport war materials from the continental United States to military facilities abroad.  His first assignment took him to the Caribbean where the LaSalle encountered a surfaced enemy submarine which was fired upon by Zeidler’s guns.  Although the submarine disappeared in the resulting smoke, there was insufficient evidence to award the crew to consider it officially destroyed although enthusiastic press accounts speculated that the enemy vessel had been sunk.  When Lt. Zeidler returned to Milwaukee on a 72 hour pass during the last week of August, he was treated as a returning hero.  As luck would have it Zeidler arrived during State Fair Week and he was able to fill his short visit with a series of public speeches and singing opportunities.

Leaving Milwaukee, Zeidler returned for the east coast where the LaSalle embarked for the Canal Zone with a merchant crew of 40 and a gun crew of 18.  From the Canal Zone, the ship was to carry military supplies, including airplanes, ammunition, and tanks to Cape Town, South Africa.  When the ship departed from Balboa, Canal Zone, on September 26, its captain was under strict orders to maintain radio silence unless it was absolutely necessary to send a distress signal.

The 26th of September was the last day that the United States has any record of the LaSalle.  The ship did not arrive in South Africa on November 1 as scheduled, nor did it appear in subsequent days.  No distress call was ever received, and the names of the crew members did not appear on German or Japanese prisoner of war lists.  Many in Milwaukee held on to the hope that they had been captured by a Japanese submarine and that they had not yet been returned to Japan.  On December 17, 1942, the ship was officially declared missing.

Even though no evidence of the whereabouts of the ship or its crew surfaced in 1943, the Secretary of the Navy elected to maintain the “missing” classification until November 4, 1944, when Zeidler’s parents were notified that their son was now presumed to have died on November 2, 1942.  An official announcement of the declaration of the fate of the LaSalle was made four days later.  That same year Zeidler’s successor Bohn was elected to a four-year term as mayor on his own.

Once Zeidler was declared dead, Congressman Thad F. Wasielewski of Wisconsin’s 5th District announced that he would try to convince either the Navy or the Merchant Marine to name a ship after the former mayor.  Wasielewski, who had been a college and law school classmate of Zeidler at Marquette—both graduated from the law school in 1931—expressed confidence that the Navy would be willing to name a destroyer escort after him.  In September of 1945, Mayor Bohn, Zeidler’s successor, appealed to President Truman for a special investigation into the disappearance of Zeidler’s ship.  In his appeal, which occurred after the surrender of Japan, Bohn mentioned that some Milwaukeeans, including Zeidler’s parents held out hope that he was still alive, but unreported.  Although an investigation was order, no additional information was forthcoming.

More than three decades after the LaSalle disappeared its fate was finally determined.  In 1975, the Milwaukee Journal reported that unofficial German submarine warfare records indicate that the LaSalle was sunk by a German submarine in the Indian Ocean, 350 miles southeast of the coast of South Africa at 10:50 p.m. on November 7, 1942.  The ship was several days behind schedule at that point, and the German torpedo detonated explosives on board the LaSalle causing it to explode.  The ship’s crew apparently had no opportunity to send out a distress call.

Although it appears that neither the Navy nor the Merchant Marine named a ship after Zeidler, the Singing Mayor was not forgotten.  Zeidler Park in downtown Milwaukee was named in his honor, and in 1948, Carl Zeidler’s younger brother Frank was elected Mayor of Milwaukee as a Socialist, at least in part on the basis of his brother’s popularity.  Carl was also memoralized with a cenotaph in Milwaukee’s Forest Home Cemetery.  Frank Zeidler served as mayor until 1960, and lived in Milwaukee until his death in 2006.

It is tempting to speculate what might have happened in Wisconsin’s political history if Carl Zeidler had not entered the Navy or if he had returned to Milwaukee unharmed after the war.  Had he remained in civilian life, he almost certainly would have been reelected as mayor in 1944.  However, his popularity was such that as early as 1941, his name began to be mentioned as a possible candidate for higher office.  The Wisconsin Republican Party enthusiastically claimed him as one of its own, and as early as 1942 there was talk of his running on the Republican ticket against incumbent United States Senator Robert LaFollette, Jr., in 1946.  LaFollette, the son of the famous Wisconsin progressive “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, held office as a member of the Progressive Party.  Although the LaFollette name was an extremely potent one in Wisconsin, Zeidler had already demonstrated his ability to knock off entrenched political figures.  Moreover, in November 1940, LaFollette had defeated his Republican opponent Fred Clausen by only 4% of popular vote, and Ziegler would clearly have been a more formidable opponent than Clausen.

Had Carl Zeidler had been around in 1946, he almost certainly would have defeated the winner of the actual 1946 Republican primary, an obscure Fox Valley Appleton judge and Marquette Law School graduate named Joseph McCarthy.  Had Zeidler not gone down with the LaSalle, not only might the history of the postwar Wisconsin have been affected, but the United States experience in the Cold War could also have turned out quite differently.

Photos of the first Mayor Zeidler can be found at http://content.mpl.org/cdm4/results.php?CISOOP1=any&CISOFIELD1=CISOSEARCHALL&CISOROOT=/MilwMayors&CISOBOX1=law

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Another Little-Known Fact: Ralph Metcalfe Was a Marquette Law Student (at Least for a While)

Ralph Metcalfe (1910-1978) is one of the best-known of all of Marquette University’s African-American alumni.  A member of the undergraduate class of 1936, Metcalfe achieved great prominence as an athlete at Marquette and as an educator and a public servant in his subsequent life.

In the 1930’s, Metcalfe and Jesse Owens computed neck and neck for the unofficial title of the greatest sprinter of the decade.  Metcalfe won a total of four Olympic medals in 1932 and 1936, and while at Marquette, he equaled the world record for the 100-yard dash and set or tied NCAA records in both the 100-yard and 220-yard dashes.  (His time in the 220-yard straightaway is still the official NCAA record and one that is likely to last since the event is no longer run.)  Although the younger Owens bested Metcalfe in the 100-meter dash at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Owens never matched Metcalfe’s best times as a collegiate runner.  In 1975, he was a member of the second class inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame.

After Marquette, Metcalfe  went on to a successful career as track coach and instructor in political science at Xavier University in New Orleans. (He also picked up an M.A. degree in Political Science from the University of Southern California.)  After service in the U.S. Army during the Second World War, the Georgia native returned to Chicago, where he had lived prior to enrolling at Marquette.

In Chicago, he achieved additional success as a businessman and politician.  A Democrat, he served four terms as a Chicago city alderman, and in 1971 was elected to the United States Congress, in which he served until his death in 1977.  As a Congressman, he was one of the founders of Congressional Black Caucus.

What is not so well known is that Metcalfe was also a Marquette law student from 1934 to 1935.  The primary reason that this is not better remembered is that Metcalfe’s stint as a law student was relatively brief and that he transferred back to the undergraduate college during his final year at Marquette.

Metcalfe enrolled at Marquette during the 1931-1932 academic year and competed in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games as a Marquette student.  In 1934, he transferred to the Law School without having yet earned an undergraduate degree.  There was, however, nothing unusual about such a course of action in 1934, since two years of college work had been a prerequisite for enrolling at the Law School since the early 1920’s.  However, in 1934, the Law School announced that all students who enrolled after  January 1, 1935, would have to present three years of undergraduate work.  (Technically, this remains the requirement today.)

Whether or not Metcalfe had earned three years of college credit before the fall of 1934 is not clear, but at that point the requirement was still just two years, which he had clearly completed.

Although Metcalfe was an excellent student — he was elected a member of Alpha Sigma Nu, the Jesuit Honor Society — and when he received the Ph.B. degree in 1936, it was awarded cum laude — he apparently found his studies at the law school quite challenging.  In Jeremy Schaap’s recent book on Jesse Owens, he reports that Metcalfe pulled out of a much anticipated race with Owens in the spring of 1935 (in Milwaukee of all places) because he had to study for his Law School exams.

However, by the following fall, Metcalfe had apparently decided not to pursue a career in law after all.  The October 10, 1935, Chicago Tribune reported that he had transferred from the Law School back to Marquette’s undergraduate college, and it was the undergraduate college that awarded him his degree in the spring of 1936.  Apparently, the fact of his transfer was not everywhere noted;  for example, a February 9, 1936, story on Metcalfe in the New York Times described him “as a law student at Marquette.”

Today, Metcalfe is best remembered at Marquette through the periodic exhibits pertaining to his career that are staged by the University Archives and by the attachment of his name to the university’s outstanding athlete award, to two prestigious undergraduate scholarships, and to the university’s Ralph Metcalfe Chair, which is used to bring noted African-American scholars to the Marquette community.

However, we can also add his name to the list of remarkable individuals who passed through the Marquette Law School during the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s, but who made their mark outside of the legal profession, a list that includes the likes of NFL players Lavern Dilweg, Biff Toucher, and Dan McGinnis; actor-athlete-singer Paul Robeson,;actor Pat O’Brien (who played Knute Rockne in The Knute Rockne Story); circus giant and actor Clifford Thompson; and controversial politician and hipster Joe McCarthy.

The picture below depicts Metcalfe (L) and sprinter Eddie Tolan at the 1932 Olympics.

Continue ReadingAnother Little-Known Fact: Ralph Metcalfe Was a Marquette Law Student (at Least for a While)