Across the street from Fiserv Forum – site of the Republican National Convention – is Turner Hall. It served as headquarters for CNN and Politico during the convention, but Turner Hall’s history, and the history of the Milwaukee Turners and their place in the city and its politics, is also relevant to the country’s current politics.
The Turners were a prominent German and German American organization from the 19th and 20th centuries that revolved around gymnastics as well as socialist policies and civic engagement. The Milwaukee Turners have broadened and modernized their mission, but it still revolves around athletics and social justice advocacy.
With the RNC in Milwaukee last week, Emilio De Torre, executive director of the Milwaukee Turners, took the opportunity to push the Turners’ own initiatives. These include efforts to end mass incarceration, especially within the Black community, and improving social services and public education.
“The way we fund our public school systems needs to improve,” De Torre said. “We need to double down on investments, specifically in schools reaching Black and Latino students. I also firmly believe the [city] budget is immoral. When our city budget puts as much of our money (as it does) into law enforcement, that’s extremely problematic.”
“We should be focusing on greater public transportation and greater free, shared common spaces and we need to dismantle the segregation that keeps our city apart and look at the unequal way Black people have been policed and then incarcerated,” De Torre continued.
These initiatives fall in line with who the Turners have been throughout the group’s history, dating back to the early 1800s.
Turner Hall, long before it was a National Historic Landmark, opened in 1883 as the home of the Milwaukee Turners. The Turners were founded in Germany in 1811 by German nationalist Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, and the group quickly became a physical, social and political powerhouse. It was shortly thereafter that some members migrated to the United States, many of whom ended up in Milwaukee and various other parts of Wisconsin.
While the use of gymnastics for physical prowess and drinking for social influence were key in the growth of the Turners, it’s the Turners’ activism, as well as its identity as one of Milwaukee’s earliest socialist groups, that has made the group politically relevant, especially in the 21st century.
Chris Ahmuty has been a member of the Milwaukee Turners dating back to the 1980s. While he said that activism was still a pillar of the group back then, he has seen firsthand the evolution of the group from being largely a social organization in the 1980s and 1990s to its current state as an activist and community organization.
“Members weren’t there for the political aspect,” Ahmuty said. “They were there for the social aspect or for the gym. I have friends from back in that period who were doing gymnastics for decades. I think coming, especially coming out of the 1960s, they weren’t going to push it with progressive, much less socialist politics. Politics seemed more muted.”
Today, the politics of the Turners are far from muted, so much so that other people in the community, including members of the Republican Party, are starting to take note.
Travis Clark was a Democratic voter before joining the Republican Party, and he now works with Urban Outreach in Milwaukee. Upon hearing about the efforts of the Turners, he said he would be more than willing to support the group’s initiatives, especially putting an end to mass incarceration.
“As a Republican, I would be an advocate on such issues,” said Clark, noting that as a Black man the issue is especially important to him. “It has to be individuals like me that make it a priority to the Republican Party and I think I could force that matter.”