From Assimilation to Multiculturalism considers the formation and history of ethnic social stratification in one locality—Milwaukee, Wisconsin—and shows the varied treatment different groups encountered at the hands of local elites, authorities, and institutions. But while much of the existing historical literature on ethnic and racial groups generally isolates one or two particular communities, August moves along the entire continuum of ethnicity, giving equal attention to Native Americans, European Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans, as well as pointing out the varied paths taken by people belonging to different religious groups.

August shows how some immigrant groups were able to undergo Americanization and graduate to whiteness, an experience vastly unlike that of minorities identified today as people of color. He also notes that the marginalization and regulation of those at the bottom of the ethnic hierarchy came at a very great social cost. When cultural adjustment—the prevailing strategy of regulating diversity in the city prior to the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s—collapsed, Milwaukee adapted as required but entered the new millennium as a still severely segregated metropolis.

“Upon careful review of a very long history,” August concludes, “it is a failure of leadership that really stands out as the source of so much misfortune. While one can surely argue that public racism limited what Milwaukee’s elected and appointed officials could do, the latter’s inaction and in some cases sympathy with the politics of exclusion ensured that the affected communities themselves would have to take action to bring about fundamental change.”

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