Hoan’s office: A Northwoods shack each summer
Dan Hoan’s cabin made the front page. Six weeks ago, shortly before his grandchildren gathered to mark the centennial of the family retreat near Eagle River, the Journal Sentinel devoted nearly half its front page — on Sunday, no less — to the story of the property and the multiple generations who have enjoyed it.
Milwaukee’s former mayor would have been surprised. Hoan often referred to his Northwoods home as “the shack” — a claim of unpretentiousness befitting a Socialist —and he would have marveled that readers would find it interesting nearly 60 years after his death.
Hoan might have protested, but the place is important because Dan Hoan himself was important. He was one of America’s longest-serving mayors, holding Milwaukee’s top office for 24 years, from 1916 to 1940, and he was also, in my opinion, our most accomplished chief executive. Hoan guided Milwaukee through the tumult of World War I, the Roaring Twenties, and the Depression, and he was at the helm as the city sailed away from a prolonged period of malfeasance and corruption to become a paragon of civic virtue. In 1936 Time Magazine put Dan Hoan on its cover, calling the mayor “one of the nation’s ablest public servants” and praising Milwaukee as “perhaps the best-governed city in the U.S.”
It’s a wonder that Hoan had any time at all to spend at his cottage. He led a city whose population rose from roughly 400,000 to nearly 600,000 during his tenure, and yet he usually managed to spend two full months up north each summer. He never downplayed the demands of his post; Hoan once claimed that only the president of the United States had a harder job than a big-city mayor, simply because the tasks involved were so numerous and often so minute. But his time off was sacred. In these days of nonstop news cycles, such prolonged absences from City Hall would be both unthinkable and politically suicidal.
Hoan’s time away was compounded by the remoteness of his location. When he bought the little cottage on Carpenter Lake in 1918, it took two days to drive there from Milwaukee. There were no telephones, and he went into Eagle River, nine miles west, only twice a week. Visitors were received but hardly courted. Even the most persistent had a hard time finding the place because there was, by design, no mailbox. In 1926 the mayor issued a tongue-in-cheek invitation to President Calvin Coolidge, America’s most
laconic commander-in-chief. “Coolidge is a man after my own heart in one respect,” said Hoan. “He doesn’t talk much. And I go up into the dense forest to commune with myself alone, to talk to myself, and only occasionally to a squirrel.”
And what did His Honor do when he wasn’t communing with Vilas County’s squirrels? He spent time with his wife and two kids, of course, but mostly he worked, and not always on pending legislation or policy initiatives. In 1928 the Milwaukee Journal sent Richard Davis, one of its star reporters, up north to interview Hoan. Davis found his subject in overalls, working through a long list of projects, including a screen porch, a partial basement, an open-air garage, a dovehouse, a smokehouse, and concrete sidewalks. “Keep busy?” the mayor asked rhetorically. “I should say so.” When Davis rose to leave, Hoan insisted that the reporter examine his hands. “Just look at these calluses,” he said. “Hammers and saws and what not always do that to a man.”
The mayor could not escape his official duties completely. He received one newspaper and a briefing letter from his secretary every day, and there were occasional emergencies. In 1928 the Common Council staged a minor insurrection during his summer sojourn, voting to strip the mayor of his power to fill aldermanic vacancies. Hoan rushed home — “rushed” being a relative term in those days — to veto that measure and several others, then motored north again to finish his vacation.
Dan Hoan was by no means the only public official to seek the solace of the Northwoods. Edward Kelly, the political boss who became Chicago’s mayor in 1933, owned a lavish home on Catfish Lake, just a few miles from Hoan’s. “The Milwaukee mayor,” the Milwaukee Journal assured its readers, “has a much more modest and secluded retreat.” Other Milwaukeeans were nearby. Jacob Laubenheimer, the city’s police chief, vacationed at an Eagle River resort every summer until he died there in 1936. Laubenheimer lived across the alley from Hoan in Milwaukee’s Concordia neighborhood, and the pair were practically neighbors up north as well.
The summer exodus became so general that Milwaukee experienced an occasional leadership vacuum. On Aug. 24, 1937, the Milwaukee Journal described the city as “a ship without a skipper.” Mayor Hoan was up north, and the next officials in the line of succession — the Common Council president and the Finance Committee chair — were out of town as well. The Journal reported no panic in the halls of power: “Several aldermen, not eligible for the mayorship, loitered about the city hall, but nothing was stirring sufficiently to necessitate mayoral action.”
The exodus is more understandable when you realize that air conditioning was an unaffordable luxury until well after World War II. Many offices, not to mention all factories, must have felt like saunas in late summer. Vilas County was a comparative heaven.
Not that it lacked hazards. In 1939 Dan Hoan was banging away on a chisel when a splinter of steel pierced his eyelid and lodged in his eyeball. He lost the sight in that eye.
Hazards aside, it’s clear that the mayor relished his time on Carpenter Lake. After two months of solitude and exertion in the Northwoods, Hoan generally came back to City Hall recharged and refreshed. After his 1927 break, he pronounced himself “physically fit for the winter’s work.”
The sojourns continued after he lost the 1940 mayoral race to a vigorous young city attorney named Carl Zeidler. Retired to civilian life, Dan Hoan outlived two wives, weathered eight strokes, and witnessed the collapse of his own party as an electoral force. He died in 1961 at the age of 80. For years before his death, Hoan was the patriarch of family gatherings at Carpenter Lake, and he remains the presiding spirit of the place.
True to his Socialist ideals, Hoan decided to share the wealth. His will dictates that the property, which includes 40 acres and a quarter-mile of lake frontage, be sold following the death of his last grandchild. (The youngest is now 64, and there are family jokes about putting her on life support when the time comes.) One-third of the sale proceeds will go to his great-grandchildren, one-third to the Milwaukee County Historical Society, and the final third to a foundation Hoan established to continue his legacy.
Whatever its ultimate fate — a public park would be ideal — Dan Hoan’s “shack” stands as a testament to his vision and a tangible expression of his values. “It’s a great summer resort I have,” the mayor said in 1927, “and silence is its predominating factor.’” That’s something we could use a great deal more of in our public life.
John Gurda, a Milwaukee historian, writes for the Crossroads section on the first Sunday of each month (www. johngurda.com).