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Milwaukee’s Socialist Heritage
HOW DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS MOVED THE CITY FORWARD ONE STEP AT A TIME
By David Luhrssen
My father’s first job in America was delivering milk and butter to the mayor of Milwaukee. Frank Zeidler (1912-2006), Milwaukee’s final Socialist mayor, lived in a modest home along the inner-city route where my father drove his delivery truck. Years later, he recalled Zeidler as friendly and unassuming, eager for a short chat in the kitchen on politics before leaving to catch the streetcar to his office in City Hall. Zeidler declined to seek a fourth term in 1960, partly because of a racist campaign that derided him as sympathetic to Milwaukee’s black population and accused him of actively recruiting black migrants to the city. Frank P. Zeidler. Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee County Historical Society. Although Milwaukee never elected another Socialist since then, the party’s pragmatic progressive legacy remains visible. Milwaukee has one of America’s most extensive public park systems, spurred by the Socialists’ belief that green space and fresh air should be available to everyone. They raised the minimum wage and promoted the eight-hour workday and the two-day weekend against the objections of corporate interests. They strengthened the city’s health department and sent inspectors into schools, factories and restaurants. They helped establish Milwaukee Area Technical College, a vocational training school for the masses. They pushed for goals that would later be achieved nationwide, including
Social Security and women’s suffrage.
Perhaps one of their most important contributions to Milwaukee was the tradition of clean, honest government. Instead of the flagrant corruption that characterized many big cities in 20th-century America, including Milwaukee when the century began, the city’s Socialists promoted cost-conscious civic-mindedness and public responsibility.
Landslide Victory
Milwaukee’s Socialists were swept into power by the 1910 municipal and county election through campaigning against a corrupt, self-serving administration. The Socialist small-business owner Emil Seidel led the field and became mayor. Socialist candidates won 21 of the city’s 35 aldermanic seats, 10 of 16 county supervisor seats and took two benches in the county court system. Charles B. Whitnall, who later spearheaded the growth of the park system, became city treasurer. Daniel Hoan was elected city attorney. The leader of the city’s Social Democratic Party, Victor Berger, took a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was a rarity on Capitol Hill in those years as a third-party congressman and a Jew.
According to historian John Gurda, whose 2006 PBS series “The Making of Milwaukee” earned an Emmy for Best Documentary, “A potent combination of factors made Milwaukee a Socialist stronghold: intellectual currents that
crossed from Germany with leaders of the failed 1848 revolution, a huge working-class population, the corruption of the traditional parties, the killing of seven strikers in the 1886 demonstrations for the eight-hour day, and the organizing genius of Victor Berger.”
Berger set the tone for Milwaukee’s Social Democrats. A school teacher and theater critic, he stressed the importance of inspiring public opinion and founded one of America’s leading Socialist newspapers, Wisconsin Vorwärts (Forward). Although he was an intellectual, he had no patience for the ideological hairsplitting that often divided the left. Berger was content to be described as an “evolutionary moderate” who changed the world through one initiative at a time. He placed his faith in the ballot box of democracy, not the barricades of revolution.
Berger was a skillful tactician, linking his movement with organized labor and mobilizing his “Bundle Brigade” of thousands of volunteers who circulated tens of thousands of leaflets throughout the city; his ideas went viral as leaflets passed from hand to hand. Although Milwaukee’s Social Democrats emerged from Turner Hall and other male-oriented German cultural institutions, Berger pitched its appeal across ethnic lines and eagerly enrolled women into the party.
Emil Seidel. Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee County Historical Society.
Pragmatically, Democratically
Milwaukee’s Socialists were unable to repeat their landslide in post-1910 elections. For many years they competed with better-funded campaigns by Wisconsin Sen. Robert La Follette’s Progressives, the relatively conservative
local Democrats and the often relatively liberal local Republicans. Although no longer dominant in all branches of local government, they continued in key offices and infused the city with fresh ideas, implemented pragmatically and democratically. They were dubbed “Sewer Socialists” for their emphasis on nitty-gritty details such as sanitation and garbage collection.
Daniel Hoan, for whom the bridge spanning the Port of Milwaukee is named, became mayor in 1916 and served for 24 years. Frank Zeidler was elected mayor in 1948 and continued his party’s tradition of efficiency, honesty and concern for the underdog. That he governed Milwaukee through the era of Joe McCarthy, the infamous Red-baiting U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, testifies to his political acumen as well as the state’s purple-colored political history.
Milwaukee’s Socialist past has been getting a second look and is featured in the 2020 documentary “America’s Socialist Experiment,” aired on PBS stations across the U.S. The program’s co-producer, Marquette University Law School’s Mike Gousha, distinguished fellow in law and public policy, explains the decline of Milwaukee’s Social Democrats. “On some occasions, especially in the early years, they overreached. They struggled to counter the idea that Socialism and Communism were the same, and they didn’t create the next generation of socialist leaders, which
effectively ended Milwaukee’s socialist experiment.
“But the socialists won elections because they listened to the people,” Gousha continues. “Milwaukeeans wanted an end to corruption. The Socialists restored honesty and integrity to government. Milwaukeeans wanted a cleaner and safer city. The Socialists made significant advances in public health. Milwaukeeans wanted to enjoy their lives outside of work.”
In the dedication to his 2007 book, Cream City Chronicles, Gurda calls Zeidler a “model Milwaukeean.” I asked him why.
“Frank Zeidler was a model Milwaukeean because he was steeped in its history and devoted to its betterment,” he replies. “No one has ever had a better grasp of our city’s past, and no one ever worked harder for the common good.”
David Luhrssen has authored several books on American and cultural history. He taught history of Wisconsin at Milwaukee Area Technical College.
