Photo credit: Milwaukee Public Library
Milwaukee thrived under three socialist mayors through nearly four decades in the 1900s: Emil Seidel (1910-1912); Daniel Hoan (1916-1940); and Frank Zeidler (1948-1960).
No one could deny the excitement Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders stirred in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, particularly among a new generation of young political activists. That didn’t stop more cautious Democrats from worrying about nominating Sanders, who describes himself as a democratic socialist. I’ll confess to having fears, myself, that Donald Trump, an unprincipled demagogue, would add the red-baiting of Sanders as a “socialist radical” to his inflammatory appeals to racism and religious bigotry and increase his danger of reaching the White House.
We’ll never know whether all the voter enthusiasm behind Sanders could have overcome Trump’s hate campaign any better than more conventional Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Trump’s election shocked everyone who previously had higher respect for the fundamental decency of American voters. But in this current election year, Sanders’ lifelong push for a more boldly progressive Democratic Party is succeeding.
The next generation of energized, exciting, new candidates includes Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez—a bright, young Latina community organizer who pulled off her own primary shocker by defeating New York Congressman Joe Crowley, considered a potential successor to Nancy Pelosi as Democratic House Speaker. Ocasio-Cortez—and other rising new Democrats around the country—also proudly refer to themselves as democratic socialists.
There’s a reason why young activists don’t consider socialism to be a scary word. They’re well-educated. I smile writing that because I taught an urban history course at UW-Milwaukee on the history of Milwaukee. That history includes the longest, most successful control of any American city under the administration of socialist mayors. Even many people aware that socialism bears little resemblance to communism—or to those murderous, totalitarian dictators Trump so admires—often have a mistaken belief it’s some kind of idealistic, pie-in-the-sky governing philosophy that could never succeed in the real world.
Milwaukee’s Socialist Example
Milwaukee totally destroys that idea, thriving under socialist mayors nearly four decades between 1910 and 1960. Those 38 years included just three extraordinary politicians: Emil Seidel (1910-1912); Daniel Hoan (1916-1940); and Frank Zeidler (1948-1960).
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The administration of Seidel, Milwaukee’s first socialist mayor, was the shortest, but set the pattern for socialist government: clean government instituting professional budgeting and city planning with an emphasis on public services and improving the lives of workers with an eight-hour work day and raising the minimum wage. That was truly revolutionary since Seidel followed David Rose, the most corrupt mayor in Milwaukee history who ran a wide-open city overseeing brothels and 24-hour gambling houses within sight of City Hall. Democrats and Republicans resorted to drastic measures in 1912 to defeat Seidel, campaigning together with a bipartisan “fusion ticket” to take back the mayor’s office.
Many of us are proud to have known Frank Zeidler, the city’s most recent socialist mayor, who remained a strong, active voice for good government and humane public policy until he died in 2006 at age 93. But it was Hoan—the crusading socialist city attorney left standing after the 1912 bipartisan purge of socialists who was elected mayor in 1916 and held the office for the next 24 years—who defined the lasting contributions of democratic socialists to democracy itself. Hoan’s time in office included the Great Depression, the worst hard times in American history. That’s when Hoan’s socialist government was recognized nationally for its sound financial management while expanding public employment for those out of work.
In December 1931, two years after the stock market crash of 1929, The New York Times wrote: “The City of Milwaukee has paid its bills, expended hundreds of thousands in unemployment relief and at the end of the year will have about $4 million in the bank.” Time magazine, the national newsweekly of conservative Republican publisher Henry Luce (certainly no friend of socialists), put Hoan on the cover in April 1936, reporting: “Under him, Milwaukee has become perhaps the best-governed city in the U.S.”
Here’s the truth few people talk about that explains why the Socialist Party faded politically in the U.S. just when its programs for the working class were most desperately needed: The Democratic Party adopted the most popular and successful programs of democratic socialists like Seidel, Hoan and Zeidler. Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used public employment, unemployment benefits and other social safety net programs to pull the nation out of the Great Depression and become the most popular president in history. He was the only president ever elected four times.
Republicans who have viciously fought such economic improvements in the lives of all Americans ever since are actually right when they attack Roosevelt’s Social Security, Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare and Medicaid and Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act as socialist programs. But they’re totally wrong to suggest socialist programs are somehow un-American. They’re American democracy’s most important economic equalizers.
It’s as American as apple pie to elect a bright, new generation of democratic socialists. They’re fighting to preserve the American ideal of sharing the economic benefits of democracy with everyone, not just the wealthy.
