“How should we look back at the history of the “sewer socialists” of Milwaukee? This question has taken on renewed urgency following the elections of Seattle’s Katie Wilson and New York City’s Zohran Mamdani, who has said that “the example of sewer socialism is one that I think of often.””
“Socialists in Milwaukee achieved electoral success that was unmatched in any other U.S. city in the twentieth century”
“In 1910, Victor Berger, a founder of the Socialist Party of America and the most influential socialist leader in Milwaukee in the early twentieth century, was elected as the first socialist to sit in the U.S. House of Representatives. The same year, Emil Seidel became the first socialist elected as Milwaukee’s mayor. Voted out of office in 1912, he became Eugene Debs’s running mate in the presidential election, in which Socialists won about 6 percent of the national popular vote—their greatest percentage ever. Daniel Hoan, the city’s second socialist mayor, was elected in 1916 and served for twenty-four years before he was voted out of office in 1940. The third socialist to win election to the mayor’s office, Frank Zeidler, served three terms, from 1948 to 1960, when he decided against running for re-election. As historian Joshua Kluever recently reminded us, socialists from Milwaukee and elsewhere in Wisconsin also allied with progressive Republicans to pass laws in the state legislature related to labor, the judicial process, and public utilities in the 1920s and early 1930s”
“Socialists in Milwaukee assembled an impressive urban record. In a 2019 Dissent article, Peter Dreier reviewed many of these achievements, which included innovations in basic services—not just sewage treatment but also public health, housing, education, libraries, fire protection, and parks—along with systematic efforts to reduce corruption through the introduction of modern accounting and other methods”
“Although the moniker is often applied anachronistically to the entire sweep of socialist electoral success in Milwaukee in the twentieth century, “sewer socialism” has more precise historical origins in bitter struggles over control of the Socialist Party in the early 1930s”
“socialists in Milwaukee rarely used the term to describe themselves. In his Ninety Years of Democratic Socialism: A Brief History of the Socialist Party USA, Zeidler made only one mention of the term, and as a pejorative name applied by outsiders (an “exonym”) rather than a self-description”
“the organization that laid the foundation for Zeidler’s first election was not the Socialist Party but the Municipal Enterprise Committee (later the Public Enterprise Committee), a grassroots coalition of activists who were united not by party membership but by common aspirations”
“Zeidler continued to be active as a leader in party affairs at both the local and national levels. But in his role as a mayor, he identified as a liberal—a term that, in his usage, included democratic socialists and like-minded people of any party affiliation”
“Party discipline was an important element of Socialist success in the early twentieth century, when the famed “bundle brigade” canvassed for votes in working-class neighborhoods. But as historian S. Ani Mukherji has pointed out, efforts to maintain discipline were less effective in the Popular Front era”
“Zeidler’s success hinged on Milwaukee’s larger associational culture—a rich working-class world sustained by unions and cultural, activist, social, and religious organizations”
“Today, Socialists in Milwaukee are largely remembered for their achievements within the city’s limits. But they also understood themselves to be international actors, as did a substantial number of the people who voted them into power. Their efforts to remake their city were part of the larger, international networks that Shelton Stromquist has retraced in his magisterial Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism”
“Berger was influenced by his understanding of the Second International and of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, and by his reading of Eduard Bernstein. Other influences on early Socialists included not just Marx and Engels but also Ferdinand Lassalle, the Fabians, Keir Hardie, and Jean Jaurès”
“Milwaukee’s Garden Homes, a city government-sponsored cooperative, was informed by a study of innovative approaches to workers’ housing in Europe, including England’s Garden Cities”
“Milwaukee’s socialists solved problems, it’s true, but the solutions they proposed were inseparable from their ideological commitments, including aspirations for public ownership or, to use a term that Zeidler embraced, “production for use” rather than for profit”
“His commitment to pursuing world peace through the United Nations was a prominent feature of his politics both during and after his time as mayor. His environmentalism was similarly informed by concerns about the fate of the planet”
“Socialists in Milwaukee built an inspiring record of tackling urban challenges, but their famed “pragmatism” was not an alternative to but rather a manifestation and expression of commitments and ideas that were firmly rooted in their understanding of larger debates within the world of socialism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries”
“In his unpublished autobiography, Emil Seidel gave his own verdict on efforts to relegate Milwaukee socialists to the gutter of history: “Yes, we wanted sewers in the workers’ homes; but we wanted much, oh, so very much more than sewers.””
“Zeidler’s commitment to world peace mattered less to the majority of the voters who elected him to office than it did to his close allies and admirers, Socialist or otherwise. But his internationalism cannot be hived off from his efforts to expand public libraries or increase fire protection in working-class neighborhoods”