Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 44, number 2, winter 1960-1961

              THE SOCIALIST PARTY AND THE UNION

IN MILWAUKEE, 19001912

By Frederick I.  Olson

ON April 19, 1960, when Frank P. Zeidler retired from the Milwaukee city hall. So¬ cialist party members had occupied the may¬ or's office for thirty-eight of the previous fifty years, making of Milwaukee one of the most successful and durable examples of local So¬ cialist party strength in the nation. To name some of the party's former leaders of the past half-century is to prove a point: Emil Seidel, first Socialist to become chief executive of a major American city; Daniel Webster Hoan, for twenty years mayor, and city attorney dur¬ ing the preceding six years; and Victor L. Berger, the nation's first Socialist Congress¬ man.

Although as a party Milwaukee's Socialists never commanded the dependable allegiance of a majority of the city's voters and at their peak had hardly even a numerous membership, their candidates, beginning in 1904, could and did win election and re-election to selected local, state, and Congressional offices. Their electoral successes were particularly marked until the mid-1930's when they chose to join a broader movement with the La Follettes and their labor farm allies, and thus lost their identity.^

It is possible to find a convincing explana¬ tion for the remarkable political success of the Socialists in Milwaukee. During the nineteenth century the city received a large migration of Germans, many of them familiar with and some quite sympathetic to socialist ideas. Among the convinced socialists, all of whom were friendly to labor and to union organiza¬

tion, were such leaders as Berger, who advo¬ cated political action and the revisionist doctrines of Eduard Bernstein. Early in the twentieth century these politically-conscious leaders found their opportunity in Milwaukee¬ ans' increasing awareness that Democrats and Republicans alike shared in local corruption and incompetence. The national trend toward municipal reform in the Progressive era, and particularly the increasing respectability of So¬ cialist party activity, helped to make Milwau¬ kee's Socialists acceptable. Increasing public confidence in the record of party members elected to the state legislature, the common council, the county board, and the school board was stimulated by constant party agitation and a sound political organization. Berger's pub¬ lishing enterprises, in German and English, though privately controfled, provided a form of party press. The successes of 1910, when So¬ cialist pluralities won control of the common council and county board, elected a mayor and Congressman and sent a fourteen-man delega¬ tion to the state legislature, surprised only those who had ignored the meaning of election returns since 1904.^

^ Marvin Wachman, History of the Social-Demo¬ cratic Party of Milwaukee, 1897-1910 (Urbana, Illi¬ nois, 1945) and Frederick I. Olson, "The Milwaukee Socialists, 1897-1941" (Unpublished Ph. D. thesis, Harvard, 1952) are useful treatments of the Socialist experience in Milwaukee.

^ In addition to Wachman and Olson, see Bayrd Still, Milwaukee, the History of a City (Madison, 1948), chapter 12, especially pp. 319-320, for per¬ spective on the rise of the Socialists in Mihvaukee.

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