Milwaukee Socialists
In 1910 the local Socialist Party scored stunning victories in all Milwaukee elections. Emil Seidel was elected the city’s first Socialist mayor in March as his party gained control of both the city council and the county board.
That autumn more than 7,000 local party supporters rallied to hear German radical socialist Karl Liebknecht speak in the Milwaukee Auditorium the Sunday before their party dominated the area’s legislative delegation, and voters of the Fifth Congressional District sent party leader Victor Berger to Washington; he was the first Socialist elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. A grassroots organization modeled on the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), Branch 1 of the Social Democratic Party of America was founded in Milwaukee just twelve years earlier, and its success altered the nature of local politics for the next ninety years. This startling electoral triumph resulted from two decades of courting Milwaukee’s large working-class ethnic community—mostly Germans—and delivering on the promise of reforming government to counter the excesses of both Republican and Democratic politicians. Touted as the “machine shop of the world,” Milwaukee had been surpassed by Chicago as a transportation and grain-shipping center. Its innovative factories, however, manufactured a variety of machinery, ranging from the minute to the gigantic, and the corporations tapped a constant flow of immigrant labor—much of it skilled and mostly trained in central Europe. Mayor Seidel of Milwaukee was born in Ohio to German parents, but he was converted to socialism during his apprenticeship training in Berlin. While learning his trade in the German capital, he attended a Socialist rally where he heard a speech by the SPD leader August Bebel. Seidel vowed that when he returned to Milwaukee he would join whatever Socialist party existed there, and he found a working-class movement well underway.The first known German Socialist to visit Milwaukee was none other than Wilhelm (Christian) Weitling, precursor of Karl Marx who fled Prussia after the 1848 revolutions. Weitling found Milwaukee, a commercial town not yet industrialized, not at all receptive to what he was preaching and returned to Brooklyn. An itinerant printer named Josef Brucker founded Der Sozialist, the city’s first Socialist newspaper in 1875. That paper suspended publication after Brucker determined that the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln was progressive enough for his taste, and he abandoned socialism. The Knights of Labor—populists, not Socialists—organized the Bay View Rolling Mills strike in Milwaukee on behalf of the eight-hour day in May 1886, but local repression left the door open to Socialist agitation. At least eight strikers, most of them from German- ruled Poland, were killed when Wisconsin National Guard troops fired on the assembled strikers. Socialism reentered the scene when the actual founder of the movement in Milwaukee was arrested falsely in the aftermath of that strike action. Gaining freedom after his erroneous arrest, the Berliner Paul Grottkau took up where he had left off in Berlin and Chicago. Grottkau was a refugee from the Bismarckian anti-Socialist laws who avoided involvement in Chicago’s Haymarket riot. He founded and published Die Milwaukee Arbeiter Zeitung (Milwaukee Workers’ Paper) until he left the city in 1890 and passed the torch of socialism to another group of immigrants. Throughout the 1890s, the core membership of Milwaukee’s Socialist movement, Der Soczialistische Verein, held regular meetings in John Doerfler’s Saloon, a friendly neighborhood tavern near the city’s brewery district. At Doerfler’s through most of the final decade of the nineteenth century, the language of political discussion was German until several “Yankee” intellectuals joined the club. A former language teacher who took over editing the Socialist newspapers (both in German and English) and sold insurance on the side, Victor Berger dominated the discussions at Doerfler’s and assumed leadership of the local party.
Berger also took responsibility for contributing to the conversion of Eugene Debs to socialism. Debs, who became the party’s perennial presidential candidate, adopted socialism after Berger presented him a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital at his Woodstock, Illinois, prison cell (following his arrest after the famous Pullman strike). Berger worked closely with Debs at the national level after that. Milwaukee’s Socialists also formed a union with the Federated Trades Council, the governing body of the city’s trade unions. Opening the first decade of the twentieth century, Milwaukee’s Socialist publications carried constant news reports covering the progress of social democracy in Berlin and Vienna.No Socialist was elected to office until 1904, when Seidel, Fred Brockhausen, and three other Social Democrats won seats on the city council. Yet the Milwaukee Socialists built their party base on trade union membership and second-generation Americans mostly employed in the city’s factories, foundries, and breweries. They sponsored congenial social events—picnics in Schlitz and Pabst parks in summer, concerts and bazaars in winter—building a respectable electoral foundation that offered a clear-cut alternative to the morally degenerate Republican and Democratic political machines. Pabst Park picnics drew as many as 25,000 people to sample beer and sausage and listen to spirited political speeches on warm summer weekends. So
cialist Party events were perfectly acceptable social activities, and well-known brewers like Valentin Blatz even contributed to party finances. Conventional politicians and newspapers condemned Berger for “bossism,” while fellow Socialists more to the left attacked his lack of original ideology. However, the borrowed ideas worked well in Milwaukee. Frank J. Weber and other union leaders joined the Socialist movement, and their party became the choice of the blue-collar working class. Social Democrats became recognized as the heart of a legitimate reform movement.
They gained acceptance in the community, and the Milwaukee victories marked a high point for Socialist politics in the United States. These victories resounded with a strong German accent. During their first two years in office, the Milwaukee Socialists incorporated “the Milwaukee Idea,” a doctrine of amalgamating trade unions into their political party for educational, social, and electoral purposes. They cooperated with the Progressives in Madison to enact social reforms (most notable was the country’s first workmen’s compensation law, a model for the later New Deal reforms of Franklin Roosevelt), acquired land to establish an extensive public park system, and modernized school curricula, incorporating physical education and extensive foreign-language training. Their voting base consisted of the immigrant working class, mostly German, but geared to Poles, Serbs, and other central Europeans. Editor of the Socialist publications in town, Berger reigned as the unquestioned leader of the Milwaukee movement and gave his party national prominence, before and after his election to Congress. Although “fusion candidates” of Democrats and Republicans removed Socialists from key offices in 1912, Berger returned to Congress from 1922 to 1928. During World War I, Berger led the peace faction of the Socialist Party and faced charges of treason for editorials calling on Socialists to ignore the draft. His trial drew national attention, but the guilty verdict was overturned before he served prison time. Politics intervened to keep him in the spotlight, however. In a special election for the U.S. Senate in the spring of 1919, Berger did very well in rural counties of heavy German settlement, polling 150,000 votes statewide against the Progressive Party’s Irvine Lenroot. After the armistice, it was acceptable to be German again in Wisconsin. Daniel Webster Hoan (whose parents were Irish and German) and Frank P Zeidler carried on the Socialist legacy as mayors of Milwaukee (1916—1940 and 1948—1960, respectively). Hoan was elected city attorney in 1910 and was returned to that post until he ran for mayor and won four years later. When the United States entered the war in 1917, Hoan deserted much of his party and supported it with patriotic fervor. Union leader Frank J. Weber led a Socialist faction in the state legislature into the 1920s, but party membership waned after the New Deal was introduced in the 1930s. Berger served as national party chairman for two years shortly before his death. Ultimately dubbed “Sewer Socialism,” the Milwaukee variety was modeled after the practical application of electoral politics that German Social Democrats practiced before 1914. The party shrank further in numbers after the Red Scares of the late 1940s and 1950s, but the Hoan and Zeidler mayorships maintained respectability for the party. Hoanlost the 1940 election to Zeidler’s brother Carl, a Republican who was killed at sea during World War II. Frank Zeidler served Milwaukee with distinction during the second Red Scare and the McCarthy era, and left office with universal respect in 1960.
Gareth A. Shellman
See also Berger, Victor L; Haymarket; Newspaper Press, German Language in the United States; Weitling, Wilhelm
References and Further Reading
Gavett, Thomas W. The Development of the Labor Movement in Milwaukee. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1965.
Olson, Frederick I. The Milwaukee Socialists. PhD diss. Harvard University, 1951.
Quint, Howard H. The Forging of American Socialism. New York: American Heritage Series, 1953.
Shellman, Gareth A. “Toward a Better Beer Hall: Social Democracy from Berlin to Milwaukee.” In The Quest for Social Justice. Vol. II. Ed. Alan Corre. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1992.
Wachman, Marvin. The History of Socialism in Milwaukee, 1890—1910. Champaign- Urbana: University of Illinois, 1945.