“No city in America has stronger ties to socialism than Milwaukee. And with the rise of Bernie Sanders and the embrace of socialism by its newest leaders, the American left has come full circle,” warned Mark Jefferson, the executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party when it was announced that the 2020 Democratic National Convention would be held in Milwaukee.
Ron Johnson amplified the point when he grumbled, “It’s only fitting the Democrats would come to Milwaukee,” where the Republican senator from Wisconsin said Democratic conventioneers would get a “firsthand look” at “the risk of Democrat socialistic tendencies.”
Despite all the past criticism of Milwaukee socialism, it looks like Republicans are on track to hold their 2024 national convention in, of all places, Milwaukee.
Last week, a GOP site-election committee named Milwaukee as the preferred host city for a convention that could well nominate Donald Trump for a new term as president.
Trump’s last presidential bid famously suggested that voters faced a choice of “American vs. Socialist,” with the candidate warning, “Joe Biden is a Trojan horse for socialism.” The Democrat, who defeated Trump by more than 7 million votes, was not a socialist. But that hasn’t prevented Trump and his delusional partisans from claiming — as did Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in a recent Biden-bashing interview — that “Socialism doesn’t work! It has produced misery, suffering, poverty, and death wherever it’s been applied.”
Welcome to Milwaukee, Comrade Cruz.
Wisconsin largest city does not elect as many socialists as it once did, but its reputation as a historic hotbed of socialism remains intact. It even earned mention in the movie “Wayne’s World,” in which rocker Alice Cooper explained, “I think one of the most interesting aspects of Milwaukee is the fact that it’s the only major American city to have ever elected three Socialist mayors.”
Alice Cooper and Ron Johnson may not agree on everything. But they share an a parallel understanding of Milwaukee’s history. The city does, indeed, provide insight into the influence of “socialistic tendencies” on municipal governance.
Most historians, as well as a great many Milwaukeeans, will tell you that socialism worked very well under the trio of Socialist mayors who shaped the city as it is now known during the period from 1910 to 1960. Indeed, the longest serving of those mayors, Daniel Hoan, was widely hailed as the finest municipal leader in the country. Time magazine identified Hoan in a 1936 cover story (“Marxist Mayor”) as “one of the nation’s ablest public servants, and, under him, Milwaukee has become perhaps the best-governed city in the U.S.”
Hoan, who served from 1916 to 1940 as the second of Milwaukee’s Socialist Party mayors, was a proud radical who was recognized for his good working knowledge of Marxist economics. He was also a brilliant financial manager whose steadfast refusal to let the city get indebted to big banks during the Great Depression helped Milwaukee to avoid a measure of the misery, suffering and poverty that buffeted the nation from 1929 into the 1930s. During that period, Hoan’s “sewer socialism” earned praise from President Franklin Roosevelt, and recognition for landmark achievements on issues ranging from improving public health to battling racism.
Hoan took on the Ku Klux Klan at a time when politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties were compromising with the violent racists who sought to extend their reach from the South to Northern cities. “The Ku Klux Klan will find Milwaukee a hotter place to exist in than Hades itself,” declared the mayor in 1921.
Hoan’s integrity, along with his managerial skills, would eventually earn him recognition as one of the 10 finest municipal leaders in American history. In 1999, Melvin Holli wrote a groundbreaking book called “The American Mayor,” a 1999 assessment of municipal governance in cities across the country. In it he wrote: “Although this self-identified socialist had difficulty pushing progressive legislation through a nonpartisan city council, he experimented with the municipal marketing of food, backed city-built housing, and was a fervent but unsuccessful champion of municipal ownership of the street railways and the electric utility. His pragmatic ‘gas and water socialism’ met with more success in improving public health and in providing public markets, city harbor improvements, and purging graft from Milwaukee politics.”
Socialist Mayors Emil Seidel (1910-1912) and Frank Zeidler (1948-1960) served before and after Hoan. The city’s voters also elected dozens of Socialists to the City Council, County Board, School Board, state Legislature and Congress. The Milwaukee Socialists were so fiscally and socially responsible that historians to this day hail them as exemplars of a uniquely American form of democratic socialism. Some years ago, an aging Zeidler explained to me: “Socialism as we attempted to practice it here believes that people working together for a common good can produce a greater benefit both for society and for the individual than can a society in which everyone is shrewdly seeking their own self-interest.”
That worked well for Milwaukee in the 20th century. So much so that the word “socialism” ceased to be frightening for Milwaukeeans. Zeidler saw this as a form of political evolution that might even come to influence Republicans.
“There is always a charge that socialism does not fit human nature. We’ve encountered that for a long time. Maybe that’s true,” explained Zeidler. “But can’t people be educated? Can’t people learn to cooperate with each other? Surely that must be our goal, because the alternative is redolent with war and poverty and all the ills of the world.”