In 1910 the Milwaukee Socialists won a clean sweep: they were in charge of the Mayor’s Office, the Common Council, and the Milwaukee County Board. Working class people and labor unions that had been galvanized by the conditions of the late 1800s had helped propel the Socialists into office.
Social-Democrats win a clean sweep
Publisher Victor Berger became the first socialist elected to the U.S. Congress.
It was a huge success for the Socialists, but for Victor Berger in particular, who had championed what he called the “Milwaukee Idea."
"[It was] a hand in glove alliance between the working people's unions and the party itself, you know, this was a time when they were pretty much shut out of the corridors of power and unions were, were certainly had risen, they were in the ascendancy back then," explains John Gurda, local historian and author of The Making of Milwaukee.
After the election, Socialists controlled 21 of the 35 seats in the Common Council, and 10 of the 16 County Supervisor positions. And of course, there was Milwaukee’s new mayor, the first Socialist mayor of a major U.S. City: Emil Seidel.
"Emil Seidel, who clearly comes from the working class, he's a pattern maker in industrial plants; in a lot of ways, his message is one of cleaning up the city and ending corruption," says history teacher John Deisinger. "This was like the big thing the Socialists ran on, you know, the sort of graft, the filth, the wheeling and dealing of the Rose administration and other administrations, [Seidel] sort of said, we, the Socialists are going to get into office and we're going to run this city cleanly, fairly, and we're not going to take graft."
Seidel had run and won on the idea of cleaning up city government and the city itself, especially the waterways which were contaminated with sewage. This pragmatism would later lead to the Milwaukee Socialist’s nickname, the “Sewer Socialists.” But Seidel had much larger goals. Gurda shares one of his favorite quotes from Seidel.
"‘Some eastern smarties called ours a sewer socialism. Yes, we wanted sewers in the workers' homes, but we wanted much, also very much more than sewers. We wanted our workers to have pure air, sunshine, planned homes, living wages, recreation for young and old, vocational education. We wanted a chance for every human being to be strong and live a life of happiness. And we wanted everything that was necessary to give them that: playgrounds, parks, lakes, beaches, clean creeks and rivers, swimming and wading pools, social centers, reading rooms, clean, fun, music, dance, song, and joy for all. That was our Milwaukee social democratic movement,'" quotes Gurda. "I love that, you know, it's kind of very, very non-policy oriented.. He wanted people to be happy, he wanted the government to be the agent of their happiness."
But he wouldn’t have much time to do it. The term for mayor was just two-years at the time, and most of the Social-Democrats had won by very slim margins. Seidel had won his seat with just 46 percent of the vote.
"We wanted our workers to have pure air, sunshine, planned homes, living wages, recreation for young and old, vocational education. We wanted a chance for every human being to be strong and live a life of happiness."
"Seidel and Berger, and others, understood that the corruption of the other parties had given them an opening, but that that opening would close up or disappear if they didn't deliver on their promise to clean up government," explains historian Aims McGuinness
Socialists create the first 'scientific' budget in Milwaukee
As soon as they were elected they got to work. One of the first things on the docket: fixing the budget.
Under previous administrations, politicians had engaged in widespread misuse of city funds. Theft from the city was commonplace, everything from oats for horses or coal for homes, to equipment from job sites.
"They did things that in retrospect may seem kind of basic, but at the time were revolutionary, and seem almost poignant. They did things like come up with inventories of city property. When you count the number of shovels you have, it makes it harder for people to walk off with your shovels," says McGuinness.
Under the Seidel Administration, the city completed its first inventory of city property.
The Socialists were very concerned with how Milwaukee’s government had been spending taxpayer’s money. Today, that fact may sound surprising because of how socialist policies are often portrayed.
Gurda says, "I think there's this lingering myth that socialists are these sort of tax and spend radicals. They were as frugal as any Milwaukee housewife, any Milwaukee hausfrau, and certainly that was in Seidel's administration when that began. He claimed that he saved Milwaukee something like $500 in printing costs by taking the names of dead people off the voting ballots. So he was very much hands on and began that tradition of efficient and public looking government."
"There's this lingering myth that socialists are these sort of tax and spend radicals. They were as frugal as any Milwaukee housewife."
The Socialists not only wanted to create a more efficient budget process, but a transparent one, so citizens could see how funds were being spent. And they wanted to do it with experts.
McGuinness explains, "Milwaukee socialists believed in expertise and they believed on going to the leading national and international experts. What did research, what did the latest findings of science and social science have to teach us about creating a more just society and a less wasteful government? They bring in accountants from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. And socialists in Milwaukee introduced cutting edge accounting techniques that really make Milwaukee a leader in municipal governance in the early 20th century."
Mayor Seidel created a new office dedicated to the task of cleaning up the city’s budget.
Gurda explains, "He had something called the Bureau of Economy and Efficiency that was run by a Madison prof, John Commons, who came in on a salary of $6000 a year and pretty much put Milwaukee on a scientific basis. And that was really turning things around from one page budgets under the Rose years, in earlier periods, to very detailed line item budgeting. So turning Milwaukee around from something that had been very informally run to something that was quite efficient."
In 1911 they presented their budget in a first-of-its-kind exhibition open to the community. The event was publicized in the Milwaukee Leader — a Socialist newspaper established by Victor Berger in that same year.
The Leader became an essential part of the Socialists’ messaging campaign, alongside the “Bundle Brigade,” a group that distributed literature and leaflets for the Socialists. They could reportedly paper the entire city in just a couple days.
"The socialists, whenever they were at moments of strength, they really relied on a socialist press, socialist newspapers, to reach working class and other readers," says McGuinness.
This was a part of the transparency the Social-Democrats had promised to the people of Milwaukee. But they had also made another major promise: to clean up the city’s streets and most importantly, the water.
Socialists start work on cleaning up Milwaukee
"If you think about Milwaukee in the early 20th century, a city of many hundreds of thousands of people where the primary mode of locomotion is horses; Think about… how many millions of tons of manure that is," says Deisinger. "The city stank. It was disgusting. There was precious little green space, where people could sort of escape from that stink. The river was a fetid, hideous sewer. And so a big part of what Seidel does is say we need to make this city a clean, decent place to live in. So he's putting into place much more scientific and organized street clearance. This is also where you start to see a really serious approach towards solving Milwaukee's wastewater problem."
"There was precious little green space, where people could sort of escape from that stink. The river was a fetid, hideous sewer. And so a big part of what Seidel does is say we need to make this city a clean, decent place to live in."
Cleaning the city’s water was a monumental task – and not something Seidel would be able to complete during his short time in office. But the stakes were too high to do nothing.
"Socialists were often going on about what a shame it was, you know, how many babies in Milwaukee were dying of typhoid fever, for example. How many people were dying of these illnesses spread in part by contaminated water and contaminated air," says Deisinger. "They were saying, you know, we need to do something about that, it is the job of the city to do something about this. This is a matter of the public welfare, and so it should be of public concern."
The Social-Democrats once again turned to experts for help.
McGuinness explains, "They tap leading public health experts and leading experts in designing water related sewage related infrastructure. So they promised to make things better for people, they did research and found new methods and strategies to deliver on those promises. And then they created systems of accountability to make sure that citizens could see for themselves that socialists were improving their lives. It was a remarkably effective approach to working fast politics that benefited us all."
Democrats and Republicans join forces in opposing Social-Democrats
But the Social-Democrats’ trifecta of power would come to an abrupt end with the election of 1912 and the collaboration of unlikely allies.
"The Democrats and Republicans found more in common with each other in opposing Socialists than they did in opposition ideologically. So they had a fusion candidate, Gerhard Bading, who was a health commissioner. So I guess you call that ideological bankruptcy, you know, they saw more interest in putting themselves together to oust Seidel," Gurda explains.
The Socialists lost the mayor’s office. But they were still powerful.
Daniel Hoan continued on as City Attorney for another four years after Seidel left office. Victor Berger remained in Congress, and the Socialists still held many seats on the Common Council and County Board.
More than that, they had created a larger culture that was sustaining the movement.
McGuinness says, "It's this world of taverns, of musical societies, of literary societies, parades, parties, picnics, union halls, and it just creates a kind of culture that sustains people, as individuals, as families, as members of unions. And [it] also enables this kind of transmission of ideas and then creates this formidable platform for mobilization."
And their biggest triumphs were still on the horizon.
