Walking through the city, the legacy of the Milwaukee Socialists looms large. You can see it in our expansive park system, our clean drinking water and rivers — even in the borders of what we now call Milwaukee. But the rise of the Social Democratic Party was anything but inevitable. It was a struggle against monied interests, powerful political parties, and a fight for the rights of those whose labor had made others rich.
Forty-eighters bring ideas and culture to Milwaukee
The rise of the Milwaukee Socialists is the culmination of both local and global events that radically transformed how people lived and worked. In some ways, this story starts in 1848, in the sovereign states that made up the German Confederation.
"We were the most German city in America. Germans were a majority of Milwaukee's population as early as 1860. And that included a group called the Forty-eighters, who had been revolutionaries in 1848 and for a while succeeded and then got essentially exiled to America," says John Gurda, a Milwaukee historian and author of The Making of Milwaukee.
The radicals among these revolutionaries were attempting to unite the German-states under a written-Constitution with democratic principles, replacing the monarchies that had ruled them for centuries.
They lost. But their commitment to their ideals remained. When they were exiled, they brought their ideas and their culture to Milwaukee.
Gurda explains, "These are the guys, some women too, the people who began the Turner Societies, the Freethinker congregations, the debating clubs, so they were kind of the intellectuals, the liberal intellectuals of the movement. And they were the ones who brought with them Frederick LaSalle, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, the currents, there was very left-leaning currents in Europe at the time."
By the mid-1800s, Milwaukee’s immigrant community was rapidly growing. People were drawn to the city by the promise of jobs and relative freedom compared to their home countries.
But there was something else gripping the city: the technological revolution.
Technological revolution transforms Milwaukee
The city was quickly industrializing as the expansion of railroads and steam-powered engines allowed people, products, and ideas to travel around the world. And this progress was only made possible through the brute labor of working people.
"Milwaukee in the 19th century is a rapidly growing, rapidly industrializing city. Now, there's a time when Milwaukee was referred to as the machine shop of the world," history teacher John Deisinger explains. "That heavy industry requires a huge amount of human labor and the people working in these factories were often doing so under extremely difficult conditions, low wages, long hours, and dangerous, sweaty, risky work."
As more and more immigrants flocked to the city they were met by this reality.
There was little government regulation on how factories could be run. And much like today, business owners wanted to pay as little as possible to keep their companies running. So laborers ended up paying the cost of these unsafe working conditions, with their limbs and their lives.
"[The Socialists], like many other observers across the world, were deeply troubled by what they saw as the terrible effects of factories and other aspects of industrialism on people's lives, on their health, on their spirit."Aims McGuinness
As these companies ballooned in size, the conditions facing working people sparked a global conversation among people drawn to socialism.
Historian Aims McGuinness explains, "[The Socialists], like many other observers across the world, were deeply troubled by what they saw as the terrible effects of factories and other aspects of industrialism on people's lives, on their health, on their spirit. And so they saw these different parts of society as being integrated. And it wasn't enough to win at the ballot box. Transformations need to take place in the places where people worked, in the places where they lived, in places where they played."
Labor activists and bystanders killed in Bay View
At the time, workers’ shifts were often 12 to 14 hours long. The weekend didn’t exist for them. The weight of work was crushing people, physically and spiritually.
Led by the national labor organization the Knights of Labor, many of Milwaukee’s factory workers and laborers helped organize the 8-hour movement.
They were fighting for an 8-hour workday, and just 40-hours a week. By 1886, the movement had fomented into strikes and marches.
On May 5th, workers and labor activists marched toward the Bay View Rolling Mill, a moment commemorated every year with a re-enactment of the events, a moment commemorated every year with a re-enactment of the events. They were met by a militia.
These militiamen had been called in by Governor Jeremiah Rusk, a Republican who had made it clear he was more concerned with the rights of the factory owners than the rights of the workers who toiled there.
As the workers neared the mill, the shots rang out. At least 9 people were shot — killing at least 5.
Deisinger explains, "There is a shaking of faith in these institutions of government. I mean these are the people who literally assembled at St. Stanislav's Catholic Church, peacefully marched down to the rolling mills to demand something that was by no means revolutionary and they were met with bullets. And so I think that left open a lot more working class Milwaukeeans to more strident, even radical ideas."
Milwaukeeans were tired of a two-tiered system that allowed the wealthy and powerful to extract wealth from the community, but punished working-class people when they asked for their share. They were tired of dying for the sake of capitalism.
Organization of the Social Democratic Party of America
As the smoke cleared from the Bay View Massacre, the Socialists saw a path forward to help mend this broken community.
"Socialists cared deeply about working class lives, working class people, and working class society more generally," says McGuinness. "And they saw the health and the power of working class as important, not just for the working class, but for society and humanity more generally, from their perspective, you couldn't have a thriving society without a thriving working class. Because from their perspective, working people produced all the wealth. They were essential in a way that, for instance, the wealthy or capitalist were not."
This change wouldn’t come easily. It would take decades of organizing and community-building to realize their goals. But they had a man for the job: Victor Berger.
"Socialists under the leadership of Victor Berger were extraordinarily good strategists. They found ways to create bonds between party and their voters. They developed very concrete proposals, platforms that promised tangible improvements in the city and in people's lives," McGuinness explains.
Berger was not just a politician, but an influential journalist and publisher whose works helped spread the socialist’s message.
He was a founding member of the Social Democratic Party of America and helped promote socialist candidates at all levels of government, with a clear goal: ending the extensive corruption in the City of Milwaukee.
Corruption and vice in Milwaukee leads to indictments
"Milwaukee in the 1800s, and especially in the late 1800s is an extremely corrupt city. The administration of the city worked essentially gleefully hand in glove with major industrialists. Almost anything that wasn't nailed down was up for sale to the highest bidder. The Milwaukee River became a disgusting open sewer because industries were just dumping all of their waste into it, along with the actual sewage from the city," says Deisinger.
"Almost anything that wasn't nailed down was up for sale to the highest bidder. The Milwaukee River became a disgusting open sewer because industries were just dumping all of their waste into it, along with the actual sewage from the city."
Perhaps no one exemplified this corruption better than Mayor David Rose, first elected in 1898.
Deisinger explains, "Dave Rose, who had the wonderful nickname of all the time Rosie Dave Rose or anything goes Dave Rose basically allowed the city to rot and lined their own pockets on bribe money from major industrial concerns."
Mayor Rose was known for turning a blind eye to illegal activities, including in the red light district that sat in the shadow of City Hall where there was prostitution, gambling parlors, and all-night saloons. The Socialists wanted to clean up the city, both literally and figuratively.
Deisinger explains,"This grew out of this feeling that Milwaukee's working class was being preyed upon, was being almost parasitized by these people who worked them to the bone in industrial plants and then took what little they had in their wages back at taverns, at sporting parlors, at brothels, and that it was a city in which being a worker was a miserable life."
The corruption boiled over into what would become known as the Boodling Scandal with Mayor Rose in the center of everything.
"Boodling's just graft," says Gurda. "It means paying five bucks for an alderman's vote, or it means aldermen… helped themselves to public coal, oats, horses. It was just, anything went back in those days. All the time, Rosie. He was the most corrupt figure probably in Milwaukee's history. During his administration, 276 grand jury indictments were returned against people who were in public office. You know, back then, Rose escaped, but he was described by the prosecutor as the self-appointed attorney general of crime in Milwaukee."
Socialists win narrow victories and control of the city
The stars aligned for the Socialists in 1910. The Democratic Socialists of America ran a full slate of candidates, including Victor Berger who ran for U.S. Congress.
They had been running candidates for more than a decade with some small victories along the way.
"They began to run candidates back in 1898, and a little bit, a little of the time, they were incremental, and in 1910 they swept. The common council, the mayor's office, a pattern maker named Amos Seidel was elected mayor, first socialist mayor of any major American city. Victor Berger went to Congress. So you really did have kind of for time kind of a clean sweep," says Gurda.
Most of the victories were narrow, but enough to tip the scale. The Socialists accomplished what had previously seemed impossible. They were in charge of the Mayor’s office, the Common Council, and the County Board.
Now that they had power, what were they going to do with it?
