In 1916, Milwaukee elected its second Socialist mayor. He would go on to have the longest tenure of any socialist administration in U.S. history – serving the city for 24 years as mayor. And his time in office would be marked by many firsts; landmark accomplishments that made Milwaukee the envy of industrialized U.S. cities. But by the end of his time in office, the Socialist Party would all but disappear from the city’s political landscape.
That mayor was Daniel Hoan.
'Hardscrabble' Mayor Daniel Hoan
"He'd gotten a law degree, having never gone to high school, you know, he was an adult special student. His dad died when he was when he was 13, his parents divorced, so he was hardscrabble, you know… he’s kind of a Lincoln-esque quality to Dan Hoan," says historian John Gurda.
Hoan started his political career in 1910, as part of the Socialists' clean sweep in Milwaukee. He was elected city attorney and started working on a key priority for the party: cleaning up government corruption.
Monied interests and companies still held a lot of sway in city government. Hoan set his sights on a company that had monopolized key utilities in Milwaukee: the Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light Company. It controlled the city’s electricity and its streetcars. The Socialists believed the utilities should be controlled by the public, not a private company. But the Electric Railway & Light Company represented just one entity among many that the Socialists had their sights on.
"The term that you always use, in terms of what the socialists believed in governing, is 'public enterprise.' So enterprise, in as red-blooded a sense of dynamism and forward thinking-ness as any capitalist, but for the public interest. So public enterprise," Gurda explains. "What that meant was, practically, public parks, public schools, public libraries."
The fight with the utility would play out in both City Hall and courtrooms, but the Milwaukee Socialists had other issues to fix, including the city’s water.
Milwaukee's groundbreaking sewage treatment plant
As heavy industry had moved into the city, the rivers had become polluted with runoff and raw sewage. Even Lake Michigan had become contaminated, which was a big issue for the city’s drinking water, according to history teacher John Deisinger.
"The sort of theme with the Sewer Socialists, is this idea that if there's a matter of public concern, it is the duty and the responsibility of the city to speak to that through public expenditure and public effort."
"The idea that you turn on your faucet, you can drink what comes out of your faucet, and it's not gonna give you a horrible illness, is something we like to take for granted. That was not something you could take for granted, even if you had running water in the early 1900s," says Deisinger. "That was a good way to give yourself a terrible infectious disease...The sort of theme with the Sewer Socialists, is this idea that if there's a matter of public concern, it is the duty and the responsibility of the city to speak to that through public expenditure and public effort. We're gonna fix the water supply."
Hoan picked up where Milwaukee’s first Socialist Mayor Emil Seidel had left off, relying on expertise and cutting-edge methods for water treatment. The plan would take time, money and most importantly: property. It was a problem the Socialists would continue to encounter.
"One of the struggles, of course, was just getting the land. There were constant, constant, constant fights at getting the land needed for these improvements, whether those were parks, whether that was sewers, whether that was gas plants — whatever it was. There were constant squabbles over land," Deisinger explains.
The Socialists set their sights on the lakefront – specifically Jones Island. But Jones Island already had residents: Kaszubs, an ethnic group from Poland that had created an informal fishing village on the land.
In a historical “Small-waukee” moment, a familiar foe for the Socialists had tried to evict the Kaszubs decades earlier: the owners of the Bay View Rolling Mill.
Gurda explains, "They claimed prior ownership of land going up to the end of Jones Island where the sewage plant is today, and that was contested in court by the Jones Islanders and their guardian or their advocate was Victor Berger...The mill didn't want to pay them, you know, they just wanted to condemn that land and evict them. So it was war. Then finally, in 1914, the city paid the islanders, and they left."
The plant opened in 1926 and it came with the added bonus of creating revenue with a new product: Milwaukee Organic Nitrogen, known as Milorganite. Milwaukee became the first U.S. city with a modern sewage treatment facility and the first city to sell the byproduct as fertilizer.
"It was groundbreaking. We were the first to do it," says Gurda. "I think once you get past the idea of a sewage plant, anything goes. And what [Milorganite] is, is sort of the dried dead bacteria that were used to purify the sludge. It was a very creative act of civic recycling, you know, you take your own waste and you turn that to green dollars."
With the redevelopment of Jones Island, the Hoan administration was able to create the Port of Milwaukee in the outer harbor. The new port was necessary to accommodate the ever-larger ships coming to Milwaukee, then known as the “Machine Shop of the World.”
In a fitting tribute to the man who made it happen, the bridge that goes over Jones Island was named in Mayor Hoan’s honor. Its smell has inspired its own fitting tributes.
Socialist Charles Whitnall guides creation of Milwaukee's park system
The Hoan administration’s transformation of the lakefront didn’t stop with Jones Island. For decades, the Socialists had been talking about the need for more green space for the average Milwaukeean.
Even before they came into power, the city had been working on acquiring land for the parks. But it was during the Hoan administration that everything came together, under the guidance of the city’s first Socialist treasurer: Charles Whitnall.
"He was a landscape architect, a landscape planner by profession, and he became the secretary of that, the commission on both the city and the county. So he was the dominant influence on land use in Milwaukee from probably the 20s into the 40s," says Gurda. "He was as visionary as Emil Seidel; someone who believed devoutly, fervently, religiously in the need of public green space. He wanted everyone to live within walking distance of the park."
Under Whitnall’s guidance, the city created one of the largest park systems in any U.S. city at the time, including six main parks that remain today: Washington, Riverside, Mitchell, Humboldt, Kosciuszko, and Lake.
"If you look at the 1923 map that Whitnall put together and today's park system, it's really pretty close. So the result was today we have 15,000 acres of public green space, which is five times per capita more than the city of Chicago has," says Gurda.
During his 24 years as mayor, Daniel Hoan was able to transform the city’s lakefront, clean the city’s drinking water and even create the first municipally-funded public housing in the U.S., with the creation of Garden Homes in 1923.
For a time, Milwaukee became a pinnacle of good governance, in large part thanks to Mayor Hoan.
"A lot of what he did was basically turned what had been a graft-ridden, kind of a boss-riddled society into a paragon of good government. So it's hard to imagine today, but Milwaukee won during his years award after award as the safest, healthiest and cleanest big city in America," says Gurda.
The Socialists had completely reshaped the city during their time in power, but none of these successes came easily.
"The Socialist position in Milwaukee is always kind of precarious, you know, they hold office for a long period of time, but it is always contested. This is a movement that has governing authority, has legitimacy, has a strong base, but they're fighting for it every chance they get. They are constantly embattled here," says Deisinger.
And global events divided the party itself along ethnic and ideological lines.
Global conflicts divide the Socialists
By the time Daniel Hoan was sworn into office, World War I was dividing the community. Ethnic Germans and Slavs, who had made up the base of the Social Democratic Party in Milwaukee, viewed the conflict very differently.
And their pacifist beliefs put a target on the party itself. Milwaukee’s own Victor Berger became the first congressman convicted of violating the Espionage Act for publicizing his anti-war views.
Despite continuing to win re-election, the U.S. Congress twice refused to seat him until his conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
"Berger is essentially barred from Congress," Gurda explains. "So Milwaukeeans elect him anyway, they send him back to Washington. He gets kicked out again. They elect him again. So I guess that says something about the Milwaukee electorate. They were not going to be told what to do."
At the same time, there was the Russian Revolution, inspired by many of the same ideologies that had inspired the Social-Democrats.
Deisinger explains, "There's a big split in the American Socialist Party. And the question, to oversimplify, is, are we for the Soviets or are we against the Soviets? And if you're for the Soviets, you join the Communist Party, and if you're against the Soviets, you stay in the Socialist Party. That does not protect the Socialists from accusations of being communists."
Most of Milwaukee’s leading Social-Democrats were staunchly anti-Communist because they were anti-authoritarians, but this stance revealed another division in the party.
During this time, the Milwaukee Socialists had been given the nickname “the Sewer Socialists” in part inspired by the sewage plant they were so proud of. But it was also an accusation of pragmatism and complacency.
"There are other socialists who argue that any effort that wasn't focused on leading armed revolution against a capitalist society in the present was a waste of time. Making sure that schoolchildren had enough to eat was a waste of time. Increasing wages for workers was a waste of time," historian Aims McGuinness explains. "Ensuring that working class children had a place to play was from their perspective, a waste of time or even worse than a waste of time, it was counterproductive because it was making capitalism more palatable when what these socialists wanted — was to bring capitalist society to a crisis, which they hoped that they could then exploit to overturn capitalism altogether through a revolution."
"There are other socialists who argue that any effort that wasn't focused on leading armed revolution against a capitalist society in the present was a waste of time."
Then, there was the Great Depression. Under the guidance of Hoan and other Socialists, Milwaukee didn’t take on the same debts that hampered other U.S. cities. In fact, the Hoan administration was able to keep the city solvent during the crisis and provide jobs through work programs.
The New Deal headed by Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt helped many Milwaukeeans weather the crisis, but it did something else, too.
Deisinger explains, "The Socialists bitterly complain in the 1930s that FDR is stealing all their best ideas for the New Deal. There's a grain of truth to that. And so, as more and more of these sort of social democratic ideas are being incorporated into the New Deal, through the alphabet agencies of the New Deal, more and more Milwaukeans are sort of like, well, you know, just vote for the Democrats."
The Social Democrats lose top leaders
By the election of 1940, there were far fewer Social Democrats in office. The party was splintering and it was about to lose one of its most prominent members.
"Socialist electoral fortunes kind of go up and down in this period. There's a brief zenith again at the very beginning of the Great Depression, but Daniel Hoan loses his last attempt to be reelected as mayor, and he loses to a conservative, 'nonpartisan' candidate, Carl Zeidler. Daniel Hoan then left the Socialist Party and became a Democrat," says McGuinness.
While Hoan’s time as mayor was defined more by its successes than losses, he was never able to achieve one of his biggest goals when he first took office: bringing the Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light company under public control.
In an ironic twist of fate, the beating heart of the Milwaukee Socialists, Victor Berger, died after being hit by one of the company’s streetcars.
Today, that company is known as We Energies and the fight to make it public has continued under a new group of socialists: the Democratic Socialists of America.
"One of the major campaigns of the DSA right now is what's called the Power to the People campaign, which is an effort to municipalize We Energies. This was a constant fight and a constant goal of the Sewer Socialists, and they never got there. Dan Hoan speaks at length about how he wanted to get the utility under the control of the city in Milwaukee, that he wanted electricity under the control of the city. It never quite happens. There's many different court cases that kind of hang him up, he's not able to get full support in a referendum to make it happen," says Deisinger.
Although Hoan left the party after his tenure, his work as mayor remains a testament to the Milwaukee Socialists’ ambitions and accomplishments. His time in office saw the completion of many of the party’s biggest goals for the city, and it redefined what life looked like for the average Milwaukeean.
"The Sewer Socialists were socialists for a reason. There's a reason that they ran and governed as socialists and not just as progressive Democrats because they essentially took the radical and Marxist analysis of capitalism in a capitalist society very, very seriously."
"There's this famous picture of Dan Hoan on the cover of Time magazine, about, you know, supposedly the best mayor in America. And it says underneath, 'He gives all the credit to Karl Marx.' And that was often taken as being sort of tongue-in-cheek, and to an extent it was, but to an extent it wasn't," says Deisinger.
"The Sewer Socialists were socialists for a reason. There's a reason that they ran and governed as Socialists and not just as progressive Democrats, because they essentially took the radical and Marxist analysis of capitalism in a capitalist society very, very seriously. And the efforts they made were to improve the lives of working people, but it was also to pursue this idea of a cooperative socialist economy," he continues.
While Hoan may have left the Socialists, the Socialists weren’t quite done with Milwaukee. That's next in part four of our series.
