By 1948, when Milwaukee elected its third Socialist mayor, the city was a very different place than it had been just a few decades earlier.
Socialist power at a low point when Zeidler ran for mayor
Frank Zeidler had joined the Socialist Party as a young man at the height of the Great Depression, drawn in by its ideals. But the party had changed a lot over the last decade.
"The Socialist Party that existed in 1948 was kind of just barely hanging on, and the group of young people, relatively young people like Zeidler himself who were at the center of it, were actually relatively newcomers to the party, and trying to reinvent it for a different historical moment," says Historian Aims McGuinness.
The Socialists had lost many of their most fervent leaders to death or defection, and the city was undergoing a massive transformation. The end of World War II marked a new era in America, and Milwaukee was no exception. The metropolitan area was expanding quickly, but the city's aging infrastructure was struggling to keep up.
To get elected, Zeidler would need far more support than the socialists could provide, as historian John Gurda explains.
"The Socialist Party that existed in 1948 was kind of just barely hanging on and the group of young people... like Zeidler himself, who were at the center of it, were actually relatively newcomers to the party, trying to reinvent it for a different historical moment."
"By that time, there was no longer a Socialist organization that could do the bundle brigade of literature drops," he explains. "So he ran with the Municipal Enterprise Committee and pretty much a volunteer-led [campaign], people on the left wing, idealists and good-government types. So, a ragtag campaign, but he was someone who was carrying on, quite visibly and openly, the legacy of the Socialists that had done such good things for Milwaukee over the years."
Frank Zeidler was following in the footsteps of his brother Carl, who had unseated the city’s longest serving Socialist Mayor Daniel Hoan in 1940. Carl, a conservative, served two years as mayor before going overseas to fight in World War II where he was killed at sea.
When Frank was elected mayor in 1948, some questioned whether he had been elected on the strength of his argument or the strength of his family name. But regardless of how he’d gotten there, Frank Zeidler had big plans for his time in office.
Zeidler governed like a Socialist, focused on housing
"[He] certainly governed idealistically and was someone who believed very much in socialist ideology. But like his predecessors, he had to run a city, you know, he had to deal with very practical kinds of concerns. And two of those were very important for Frank Zeidler," says Gurda.
He continues, "You have 15 years of depression and war, when the streets had gone to pot, the infrastructure had suffered because there was no money during the Depression and no will during the war because everything was diverted to the war effort. So he had to do a very concerted campaign of rebuilding of the infrastructure. And the city's responsible for a lot, you know, bridges and buildings, streets, so that was a large part of what he had to do."
Like Mayors Seidel and Hoan before him, Zeidler was also focused on housing for the average Milwaukeean. By 1948, the nation was facing a severe housing shortage. It had started decades earlier, but the end of the war and the beginning of the baby boom turned the shortage into a crisis.
"Zeidler is always really worried that Milwaukee, he has this sort of concern which is very common among urbanists of the mid-twentieth century. He's terrified of the specter of the slum, of the overcrowded, dangerous, dirty city, and he's really worried that Milwaukee is growing too fast for its boundaries," says history teacher John Deisinger.
"He's terrified of the specter of the slum, of the overcrowded, dangerous, dirty city, and he's really worried that Milwaukee is growing too fast for its boundaries."
At the same time, the areas around the city were quickly being filled by new developments and the expansion of the suburbs. Zeidler saw this as a direct threat to the health of Milwaukee and he didn’t hide his disdain for the suburbs.
"He famously says, 'We consult with the suburban governments, but we do not believe they have reason for existing.' He sees the suburbs as basically a way for the privileged to freeload on Milwaukee, to basically work in the city or own businesses in the city and then go home to their little borough in Cudahy or Wauwatosa or Whitefish Bay and not pay any taxes. And so he embarks on that process of annexation of literally expanding Milwaukee's boundaries into surrounding areas," says Deisinger.
Zeidler conducts aggressive annexation campaign
Under the Zeidler Administration the city undertakes a massive campaign of expansion, and begins annexing large parts of the surrounding areas.
"Milwaukee was pretty much landlocked in those years, and Frank Zeidler with his field marshal, a guy named Art Werba, annexed land aggressively. Milwaukee doubled its land area during the Zeidler administration, basically from 50 to 100 square miles," Gurda explains.
The annexation campaign was important for two main reasons. It gave Milwaukee new space to build homes for its growing population. It also served a practical, financial function.
Gurda explains, "What [annexation] did was it created a tax base inside what might have been suburban. Milwaukee and Brown Deer fought like crazy, and Milwaukee won that war in the Supreme Court. So Brown Deer became a village of its own, but it would have had the whole Northwest side that became Milwaukee's. And what that meant was you have a place for Milwaukee to grow and a place for Milwaukee to develop tax base that helped to ease the burden on the older part of town that was in more serious need of repair and reinvestment."
"Milwaukee was pretty much landlocked in those years, and Frank Zeidler with his field marshal, a guy named Art Werba, annexed land aggressively. Milwaukee doubled its land area during the Zeidler administration."
The expansion included the Town of Granville to the north and Town of Lake to the south, as well as areas that bordered the suburbs on all sides of the city. Although Zeidler was unable to stop the expansion of the suburbs, he was able to double the size of the city at a time when Milwaukee’s population was growing.
"The last one to incorporate was 1957. That was Greenfield, and that was the last link in the Iron Ring. Since then, there's Milwaukee's had piecemeal annexations... [it] pretty much locked Milwaukee into its its present dimensions," says Gurda.
Like previous socialist mayors, Zeidler was focused on building more public housing. And like previous mayors, he faced an uphill battle.
"Although he made some important kind of first steps in that direction, many of his efforts were thwarted by a very intense and coordinated campaign led by enemies of public housing, including people in the real estate industry, private corporations, right-wing political leaders and voters and political leaders in Milwaukee suburbs. And this happens in the context of struggles, not just over housing, but also over race in the city of Milwaukee," says McGuinness.
Racial tensions and anti-Communist sentiments impact Zeidler's time in office
Zeidler was an advocate of integrated public housing, which in the 1950s, put him at odds with large swaths of Milwaukee’s white community. The Great Migration had come to the city, as many Southern, Black-Americans looked for new horizons after World War II.
McGuinness explains, "Frank Zeidler and other advocates of public housing are accused of building public housing as a way of recruiting Black people to move to Milwaukee and then vote for Zeidler and his allies. These racist campaigns are really ugly and produce a lot, a lot of scars across the urban landscape and the metropolitan landscape that in different ways, I think are still with us today."
During his time in office, Zeidler had advocated for public housing in Black neighborhoods and created a human rights commission, which had put him in the crosshairs of the burgeoning civil rights struggle that would dominate political life in the city a decade later.
Zeidler’s politics also put him the crosshairs of the anti-communist fervor that had proliferated in the U.S., thanks in part to another Wisconsin politician, Sen. Joseph McCarthy. The accusation that Zeidler was a Communist was baseless.
"There was a real contradiction there, that Zeidler and even his opponents, I think, recognized, which was that Frank Zeidler was never a Communist. In fact, he was a stalwart anti-Communist," says McGuinness. "Socialists by the 1950s were very anti-authoritarian, pro-democracy, and hugely critical of the Soviet Union. So you can imagine then, how maddening this would be for Zeidler to find himself being accused of being a Communist or even a Stalinist when that's antithetical to the very essence of how he sees socialism."
By Zeidler’s third campaign for re-election the attacks had taken their toll. In 1960, he decided to retire.
Ironically, one of Zeidler’s biggest accomplishments in office would end up decimating some of the Black neighborhoods that he had been accused of favoring.
Gurda explains, "He was also an early proponent of freeways back in the days when they were not controversial. There was so much gridlock back in those years that anything that would keep you from having to wait through six stop lights to get across Wisconsin Avenue was greeted with a lot of enthusiasm."
Black neighborhoods, like Bronzeville, were carved up to make way for the highways, destroying homes and businesses alike. The planning and construction had started during the Zeidler Administration, although the depth of the destruction wouldn’t be realized for decades.
Zeidler continues civic life outside of politics
Zeidler left office in 1960, but he didn’t leave his civic life behind him.
Gurda says, "He spent 46 years not being mayor and I think during that time established himself as kind of the model of what a citizen should be. He's just generous with his time, always curious, always taking a part in discussions and kind of staying in the game in so many important ways."
"If you look at Frank Zeidler's resume at the end of his life, it's just extraordinary, the number of different organizations and clubs that he's not only a part of, but he's showing up and helping to lead."
Zeidler remained a committed socialist through the rest of his life, helping reform the Socialist Party of America into the Socialist Party of the USA in 1973, and became the party’s presidential candidate a few years later.
But his work expanded far beyond politics as Aims McGuinness explains, "He was an essential part of the civic fabric of the city of Milwaukee, leading by example, whether he was showing up at a meeting of the board of the Milwaukee Turner's or serving the Milwaukee Public Library, or involved in his local neighborhood association that he helped to found. Or whether he was working to support his church, Redeemer Lutheran."
He continues, "If you look at Frank Zeidler's resume at the end of his life, it's just extraordinary, the number of different organizations and clubs that he's not only a part of, but he's showing up and helping to lead. He's just an incredibly inspiring figure."
Socialist ideas gain popularity in modern Milwaukee and the U.S.
Today, a new breed of socialists have been making waves in the U.S., led by the Democratic Socialists of America or DSA. It’s an organization that promotes socialist policies, but it’s not a traditional political party like the Social Democrats.
Instead, most prominent DSA elected officials are Democrats, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani or U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In 2020 Ryan Clancy became the first socialist elected to the Milwaukee County Board since 1956. Today, he represents Wisconsin’s 19th assembly district.
While the DSA has some core differences from the Socialists before them, Representative Clancy says they share some core values.
"We are focused on, you know, pragmatic issues, but also towards larger goals. So, you know, we're all in favor of a public option, for example, for health insurance, but we all realize that the the best solution here is universal single payer healthcare at the national level," says Clancy. "We're all in favor of of the right to counsel, which I passed at the county level, which provides attorneys to folks facing eviction, but ultimately we know that the bigger solution is social and cooperative housing. So we are both pragmatic, but also we have our sights on on that larger kind of institutional change as well."
"Wealth inequality is at its highest point in terms of percentage of wealth held by the very top fraction of 1% in this country. It's at its highest point since the Gilded Age."
History teacher John Deisinger is also a member of the DSA. He sees a lot of commonality between now and the time period where the Social-Democrats rose to power.
"The Socialists rose out of what is sometimes called the Gilded Age, where the United States was seeing enormous wealth inequality. More and more of the nation's wealth congregating in the private fortunes of men like Rockefeller, and Carnegie and Morgan," says Deisinger. "So too today, we see more and more wealth being accumulated in the private fortunes of people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. Wealth inequality is at its highest point in terms of percentage of wealth held by the very top fraction of 1% in this country. It's at its highest point since the Gilded Age."
And one of the city’s pioneering socialist institutions is continuing its mission today: the Milwaukee Turners.
The organization was established in the city in 1853 and has been led by some of the most prominent Socialists in Milwaukee’s history, including Victor Berger. Although Turners in other cities have shifted away from their socialist foundation, the Milwaukee Turners remain dedicated to these ideals.
"Other Turner societies during the 1950s turned away from their mission for fear of the McCarthy era scare that anything that wasn't emblazoned in red, white, and blue and didn't comply was somehow, you know, Communist and un-American, but they've diminished because they just focused on lederhosen and fish fries exclusively and they forgot their mission," says Emilio De Torre, executive director of the Milwaukee Turners.
The Turners remain engaged in the civic life of the city through things like their workshops training citizens to act as objective observers during protests, and informative events on issues facing the community. It’s all a part of the organization’s mission.
"The Milwaukee Turners seek to be the embodiment of a diverse community and practice that confronts injustice and fosters wellness, community restoration, civic empowerment to advance the residents of Milwaukee and its neighbors," says De Torre.
"I think that, who those people are, who is Milwaukee and who are its neighbors, those change. You know, in the 1880s they were vilifying Polish people. You weren't allowed to hire Polish people. They were too radical, they wanted Sundays off," he continues. "And now we're again waging a war on immigrants, against Asian folks, against Latinos, and I think that this mission kind of speaks to unification. Our diversity is what makes us stronger. We keep us safe, and I think that it's kind of inherent in this beautiful Milwaukee idiom that we come together and we do these different things. The symptoms and the specifics of how we do this may change a little bit, but the recipe is essentially the same."
After the McCarthy era, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, and decades of anti-Communist sentiments being conflated with socialist ideals, politicians like Representative Ryan Clancy are redefining what their party means for the public.
"We are forging what socialism is and we are taking that definition out of the hands of Fox News, and it's great. And it's a long process. You know, the rise of socialism in the turn of the century, in the early 1900s was not an immediate overnight thing. It was a slog. They went up gradually and we're going up much quicker," says Clancy
The legacy of the Milwaukee Socialists lives on in the city, through its parks, its water, and the very land it sits on. But the future of socialism in the city is yet to be seen.
Today, Frank Zeidler is considered Milwaukee’s last Socialist mayor, but he may not be for long.
