Monday 6/22/26: The Milwaukee Socialists

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Joy Powers: From 89.7 WUWM, Milwaukee's NPR, this is Lake Effect. I'm Joy Powers. Today, we're exploring the many accomplishments of Milwaukee's socialist mayors. We'll look at the pioneering tenure of the city's first socialist mayor, Emil Seidel. Then, we'll learn about the nation's longest-serving socialist mayor, Daniel Hoan.

John Gurda: He'd gotten a UW degree having never gone to high school. No, he was an adult "special student." So his dad died when he was 13. His parents divorced, so he was hardscrabble.

Joy Powers: And we'll learn how the city nearly doubled in size during the Zeidler administration as it tried to fight against suburbanization.

John Deisinger: He sees the suburbs as basically a way for the privileged to freeload on Milwaukee.

Joy Powers: All of that is coming up on Lake Effect. This is Lake Effect from 89.7 WUWM, Milwaukee's NPR. I'm Joy Powers, and thank you so much for joining us. Milwaukee is known for its deep ties to socialism. It was the first major city to elect a socialist mayor, and was the first place to elect a socialist to Congress. But their rise to power was rocky, and their status as a third party often made progress an uphill battle. Today we're looking back at the many accomplishments of Milwaukee's three socialist mayors through our series on the Milwaukee socialists. If you want to hear about how the socialist movement first began in the city, you can check out the first part of the series at wuwm.com. Today we'll start with a look at the pioneering tenure of Milwaukee's first socialist mayor, Emil Seidel. 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. Publisher Victor Berger became the first Socialist elected to the U.S. Congress. It was a huge success for the party, and especially for Victor Berger, who had championed what he called the "Milwaukee Idea," as historian John Gurda explains.

John Gurda: A hand-in-glove alliance between the working people's unions and the party itself. This was a time when they were pretty much shut out of the corridors of power. And unions certainly had risen. They were in the ascendancy back then.

Joy Powers: 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. Here's history teacher John Deisinger.

John Deisinger: 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. 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. You know, he sort of said, "We, the socialists, are going to get into office, and we're going to run this city cleanly, fairly, and we are not going to take graft.

Joy Powers: 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 socialists' nickname, "The Sewer Socialists." But Seidel had much larger goals. John Gurda shares one of his favorite quotes from Seidel.

John Gurda: "Some eastern smarties called ours a 'sewer socialism.' Yes, we wanted sewers in the workers' homes, but we wanted much, oh so 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. So, I love that. You know, it's kind of very, very non-policy oriented. He wanted people to be happy. We wanted the government to be the agent of their happiness.

Joy Powers: 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% of the vote. Here's historian Aims McGuinness.

Aims McGuinness: 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.

Joy Powers: 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.

Aims McGuinness: They did things that in retrospect may seem kind of basic, but at the time were revolutionary and seem almost poignant. They did 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.

Joy Powers: 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 taxpayers' money. Today, that fact may sound surprising, because of how socialist policies are often portrayed, as historian John Gurda explains.

John Gurda: 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.

Joy Powers: 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. Here's Aims McGuinness.

Aims McGuinness: Milwaukee socialists believed in expertise and they believed in 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.

Joy Powers: Mayor Seidel created a new office dedicated to the task of cleaning up the city's budget, as John Gerda explains.

John Gurda: 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 $6,000 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 and 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.

Joy Powers: 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 socialist's 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 of days.

Aims McGuinness: The socialists, whenever they were at moments of strength, they really relied on the socialist press, socialist newspapers to reach working class and other readers.

Joy Powers: This was a part of the transparency that 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. History teacher John Deisinger explains what the city looked like at the time.

John Deisinger: 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, perhaps not pleasant to think about, but if you think about how many millions of tons of manure that is, 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 Seidal does is he says 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.

Joy Powers: 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.

John Deisinger: 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, and 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.

Joy Powers: The Social Democrats once again turned to experts for help, as McGuinness explains.

Aims McGuinness: They tap leading public health experts and leading experts in designing water-related, sewage-related infrastructure. 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 class politics that benefited us all.

Joy Powers: But the Social Democrat's trifecta of power would come to an abrupt end with the election of 1912 and the collaboration of unlikely allies.

John Gurda: 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.

Joy Powers: 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 had many seats on the common council and county board. More than that, they had created a larger culture that was sustaining the movement. Here's Aims McGuinness.

Aims McGuinness: It's this world of taverns, of musical societies, of literary societies, parades, parties, picnics, union halls, and it just creates this kind of culture that sustains people as individuals, as families, as members of unions, and also enables this transmission of ideas and then creates this formidable platform for mobilization.

Joy Powers: And their biggest triumphs were still on the horizon. Join us next week to learn about the many accomplishments of Mayor Daniel Hoan, the namesake of the Sewer Socialists, and the creation of Milwaukee's beloved park system. You just heard the second part of our series on the Milwaukee socialists. At wuwm.com, you can find the full series and see historic photos and campaign ads. Lake Effect is available as a podcast, so you can listen when you like. Find it wherever you get your podcasts, then subscribe, download, and listen on demand. We'll take a quick break, then continue our special on the the Milwaukee socialists. That's coming up on Lake Effect on 89.7 WUWM, Milwaukee's NPR. You're listening to Lake Effect on 89.7 WUWM. I'm Joy Powers. Today we're looking back at the many accomplishments of Milwaukee's three socialist mayors. You just heard about the city's first socialist mayor, Emil Seidel. Now we'll learn about Milwaukee's second socialist mayor whose tenure spanned more than two decades and radically transformed the city. And we'll learn how the Socialist Party changed during his time in office. 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 and office, the Social Democrats would all but disappear from the city's political landscape. That mayor was Daniel Hoan. Here's Historian John Gurda.

John Gurda: He'd gotten a UW degree, having never gone to high school. He was an adult special student. So his dad died when he was 13. His parents divorced. So he was hardscrabble. There was kind of a Lincoln-esque quality to Dan Hoan.

Joy Powers: Hoan had 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. Moneyed 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 and Light Company. It controlled the city's electricity and gas, as well as its streetcars. The socialists believed the utilities should be controlled by the public, not a private company. But the Electric Railway and Light Company represented just one entity among many that the socialists were targeting.

John Gurda: 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-thinkingness as any capitalist, but for the public interest. And what that meant was, practically, public parks, public ports, public schools, public libraries. So those were all things that were part of the Socialist Party platform.

Joy Powers: The fight with the utility played out in both city hall and courtrooms. But the Milwaukee Socialists had other issues to fix, including the city's water. As heavy industry had moved into Milwaukee, 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, as history teacher John Deisinger explained.

John Deisinger: The idea that you turn on your faucet, you can drink what comes out of your faucet and it's not going to give you a horrible illness is something we like to take for granted. That was not something you could take for grant, even if you had running water in the early 1900s. That was a good way to give yourself a terrible infectious disease. And so this effort, here's this sort of theme with the sewer socialists, this idea that if there's a matter of public concern, it is the duty and the responsibility to speak to that. Through public expenditure and public effort, we're going to fix the water supply.

Joy Powers: Mayor 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.

John Deisinger: There were 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.

Joy Powers: They set their sights on the lakefront, specifically Jones Island. But it already had residents: Kashubes, 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 Kashubes decades earlier: the owners of the Bayview Rolling Mill. Here's John Gurda.

John Gurda: So 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. Things being kind of circular here. The mill didn't want to pay them. They just wanted to condemn that land and then evict them. So it was war. Then finally, in 1914, the city paid the islanders, and they left.

Joy Powers: 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.

John Gurda: It was groundbreaking. They were the first to do it. I think once you get past the idea of a sewage plant, anything goes. And what that is is sort of the dry, dead bacteria that were used to purify the sludge. So I think it was, to me, it was a very creative act of civic recycling. You take your own waste, and you turn that to green dollars.

Joy Powers: With the redevelopment of Jones Island, the Hoan administration was also 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. But the Hoan administration's transformation of the lakefront didn't stop with Jones Island. For decades, the socialists have 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.

John Gurda: He was a landscape architect, a landscape planner by profession, and he became the secretary of 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. So he as visionary as Emil Seidel, someone who believed devoutly, fervently, religiously in the need of public green space. You know, so he wanted everyone to live with a walking distance of a park.

Joy Powers: Under Whittnall'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.

John Gurda: If you look at the 1923 map that Whitnall put together and today's park system, it's really pretty close, really very 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.

Joy Powers: During his 24 years as mayor, Daniel Hoan had been able to transform the city's lakefront, clean the 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.

John Gurda: A lot of what he did was basically turn what had been a graft-ridden, kind of a boss-riddled society into a paragon of good government. 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.

Joy Powers: The socialists had completely reshaped the city during their time in power. But none of their successes came easily, as Deisinger explains.

John Deisinger: 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. You know, 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.

Joy Powers: And global events had divided the party. By the time Hoan was sworn in as mayor, 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 had put a target on the party itself. Milwaukee's own Victor Berger became the first congressman convicted of espionage 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.

John Gurda: Berger is essentially barred from Congress. So the Milwaukeeans elect him anyway. They send him back to Washington, he gets kicked out again, they elect him again. So it was kind of, I guess, that says something about the Milwaukee electorate. They were not gonna be told what to do.

Joy Powers: At the same time, there was the Russian Revolution, inspired by many of the same ideologies that had inspired the Social Democrats. Deisinger explained.

John Deisinger: 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 your against the Soviets, you stay in the Socialist Party. That does not protect the socialists from accusations of being communists.

Joy Powers: 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," inspired in part by the sewage plant they were so proud of. But it was also an accusation of pragmatism and complacency, as historian Aims McGuinness explains.

Aims McGuinness: 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. Increasing wages for workers was a waste of time, ensuring that working class children had a place to play was, from their perspective, a waste time, or even worse than a waste a 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.

Joy Powers: 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 through the crisis. But it did something else too, as Deisinger explains.

John Deisinger: The socialists bitterly complain in the 1930s that FDR is stealing all their best ideas for the New Deal. There is 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 Milwaukeeans are sort of like, well, you know, just vote for the Democrats.

Joy Powers: 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. Here's Aims McGuinness.

Aims McGuinness: 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 Hohn loses his last attempt to be re-elected as mayor, and he loses to a conservative, quote-unquote "nonpartisan" candidate, Carl Zeidler. And, you know, and Daniel Hoan then left the Socialist Party and became a Democrat.

Joy Powers: 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 and 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.

John Deisinger: 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. 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 city. 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. It just doesn't quite get there.

Joy Powers: 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 redefined what life looked like for the average Milwaukeean.

John Deisinger: 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 extend it wasn't. I mean, 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.

Joy Powers: While Hoan may have left the socialists, the socialists weren't quite done with Milwaukee. Join us next week when we learn about Milwaukee's last socialist mayor, how he literally reshaped the city, and what socialism looks like in Milwaukee today. You just heard the third part of our series on the Milwaukee socialists. At wuwm.com, you can find the full series and see historic photos and campaign ads. Coming up, we'll learn about the city's last socialist mayor and what socialism looks like in Milwaukee today. That's next on Lake Effect, on 89.7 WUWM, Milwaukee's NPR. This is Lake Effect on 89.7 WUWM. I'm Joy Powers. Today we're looking back at the many accomplishments of Milwaukee's three socialist mayors. You just heard about the city's longest serving socialist mayor, Daniel Hoan. Now we'll look at the tenure of Milwaukee last socialist mayor and what socialism looks like in the city today. It's 1948 by the time Milwaukee elects its third socialist mayor, and the city was a very different place than it had been just a few decades earlier. Frank Zeidler had joined the Socialist Party as a young man at the height of the Great Depression, but the party had changed a lot over the last decade, as historian Aims McGuinness explains.

Aims McGuinness: The Socialist Party as it 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, trying to reinvent it for a different historical moment.

Joy Powers: The Social Democrats 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 quickly expanding. But the city's aging infrastructure was struggling to keep up. To get elected as mayor, Zeidler would need far more support than the Socialists could provide. Historian John Gurda explained.

John Gurda: B y that time, there was no longer a socialist organization that could do the bundle brigade of the literature drops. In 48 hours, they could blanket the city with periodicals in any language that was desired. So he ran with the municipal enterprise committee and pretty much a volunteer-led, people on the left wing, idealists, good government types. So it was kind of a ragtag campaign, but he was 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.

Joy Powers: Frank Zeidler was following in the footsteps of his brother Carl, who had previously unseated the city's longest-serving socialist mayor, Daniel Hoan. 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 Zeidel was elected mayor in 1948, some questioned whether he was elected on the strength of his argument or the strength of his family name. But regardless of how he'd gotten there, Mayor Zeidler had big plans for his time in office.

John Gurda: He, like Hoan, like Seidl, certainly governed idealistically and was someone who believed very much in socialist ideology. But like his predecessors, he had to run a city. He had to deal with very practical kinds of concerns. And two of those were very important for Frank Zeidler, where you have 15 years of depression and war. 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 of bridges and building streets, so that was a large part of what he had to do.

Joy Powers: Like Seidel and Hoan before him, Zeidler was also very 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. Here's history teacher John Deisinger.

John Deisinger: Zeidler is always really worried. He has this sort of concern, which is very common among urbanists of the mid-20th century. He's terrified of the spectre of the slum, of the overcrowded, dangerous, dirty city, and he's really worried that Milwaukee is growing too fast for its boundaries.

Joy Powers: 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

John Deisinger: He does not like 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 business in the city and then go home to their little, 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.

Joy Powers: Under the Zeidler administration, the city had a massive campaign of expansion and began annexing large parts of the surrounding area, as John Gurda describes.

John Gurda: 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.

Joy Powers: 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 to help ease the burden on Milwaukeeans who were paying to rebuild the city's aging infrastructure.

John Gurda: What that did was it created a tax base inside what might have been suburban, and 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 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.

Joy Powers: The expansion included the Town of Granville to the north and Town of Lake to the south and other border areas on all sides of the city. Although Zeidler was unable to stop the expansion of the suburbs, he was able to nearly double the size of the city at a time when Milwaukee's population was changing.

John Gurda: The last one to incorporate was 1957, that was Greenfield, and that was the last link in the iron ring. Since then, Milwaukee's had piecemeal annexations that pretty much locked Milwaukee into its present dimensions.

Joy Powers: Like previous socialist mayors, Zeidler was focused on building more public housing. And like previous mayors, he faced an uphill battle. Here's Aims McGuinness.

Aims McGuinness: 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 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.

Joy Powers: 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.

Aims McGuinness: 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 Zeidlar and his allies. These racist campaigns are really ugly and produce a lot of scars across the urban landscape and the metropolitan landscape that, in different ways, I think, are still with us today.

Joy Powers: During his time in office, Zeidler had advocated for public housing in Black neighborhoods and created a Human Rights Commission, which 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 into the crosshairs of the anti-communist fervor that had proliferated in the U.S., thanks in part to another Wisconsin politician, Senator Joseph McCarthy. The communist accusations were baseless.

Aims McGuinness: There was a real contradiction there that Seidler and even his opponents, I think, recognized, which was that Frank Zeidler was never a communist. In fact, he was a stalwart anti-communist. 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.

Joy Powers: By Zeidler's third campaign for re-election, the attacks had taken their toll. In 1960, he decided to retire. Ironically, one of Zeidlers' biggest accomplishments in office would end up decimating some of the Black neighborhoods he had been accused of favoring. Here's John Gurda.

John Gurda: 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 stoplights to get across Wisconsin Avenue was greeted with a lot of enthusiasm.

Joy Powers: 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 may have left office in 1960, but he didn't leave his civic life behind him.

John Gurda: He spent 46 years not being there, and I think during that time established himself as kind of the model of what a citizen should be. He was just generous with his time, always curious, always taking apart in discussions, and kind of staying in the game in so many important ways.

Joy Powers: Zeidler remained a committed socialist through the rest of his life, helping reform the Social Democratic Party into the Socialist Party of the United States of America in 1973. But his work expanded far beyond politics. Here's Aims McGuinness.

Aims McGuinness: 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 shown up and helping to lead, just an incredibly inspiring figure.

Joy Powers: 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 were. Instead, most prominent DSA-elected officials are Democrats, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani or U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In 2020, DSA member 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 Social Democrats before them, Representative Clancy says they share some core values.

Ryan Clancy: We are focused on pragmatic issues, but also towards larger goals. So we're all in favor of a public option, for example, for health insurance, but we all realize that the best solution here is universal single-payer healthcare at the national level. We're all on favor 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 that larger kind of institutional change as well.

Joy Powers: 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.

John Deisinger: 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, Carnegie, and Morgan. So too today. We see more and wealth being accumulated in the 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 a percent in this country. It's at its highest point since the Gilded Age.

Joy Powers: 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. Although Turners in other cities have shifted away from their socialist beginnings, the Milwaukee Turners remain dedicated to these ideals, as executive director Emilio de Torre explains.

Emilio de Torre: 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 communist and un-American. But they've diminished because they just focused on lederhosen and fish fries, exclusively, and they forgot their mission. I think the success of what we're doing today is because we've never forgotten our mission.

Joy Powers: The Turners remain engaged in the civic life of the city through things like their workshops training citizens to act as objective observers and informative events on issues facing the community. It's all a part of the organization's mission.

Emilio de Torre: 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. And 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. And now we're again waging war on immigrants against Asian folks, against Latinos, and I think that this mission kind of speaks to the unification. And I think 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.

Joy Powers: 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.

Ryan Clancy: 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 is a long process. I think, 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.

Joy Powers: 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. You just heard the fourth and final part of our series on the Milwaukee Socialists at wuwm.com. You can find the full series and see historic photos and campaign ads. And that wraps up today's show. Thank you so much for being here with us. I'm Joy Powers. If you missed any of Lake Effect this week, you can find all of our conversations at wuwm.com. If you'd like to take the show on the go, you can download the Lake Effect Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Tomorrow on Lake Effect, we'll learn about the pioneering opera, "Porgy and Bess," and its lasting impact. Thanks so much for joining us right here on listener-supported 89.7 WUWM, Milwaukee's NPR.