Milwaukee Wisconsin

MILWAUKEE WISCONSIN. The history of the left in Milwaukee begins with resistance to European colonization and wraps up with opposition to the conservative austerity program of eviscerating the social wage. Between these two moments is an uneven story of struggles for the public good and contests over how that public is defined.

Among scholars of the left, Milwaukee has long been recognized as the site of electoral socialism’s premier achievement in the United States. Socialists held the mayoralty of Milwaukee from 1910 through most of the 1930s and again from 1948 to 1960. Through the 1910s, they repeatedly elected a substantial minority and sometimes a majority of the city council. In the heyday of the 1910s–1920s, they regularly had a delegation in the state legislature, and they sent Victor Berger to the House of Representatives for six terms.

The success of Milwaukee Socialists was built on a three-legged pedestal of labor unions, party activists, and the press. They developed a powerful and popular daily, the Milwaukee Leader, mostly funded by the labor movement. “Bundle brigades” regularly leafleted every neighborhood in the city in several languages, proclaiming socialist integrity and idealism. Over time the Socialists demonstrated their ability to elect candidates and to govern without corruption, winning over large sections of the middle class and forward-looking business classes. In power, they achieved advances in public education, cooperative housing, transportation, health, parks, and the reduction of municipal debt, providing a studied model of socialism in one city.

By the late 1930s, internal disputes and political opposition—both from the left (the Communists) and from the right (the New Deal)—greatly reduced the Socialists’ strength. But Milwaukee Socialism had one last act, Frank Zeidler’s mayoralty from 1948 to 1960. Governing during the height of the Cold War, Zeidler’s liberal administration continued themes of honesty, efficiency, and cooperation. Zeidler also made earnest, but imperfect efforts to address structural racism in the city. But over all his success was hamstrung by more conservative members of the City Council. Though he left the mayor’s office exhausted by relentless attacks by anti-radicals and racist opponents, Zeidler acted as the living memory of Milwaukee socialism for two more generations until his death in 2006.

Unlike the Socialists, Milwaukee’s Communists never experienced electoral victories and have been largely ignored in the scholarship on Wisconsin’s left. But from the 1920s into the Popular Front years, the Communist Party (CP) commanded a sizeable following and wielded considerable influence through its mass organizations and connections to left unions. In its early years, the CP was a peculiar amalgam of immigrant radicals, cultural bohemians, and former Socialists who moved leftward after the Bolshevik Revolution. With the onset of the Great Depression, the ranks of the party swelled. The Unemployed Councils were especially successful at bringing in new recruits. The local International Labor Defense also made inroads into the city’s growing Black population. Under the leadership of Fred Bassett Blair and Eugene Dennis, the Party became an energetic organization committed to labor militancy, anti-racism, and the defeat of fascism. At its peak, the section of the Communist Party organized in Milwaukee was proportionately larger than the well-known Chicago branch of the Party.

The CP was also the bête noire of Wisconsin’s anti-radical bloc. In the 1920s and 1930s, party members were attacked by vigilante patriots and hounded by Milwaukee’s red squad. Party headquarters were repeatedly raided by the police. A comrade from Racine was kidnapped and beaten by members of the local American Legion. After World War II, the anti-Communist crusade escalated with a concerted media campaign, the destruction of CP-influenced unions, and the arrest of key leaders. By the 1950s, the CP in Milwaukee was effectively broken.

The post-war repression of Wisconsin’s left paved the way for an ascendant right with a revanchist austerity program. While the Democratic Party maintained power in the city, the conservative forces that had targeted Zeidler and the Communists coalesced in this period into a formidable force at the state and national levels that aimed to roll back progressive and New Deal reforms.

As Wisconsin turned into a laboratory of conservative politics, creative and dynamic left formations emerged that continued Wisconsin’s tradition of opposition to capitalism’s violence and inequities. Beginning in the late 1950s, civil rights activists protested police violence and fought for access to education and housing. Following the uprising in Milwaukee in the summer of 1967, local and national NAACP activists launched a prolonged campaign for the enactment of an open housing law in the city. From the late 1960s and into the 1970s, welfare rights activists fought attempts to cut anti-poverty programs in the state legislature. The Milwaukee Black Panther Party adopted a mutual aid program that offered free breakfasts, daycare, and busing to visit incarcerated family members.

From the late twentieth century onward, public education has been hotly contested terrain. Since the 1980s, community activists and the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association (MTEA) worked to organize a political vision that defended public education in a moment when right-wing privatization schemes abounded, and that addressed the effects of the organized abandonment of Milwaukee’s multiracial working class. The workers’ organization Voces de la Frontera led efforts to defend and empower immigrants, mobilizing some of the largest protest turnouts in Wisconsin history. Though these movements have not always used the language of socialism to advance their claims, their work has been defined by its efforts to create an alternative to the herrenvolk neoliberalism that typifies late capitalism in Wisconsin. They worked to build an expanded sense of the public good and of the public itself. In this sense, the left in Milwaukee remained as strong as it ever was.

Jones, Patrick. The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.

McGuinness, Aims. “The Revolution Begins Here: Milwaukee and the History of Socialism.” In Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

Mukherji, S. Ani. “Reds among the Sewer Socialists and McCarthyites: The Communist Party in Milwaukee.” American Communist History 16:3-4 (2017).

Schirmer, Eleni. “After ACT 10: How Milwaukee Teachers Fought Back.” Dissent (Spring 2019).

“America’s Socialist Experiment.” Documentary, 2020. American Public Television. https://www.aptonline.org/catalog/AMERICA-S-SOCIALIST-EXPERIMENT