Municipal Socialism

MUNICIPAL SOCIALISM. The greatest gains for American radicals in municipal politics came during the ascendancy of the Socialist Party of America, 1910–1915. During these years the party was heavily committed to city elections and was rewarded by an impressive run of electoral successes across the country. Most Socialists understood the limitations of local government, but faced with the task of building a coordinated, nationwide political movement from the ground up, hoped to use municipal politics to build a grass-roots organization. Local campaigns, they believed, could expose exploitation in the neighborhoods, raise working-class political aspirations and confidence, and teach political methods and ideology. Experience at this level would prepare workers for state and national affairs.

In terms of organizational benefits, the party’s successes in municipal politics help explain the rapid growth of the movement during the Progressive Era. Conversely, the party’s inability to consolidate these electoral gains—its failure to build stable grassroots political organizations—was an important factor in the subsequent decline of the movement. The party entered its most difficult trials during and after World War I with an organization in shambles at the grass-roots level.

Municipal socialism drew upon a long tradition of organized working-class participation in city elections. Local politics, like union organizing, cooperative and Utopian programs, and economic boycotts, was part of an evolving search for control at the workplace that spilled over into a drive to control neighborhoods. In the mid-1880s, scores of Knights of Labor assemblies embraced municipal politics through Labor and Workingmen’s parties. The most notable results came in 1886. In New York City, “single-taxer” Henry George, running with strong labor backing, nearly defeated Democrat Abram Hewitt, and in Chicago the United Labor Party elected seven assemblymen and five judges. The Knights did not enter local politics with a larger revolutionary goal in mind, yet the similarities between their demands and those of the Socialists three decades later suggest the continuity in working-class republicanism expressed at the local level.

In 1898, Social-Democrat John C. Chase was elected mayor in Haverhill, Massachusetts, along with several Socialist aldermen and councilmen. Socialist Charles R. Coulter became mayor of Brockton a year later. Both candidates received strong union support but were subsequently defeated by fusion tickets composed of Republicans and Democrats. A decade later the Socialist Party claimed thirty-five minor municipal offices in eight states.

The party’s first major victory came in 1910 in Milwaukee. Building on a history of labor politics, Social-Democrats ran a machinist, Robert Meister, for mayor in 1898 on a platform that included municipal control of public utilities, union labor and the eight-hour day for city work, relief for unemployed workers, heavier taxes for large corporations, and free legal and medical service for needy people. This would become standard Socialist fare across the country. Having secured the union labor vote, the Socialist appealed to liberal middle-class citizens, highlighting a 1903 scandal that involved both Republicans and Democrats. Under the firm hand of Austrian-born Victor Berger, Milwaukee Social-Democrats perfected a remarkable political machine, the most conspicuous feature being a “bundle brigade” that could canvass the entire city with literature in seven languages in a matter of hours.

In 1910, Milwaukee Socialists elected a mayor, Emil Seidel, seven aldermen-at-large, and sixteen councilmen. Two years later a fusion candidate defeated the Seidel administration, but in 1916 the Socialists returned to power and held office until 1940. Their success was partly due to adept handling of the city’s diverse ethnic groups. Local Milwaukee’s “formula”—a moderate, practical municipal program, close ties with unions, and solid organization—was copied by Socialist locals everywhere, even though many criticized the substance of Berger’s reformist municipal program.

Across the nation in 1910–1911, Socialists elected more than 400 officials, including twenty-eight mayors and village heads. The prominent victories were in Berkeley, California; Butte, Montana; Flint, Michigan; Granite City, Illinois; Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; Two Harbors, Minnesota; Manitowoc, Wisconsin; Schenectady, New York; Canton, Hamilton, Lima, and Lorain, Ohio; and Reading and New Castle, Pennsylvania. The bulk, however, were in smaller manufacturing, mining, railroad, and lake-shipment communities in the Midwest. Socialists won across a broad range of economic circumstances, but their political strength invariably lay in the factory districts and the “lower ends” of the cities. Their elected officials were likewise generally working people. By 1912 there were more than 2,000 Socialists serving in public office.

In terms of gross numbers of victories, Socialist fortunes in city government, like the party’s development as a whole, grew rapidly during the prewar years. But the party’s strength in each particular city was far less constant than the national trends. Socialist administrations typically ended with Socialists forced out of office in the first or second election after their victory by a fusion of all nonsocialist parties. This local instability suggests weaknesses in the grass-roots movement.

While the Socialists succeeded in drawing support from working people, they failed to deal effectively with middle-class reformers, who were attracted to the party’s immediate demands but repelled by the working-class bias the party showed once in office. Often general reform sentiment fragmented traditional party organizations, and the resulting multiparty elections allowed the Socialists to take office on a plurality based on their strength in working-class wards. The local became entangled in an unstable coalition only partly of its own making, composed of workers and frustrated middle-class voters. Once in power, the Socialists faced a difficult choice between moving to the left to consolidate their working-class support or broadening their program to include general reform sentiment. Unappeased, middle-class voters gravitated to a fusion ticket endorsed by both major-party organizations and offering a “businessman’s” administration with a clear middle-class appeal. Just as damaging were coalitions with middle-class reformers. More than a score of elected Socialist officials, including Schenectady Socialist mayor George R. Lunn, were expelled from the party for adopting middle-class reform issues once in office.

During the World War I, Socialists faced state repression, fusion-party opposition, and heightened intolerance. Although victories in smaller communities dropped off accordingly, the Socialist vote in larger cities increased. In New York City, Morris Hillquit came within a few thousand votes of victory in 1917, and six Socialist aldermen were elected. Socialists in Cleveland, Toledo, Dayton, Buffalo, and Chicago received between 20 and 44 percent of the municipal vote, much of it coming from immigrant groups.

Postwar elections brought scattered victories in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Ohio. In Milwaukee, Daniel Hoan, first elected mayor in 1916, held together a coalition of union workers and liberal reformers through the 1930s. Hoan was defeated in 1940, but eight years later Frank Zeidler was elected as America’s last old-style big-city Socialist mayor. Zeidler outlasted his Socialist Party base and weathered several controversies over his progressive stand on minority rights, slum clearance, and building inspection. He won a third term in 1956 and chose not to run in 1960.

The Socialist Parry’s other notable postwar municipal success came in Reading, Pennsylvania, a working-class city of around 100,000 that elected Socialist Henry J. Stump mayor in 1927. Campaigning against a tax proposal that overburdened working-class homeowners, Socialists promised to equalize property assessments and reduce spending. This limited-government platform, ironically, left the Socialist administration unprepared to deal with destitute workers during the Depression. In 1935 the Reading movement succumbed to a national party split between followers of Norman Thomas and the Old Guard. Although the Old Guard retained control of the local, it was unable to conduct effective campaigns and lost decisively in 1939. Stump was reelected in 1943, but his campaign was largely personal.

Socialists in Bridgeport, Connecticut, led by perennial Socialist mayoral candidate Jasper McLevy, won office in 1933 after a series of bridge-contracting scandals tarred both major parties. Mayor McLevy, like Hoan and Stump, offered an efficient, responsible government, but nothing distinguished his administration as Socialist. The Connecticut state party censured the conservative administration in the late 1930s, but McLevy, enjoying wide appeal among liberals, continued in office until 1957.

The Socialist Party disintegrated as an independent political force between 1948 and 1960. In the late 1970s the political initiative was picked up by a variety of new progressive coalitions in cities like Cambridge, Massachusetts; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Santa Monica, California. Berkeley progressives won a number of seats on the rent board and city council in the early 1980s, as did Tom Hayden’s Campaign for Economic Democracy in Santa Monica. Their concerns ranged from housing reform and rent control to city planning, minority representation, and energy use. The new leadership, drawn from middle-class backgrounds, demonstrated greater flexibility in building coalitions, but lacked the national organizational ties Socialists had formed earlier. Still, they retained the old radicals’ faith in social control over economic development and shared a belief that municipal politics could yield tangible organizational benefits and at the same time redistribute, at least in small ways, community wealth through housing reform, improved social services, neighborhood preservation, and other socially responsible actions.

The best known of the new progressive municipal coalitions was ushered in by Bernard Sanders’s nine-vote victory over a conservative Democratic incumbent in Burlington, Vermont, in 1981. Sanders, like socialists before him, immediately faced united Republican-Democratic opposition, and like his predecessors responded by taking the council fights into the neighborhoods. Sanders’s support came from young professionals, the elderly, students, and working people—a mix that suggests the continuing viability of the old-line Socialist coalitions. Sanders’s program, like those of the older Socialist administrations, stressed a concern for more efficient government, equalized tax burdens, improved services for low-income citizens, and popular access to the arts.

In 1983, Socialist Michael Rotkin was elected mayor of Santa Cruz, California. His coalition would dominate city government for well over a decade, promoting a host of progressive initiatives. Municipal socialism in the 1990s involved coalitions similar to that around Rotkin and frequently gained power in nonpartisan contests. The Green Party gained a majority on the city council of Areata, California, and the New Party elected many local candidates in the Midwest, Mountain states, and Far West (sometimes endorsing left-leaning Democrats).

Critchlow, Donald T., ed. Socialism in the Heartland: The Midwestern Experience, 1900–1925. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986.

Judd, Richard W. Socialist Cities: Explorations into the Grass Roots of American Socialism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.

Kaltnick, Arnold. “Socialist Municipal Administration in Four American Cities: Milwaukee, Schenectady, New Castle, and Conneaut, Ohio.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1982.

Stave, Bruce, ed. Socialism and the Cities. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1975.