In the 20th Century, socialism enjoyed a remarkable run in Milwaukee. Ever since, this saga has been a socialist success story on a scale that no other sizable American city has ever come close to matching.

The city had three socialist mayors for 38 of the last century’s first 60 years. This saga began in 1910, when socialists swept Milwaukee’s election — the mayor’s office, 21 of the city’s 36 aldermen and 13 state legislators.

Milwaukee-style socialism was special. The city’s socialists stressed pay-as-you-go financing for big public works projects as opposed to piling on debt by borrowing heavily from Wall Street lenders. They built a robust reputation for running a highly competent, corruption-free government. They were pragmatists who often worked with capitalists to build a better city. They created an expansive and beautiful network of parks and pioneered robust environmental practices.

Does their success send a message to today’s emerging socialists in the Twin Cities, many of them millennials and Generation Zers born from 1981 to 2012? The question is worth pondering, given the beachheads the Democratic Socialists of America have established on the city councils of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Two of St. Paul’s seven City Council members now identify as socialists; in Minneapolis, it’s four out of thirteen.

Milwaukee-style socialism has been saluted repeatedly. In 2020, Wisconsin Public Broadcasting produced a documentary, “America’s Socialist Experiment,” about the triumphs of Milwaukee’s socialists that aired on more than 300 public television stations including Twin Cities Public Television. Last year, Shel Stromquist, a leading labor historian who is a professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, devoted an entire chapter to Milwaukee socialism in his monumental history of working-class struggles around the world. The Milwaukee socialists’ sweep of the city’s 1910 election “stunned the world,” he wrote.

The 2020 documentary presents a well-researched and fascinating accounting of the rise and fall of socialism in Milwaukee. The documentary explains how the rise was triggered by widespread corruption and degradation of living conditions in the first decade of the 20th Century, waves of frugal German immigrants and strong labor unions.

Socialists in the Northeast, more revolutionary-minded and ideologically inclined, panned their counterparts in Milwaukee as “sewer socialists.”  Mike Gousha, one of the producers of the documentary, told me that initially, Milwaukee’s socialists resisted the term. Later, they embraced it, pointedly noting that their brand of socialism had proven to be extremely popular with voters while the big-city socialists in the Northeast kept striking out at the ballot box.

Frank Zeidler, Milwaukee’s three-term socialist mayor, was the last Socialist Party mayor of any major American city. Health concerns led him to step down in 1960. Gousha attributes much of socialism’s subsequent decline in Wisconsin to the legacy of the Red Scare in the 1950s; the legislative successes of the Democratic Party in co-opting some of socialism’s best ideas; and the socialists’ failure to find successors to popular politicians such as Zeidler.

Fast forward to the fiscal challenges facing both St. Paul and Minneapolis today.

Elected officials and administrators in both cities are finding it increasingly difficult to provide basic services without raising taxes. To succeed, they’ll likely need more help from taxpayers and voters in the suburbs and exurbs, where four of every five metro area citizens now live. Yet rightly or wrongly, “socialism” remains a dirty word – a stigma — to many of these residents.

Today’s democratic Socialists share many of Zeidler’s views. He was  a humble man who lived a modest life, consistently supported civil rights for minorities, initiatives for world peace and better conditions for the working class. In 1962, he wrote a 1,022-page manuscript titled “A Liberal in City Government.” It was finally published in 2005, a year before he died, as both a reflection on municipal governing and a memoir.

But Zeidler and his fellow socialists in Milwaukee were also fiscal conservatives, averse to deficit spending. They took care of the streets, developed and maintained good municipal services, ran an efficient, transparent government and built a deep sense of civic pride that Milwaukee was one of the country’s best-run big cities.

If today’s democratic Socialists want to consolidate and expand their presence in Minnesota, they will need to show that they can run St. Paul and Minneapolis well. Like their predecessors in Milwaukee did.

Dave Beal is a retired Pioneer Press business editor and columnist. Before coming to the paper, he was the business editor and a columnist at the Milwaukee Journal.

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