Sewer Socialism

Nathan Connolly: Talk of socialism seems to be roaring back in the media these days, from Democratic candidates who embrace it to Republicans who deride it. And, polls show its popularity is growing, particularly among Millennials. So, today on the show, the history of socialism in America.

Brian Balogh: We’ll talk about the way a conservative pundit used radio to push back against socialism during the Cold War.

Nathan Connolly: And, I’ll be talking to an elected Socialist mayor in the heart of Mississippi.
Most know Milwaukee, Wisconsin for its baseball and breweries, but recently, people are rediscovering a whole different side of the city. In March, it was announced that the 2020 Democratic National Convention will be held in Milwaukee. That announcement has generated renewed interest in the city and its largely forgotten socialist past. From 1910 to 1960, Milwaukee elected three Socialist mayors, more than any other major American city. Their policies were centered on sanitation, parks, and education, became known as Sewer Socialism. But, why, of all places, did socialism take root in Milwaukee?

Aims McGuinness: Some of the answers that historians have given have focused on the large population of immigrants, especially from German-speaking parts of Europe, and the presence of a large, working-class and a booming industrial economy in Milwaukee in the early 20th century.

Nathan Connolly: That’s historian Aims McGuinness. He says those answers, while true, only tell half the story. What really sets Milwaukee apart from other industrial cities revolved around something called the Milwaukee Idea.

Aims McGuinness: Victor Berger, who is the first Socialist elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1910, and he and his allies look particularly to the Social Democratic Party and a history of social democracy in Germany. They adapt those ideas to the context of the United States, and they come up with what, at least for a time, is a very successful political strategy that Victor Berger dubs the Milwaukee Idea.
The Milwaukee Idea he envisions as an alliance between labor unions and a specifically Socialist, working-class, political party. There are other competing ideas of how to make a socialist revolution happen. This is Victor Berger’s particular spin. This proves for a time to be extraordinarily successful in Milwaukee and makes Milwaukee, at least for a time, a model for Socialists elsewhere in the United States.

Nathan Connolly: Well, this is one of the things that I’ve always found so incredible is that you have these moments of backlash against the socialist movement, after World War I, again during McCarthyism in the 1950s. You have, in some ways, this durability of socialism in Milwaukee, and I’m curious, is this attributed to the Milwaukee plan that Berger initially conceives of, or are there other elements that allow Milwaukee socialist element to be so durable across these years?

Aims McGuinness: The repression of the Wilson administration against Socialists and other critics of U.S. entering into World War I, it hits Socialists hard across the board in the United States. Because Milwaukee had a relatively large German-American population, many of whom were critical or, at least, unsympathetic to U.S. entering into World War I, this, in the short term, actually increases German-American support for the Socialists in 1917, 18, 19 and partly as a reaction. In other words, you have German-Americans who didn’t necessarily regard themselves as Socialists but are drawn to the party precisely because of its position on the war. So, I think that’s one reason.
I think another factor to consider really important is Socialist discomfort with and then opposition to the Bolshevik Revolution. The Socialist Party and the Communist Party are in conflict, in competition with one another in the United States after 1917. Although, both Socialists and Communists are red-baited, the fact that most Socialists, and certainly Socialist leaders in Milwaukee, are highly critical of a Soviet Union and then anti-Stalinists, that, to a certain extent, shields them from the full wrath of Joseph McCarthy.

Nathan Connolly: These are shades of gray that are obviously very foreign to people thinking only from the early 21st century where we tend to paint communism and socialism with the same broad brush. Most people, even before the 1950s, have a hard time getting their mind around these different gradations on the left. But, there’s even finer points. There’s something in Milwaukee, as I understand it, called Sewer Socialism. Now, what is that exactly and where did that term come from?

Aims McGuinness: The term Sewer Socialism began as an insult or a condescending remark by another famous Socialist from the early 20th century, Morris Hillquit, who derided Daniel Hoan, who was Milwaukee’s second Socialist mayor, essentially being overly practical, not sufficiently concerned with a larger project of revolution. He has a famous quotation, Hillquit does, where he says, “I do not belong to the Daniel Hoan group to whom socialism consists of merely providing clean sewers of Milwaukee.”
So, that started out as an insult, but then some Socialists in Milwaukee really embraced this term and they say, “That’s right. That’s who we are. We care about improving the lives of working-class people, and that means, among other things, giving them clean water, parks, higher wages, et cetera.”

Nathan Connolly: Give me a sense of some of those improvements because just knowing how local politics work, you don’t get to be mayor, and certainly not stay mayor, unless you can deliver goods and services to your constituency. Local politics are very unforgiving where that’s concerned. So, I have to imagine that there are a number of really concrete accomplishments that Milwaukee Socialist mayors could point to. What might those be?

Aims McGuinness: Milwaukee Socialists initially came in as clean government activists. They didn’t just promise to clean up government, but they instituted policies that actually ensured that government would be cleaner in the future, things that in retrospect might seem simple, but, at the time, were revolutionary, like creating an inventory of city property, going to the University of Wisconsin and getting the advice of economists there like John Commons. How do we introduce modern accounting into municipal governments? How do we, in a sense, open the books to the people?

Nathan Connolly: I just want to be sure I understand. You have the Socialists befriending the economists as part of their governing strategy.

Aims McGuinness: Oh, absolutely. The Socialists really rely on the University of Wisconsin, including experts who are not Socialists. But, they reach out beyond the Party for expertise, again, to make corruption less possible. One of the things that Socialists wanted to do was to build infrastructure and that means public investment, and that means people’s tax dollars. People aren’t going to be willing to make that investment if they can’t be sure that that money isn’t going to what it’s supposed to be going.
So, accounting is revolutionary from the Socialists’ perspective and that’s one of the reasons why they’re able to build this broader electoral support. That same is true with debt. This often surprises people in the present to hear that Socialists also promised and succeeded in minimizing municipal debt and also even in lowering taxes. Well, how did they do this? In part, it was through reducing corruption, making sure that the money went where it was supposed to go rather than people’s pockets.
But, their interest in minimizing municipal debt actually also comes from a socialist critique. They’re very concerned about the influence of what we would now call the financial industry on municipal politics. They see that one of the ways in which banks wield influence over public policy is through financing public works through debt, high-interest debt, to the private sector. What Socialists in Milwaukee say is, “No, actually the way to free ourselves from banks is through, what they call, pay as you go government. We’re not going to spend any more on public works than we get in revenue.”
They were remarkably successful at this. Milwaukee city government remains solvent, doesn’t go into bankruptcy even in the darkest moments of the Great Depression.

Nathan Connolly: Aims, how would you account for the fact that Milwaukee’s socialist history, as rich as it’s been, has been largely forgotten to folks living outside of that city?

Aims McGuinness: One reason is because of red-baiting and red scare. Too often, self-described liberals in the United States have been in denial about the socialist roots of some of their most important and courageous and valuable ideas. And, they haven’t wanted to acknowledge that history for fear of being branded Reds themselves. Sadly, by running away from that history, they have, in a sense, cut themselves off and cut our country off from this larger, global history and conversation about the roots of inequality in our world.
You know what? It hasn’t gotten them very much because any Socialist who thought that they could shield themselves by red-baiting, by calling themselves liberals, was soon to be disappointed to find out that the term liberal could be just as viscously stigmatized as the term-

Nathan Connolly: Socialist.

Aims McGuinness: Yeah. So, at a certain point, people on the left, no matter how they think of themselves, have to step back and think, “What do we do with our keywords? Do we keep on running away from them and letting our opponents paint us into corner after corner, or do we sit back and say, ‘You know what? Actually, own it. I may not be a Socialist, but I owe a debt to this history.'” If more liberals and more people on the left would be willing, even if they’re not Socialists, to stick up for the richness of our political vocabulary, there might be, at the very least, more competition. We’d have a richer political debate in this country then we have right now.

Nathan Connolly: Aims McGuinness is a History Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.