Don't Cancel Sewer Socialism
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Victor L. Berger
1 min read
The article centers on Berger's political evolution and legacy as America's first Socialist congressman, but readers may not know the full scope of his career, his conviction under the Espionage Act, or his exclusion from Congress
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Sewer socialism
10 min read
The article assumes familiarity with this term and Milwaukee's unique brand of pragmatic municipal socialism, but most readers would benefit from understanding its origins, achievements, and what distinguished it from other socialist movements
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Great Migration (African American)
11 min read
Understanding the massive demographic shift of Black Americans from the South to Northern cities like Milwaukee during the 1910s-1920s provides essential context for why race relations and socialist attitudes toward Black workers became so significant in this period
With an eye to the dilemmas and possibilities of having a socialist mayor in New York City, last month I published an article on the lessons of Wisconsin’s so-called sewer socialists, who governed Milwaukee for almost fifty years. It drew more readers than normal — as well as more blowback. To quote one critic, “Victor Berger was the godfather of the ‘sewer socialist’ movement and was also incredibly racist against Black people.”
Another polemical response insisted that white supremacist views were not a personal flaw of Berger. Rather, they arose from the sewer socialists’ “appeal to the lowest-common-denominator instincts of the workers whose votes they depended on, including racism.” Such criticisms echo a historiographic consensus, which for over 75 years has painted Berger as America’s prime example of a racist white socialist. Even otherwise sympathetic portrayals of Berger have suggested he remained a bigot his whole life.
Before I started researching Milwaukee’s socialists, I assumed that the consensus view was accurate. And that’s why I was so surprised to stumble across a 1929 obituary on Berger from Milwaukee’s NAACP praising “the very broad and sympathetic views Mr. Berger always had regarding us as a race, the unbiased attitude of his paper, The Milwaukee Leader, and his interest in the welfare of all.” How could one square this NAACP assessment with Berger’s infamous 1902 declaration that “there can be no doubt that the negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower race—that the Caucasian and even the Mongolian have the start on them in civilization by many thousand years”? Maybe the Milwaukee NAACP was just saying something polite but inaccurate about an influential dead man?
Searching for answers, I started systematically reading The Milwaukee Leader, the newspaper that Berger founded in 1913 and edited until he was killed by a trolley car in 1929. What I found surprised me. It turns out that generation after generation of historians had somehow managed to overlook a remarkable transformation: not only did Berger eventually ditch white supremacist views, but he and his paper became ardently anti-racist during the 1920s, a decade when most of white America in both the North and South actively embraced Jim Crow. Using his bully pulpit as America’s first Socialist congressman, Berger became one of the country’s highest-profile white fighters against lynching, racism, imperialism, and nativism.
This is an important story to tell. One-sided portrayals of Berger have ...
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