Sewer socialism

Based on Wikipedia: Sewer socialism

The Insult That Became a Badge of Honor

In 1932, at a Socialist Party convention in Milwaukee, a New York delegate named Morris Hillquit meant to mock his midwestern comrades. They kept bragging, he complained, about their city's excellent public sewer system. So he called them "sewer socialists."

The Milwaukee socialists loved it. They wore the label proudly for decades.

This tells you almost everything you need to know about one of the strangest and most successful political movements in American history. While socialists elsewhere dreamed of revolution and debated dense theoretical texts, Milwaukee's socialists were obsessing over garbage collection, clean water, and yes, sewage systems. They governed their city for nearly fifty years, and they did it by being, frankly, boring—but effective.

What Made Milwaukee Different

To understand sewer socialism, you first need to understand what it wasn't. It wasn't the socialism of Karl Marx's revolutionary manifestos, calling for workers to seize the means of production. It wasn't the socialism of fiery barricades and general strikes. It wasn't even particularly interested in transforming the fundamental structure of capitalism.

Instead, the Milwaukee socialists had a simpler goal: clean up the mess that industrialization had created, and do it honestly.

By the late 1800s, American cities had become nightmares of pollution, disease, and corruption. Factories belched toxic smoke. Rivers ran thick with industrial waste. Tenement housing packed immigrant workers into spaces where cholera and typhoid spread like wildfire. And the politicians who were supposed to fix these problems were usually too busy taking bribes to notice.

The sewer socialists looked at this situation and decided that their version of socialism would be, as they called it, "constructive." They would focus on what government could actually do, right now, to make life better for working people. City-owned water systems. Municipal power plants. Better schools. Parks. And above all, sanitation—because nothing kills working-class families faster than contaminated water and untreated sewage.

The Austrian Immigrant and His Newspapers

The movement's most famous figure was Victor Berger, an Austrian Jewish immigrant who arrived in the United States as a young man and settled in Milwaukee. Berger was a schoolteacher, but he found his true calling in journalism and politics. He published both English and German daily newspapers—an important detail, since Milwaukee in this era was heavily German-American—and before every election, he distributed free copies to every household in the city.

This was grassroots organizing before the term existed. While other socialist leaders were writing theoretical treatises, Berger was knocking on doors and explaining, in plain language, why the city needed better sewers.

In 1910, Berger became the first socialist elected to Congress in the twentieth century. He represented Wisconsin's Fifth Congressional District and introduced proposals that seemed radical at the time: old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, public housing. Every one of these ideas would eventually become law, though not until decades later under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

His wife, Meta Berger, was equally influential in local politics. She championed "penny lunches" for schoolchildren—essentially the forerunner of modern school lunch programs—along with medical examinations for students and better wages for teachers. The Bergers were a power couple before that term existed too.

The Price of Dissent

Victor Berger's career took a dramatic turn during World War One. Like many socialists, he opposed American intervention in the European conflict. This was not an unusual position in 1917—the war was genuinely unpopular among many Americans, especially those from German-speaking backgrounds—but the federal government was in no mood for dissent.

Berger was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, a wartime law that made it a crime to interfere with military operations or support America's enemies. He was convicted and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

But here's where the story gets remarkable. While his conviction was on appeal, Berger ran for Congress again in 1918. And he won.

The House of Representatives refused to seat him. They declared his seat vacant and called a special election. Berger ran again. He won again. The House refused to seat him again.

The standoff continued until 1921, when the Supreme Court overturned his conviction on technical grounds. Berger returned to Congress in 1923 and served until 1929, finally able to advocate for his causes from inside the institution that had tried to exclude him.

Fifty Years of Socialist Mayors

Milwaukee's experiment in municipal socialism began in earnest in 1910, the same year Berger went to Congress. The Socialist Party swept the city council elections, won control of the county board, and elected Emil Seidel as mayor—the first socialist mayor in American history.

Seidel only served one term, losing his reelection bid in 1912. But his tenure established a template that his successors would follow. The city undertook a massive expansion of public services: new parks, better schools, improved sanitation. The government operated with a transparency and honesty that shocked observers accustomed to the machine politics that dominated other American cities.

In 1916, Milwaukee elected another socialist mayor, Daniel Hoan. He would remain in office for twenty-four years.

Twenty-four years. Think about that. Hoan governed Milwaukee through the end of World War One, through the Roaring Twenties, through the Great Depression, and into the beginning of World War Two. He was reelected again and again because voters—many of whom did not consider themselves socialists—trusted his administration to be honest and competent.

When Hoan finally lost in 1940, it was partly because the word "socialist" had become more politically toxic as Americans grew alarmed about Soviet communism. But even then, the socialist tradition wasn't finished. In 1948, Milwaukee elected Frank Zeidler, who served three terms as mayor until 1960.

The Incorruptibles

In 1961, a newspaper editor named William Evjue looked back on the socialist legislators he had known throughout his career. His verdict was unambiguous:

They never were approached by the lobbyists, because the lobbyists knew it was not possible to influence these men. They were incorruptible.

This reputation for honesty was perhaps the sewer socialists' greatest political asset. In an era when urban political machines traded jobs and favors for votes, when aldermen expected kickbacks and mayors looked the other way, Milwaukee's socialist government was famously clean.

They weren't saints. They were politicians, with all the usual human flaws. But they had built a political culture where corruption was genuinely unacceptable—not just officially forbidden but actively punished by voters who had come to expect better.

Socialists and Progressives: Uneasy Neighbors

Milwaukee's socialists shared their state with another reform movement: the Wisconsin Progressives, led by the legendary La Follette family. Robert La Follette Sr. served as governor and then senator, championing railroad regulation, direct democracy, and clean government. His sons, Robert Jr. and Philip, followed him into politics.

On paper, the Socialists and Progressives agreed on many things. Both wanted honest government. Both supported workers' rights. Both distrusted big business. You might expect them to have been natural allies.

They weren't.

The fundamental problem was ideological. Progressives believed capitalism could be reformed and regulated to serve the public good. Socialists believed capitalism was inherently exploitative and needed to be replaced with collective ownership. These are not the same thing, even if they sometimes led to similar policy positions.

One socialist legislator, George Tews, put the tension memorably during a 1932 debate. A Progressive, he declared, was "a socialist with the brains knocked out."

Still, the two movements occasionally cooperated. In 1924, the Socialist Party endorsed Robert La Follette Sr.'s presidential campaign, even though he ran as a Progressive rather than a Socialist. And in 1935, a skilled political operator named Thomas Duncan—a state senator who had been Victor Berger's successor as leader of the Wisconsin socialists—brokered a formal alliance called the Wisconsin Farmer-Labor Progressive Federation.

The deal was complicated. The Socialists gave up their separate ballot line in exchange for guaranteed slots on Progressive tickets. It was a practical arrangement, but it also marked the beginning of the end for socialism as an independent political force in Wisconsin.

The Long Goodbye

After Frank Zeidler left office in 1960, socialist parties had limited success in major American cities for decades. The Cold War had made socialism a dirty word in American politics. The urban political coalitions that had supported Milwaukee's socialists were fragmenting as white ethnic voters moved to suburbs and African Americans who moved into cities faced discrimination from all parties.

But the sewer socialist tradition never entirely died. It lived on in the programs the Milwaukee socialists had championed: Social Security, unemployment insurance, public housing, school lunches. These ideas, once considered radical, became accepted parts of American life.

And occasionally, candidates who called themselves socialists would win elections again. In 1981, Bernard Sanders—better known today as Bernie Sanders—was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, running as an independent democratic socialist. He would later become the most prominent socialist in American politics since Victor Berger.

The Return of Milwaukee Socialism

In November 2025, something happened that would have astonished observers of American politics: a socialist was elected mayor of New York City. Zohran Mamdani, a member of both the Democratic Socialists of America and the Democratic Party, became the first member of a socialist organization to lead a major American city since Frank Zeidler left Milwaukee's city hall sixty-five years earlier.

But Milwaukee itself had already been experiencing a small socialist revival. In 2022, two members of the Democratic Socialists of America—Darrin Madison and Ryan Clancy—were elected to the Wisconsin State Assembly. They announced the formation of an informal Socialist Caucus, the first of its kind in the state since 1931.

When union organizer Juan Miguel Martinez joined the Milwaukee County board of supervisors in 2022, becoming the second self-proclaimed socialist on the eighteen-member body, he and his colleague Ryan Clancy both invoked the sewer socialist legacy. They saw themselves as inheritors of a tradition, picking up work that had been interrupted but never entirely abandoned.

What the Sewers Taught Us

The sewer socialists offer an unusual lesson for political movements. They succeeded not by being dramatic but by being useful. They won elections not by promising revolution but by fixing things that were broken. They held power not through charisma or ideology but through honest, competent governance.

This was never glamorous. Nobody writes stirring songs about sanitation systems. But the sewer socialists understood something that more radical movements often forget: politics is ultimately about improving people's daily lives. A family doesn't care much about economic theory when their children are dying of waterborne diseases. They care whether the water is clean.

The name "sewer socialism" was meant as an insult. But the Milwaukee socialists recognized something profound in it. Sewers are unglamorous, but they're essential. They're the infrastructure of civilization, the hidden systems that make urban life possible. A politics that focuses on sewers is a politics that takes seriously the basic conditions of human flourishing.

That's not a bad legacy for a movement that started with some German-American immigrants who just wanted their city to work properly.