Milwaukee’s Socialist Mayors: Seidel, Hoan, and Zeidler

Milwaukee is the only major American city to have elected three socialist mayors. Emil Seidel, Daniel Hoan, and Frank Zeidler held the office for a combined 38 years between 1910 and 1960, running a pragmatic, infrastructure-first brand of government that built the city’s water system, sewage plant, parks, and public housing while keeping the books cleaner than almost any other large American city of the era.¹

Why Socialism Took Hold in Milwaukee

Milwaukee at the turn of the twentieth century was called the “Machine Shop of the World,” packed with factory workers and a large German-immigrant population already familiar with European social-democratic politics.² City Hall was controlled by machine politicians; Mayor David Rose ran what contemporaries called a “wide-open town,” and his administration produced 276 grand jury indictments against 83 people.³

The organizer who turned that discontent into a political machine was Victor Berger, an Austrian immigrant and newspaper editor who co-founded the Socialist Party of America with Eugene Debs in 1901 and built an alliance with the Federated Trades Council and labor leader Frank J. Weber.⁴ Berger ran a chain of socialist newspapers, including the Milwaukee Leader, and in 1910 became the first Socialist elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.⁵ Dense associational life reinforced the base: the Milwaukee Turners, a German athletic and social society founded in 1853, provided meeting halls, press, and a steady stream of politically engaged members.⁶

What “Sewer Socialism” Actually Meant

The label “sewer socialist” began as an insult. Socialist Party national chairman Morris Hillquit used it in 1932 to mock Milwaukee’s wing for fixating on infrastructure instead of revolution. Milwaukee’s socialists adopted it anyway. Emil Seidel put it this way in his unpublished autobiography: “Yes, we wanted sewers in the workers’ homes; but we wanted much, oh, so very much more than sewers.”¹

In practice, the philosophy meant delivering tangible improvements in daily life — clean water, sewage treatment, parks, libraries, housing, public health — while running the city with strict fiscal discipline. The movement called this “production for use” rather than production for profit, but it worked through ballots and budgets, not barricades. In 1936 Time magazine’s cover story on Daniel Hoan declared that under socialist rule “Milwaukee has become perhaps the best-governed city in the US.”⁷

Emil Seidel (1910–1912)

Seidel took office after a 1910 landslide that gave socialists majorities on the Common Council and the County Board along with the city treasurer, city attorney, comptroller, and two judgeships.⁸ His administration raised the minimum wage for city laborers to two dollars a day, instituted an eight-hour workday for municipal employees, and began building the county parks system.⁹ His team tightened voting procedures, expanded Health Department inspections of factories, schools, and milk plants, and introduced modern accounting methods.³ His personal secretary was the poet Carl Sandburg.

Seidel lost reelection in 1912. Opponents moved quickly to blunt the Socialist advantage, including nonpartisan ballot laws designed to strip party labels from municipal elections so voters could not easily identify socialist candidates.³ That year Seidel ran as Debs’s vice-presidential running mate.¹⁰

Daniel Hoan (1916–1940)

Daniel Webster Hoan won the mayor’s office in 1916 and held it for twenty-four years, the longest tenure of any Milwaukee socialist mayor and the stretch that made the city’s reputation.¹¹

Water, Sewers, and Public Ownership

Hoan secured municipal ownership of the water system in 1917 and opened a city-owned power plant the following year.¹² His signature project was the Jones Island sewage treatment facility, completed in 1925. It was the largest plant in the country to use the activated sludge process, in which microorganisms consume pollutants in wastewater.¹³ Milwaukee had recorded 1,605 cases of typhoid and 171 deaths from waterborne disease in 1910; Jones Island helped end that crisis. The facility also produced Milorganite, a fertilizer made from the dried bacterial remains of treatment, which generated city revenue and remains in commercial production.¹⁴ Jones Island was later designated a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark and placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Hoan’s administration redeveloped Jones Island to create the Port of Milwaukee and, in 1920, made Milwaukee the twelfth American city to adopt comprehensive zoning.¹¹ Working with Socialist treasurer and landscape architect Charles Whitnall, the city built one of the largest park systems in the country — 15,000 acres of public green space, with Whitnall’s 1923 master plan creating 84 miles of parkways along the city’s watercourses.³

Public Housing and Social Programs

In 1923, Hoan launched the Garden Homes project, widely recognized as the first municipally funded public housing initiative in the United States. It was organized as a cooperative corporation in which the city, county, and private investors held stock, and it provided 105 residences on 29 acres, with homes costing roughly $4,500 each. Income eligibility excluded anyone with more than $1,500 in savings.¹⁵ During World War I, Hoan had already created a Bureau of Food Control to combat price speculation.¹² He reformed the police and fire departments with merit-based hiring and pay increases and created city-sponsored recreation programs aimed at reducing juvenile delinquency.¹¹

Fiscal Record

Hoan created an amortization fund intended to make Milwaukee debt-free. When the Depression produced a liquidity crisis, he kept the city solvent by issuing “baby bonds” in 1933 to cover payroll.¹¹ By 1940, Nation’s Business designated Milwaukee a “four-star city” for having the lowest per capita indebtedness of any American city with a population over 500,000.¹² In 1934 the U.S. Conference of Mayors elected Hoan its president.

Labor and the Boncel Ordinance

Hoan’s administration worked closely with organized labor. Its most aggressive measure was the 1935 Boncel Ordinance, passed by a Socialist-controlled Common Council, which empowered the mayor or police chief to shut down any plant where an employer’s refusal to bargain produced crowds of more than 200 people for two consecutive days. Violating employers faced fines or imprisonment.¹⁶ Union density in Milwaukee County rose tenfold between 1929 and 1939, reaching roughly 60 percent of the workforce.¹⁷ The ordinance was repealed a year after passage, when socialists lost their council majority. Hoan also blocked the Ku Klux Klan from using city auditoriums in the 1920s, warning that the police department would make “short work of anyone advocating violence.”¹²

How He Lost in 1940

Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal absorbed much of the socialist platform by the late 1930s, pulling unions and working-class voters toward the Democratic Party.¹⁸ Hoan dropped the Socialist label in 1936 and ran under the Farmer-Labor Progressive Federation, but most of his slate lost that year, leaving him to govern against a veto-proof City Council.¹¹ On April 2, 1940, thirty-two-year-old Carl Zeidler, a “nonpartisan” conservative, defeated Hoan by 12,000 votes in a record-turnout election run on spectacle: a brass band, balloons, and the candidate singing “God Bless America” in five languages.¹⁹ Hoan left the Socialist Party and became a Democrat.

Frank Zeidler (1948–1960)

Frank Zeidler, Carl’s younger brother, won the 1948 election with help from his brother’s lingering popularity and a coalition of labor, old socialists, and liberal Democrats.¹⁹ By then the Socialist Party was barely functioning as a formal organization, and Zeidler ran under the banner of the Municipal Enterprise Committee, a group advocating public ownership of services where the private sector had failed.²⁰ He served three terms, making him the last socialist mayor of a major American city.

Annexation and Public Investment

Zeidler inherited a city whose bridges, buildings, and streets had decayed through the Depression and World War II. His most ambitious policy was an aggressive annexation campaign that doubled Milwaukee’s land area from roughly 50 to 100 square miles, incorporating places such as the Town of Granville and the Town of Lake. His field marshal, Art Werba, organized more than 300 individual annexation votes. The campaign effectively ended around 1957, when the incorporation of Greenfield completed an “iron ring” of independent suburbs around Milwaukee.²⁰

Zeidler championed the founding of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and Milwaukee Public Television, expanded the public library and museum, built a civic center, and paved hundreds of miles of streets.³ His administration built 3,200 public housing units, including Westlawn, the largest public housing project in Wisconsin history. In 1957 Fortune magazine named Milwaukee one of the two best-governed large cities in the country.²¹

Racial Backlash

During Zeidler’s twelve years in office, Milwaukee’s African American population tripled to roughly 60,000 as part of the Great Migration.²² Zeidler advocated integrated public housing and established a human rights commission, drawing coordinated opposition from real estate interests, private corporations, and suburban political leaders who falsely accused him of using public housing to recruit Black residents for voting purposes.²⁰

The 1956 campaign turned the hostility explicit. Alderman Milton J. McGuire ran against Zeidler on the slogan “Milwaukee needs an honest white man for mayor.” Police were posted outside the mayor’s home. Zeidler won, but narrowly, a stark contrast to his 75-percent landslide in 1952.²³ He chose not to run again in 1960, later writing that his health “could not stand another vicious campaign… on the housing issue and the race question.”²² His final act as mayor was the January 1960 Inner Core Report, which documented conditions in the predominantly Black inner city and recommended action on youth outreach, job training, and housing. His successor, Henry Maier, shelved it.²¹

What Ended the Socialist Era

Henry Maier, a Democrat, held the mayor’s office for 28 years after Zeidler. He immediately imposed a two-year freeze on public housing construction, told his community relations commission to “go slow” on civil rights, and between 1962 and 1967 opposed open-housing ordinances introduced by the city’s sole Black alderman, Vel Phillips, on four occasions, each defeated 18 to 1 by the Common Council. In 1967, Milwaukee experienced a riot that killed three people, and Father James Groppi and the NAACP Youth Council launched 200 consecutive days of open-housing marches, earning the city the nickname “The Selma of the North.”²²

Other American cities elected socialist mayors in the early twentieth century, but none sustained what Milwaukee did. Three socialist mayors governing a major city for 38 out of 50 years was, as one historian put it, “unmatched in any other U.S. city in the twentieth century.”¹ The durability came from a dense base of unions, Turner halls, a socialist press, and neighborhood organizations, combined with a pragmatic focus on measurable results that won support from middle-class and ethnic voters who did not necessarily embrace socialist ideology in the abstract.³

The Socialist Thread in Milwaukee Today

The socialist label was politically toxic in Milwaukee for decades after 1960, but that began to shift in the 2020s. Ryan Clancy was elected to the Milwaukee County Board in 2020, and in 2022 Clancy and Darrin Madison Jr. won seats in the Wisconsin State Assembly, the first socialists elected to the state legislature since 1931.²⁴ They founded a Socialist Caucus in the Assembly, which doubled to four members after the 2024 elections with the addition of Madison’s Francesca Hong and Eau Claire’s Christian Phelps. All four run as Democrats while identifying as democratic socialists and members of the Democratic Socialists of America, and they organize their platform around what they call an “Economic Justice Bill of Rights.”²⁵

At the local level, the Milwaukee DSA chapter endorses candidates for school board and Common Council and lobbies for park funding and public utility operation.²⁶ The Milwaukee Turners still operate out of the same Turner Hall they have occupied for more than 125 years, now a National Historic Landmark.²⁷ Whether the current movement can approach the electoral reach of the Seidel-Hoan-Zeidler era is unresolved. Marquette University political scientist Philip Rocco has said the challenge of “bringing people together in the age of isolation” is a different kind of problem than the one Victor Berger solved a century ago with union halls and socialist newspapers.

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2
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3
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5
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15
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17
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18
WUWM. Mayor Daniel Hoan Cleans Up the City While Party Splinters
19
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20
WUWM. Mayor Frank Zeidler Expands the City Through Annexation, Housing, Highways
21
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