Victor Berger and the Contradictions That Made Milwaukee a Wonderful, Terrible City

A History of Clean Government and Nasty Racism

Victor Berger in 1923

Victor Berger emigrated from Austria to the United States in 1878 and settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There, he worked as a public school teacher, established and edited several socialist newspapers, helped found the Socialist Party of America in 1901, and in 1910, became the first Socialist Party candidate elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He served one term, and did not regain his seat until 1918. He was never sworn in that second time, since he had just been convicted under the Espionage Act for opposing U.S. entry in the First World War and the other members of the House took that as a great excuse to declare him unacceptable.

In his adopted hometown of Milwaukee, Berger and his fellow Socialists created a city with clean government, an alarming number of public parks, and very strong unions. In an era of corrupt boss-driven politics, people like Mayor David Rose had fulfilled that role in Milwaukee, making money off public utilities through every conceivable method. Rose was defeated by Socialist Emil Seidel in 1910, who, after losing to a unity party of the opposition 1912, was followed eventually by fellow Socialist Daniel Hoan, who served as mayor from 1916 to 1940. Milwaukee started winning the national award for public health so often that it had to be barred from competition so other cities might have a chance. The Socialist Charles Whitnall served as Parks Commissioner from 1907 to 1941, and set aside much of the land along rivers and the lake shore as public space and created over 150 parks across 15,000 acres. Milwaukee became such a dedicated union town that in 1955, Milwaukee Mayor Frank Zeidler refused to let a freighter unload materials destined for the Kohler plant in nearby Sheboygan, where the workers were on strike and the scabs were in the factory.    

Victor Berger was the chief theorist, tactician, and director of the Milwaukee Socialists who helped make all that possible. While he may sound like a forgotten hero of the left, it’s worth noting that Berger was firmly on the right wing of his era’s leftists, often using his position on the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party to support the gradualist electoral strategies he favored. For instance, he forced the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and other “direct actionists” out of the party altogether. He was also remarkably racist, and that’s where it gets ugly.

Victor Berger and the Milwaukee socialists receive a lot of well-earned praise, but the legacy of racism Berger normalized as their most influential figure helped make Milwaukee one of the most segregated cities in the United States—earning it the epithet “the Selma of the North” right around the time the Sherriff of Selma was deputizing white men to beat and kill civil rights protesters.

The Committee on Immigration Speaks

It is the middle of May in 1910. In Chicago, the Committee on Immigration reads its report to the the Socialist Party Conference. In the report, Ernest Untermann, Victor Berger, and Joshua Wanhope argue for the “exclusion of immigrants from specific and definite nations,” namely, “Chinese, Japanese, Coreans, and Hindus.”[1] Other than the spelling of “Koreans” and the idea that there’s a place called “Hindu,” you may wonder, why should we exclude them? “These people occupy definite portions of the earth in which they are so far behind the general modern development of industry, psychologically as well as economically, that they constitute a drawback, an obstacle and menace to the most aggressive, militant and intelligent elements of our working class population.”[2]

The following day, Berger took the floor and said “We get about a million immigrants from Europe every year and we can digest them very nicely. This country has digested me pretty well. [. . .] But, comrades, it is entirely different with these other races. They have their own history of about fifty thousand years. That cannot be undone in a generation or in two generations, or in three generations. Now there are about five hundred million chinamen. They can send us about five million a year and not feel it.”[3] Later, Berger states that “we have the black race problem with us now. We don’t want any additional race problems. We have troubles enough already.”[4]

Berger believed that the well-organized and well-compensated workers in Milwaukee ought to stop less well-off workers from coming to town and driving down wages. This belief is a departure from socialist tradition. The International Workingmen’s Association, founded in 1864, helped make international working class solidarity central to the labor movement. Berger’s regional protectionism is opposed to the basic values of “The International,” which would hold that the political and economic goals of workers in Milwaukee and everywhere else on Earth are more closely aligned than the political and economic goals of workers in Milwaukee and their bosses in the same town. Working class solidarity needs to be international to be effectual.

While defending his stance on immigration at the 1910 Socialist Party Conference, Berger attempted to connect his views with Karl Marx’s, the primary author of the International Workingmen’s Association’s organizational program. Berger does a less-than-convincing job. “Now I believe in the motto of Marx that the proletarians of all countries should unite, absolutely. But he did not say, nor would he say if he lived to-day, that we should unite in Milwaukee or Chicago or New York. We unite in spirit; we fight in the same cause; but we do not come together in the same place unless it is absolutely necessary.”[5] He continues, “Immigration from foreign countries, even European countries, did lower and does lower our standard of living. Anybody who tells you it does not is not telling the truth.”[6] Berger, an immigrant, takes time to mention that he came imbued with “the right kind of Americanism.”[7]

This type of nationalist, regionalist, and racist protectionism can never function for long. Even in a place like Milwaukee in the early twentieth century—where workers were paid more, exploited less, and politicians got away with way less graft—if you make sure people who are paid less and exploited more stay out of your relatively comfortable oasis, the people who own the factories will eventually find a way to move where the wages are lower. Labor struggles often occur on an extremely local level, but if all the gains remain localized, those gains will eventually go away. Tariffs and border patrols can delay the decline, but if the struggle isn’t global, the decline eventually comes.

The big breweries that employed so many Milwaukeeans in Berger’s day are mostly gone now. Schlitz, “The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous,” was bought by Pabst, another Milwaukee beer maker. Pabst is now headquartered in Texas and owned by Blue Ribbon Holdings, LLC, part of a San Francisco-based equity firm. Pabst now owns no breweries, and all their brewing is done through subcontracting. Without international solidarity, something as seemingly simple as the invention of refrigerated trucks can make jobs that seem permanent go away faster than you can finish saying that racist thing you just thought of.

When perennial presidential candidate for the Socialist Party Eugene Debs was serving a prison sentence for his role in the 1894 Pullman strike, Berger gifted him all three volumes of Marx’s Capital to read.[8] Berger was an avid reader of Marx and was certainly familiar with Marx’s labor theory of value. Marx’s predecessor David Ricardo also had a labor theory of value. He held that the amount of labor put into transforming one thing into another thing determines how much added value the new thing possesses. In short, labor creates value. Marx transformed the “labor theory of value” into something more like a “value theory of labor” by adding the key caveat that value is truly determined by “socially necessary labor time.” How long does it take to make a particular thing, on average and globally? According to Marx, a worker under capitalism performs concrete, actual labor, but that concrete labor is judged against a globally determined abstraction. Yes, there is work that you’re performing, but the amount of work you personally perform doesn’t determine the exchange value of the commodity as much as the work you perform aggregated with all other similar work. Protectionist strategies can only operate for so long. If someone is doing the same thing faster or for less, eventually, you will have to meet their price or face failure.

A Legacy of Bigotry

Berger’s racist protectionism was short-sighted and bound to fail. It is also not worth forgiving as a symptom of the times. Granted, he was hardly the only person in the U.S. in the early twentieth century to make sweeping generalizations about immigrants. Racism was rampant. The Chinese Exclusion Act was in effect. Jim Crow laws were appearing all across the South. The Ku Klux Klan was experiencing a resurgence, particularly in the Midwest. But Berger’s bigotry seems less forgivable. He had to willfully reject the internationalism of the socialist tradition and purposefully misread Marx and Engel’s suggestion that all the workers of the world unite. In addition, many people did manage to evade the prejudices of the era.

Statue of Fighting Bob La Follette in the Wisconsin State Capitol with guitars from my house in front of it.

Fighting Bob La Follette—the Wisconsin progressive who served in the U.S. House, as governor, and in the Senate, and like Berger, also got in trouble for opposing U.S. entry into WWI—was outspoken against racism from the start of his career. Moreover, he was antiracist long before there were enough minorities in Wisconsin that his stance could be dismissed as callous vote-grabbing. As his biographer Nancy Unger writes:

La Follette’s fervent belief in the equality of all people led him to actively oppose anti-Semitism and discrimination against Asian Americans as well, but in the House he received more notice for his defense of African Americans. In 1889, during the bitterly contested election of an African American representative from South Carolina, La Follette lectured white racists: “There is nothing threatening or portentous in the negro problem today, excepting as you make it so. The difficulty does not lie with him, but with you instead.”[9]

Berger and the Milwaukee socialists left a legacy of clean government, ample public parks, free and easy access to Lake Michigan, and a city filled with strong unions and worker protections. But Berger’s bigotry, racism, and nationalism, combined with his role as one of the most prominent socialists and Milwaukeeans of the era, helped turn his city into one of the most segregated cities in the nation.

In 1929, a streetcar hit Victor Berger and he died, aged 69. (Perhaps getting struck by public transit is an ironic end for a socialist. What’s maybe more ironic is a bigoted socialist getting hit by a streetcar on a stretch of Third Street now named Dr. Martin Luther King Drive.) Berger’s more negative impacts were immediately apparent in the years following his death. He helped create clean government and workers’ protections, but also fostered a climate of racism. As Patrick Jones writes in The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee: “Two major breweries, Schlitz and Pabst, refused to hire black workers at the peak of the Depression in 1933. Similarly, despite the city’s strong labor movement, no black-white working-class alliance materialized as it did in other major industrial cities at the time.”[10]

Milwaukee’s history of good government and terrible racism is most apparent in Frank Zeidler’s tenure as mayor from 1948 to 1960. Zeidler himself was not racist, but it was Milwaukee’s rampant racism that brought him down. Zeidler was a Socialist. Although Milwaukee Mayor is a non-partisan position, the newspapers tried to play up Zeidler’s politics to do a little red-baiting in those early years of the Cold War. Zeidler writes in his memoirs that “the editorial board or management of the Milwaukee Journal is said to have issued orders to its staff writers early after the primary that in all stories about the campaign Mr. [Henry] Reuss’ name would appear first with the word ‘non-partisan’ afterward and my name would appear second with the word ‘Socialist.’”[11] Yet Zeidler won. He was then re-elected in 1952 with 72% of the vote.[12]

It’s worth noting that Joe McCarthy, that alcoholic enemy of everything to the left of Allen Dulles, was a Wisconsin Senator from 1947 to 1957, overlapping almost perfectly with Zeidler’s time as mayor. (McCarthy beat Robert La Follette Jr. to snatch the Senate seat the younger La Follette had held since his father’s death. La Follette Jr. committed suicide in 1953.) Milwaukee, Wisconsin repeatedly re-elected Frank Zeidler (Socialist) at the same time the state of Wisconsin kept re-electing Joe McCarthy (Loudmouth), all while “socialist” remained among the most feared and misunderstood words in English.

Frank Zeidler (Socialist) & Joe McCarthy (Loudmouth)

Ultimately, it wasn’t red-baiting, but race-baiting that made Zeidler not run again in 1960. The 1956 election was a tough one, and race was the biggest issue. The black population of Milwaukee roughly tripled in the 1950s, and rumors spread that Zeidler was placing billboards throughout the South urging African Americans to move to Milwaukee. Another rumor had his eldest daughter married to a black man, in a time when you still might see the word “miscegenation” outside of Atomwaffen message boards. Zeidler’s opponent in 1956 was Milton McGuire, whose campaign actually used the slogan “Milwaukee needs an honest white man for mayor.”[13] Zeidler was narrowly re-elected in 1956, but chose not to go through more of the same in 1960.

One of Zeidler’s last acts as mayor was a report on conditions in the predominantly black inner city, looking for ways to improve housing and at least take some steps toward equality. Zeidler’s successor, Henry Maier, shelved the report and tried to ignore issues of segregation and racial inequality to the best of his ability. On June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy addressed Congress and the nation on civil rights. The National Guard had just gone to Alabama to force integration. Kennedy said, “It is time to act in Congress, in your state and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives.” On exactly the same evening that Kennedy demanded immediate action on racial justice from all U.S. citizens, Henry Maier made a speech suggesting Milwaukeeans “go slow” on civil rights.[14] Sixty years later it’s still embarrassing.

Milwaukee’s socialists, led by Victor Berger, created a well-governed city with ample green space and comfortable jobs for much of its working class. There were corrupt political machines in Milwaukee before the rise of the Socialist Party, but the bosses were put out of work and graft became astonishingly rare for the era. There is a direct causal relationship between the rise of the Milwaukee Socialists and the decline in municipal corruption. It’s actually pretty amazing. Those are the nice parts of their legacy. The bad parts come out of their bigotry, especially Victor Berger’s. The extreme distrust of outsiders from unfamiliar places and the tendency to treat those outsiders poorly whenever they arrived ultimately made the city worse for everyone.

There are a lot of positive lessons we can take from the Milwaukee Socialists, such as their ability to actually take some power and use it for the common good. Hopefully, the negative aspects of their legacy can help us see how to make the future even better than the present they left us. Because if you only secure the existence of your people, you haven’t secured anything at all. The future will either be anti-racist or bleak as Hell.

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[1] Proceedings: National Party of the Socialist Party, Held in Masonic Temple, Chicago, Ill., May 15 to 21, 1910 (Chicago: The Socialist Party, 1910), 76.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 120.

[4] Ibid., 121.

[5] Ibid., 118.

[6] Ibid., 119.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 150.

[9] Nancy Unger, Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 89-90.

[10] Patrick Jones, The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 23.

[11] Frank Zeidler, A Liberal in City Government: My Experience as Mayor of Milwaukee (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Publishers, 2005), 25.

[12] Jim Arndorfer, “Cream City Confidential: The Black-Baiting of Milwaukee’s Last Pink Mayor,” The Baffler, Number 13, Winter 1999, 71.

[13] Jones, Selma of the North, 29.

[14] Ibid., 51.