Frank Zeidler's Milwaukee at the Height of McCarthyism

In nineteen forty-eight, at the high point of the Red Scare, the city of Milwaukee elected a Socialist mayor. His name was Frank Zeidler, and he was the third Socialist to hold the office after Emil Seidel and Daniel Hoan. His opponents called him a Communist. Red-baiting, as the political tactic was then known, was standard practice in that election year. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who gave his name to the era of anti-Communist persecution, represented Wisconsin in the United States Senate.

Zeidler won anyway. He won again in nineteen fifty-two and again in nineteen fifty-six.

He was not a revolutionary. Time Magazine, covering his administration, described him as more like a conservative burgomaster than a doctrinaire Socialist, which he took as an insult and which was probably accurate. He expanded the city's boundaries through annexation, essentially doubling Milwaukee's geographic footprint and pushing its population toward seven hundred fifty thousand. He built an arena and a county stadium. He expanded the library and park systems. He established a public television station. He increased the supply of affordable housing.

The things he did were the things sewer socialism had always promised to do: run the city honestly, spend public money on public goods, and leave politics to the minimum necessary to keep winning elections.

Zeidler chose not to run for a fourth term in nineteen sixty, ending Milwaukee's continuous run of Socialist mayors at fifty years. He remained in Milwaukee, writing, advocating, and serving on city planning bodies, until his death in two thousand six at the age of ninety-three.

He is buried at Calvary Cemetery in Milwaukee. The gravestone says: Frank P. Zeidler. Mayor of Milwaukee. Socialist.