Sewer Socialism: The City That Built Things
Near Milwaukee, Wisconsin
In nineteen thirty-two, at the Socialist Party of America's national convention held in Milwaukee, a New York party leader named Morris Hillquit rose to criticize the city's socialists. He called them, with contempt, sewer socialists. They cared more about sewers, he said, than about revolution. Milwaukee's socialists accepted the term and wore it as a badge.
The movement had started quietly in the eighteen nineties and arrived in City Hall in nineteen ten, when Emil Seidel was elected mayor. Seidel lasted one term. Daniel Hoan followed in nineteen sixteen and served twenty-four years, through the Depression, making Milwaukee's finances so clean and its public health so well-administered that it earned a national reputation for honest, efficient government. Frank Zeidler, who won the mayor's office in nineteen forty-eight, the early heart of the Red Scare, served three terms and declined a fourth.
Between the three of them, Milwaukee had Socialist mayors for thirty-eight of the fifty years between nineteen ten and nineteen sixty. Few American cities have matched that run.
What did sewer socialism actually build? Not a revolution. A water purification system. A public library system that became a model. Municipal parks. Honest audits of city contracts. A public health department that drove down infant mortality rates. A public housing program. And yes, sewers. The Socialists believed that if the city provided clean water, the people would be healthier; if the library was good, the people would be better educated; if the parks were well-maintained, the people would have somewhere to go.
Victor Berger, who ran the German-language socialist newspapers that made the movement's arguments, put it plainly in print year after year. His readers were working people. They wanted their streets paved and their water clean and their children to have a chance. The socialism he offered was not an abstraction. It was a utility bill.
Morris Hillquit was right about one thing. Milwaukee's socialists preferred a good sewer to a barricade. The sewers are still there.
