Victor Berger: Elected, Expelled, Elected Again

Victor Berger arrived in Milwaukee from Austria in eighteen eighty-one and spent the next thirty years building an argument in print. He published newspapers in both English and German, distributed free copies to households before elections, and insisted that working people could govern themselves if they had the information to do it. By nineteen ten, enough Milwaukee voters agreed that they sent him to Washington as the first Socialist ever elected to the United States House of Representatives.

Congress accepted him, seated him, and tolerated him for one term. Then America entered the First World War. Berger opposed the war in print, in the pages of his Milwaukee Leader newspaper, arguing that it served the interests of capital rather than working people. Under the Espionage Act of nineteen seventeen, he was indicted and convicted of sedition in nineteen nineteen and sentenced to twenty years in federal prison.

His Milwaukee district reelected him while he was under indictment. Congress voted three hundred eleven to one to deny him the seat. Then his district elected him again in a special election to fill the vacancy. Congress refused him again.

The Supreme Court overturned his conviction in nineteen twenty-one in Berger versus United States, ruling that the judge who had presided over his trial had shown bias. Berger returned to Milwaukee. His constituents elected him three more times in the nineteen twenties. He was seated each time.

He died in Milwaukee in nineteen twenty-nine, struck by a streetcar. His newspaper, the Milwaukee Leader, continued under successor names until nineteen forty-two.

What the Berger story contains, in compressed form, is the question of how much political dissent a democracy can hold. Congress answered that question one way. Milwaukee answered it another.