Focus on Milwaukee and Chicago – Can the United States put the Cold War and McCarthyism behind it?
Bernie Sander’s challenge for the
Democratic Party’s nomination in 2016 was unique for a number of reasons, not
least for the fact that he was the first mainstream Presidential contender to
openly call himself a socialist. The fact that he nearly won the contest was remarkable,
especially given that ‘Crooked’ Hilary and her friends openly cheated.
Whereas Europe has had a tradition of strong
socialist and communist parties in the United States such parties have always
been confronted with a virulent anti-communism. Attacks against labour unions
and the right to organise have been particularly
vicious in the USA.
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| Sacco and Vanzetti |
Frank Little of the Industrial
Workers of the World was lynched
in August 1917 by six thugs who pulled him out of his bed and Joe Hill was judicially murdered in
Utah in 1915. Twelve years later two Italian born anarchists, Sacco
and Vanzetti, were again judicially murdered
on trumped up charges in Massachussetts.
Nonetheless the United States has had
a rich socialist history
of class struggle such as in the car factories of Detroit in the 1930’s. In
1912 when Eugene Debbs stood for President he got nearly a million votes and 6%
of the vote. In 1920 he stood again and got
nearly a million votes but just 3.4%.
The first Red Scare was in the first
World War when Debb’s Socialist Party opposed the draft. A speech in Canton
Ohio on June 16 1918 at the end of the war when Debs declared
that:
“The working
class have never yet had a voice in declaring war. If war is right, let it be
declared by the people – you, who have your lives to lose.”
led to a prosecution under the
Sedition Act and Debs being sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, of which he
served 32 months before being pardoned.
 |
| Debs campaigning for President in 1912 |
In the post-war period McCarthyism
and anti-Communist hysteria led to a witch-hunt of supporters of all progressive
and radical politics. This was depicted
by Arthur Miller in The
Crucible, which was ostensibly about the Salem Witchhunt. People like Pete
Seeger and Charlie
Chaplin were victims of the determination of the American Right to root out
anyone who was seen as an opponent of US imperialism and its war machine.
It was only with the movement against
the Vietnam War that radical and socialist organisations began to resurface and
grow. Nonetheless the American political environment is very different from
that in Britain or Europe. There is no
equivalent to a mass social democratic or Labour Party. Instead there are two capitalist parties –
Republican and Democrat.
The Democrats were originally the
party of Dixieland, the KKK and White Supremacy. In the 1950’s and 1960’s it
became the party of civil rights and an end to segregation and the Big Society. This caused a rupture in its southern base
with the Democratic Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, running an independent
campaign for US President in 1968 having coined the slogan 5
years earlier ‘segregation now,
segregation tomorrow, segregation forever’. Wallace won 5 states in the
Deep South.
 |
| Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes |
In the Congressional elections last
year, Bernie Sanders, the Independent Senator for Vermont was joined
in Congress by two members of the Democratic
Socialists of America Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and the
Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. It has to be said that the DSA
are a social democratic not a Marxist party. Class struggle
is not to the fore in their politics.
Nonetheless this has provoked a backlash.
In his State of the Union address, Donald Trump railed
against the advance of socialism. when he warned that
“Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new
calls to adopt socialism in our country. ... Tonight, we renew our resolve that
America will never be a socialist country”
Not only Congressional Republicans
but Nancy Pelosi joined in the applause!
An
article in The Hill by Paris Dennard, a CNN political commentator and
former Bush official explained:
‘The Democratic Party continues to go further to the
extreme left. Their latest clarion call is the idea of "Democratic
Socialism." Socialism by any other name is still socialism, and trying to
infiltrate it into our modern political process and system of government is
dangerous.
There is no doubt that this new rise of socialism
found in the base of the Democratic Party is a flawed economic ideology that
must be challenged by all Americans who support free enterprise....
This is, of course, what
the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign and the launch of Chuka Ummuna’s now failed TIG was all about. Making the Labour Party into a
safe party of capitalism.
Below are two interesting
articles on socialism in Milwaukee and the Democratic stronghold of Chicago,
home to the infamous Mayor
Daley.
Tony Greenstein
For much of the 20th century, Milwaukee was run by
socialists—and Time magazine called it “one of the best-run cities in the U.S.”
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| Dan Hoan, Milwaukee’s mayor from 1916 to 1940. (Milwaukee Public Library / Historic Portrait Collection), (Milwaukee Public Library / Historic Portrait Collection) |
“If I owned all the real estate in the world, I wouldn’t feel so
powerful as I do on the streets of this socialist city,” declared former New
York City councilman Baruch Vladeck when he arrived in Milwaukee in 1932 for
the Socialist Party’s national convention in that city.
Norman Thomas, the famed civil-rights and economic-justice campaigner
who became the party’s presidential nominee
that year, celebrated the fact that he was chosen for that honor in a city
governed by Socialists. The success of Milwaukee under then-Mayor Dan Hoan,
Thomas said, was proof that the party’s social-democratic “dreams will someday
come true.”
“Someday” was dramatically delayed by the results of the 1932 elections.
The Socialist ticket did well, securing almost 900,000 votes nationwide and
registering its highest percentage of the total vote in Wisconsin. The winner
of that year’s race, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, took notice: He met with
Thomas after the election and borrowed liberally from proposals that had long
been championed by the Socialists—for a Social Security system, unemployment
compensation, strengthened labor unions, and public-works programs. Roosevelt’s
New Deal took the wind out of the Socialist Party’s sails in the national
arena, but the party remained a force in Milwaukee for decades to come.
Now that Milwaukee has been selected as the host city for another
national convention—that of the Democrats in 2020—Republicans have suddenly
discovered its history. “No city in America has stronger ties to socialism than
Milwaukee,” griped Wisconsin Republican Party director Mark Jefferson. “And
with the rise of Bernie Sanders and the embrace of socialism by its newest
leaders, the American left has come full circle. It’s only fitting the
Democrats would come to Milwaukee.” Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson
said the Milwaukee convention would provide a “firsthand look” at “the risk of
Democrat socialistic tendencies.”
Apart from the fact that Wisconsin’s top Republicans don’t seem to like
the state—or its history—very much, the GOP response is comic. Many
Wisconsinites know that their state has a long, rich socialist tradition, and
that Milwaukee’s association with it is one of the coolest things about the
city. It even earned a mention in the movie Wayne’s World, when rocker
Alice Cooper explains, “I think one of the most interesting aspects of
Milwaukee is the fact that it’s the only major American city to have ever
elected three Socialist mayors.”
The Democratic Party is not a socialist party, but the delegates to its
2020 convention might nominate a democratic socialist, Vermont Senator Bernie
Sanders, for president. And when they convene in Wisconsin’s largest city next
summer, they shouldn’t hesitate to take the Republicans up on their call to
highlight lessons from Milwaukee’s Socialist past. Doing so will strengthen the
hand of the party’s eventual nominee, whether it’s Sanders or another of the
contenders, all of whom will surely be labeled “socialist” by Donald Trump and
his troll army.
Instead of fearing mention of the S-word, Democrats can and should
approach it as smart Republicans have the L-word—“libertarian.” Republicans
frequently borrow from the libertarian lexicon and toolbox, and acknowledge as
much, without abandoning their essential partisanship. Democrats ought to be
similarly limber. It’s great that the party now has a strong
democratic-socialist wing, which includes Sanders and members of Congress like
New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib. But Democrats
who do not identify as socialists can still follow the lead of FDR and the late
senator Edward Kennedy, who worked closely with and celebrated the ideas and
ideals of democratic socialist Michael Harrington, author of The Other
America, a groundbreaking study on poverty. Another 2020 Democratic
presidential contender—Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana—gets it
right when he says that the old Republican strategy of attaching a “socialist”
label to every progressive idea is just that: old. “Today, I think a word like
that is the beginning of a debate, not the end of the debate,” explains the
most millennial of the Democrats’ presidential prospects.
Buttigieg says that the S-word has “lost its
ability to be used as a kill switch on debate,” arguing: “If someone my age or
younger is weighing a policy idea, and somebody comes along and says, ‘You
can’t do that—it’s socialist,’ I think our answer is going to be, ‘OK, is it a
good idea or is it not?’”
Polling tells us that young voters are more comfortable with socialism
than capitalism. Older voters may still be susceptible to Republican appeals
rooted in Cold War hysteria, but the challenges posed by the existential crisis
of climate change and the radical transformation of our economy in an age of
AI-driven automation are going to make everyone far more open to radical
responses. And many of the best of these—especially those that call for
expanding the social-welfare state—will draw from historic and contemporary
socialist thinking.
Democrats can get ahead of the curve and disarm Trump and the trolls by
embracing the opportunity that Milwaukee offers to talk about socialism as it
has existed and succeeded in the United States. For American socialists in the
20th century, Milwaukee was a political mecca, a city that tested and confirmed
the validity of their ideas. Vladeck, then the manager of The Jewish
Daily Forward (these days known simply as The Forward), called it an
example of “the America of tomorrow.”
Socialists were proud to point to Milwaukee, which had a Socialist mayor for most of
the period from 1910 to 1960, as a model of sound and equitable governance. And
they were not alone: During Hoan’s 24-year tenure, Time magazine
reported, “Milwaukee became one of the best-run cities in the U.S.”
Hoan also took on the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, at a time when
politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties were compromising
with the violent racists as they extended their reach from the South to
northern cities. “The Ku Klux Klan will find Milwaukee a hotter place to exist
in than Hades itself,” the mayor declared in 1921.
Hoan’s integrity, along with his managerial skills, would eventually
earn him recognition as one of the 10 finest municipal leaders in American
history. In The American Mayor, his groundbreaking 1999 assessment of
municipal governance in cities across the country, Melvin Holli wrote:
“Although this self-identified socialist had difficulty pushing progressive legislation through a nonpartisan city council, he experimented with the municipal marketing of food, backed city-built housing, and was a fervent but unsuccessful champion of municipal ownership of the street railways and the electric utility. His pragmatic ‘gas and water socialism’ met with more success in improving public health and in providing public markets, city harbor improvements, and purging graft from Milwaukee politics.”
Emil Seidel and Frank Zeidler, the mayors who served before and after
Hoan, were Socialists as well. And Milwaukee voters elected dozens of
Socialists to the city council, county board, school board, state legislature,
and Congress. Milwaukee’s Socialists were so fiscally and socially responsible
that historians to this day hail them as exemplars of a uniquely American form
of democratic socialism. Zeidler once explained to me,
“Socialism as we attempted to practice it here believes that people working together for the common good can produce a greater benefit both for society and for the individual than can a society in which everyone is shrewdly seeking their own self-interest.”
That worked well for Milwaukee in the 20th century—so much so that
“socialism” ceased to be a scare word for the city’s residents. What frightens
Republicans today is that “socialism” is ceasing to be a scare word in our
contemporary national discourse.
John Nichols is The Nation’s national-affairs
correspondent. He is the author of Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A
Field Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America, from Nation Books, and co-author, with Robert W. McChesney, of People Get Ready: The Fight
Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy.
Tuesday night’s elections saw the
largest socialist electoral victory in modern American history
April 3,
2019 Micah Uetricht
The United States is experiencing a socialist surge right now. That
surge came to Chicago last night, where
democratic socialists won big in the second, final round of municipal
elections.
Three Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members won their city council races in runoff elections on
Tuesday: Byron Sigcho-Lopez in the 25th ward, Jeanette Taylor in the 20th and
Andre Vasquez in the 40th. The fourth candidate, Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez, is
locked in a race in the 33rd ward that is too close to call and will await the
counting of mail-in ballots, but was up by 64 votes once all precincts’ votes
were counted.
They will join two other socialists who handily won the first round of
elections outright in February: Carlos Rosa, an incumbent in the 35th ward, and
Daniel La Spata, who defeated an incumbent in the first ward.
Add them up and you’ve got at least five, maybe six democratic
socialists who will be on the 50-member Chicago city council. Few major
American cities have seen even a single socialist councilor in generations; the
third-largest city in the US could soon have half a dozen. It’s the largest
socialist electoral victory in modern American history.
The socialists won by strong, straightforward campaigning on
working-class issues. Rosa, for example, made his race a referendum on
affordable housing in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, painting big real
estate developers as the enemy and demanding rent control in the city.
Taylor, a longtime neighborhood and education activist on the city’s
South Side, demanded the forthcoming Barack Obama presidential library in her
ward include a community benefits agreement to fight displacement of
working-class residents. In 2015, she participated in a 34-day hunger strike to
demand the reopening of Walter H Dyett high school; her website homepage reads: “Send a Dyett hunger strike to city hall.”
And Rodriguez campaigned on a history of activism for affordable housing
and immigrant rights in a gentrifying, working-class immigrant neighborhood and
against privatization of public services and expansion of police power in the
city.
In other words, these democratic socialists ran as unabashed fighters
against corporate greed and austerity and for the city’s working class.
Political observers and organizers should take these victories as a
lesson: voters found that strong leftwing message appealing – and weren’t
scared off by candidates who proudly called themselves “socialists”.
Socialism is spreading throughout the US, as seen in the popularity of the
Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and New York representative Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, and the huge bump in DSA membership, increasing more than seven
times over to 60,000 in the past three years. But what sets Chicago apart from
many other cities in America – and played a crucial role in last night’s
socialist victories – is that the left wing of the city’s labor movement hasn’t
been afraid to partner with democratic socialist candidates.
Since its 2012 strike, the Chicago Teachers Union has
served as the anchor of the city’s labor left. The CTU, along with community
groups and other progressive unions such as SEIU Healthcare Illinois and
Indiana, formed a political organization called United Working Families (UWF)
in 2015. Many union leaders, in Chicago and elsewhere, are skittish about
backing openly socialist candidates.
UWF appears to be, endorsing most of the DSA’s city council
candidates (and in many cases expended significant resources on them). Another
progressive electoral group, Reclaim Chicago, was the principal backer of two
of the victorious DSA members, Vasquez and La Spata.
That coalition of left unions and community groups will be crucial in
the years to come. Last night also saw the election of the Chicago’s first
black woman mayor, as well as its first lesbian mayor, Lori Lightfoot, a former prosecutor and
corporate lawyer.
Lightfoot claimed to be a progressive, but her record has been scrutinized by criminal justice
activists and the CTU (which backed Lightfoot’s
opponent, Cook county board president Toni Preckwinkle); she drew a large
donation from a murky “dark money” group that uses vague pro-austerity
rhetoric as well as support from Emanuel’s personal lawyer. The city’s labor
movement and left will probably find themselves joining together to fight
Lightfoot in office.
Chicago’s socialist victories last night weren’t a fluke. Throughout the
country, people are tired of low wages, soaring housing costs, privatization of
public goods, budget cuts and corporate giveaways of public money. They have
tried austerity and found it miserable.
If Chicago’s elections are any indication, maybe they’re ready to try
socialism.
- Micah Uetricht is the managing editor of Jacobin magazine. He is the author of Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity (Verso, 2014) and a member of the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America
