- So, you know, it was like, yeah, I'm from Milwaukee, beer and socialism.

- [Narrator] Milwaukee may be synonymous with beer, but for many people, its socialist past is little more than a quirky piece of 1990s pop culture.

- So, do you come to Milwaukee often?

- 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.

- Does this guy know how to party or what?

- [Narrator] Alice Cooper is right.

And he points to a little known chapter in American history that has increasing relevance today.

- Socialist mayors were the rock stars of the age.

They were the ones that did things, they were the protesters, the radical people who changed the world as we knew it.

- It wasn't anything I was afraid of, but I don't think people understand it.

- You know, the pure socialism is the government's ownership of the means of production.

That was not what socialism was about here.

- Even though there may have been some discomfort with the rhetoric of socialism, there was a feeling that Milwaukee worked.

- The public had trust in government.

- [Narrator] Unlike its beer, the city's socialism isn't world-famous, but it should be.

Because Milwaukee offers a case study of how socialism played out in an American setting.

- [Announcer] Major funding for America's Socialist Experiment was provided by Brico Fund, Madeleine and David Lubar, Marianne and Sheldon Lubar, Marquette University Law School, and by Greater Milwaukee Foundation and by Richard and Barbara Weiss Fund.

Additional funding by.

(upbeat violin music) For a full list of funders, visit aptonline.org.

(gentle cello music) - [Narrator] For nearly half a century one of the largest cities in America was run by socialists.

They ended corruption, fought for better conditions for working people and cleaned up the environment.

But you've probably never heard of them.

Because it was policy, not publicity that drove them.

- I mean, these were not charismatic, flashy ideologues.

- There was a kind of sense that these were our people.

- [Narrator] As interest in socialism increases, one heartland city has a surprising story to tell.

Electing three socialist mayors and the first socialist member of the US Congress.

- What happened in Milwaukee was the biggest political story.

- They were the vanguard of of experimenting with things that government had never thought to do before.

- [Narrator] This didn't happen in some small liberal enclave, this was a fiscally conservative city that at the time, ranked among the nation's largest.

The story of these 20th Century Midwestern socialists offers insights into why this brand of American socialism succeeded for a time and why it ended.

- Socialism gets such a dirty rap, but I think it's just the rhetoric without understanding.

- Back then socialism hadn't quite been stigmatized the way it was later on.

- And it was considered just sort of normal, if you will, that yeah, we've been this socialist city and they did good things.

- So this was a city that was built, really under socialist mayors.

And this was a period of incredible prosperity.

This was really when Milwaukee became the machine shop of the world.

- They became the avant garde experimenters.

The proponents of what people thought were outrageous ideas, and made it work.

- [Narrator] It's the story of America's Socialist Experiment.

(inspiring music) (somber music) Sewage is a problem.

It stinks.

Worse, it carries disease.

And as people are packed closer and closer together, it becomes impossible to avoid.

This was a huge problem at the turn of the 20th Century.

As poor European immigrants pressed into American cities like Milwaukee.

- Was very, very crowded.

The population density in Milwaukee matched Manhattan.

So it was a very dense and crowded place.

- [Narrator] As the population swelled, the sewage became unbearable.

This is a time when you have horses and mules in the streets.

So they were disease carriers, all that manure in the streets.

People died from bad water or from bad food.

Or from filth.

The city did not do a good job of protecting people at the most basic levels.

- So it really was an open sewer literally.

And all they did was convey human, industrial and animal waste to the nearest river.

That all it was for.

- [Narrator] Anyone who cared about this problem would certainly have the support of the people.

The socialists had a solution.

(cheerful piano music) Part of that solution is still visible today here.

Massive amounts of sewage come into this plant where it's filtered, fermented and then bagged into fertilizer.

(bag tearing open) So, in effect, the city sells its sewage to homeowners who spread it on their manicured lawns.

The proceeds are then used to maintain and enhance the sewage system.

In the 1920s only one city was working to spread this ingenious idea.

A city run by a highly respected socialist mayor.

The city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

- One of the main legacies from the socialists was the tradition of clean government here.

You almost can't find a city that is more different than say the political culture of Chicago than Milwaukee.

(relaxing cello music) - [Narrator] 90 miles to the South in Chicago, municipal government officials had a different solution to the sewage problem.

They built a canal to flush it into the Des Plaines River.

Chicago's waste became the problem of the unfortunate people downstream who didn't have the political clout to do much about it.

- There's no question that Milwaukee was a different place to live and work than Chicago just 90 miles away, and it's always sort of amazed me that you could have two cities close to each other, same culture, but to be so different.

- [Narrator] Unlike Chicago, Milwaukee had socialist leaders who were focused on empowering working people with no political connections.

And an important step was to give citizens basic sanitation.

Streets without open sewers.

Milwaukee's leaders came to be called sewer socialists.

The term was originally meant as an insult.

Hurled by East Coast socialists with more lofty goals.

- The Eastern socialists called the Milwaukee socialists sewer socialists, but the Milwaukee socialists loved that.

Because they just laughed at the Eastern visionary people and said, you couldn't get elected dog catcher.

- It was thrown at the Milwaukee socialists that they weren't sufficiently revolutionary.

That they were too interested in the sort of day to day, the sewers, things like that.

And they took it up as a term of pride.

- [Narrator] The Milwaukee socialists were more than just talk.

They won elections and implemented policies.

Their nearly 50 year experiment offered a unique glimpse into socialism's potential and pitfalls in an American context.

(upbeat piano music) Voters go to the polls for two reasons, to vote for something or to vote against something.

In 1910, a lot of people wanted to vote against the regime of David Rose.

After 12 years as Mayor, Milwaukeeans had enough.

Rose didn't just tolerate vice, he seemed to encourage it.

- His nickname was All The Time Rosey and he not just tolerated, but came close to encouraging all-night saloons, gambling dens, prostitution and literally in the shadow of City Hall.

- [Narrator] Rose packed his government with shady characters, leading to nearly 300 indictments against city officials during his term.

- Milwaukee was pretty much a political cesspool.

It was sometimes said it was the most corrupt city in the country.

- So the point is that we had malfeasance in high office, and that created a real momentum for reform.

- [Narrator] The promise to clean up the corruption in Milwaukee resonated with voters, leading to a landslide win for socialist Emil Seidel in 1910.

And Seidel delivered on the promise.

Brothels were shut down.

Corrupt city workers were fired.

And the police department was completely overhauled.

Officers received vastly improved training.

Later, the US attorney general named Milwaukee as having the best police force in the United States.

- So it's an interesting thing here that the socialists rose in 1910, not merely as a party proposing economic alternatives, but also I think much more so as a party proposing clean government.

- [Narrator] It wasn't long before Milwaukee earned the nickname, The Crime Free City.

- On the front page of the New York Times day after day there were news reports, and not negative or overly positive.

They were just this thing of, something amazing has happened out in America, out in the middle of the country.

- [Narrator] For many voters, the socialist government elected in 1910 had done its job by rooting out corruption.

But the socialists had a much bigger agenda.

(bouncy piano music) (typewriter clicking) - [Narrator] Just about any problem can be solved with honest, efficient government.

That's what Milwaukee's first socialist mayor thought.

At a time when Vladimir Lenin longed for revolution, the newly elected American socialists were more worried about inventory management.

By bringing modern accounting and inventory practices to city government, the new mayor, Emil Seidel, hoped to save money and lives.

- Sometimes socialists are considered these tax and spend radicals.

No, these Milwaukee socialists, they were good governors.

And they introduced things like unit cost accounting, the first inventories, line item budgeting.

- [Narrator] By the early 1910s, American socialism was rising fast.

And Milwaukee was ground zero.

After Emil Seidel won City Hall, he worked to quell fears he was a revolutionary.

Like the other Milwaukee socialists, Seidel's goal wasn't a quest for raw power.

Instead, his focus was using the existing tools of government to improve the daily lives of working people.

- The Milwaukee socialists existed in a time where they believed it was quite possible to perfect a city, a state, a nation, the world.

This was a very, very radical vision.

- [Narrator] The arts, recreation and education were just as important to the socialists as healthcare and worker's pay.

As evidence, Seidel's top assistant wasn't a political operative, rather he was a poet, Carl Sandburg, who would later win three Pulitzer Prizes for his writing.

- But he becomes Emil Seidel's personal secretary.

So kind of his left-hand man is how I described it.

- [Narrator] Emil Seidel's win was deeply embarrassing for both Democrats and Republicans.

And so they joined forces crafting an unprecedented backroom deal to oust the Socialist mayor.

A single candidate would be endorsed by both Democrats and Republicans.

The tactic worked.

Seidel lost, but America's socialist experiment was far from over.

(whistle blowing) The massive factories of the American heartland created jobs and injuries.

Workers in places like Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Chicago had little recourse when hurt on the job.

- You had a lot of ethnic people working in these factories in very challenging situations and environment.

They'd get injured and then they'd have job loss and couldn't support their families.

- If you were injured on the job, you were out of luck.

If you died on the job, that's why there were orphanages back in those years.

- [Narrator] In 1911, Milwaukee's newly elected socialist city attorney enters the story.

Authoring the nations first workman's compensation law, which was then implemented in Wisconsin.

The city attorney's name was Daniel Hoan.

- He came to public office with the notion that the government has a role, perhaps, in helping people when times are tough.

That wasn't know before.

It was really a radical idea in America, that the role of government should somehow intervene in the lives of citizens when things are tough, whether it's healthcare or unemployment.

The Supreme Court would always knock those things down.

It was just survival of the fittest.

- [Narrator] Factory owners hoped the Supreme Court would, once again, rule against a governmental role in worker safety.

- The issue at the time was, well if you're injured on the job, you know, you got your hand cut off, who's fault is it?

And there was an old common law notion of the fellow servant rule that basically said, it's your fault.

You shouldn't have put your hands in the machine if you will.

And it led, of course, to the almost instant impoverishment of a family.

- [Narrator] The US Supreme Court changed all that when it ruled in favor of the Wisconsin law.

And workmen's compensation became standard across the US.

The workman's compensation law elevated Daniel Hoan's reputation as a socialist.

Leading to his election as mayor of Milwaukee in 1916.

Hoan continued to advocate for worker's rights as his socialist predecessor had.

Pressing for an eight hour work day and a higher minimum wage.

At the time, Hoan's measures were decried by many as radical, even un-American.

Today they are commonplace.

- So when we talk about workman's compensation or a eight hour work day or Social Security or even Medicare, those were ideas that were put forth by the socialists.

- [Narrator] A strict definition of socialism requires government ownership of factories.

But in Milwaukee, that was not the endgame.

Here, socialists felt they could accomplish their goals working with big business.

- You had the civic socialism, which was good, efficient government, creation of community, but then you also had a very vibrant capitalist sector here.

- [Narrator] By working with capitalists, the socialists in Milwaukee continued to advance their worldview.

A view that extended far beyond the workplace.

In the early 1900s this public lakefront didn't exist.

The ultra-wealthy owned much of the land along the Lake Michigan shoreline.

The poorer classes were shut out.

Once elected, the socialists saw a solution.

They ramped up dredging and filling efforts to build a new lakefront.

Creating acres of beaches and parks for the working classes to enjoy.

- Socialists said, we don't want to see rich people building their houses right down there.

We want to have an open lakefront.

- My grandfather took me to the lakefront when I'm only 10 years old and says, "This lakefront belongs to the people."

- [Narrator] This massive infrastructure project can today accommodate hundreds of thousands on a warm summer day.

- Most of Milwaukee's lakefront is in the public domain.

Other places in the country it's sort of high-end housing or high-volume expressways, in Milwaukee it's park land.

- [Narrator] The lakefront project was just one step in a larger socialist plan to address a new concept in the lives of working people, leisure.

With the move toward an eight hour work day and two day weekend, workers would have more time to relax.

And the socialists were determined to provide wholesome activities to fill that time.

Socialists working in both the city of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County, developed one of the largest park systems in the nation.

- I think the reason why we have a lot of parks, the reason why we had social centers in all of those, I think reflected that socialist view of community.

- So the whole idea was to have these parks as lungs of the city and a respite from the chaos and grime of industrial Milwaukee.

Milwaukee County has 15,000 acres of public green space.

That is five times per capita more than Chicago has.

- [Narrator] Today, Americans take for granted that their city's parks department also included organized recreation.

(players yelling) But the idea of a robust recreation department can be traced back to this woman.

(bouncing piano music) Dorothy Enderis became the nation's first municipal director of recreation in 1920.

Under a socialist government, she spearheaded an endless list of activities to meet the needs of nearly every citizen.

- She had a great line, often repeated, "During our work days we make a living, "in our leisure we make a life."

- [Narrator] In addition to competitive sports there were singing clubs, drama productions, lectures and dancing.

More practical activities included English classes and work skills for the unemployed.

- Every school during the Summer that had a playground, you had people working on the playground with recreation for kids.

That's what I did.

I was the director of a playground.

I didn't realize that that was the result of a certain political economic philosophy that was driving the decisions that were being made for the city.

I didn't realize that until much, much later on.

- [Narrator] Dorothy Enderis's drive for organized recreation grew out of a larger socialist idea that government should serve the whole person providing a platform for a range of cultural activities.

- They like that sort of a communal place where they could be.

Where in fact they saw themselves as part of a community.

And I think that's what this specific kind of German socialism meant.

- [Narrator] Opportunities to share music, food, and beer were baked into the socialist view of a good life.

Today Milwaukee is home to the world's largest music festival.

An idea that grew out of the socialist view that government should play a role even in the leisure side of life.

- The City of Festivals tradition, in some sense, goes back into the sort of same notion that ordinary people should be able to have fun.

(laughing) And drink.

- The socialist movement in Milwaukee wasn't so much about ideology, it was about playgrounds and music and art and fun and a good life and a chance for happiness for all of us.

- [Narrator] Because Milwaukee's socialists believed government should play a role in providing recreation, they supported public financing for a new baseball stadium.

Even though Milwaukee didn't have a Major League team.

After County Stadium was built, the Boston Braves were lured to Milwaukee.

- [Announcer] The Governor of Wisconsin, the Honorable Walter J. Kohler throws out the first ball.

- [Narrator] Eventually winning the 1957 World Series.

Mayor Frank Zeidler called the Braves arrival a means of letting people know we exist.

City and county officials worked with business leaders who had led the push for a new stadium.

A bold bet on the future.

- Because it showed what leadership can do.

And because they did it, a number of things happened.

Number one, they probly saved the Green Bay Packers.

- [Announcer] Don scampers for a score on a 55 yard maneuver.

- [Narrator] That's because in addition to baseball, Milwaukee County Stadium hosted several Green Bay Packers football games each year.

At the time the team was in dire financial straits playing in a small outdated stadium in Green Bay.

There was talk the Packers might leave.

Even move to Milwaukee.

County Stadium gave the Packers time and motivation to build a new home, Lambeau Field.

- [Announcer] Billy Howton has it in the far corner and the Packers have the lead.

(cheerful string music) - [Narrator] Today, home builders can make a nice profit from big, upscale homes.

But smaller homes are not nearly as lucrative.

So there is little incentive to build housing for people of lesser means.

And this isn't a new problem.

(somber music) In 1920, Milwaukee was the second most densely populated city in America after New York.

Waves of new immigrants here were pressed into decrepit tenement housing.

Socialist leaders saw a solution, single family homes, each with its own small plot of land.

A more healthy environment for workers' families.

But builders weren't interested.

So Milwaukee's socialist government stepped in.

Creating the nation's first municipal public housing project in 1921 called Garden Homes.

When construction started on 105 houses, there were 700 applicants.

The dream of an idyllic community of low-cost homes fueled tremendous optimism.

- This cooperative that would own these houses in common and you wouldn't pay rent, you'd pay money into this cooperative association.

So it was kind of the socialist model made tangible on the small scale, the small residential scale.

- [Narrator] But because the families would not own their home until after a 20 year period, many were leery of making improvements.

- And the people that lived there said, I think we'll opt out of the coop and we want these on our own.

We want to own these privately.

- [Narrator] Cost overruns were also a problem.

This template of an idea was not repeated.

- And when you isolate poor people a couple of things happen.

One is, poor people have a lot of problems driven by the fact they don't have money.

And secondly, when you concentrate them, you pretty much eliminate political support for what they want.

- [Narrator] Despite the challenges of this public housing project, socialists were undaunted in their quest to bring a more healthy living environment to Milwaukee's workers.

A later public housing project called Hillside faced opposition because most of the residents were African American.

- I don't remember very many white people in Hillside.

People wanted to live in the projects because it was new, it was like great living as far as I was concerned.

- [Narrator] Socialist mayor Frank Zeidler ignored the criticism ensuring he was photographed with new residence of the city's public housing projects.

Building sewers was just one step in the socialist quest for improving the health of the city's residents.

- People are burning coal for everything.

The women would not put wash on their line on Monday because if the wind blew from the South, it would come out gray or black.

So these large families living in close quarters just sweating in the late Summers.

- [Narrator] The socialists built natatoria, but recreation was only a secondary function.

The main purpose of these facilities was to give people an opportunity to bathe.

Because in the early 1900s, most working people did not have running water in their homes.

- Places where you could go swim, and this was a big thing in Milwaukee where people would go and they would swim naked.

I don't know when that stopped, but this was a Milwaukee thing, believe it or not.

You imagine these old German factory workers going out and they would go to the natatoria, but this was kind of that socialist sort or thing.

- [Narrator] The socialist's aggressive vaccination program in the 1920s led to a doubling of life expectancy in the city by the early 1930s.

- So you have these appalling rates of child mortality.

During those years about 60% of the funerals were for a child.

So this was hard living in Milwaukee.

And not just Milwaukee, this is kind of the state of affairs in urban America.

- [Narrator] The campaign to reduce infant mortality quickly brought about the lowest rates in the country.

And the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic had a much smaller impact on Milwaukee than other cities thanks to a powerful health department that effectively shut down public gathering places.

Milwaukee eventually won so many national public health awards it was exempted from the competition so that other American cities would have a chance.

- Milwaukee becomes a paragon of civic virtue.

And we won award after award as the safest, healthiest and cleanest big city in America.

- [Narrator] The successful innovations of the Milwaukee socialists did not go unnoticed across the nation.

What came to be called the Milwaukee experiment was closely watched by friends and foes.

But attempts to replicate this brand of socialism elsewhere were not successful.

Largely because Milwaukee's back story brought together a unique set of factors.

- What happened in Milwaukee is partially because it was a heavily immigrant population from Central Europe, mostly Germans initially, that they brought with them political traditions that were bubbling up in Europe at the time, and socialism was one of them.

- [Narrator] In the decades following the American Revolution, the countryside of Europe became increasingly unsettled.

Commoners longed for American styled freedoms, but the aristocracy resisted.

This all came to a head in 1848 when a series of protests were crushed in the German territories.

The intellectuals behind the protest movement escaped to America.

Because they were mostly German, they came by ship to the place with the largest number of German immigrants, Wisconsin.

Unlike the previous wave of German farmers, the 48ers as they were known, were writers, artists, teachers and lawyers.

- These were idealists, but they were also politicians.

And they loved politics.

And they believed that they could win elected office, and in fact, they did.

- [Narrator] Over time, the 48ers in the growing city of Milwaukee gained influence.

Fueling their popularity was their concern for the problems of the lower classes.

Poor working conditions, rampant disease, squalid housing, and an utterly corrupt city government.

The issues they championed finally reached a critical mass in 1910 with the election of Emil Seidel as Milwaukee's first socialist mayor.

But the real power behind the movement was not Seidel.

It was Victor Berger.

Victor Berger was a founding member of the Socialist Party in America and the very first socialist elected to congress.

As the de facto leader of the Milwaukee socialists, Berger spent much of his career fighting the more radical wing of the National Socialist Party.

Some of whom advocated violent change.

Berger always saw socialism coming incrementally through the existing political process.

- He was not only a very pragmatic politician, but he was a masterful tactician.

He could be prickly.

He could be egotistical, but he was certainly, he was kind of the Moses that led Milwaukee socialism into the promised land.

- [Narrator] Early on, Berger and the Milwaukee socialists came to understand that a government takeover of big business was not going to happen.

So they made a key pivot.

Refocusing on using government to help people within a capitalist system.

- They were smart to abandon the theory of socialism that there should be government ownership of private industry.

They got that right.

They just said, it ain't workin' so let's back off.

- [Narrator] In retrospect, some of Victor Berger's policies seem remarkably tame.

He advocated for a government program of old-age pensions.

Considered outlandish at the time, but eventually passed under a different name, Social Security.

Not all of Berger's ideas were so readily adopted.

For example, he advocated abolishing the US Senate.

The beginning of Berger's downfall was World War I.

It was not a good time to be of German heritage in America.

Once America entered the war, Germans were considered the enemy.

And German Americans were viewed with suspicion.

Especially since most still spoke in their native tongue.

- World War I was this great divisive moment in American politics.

- [Narrator] Declassified FBI documents show that US government agents surreptitiously attended church services in Wisconsin looking for any pro German messages in the sermons and threatening to jail the offending pastors.

But spies weren't needed to determine if Victor Berger was opposed to the war.

He put up posters all over Milwaukee saying, "War is hell caused by capitalism.

"Socialists demand peace."

By 1918, Berger's anti-war stance led to charges he had violated the new Espionage Act.

The judge in Berger's case was Kennesaw Mountain Landis, who would later become the commissioner of baseball.

- He had been a federal judge in Georgia, was one of the great autocratic personalities of all time.

Got away with it for awhile.

He was an interesting guy.

- [Narrator] Landis sentenced Berger to 20 years in prison.

Stating afterwards that the law did not permit him to have Berger lined up against a wall and shot.

Berger's crime, running an anti-war newspaper.

- Victor Berger is arrested, tried and convicted, the Espionage Act, of using his paper, The Milwaukee Leader, to espouse anti-war views.

Milwaukee elected him anyway.

He went back to Congress.

Congress wouldn't seat him.

- [Narrator] A new elect was held and Berger, now in prison, won again.

In fact, voters returned Berger to the US House of Representatives in three consecutive elections.

The US Supreme Court eventually heard the case and overturned his conviction.

The socialists had learned their lesson.

And the second socialist mayor of Milwaukee, Daniel Hoan, would not be so confrontational.

(crowd jeering) 1886.

(bomb exploding) A bomb goes off in Chicago's Haymarket Square killing a policeman.

Albert Parsons, a famous socialist, is implicated.

He escapes to rural Wisconsin and hides out in a barn.

The following morning a young boy named Daniel Hoan goes out to the barn alone and sees a man hiding in the corner.

- So Parsons ends up on their front doorstep.

And of course, Illinois puts out a reward for $10,000 for Parsons.

They want him back and they want to hang him.

- [Narrator] Parsons has come to the Hoan farm because Daniel Hoan's father was sympathetic to the socialist cause.

The family hides Parsons for a time, but eventually he returns to Chicago.

- Parsons gave himself up and stood in solidarity with his fellow defendants and was hanged.

He might have applied for a commuted sentence, but chose not to because it would have been an admission of guilt and he thought he was innocent.

- [Narrator] The episode had a huge impact on Daniel Hoan, cementing his quest for justice and his support for socialist ideals.

(typwriter clicking) After Hoan wrote the nation's first workman's compensation law, he was elected mayor of Milwaukee in 1916.

He would server for the next 24 years.

The longest socialist administration in US history.

Time magazine put him on the cover.

- Milwaukee, again and again, was rated as one of the most financially sound cities in the country.

So here you had socialists running the city that kept topping the lists as being best run.

- [Narrator] Daniel Hoan had no interest in touting his celebrity.

He preferred to talk about results, often citing how his administration significantly lowered the cost of garbage collection.

- It is quintessentially Milwaukee to say, "I'm gonna run to lower the price "of collecting garbage."

That is almost the essence of what Milwaukee socialism would be about.

Not that we are going to transform Milwaukee into a worker's paradise, but we're gonna make it cheaper to collect your garbage.

- [Narrator] Hoan liked to brag that smallpox vaccinations, which were $3 from a private doctor, cost the city only seven cents to administer.

He was convinced that the city could provide a wide range of services cheaper than any private company.

Hoan was particularly irked by the private streetcar company, which he thought was gouging the citizens of his city.

- Public transit was, in the days before automobiles, it was a public necessity.

And you have this New York company, The North American company, they're the ones who are making the profits.

And Dan Hoan, like all socialists, believed the profits should stay here and that people who supported that system should own it.

- [Narrator] Dan Hoan never had the opportunity to take over the transit system.

But he did venture into the grocery business when during World War I, profiteers drove up the cost of food.

Hoan authorized the city to buy boxcars of canned goods, fish and produce to be sold to the public at deep discounts.

Hoan didn't overspend on his ambitious projects.

He considered fiscal responsibility to be a centerpiece of effective socialism.

During his tenure the city did not run budget deficits.

(upbeat music) On occasion, Hoan's more idealistic side became visible.

When the King and Queen of Belgium planned a visit to Milwaukee, Hoan blocked the trip.

His sole reason, monarchs represent everything socialists despise.

Hoan could not bring himself to welcome any aristocrat.

- So a royal visit to Milwaukee was considered quite something.

Except by Dan Hoan, who when he was invited to come and greet the King, sent back a message that was essentially, I don't greet kings.

- [Narrator] His official statement read, "I stand for the man who works.

"To hell with kings."

- So Dan Hoan writes the Belgian ambassador to say, "I mean no disrespect to the king, "but as far as I'm concerned, to hell with kings, "I'm for the man who works."

Whoa, front page of the New York Times, there's a crazy man in Milwaukee.

- [Narrator] A much more serious test came when the Ku Klux Klan tried to establish a beach head in Milwaukee in the 1920s.

While Democrats and Republicans did little, Hoan harassed the Klan relentlessly, eventually driving them out of town.

- And he made it clear, they weren't welcome in Milwaukee.

They can get out of town fast.

And then he spoke positively about these communities that they targeted.

- [Narrator] Efficient frugal government doesn't make headlines.

And over time, Daniel Hoan began to seem stodgy, even boring.

He was vulnerable to a more exciting competitor.

And that's exactly what he got in 1940 when Carl Zeidler, who was not a socialist, ran for mayor.

- Carl Zeidler was the first of the modern campaigners.

A blonde, baritone and someone who would walk into a rally with a girl on each arm and sing, "God Bless America."

- [Narrator] In his campaign to unseat Hoan, Carl Zeidler didn't talk about his political philosophy.

Instead, he put on a well-orchestrated show.

His events included a five piece band, a giant American flag and glamorous women handing out literature.

Zeidler's team even invented the balloon drop, which is now a staple of political rallies.

- He was the singing mayor of Milwaukee and he was a very charismatic figure.

- Uncle Carl was tall and blonde and athletic and had a terrific singing voice and extremely gregarious.

- He was drop dead gorgeous.

He was young and he could sing beautifully.

He could sing, "God Bless America" and he would run around the city singing to all these groups.

Dan Hoan never took him seriously.

♪God bless America ♪ ♪ My home sweet home ♪ - [Narrator] Carl Zeidler defeated Dan Hoan and became mayor in 1940.

But shortly after, Zeidler volunteered to serve in the war effort and was lost at sea.

A few years after Carl Zeidler died, his younger brother Frank decided he wanted to be mayor, but Frank was a socialist.

And it wasn't easy to get elected as a socialist in 1948.

Even in Milwaukee.

With America now in the cold war, many saw socialists as the equivalent of communists.

And communists were America's greatest perceived threat.

This widely published photo turned the tide in favor of Frank Zeidler showing his gentler, unassuming family side.

- It was an image of a Milwaukee family that people could empathize with.

It was not a scary socialist.

And it was really difficult for anybody to think that was a very threatening man or a very threatening family when they saw that.

It was very ordinary.

Just a very comfortable person, which my father was.

- There would nothing that looked totalitarian about Frank Zeidler.

He rode the bus.

- He was so not a politician, but he was probly one of the best ones I'd ever known.

- [Narrator] Part of the reason for Frank Zeidler's win has been credited to the popularity of his war hero brother.

But Frank never shied away from his socialist views.

- My father was a very good politician.

And he knew how to run a campaign.

He believed that people coming together, working together, would produce much better outcomes than everybody just individually striving for their own selfish interests.

- [Narrator] The issues socialists championed in the 1940s and 50s were far different from their predecessors.

For starters, there were these, freeways.

Frank Zeidler originally loved freeways calling them citizen highways.

As the latest in a line of efficiency minded socialists, Zeidler saw freeways as a way to reduce congestion and a faster, better way to get workers from place to place.

But then Milwaukee actually built its first freeway and everything changed.

- Those neighborhoods were gorgeous.

Beautiful parks, beautiful homes, and then all of a sudden the freeway starts in.

Houses started dropping.

- Zeidler's attitudes towards freeways changed very quickly when he saw what happened with stadium north, which was the first freeway built in Milwaukee.

And the net result was it diminished property values, ruined Washington Park, which had been the busiest park in the city.

You know, cost the city tons of property value.

It was just insane.

- The expressways became highways to take wealth out of the community, rather than to sustain the community.

- [Narrator] Zeidler's focus on efficiency led to his greatest quest in office, annexing suburbs into the city of Milwaukee.

Zeidler was outspoken, in his view, that suburbs were sucking badly needed resources from the city, but not paying a fair share of taxes.

- He really felt that this was one community.

And to have many different little local governments competing for resources was not the best way to serve the people of this community.

- They would consider suburbs kind of incorporated selfishness.

So Frank would say that, we'll work with them, but don't acknowledge their right to exist, basically.

- So many of those business interest people lived in the suburbs and they were protecting their lower tax rate, and so they were opposed to many of his policies that would have disrupted that.

- [Narrator] Zeidler was unrelenting in gobbling up neighboring communities.

Often using Milwaukee's access to Lake Michigan water as hostage in the negotiation.

It worked.

Milwaukee doubled in size during his term.

The larger footprint led to economies of scale, which helped Zeidler continue the socialist tradition of balanced budgets.

He was able to pay for his socialist agenda.

- In the middle of Zeidler's first term, US Senator Joe McCarthy began a campaign to root out communists in government.

The nation's leading anti-communist and leading socialist hailed from the same state, but they didn't attack each other.

Zeidler believed McCarthy's combative behavior was influenced by the senator's drinking.

- My father said he thought he was in over his head.

And he was in over his head partly due to his, basically alcoholism.

And so even when there was a person doing some pretty evil things, my father tried to look for the humanity.

- [Narrator] Earlier in his career, Joe McCarthy was a New Deal Democrat who played poker with his left leaning buddies.

Now the Wisconsin senator was at the center of the nation's anti-communist fervor.

McCarthy's red scare quickly gained traction nationally.

But in Milwaukee, the story played out differently.

At the height of McCarthyism, in 1952, the citizens of Milwaukee re-elected their socialist mayor, Frank Zeidler to a second term in office.

- I think it was like the old reliable slippers you had in the closet.

It wasn't coming to take away your stuff, it wasn't going to nationalize your business, it wasn't going to tell you where you had to live, but it was going to provide those needed public services.

So it never had that visceral reaction that I think some people had.

- [Narrator] Frank Zeidler was a strong advocate of civil rights a decade ahead of many other Northern mayors.

During his tenure, the city's African American population tripled and Zeidler embraced the new Milwaukeeans.

It was a sharp turn from the position of socialist leader Victor Berger, who 50 years earlier was outspoken in his claim that African Americans were inferior to whites.

Zeidler repudiated that racism living in a modest home in an increasingly black neighborhood.

- I can see him in my head and I see his hat and the coat and everything, but he was just a very humble person.

I think the whole family was like that.

Just wanting to be helpful, wanting to be a part of, wanting to educate.

- [Narrator] Zeidler's advocacy of civil rights made him a target.

Especially in the 1956 campaign.

- The real estate industry was redlining districts, keeping African Americans out of certain neighborhoods.

My father fought that.

He did not think that was right.

- [Narrator] Critics falsely claimed that Zeidler had put up billboards in the American South encouraging African Americans to move to Milwaukee for free housing.

- That '56 campaign was an ugly campaign.

And there were efforts to divide the community along issues of race.

- [Narrator] The escalated rhetoric led to death threats against Zeidler for his pro African American stance.

The stress took a toll on Zeidler's health.

He considered pulling out of the election.

But he was so incensed by the racism, he stayed in and won.

- He was very fatigued.

He was very tired.

He would be so fatigued that he was hospitalized once for it.

And I think it was definitely hard on him to be judged unfairly.

So people can disagree with you, but to say things that were basically ignorant or untrue or unfair, it's hard to combat.

- [Narrator] The ugliness of the campaign made national news.

Time Magazine called it, "The shame of Milwaukee."

Frank Zeidler served four more years and then chose to retire at the age of 48 citing mental and physical strain of the office.

When he left office in 1960, America's socialist experiment all but ended.

(somber piano music) By the time Frank Zeidler left office, the Socialist Party in Milwaukee had long since lost its steam.

But many of its ideas, once considered radical, were now embedded in mainstream American life.

Even socialist standard bearers like Daniel Hoan had joined the Democratic Party.

- So the Democrats, under Roosevelt, they co-opted the socialist platform, socialist rhetoric, and the socialist base.

- Once the reforms begin to be successful, the Republican and Democratic Parties pick them up.

So that the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal incorporated, say, Unemployment Insurance, which was passed in Wisconsin some years earlier.

- What they stood for had been accomplished with the New Deal.

The Democrats literally absorbed so much of what the socialists stood for and put it into law.

- When I would ask him, "Why are you staying with this party?"

He would talk about the importance of third party movements.

And the importance to him was that they put out ideas and platforms which then became picked up by the major parties.

- And people like Roosevelt owed so much of a debt of gratitude, he would never say it publicly, obviously, but they really needed that experimentation to decide what they were gonna do in Washington.

- It seemed as if Roosevelt had succeeded in moving the Democratic Party far enough left that there wasn't a space for the socialists.

- [Narrator] The socialists had another problem.

Good government doesn't make good headlines.

And after a few decades, the socialist's clean up of corruption was a distant memory for voters.

- I think people got tired of the socialists.

I think after awhile they were boring.

- Milwaukee was ready for a modern type mayor.

As the generations moved into my generation, I think the need for socialism was gone.

- [Narrator] In addition, the word socialism was now being equated with Soviet-style communism.

At the 1956 National Socialist Party convention, Frank Zeidler, a strong anti-communist and a church-going Lutheran, warned that McCarthyism and the red scare had taken a toll.

- I think people got scared.

All you have to do is tell somebody, that's the boogie man and that's who they go for.

- Socialism and communism began to be seen as foreign ideologies.

Again, the Milwaukee socialists never had great love for the Communist Party of the US, but that certainly tarred them badly.

- There was a blurring of the margins where socialist, communist, you know, throw 'em all in the same pot, put 'em aside, don't need any of that.

- [Narrator] In years past, Milwaukee's socialism had been custom built for the waves of Germans immigrating to the city.

But now the newcomers were largely African American.

And party leaders struggled to connect to this new population.

- It wasn't that the new migrants were having trouble getting jobs.

They were having trouble getting good housing and then having good schools for their kids.

But because the socialists didn't frame it in terms of the race issue and the racism that was embedded in the older white ethnic community, essentially you get a silence.

- Like any political party, I think they struggled with race and with gender.

And this was a party where white men tended to be in the leadership.

- They did not succeed in translating their deeply held philosophy of equality and egalitarianism to the larger population.

- My father, at the end of his administration, commissioned a report on what was called the inner core to address the needs of the people and the families and the employment situation in the inner city that would alleviate some of this tension and help people help themselves to a better life.

He was very disappointed that that report was shelved.

- For those of us who have resources, clearly the world is better.

But there's still a significant number of people who still don't have the resources that they need to live a decent life in our city.

- [Narrator] Milwaukee's socialists may have had unfinished business, but they accomplished many of their goals.

They were efficient problem solving innovators.

- It was a certain scientific approach to government that I think people wouldn't necessarily associate with socialists, they would associate with more of an entrepreneurial spirit now.

- So it was being just as enterprising as a capitalist, but directing that energy to the common good, to the public good.

- The whole nation embraced the fact that government can be part of solving people's problems in life and it's not unconstitutional, it's what government actually should do.

- [Narrator] Milwaukee's socialists improved the quality of life for city residents.

- I think that they were seeing into the future, because we have things and amenities and attractions that people don't have in other cities and towns.

One of the largest public park systems.

- When you invest in mass transit, when you invest in education, when you invest in parks and those kinds of things you create a quality of life.

And I do think that that's essentially become what a lot of successful urban areas have done.

They don't call it socialist, but I think that a lot of it is that ethos.

- What we're talking about is continually looking to improve the human condition and the condition of individuals.

- [Narrator] During their tenure, Milwaukee's socialists brought honesty and integrity to city government.

- Milwaukee have had clean government and I think that was the legacy of socialism.

- I think there's inspiration in the Milwaukee socialist clean honest government.

Not a hint of corruption form Frank or Dan Hoan or Emil Seidel.

That's what really distinguishes them.

- They governed very responsibly and balanced their budgets and got awards for doing a better job than most other cities.

- A sense that government, despite periodic failures, is still all of us.

I think that is absolutely a legacy of Milwaukee socialism.

- [Narrator] In 1936, Mayor Daniel Hoan published a book called, "City Government: The Record of the Milwaukee Experiment."

It got the attention of one prominent reader in Washington who wrote a letter to Hoan Praising the book.

"You have done a fine job and one of which I am proud," the letter said.

"It makes no difference if you call yourself "Republican, Socialist, Democrat, "you have contributed greatly to the theory "and practice of local government."

The letter was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

(inspirational cello music) Are there lessons to be learned from America's socialist experiment?

Or was what happened in Milwaukee simply an outlier?

While Milwaukee's socialist leaders had always been deeply committed to the ideals of their cause, the appeal to voters was not the socialist party itself.

Milwaukeeans were more impressed by the socialist's squeaky clean reputation for honesty and efficiency.

And the focus on practical issues that mattered to working people like better pay and improved living conditions.

And of course, sewers.

No one really thinks much about sewers, toilets and clean water until they're not available.

But Milwaukee's socialists did.

(inspirational music) (playful piano music) - There is one place in America where if you come and you walk the streets and you talk to some older folks and you look at the histories, you can say socialism or a form of socialism existed in the United States.

Democratic socialism, maybe social democracy, however you want to describe it, but it existed in the United States and it generally got high marks.

- [Announcer] Major funding for America's Socialist Experiment was provided by (cheerful string music) Brico Fund, Madeleine and David Lubar, Marianne and Sheldon Lubar, Marquette University Law School and by Greater Milwaukee Foundation.

And by Richard and Barbara Weiss Fund.

Additional funding by.

(cheerful string music) For a full list of funders, visit aptonline.org.