On November 28, 1934, one day before Thanksgiving, 600 employees of Milwaukee’s largest department store called a strike.
The demands of the Boston Store’s retail clerks were simple: better wages, better working conditions, and recognition of their union. Management, unsurprisingly, had refused to budge. Now, with the Christmas shopping season at full tilt, the Boston Store action – one of more than 100 strikes involving some 27,000 Milwaukee workers in 1934 – held the city’s gaze.
But what Milwaukeeans learned of the strike depended in large part on which paper they read.
Subscribers of the Milwaukee Journal – one of the city’s largest papers, with a daily circulation topping 160,000 – woke up on Thanksgiving Day to find a headline announcing “BOSTON STORE STRIKE CALLED FOR TOMORROW.” The article accompanying the headline, however, was not simply a description of the strike plans, or the conflict between labor and management that had led to the action in the first place. Instead, it also quoted at length from what amounted to a piece of propaganda: a long letter from the Boston Store’s management to its workers. In no uncertain terms, the letter advised the workers that they would be better off without a union. A strike would only result in a “loss of pay and family suffering,” the letter said. Hinting, without evidence, that violence might also erupt, the Boston Store assured its employees the management would see to it that “no one interferes with your right to work or molests you and your families in your home.”
If this sounded like little more than an advertisement, there was at least one potential reason. The Boston Store was one of the Journal’s most important sources of profit, accounting for nearly 17 percent of the paper’s advertising revenue.
Readers of the Milwaukee Leader – a daily paper founded by the city’s Social-Democratic Party in 1911 – discovered a different picture.
The Leader’s first story on the action, which appeared two days before the Journal’s, trained its attention not on the arguments of store owners, but on the reasons members of the Retail Clerks Union 1284 had decided to call the work stoppage, as well as on the behavior of Boston Store management, which had recently backed out on a promise to consider workers’ demands for wage increases and union representation. In the same week, the Leader’s editorial page ran a cartoon featuring a top-hat wearing tom turkey labeled “profit system” who has just devoured a dozen plates worth of food. Behind him, one worker says to another – who bears an ax – “Go ahead! He’s eatin’ us outta house and home.”
By contrast, the Journal’s anti-worker tone persisted throughout the six weeks of the strike. Whereas the Leader maintained a focus on strikers’ demands and management’s counter-offers, the Journal’s strike stories bore headlines like “FIVE ARRESTED AT STORE.” In one particularly egregious example, on December 1, 1934, the Journal printed its strike coverage opposite a Boston Store ad – four columns wide and eighteen inches deep – which celebrated the “splendid loyalty” of “the majority of our employees, who are remaining at their posts during the present labor difficulties” and “our customers who have continued to throng our store while pickets marched outside.”
Yet the Journal’s coverage of the strike was not only condescending, it also tended to downplay the significance of the event. Over the six weeks of the strike, the Leader would ultimately publish double the number of front-page strike stories that appeared under the Journal’s masthead.
By the time of the 1934 strike wave, the Leader had developed a wide readership among Milwaukee’s working class, and a reputation for being – as the paper’s masthead put it – “unawed by influence and unbribed by gain.” At its peak, the paper was the most widely circulated English-language socialist daily in the United States, and was ultimately the longest-lasting socialist paper in the country. Building this reputation, as the Leader’s editors and reporters discovered, meant more than foregoing ad revenue from department stores. It meant standing up to power, even at the peril of imprisonment and government censorship.
Milwaukee Leader Masthead, 1921
THE STRIKE AT THE BOSTON STORE may have captured public attention, but in 1930s Milwaukee, the growing power of the working class – both on the shop floor and at the ballot box – was not necessarily news. During the early decades of the twentieth century, a working-class movement had begun to redefine the political and economic life of the Cream City.
At the heart of this movement were the socialists who organized Milwaukee’s Social-Democratic Party. Founded in 1898 and led primarily by German immigrants, the party gave voice to the demands of industrial workers: fair wages, safe working conditions, and an eight-hour day. Workers also demanded a city where they could make a life, rather than merely earn a living. Milwaukee County’s extensive system of parks and beaches was the product of visionary socialist city planner Charles Whitnall. Socialist leaders also pioneered the creation of public higher-education institutions, and vastly expanded the quality and extent of city services, from streetlights and sewerage to libraries and museums.
This focus on practical changes to improve the lives of the working class earned party members the nickname “Sewer Socialists.” Yet as Emil Seidel, the city’s first socialist mayor, wrote in his memoirs, the Social-Democratic Party wanted much more than better sewers. As he put it, Milwaukee socialists wanted to build a city where “every human being” had a chance to “live a life of happiness.” “Playgrounds, parks, lakes, beaches, clean creeks and rivers, swimming and wading pools, social centers, reading rooms, clean fun, music, dance, song and joy for all,” Seidel recalled, “That was our Milwaukee Social Democratic movement.”
To remake Milwaukee, the socialists did nothing less than forge a broad working-class coalition in a city divided by ethnicity, language, and religion. Beginning in the 1890s, the Social-Democratic Party slowly built up mass membership, neighborhood by neighborhood, holding not only meetings but public lectures, concerts, and festivals. Socialists also forged a critical alliance with a burgeoning labor movement, led by the Milwaukee Federated Trades Council, the city’s affiliate of the American Federation of Labor. By the early decades of the twentieth century, Trades Council members were also Social-Democratic Party comrades. Just as workers support socialists at the ballot box, socialists supported labor on the shop floor. By the 1930s – at a time when other governments were exercising violence against striking workers – Milwaukee’s longest-serving socialist mayor, Daniel Hoan, supported the Boncel Ordinance, which allowed the government to close down factories when employers refused to negotiate with workers.
None of this would have been possible, however, without a newspaper.
BY THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, local newspapers were the lifeblood of American politics. Within a century of the city’s founding, Milwaukee itself had a flourishing publishing industry that ranged from religious periodicals to ethnic weeklies. The city’s largest publications, however, were dominated by the interests of a powerful few, quick to quash any dissenting voices. In 1901, the editors of the Milwaukee Sentinel found this out the hard way. While the Sentinel had long been an organ of the Republican Party, its editors nevertheless called out the party bosses who owned the Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company, the city’s largest utility, for revoking commuter rail passes and raising utility rates during an economic depression, all while juicing their profits with city contracts they had obtained through bribery. In response, one of those owners, Charles Pfister, simply bought a controlling share in the newspaper’s stock, and assumed publishing duties. In 1924, with Pfister’s influence on the wane, another corporate mogul, William Randolph Hearst, took over The Sentinel. But the paper’s fidelity to corporations, and its disinterest in the lives or livelihoods of the working class, remained constant.
Socialist Newspapers in the United States, 1900–1920 (by circulation) | Source: University of Washington
Milwaukee socialists may have lacked the deep pockets of the Sentinel or the Journal. But when it came to reaching readers, they had one advantage: people. By the early decades of the twentieth century, the Social-Democratic Party had already become famous for its so-called “bundle brigades”, teams of volunteers who fanned out across all parts of the city to distribute socialist literature, which was printed in several languages. The party’s members were themselves heavily involved in the publishing industry, too. In 1893, the party founded a German-language newspaper, the Wisconsin Vorwärts (Wisconsin Forward), which published daily. Less than a decade later, The Social–Democratic Herald – the national organ of the Social Democratic Party of America – moved its offices from Chicago to Milwaukee. By 1910, Milwaukee socialists had also started Naprzod (Forward), a Polish-language weekly.
Yet in a city with five other English-language dailies, and with the circulation of the German press in decline, the Social-Democratic Party found it difficult to compete. The Social-Democratic Herald, the party’s weekly newspaper, lacked both the depth and the reach of the Journal and the Sentinel. The limits of the socialists’ existing strategy became especially clear in the first decade of the twentieth century, as the socialists began making inroads in electoral politics, invoking the ire of the city’s political class, often in the pages of the Journal. The socialists needed, and the workers deserved, something more.
Social-Democratic Party Election Postcard, 1910 | Source: Private Collection
Milwaukee’s 1910 spring elections proved to be the breaking point. In the mayoral race, voters selected Emil Seidel, the earnest, plain-spoken socialist who had been vigorously opposed by both Democrats and Republicans alike. Social-Democratic Party candidates also won nearly 70 percent of seats on the city’s Common Council. Milwaukee socialism – several decades in the making – had finally arrived in City Hall. Less than a mile away, at what was once called Brisbane Hall and is now part of the Fiserv Forum complex, a new era in working-class news had arrived, too.
Not long after Seidel had taken office, the work began in earnest. In a mass meeting held during the summer of 1910, the Social-Democratic Party planned the new paper and accepted tens of thousands of dollars in pledges to support the new publication. The task of building the Leader proved delicate work. Unlike the old party papers, a bona fide daily newspaper could not run on the “burning enthusiasm of a few hundreds” who might eagerly thumb through the pages to read labor news and announcements about party meetings. Moreover, socialists faced obvious hostility from the business community – hardly an ideal climate for ad sales.
In short, because a socialist daily had to attract a broad readership – at the low cost of just one penny per copy and six cents a week – it could not be a mere propaganda outlet. It needed, instead, to combine solid reporting on issues ignored by the major papers with first-rate coverage of sports and culture – not to mention comic strips. Only with a large readership, drawn in by high-quality content, would the paper be able to spread the socialists’ vision for a new Milwaukee. With this concept in hand, the Social Democratic Publishing Company authorized a bond issue of $100,000 at four percent interest. By the fall of 1911, barely half of the bond had been paid for, but with local elections fast approaching, there was no time to spare.
Armed with a new four-deck printing press, Milwaukee socialists readied the explosive first edition of the Leader.
THE MAIDEN VOYAGE of the Milwaukee Leader came on December 7, 1911. The front page of the paper bore the drawing of a ship, christened with the paper’s name, sailing into the sun. In its wake were two shipwrecks, alternately labeled “Capitalism” and the “Old Parties.” The caption read: “ARRIVED!”
Under the paper’s masthead, the lead story’s headline announced: “Gas Records Reveal Extortion for Benefit of Wall Street.” The article telegraphed the power of the U.S. gas monopoly and its oppressive rate-setting regime. There could be no mistake: this was not the paper of the “old parties.”
The first issue’s editorial page explained to the readers, in boldface, both the purpose of the publication and the reason for its name. “The rank and file of the Milwaukee Social Democracy,” the column explained, “got tired of the hateful misrepresentations of the Socialist administration, and of Socialism generally, made by the capitalist press and particularly by the Milwaukee Journal.” As a result, the party’s “rank and file” members demanded that the old Social- Democratic Herald be turned into a popular daily publication. The management “obeyed the real leader, the rank and file – and the result is THE MILWAUKEE LEADER.”
Milwaukee Leader Front Page Cartoon, December 7, 1911
Lest readers miss the point, the editorial repeated itself. What mattered was not the management – either at the paper, at City Hall, or in the factories – but the workers themselves. “The most important fact in Milwaukee at the present time is not the Socialist administration – is not the work the comrades are doing in the county, in the municipality, and in the school board,” the Leader explained. The “most important fact in Milwaukee is the resolute men and women who are determined to lead the world into new channels,” the vast ranks of the discontented members of the working class to whom the Leader would address itself. “We shall preach no class hatred,” the editorial resolved, “But we shall preach class consciousness.”
The paper also made a pitch for the hearts and minds of white-collar workers: “Capitalism in America is giving the middle class little or nothing,” it explained, “Most of our intellectuals, physicians, journalists, and last but not least teachers, are among the disinherited.” Aspiring young professionals might start out with “great expectations, but very soon they consider themselves lucky if they can simply secure a livelihood.” The Leader would plead their case, too.
That case, as the paper had it, was for nothing less than “the complete change, the adaptation of all social elements to necessary conditions.” The Leader had no truck with reformers, “whose remedies are usually just as unscientific and stupid as bleeding for a fever was in olden times – both being simply crude methods of suppressing symptoms” rather than getting at the root causes of suffering.
Milwaukee Leader Front Page, 1920
While it was important to lay down their cards, the Leader’s editors knew that selling newspapers meant more than editorializing. Building class consciousness required readers. To get them, the Leader built up a bullpen of top journalists from across the country who were disenchanted with their positions in the capitalist press. The paper succeeded in wooing away journalists from competing publications, including Chester Wright, who had been city editor at the Milwaukee Journal and Thomas Andrews, who edited the Evening Wisconsin sports page for over a decade. Before his rise to fame as a poet, none other than Carl Sandburg oversaw the Leader’s regular column on “Work and Workers.” Another section that distinguished the Leader from its contemporaries on the Milwaukee scene was the existence of a “women’s page” which focused on the fight for women’s suffrage and presented stories that challenged traditional gender roles.
Group portrait in front of the Milwaukee Leader (Date Unknown) | Source: Wisconsin Historical Society
The paper delivered Milwaukeeans sports and theater coverage along with political news, but it promised them something more, too: access to stories about working-class struggles happening far beyond the shores of Lake Michigan. The Leader even boasted correspondents in Washington, London, Paris, and Brussels, one of whom was the future French Prime Minister, Leon Blum.
It was this heady mix of culture, local news, and working-class political commentary that built the Leader’s readership over the next decade. Within a month of the paper’s first issue, it generated significant interest with a series on the streetcar workers’ struggle for better working conditions and safety precautions. “It’s the talk of the town,” wrote the paper’s business manager, H.W. Bistorius. The Leader’s reach soon spread beyond Milwaukee to a network of hundreds of newsstands around the country.
The paper’s eager staff faced a problem, however: the Leader was seemingly always at risk of bankruptcy. Even with a growing circulation, delivering the news to working-class readers at an affordable cost was simply not a sound business proposition. By 1913, the paper had $25,000 in unpaid bills and was four weeks in arrears on its wire service account.
Solving this problem required an extraordinary amount of unity among its working-class readers and supporters. In the early years, the Leader relied on short-term loans from other socialist publications across the country. More importantly, it required local union and party members to volunteer their time to collect donations and build the paper’s subscriber base. Most of the initial contributions for the paper came in $5 and $10 increments by individual workers. As the paper’s readership grew, it gradually became more attractive to advertisers. Within a few years of its creation, the paper had become “one of the best advertising mediums in Milwaukee.”
But working-class unity was not enough. The Leader also depended on some measure of disunity within the ruling class. A handful of wealthy patrons who rejected capitalism, and who were willing to devote their cash reserves to a good cause, also helped to support the fledgling paper. This included Arthur Brisbane, an executive for the Hearst newspaper chain, and – evidently – a utopian socialist who thought of the Leader’s work as the best thing since Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.
“Metcalfe for Governor” Truck Outside Brisbane Hall (1912) | Source: Wisconsin Historical Society
The support of patrons like Brisbane – after whom Brisbane Hall, the Leader’s headquarters, was named – proved to be inconsistent. Especially as the paper became embroiled in libel lawsuits filed by the powerful people its columns attacked, it became difficult for the publication to repay the loans Brisbane had made. This strained his relationship with the publishers. Yet he was nevertheless invested in the paper, as long as its circulation continued to grow.
And, crisis after crisis, circulation grew by the tens of thousands. By 1916, thanks in part to the Leader, the socialists swept back into power in Milwaukee. At the helm was the city’s new Mayor, Daniel Webster Hoan, flanked by eleven socialist aldermen and six county supervisors.
The paper’s most significant crisis, however, was yet to come.
APRIL 6, 1917 marked the beginning of an emergency for America’s budding socialist movement. The United States’ entry into World War I gave birth to a new regime of government censorship that threatened to bring the Leader’s operations to a halt. By June, Congress had passed the Espionage Act of 1917, which gave the postmaster general – a self-styled “progressive Democrat” named Albert Burleson – sweeping powers to monitor any printed materials he considered to be in violation of the new law.
The Leader made itself a target for Burleson early on. Milwaukee’s Social-Democratic Party had long opposed American involvement in the European conflict. As early as 1914, the paper formulated an anti-war slogan “Starve the war and feed America.” Socialists’ opposition to the war ran deep. As the Socialist Party of America’s five-time presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, put it in a 1918 speech, the purpose of the war was nothing more than the “conquest and spoliation of the weaker nations.” “The working class who fight all the battles,” Debs continued, “the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.”
Printing anti-war sentiments earned the Leader swift retribution from the postmaster general. Along with fourteen other socialist publications, the paper was denied second-class mailing privileges – the special rates that allowed for circulation throughout the country. The higher mailing charges cost the Leader a total of $400,000 over the first six months. But the editors were undeterred. “The Social Democracy of the world stands for and demands peace,” declared the editorial page, “If this be treason let them make the most of it. We are here ready to answer any charge.”
Socialist Anti-War Pamphlet, 1918 | Source: UWM
The conservative Milwaukee Journal took the opportunity to pounce, declaring the Leader a “public enemy” which “no loyal citizen” could continue to support. Yet the government’s actions also evoked a loud backlash in newspapers across the country. Milwaukee’s mayor, Daniel Hoan, protested the move in a telegram to President Woodrow Wilson. The Leader itself advanced both legal appeals and public campaigns declaring the action unlawful: “The grand dukes in Washington preferred no charges; considered no defense; harkened to no plea. They simply killed the Socialist paper ‘on account of its tendency.’”
This was not the last of the shots fired at the Leader in the early months of the war. Federal agencies threatened to deny contracts to manufacturers who dared to advertise in the paper. The U.S. Food Administration, created by President Wilson in August of 1917, threatened to deny flour, sugar, and coal rations to Oswald Jaeger, a socialist baker from Milwaukee, if he continued to advertise in the paper.
Then, in early 1918, the wartime government brought down the hammer. Under the Espionage Act, federal authorities arrested and indicted the Leader’s publisher, Victor L. Berger.
The arrest was the shot heard around the world. Berger – an Austrian emigre born to Jewish parents in 1860 – was not only the paper’s publisher, he was the central figure in the birth of Milwaukee’s Social-Democratic Party and a pivotal player in the advance of the socialist movement across the country. Berger was even credited with converting the socialists’ presidential hopeful Eugene Debs to the cause. When Debs was imprisoned following his violation of an anti-strike injunction in 1894, it had been Berger who first brought him a copy of Das Kapital, Karl Marx’s foundational 1867 text. In 1910, Berger had become the first socialist elected to Congress, and in 1918 – after several unsuccessful bids for re-election – he was planning to run again. His wife, Meta Berger (née Schlichting), had also been a powerful voice in Milwaukee politics. After winning election to Milwaukee’s school board (a position she would hold for a total of 30 years), Meta introduced a number of progressive reforms to the school system, including the construction of playgrounds, ‘penny lunches’, free medical exams for children, and – for the first time in Milwaukee – protections for teachers, including tenure, a fixed-salary schedule, and a pension system.
While Victor had been instrumental in the rise of the Leader and the Social-Democratic Party, he also had a knack for making enemies – and not just among the ruling class. Berger represented the “conservative” wing of the American socialist movement, advocating for a “gradual and peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism” through winning control of government in popular elections – not through violent struggle. This put him at odds with some American radicals, especially in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. While he was no doubt charismatic, he could also be arrogant, irritable, and tedious. And though Berger strongly opposed “race hatred” in his public writings, he also espoused deeply bigoted views on other races, Catholics, and immigrants (even though he was one).
Berger’s enemies became the Leader’s enemies, too. Even top-ranking members of Milwaukee’s Social-Democratic Party found themselves at odds with the man. He had spent, in their view, too much time traveling the country to preach the cause and devoted too little effort to strengthening the movement (and its newspaper) back home. Berger’s penchant for pomposity did not sit well with some Milwaukee socialists. As one organizer told him in a letter: “Some of the comrades here are becoming very much discouraged, and unless you are going to do your share, we are going to have a hard road [sic] to hoe here in Milwaukee County.”
Berger’s spiky personality hardly made his clash with the Wilson administration any easier. Still, he had allies back in Milwaukee. Following the indictment, Mayor Hoan, among others, helped to raise a defense fund, which kept the publisher out of prison while awaiting trial. This was important in part even though he remained under indictment, Berger was once again running for a seat in Congress. In November of 1918, he won his election by a 5,500-vote plurality – just before Armistice Day. A month later, Berger would be tried for espionage along with five other radicals.
Berger’s trial was a sham. The presiding judge, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, flagrantly announced his bias against the defendants, suggesting that the hearts of German-Americans were “reeking of disloyalty.” Yet despite Landis’s frequent outbursts, the jury convicted all five men. Landis quickly sentenced Berger and his comrades to 20 years in Leavenworth Prison. Given Landis’s ridiculous performance at the trial, however, Berger’s lawyers sought – and were soon granted – an appeal. Released from prison, Berger boarded a train to Washington and demanded to be seated in Congress. He was denied that request on the grounds that he had “given aid and comfort to the enemy.” A special election was called for his Fifth District seat. Berger ran and, perhaps unsurprisingly, won. Yet Congress again denied him his seat. When he ran for the seat again in a 1920 election that would later be remembered as a Republican wave, he lost.
By this point, the Leader had been forced onto its heels. While the Supreme Court overturned Berger’s conviction, it upheld the federal government’s revocation of the paper’s mailing privileges, over the vigorous objections of Justices Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
WITH THE WAR’S END, the postmaster general slowly restored the Leader’s privileges. But by then, the damage had been done. The Leader had become a pariah among professional journalists. During the war, the National Press Club had expelled Berger for sullying its members’ delicate “sense of loyalty.” Not to be outdone, the Milwaukee Press Club also removed him from their rolls for being “injurious to the good order, reputation, and welfare of the club.” By the war’s end, the Leader had lost thousands of subscribers. Berger’s trial plunged the paper into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. As a final twist of the knife, the Internal Revenue Service refused to allow Berger to deduct $2,000 in legal fees as a personal expense.
Milwaukee socialists, including Berger, continued to win elections at all levels of government well into the twenties. Yet the Leader nevertheless entered a slow period of decline. By the middle of the 1920s, the paper was running consistent deficits. Ad revenues flagged. Its remaining asset was Berger’s personal friendships – but these too were dwindling in number. In early July of 1929, feeling incapable of carrying on with the paper, Berger surrendered his shares to the Social-Democratic Party. Less than a month later, he slipped in front of a Milwaukee streetcar, fracturing his skull. The 69-year-old publisher was dead within weeks. Berger’s body lay in state in city hall, where it would be visited by some 75,000 mourners.
While its strength had been much reduced, the Leader still maintained the fighting spirit it had at its birth. During the early years of the Great Depression, socialists found themselves on the upswing. Between 1931 and 1934, the Leader’s circulation grew from 31,000 to 48,000. But the paper struggled to break even. Attempts to rely on the unions that made up the local Trades Council also produced limited returns. As the sweeping reforms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal won the hearts and minds of would-be socialists, interest in the Leader cratered. By 1939, as the Leader’s finances dried up almost completely, the paper was reorganized by new management – three former Sentinel executives – who dubbed it the New Milwaukee Leader before rebranding it yet again as the Milwaukee Evening Post. By this point, the paper had lost all of its socialist spark. In 1939, the Post’s editors declared that the paper “will zealously support the cause of labor BUT IT WILL NOT BE A LABOR ORGAN.”
The new regime lasted less than a year before the paper was sold yet again, this time to the Milwaukee Federated Trades Council, which promised the “workers and liberally-minded citizenry” a “PEOPLE’S NEWSPAPER in every sense of the word.” But efforts to distance the publication from organized labor – whose ranks constituted 75 percent of the new paper’s limited readership – only invited more ire. By 1940, union members began to push their locals to publish their own weekly newspapers. Within a year, the unions gave up on the Evening Post, leaving it to be run by the employees themselves. But even their interest wavered; as one editor noted at the time: “reporter after reporter, printer after printer, had drifted away. At last the bottom of the barrel had been scraped.” On May 23, 1942, the Post’s printing press stopped for good.
MILWAUKEE SOCIALISM did not expire with the Leader or its successors. The last of Milwaukee’s socialist mayors, Frank Zeidler, won office in 1948. Yet while Zeidler carried the socialist torch, he found himself increasingly politically isolated. The 1948 mayoral election, which Zeidler ultimately won, was dominated by a campaign of red-baiting that only intensified when his administration approved racially integrated housing projects on Milwaukee’s all-white west side. Zeidler’s final election to office in 1956 found him battling a racist smear campaign and a Common Council dominated by allies of the Wisconsin Property Owners’ Association, which vigorously opposed public housing.
The election of Zeidler’s successor, Democrat Henry A. Maier, marked a turning point. Maier’s virulent opposition to fair-housing proposals authored by Vel Phillips, the city’s first black alderwoman, fueled a wave of protest that would define the city’s politics in the late 1960s. Maier leveraged his confrontations with black leaders to consolidate support among both the city’s business elites and white working-class voters. Meanwhile, deindustrialization pummeled the city, driving down unionization rates and creating the racial and economic inequalities that still plague Milwaukee today. Working-class African Americans, most of whom had arrived during and after World War II, were hit the hardest.
The desperation and resentment produced by this process animated state and local politics throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In 1986, Republican Tommy Thompson won his first of four straight gubernatorial contests by stirring up rural and suburban anger at taxes and social welfare spending, while Democrats abandoned pro-worker rhetoric in favor of a lifestyle-based appeal to the white middle class. Elected in 1988, Milwaukee mayor John Norquist sought to draw professionals back to the city through a set of “new urbanist” investments in walkable neighborhoods and entertainment districts that didn’t even gesture at working-class voters.
Deprived of the tax base and state-level aid needed to address its increasing social ills, the city continued to shed population and wealth throughout Norquist’s mayoralty and that of his successor, Tom Barrett. The 2008 financial crisis dealt still another blow, setting off a firestorm of foreclosures.
The deterioration of working-class politics, the immiseration of the urban poor, and the middle-class anxiety produced by the housing crisis created the opportunity for the antidemocratic pirate regime of Governor Scott Walker. Elected in the 2010 Tea Party wave, Walker used his victory to remake state politics. His signature piece of legislation, Act 10, destroyed the power of public sector unions, his redistricting plan ensured a durable conservative majority in an otherwise evenly divided state, and his economic development policy provided a no-strings-attached slush fund for corporate interests.
Newspaper Closures Since 2004 | Source: UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media
By this point, Milwaukee’s news landscape had decayed tremendously. In 1995, the Journal and Sentinel merged into a single paper which has, in the decades since, been wrung for profits by its owners – gutting critical local and state political coverage and stretching the skeletal staff ever thinner. That trend only intensified following the paper’s 2016 acquisition by the Gannett Company for $280 million. The consolidation and hollowing out of local publications has made the state of Wisconsin itself into a “news desert.” Between 2004 and 2019, the number of newspapers in the state fell by 35 percent while newspaper circulation plummeted by 39 percent. While digital publications have emerged, they alone have not filled the gaping void. Nor have the remaining labor weeklies, whose circulation fell as union membership dwindled. The Milwaukee Labor Press published its last issue in 2013.
None of this would have surprised the editors of the Milwaukee Leader. As they well knew, the treatment of news as a commodity, rather than a public good, places a squeeze on the resources journalists require to hold the powerful accountable. Nor would the Leader’s intrepid reporters be shocked to see that, over the last few decades, newspapers have all but obliterated coverage of organized labor in favor of stories valorizing CEOs and entrepreneurs. That a single New York City-based hedge fund owns more than 200 newspapers across the country today would hardly raise the eyebrow of any journalist working in the era of William Randolph Hearst.
What the Leader’s reporters also surely knew – or surely learned – is that building a “people’s newspaper” takes more than tight prose, scrupulous editing, and eye-catching design. It takes a movement of thousands of workers who want to read not bland Chamber of Commerce boilerplate and worn-out “lifestyle” spreads, but coverage of their own struggles for a dignified life and news that holds the powerful to account. After all, it was ordinary people – the rank and file – who gave the Leader its purpose, and its name.
