by Sal Clementi
On the 13th of June, 2024, former President Trump called Milwaukee, the site of the 2024 Republican National Convention, a “horrible city” (read: shithole). This promoted Democrats to defend the city and Republicans to attempt to backtrack on their nominee’s crude slander of their convention hosts. While Milwaukee has seen better days for the working class –something it shares with most cities of the Rust Belt– and while it still has many problems (crumbling infrastructure, entrenched segregation, and inadequate public transit, to name a few), it is still a place many are proud to call home.
There was a time, of course, when Milwaukee really was a shithole; when the corruption of the Democratic and Republican political machines were a matter of national embarrassment. Despite our city’s reputation as “the German Athens” before World War I, Milwaukee politics were notoriously corrupt. A Chicago Socialist paper said of Milwaukee: “Graft and corruption were so notorious that even the thieves themselves had to hold their noses.” Republicans and Democrats traded the mayor’s office between themselves for decades, enriching their cronies with spoils while industrialists like Edward Allis and Frederick Layton grew obscenely wealthy on the extracted wealth of a disenfranchised working class, kept in line by violent repression and hired strikebreakers.
It was the Socialist Party, with the promise to “apply international socialism to a local level”, that managed to clean up Milwaukee. As mayor, former labor leader Emil Seidel established an eight hour working day, $0.25 raise for city workers, and the establishment of a city parks system and the future Milwaukee Area Technical College. This success prompted the two bourgeois parties to run a fusion ticket, briefly recapturing City Hall and undoing many of Seidel’s accomplishments. The office would become officially non-partisan in 1914 explicitly to stop the growing socialist movement in Milwaukee. However, former city attorney Daniel Hoan would regain the office for the Socialists and hold it until 1940, surviving the censorship of World War I, the Palmer Raids, and the migration of organized labor towards FDR’s New Deal Democratic Party. After World War II, Frank Zeidler would win office in 1948 during the Cold War and would hold office until 1960.
Today, corruption in Milwaukee is not the crude spoils system of the Gilded Age. Ruled today by an unholy alliance of major property developers, slumlords, Chamber of Commerce vampires, and the Milwaukee Police Association, the best way for a working class Milwaukeean to build a better world is ultimately the same as it was over a hundred years ago – through a strong working class movement. After all, every Milwaukeean should know that our city was at its greatest when the other Red Party had its conventions here.
