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When Socialists Ran American Cities
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Keep the narrative flow going! for ad-free listening, bonus content, and access to the entire catalog of 500 episodes. The Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani is the favorite to be elected New York City's mayor next month. He is an inheritor of...
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A
Morning Zoe. Got donuts.
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B
Jeff Bridges why are you still living above our garage?
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A
Well I dig the mattress and I want to be in a T mobile commercial like you teach me.
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B
So Dana oh no, I'm not really prepared. I couldn't possibly at T Mobile get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system.
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C
Wow.
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A
Impressive. Let me try. T Mobile is the best place to get iPhone 17 Pro because they've got the best network.
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D
Nice.
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B
Je free.
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E
You heard them. T Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible traded in any condition.
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A
So what are we having for lunch?
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B
Dude, my work here is done.
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F
The 24 month bill credit on experience beyond for well qualified customers plus tax and $35 device connection charge credit send and balance due if you pay off earlier Cancel Finance agreement. IPhone 17 Pro 256 gigs 1099.99 a new line minimum 100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes and fees required best mobile network in the US based on analysis by Oklahoma speed test intelligence data 182025 visit t mobile.com.
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C
You can have ad free listening bonus content and access to the entire catalog of 500 episodes. Become a subscriber at historyasithappens.supercast.com plus you can say you're supporting the important work we're doing here and you won't ever have to listen to this sales pitch again. Historyasit happens.supercast.com history as it happens October 21, 2025 when socialists ran American Cities.
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Analyzing the campaign of Zorhan Mamdani after his stunning victory in last night's mayoral primary.
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G
In the words of Nelson Mandela, it always seems impossible until it is done.
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A
We don't need a communist in this country.
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D
But if we have one, I'm going to be watching over them very carefully on behalf of the nation.
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We have won because New Yorkers have stood up for a city they can afford.
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He's only 34 years old. Democratic Socialist Zoran Mamdani is the favorite to be elected mayor of New York City next month, a remarkable possibility considering his limited political experience and the general popular disdain for anything socialist, or at least what people believe socialism is. But socialist politicians once ran American cities at a time when cities were beset by terrible problems. The socialists succeeded that History Next as we report history as it happens, I'm Martin DeCaro.
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D
I pass groundbreaking laws, minimum wage, paid family leave, built projects that had never been built before.
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H
If you think that the problem in this city is that my rent is too low, vote for him. If you know the problem in this city is that your rent is too high, vote for me.
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D
Cities are magnets and culturally vital centers and also beset with enormous problems that are product of that kind of growth and vitality to some degree. It's not a simple thing, obviously to craft a program that's going to address the range of problems that cities have inherited. But cities like New York or like Chicago have a certain fundamental strength and vitality that I think is something that Mamdame or Johnson in Chicago or Michelle Wu in Boston can draw on and build on.
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C
Eureka, California. Edgewater, Colorado. St. Johns, Oregon. Milwaukee, Wisconsin. What do these places have in common? Well, they were among dozens of cities and towns that elected socialist mayors in the years before the First World War. Milwaukee was governed by socialists for the better part of a half century from 1910. They were not radical dreamers. Rather, these mayors wanted to modernize city infrastructure like the sewers, while dealing with some very serious problems. Mass migration, epidemic diseases, horrendous working conditions, sanitation, you know, garbage pickup, something we take for granted today, as well as clean drinking water. Speaking of today, a democratic socialist is on the verge of becoming New York City's next mayor. On a platform that would make the early 20th century socialists proud. Zoran Mamdani is focused on affordability over all other issues. Here he is on NBC's Meet the Press a couple of months ago.
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H
I think that people are catching up to this election. This is an election that went against so much of the analysis that had been told about our party and where we needed to head to. And ultimately what we're showing is that by putting working people first, by returning to the roots of the Democratic Party, we actually have a path out of this moment where we're facing authoritarianism in.
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I
Washington, D.C. well, let's talk about your policies, your vision for this city. Here are some of the things you've proposed. Free buses, rent stabilized housing, a $30 minimum wage, creation of city owned grocery stores. It's a very long list of proposals. So let me ask you, if you were to be elected the next mayor of New York, what would your day one priority be?
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H
The first thing is living up to these promises that I have made, because I've made them, because I intend to keep them. And in a city of about eight and a half million people, close to two and a half million New Yorkers live in rent stabilized housing. The mayor through a board called the Rent Guidelines board sets whether or not those rents increase or stay the same. The previous Merrill administration froze the rent three times. This one, led by Mayor Adams, increased it by 9%. So the first thing that I would do is start to constitute a board that votes in reflection of reality. And the reality I'm speaking of is that the median household income of those tenants is $60,000 a year. The landlords of those units have seen their profits increase by 12%. It's time for relief for working class New York.
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C
Quality of life and crime are big issues, too. They always are in New York. And Mamdani is running at a time when Democrats across the country are routinely accused of mismanaging the cities they've been running for decades. As expected, his opponents say Mamdani will destroy New York because that's what history tells us socialism does, that it is incompatible with democracy and private property. Well, that is true about Stalinism, not the American municipal socialist tradition. Historian Shelton Stromquist is an expert on that tradition, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, and author of Claiming the City, A Global History of Workers Fight for Municipal Socialism. Our conversation next. And remember, if you want to skip ads, subscribe at history as it happens.supercast.com Morning Zoe.
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A
Got donuts.
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B
Jeff Bridges why are you still living above our garage?
- [06:31]
A
Well, I dig the mattress and I want to be in a T Mobile commercial like you teach me.
- [06:36]
B
So Dana oh no, I'm not really prepared. I couldn't possibly AT T Mobile get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system.
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C
Wow.
- [06:50]
A
Impressive. Let me try. T Mobile is the best place to get iPhone 17 Pro because they've got the best network.
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D
Nice.
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B
Jeffrey, you heard them.
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E
T Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade in in any condition.
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A
So what are we having for launch?
- [07:07]
B
Dud. My work here is done with 24.
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F
Month bill credit is on experience beyond for well qualified customers plus tax and $35 device connection charge credit send and balance due to payoff earlier Cancel Finance Agreement. IPhone 17 Pro 256 gigs $1,099.99 A new line minimum 100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes and fees required. Best mobile network in the US based on analysis by Ooklove Speed Test Intelligence.
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C
Data 1H 2025 Visit T mobile.com Shelton Stromquist Welcome. Welcome to the podcast.
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D
Nice to be here. Nice to join you.
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C
It's your first time on so tell us a little bit about your work over the decades as a labor historian, a specialist.
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D
It's always tempting to go on at length about one's own trajectory, so to speak, before going to graduate school. I'd been involved in the 1960s in the Civil rights movement and the anti war movement and had done a certain amount of factory work and trade union activism. But when I got to graduate school, I was studying with a labor historian at the University of Pittsburgh named David Montgomery, who even then had quite a legendary reputation. And I was drawn very strongly to labor history as a field of study in the context of a kind of broader social history. So my dissertation and later first book was a study of railroad labor conflict in the United States, looking at strike patterns in the late 19th century. During the period of what we call the great upheaval. Railroad workers were very prominent, legendary mass strikes. In 1877, 1886, then particularly the Pullman strike in 1894. I did a book of oral histories of Iowa workers that was drawing on an incredibly rich collection of oral histories that others had done with Iowa workers. About 1000 or 1500 interviews in the end. And then I got interested in politics, looking at progressivism in the late 19th, early 20th century. Did a book called Reinventing the People, and then began to sort of take stock of a kind of international context of labor politics. And in doing that, I landed on municipal socialism, the global patterns of new kind of city politics. Again in the late 19th, early 20th century. The United States was always there, but it was part of a larger story.
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C
I think people expect to hear socialism in European countries or democratic socialism. Right. But maybe not in the United States. But you've been tearing apart this question for a long time. Time. Why no socialism in the U.S. you said you did your dissertation directed by David Montgomery, University of Pittsburgh. Right. I was just in Pittsburgh. I went on a tour of the Frick mansion. What was his name? William. I've already forgot the guy's name.
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D
Henry Clay Frick.
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C
Henry Clay Frick. The tour guide was fantastic. She didn't just talk about the furniture and the carpeting and the wallpaper. She put the whole place in historical context. The burgeoning conflict between the ownership class and workers. And there were really violent strikes that Frick was involved in.
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D
Oh, absolutely.
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C
Calling in Pinkerton.
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D
Pinkerton in the 1892 Homestead Strike.
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C
Yeah, homestead strike. So, yeah, this is right up your alley. Sorry for that digression, but that's okay. So let's get into it now. We'll start in the late 19th century. Before we eventually get to what's going on in New York City today, what was happening in American cities that made them fertile ground for socialist politics, late 19th century?
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D
I would focus particularly on two things. One is that cities were growing very rapidly, and the concentration of population and new migrants into cities was producing two kinds of social crises, really. One was a crisis of working conditions and horrible employer suffocation of any attempts of workers to organize to improve their lives. On the workplace, there was a of mass strikes. And in my book on railroad workers, that was part of what I was focusing on that erupted in cities. And these strikes really shattered the status quo in a way that led workers to both think about how they could improve their conditions at work, and very often these strikes were unsuccessful, but also how they could improve their living conditions in the community. One of the consequences of this, in massive growth of cities and this influx of new migrants, immigrants as well as internal migrants, was that housing and living conditions just deteriorated massively. They weren't great to begin with, but they were increasingly getting worse. So the access to clean water and sewerage and basic public health was in crisis. People's kids were dying of epidemic disease. There was something about life in cities that called out to be addressed. And so, you know, in one city after another, and this wasn't necessarily coordinated or part of a larger plan of reform. This was erupting in one city after another. And one of the obvious things was how do we gain control of city government in a way that we can use it to address these kinds of basic needs? So that's where this new politics came out of both industrial conflict and the horrendous living conditions that workers faced in cities.
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C
Yeah, there's a need for services, basic municipal services. I will get to Milwaukee in a bit, but I was on the Milwaukee Public Library's website preparing for our conversation, and they have a great archive from this period when the socialist mayor started to be elected. They had a map, a city map with plot points where all these epidemic diseases were killing kids the most. They had to do something about it. So was this socialism? I mean, we're talking about the years prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, which is the usual frame of reference for folks when they think about the rise of communism or socialist ideas and their spread. We're in the years, the decades before that. Was this socialism imported from Europe to the US in the way of European immigrants, bringing these ideas into the cities with them, or is this a US native socialism?
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D
It's both, really. I certainly wouldn't want to underestimate the extent to which a segment of the immigrate population brought with them experience of having lived in European cities. We're primarily talking here about European immigrants in those European cities. There was also a new politics gestating and taking shape, and new ideas about how to govern cities. So some segment of immigrants, and particularly skilled immigrants from Germany, parts of Eastern Europe, Jewish immigrants, were very crucial to this movement in many cities. And they brought with them an experience of urban life, but also of socialist movements in those cities that were beginning to address this kind of agenda. So that's one element. The other element is it had a kind of natural growth in an American context. Migrants from rural areas, people who were being pushed out of farms, skilled railroad workers who had seen their unions attacked and brutalized. They began to think along parallel lines. There was cross fertilization. Certainly it was neither purely an import nor purely homegrown. And Milwaukee is a good example of that. I mean, clearly German immigrants were very critical to the emergence of that municipal socialism in Milwaukee. But that was true in places like Dayton and Hamilton.
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C
Let's talk about the state of socialist politics during this period too. Again before the Bolshevik Revolution, before the Red Scare, following World War I, the Palmer Raids, scary. Immigrants were rounded up without warrants, thrown into prison or thrown out of the country. Socialist movement in many ways never recovered from what happened during Wilson's administration. The Socialist Party of the United States was founded in 1901. But today, Shell, it's widely held that socialism and democracy are incompatible. Many people are still afraid of socialism or socialist sounding ideas, as we see in the reaction to Mamdani in New York. Was that idea around 125 years ago.
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D
You know, the socialist movement in the United States evolved through a variety of organizations. So there was a socialist Labor Party that was founded in the 1870s and continued to be a political force of some significance, although diminishing significance into the 20th century. The populist movement had, and this is something people don't often acknowledge, had a very important urban component. It wasn't just a movement of aggrieved farmers. It was also workers. And so the populists were crafting a platform in 1892, the so called Omaha Platform that addressed both rural issues and farmer agricultural issues, but also urban issues. So it called, for instance, for the nationalization of railroads and it called for municipalization of basic services in cities. So there was a wing of that movement that came out of the populist movement and evolved in many places into what became the Socialist Party of the United States that you were talking about, having been technically formed in its mature state in 1901. But within that socialist movement there was a very fierce debate about what the best path forward to realizing what was commonly called the cooperative Commonwealth, which was essentially a socialist transformation of the country as a whole. And there were those who, in the socialist movement who argued, well, you know, we're really revolutionaries, we really want to focus on transforming society as a whole, and we're not that interested in piecemeal reforms, you know, that push us gradually, incrementally in that direction. Those were called, in the terms of the day, impossibilists. It was a funny, a funny anecdote in the debate at the 1901 convention. One of the so called constructivists who were the other wing said, you know, these impossibilists, if you were in a shipwreck with them, they would say, you know, I'm only interested in getting to shore. We'll just, we'll just focus on getting to shore. And the constructivists would say, well, you know, I think we ought to bail the boat to gradually get ourselves to shore. And so this debate between focusing on some immediate incremental improvements and the revolution, so to speak, was a fierce one.
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C
Overthrowing capitalism or working within capitalism.
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D
Well, working within capitalism. We're talking now about the constructivists working within capitalism with the goal of ultimately achieving that, call it overthrow or that transformation of capitalism into, into a socialist society.
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C
Overthrow is a scary term. It sounds like revolution, but.
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D
Right, right, you know, so the constructivists were not prepared to say, oh no, we're happy to live within capitalism. They simply said the only strategy that makes sense and it's necessary because we need changes right now. We can't wait for the revolution to happen, the total transformation. We need to improve daily life right now. But they didn't lose sight of that ultimate goal.
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C
So these ideas were controversial, were they not? I mean, how intense was the backlash to this or just the opposition to it? Because again, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Leninist terror, the revolutionary nature, the violent nature of what happened in Russia, that hasn't happened yet. But were there people in the United States, like big business owners, who feared the hell out of what these mainstream socialists? Were they afraid of what they were calling for?
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D
Oh, absolutely. But to bring it back to cities, Cities historically in the United States, but also in other Western countries in particular, had been governed by elites, historically property owning elites, who had a vested interest in maintaining the status of their property ownership in Much of the world, workers simply had no even where they got a parliamentary franchise to be able to vote in national elections, they were denied the municipal franchise because elites feared that if workers got a foothold in cities, that this would not only transform the fabric of their control in cities, but it would also ultimately lead to a broader revolution. So the battle in cities against established elites, and these were large corporations as well as traditional property owning elites. Large property owning elites.
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C
It sounds a little bit like the debate happening today in New York with Mamdani.
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D
Oh, absolutely, yeah.
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C
He and his folks are saying it's capitalism, not socialism, that's endangering our democracy. The excessive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few billionaires who are now buying up media outlets, which I have a big problem with. I don't think it's good for my industry at all. Well, if people only think of Soviet communism, then yes, that's not compatible with democracy. We're talking about a different socialist tide here in the early 20th century United States, although there were communists in our country. But that's not who we were really talking about here.
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D
No, we're talking about social Democrats committed to the idea of democracy, but to socializing democracy, to ensuring fairness and equity in people's lives. What these elites were most afraid of or what they were most resistant to. And this also applied to a lot of so called progressive reformers who at times could ally themselves with social Democrats around particular issues. But what they were most afraid of was taxes that would erode their property. And of course, social Democrats in cities and had to find a way to finance these new programs that they were advocating for improving the daily life of workers in cities. And so the battle over taxes was a very bitter and brutal one, and that's of course playing out today. The other was Social Democrats believed very strongly in an expanding public sector that was providing public services and that those services were provided by public employees. And so they fought very hard for improving the wages and working conditions of public workers because among other things, they saw that as a model for the private sector. And of course, the private sector in this period especially was the last thing they wanted was to see their own workers unionized. And so seeing public sector workers as a kind of model for private sector employment was a scary thing for them.
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C
Yeah, I'm not sure that comes from the pages of Marx. You know, we're talking about just getting a city to run. Well, I'm a resident of a city. I'm not really too preoccupied with the ideology, the ideological inclinations of well, the city council here is all democratic. I want them to run the city well, and actually we'll get to that in a little bit too when we talk about the current situation, because that is a critique of liberal or left leaning city leaders across the country right now, is that they're just doing a really bad job, whatever the ideology of running their municipalities. So given all you said, how popular were socialist politicians? I have a Wikipedia page open here. You'll have to forgive me as a professional scholar, but I was just preparing for our talk. James Weinstein's table of cities and towns electing Socialists, mayors or other major municipal officers, 1911 to 1920. He counted 74 in 1911, 32 in 1913, 22 in 1915, 18 in 1917. So we're talking dozens, not hundreds, not thousands.
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D
The numbers for any one year may seem pretty pedestrian, but cumulatively the number of cities governed by socialists, and here we're talking about control of city council and mayor reached at least 180, maybe over 200 over the course of this period. This period that, that I'm talking about from the late 1890s through World War I. So that's not an insignificant number. But beyond that, socialists were being elected to city councils in increasing numbers as well. So that even where they didn't win control of the city as a whole to govern it for a period of time, they acted as a very important force within governing bodies of the city school boards as well as city councils. So I'm not suggesting that a majority of cities were transformed in this way, but it was significant. And the other thing that's significant is that many of the programs that socialists were advocating were actually implemented by reform mayors in cities where they were not technically socialists, but they were pushing a program that was very closely associated with socialism. So in Detroit, in Cleveland and in Toledo, for instance, what I like to call the reform triangle, these never had socialist governments, but they had reformed governments that certainly in the eyes of elites, very closely approximated socialist governments. So the phenomenon, particularly in the United States, isn't limited to cities that were technically governed by socialists. There was a much broader slice because.
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C
Maybe they were winning the argument, but not the election. But you know, you pull a party further to your side, further to the left, I guess, in this case, and they start implementing policies that the people want. I want to talk about those policies now, but I'll just briefly mention some of the cities in the early 1900s that elected socialists. Here they are, 1903, Anaconda, Montana, Avril, Massachusetts, Red Lodge, Montana, 1905. Toledo, Ohio, 1906. Cedar City, Utah, 1906. Oh, there's Milwaukee, 1910. Ledford, Illinois, 1910. Greenville, Michigan, 1911. There's a bunch in 1910, 11, 12, 13. Yeah, that's the heyday. We're seeing that in European cities, too, right at this point.
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D
Oh, absolutely. I looked at European countries, particularly Germany, England, Sweden, Austria, but also at Australia and New Zealand. And these municipal socialist successes there were very similar to the phenomenon that emerged in the United States. And so this notion that somehow the United States was exceptional in the degree to which socialism was not a political factor, really, for me, at the city level at least, is kind of blown out of the water. Even though these were very locally grounded movements, they were internationalist in a very real sense, in the sense that they were learning from each other. They were exchanging newspapers and pamphlets, and they were essentially, with the technology of the day, talking to each other or traveling to observe what was happening in another country. And there are some wonderful stories about people in these movements picking themselves up and going across oceans to observe what's going on in other places. So. So there's a kind of cross fertilization internationally in this movement of very locally grounded movements. And that, to me, was an exceptionally interesting.
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C
That's fascinating. Two Harbors, Minnesota. Schenectady, New York. Adamston, West Virginia. Eureka, California. Edgewater, Colorado. Lake Worth, Florida. These are all electing socialists prior to the years of the Bolshevik Revolution. Okay, Milwaukee. For the better part of 50 years, Milwaukee from 1910, had three socialist mayors. One of them was the mayor for 24 years. Let's start in 1910. I learned a little bit about this thanks to the Milwaukee Public Library and their online archive. Emil Seidl. He was only the mayor for two years, but he enters City hall when there are a lot of problems in Milwaukee. Corruption, garbage collection. What were his priorities and what did he accomplish?
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D
Before I talk about that, let me just suggest that in order to understand the phenomenon in Milwaukee, but also in other cities as well, one has to look at the way this movement crystallized and developed and built itself over time. So the Milwaukee Socialists didn't just suddenly come to power in 1910. This was a movement that had grown, at first very incrementally, but then with increasing success over the course of more than a decade and a half, going back into the mid-1890s. And they had done so by running candidates for city council and at first electing one or two and eventually nine, and in a council of 45. So these were still. This was still very much a minority movement. But by 1910, they had built a base of support in the city that was broad. It was committed to this idea in their program that the city life could be improved in ways that the existing parties were not addressing. So the Milwaukee Socialists won the mayoral campaign and control of City Council, and they began immediately implementing many of the minority proposals that they had been fielding in City council over the years. And this included things like expanding the park system. Traditionally, parks were the preserve of elites. Right. They were in elite areas and workers really didn't have much access to them. So they wanted to expand the park system. They wanted to municipalize park streetcars and sewage and water and so forth. And they weren't entirely successful in that two year span on all of these, but they made some headway. They wanted public markets that would, you know, reminds me of Mandami's proposal for municipally owned grocery stores. And they wanted affordable housing. And again, an echoes of today. They were in office for only two years initially. This is a very important point because it is something that municipal socialists have had to wrestle with in this country perpetually. And that is, once they're elected to office, the Democratic and Republican parties find common ground suddenly in opposing the Socialists and manage to run what are called fusion candidates, the main purpose of which is to kick the Socialists out of office.
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C
We're seeing that in New York City in a way today, right?
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D
Absolutely.
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C
Yeah. Yeah. I'm not pro mom Donnie. Anti mom Donnie. I just noticed going to give into this. Oh, he's a scary socialist stuff. But, you know, that's, I guess, unavoidable in politics. We'll return to history now. Emil Seidel.
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D
Emil Seidel.
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C
Emil Seidel. They came up with a map, did the early Milwaukee Socialists, once they got into power, of their plans to expand the parks, as you refer to this was for families, this special map they came up with newcomers where you should live so your kids would have access to park space.
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D
Right.
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C
Green space. Instead of. This is the era of child labor. The idea of kids enjoying themselves and recreating outside, that was new.
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D
Yeah. Not in the streets or alleyways, but in parks.
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C
So transparency, clean government reform. That was what Seidel was dealing with there. As you said, he was only in for a couple of years. It sounds like he accomplished something because another socialist won in 1916. These ideas must have been popular or their program was effective.
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D
Right.
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C
Daniel Hone, 1916, he becomes mayor.
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D
Right. And Daniel Hone was very much in the mold of the program that Emil Seidel had crafted with his. With his colleagues. And, you know, we have to mention in the Milwaukee context, Victor Berger, because Victor Berger was in many ways the most influential politician on the socialist side for decades. He had started building, or trying to build this movement in the 1890s. He was elected to Congress. It was kicked out of Congress for his opposition to World War I, and was reelected by the constituents in Milwaukee. But Daniel Hone came up first as city attorney under the socialist government, the first socialist government, and then ran for mayor in his own right in 1916. Of course, World War I was already underway and there was a lot of opposition TO World War I in the United States, some of which was crystallized by the Socialist Party, but it was more broadly based than that. And so Daniel Hone, basically, following the program that the party had established early on, began again to incrementally try to address the basic needs of urban Milwaukee sewer socialism.
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C
He was called the sewer socialist. What did that mean?
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D
Well, it, you know, it literally means improving the sewers and the basic infrastructure of urban life. It's often used as a kind of dismissive term. Oh, they're just sewer socialists. Right. Well, for urban Milwaukee and other urban dwellers in the late 19th and early 20th century, improving the sewers was a big deal.
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C
Yeah, he was not interested in communist ideology. Right. Have you read Robert Gordon's book, the Rise and Fall of American Growth?
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D
I have not.
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C
So the first period he covers in there, 1870-1940, he compares growth between these two periods prior to 1940, after 1940, we take so much for granted today, although maybe we shouldn't anymore when it comes to things like vaccination. But Anyway, that period, 1870 to 1940, if you could transfer yourself in a time machine in any major city from 1870 and then show up all of a sudden in 1940, you would not believe the changes that had taken place. Clean water, garbage, sanitation, public transit, public transit, everything. Right. And some people would say today, well, that's because of American capitalism, made this possible. How would you respond to that when so much of this was happening in socialist run cities?
- [33:59]
D
Well, the socialist run cities provided a kind of model and they articulated a coherent program for how to make cities livable. Some of that program was adopted by other parties over time. There's no question of that. And some of the success that socialists had in cities where they governed was premised on being able to build alliances with other reformers who weren't themselves necessarily socialists, but who shared a perception that something had to be done to dramatically change the quality of life in cities. Even in cities where they didn't win governing power. If you read the city council minutes, and believe me, I've read more city council minutes from around the world.
- [34:43]
C
Thrilling reading. Thrilling.
- [34:45]
D
They require very close and detailed reading to decipher their significance, necessarily. But if you read those city council minutes in Christchurch, New Zealand, or in Bradford, England, or in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which I've done, what you see is minority socialist elected officials in city council, pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing forward one policy initiative after another and getting defeated repeatedly, but coming back and fighting again for that. And in doing that, and I think this happened in Milwaukee, as other places, you build a base of support in the population where people are saying, oh, yeah, these are the things we really want. This is what we aspire to. And I want to find politicians who are going to address those needs, help me find affordable housing, who are going to clean up the sewers and provide clean water. So socialists were swimming in a larger pool of reform, but they were very important.
- [35:47]
C
The conversation with Shelton Stromqvist continues. Public housing has a bad reputation today and for good reason, because of neglect on the part of the cities that run public housing projects. But the first such project was in Milwaukee, first in the United States. Milwaukee Garden Homes. Tell us a little bit about Garden Homes and whether it was successful.
- [36:14]
D
I can't claim a lot of specific expertise on the garden homes project, but it was. It was the first and it was a model for what decent affordable housing can be. And so Garden Homes was an example of that. It was a city funded new housing development. These were very modest but very nice homes that were a big step ahead of what workers living in inner city tenement dwellings had the opportunity to have access to. And so it suggested that this could be the norm, the way people ought to be able to live, that this is a kind of basic human right in a certain sense. Now, the other model was in Vienna, Austria.
- [36:58]
C
Oh, wow.
- [36:59]
D
There was a political movement in Austria very parallel to that that I've been describing in the United States and other places where socialists began to win power and at the end of World War I, one control of the city council and the mayor office. Their major initiative during the 1920s, like the garden Homes, was to build public housing that was decent and affordable and would provide access to better living conditions. And that Viennese model in so called Red Vienna continues until today. Over 80% of the Vienna population has a right to access to public housing. And a very high proportion of the population actually lives in public housing and pays on an average 8% of their income for rent. Compare that to New York City or any or Washington D.C. where you are.
- [37:51]
C
8% of my income doesn't go to rent. Still such a huge issue, the lack of affordable housing stock in American cities. But public housing is not the option that cities are. They're not building new tracks of public housing, as I said before, has a really bad reputation in many people's minds, synonymous with poverty or slums. Yeah, it's a zoning issue. Zoning has to change. But go ahead.
- [38:16]
D
Yeah, part of it obviously, as Mamdani is talking about in New York, has to with rent control and rent subsidy. The public housing built in the 1950s and 60s in the United States is not a good model and we've learned that. But that doesn't necessarily mean that public housing per se is not an appropriate part of the mix of creating an affordable housing market. It's time to think about a whole range of publicly either initiated or controlled solutions to this affordability crisis in housing in big cities.
- [38:50]
C
So Daniel Hone is mayor until 1940. Then there's an eight year gap without a socialist. Frank Zeidler is the Mayor of Milwaukee, 1948-1960. He is the last big city mayor to be a socialist for quite a while. It takes decades until you see something like that again in the United States. But before we get to what happened to the socialist project, why it came to an end in Milwaukee and elsewhere, at least until recently. I mean, there just saw an article in the New York Times the other day about the socialists who run Portland, for instance. There was a lot going on in this quarter century, you know, World War I to World War II with the socialist movement in our country. It was severely damaged. The Wilson administration shut down the socialist presses, threw socialists in prison or threw them out of the country. Socialism then becomes synonymous in many people's minds with communism and the Bolsheviks and Stalinism. How did those broader trends, international developments, affect the socialist municipal movement?
- [39:50]
D
I would say two things. One is at the end of World War I and the Red Scare that you're alluding to. But really, really stepping back into the World War I years where severe repression was visited on the socialist movement in part because the socialist movement had led outspoken opposition to World War I. By the end of the Red Scare, the socialist movement at the municipal level, but also at the national level was in disarray. There were a few socialist strongholds that remain. Reading, Pennsylvania, Bridgeport, Connecticut and Milwaukee. Which comes back into the story in the 1950s. But the repressive atmosphere in the United States at the end of World War I and then again at the end of World War II in the McCarthy era had a severe effect on the health and well being of the socialist movement. But the other thing that I would say, and this, you know, and in some ways this relates, I think, to the current situation, is that one doesn't have to look specifically at the. The viability and the life of the Socialist Party per se to assess the lasting significance of this movement. The Socialist Party goes into a period of decline, no question about it, as does the Communist Party. But what the Socialists did, and their progressive allies alongside them did, was to create life in cities that became kind of normative. You know, without question. We have clean water and we have sewage and we have garbage collection, and we have city streets that are cleaned, and we have public transit and we have public parks and we have public schools. I mean, we have a whole range of public services that are the inheritance that we enjoy from that period.
- [41:38]
C
And how about unions? I haven't done enough to talk about labor in this conversation. That's the big part of it. Milwaukee. Milwaukee was an industrial heartland. So I'm assuming that a big part of the socialist project there under hone and then Zeidler up until 1960 was industrial labor unions and craft unions.
- [41:58]
D
I mean, we often think of the craft unions as going into decline, and the AFL is being eclipsed by the CIO in the 1930s. And to some degree that's true, but there were many AFL affiliated craft unions that remain viable, particularly in the building trades. So no question that the Milwaukee Trades Council, you know, a body of affiliated unions at the city level in Milwaukee, was crucial to the success of the.
- [42:27]
C
Socialists as a glue that holds a political coalition together, or one. One part of the glue is unions. Why is the Democratic Party so hollow today? Well, where are its unions? Where are those industries that supported the unions? Where's the political program?
- [42:43]
D
One of the important things to remember is that the trajectory of the decline in union membership parallels the increase in income inequality in this country. So that as unions decline, income inequality rises. The unions are an absolutely important bulwark. One of the important things to remember is that the socialists of the period that I'm talking about the early years were very much advocates of public sector unions in the municipality. And it's not surprising today that one of the chief objects of attack by Republicans and elites is public sector unions, because they're the ones that have remained robust even when private Sector unions have been in decline, you know, as in the earlier years. The existence or the vitality of these public sector unions is critical to unionization in the rest of the country. And without that public sector unionism today, the labor movement is even more anemic than it might otherwise be.
- [43:47]
C
Hardly any unions at all if it weren't for the public sector unions.
- [43:50]
D
Well, the public sector. You know, rates of unionization still in the public sector are significantly, dramatically higher than rates in private sector. So it's not surprising that in Iowa and in Wisconsin and in other. In Ohio and other states, Republicans in control have made public sector unions the point of attack.
- [44:09]
C
Why does the socialist project, which had steered Milwaukee through a great period of prosperity. I'm not saying it's a Garden of Eden. I'm sure there are plenty of problems that weren't solved. Right. That's the nature of cities. But why does the socialist project run out of steam in 1960?
- [44:24]
D
You know, I mean, I guess it.
- [44:25]
C
Had been running out of steam. You've alluded to the.
- [44:28]
D
Yeah, I mean, Frank Zeidler, whom I met and knew and to some degree was a noble human being. He had very high principles, and he tried to govern the city in the 1950s along his understanding of the lines of democratic socialism. But the combination of a kind of eroding politics of the left with the McCarthy era and the limitations of what he was able to do in that political context in Milwaukee, I think ultimately kind of eroded the base of support that the socialists had. And, you know, he'd been in office for 12 years, and his program had some reason to be touted as successful, but it sort of ran out of steam. And the Democratic Party in 1960 was kind of on the ascent. Kennedy wing of the party promised all kinds of things for cities. The party just kind of ran out of scene.
- [45:26]
C
I mean, that's natural in politics. Ideas can stay around, but movements come and go. Political parties ebb and flow. The Republican Party today, certainly not the Republican party of Reagan or the Republican party of Eisenhower. Right. New Deal liberalism is a spent force, has been a spent force for a long time. So that's kind of just the natural way of things. So New York City, Mamdani and others of his generation who have a more democratic socialist bent than, say, the professional managerial class and consultants who have come to dominate the national Democratic Party. Right. But he's trying to become the mayor of the city, the biggest city in the country, at a time when Democrats are being criticized. And these criticisms are not entirely unwarranted. There's a lot to this for doing a terrible job of running cities. What's your take on that?
- [46:22]
D
Cities are magnets and culturally vital centers and also beset with enormous problems that are product of that kind of growth and vitality to some degree. It's not a simple thing, obviously, to craft a program that's going to address the range of problems that cities have inherited. But cities like New York or like Chicago have a certain fundamental strength and vitality that I think is something that Mamdami or Johnson in Chicago or Michelle Wu in Boston can draw on and build on for all of the problems that cities today have. And. And to some extent, they're a byproduct of the inability of cities to fully control their own destinies. That is, state governments, and it varies from state to state, enjoy a degree of control or preemption of what cities can do. In other words, they regulate what taxes can be undertaken, what public policies can be initiated.
- [47:29]
C
Immigration, too, is a federal issue when a lot of immigrants show up in a city. But I mean, that's always been the case in New York.
- [47:35]
D
But immigrants are drawn to cities.
- [47:36]
C
Yeah, of course.
- [47:37]
D
And they're drawn to cities because there are jobs, there are communities, there's a sense of potential.
- [47:44]
C
Of course, I'm only sitting here because Italians and Sicilians came to New York City, but go ahead.
- [47:50]
D
They came to these cities and because cities held a promise that they believed could make their lives better. And indeed, for much of the 20th century, the changes that came about in cities did dramatically improve the life of their inhabitants, who were still poor, who were still needing additional services, who were still beset by extreme inequalities, but who found in cities a degree of opportunity that they certainly didn't have where they came from initially, and that remained to be fully realized in cities, but nonetheless were a kind of promissory note. So, you know, I think this issue of home rule is going to be one that Mamdani and the movement in New York is going to have to contend with. And although Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, is supporting his candidacy, there's going to be have to be some tough negotiating between the city and the state over taxation and over other issues where the city's hands might be tied to unless they get state support. And state.
- [48:58]
C
That's a very good point.
- [48:59]
D
Willingness to go along. So the fight over home rule is going to be a real one if Mandami's program is to be fully realized, for affordable housing for free, childcare for free Bus service for public sector markets and grocery stores. There's a lot in his agenda that's going to require some additional funding.
- [49:20]
C
Yeah, I can relate to that home rule debate as a resident of Washington. Yeah. Where Congress is in charge of what happens here, ultimately. So, final thing, we live in a very hyper polarized, politicized period where it seems national politics infiltrates every aspect of the day. But at the city level, I don't really think most people are ideological in general, and especially at the city level, when it comes to your trash pickup, having clean and safe parks, functioning schools, et cetera, people just want the job to be done. So here, Mamdani and democratic socialism more broadly, which I think Bernie Sanders has done a great job of popularizing. He lost the nomination, but he may have won the argument. Right. This is a generational opportunity. If Mamdani succeeds, this could maybe bring us back to an era where socialists or Democratic socialists can run and win elections again in cities.
- [50:19]
D
Yeah. So I think it really does begin in cities. But it's also, you know, important to bear in mind that while Mamdani is running as a democratic socialist, people like Michelle Wu or Brandon Johnson in Chicago or other places around the country aren't necessarily running as socialists, but are running on a program that very much approximates the one that socialists in New York are putting forward. There is a movement afoot. If you Google the new municipalism, you will find an array of cities of many different sizes where this kind of movement is underway and is enjoying some success. Richmond, California, for instance, used to be a city controlled by the oil companies. But going back maybe 10 years now, Democratic forces began electing a city council that ultimately took control of the city away from the oil companies and began instituting the kind of programs that Mamdani is talking about in New York. And there are a host of cities around the country where this kind of political phenomenon at the municipal level is taking hold. And it's. And it's pretty exciting.
- [51:31]
G
A city where they can do more than just struggle. One where those who toil in the night can enjoy the fruits of their labor in the day, where hard work is repaid with a stable life, where eight hours on the factory floor or behind the wheel of a cab is enough to pay the mortgage. And it's where the mayor will use their power to reject Donald Trump's fascism, to stop masked ICE agents from deporting our neighbors and to govern our city as a model for the Democratic Party.
- [52:21]
C
On the next episode of History. As it happens, Hannah Arendt and the Age of Trump. Remember, sign up for my weekly newsletter. It is free and it comes out every Friday, sometimes on Tuesday too. Just go to Substack and search for history as it happens.
- [52:37]
A
Morning Zoe. Got donuts.
- [52:39]
B
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A
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B
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Wow.
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C
Nice.
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Jeffrey, you heard them.
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E
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A
So what do we have for logic?
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B
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J
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