9UNP0436SD_Ryan_Swadley

- Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Wisconsin Historical Museum. We're very pleased today to have Ryan Swadley, our museum tour registrar, to enter a discussion on Victor Berger as part of our History Sandwiched In lecture series. Please welcome Ryan. 
(applause)

- Ryan Swadley: All right, thank you. Again, I am Ryan and what I like to do is talk for about 30 to 35 minutes here, and then have a few minutes left over for questions. So I'd be more than happy to discuss anything that you'd like to know towards the end here. When I was starting to develop the program, it actually turned into a little bit bigger project than I was expecting. I started off just thinking about talking about Victor Berger as a person, his life, some of the things he did. 

But one of the other things that I thought was important to talk about was a little bit of background on socialism in the United States as a whole. I wanted to get to that first. We'll get on to a little bit more about Victor Berger himself, some of the trials that he went through, literally, a trial for treason that he was able to take all the way to the Supreme Court. And then finally, just have a little bit of a discussion about what the socialist movement and Milwaukee means for us today. When I was talking to Paul a week or two ago, we were discussing how the term "socialist" gets thrown around quite a bit these days, but it's not really well defined by anyone. So maybe talking a little bit more theoretical about those issues as well. So to me, and other people who study socialism, I've read quite a number of histories of socialism, as well as some of these primary resources. There seems to really be two phases of it. And the first phase was much longer lived, starting with Plato in the Greek times, coming up all the way through the Middle Ages when there wasn't a whole lot going on as far as literacy for most people, but then into the Enlightenment and some later periods. And I would consider all of these works, especially the first three, are ones that most people have read along the way somewhere, to be sort of socialist writing. 

And by "socialist" what I really mean is someone who has sat down and thought about what an ideal world might look like. The term "utopia" there, which most people know is the Latin term for something like "nowhere" or "no place," because it doesn't really exist. So these are all books that deal with what an ideal society might look like. Plato laid out his theory, which is probably the most famous one. "Gulliver's Travels" lays out three different scenarios, some of them better than others, but in the end, he gets to the island with his

- they're like horse-people or something like that, and he really thinks that's the way that people should live. The bottom two are more traditionally thought of as purely socialist writings. Charles Fourier is a French writer, and he developed the idea of the commune, which is where, it wasn't an attempt to reform society. He was going to take people who were interested in developing a new way of life back out of society, form up their own society, I guess, in the countryside or somewhere else, live completely independently of the rest of the world, and his theory was eventually that they were going to be so successful that the rest of society would sort of emulate their process. And Robert Owen was a British historian. 

He probably came the closest to actually setting this up. He was an industrialist right at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 1830s or so. And he took his factory and his own factory workers and created basically a society around his factory, housing for all the employees, and he set it up as kind of this benevolent overseer of everyone who worked for him. Eventually he emigrated to the United States and set up a city called New Harmony here, which was modeled on this idea of this factory town and was in the true sense of the word a commune. Now, the best book that I've found, I've actually got my copy of it here, is Albert Fried. And I like this book for a lot of different reasons. The first one is that it's published by Columbia University Press, so it's pretty academic. He identifies six major periods that I've sort of shifted in my presentation here, but he identifies the same sort of periods in the United States. He starts off the book talking about how he was originally with another author, they did a history of socialism in Europe, and they thought that the socialist movement in America was sort of a short-lived thing, not very important, wasn't really a whole lot going on. So they sort of just disregarded it. 

But as they worked on this book to do with European socialist movements, they sort of kept coming back to some of the American ideas. And when he finished up that book, he decided to focus more on the American socialist movement. So that's where this one comes in. And the other thing that's cool about it, they'll have a paragraph about that particular era, and then he reprints a bunch of documents having to do with it, so you actually get to read some of the writings of the people of that period. So if you come across this book, it's a very good one. The very first phase that he identified in American socialism are the Religious Commutarians. The period here very early in American history. These people essentially wanted to split off, live on their own in perfect unity with God, identified all the evils in society and wanted just to get away from that. And the two main groups were the Shakers, which is definitely the more famous and more numerous group. They had quite a few different communities. 

And then the Perfectionists, who had this sort of, it was almost like a free love philosophy where they thought that everyone who lived in the community was married to each other and they had some weird kind of justification for it, which would probably take a whole hour to explain. But in any case, they were the two main groups. The Oneida Silverware Company actually started out as a Perfectionist Community. But none of those really were able to take hold as the country switched over to more industrial and secular. So as religion kind of faded in importance a lot of people were less willing to leave society and go live in a religious community. So far more than that, there was another group of people which, again, Fried identifies as the Secular Commutarians. They didn't really have the religious reasons for wanting to split off and live in these communities. What they were really looking to do was create a perfectly rational society. And to do that they kind of took a cue from Fourier that we saw earlier and instead of trying to reform the society they lived in they wanted to split off, figure out how it's done, and then maybe go back and try and reform the rest of society later. This is where Robert Owen came over from Britain to the United States and he was part of this movement. 

Robert Owen specifically had it down to the number of people who would live in the community, identified every job that needed to be done, how many people were going to do it, how long it was going to take, he had life extremely laid out. This is sort of the era where a lot of these things, people wanted to be rational, as in, 100% purely scientific. And that was the attempt, anyway, but the people who most often came to these things were people who lived on the east coast, they wanted to move somewhere in the center of the country and try to work on building this new community. But oftentimes they were businessmen. They didn't know anything about farming or anything like that. So of course they couldn't have a sustainable, self-sufficient commune. They sort of faded from memory, too. The biggest group, both in the Milwaukee socialist movement, which we'll get to in a moment here, and in socialism all around, were German immigrants. And from 1848, a little bit before that, and on, there were a lot of German immigrants to the United States and especially they came to the Midwest, and as we all probably know, to Wisconsin. In 1848, which is the year Wisconsin became a state, oddly enough, there were a lot of different revolutions in Europe. 

That was the year that the "Communist Manifesto" was published and there was just a lot of social upheaval in a lot of different countries. There was a failed revolution actually in Germany and really Britain was the only country that didn't really have a huge social upheaval at that point. Although there were a lot of different movements, that never really solidified. So with a huge German population coming, most of the Germans who were fighting against the autocracy in that revolution considered themselves socialist and they had, again, a very scientific view of it. They used a lot of Hegel's dialectic reasoning, which again would take hours to explain, but the idea is that capitalism has a system. They weren't just thinking of how to create a perfect society. They actually believed that capitalism would destroy itself because capitalism constantly needs to expand in order to survive and at some point it's going to expand to a point where it can't expand anymore so it will implode. So that's the basic idea of it. And these German folks came over here. They were sort of a self-sustained community. 

They tried to reach out, they tried to have a little bit of a political movement, but really it was sort of a movement that immigrants were only involved in, but there were a few other people who did delve into this movement and were influenced by it. And we get to one of the last phases here before the modern era, which is the Moral and Christian Socialists. And they were sort of a throwback to those earlier groups. They wanted to take some of the ideas that the Germans had, but apply them more to the American circumstance and put it in a way that Americans could be sympathetic with and could understand, because America at this time was far different than any of the European countries just in the way its society was structured and industry and everything. So again, there were a number of Christian groups. The social gospel is something that's come up as of late, what the role of religion should be. Should it be for helping the poor, sharing the wealth, that kind of thing? So they definitely saw an intersection there with capitalism and Christianity not really jiving together. So they turned to socialism as a way to solve that dispute. One of the main political accomplishments they had in this time was, they were able to form an alliance with the Populists. 

And the Populists were a political movement mostly in the middle of the country, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Kansas, that area primarily. And they were a political party. They had pretty good success in one or two presidential elections and to me, I was reading up on it this morning, nowadays the Populist party still exists, but it seems like it's kind of this small government Tea Party kind of platform, which makes sense, but in these days, they had actually called for a lot of the same things that the socialists were calling for. They called for national ownership of the railroads and telephone transmission lines and things like that, so it was almost sort of like a left-wing Tea Party almost, so it's pretty interesting stuff. And in 1893 there was a big period of rest in the United States, a lot of riots and strikes that were sort of struck down by the military and it created a sort of period of calm, where there wasn't a huge movement going on. Now, the Socialist Labor Party was really the very first socialist party in the United States and it was headed by this gentleman here, Daniel DeLeon. He was really influenced by the German socialists. His main platform was that he believed that the revolution with the backwards "R" was bound to come, that he was going to do everything he could to get there. He thought that compromising was just delaying the inevitable, so he wasn't very interested in any reforming. And the other thing that becomes really important in the story is that he was a proponent of dual unionism, which is going into industries that are already unionized and instead of having his followers joining that trade union, actually set up a separate parallel union that was more committed to socialist principles, even though both were theoretically looking out for the welfare of the workers. 

This struggle between the reformists and the revolutionaries really plagued the socialist movement as a whole. It was pretty evenly split at times. Eventually one side would gain strength over the other side. And in 1905, the reformers outnumbered the revolutionaries here, which leads us to the Socialist Party. That's where we've been trying to get to. Now, the Social-Democrats was their original name and they were headed by the people who wanted to use democracy and voting to bring about the socialist reforms. And they wanted to be a mainstream party, not a political sect or a movement. And that's where we finally get to our friend, Victor Berger. He was an Austrian immigrant and eventually the family moved everything to Connecticut first, then Illinois, and then up to Milwaukee in 1881. He was a German schoolteacher for a number of years there and he married his wife, Meta, who was also an important person, and she served on the school board as well. 

I think she may have been one of the first women to do so. So Berger initially joined Daniel DeLeon in his Socialist Labor Party, but again, there was that conflict between the revolutionaries and the reformists, kind of the left and the right. The reformists often called themselves "Constructive Socialists" because they wanted to be constructive about it, not destructive through revolution. And this is a quote from them here. "It is foolish to expect any result from riots and dynamite, from murderous attacks and conspiracies, in a country where we have the ballot. As long as we are in the minority, we of course have no right to enforce our opinions on an unwilling majority." So that pretty much sums up his thoughts. And his idea was to build this respectable political party and from there institute some of their ideas and reforms and eventually get to a place where he was seeing a society more like he was hoping to see. Now, the other person who often gets labeled as the most important person in the socialist movement, I happen to think Victor Berger is, but I suppose it's up for debate, is Eugene Debs. And he was the perennial presidential candidate for the Socialist Party. 

And just like most political parties, there was sort of the national branch and then there were state branches and local branches, which is how most political parties are still set up today. So Debs was really the number one person in the national party, whereas Victor Berger was a huge player in the Wisconsin party and then also headed the Milwaukee party. So the story is that Debs, before he was a socialist, actually, was a trade unionist and he was jailed in the Pullman strikes. The legend goes that Victor Berger visited him in his prison cell, gave him a copy of Marx, and from there they became good friends and eventually Debs became a socialist, although in a lot of cases, Debs took the national party to places that Berger didn't approve of because Debs was a little bit more left-wing than Berger. They often say Berger is a very right-wing socialist, which is kind of a funny term. So why did it get so big in Milwaukee? The obvious answer is, a lot of German immigrants. Like I said, when Germans were immigrating to the United States after the big upheavals of 1848, a very large portion of them came to Wisconsin and Milwaukee especially. Still today, a huge German population in this state, at least. Berger, when he bought his first newspaper, it was German language and it continued in German language for quite a while. 

Up through this whole period there were still neighborhoods that were primarily German-speaking and many of the immigrants who did come were already pretty partial to the idea of socialism. So Berger eventually became the leader of Branch One, the local branch of the Socialist Party in Milwaukee. He was a newspaper editor, changed the name of his paper to the "Milwaukee Leader" and began printing in English in 1911. Eventually he made it from a weekly paper to a daily paper, so the historical society has all of his papers on microfilm, endless rolls of it, so it's a very good newspaper just to page through. One of the main ways that he contributed to politicking is, he was really organized and he was able to distribute his literature. They would distribute it by neighborhood, put it in whatever language the homes needed it as. They were very organized as far as how they were going to get their literature out on election day. So just quickly, Berger on the issues. For clean government and against corruption, that makes sense, right? That's what everybody's really shooting for. 

But the Socialist Party especially was very big on that. One of their main issues that they ran for, especially in Milwaukee, was public ownership of the utilities. They were often labeled as "sewer socialists" because one of the first things that the socialist elected officials did when they got into power was work on making the sewer system in Milwaukee a public utility. They also worked on getting some of the electric and all that kind of stuff publicly owned rather than through private companies. One of the main things that he fought for when he got to Congress was unemployment insurance, old-age pension, which of course became social security, and free education up to the age of 18, which we now have. A big fan of trade unions. One of the more surprising things I found was that he argued that having a well-armed public, sort of in the vein of the second amendment, would actually be what would ensure a smooth transition from a capitalist system to the socialist system. So that was sort of a surprising thing that I found. And he wanted proportional representation. So rather than electing members of Congress by district, he wanted to say, well, if 60% of the voters in Wisconsin voted for the Republicans, who were the Progressives at that time, then 60% of Wisconsin's legislators should be Republican, and divide it up by percentage rather than by who won each district. 

On that same vein, he actually called for the abolition of the US senate, which he thought was sort of this overarching branch that was corrupt and kind of built for the elites, which, I guess you could maybe argue that it was with the 6-year terms and representing the whole state at large. He was against the idea of revolution, like I said earlier, wanted to bring about his reforms by political means and he really opposed the idea of having dual trade unionism, so he found himself sort of in a strange alliance with AFL, rather than creating separate, parallel unions that were going to be pro-socialist. Even though the AFL and Samuel -- were very against the idea of socialism in general, he had this sort of uneasy alliance with them because they didn't want to upset him. And he was very against the idea of "direct action," which is just a euphemism against workers sabotaging the factory place. So he was trying to do this all in an orderly fashion. Now, one of the parallel unions that got set up, and actually Eugene Debs played a part in this, was setting up the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World. And if you read a lot of history about this period, they often get a lot more attention because they were adamantly a socialist union. They went into places where the AFL may have already been strong and set up a whole separate parallel union. Again, Victor Berger was not in support of that, but at the same time, did sometimes find himself allied with them just because they were fellow socialists. So all this sort of culminated in the elections of 1910, where the Socialist Party had quite a bit of success in Milwaukee. 

They won the mayor, seven alderman seats, and two judges, and Berger was elected to the Common Council. And then in the fall, he was elected to his first term in Congress, so he was the first socialist in Congress. And nationally during that time, Eugene Debs, as you can see, just about doubled his votes. He was still only winning maybe 2%, 3%, 5% in each state, but there was definitely an upward trend and because of that alliance with the Populist Party that some socialists had had in previous years, Oklahoma was actually the strongest socialist state. Even though they were often talking about how they supported workers' rights in urban areas, it was often the rural people which had this former alliance with the Populists who really came out for the socialists. In 1912 there was actually a downturn, and the argument is that the socialists actually got in, they rooted out a lot of the different corruption and things that were going on, so the idea was that maybe they had accomplished their goals, so they didn't really have anything to run on at that point. And also at that time, the Democrats and Republicans in Milwaukee started running what they would call a "fusion" candidate, so they would just, the two major parties would throw all their support behind a non-partisan candidate in order to defeat the socialists. And Berger was defeated by one of these people in his re-election bid. 1914, he was again defeated for the House, but the socialists in Milwaukee did gain some seats and they sent nine state assemblymen to Madison, which was fairly impressive, even to get one. They officially changed their name to the Socialist Party at that time. 

Again, that was something that Berger wasn't terribly excited about, but he went along with it just in the name of party unity. Again, he was very cautious, very moderate. At that point, they ended up in a feud with the IWW as they turned to the idea of syndicalism, and that is basically the idea that the union should hold all the power, and taken to its extreme, the theory would actually stand that you wouldn't even need a government anymore because the unions would have a hierarchy and they would eventually all come together to run the society, so obviously it's a lot more radical than Victor Berger wanted to be. And then, they eventually passed an issue on the national committee of the Socialist Party expelling any members who supported the idea of direct action, which the IWW certainly did. Big Bill Heywood here, who was actually sort of the unofficial head of the IWW was actually on the national commission of the Socialist Party. He was expelled from the party for being involved with the IWW, and Eugene Debs, who was actually there to help start the IWW, abandoned it, disowned it, and a lot of the people were arrested. Again, if you read a lot of history of the time period, the military again cracked down on IWW strikers pretty harshly and Big Bill Heywood here actually fled to the Soviet Union after 1917 when he was under indictment. Jumped bail and left. Kind of a quick end to that group. So World War I really put the brakes on the socialist movement. 

It was sort of on an upward trend, things were looking up, they had this reformist ideology that was starting to gain votes, gain political power. But when World War I hit, it was a big problem for several reasons. First of which, the socialist ideology is pacifist, that a war is just a movement between capitalists, it doesn't serve the workers any, and that was the general position. Also, the high level of Germans in Milwaukee and Wisconsin at large caused a lot of people in Wisconsin and the rest of the country to look at Wisconsin kind of with a suspicious eye. Here we've got a cartoon of Robert LaFollette who as a senator at the time was anti-war. We've got a picture of the German kaiser pinning iron crosses on him there. So that was a political cartoon which we have upstairs, you can see. It posed a big problem for Wisconsin in general. So the Socialist Party, to deal with this, came to St. Louis in 1917 to develop a formal policy. 

And when they got there, they realized that there was a large cadre of leftist socialists who had banded together and they sort of took control of the meeting. And this was a big problem for people like Berger who was extremely conservative in the party, and they ended up passing a resolution that Berger didn't really agree with. It was very strongly worded, very anti-war under any circumstances, which Berger again, being the consummate politician, didn't really like having such absolutes, but it was a strong line put forth by the left wing of the party who had become the majority, sort of pulled the rug out from underneath him, and he signed on just in the name of unity again. So at this point, the socialists were a clear target for the government and they clamped down on Berger by stripping him of his mailing rights of the paper, which meant that it could only be sold just on the newsstands, it couldn't be delivered in the mail. And the postmaster general found several articles that he had written, several editorials, saying that his writing was treasonous. And as 1918 came along, one of the Wisconsin senators died so there was going to be a special election that was going to be held in April of that year along with all the other elections. And as Berger tried to campaign, there's a couple quotes here from other newspapers throughout Wisconsin who refused to print his campaign ads. And right before the election at the end of March, he was indicted for treason, clearly right before he was about to make his election bid. So there was some consternation there. Although he did finish with 26% of the vote between, there wasn't a fusion candidate in this case, there was a Democrat, Republican, and Socialist. 

He finished with 26%, which really isn't bad considering he was under indictment for treason. Failing that, he ran for the House, but again, five days before the election, he was indicted again under the Espionage Act. The movement came to a head, but they won quite a few more seats than even in 1910, which is considered the banner year for socialism. Other places in the country didn't have as much success, but Berger attributed this to the fact that the government was trying to oppress them by putting all these well-timed indictments out. So they won 16 state assembly seats, four state senators, as well as a lot of the local offices that they always won. And then Berger returned to the House, and this is where the story gets interesting. So right after the election, he's elected to the House, and while he's sort of waiting for that time period before he goes to Washington, they have his trial and he's tried with several other defendants. And the judge here, who actually, his claim to fame was that he later went on to become the commissioner of Major League Baseball, which is kind of ironic. Depends on whether you're a fan of Bud Selig or not, I suppose. But this is a quote from him. 

It goes on quite a ways. He was not a fan of German-Americans, let's put it that way. Even after the armistice, World War I ends, the trial still went on for a number of weeks, and in 1919 in the winter there, Berger and all the co-defendants were sentenced to 20 years in prison. Immediately they filed an appeal, of course, which you would expect, and it was actually overturned a couple years later and the Supreme Court ruled. What happened was that Berger and the co-defendants put in an affidavit quoting Landis, several things he said at the trial, which pretty much revealed that he did not like German-Americans and as the Supreme Court saw that, they ruled that he should have recused himself from the case, shouldn't have presided over it. So the old trial was thrown out in the end. But in the meantime, anyway, Berger was a convicted felon, his case is in appeals, and he goes to Washington DC to sit in his seat. And there's a commission struck up to determine whether or not someone's who's been convicted of treason should really be sitting in the House. And after about a year of deliberation, they voted to deny Berger the seat in Congress and ordered Milwaukee to call another election. Berger went back to Milwaukee, they held the election, I think it was about a month later, and once again he actually won the seat for the second time. 

And when he arrived back in Washington DC, he was denied the seat again, and it stayed empty until the next term came up, and he actually did not win in 1920. It's kind of strange, he has a lot of losses and then comes back, which I suppose you don't see so much today. But following that, he did serve in '22, '24, and '26, won all those elections, and then lost again for the final time in 1928 and returned to edit his newspaper. And by this time, the Socialist Party, mostly due to World War I and then the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, had sort of broken apart. A lot of the people were in jail. Eugene Debs was actually in jail for a time. He served a couple of years before he was pardoned by Harding and the infrastructure of the party had really fallen out from beneath him. And two different communist parties had actually arisen in their place, who were both far more radical. And the Socialist Party did try to ally itself with the Progressive Party, which was started here in Wisconsin by the LaFollettes. I have some information upstairs about that as well. 

But again, that was sort of the last hurrah and socialism as a movement pretty much died off following the second world war, especially, and the Cold War, and the communist party, even though they had a resurgence during the Great Depression, faded away. Being a socialist or a communist kind of became the dirty word that it is today. And Berger himself was actually killed in a streetcar accident in downtown Milwaukee in 1929, so just a year after he left Congress. So that brings us to the end here. Why socialism never did catch hold in the US? Getting back to some of the theoretical things again. In Europe, even after the second world war, the Labor Party in Britain was really in a lot of ways more socialist than even what we usually think of as socialist parties. They had nationalized a lot of the different industries, like transportation and coal and a lot of the natural resources. They had instituted national health service and places like Canada had done the same. In the United States we never really did adopt some of these things that started off maybe as socialist proposals, but have kind of come into the mainstream. 

If you remember back, some of the things that Berger did propose, the old-age pension and unemployment insurance and things like that have kind of come about, but there's really not a solid movement of socialism like there is in other countries, so it's kind of strange how that's happened and again that's something that's up for debate. I don't know if I really know the answer to that, as well. If you go to Milwaukee today, there are a number of different signs of a socialist past, probably the biggest being the park system. Aside from having Victor Berger and a lot of different state representatives, they had socialist mayors for quite a while. And one of the biggest accomplishments just within the city was building the parks system to be kind of the lungs of the industrial city. So that's one main thing you can see there. Of course, the Daniel Hoan bridge, which is one of the more famous bridges, which I'm told they're actually talking about tearing down to make sort of more lakefront property there, but that again is named after Daniel Hoan, who was the second socialist mayor of Milwaukee, served for quite a number of years there. And there's some other ones, too, for people who are more familiar with Milwaukee than I am. I'm sure you can think of some other legacies from this area. And then lastly, again, just tying back into what we were talking about before. 

The term "socialism" really is thrown around quite a bit these days. And the definition to me has changed and it's been used in so many different ways, it's almost sort of a meaningless term. If you're going to call somebody a socialist, it's like calling somebody a capitalist. You sort of know what it means, but you don't really. And it's just interesting to look back at some of these movements, especially within the US and just think about what the term "socialism" has meant over the years. With that, I'd like to conclude and say thank you, and if anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to talk with you. 
(applause)