Eric Blanc

The sewer socialists were the most important socialist party in the history of the United States. They ran Milwaukee for most years between 1910 and 1960. They had more members per capita than anywhere else in the United States. They were as strong in Milwaukee as the German Social Democratic Party was in Germany.

They ran the town. They led the labor movement. They were electorally successful. They were deeply rooted across the working class.

And they delivered. They pioneered a lot of the things that now we take for granted, or have been taken away from us, that came to fruition in the best parts of the New Deal, and they showed the rest of the socialist movement at the time — and I think still today — what mass democratic socialist politics can look like and deliver.

Eric Blanc

For those of us who are on the Left today and are trying to think about how we could reconnect socialist politics with the working class and what that looks like, the sewer socialists show that it’s possible. And at a moment when the Democratic Party is in such a crisis and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has an opening. I actually think that our best model for replicating some sort of mass majoritarian politics is the democratic practice and politics of the sewer socialists.

What they were able to deliver was remarkable for a local level. They dramatically expanded public services. They improved people’s health. This is a moment, remember, when things like cholera are really widespread. For us, saying they expanded the sewers might sound like small change, but if your kids are dying from preventable diseases, it’s actually a big deal if you can prevent these needless deaths by providing basic public services.

They [also] made people’s lives more fun. It wasn’t just the bread; it was the roses as well. I think Zohran Mamdani in New York City is living up to that spirit. They had free public concerts; they built a ton of parks; they had parades. They did that over and over and over again, both through bottom-up struggle and by using the power of the state.

Eric Blanc

Yeah, in both places. A huge part of the reason for their success lies in the culture, if you want to think about it that way — they built this culture of socializing and community and purpose. It was almost like a church at its best, where you have the music, you have the community.

I think that’s something we can look toward, especially right now when people are so atomized and stuck at home on their phones, and there’s something truly transformative about singing “Solidarity Forever” with a bunch of other comrades or being out at a picnic all day — these types of things that back then were less rare and a little more par for the course in politics. Today, when we look at what the sewer socialists did, or what they did in Texas, that’s maybe the lowest-hanging fruit for being able to replicate their success.

Eric Blanc

That’s so crucial because the strategy of the sewer socialists, and I think Zohran as well, wasn’t limited to this vision of a better welfare state. They understood that you were never going to be able to get a majority of working-class people to go further to demand a radical transformation of society, economic democracy, socialism, if you couldn’t show that the public sector and the government works better than the private sector. You had to provide some proof of concept.

You also needed to help them get better organized. One of the big things that the sewer socialists did was that they created an environment for unions to flourish. I think the union movement in Milwaukee got stronger than anywhere else. They had something like 60 percent union density, which is astronomical, because they would have the state literally intervene when the workers were on strike.

Can you imagine if that was today? Workers go on strike, and you have the state, in one case, literally shutting down the company — forcing it to close and prevent scabs from coming in. These types of direct intervention on the side of the workers from the state is something that I think should open our vistas for the possibilities of creating bottom-up organization, not just through organizing but leaning on our elected officials as well.

Eric Blanc

A lot of the debates we still have on the Left were paralleled back then. It’s funny because before I started doing the research for this, I had a lot of myths in my head about what the sewer socialists were that turned out not to be accurate. I had thought, these are just moderate, milquetoast reformists who weren’t real socialists; they just wanted to expand the sewer system or whatever.

Far from that being the case, these were committed socialists. They were what we call democratic socialists today. But their goal was to overcome capitalism. They educated people about it; that was very central to what drove their volunteer base. If you’re getting up at 5:30 in the morning to distribute the newspaper to all of your neighbors, what drives you is a vision of that long-term society.

But they were also extremely pragmatic. They understood that you had to base your politics on an accurate assessment where the majority of working-class people were. You couldn’t go too far ahead of them. You had to really gauge how far you could go: What demands are plausible right now?

They also understood that the main way you get to socialism isn’t just going to be spreading the good word. They did spread the good word. They had a lot of publications. Victor Berger, the founder of sewer socialism, said it well. The main obstacle is not that people haven’t heard our ideas or are uneducated. It’s that they don’t have hope. They don’t have confidence [that things] can be better. You need to be able to prove in practice that collective action and organization and public power through the state can make a difference.

That was different from the approach of a lot of socialists. There was a lot of sectarianism and what I think you can call ultraleftism in the Socialist Party at the time. The Milwaukee socialists were more the exception than the norm. In a lot of other places, the idea was, you just preach the good word of socialism, and eventually people will come around. We saw in practice that that didn’t really work. You have to do that, but it’s not enough, because people need to be able to see you deliver in the meantime.

Eric Blanc

There’s a lot of lessons there. When I was eighteen, I just wanted to go to the barricades the next day. So I get the spirit of it, and there’s a basically healthy impulse there, which is that capitalism is terrible, and the sooner we can get rid of it the better. But you have to take it seriously.

If you treat this as a science, you have to look at what’s worked and what’s working. One of the exciting things about the sewer socialists and part of the reason for their success is that they understood you couldn’t just borrow models from other countries because there are particularities to the United States. Consciousness is different; the political conditions are different.

Part of their success was they said, “We’re going to look at everything that’s working around the world, but we’re not going to assume that there’s some formula for what’s going to work here.” They did a lot of experimenting. Ultimately, that acknowledgment that we don’t yet know what’s going to work and we have to learn through experience — I think that kind of pragmatic approach is the only viable way if we’re going to rebuild a mass socialist politics in the United States today.

Eric Blanc

One important thing we haven’t talked about as much is that they had a robust vision and practice for working inside and outside of the state, as we would put it today. They didn’t believe what those who we might call social democrats believe today, in some parts of the world, that you can just elect people and that’s going to be how change happens. They purposefully and consciously said that’s not going to be enough, because they understood you’re going you’re going up against important corporations and the political establishment, even the best politicians getting elected aren’t going to be able to win their program.

So they consciously and consistently combined electing people and doing mass organizing in neighborhoods and in workplaces. That was the sweet spot, because without that bottom-up power, there’s no way that the sewer socialists — who, it’s worth saying, very rarely had a majority on their city council, and never had a majority statewide — they ended up passing all of this stuff despite being in a minority within the state for most of the time. They tended to have the mayorship, but they didn’t have some sort of supermajority through which they could have done everything.

The way they were able to pressure all these establishment politicians and overcome the capitalists who were funding them and trying to stop these policies was by going and talking to the people: constantly going and talking to your neighbors, talking to your coworkers, leading the union movement. I don’t think we can overstress this. It wasn’t just that they were involved in the union movement; they led a mass workers’ movement. It was socialists who were literally the leadership of the union. So much so that Berger’s newspaper was actually published and printed by the union movement of Milwaukee.

That outside power really gave the punch to the electoral realm. But they were really pragmatic. Beyond the things I already said, I want to flag that they were extremely focused on the most widely and deeply felt needs of working people. They didn’t just project what their program would be and hope people would come around. They listened.

It turned out that what people wanted was same thing they want today. They want to be able to get by. You want decent wages, decent housing, to be able to afford health care for your kids, be able to afford enough to enjoy life. So they were ruthlessly focused on bread-and-butter issues. They had the message discipline of Bernie Sanders or Zohran. If you’ve ever seen Bernie or Zohran talk, they always pivot back to what they know the core issues are. That was sewer socialism.

Eric Blanc

The easy way to see that’s not the case is that the number of Germans was actually going down. From about 1890 through the 1960s, it’s consistently going down by this time. The big waves of immigration were earlier.

Certainly the Germans were an important part of the party. I don’t want to discount that aspect of it, but at first, most of those Germans weren’t socialists. Even in Milwaukee, the socialists were a minority. It took them decades to win the leadership of the union movement. It took them decades before they even elected their first city councilors. And so, if all of the Germans had been naturally socialist, then it would have been the case from the start. But actually, they had to do the work.

And it wasn’t just Germans who they won over. Not just because a lot of those Germans were basically Americans by then; the kid of a German who didn’t speak German was an American just like anybody else. But they had to win over Poles. Poles were the biggest non-German group.

Pretty remarkably, if you want to say which ethnic group in Milwaukee most overwhelmingly supported the sewer socialists, it wasn’t Germans or Poles. It was black people The black population of Milwaukee, which was very small — we’re talking about roughly 1 percent of the population, but it was growing after World War I — overwhelmingly supported the sewer socialists because they were the only ones that were fighting for their economic interests, and they were the only ones that were fighting against the Ku Klux Klan and against lynching nationally.

That was a story that I had never heard about before and, frankly, I found surprising. Victor Berger is notorious, rightly so, for early on in his career being an open white supremacist. What I found in my research was that there was a totally untold story. During World War I, he flipped, and the movement flipped, because of the influence of the black movement and because of the discrediting of scientific racism. People were starting to understand that there aren’t scientifically different races. They reenvisioned what socialist politics meant in the fight against racism, and they became very consistent anti-racists.

That’s an important story as well, because the white supremacy of Victor Berger has often been used to discredit the socialist movement: “Why would you talk about these people? They were a bunch of racists.” But then also, it’s just an inspiring story. It’s pretty remarkable that somebody who had been so racist could become, by the time he died. . . . 

This is how I found out that Berger ended up becoming an anti-racist. I was looking at the newspaper the day after he died; he was hit by a trolley in 1929. So I’m looking at the sewer socialist newspaper, and it has all these different people’s speeches and mourning and remembrances of Victor Berger. On the front page of their paper, the leader of the NAACP in Milwaukee had long paean to Berger — not just as a fighter for working people, but [he said,] “There’s never been a more consistent fighter for racial justice,” which is actually not true. I think he didn’t even realize that Berger had been pretty bad on this before. This is the pre-internet era; there are not so many receipts.

But by the time he died, he was rightly revered as a fighter for black equality. That’s an important part of the sewer socialist legacy worth reviving.

Eric Blanc

Part of it was his own independent sort of  . . .  Victor Berger was a big nerd. Part of the reason he was so racist before is that he was reading all of this scientific racist nonsense. But then, in these years during World War I, it starts getting discredited. There’s all this research coming out, rigorous comparative studies, that proved scientific racism wrong. Berger was like, “Oh, I was wrong.”

Then part of it was just that black people finally had significant enough representation within Milwaukee that they could start working together. It wasn’t just what he read about in other parts of the country. There was a black community, and through experience, he and the socialists through experience saw that these were working-class people who had nowhere else to go politically, who had been abandoned, who were very open to socialism, and who weren’t like what all of the myths of the time said about black people. These myths just weren’t proven to be true in practice.

There’s story after story that I talk about in my blog post. Just to give one example, they have this multi-month defense of a black pastor who killed a white man who was trying to kill him.

The sewer socialists put all of their effort into saying it was self-defense, and they won. At the time, this is the peak of the KKK. Nobody else is doing this at the time.

So there was this real affinity between the socialists [and the black population]. Part of it had to do with the fact that they themselves were being repressed at this time. There’s this moment during World War I when there’s an anti-socialist and particularly anti-German offensive across the country, where they’re really demonized.

I think, for Berger, that was a profound experience that heightened his attention to the dangers of demonization and what it felt like to be persecuted. He was thrown in prison; he was facing up to twenty years of jail time. If you go through an experience like that, then your sensitivity to repression and prejudice gets heightened, and I think you saw that in Victor Berger’s evolution.

Eric Blanc

It’s funny, because I when I first published a short version of this piece, some far-left critics said, “You like the sewer socialists. You’re saying they’re a bunch of moderates. But actually, they’re even further to the left than you are today in DSA, because at least they had independent party.”

The answer is, well, the contexts are different. They were very pragmatic at the time, and they were in a time that predated the establishment and crystallization of party primaries across the board.

This is a big factor. Up until 1968, basically, you couldn’t run a socialist, for instance, for Democratic president. It couldn’t happen. Party insiders determined who the candidate was going to be. You couldn’t have had Bernie; you couldn’t have an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Even on a local level, the primary system didn’t really become normalized for many more decades into the twentieth century.

The context through which you might be able to do an inside-the–Democratic Party strategy or where that would make sense was basically cut off. That meant that their voters weren’t like, “We’re going to go try to work within the Democrats” — or actually, in this case, the Republicans, who were the more progressive party in Wisconsin at the time.

Also, part of the difference was that the Democrats and Republicans were way less polarized. So the Socialists could afford to be a third party, because the spoiler question was really a nonissue. Whereas today, if you run somebody for president or even on a state level and you’re a third-party candidate, you’re not going to get too many votes — because if you do, that’s likely to make the Republicans win, and that’s going to be extremely detrimental to working-class people’s interests.

That wasn’t the case in the early 1900s. As I mentioned, the Republicans in Wisconsin were actually better; the political differences between Democrats and Republicans was like Tweedledee and Tweedledum. People say today that they’re the same. Well, it was actually the case then, as far as the material differences [on many issues]. The Democrats were the party of Jim Crow. It was very messy.

In that context, they had more space for a third party. I don’t think that you can replicate that today, because the contexts are different. But you can replicate their approach, which was to scientifically study the terrain. It’s not just formulas. The formulas emerged from experience. They saw what worked in practice, and they changed their positions.

We’re having to relearn through experience and not just books what it takes to do mass politics in the United States today. How do you relate to the Democrats? What are the contradictions? What are the dilemmas? To think that there’s just a formula for how to do that, independently of assessing and reassessing what’s working on the ground, I think, is wrong. So it’s more the methodology of the sewer socialists and their spirit [that we can learn from] than just this or that tactic that they employed.

Eric Blanc

They didn’t have a formula for it. Which is to say that they actually had to assess each compromise on its own merits. Oftentimes they wouldn’t accept the first compromise offer that was made. If you’re in a state legislature or Congress, it’s constantly an issue: Which compromises are going to be enough for you to call a victory, for your base to feel, “Okay, that was enough”?

Obviously, their demands were very ambitious. They wanted to overthrow capitalism; they wanted to nationalize industries. They wanted to do all these things, but they were also pragmatic. They knew they had to deliver. So there was always going to be a gap between the maximal program and what they knew they could win, what they had the votes for.

They took it on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes they just voted no. Relatively frequently, they would reject the Democrats’ or Republicans’ milquetoast reforms if they didn’t go far enough. But sometimes, they would accept the compromise and say, “We’re going to keep on fighting.”

I think the lesson there is that the secret to figuring out which compromises are acceptable is assessing each one on its own but then also understanding that your independence [as socialists] doesn’t just come from what this or that politician says or this or that decision. It comes from your independent organization. They could afford to make some compromises, because they knew that they had a base that understood their politics. That independent vision and that independent structure allowed them to collectively figure out, okay, this is as far as we can go at this moment, and they didn’t demoralize their base in that way.

It’s also how they understood which compromises went too far. How can you know what you should accept without actually having a deliberative process with working-class people? because of that, they were able to thread that needle, which is extremely difficult, better than anybody else I’ve seen.

Eric Blanc

It’s clear that Zohran has already taken a lot from the sewer socialists. He talks about it. Some of the things that he’s talked about . . .  well, first of all, running for mayor — just the plausibility of that. He’s proven that in practice, but then also by pointing to the history and the precedent that you can take executive positions even under capitalism and deliver.

He talks about making government more efficient, so that you can show it’s better than the private sector, and having excellent public governance. Those are things that he’s already done.

The third piece, which is something he’s sort of done and is doing better but that I’d still like to see more of, is using the state to do everything possible to build up working-class organization from below. This was not a secondary piece for the sewer socialists. When they talked about delivering, it wasn’t just public services. They were delivering a political context in which you could have 60 percent union density, 60 percent of workers in a union, in which working people could build power from below. They understood that their project was inextricable from that.

Zohran is most of the way there, but it hasn’t yet been the same degree of focus, particularly the labor movement, but you’re starting to see it now. I was more critical of Zohran early on because we hadn’t seen so many initiatives. But I’ve been pretty excited over the last few weeks. For instance, the administration has made a big thing about supporting the Amazon workers who are unionizing and who are pushing for the Delivery Protection Act, which would essentially make it possible for them to be treated like Amazon workers. [The Mamdani administration] didn’t just write a press release. It made a video; it’s putting political capital to it. It has also been putting a lot of resources toward organizing tenants.

So I think that Zohran’s administration is moving in that direction. But I think it’s good to keep on pushing it on that, because the reality is there’s only so far you can go, and there’s only so far he’ll be able to go until the working class in New York City is far more organized.

This is the biggest danger. As popular as Zohran is and as exciting it is that New York City DSA has over fifteen thousand members, the reality is we’re still very fragile. Our links to the working class are still much more tenuous and shallow than the sewer socialists’ were. That’s a difficult situation because people’s excitement and the good vibes can go away really quickly if there’s one economic crisis or one political defeat. If you don’t have that organized base, all of that can evaporate quickly.

So I think that there’s a bit of a race against the clock. I would urge listeners, Zohran and company, to just keep that urgency in mind. We need to get as organized from below as possible so that this project can succeed in New York and nationally.