There’s a genre of progressive nostalgia currently making the rounds in left-leaning publications like Jacobin and in the campaigns of a new class of so-called Democrat Socialists like Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong and Madison Assembly candidate Julia Bennett. It’s a warm, sepia-toned celebration of Milwaukee’s “sewer socialism,” the municipal movement that governed America’s most German city for the early part of the 20th century.
The pitch is irresistible to a certain kind of romantic: clean streets, honest government, and swimming pools for the working class. A socialism that actually worked, they say. Practical. Pragmatic.
A model for today?
Not so much.
The revisionism required to celebrate sewer socialism demands ignoring the man most responsible for it: Victor Berger, founder of the Social Democratic Party of Wisconsin, editor of the Milwaukee Leader, and the first socialist elected to the United States Congress. Berger was not merely a product of his times whose racial views can be charitably bracketed. He was an aggressive, systematic, and enthusiastic white supremacist whose racism was inseparable from his socialism.
Berger wrote openly and repeatedly that Black Americans were inferior. In his newspaper, he argued that African Americans were “uncivilized,” that their presence degraded communities, and that immigration restrictions should apply racial hierarchies explicitly. He opposed Black workers organizing alongside white workers, not on tactical grounds but on biological ones. He believed the socialist movement should be — and remain — a white man’s movement. These were not offhand remarks. They were editorial positions, repeated, defended, and institutionalized in the political machinery he built.
He was also a virulent anti-Asian racist who championed Chinese exclusion with the fervor of a nativist, framing it explicitly in terms of racial competition for wages and civilization. The working class Berger wanted to liberate was a carefully curated one — Northern European, white, and sorted by his own ethnic prejudices.
His anti-Black politics had concrete consequences. Milwaukee, under socialist governance, became one of the most residentially segregated cities in the North. The clean parks and public pools the nostalgists celebrate were, in practice, racially exclusionary. The socialist-backed municipal housing initiatives featured whites-only racial covenants. The civic infrastructure built in Berger’s image served the white ethnic working class and excluded the Black residents who migrated north seeking industrial work and human dignity.
Milwaukee’s segregation legacy — which persists to this day, making it consistently one of the most racially divided metropolitan areas in America — was not an accident of history. It was baked into the political culture sewer socialism constructed.
Modern progressives celebrating sewer socialism are engaged in the oldest intellectual vice of the left: cherry-picking the outcomes they like while discarding the ideological baggage that produced them. The swimming pools were real. So was Victor Berger.
A political tradition founded by a man who believed Black Americans were subhuman and built institutions that enforced that belief in concrete and asphalt does not deserve rehabilitation. It deserves honest reckoning.
Some things belong in the sewer. Sewer socialism is one of them.
