In 1910, during the United States’ first Gilded Age, Milwaukee elected Emil Seidel as its first socialist mayor. For much of the next 50 years — even during the Red Scare led by Wisconsin’s notorious Sen. Joseph McCarthy — the city elected and reelected socialist mayors. These mayors, author Dan Kaufman wrote in the New York Times, were known for their integrity — uncompromised by the local business community that despised them — and for their frugality, their commitment that public money should be spent carefully and not squandered in smarmy deals with private contractors. They installed hundreds of […]
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