Before I started researching Milwaukee’s socialists, I assumed that the consensus view was accurate. And that’s why I was so surprised to stumble across a 1929 obituary of Berger from Milwaukee’s NAACP praising “the very broad and sympathetic views Mr Berger always had regarding us as a race, the unbiased attitude of his paper, The Milwaukee Leader, and his interest in the welfare of all.” How could one square this NAACP assessment with Berger’s infamous 1902 declaration that “there can be no doubt that the negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower race — that the Caucasian and even the Mongolian have the start on them in civilization by many thousand years”? Maybe the Milwaukee NAACP was just saying something polite but inaccurate about an influential dead man?
Searching for answers, I started systematically reading The Milwaukee Leader, the newspaper that Berger founded in 1913 and edited until he was killed by a trolley car in 1929. What I found surprised me. It turns out that generation after generation of historians had somehow managed to overlook a remarkable transformation: not only did Berger eventually ditch white supremacist views, but he and his paper became ardently anti-racist during the 1920s, a decade when most of white America in both the North and South actively embraced Jim Crow. Using his bully pulpit as America’s first Socialist congressman, Berger became one of the country’s highest-profile white fighters against lynching, racism, imperialism, and nativism.
This is an important story to tell. One-sided portrayals of Berger have long steered US radicals away from learning from our country’s most successful socialist organization: no other group has come close to replicating the Wisconsin socialists’ continued governance over almost five decades, their per capita recruitment to socialism, and their degree of leadership within organized labor and the broader working class. Nevertheless, as a comrade in Milwaukee wrote me a few weeks ago, “the activist attitude here and elsewhere has just been: Berger said racist things so Milwaukee socialists were racists. And then a lot of people just stop there.”
We can’t afford to keep dismissing sewer socialism, especially now that socialists are about to govern New York City and Seattle. This doesn’t mean we should paper over Berger’s initial white supremacist views, which activists today are obviously right to reject. Nor am I suggesting that the major reason to learn from sewer socialism is because of Berger’s later anti-racist praxis. My point is simple: the evolution of Victor Berger’s strategy and practice shows that there’s nothing inherently racist — and therefore politically disqualifying — about sewer socialism.