“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”
“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar, sternly. “Explain yourself !”
“I ca’n’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”
-- Lewis Carroll. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (Kindle Locations 1019-1023). Random House, Inc..
I'm from Milwaukee. The home of beer, meat packing, and socialism. Or as Alice Cooper explained in Wayne's World, "I think one of the most interesting aspects of Milwaukee is the fact that it's the only major American city to have ever elected three socialist mayors."
Milwaukee holds a rich and vibrant immigrant past. Germans brought with them the techniques for brewing as well as the ideals of a government supporting the people, not to mention festivals, pilsners and lagers. At one time, when walking in the streets of Milwaukee, you'd have heard more German than English being spoken. Several of the major newspapers were published in German. Buildings retain that German heritage indelibly etched in stone, like the German-English Academy that still boasts 'Turnlehrer Seminar N.A.T.B.' The legacy of a socialism movement in Milwaukee remains in the public transit, Summerfest, and lakefront festivals, and on Jones Island where effluence is transformed into Milorganite for fertilizer, and the liquid refuse is sanitized and returned to Lake Michigan.
In this pandemic-plagued election season the most common boolean search should be socialism. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have made socialism one of the most talked about concepts throughout a good portion of the campaign season. The Right and conservatives demonize and vilify it while Marxists and the Left idealize it.
The truth is far less sensational. The truth is that socialism and socialist constructs are ubiquitous in America and have been for over a century. The truth is also that fighting for socialism required the no-nonsense duty and commitment that didn't make headlines and didn't bring fame. Victor Berger, the editor and journalist from Milwaukee and the first elected socialist congressman, was denied his seat in D.C. For his dissent against American involvement in World War I, he spent time behind bars. But the people of Milwaukee would not be denied his seat. They re-elected him three times until a judge finally overturned his conviction and he served his term in the nation's capital. As a reward for his hard work, the east coast socialists bestowed the Milwaukee socialist with the vituperative name 'sewer socialists.'
Milwaukee politicians and the public embraced the term. Sewer socialism earned its name from the fight in Milwaukee over clean water. Milwaukee at the turn of the twentieth century was one of the largest cities in America. The population density matched that of Manhattan and it was growing fast. As the population grew, so did the amount of polluted water. Human, animal and industrial waste was transported from the source to the nearest rivers. And the rivers were the source of potable water, which it wasn't. Sickness and illness were rampant. The socialists organized to fight for clean water and clean government.
The sewer socialists weren't talking about government takeover of industry like their namesakes on the east coast. Instead, in Milwaukee the socialists won elections by promising and achieving practical change. Along with clean water, they fought corruption in the government; they aimed at creating better lives for the people through public education, parks, libraries, and safer working conditions. This mantle of socialism in Milwaukee thrived until the last socialist mayor, Frank Zeidler, decided not to run for a fourth term in 1960. So for about 60 years, socialists held major sway over the running of a major US city.
Yet for all of that history, there's an awful lot of confusion about just what socialism is and what it is not.
It's hard to know what people are talking about when socialism is brought up especially when in many cases the person describing socialism doesn't know what socialism is. Listen to Alabama's newly elected senator Tommy Tuberville's ahistorical explanation that we fought against "socialism and communism as our enemies in WWII." Of course, he botched that entirely. The communists in the Soviet Union were, in fact, US allies fighting against the Nazis and the axis nations. Our common enemy was fascism as introduced by Mussolini and Hitler. It was not socialism. Over the years, socialism and communism have melded together. Is that an accurate conflation? What is socialism? Socialism who, what, are you?
William Buckley, Jr. defined socialism when in growing frustration with interlocutor Michael Harrington's repeated denials that the LBJ poverty program was a socialist platform, Buckley blurted out, "Nobody any more thinks of the word socialism as involving purely the ownership of the means of production. Obviously, it's a socialist program; socialistic in the sense that it is financed and governed by a central authority, that it does not encourage private means by which much of the same thing can be done." For Buckley, poverty would better be attacked through private entrepreneurship and government incentives like tax deductions.
But for the socialists in Milwaukee, poverty could be defeated when the government invested in education, mass transit, clean parks and a clean way of life. They created a Milwaukee that thrived up to and around the two world wars.
American socialism's apex nestled between the Civil War and the beginning of the Cold War. Nationwide, life for the common worker was poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Upton Sinclair's depiction of the meat packing industry in The Jungle spurred vast regulation and oversight. Theodore Roosevelt rode into the White House with the full support of muckraking socialist-leaning journalists and progressives who hoped for a presidency more inclined to "government takeover of the railroads, elimination of private utilities, easier credit for farmers, the outlawing of child labor, the right of workers to organize unions, increased protection of civil liberties, an end to US imperialism in Latin America, and a national referendum vote before any president could again lead the nation into offensive war."
Around the country, socialists elected to local office ushered in huge changes to work weeks, workers' rights, safety standards, clean water standards, fire prevention, and myriad public works. It was progressives and socialists who paved the way for the New Deal and it was Eugene Debs' influence on unions and worker organizations that led to OSHA and safety standards.
Anyone who tells you that publicly funded fire prevention, police protection, national parks, education, sewerage systems, roads and infrastructure, a standing military, libraries, Medicare, Social Security are not socialist systems need only be reminded of Milwaukee's history.
In the wealth of available contemporary literature on the subject, there's Michael Newman's very easy reading book simply called Socialism. But it's journalist John Nichols' The "S" Word: A Short History of an American Tradition...Socialism that narrates the full poignant and compelling story of the people behind the movement that changed America. Milwaukee takes center stage as the experimental city with its socialist vision for anti-corruption and a government that fights for the welfare of the people.
Berger, Eugene Debs, Daniel Hoan, Zeidler, Emil Seidel, Norman Thomas share the starring roles. "The Socialists’ most immediate and noteworthy accomplishment...was to root out municipal corruption, much of which came from the brothels in City Hall’s shadow and from the privately-owned streetcar which stopped at its front door. With that task complete, Hoan and Zeidler then set about building public institutions, which continue to improve our lives today."
Today, regardless of the way Republicans tell it, people really like socialist policies. Take a look at health care, for example. The Kaiser Family Foundation has tracked public opinion on Medicare for many years. Older Medicare recipients are happiest with their coverage. Nearly nine out of 10 people who are 80 years old or older say they're satisfied or very satisfied with Medicare. Only 6% said they're either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. That's compared to 79% of people age 71 to 79, 71% of people 65-70 and 69% of those under 65; satisfaction with private health plans drops to 55%.
Upon reaching the final pages of Nichols' crucial and essential book, no one should be surprised if a latent desire to implement socialist policies throughout the country suddenly awakens. At a time when health care and public health has been thrust upon the forefront of all our minds, there are those still fighting to overturn the ACA and cast millions into healthcare uncertainty. At a time of widespread infrastructure and education failures, it seems more pressing than ever to initiate a government-backed push to restore and provide for the welfare of the American people.
From the Milwaukee experiment, FDR built on the socialist platform and co-opted its ideas and systems. Today, millions of seniors rely on socialist inspired Medicare and Social Security. All Americans can thank socialists for sewers, clean water, city, state, and national parks. The socialist legacy that began as an experiment in Milwaukee, pervades the entire American system.
Excerpt from The "S" Word, by John Nichols:
"If we have been led to believe anything by the enthusiastic expressions of our media and political elites, it is the basic premise that America was founded as a capitalist country and that socialism is a dangerous foreign import best barred at the border. The common if not quite wholly accepted “wisdom” holds that everything public is inferior to anything private; that corporations are always good and unions always bad; that progressive taxation is inherently evil and the best economic model is the one that avoids the messiness of equity by allowing the extremely wealthy to skim off their share before letting what remains trickle down to the great mass of Americans. No less a historian than Rush Limbaugh informs us with some regularity that proposals to tax people as rich as he is in order to provide health care for sick kids and jobs for the unemployed are “antithetical to the nation’s founding.” Limbaugh, the loudest voice in an anti–Barack Obama echo chamber, says that the president is “destroying this country as it was founded.”
The shrillest of Limbaugh’s flattering imitators, Fox News’s Sean Hannity, charged when Obama offered tepid proposals to organize a private health-care system in a modestly more humane manner, that “the Constitution was shredded, thwarted, the rule of law was passed aside …” Hannity got no argument from his guest on the day he assessed the damage done to the Constitution by those who would care for our own: former speaker of the US House of Representatives Newt Gingrich. “This is a group prepared to fundamentally violate the Constitution,” the former congressional leader (and 2012 Republican presidential contender) said of an Obama administration that he argued was playing to the “30 percent of the country [that] really is [in favor of] a left-wing secular socialist system.” Then, for good measure, Gingrich compared Obama with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez—an actual and ardent socialist who, though the former speaker apparently missed the report, had recently referred to the American president as “a poor ignoramus [who] should read and study a little to understand reality”—with a crack about Obama’s previous employment as a constitutional law professor. “Which constitution was he teaching? Venezuelan constitutional law?” opined Gingrich. “I mean, you know, I can’t imagine how he could have actually taught American constitutional law and be this wrong this often.”
The former speaker, who swore more than a few oaths to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States…without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion,” surely knows that the document makes no reference to economic systems, to capitalism, to free enterprise or to corporations or business arrangements. Unfortunately, as James Madison warned, partisan excess can cause even former history professors at West Georgia College to lose their bearings. The same can be said for former heads of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes at Wasilla High School.
Though Sarah Palin famously struggled to name a “favorite founder” when asked to do so by Glenn Beck, and though she made remarks about the role of the vice presidency that provoked a lively national debate about whether she had ever read the nation’s founding document, that did not in the spring of 2009 prevent the former governor of Alaska from raising constitutional concerns about Obama’s proposal to develop a system of “universal building codes” in order to promote energy efficiency. “Our country could evolve into something that we do not even recognize, certainly that is so far from what the founders of our country had in mind for us,” a gravely concerned Palin informed a nodding Sean Hannity on the Fox News Channel.
Hannity had an idea about the direction in which Obama was evolving the country. Arching an eyebrow and leaning forward with all the “I play an anchorman on TV” sincerity of someone who had recently volunteered to be waterboarded for charity, he interrupted Palin with a one-word question.
“Socialism?”
“Well,” the immediate former vice-presidential nominee of the second-oldest political party in the nation responded, “that’s where we are headed.”
Actually, it’s not.
Palin was wrong about the perils of energy efficiency. And she was wrong about Obama.
That is no cover for the 44th president. This book is not written as a defense of Barack Obama against any charge. In fact quite the opposite, as Chapter Seven will detail. What is important for the purposes of introduction is that the president says he is not a socialist. And the country’s most outspoken socialists heartily agree with him on that point. Indeed, the only people who seem to think Obama displays even minimally social-democratic tendencies are those pundits, politicos and pretenders to concern about the republic who imagine—out of sincere if misguided faith, or for the purposes of crude electioneering—that the very mention of the word “socialism” should inspire in Americans a reaction not unlike that of a vampire confronted with the Host.
Nichols, John. The S Word (pp. 4-6). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.
We are told that this is a new age. Yet, all that is new are the gadgets we are sold, and the prospect that those gadgets might put a lot of us out of work. The schemes of fabulously wealthy monopolists to increase their wealth at the expense of the rest of us are certainly not new. They are ancient, as ancient as what Eugene Victor Debs described when he recalled “the old ethic that man’s business on this earth was to look out for himself.” That, complained Debs, “was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man.” Just as monopolists and monopolies are not new, neither are the responses to those schemes. It is good and necessary to demand jobs for the unemployed and wages for the underpaid. It is good and necessary to fight to maintain the rough outlines of civil society as defined by public education and public services. There is nothing new about these fights, nothing modern about these demands. They, too, fit in the construct stated by Debs when he explained, “Thousands of years ago the question was asked: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.” Debs was trying to sort that all out in 1908. A century and some years later, we’re still at it.
Unfortunately, in a digital age, some responses are less sufficient than they once were. There is even, in specific circumstances, a danger that incremental responses may fit rather too easily into the business plans of the new monopolists—who meet demands for more pay for human beings with schemes to spend a little more on research and development of the apps and robots that replace human beings. It’s a vicious circle, and most of us are running in it. The way out is not to run faster. The way out is the same as it has always been: to seek a new politics that is adapted to our times but that is not defined by them. What is needed is a politics that is sufficient to assert the social and human agenda in the face of rapid technological change and the raging inequality that extends from that change—a politics that puts the people in charge not just of making economic demands but of making economic decisions.
The crisis of the twenty-first century, already well defined and much discussed by elites, is that digitally defined and driven automation, in combination with a race-to-the-bottom ethic with regard to globalization, will lead to dramatic displacement and dislocation of workers. European Commission technology commissioner Neelie Kroes explained in 2014 that: “a shortage of jobs is a pending social disaster.” Google CEO Eric Schmidt admits: “There is quite a bit of research that middle-class jobs that are relatively highly skilled are being automated out.” What is now commonly referred to by the elites who gather for economic conferences at Davos and Aspen as “the jobs problem” will, Schmidt argues, be “the defining problem” of the next several decades. “The race is between computers and people and the people need to win. I am clearly on that side,” says Schmidt, who counsels that: “it is pretty clear that work is changing and the classic nine-to-five job is going to have to be redefined. Without significant encouragement, this will get worse and worse.”
Nichols, John. The S Word (p. 264). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.
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