The new sewer socialists
When Socialist Party candidate Frank Zeidler ran for mayor of Milwaukee in 1948, his opponent leveled a charge municipal socialists of his day considered ridiculous: Future U.S. Rep. Henry Reuss said Zeidler “thinks the city ought to be running the corner grocery store.”
Nearly 80 years later, New York City’s democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, made government-run grocery stores the cornerstone of his campaign. While the rise of urban socialist leaders such as Mamdani, Seattle’s Katie Wilson, the District of Columbia’s Janeese Lewis George, and Ann Arbor’s Yousef Rabhi has led some socialists to celebrate the return of municipal socialism, the new generation’s sweeping plans reveal the extent of their predecessors’ success and how much further this generation of collectivists plans to go.
Three mayors belonging to the state affiliate of the Socialist Party of America, the Social-Democrat Party of Wisconsin (SDPW), ruled Milwaukee for most of the 50-year stretch between 1910 and 1960: Emil Seidel (1910-1912), Daniel Webster Hoan (1916-1940), and Frank Zeidler (1948-1960). Pejoratively dubbed “sewer socialists” by their more revolutionary brethren, they focused on incremental socialization of industry by local authorities.
City grocery stores are not entirely unprecedented. Hoan took advantage of World War I to establish the Bureau of Food Control, which purchased and resold Army surplus food at just above cost from 1917 to 1920. “[I]n January 1920 alone, Hoan purchased 72,000 cans of peas, 33,600 cans of baked beans, 100,000 pounds of salt, 20,000 pairs of knit gloves and wool socks, among other items,” detailed Eric Blanc, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University. While Hoan publicly advanced the measure as a way to avoid shortages and black markets, he admitted that “the public sale of food by me has offered an opportunity of demonstrating the Socialist theory of operating a business … without profits can be worked out in a grand and beneficial manner.”
Yet Hoan’s campaign to underbid private grocers ended with the Great War. Mamdani plans no armistice. He has requested $30 million to build La Marqueta in East Harlem, the first of five proposed socialist supermarkets pledging to offer staples at 30% below market price. While it will likely end like Kansas City’s Sun Fresh public grocery store, which closed in 2025 after 10 years and $18 million in taxpayer subsidies, his war on economic reality advances his predecessors’ goal of “evolutionary socialism.”
The early municipal socialists had several characteristics their successors consciously eschew. One is a moral component: Seidel posed proudly alongside Socialist District Attorney Winifred Zabel as they closed brothels and betting parlors. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) demands “full decriminalization of sex work” in deference to “one of the most criminalized, stigmatized, and persecuted workforces in history” and opposes “policies that oppress bodily autonomy,” a proposition previously associated exclusively with more ideologically inclined libertarians. Mamdani cosponsored legislation to that effect, proclaiming, “Sex work is work.” Katie Wilson already faces a recall petition over allegations that she ignored sex trafficking, prostitution, and open-air drug use while seizing street crime as a pretext to strip away residents’ Second Amendment rights.
Rapacious, ravenous socialism must continually expand to survive, forever searching out and consuming others’ resources for its own ends.
Hoan unionized the police rather than defunding them, while the DSA encourages policymakers to “disempower police unions” before “fully abolishing the police and prison system,” a position Mamdani and Wilson have at times adopted. Early municipal socialists showed enthusiasm for freeways, with Zeidler extolling the “citizen’s highway.” By the 2020s, even a perceived moderate Democrat like Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg put American communities on a “road diet.” Hoan also made the city an entrepreneur by recycling its sewage into a fertilizer called Milorganite (Milwaukee Organic Nitrogen), a side hustle that earned the city$13 million in 2024. Such ventures only benefit the city, because it is a socialist island floating in a capitalist ocean.
Politically, Hoan et al. ran on the SDPW ticket, while DSA members’ alignment with the Democratic Party caused Sen. John Fetterman, D-Penn, to chide them to “run under your own banner.” Similarly, Engels (in a letter cited by Lenin) condemned the British Fabian Society for “not putting up Socialist candidates against the Liberals but of fastening them on to the Liberals, forcing them upon them, or deceiving them into taking them.”
Yet, appropriately for socialists, municipal socialists have most things in common. SDPW founder and future U.S. Representative Victor Berger spent years infiltrating Milwaukee’s Federated Trades Council before making its members the key foot soldiers for and beneficiaries of his party. They delivered thousands of pieces of literature in dozens of languages; in turn, socialist mayors employed only union labor and threatened to close plants that refused to negotiate with union organizers. The marriage of union halls and city hall has proven so durable that today, public sector employees are more than five times as likely to belong to a union as their private sector counterparts.
Then, as now, redistribution of wealth stoked ethnic tensions. As Milwaukee’s black population increased nearly threefold between 1950 and 1960, opponents accused Zeidler of importing his own voters at native Milwaukeeans’ expense. Mass immigration incited further discontent.
For a century, sewer socialists have warred against the right of city-dwellers to retreat to the suburbs. The socialist mayors’ annexation campaign nearly quadrupled Milwaukee’s size, from 25 square miles in 1920 to 96 sq. mi. today. Half that growth came under Zeidler, who believed suburbs had no “right to exist” and who desperately needed a larger tax base to fund his extravagant projects, such as building integrated public housing in working-class neighborhoods.
Annexation destroyed the liberty created by the “citizen’s highway”: the right to self-determination, to live free from socialism.California’s proposed 2026 wealth tax would apply to residents who move before the vote, and Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax on second homes worth $5 million or more disproportionately levies those who live outside the five boroughs. Mamdani seemed too forthcoming when he confessed he felt “confident, not only in the importance of a tax on secondary homes, … [but] in the necessity of the half a billion dollars it would raise.”
To put a finer point on Dame Thatcher’s maxim, the proximate problem with socialism is that first you run out of your own money. Socialist municipalities end up mirroring the behavior their leaders critique in capitalism: Rapacious, ravenous socialism must continually expand to survive, forever searching out and consuming others’ resources for its own ends.
While sewer socialists are glamorized for creating public water and waste systems and preserving public parks, they intended to act locally and socialize globally. Socialist historian Shelton Stromquist wrote that municipal socialists developed a “translocal” socialist consciousness. Socialists at all levels of government worked in tandem to collectivize society. While Seidel raised the city’s minimum wage by 14% and instituted an eight-hour workday, Congressman Berger introduced legislation to nationalize the radio and rail industries, and to change the structure of the U.S. Senate and federal governance over Washington, D.C. Since the municipal socialist revolution is cumulative, what they began with water and sewage Mamdani and Wilson now extend to childcare, confiscatory taxation, and global identity politics.
Despite municipal socialists’ incremental means, Berger wrote in 1906, “we are revolutionists. … [W]e do not deny that after we have convinced the majority of the people, we are going to use force if the minority should resist.”
He added in 1909, “Lawlessness of the right kind is a lever that has moved the world forward. … And the better we are organized, the more political power and economic and social strength we obtain — the better the people are armed in every respect — the less bloody the revolution will be.” (All emphases in original.)
The past provides one example of failed opposition. Like modern libertarians, Zeidler’s 1956 mayoral opponent, Milton J. McGuire, cited the city’s glut of radios and televisions as proof of the free market’s superiority, just as modern libertarians belittle socialist agitators for owning a smartphone. Numerous modern libertarians, including the late Fred Smith, recognized the need to make a moral case for economic liberty.
One can begin by noting municipal socialism prevents people from forming the community they like or leaving one they do not. Collectivism hinders citizens from reflecting their own personalities and creating the rich, uniquely variegated communities federalism is intended to safeguard. Socialism, which offers the same stale answer to every question, produces not a rich mosaic but an unimaginative quilt forever copying the same patch, as socialist ends get foisted on one city after another indiscriminately.
Collectivism breeds unending sameness and tedium, leaving communities beset by the same failures again and again.
Ultimately, socialism aims to rock the foundations of American governance. “That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest,” wrote James Madison. Nations where “unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species: where arbitrary taxes invade the domestic sanctuaries of the rich, and excessive taxes grind the faces of the poor” constitute a “violation of that sacred property, which Heaven, in decreeing man to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, kindly reserved to him.”
As the snowballing of municipal socialism’s programs show, the most dangerous form of inflation comes from ever-expanding government.
V. Rev. Benjamin Johnson (@therightswriter) is an Eastern Orthodox priest with more than two decades of experience as a conservative editor, commentator, and radio talk show host. His views are his own.
