Frank Zeidler’s Milwaukee

Milwaukee has produced more notable Socialist politicians and policymakers than any city in the United States. Socialist Emil Seidl won the city’s mayoralty in 1910, as did 21 Socialist city aldermen that year. Daniel Hoan served as a Socialist mayor from 1916 to 1940 and kept the city debt-free through the Great Depression. Charles Whitnall, another Socialist, was Milwaukee’s chief planner during the 1920s and 1930s. On the national stage, Victor Berger represented Milwaukee in the House of Representatives during World War I, and his anti-war stance made him famous. Collectively, these leaders showed a remarkable willingness to experiment, remaking Milwaukee’s urban form. By 1920, it was the second most densely populated city in the country. When Whitnall created a comprehensive zoning ordinance in 1920, Milwaukee became the first city to enact zoning. Socialists built Milwaukee’s Garden Homes in the 1920s, the first municipally funded housing project in America.

Frank Zeidler, originally an engineer by trade and an admirer of both Hoan and Whitnall’s planning-minded development, came to lead Milwaukee by chance. His older brother, Carl, defeated Hoan in the 1940 mayoral election. Two years later, Carl Zeidler signed up to serve in the Navy during World War II. After his ship was lost at sea in the Pacific Ocean, he became a legendary local figure. In 1948, Frank Zeidler, already a longtime Socialist party member at age 38 and a former City of Milwaukee School Board member, decided to run for mayor in a crowded field of fourteen candidates. He emerged the victor, due at least in part to his locally famous surname.

After World War II, American cities struggled with housing shortages, increasingly drab downtowns, and emerging racial divisions. Zeidler addressed these differently than most big-city mayors. “Growth coalitions” of downtown businesses, civic elites, real estate interests, and politicians were emerging as national paradigms for rebuilding the central cores of cities such as Pittsburgh and Chicago. But Zeidler’s administration openly resisted this model. Never comfortable with Milwaukee’s business establishment, Zeidler recalled in his memoirs: “I could see that these men moved in a stratum of society into which I had never entered.” Rather than focus solely on the urban core, Zeidler urged his planners to preempt suburbanization by designing large communities in the rural countryside. In 1951, Zeidler announced an audacious plan to build a ten-square-mile community in neighboring (and then rural) Waukesha County, a “satellite city” that would house over 50,000 residents on city-owned land. Catherine Bauer, a noted housing reformer, once told Zeidler that his satellite city was “the most progressive and significant move being made in the whole field of city planning and housing in America today.” When the plan faltered due to suburban resistance in the courts, Zeidler’s administration stepped up annexation, with the goal of creating a single metropolitan government for the Milwaukee region.

Zeidler’s grand plans proved only partially successful. Milwaukee did double its size as a result of annexation, and its population decline in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s was far less severe than in other Rust Belt cities. But suburban resistance to annexation was so strong that the region grew increasingly balkanized into warring camps. One suburban attorney who fought annexation in court claimed Zeidler bugged his office with listening devices. Zeidler, increasingly frustrated by suburban recalcitrance, said in 1958: “The city consults with suburban governments, but we do not believe they have reason for existing.”

Perhaps even more politically damaging to Zeidler was the issue of race. Milwaukee’s African-American population tripled during the 1950s, and Zeidler openly expressed support of civil rights during that crucial decade. In the 1956 mayoral election, Zeidler’s opponents spread rumors that he lured African Americans to Milwaukee by putting up billboards in the rural South inviting blacks northward. Other opponents tried to use Zeidler’s socialism against him; one manufacturing firm implicitly threatened to fire any worker who voted for Zeidler in 1956. The political sabotage failed, and Zeidler won a third term, but he grew disillusioned enough to refuse to run for a fourth term in 1960, convinced the race issue would undo him.

Frank Zeidler died in July 2006 at the age of 93, and he left behind a mixed legacy. Annexation increased Milwaukee’s size, but it also created deep political divisions that have persisted. Only two percent of the Milwaukee region’s African Americans reside in its suburbs. In an interview late in his life, Zeidler expressed regret that he never attempted to save the city’s now long-defunct rapid transit system. “It remains one of my biggest regrets,” he said. No planned “satellite” communities of the type Zeidler proposed ever materialized. Despite these failings, Zeidler is remembered in Milwaukee as a unique combination of idealist, politician, Renaissance man, and maverick. “He stayed active in the public dialogue,” recalls former Milwaukee mayor John Norquist. “He had fierce idealism. He didn’t have any mundane, selfish motives.”

Zeidler remained true to his quixotic nature in the 46 years following his last term in office. He found time to publish his memoirs in a 300-page book. He typed up hundreds of pages of unpublished thoughts on urban development, only available now in a collection of his papers at the Milwaukee Public Library. He rewrote Shakespeare plays in modern vernacular and ran for President of the United States in 1976 as a Socialist. He resisted white flight, never moving out of the modest home on Milwaukee’s North Side he purchased in 1946, even as his white neighbors left. Ever the intellectual, he wryly noted to a local reporter in 2002 that when he died, if he had the chance to enter two doors, one marked “heaven” and one marked “lectures on heaven,” he would choose the latter. Let’s hope he got his wish.