By 1910, a plurality of voters were ready to embrace a third party candidate. “Milwaukee had a reputation as being one of the most corrupt cities in the United States,” says Aims McGuinness, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Both Republicans and Democrats were notoriously easy to bribe, and voters were getting sick of them. So when Emil Seidel, who had by then become one of the most outspoken members of the Socialist Party of America and was currently serving as an alderman, ran for mayor on a promise that he would clean up the city’s government, he was carried into office on a wave of anti-corruption fervor.
Seidel’s goal, and the goal of the group of socialists he associated with closely, was nothing short of revolution. “They had but one aim: to liberate the working class from the bondage of wage-slavery,” he wrote about his compatriots in his memoirs. “That was the first, the last, and the only article of their creed. And the means: Workers of the World, Unite!” But Seidel was good at tempering his idealism with practical considerations. He focused mainly on making tangible improvements to Milwaukee while he was mayor: establishing the city’s first public works department, organizing its first fire and police commissions and creating a park system. The improvements were popular. “Between 1910 and 1912, people in Milwaukee could see how their lives were getting better,” McGuinness says. “The changes weren’t just abstract. They could see that their kids were getting vaccinations. They could see that their kids were getting free textbooks. They could see that parks were being built. They could see that inspectors were coming into factories and making them safer.” While in office, Seidel also raised the minimum wage.
Seidel had so disrupted politics as usual that in 1912, local Democrats and Republicans decided to put aside their differences and jointly back the same “nonpartisan” candidate, a former municipal health commissioner named Gerhard Adolph Bading who managed to beat out Seidel at the polls. But even though he was voted out after just two years as mayor, Seidel had made a favorable enough impression on the electorate that Milwaukeeans continued to vote socialists into other offices. When Daniel Hoan, a Socialist who had been serving as a city attorney, ran for mayor in 1916, he managed to narrowly beat out the Democratic and Republican candidates.