What Will It Take To Wake Up the ‘Sleeping Giant’ of the New Working Class?
The American working class has been dissed and dismissed. Our unions busted, our wages slashed, our homes foreclosed and our rents raised. We’re blamed for the rise of Trump, but otherwise do not exist in the media landscape.
But the working class is a sleeping giant that is beginning to stir and will soon instigate a great campaign for racial and economic justice, according to a new book by Tamara Draut. A vice president of the liberal think tank Demos, Draut’s previous book, Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30- Somethings Can’t Get Ahead, explored the how the high cost of college, housing and health insurance, combined with stagnant wages and made the usual milestones of adulthood increasingly out of reach for millennials.
Her new book, Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America, attempts to connect the dots between the struggles of those millennials and the politics of austerity, globalization and the massive transfer of wealth to the 1 percent that has reduced the living standards of almost all working families over the course of the last 40 years. It finds a strong sense of optimism in the recent increase in protest activity.
Draut spends a good deal of her narrative making the case that there is still a working class in “post-industrial,” “digital age” U.S.A. The heterogeneity of this new working class—no longer solidly white and male, if it ever was—along with media indifference and a cultural legacy of devaluing “women’s work” and disenfranchising immigrants and people of color renders it “invisible” to many.
Quantifying who is even in the working class, statistically speaking, is a notoriously hard thing to do. She consults with the dean of working-class studies, SUNY Stony Brook professor Michael Zweig, who uses federal occupational data to estimate that 60 percent of us comprise the working class. But most political surveys do not inquire into one’s relationship with the means of production, and so Draut uses educational attainment as a not-unreasonable proxy.
Not that Draut’s tome would fit within the mountain of punditry that emphasizes educational attainment as a cure for poverty. She eviscerates this “elite blind spot” that focuses on the “miniscule” sliver of new professional jobs while ignoring the “scads of new jobs being created in home health care, fast food, and retail.”
Draut is one of the few mainstream writers I’ve seen who has noted the fact that workers are increasingly rejecting the label “middle class” for themselves, while political and media elites still use the term as a shorthand for the ideal American lifestyle. Not noted—perhaps not known—is that when unions do internal polling on political campaigns, questions phrased around improving the lives of middle-class Americans perform significantly worse than identical questions that talk instead about “working families.” Workers hear politicians’ “middle class” campaign rhetoric as promises to give more breaks to people who are already better off than them. (Which probably isn’t that far from the truth.)
The largest class of people in the country demanding their visibility and raising expectations that they deserve more is the very definition of a sleeping giant stirring. Draut sees the “Day without Immigrants” May Day protests, Black Lives Matter and the Fight for 15 as the beginning of a new workers movement. The key, she says, will be working through the historical legacy of racism and sexism to make common cause between these three interconnected movements.
There is perhaps a little too much optimism in Sleeping Giant. After all, the last big May Day strike was over a decade ago at this point. The ground is undeniably shifting, opening up a space for more progressive demands, but it’s not moving all that fast.
Still, since Draut handed in her final draft of this book, millions of voters rallied have to a socialist presidential candidate who will rewrite the Democratic Party’s platform, and the workers at Kohler and Verizon proved that the remaining large industrial unions can still go on strike and win. So the time is right for books that speak confidently that a new workers movement is rising up.
Still, since Draut handed in her final draft of this book, millions of voters rallied have to a socialist presidential candidate who will rewrite the Democratic Party’s platform, and the workers at Kohler and Verizon proved that the remaining large industrial unions can still go on strike and win. So the time is right for books that speak confidently that a new workers movement is rising up.
But it’s not entirely clear who the audience is for Sleeping Giant. While she clearly advocates for more unions, Draut’s treatment of unions is a little too abstract.
The “real power” of unions, she writes, is that they “can amass significant resources to engage in voter turnout, agenda setting and issue advocacy.” That’s a think-tank view of unions. Anyone who’s ever been a part of a workplace job action that resulted in, say, a reduced workload or new safety equipment or got a disrespectful supervisor straightened could take offense at the notion that our “real” power is in our union treasury and checkbook.
Sleeping Giant seems best addressed to the Acela-riding political class: reporters and political staffers who need to learn that the working class still exists and that their “untapped political power” should be heeded. There’s a value to that. One thing that preceded labor’s great upsurge in the 1930’s, ever so slightly, was a rising tide of opinion among intellectuals and political actors that an increase in union power was necessary to stabilize the economy and shore up the Democratic Party’s base.
They can have their reasons for wanting unions, and we’ll always have ours.
The book falters a bit as well when it comes to the “Blueprint for a Better Deal” it advocates. Draut correctly notes that while the demand for a $15 minimum wage was immediately derided as unrealistic, the high bar that the demand set, combined with workplace action, quickly opened up a space that made a range of wage raises politically possible. Curiously, though, her programmatic proposals are safe, moderate, vetted. It includes paid sick and family leave, universal pre-K, tuition-free public college, card check for union organizing and overturning Citizens United.
I’ll take it all, but this is the stuff of a white paper, not a political manifesto. These are transitional demands that have a snowball’s chance in hell in the short term, and that, once the sleeping giant is fully woke and pressing a campaign that looks more like a mass strike wave, would hopefully be traded-in for much more ambitious demands.
Still, Sleeping Giant is a worthy entry in the contemporary progressive canon that should inspire more debate about the world we have to win.
[This article first appeared at In These Times.]
One Day Longer
As the massive strike at Verizon enters its second month with no end in sight, the stakes — for the workers, the company, and the broader labor movement — are rising. Even mainstream media outlets like the New York Times have taken note, casting it as something of an epochal battle over whether the economy can tolerate good jobs that actually deliver economic security and decent benefits.
The strike began on April 13, when forty thousand Verizon landline workers, represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), walked out after nine months of contentious and fruitless contract negotiations. The unions are fighting employer demands to make outsourcing and offshoring jobs easier, as well as cutbacks in health benefits.
Verizon isn’t budging. It opened the month of May by canceling striking employees’ health insurance — an action that was technically legal, but union officials say represents a departure from the past. In the meantime, unions have been helping members patch together emergency health coverage.
These days, a strike of the Verizon action’s scale and duration is exceedingly rare. That’s largely because the stakes for workers are so high. Strikers don’t just lose their pay and benefits — they risk losing their job entirely.
When Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, their explicit purpose was to encourage collective bargaining, restrict interference with unions’ right to strike, and prohibit discrimination against workers for union activity. (They were also hoping that by providing an orderly process for union recognition, workers would stop physically occupying corporate property and disrupting commerce.)
But almost immediately after the NLRA’s passage, the courts got to work gutting union rights. In 1939, the Supreme Court decided that “of course” Congress didn’t mean to curtail capitalists’ right to keep their businesses open, and so “of course” employers could hire new workers to permanently replace striking workers. Being replaced, they reasoned, wasn’t the same as being fired or discriminated against.
In the 1980s and ’90s, employers began using this legal precedent in earnest. They’d bargain unions to an impasse, dare them to go out on strike, and then replace workers with scabs. The tactic worked, successfully decertifying much of the unionized industries in the US.
Unions still have limited legal recourse. In the current dispute, the CWA has filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board over Verizon’s bargaining conduct — a move that could provide strikers with a measure, but far from a guarantee, of protection against permanent replacement.
Verizon’s machinations underscore workers’ vulnerability. The company is placing full-page ads in newspapers seeking out “temporary full-time technicians” (it claims to have recruited “thousands” of scabs, a figure so vague that even Fortune magazine put it in scare quotes) and attempting to lure workers across the picket line. So far, Verizon boasts, one thousand union members have scabbed. But even if that number is accurate, it would amount to less than 3 percent of the workforce.
One of the reasons the Verizon workers are striking when few other unions are willing to take the leap is that their skills and experience are not easily replaceable. As social media sites like the Stand Up To Verizon Facebook page show with aplomb, scabs are bumbling through their repair work, with often dangerous consequences.
Verizon is willing to cope with the temporary ineptitude because it is intent on facing down the unions. With cell phones supplanting landlines and fiber-optic cables becoming a more lucrative market than Ma Bell’s legacy copper wires, the company wants to quarantine the unions from its growth divisions.
To that end, Verizon has vigorously resisted union organizing attempts at its wireless division — and with much success. While the staff at a handful of wireless stores have organized, none have won a contract.
For their part, the striking unions have extended their picket lines to as many Verizon Wireless storefronts as possible. Any dent they can put in the wireless division’s market share, the unions recognize, is collateral damage for Verizon.
They’ve also fanned out to the legal and political front. Earlier this month, the unions filed federal communications charges against Verizon for its strong-arm tactics in pushing traditional telephone customers to switch to the company’s more modern (and more expensive) fiber optic system.
And they’ve applied carrot-and-stick pressure around the company’s high-speed Fios service, which is in high demand among residential customers — and therefore popular with local politicians — but remains a lower investment priority for Verizon than its non-union wireless division.
In other activity off the picket line, union activists and supporters disrupted Verizon’s May 5 shareholders meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Two hundred and fifty activists protested the confab, including fifteen who engaged in civil disobedience. Union pension voters, representing $1.3 billion in Verizon stock, also forced an ultimately unsuccessful vote on a resolution to curtail executive compensation.
To some extent, workers have benefited from striking in a presidential election year. Bernie Sanders, whose insurgent campaign received its most prominent union endorsement from the CWA, was on the picket line the first day of the strike and has been doing solidarity work ever since. Even Hillary Clinton — no doubt pressured by a surprisingly competitive primary — found a comfortable pair of shoes and joined a picket line.
The optimistic view is that this indicates the resurgence of a long-moribund labor movement.
Last year, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, which keeps track of “major work stoppages” (those involving more than one thousand workers), reported a 400 percent uptick in lost working hours over the previous year. The increase represented the high-water mark for strike activity over the past half-decade — and the Verizon strike alone blows that record out of the water.
Yet the strike is also a major test of whether relatively well-positioned workers can withhold their labor and win.
A common chant on picket lines is “One day longer, one day stronger.” That is particularly true of a strike like this one, which is by design and circumstances a war of attrition. The company budgeted for first quarter strike-related profit losses, but admits that a protracted strike could impact the entire year’s bottom line.
The striking workers, of course, face far worse privation. They don’t have shareholders to underwrite their losses. They just have a strike fund (and a solidarity fund). But most workers, unionized and non-unionized, are in even direr straits.
The outcome of the Verizon workers’ strike will therefore be taken as a labor bellwether — for good or ill.
[This article originally appeared at Jacobin.]
The Legal Argument That Could Overturn ‘Right-to-Work’ Laws Around the Country
Union supporters had reason to cheer earlier this month when Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s hated “right to work” law was overturned by a Dane County Circuit Judge. Unfortunately, the decision is all but certain to be overturned by Wisconsin’s conservative Supreme Court. But contained in the case is a line of questioning over the constitutionality of the right-to-work concept that has quietly been playing out in federal courts.
The result could be that all right-to-work laws are nullified—and sooner than you might imagine.
“RTW” takes money and power from unions, but is that a ‘taking?’
The logic that the Wisconsin judge leaned upon in his decision has its origins in a federal case called Sweeney v. Pence, in which unions made an unsuccessful attempt to overturn Indiana’s recent right-to-work statute on constitutional grounds. Although the unions themselves did not raise this argument in the 2014 case, Chief Judge Diane Wood argued in her dissent that “right-to-work” provisions violate the U.S. Constitution’s Takings Clause.
“This is a law,” says Marquette Law Professor Paul Secunda, “that compels one private party to provide benefits to another private party with no compensation.” He is convinced that right-to-work laws, which permit represented workers to quit their union and stop paying fees while simultaneously obligating that union to continue to spend resources representing them, are an unconstitutional “taking.”
If the issue makes its way up to the Supreme Court, and the justices agree with Secunda, the result could overturn the section of the National Labor Relations Act that allows states to pass right-to-work measures as well as the statutes in all 26 states that have passed them in one fell swoop.
The Wisconsin case won’t get there. Because Wisconsin is in the same 7th Circuit that rejected the “takings” argument in Sweeny v. Pence (making it, for now, a settled matter there), unions filed their case in state court over the state’s constitution.
But West Virginia and Michigan are states that recently passed right-to-work laws, and they are both in different federal court circuits. Unions in those states could challenge the constitutionality of right to work on the federal level. Unions in Idaho already have a case pending, which is a particularly exciting prospect as that state falls within the liberal 9th circuit. (Keep an eye out for Operating Engineers Local 370 v. Wasden.)
The “takings” approach is not without its critics. Seattle University Associate Professor of Law Charlotte Garden notes that Judge Wood’s interpretation of the Takings clause is one more commonly advanced by anti-regulatory conservatives, and that labor taking up the cause could have unintended consequences. “There’s a difficulty of applying existing ‘takings’ law in this kind of context,” she says. “Takings” is generally applied to property, she says, and what’s being taken from unions is the labor of their staff.
As an alternative strategy, Garden points out that the NLRB has indicated an openness to considering whether unions in right-to-work states can charge a fee to non-members who want to file a grievance.
Any rulemaking by the Board on right to work can expect to be challenged by business interests, which could open different constitutional questions about the law. The Indiana unions actually argued in Sweeney v. Pence that the Taft-Hartley amendments to the NLRA were only meant to apply to questions of compelled union membership, not fees for service. But I believe there remains a compelling argument about legislative intent.
Remembering our history will be vital to success
The judges who rejected the “takings” logic in Sweeney vs. Pence argued that unions weren’t uncompensated for their duty to represent all workers in a bargaining unit. They wrote, “we believe the union is justly compensated by federal law’s grant to the Union the right to bargain exclusively with the employer. The reason the Union must represent all employees is that the Union alone gets a seat at the negotiation table.” This is a bunch of ahistorical nonsense that betrays a lack of understanding of labor relations and power dynamics.
But why should we expect a couple of judges to get this right when most union activists are so muddled on the history and effects of the duties of exclusive representation and the union shop? To win, we need to understand our history and have real clarity on our goals to regain power.
When the National Labor Relations Act was written, unions were “members-only” organizations that competed with each other. They contested for power in the same workplaces over who would make the best bargaining demands, who could extract the bigger concessions from management and who could organize the most successful job actions. Employers hated this.
In pursuit of labor peace, employers began signing contracts with unions as the “sole and exclusive representative” of their workers. These early contracts gave employers a one-year guarantee that there would be no new union demands and no strikes. Unions went with it because it helped knock out the competition. The NLRB, which had been certifying unions as representing their members only, also went with it and now certifies unions as exclusive representatives, exclusively.
Agency fee originated not merely as compensation for the financial costs of representing all the workers in a unit, but for the political costs. During World War II, patriotically motivated unions pledged not to strike, and were rewarded with government-dictated wage freezes. Workers protested by quitting their unions. In order to keep unions from dropping their no-strike pledges, the War Labor Board began to reward unions a “maintenance of membership” rule which prevented workers from quitting the union during the term of a contract. This evolved into the union shop and agency fees.
The combination of exclusive representation and agency fee does contain the potential for real power and real wins for unions, as well as labor peace for employers. But it also tends to make unions more conservative and less militant. Exclusive representation without agency fee is the worst of both worlds, and should be resisted.
For three quarters of a century the only way that the NLRB would “certify” a union was as the exclusive representative of all of the workers at a represented workplace, mostly with the union’s understanding that it could bargain for a contract clause that obligates represented workers to pay some fair share of the union’s expenses.
This “union certification” gives collective bargaining the force of law that an arm of the federal government—the NLRB—will drag an employer that refuses to recognize and bargain “in good faith” with a certified union to court to force them to. So, for a union to tear up this “certification” to represent all of the workers and say, “we only represent our members now” carries the risk of losing the backing of the NLRB—but the potential reward of forcing the courts to grapple with the tradeoffs of forced representation without taxation.
To win big, we need a union in a right-to-work state that is genuinely willing to cede exclusive representation to kick out the scabs.
What I think this would look like is that union, just prior to the expiration of their current contract, filing a letter with the employer and the labor board disclaiming representation of the entire bargaining unit but demanding to bargain for their members only (and subsequently refusing to bargain over a no strike clause). We’ve got a much stronger case if it’s brought to federal court by an employer complaining that a union won’t represent all the workers than one brought by a union complaining about a loss in agency fee revenue.
It is time to start using the courts more strategically
The idea that the Supreme Court could swing from seriously considering forcing the entire public sector to go right to work in this term, to weighing the very constitutionality of right-to-work laws two or three years later might seem too fantastical, but such is the strange lack of case law over the underlying legal justification for requiring that a union represent all the workers but forbidding them to mandate dues and fees for that service work.
“This isn’t stare decisis at all,” says Paul Secunda, describing the Latin term for the legal obligation of judges to stand by settled decisions. “You’ve got one decision from one circuit court. This is hardly settled case law.”
As I’ve noted, unions have tended to shy away from judicial strategies, and, on right to work in particular, labor has long favored a legislative solution. Repealing the Taft-Hartley Act that contained the right-to-work amendment to our nation’s main labor law was the top legislative priority of the AFL, the CIO and its merged successor from the time of its passage in 1947 well into the 1980s.
There were 12 right-to-work laws on the books—mostly in former slave states—at the time of Taft-Hartley’s passage. They had no force of law, as the federal NLRA preempted them—that is, until Taft-Hartley. And again, a close look at the legislative intent might reveal that Congress merely meant to allow states to ban union membership—not agency fees—as a requirement of employment. Or, more crudely, they may have basically been saying, “Let the Confederacy secede from the New Deal.”
The AFL and the CIO, which by 1947 had both abandoned organizing the south, seemingly wrote the former Confederacy off at the time. Since labor lost little to no membership as a result of those first 12 right-to-work states, little brainpower was devoted to challenging the constitutionality of the scheme. Likewise, when right to work next spread to western and plains states like Arizona and Nebraska, labor similarly wrote them off.
When right to work first spread to a bedrock labor stronghold, Indiana in 1959, the move was so controversial that within eight years labor had managed to overthrow the Republicans, who supported it in all three chambers of government and repeal the law. This win—the only instance of a right-to-work law in a vital blue-collar labor state being repealed legislatively—may have ultimately been counterproductive, giving unions false hope that killing right to work is a matter of making sure the bad guys don’t win re-election.
The labor movement of 1965 could entertain such fantasies. The labor movement that has seen bases of union power in Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and West Virginia go “right to work” within the same half decade must wake up to the fact that it will take more than elections to reverse the damage. It will also take a judicial activism agenda for labor, like I have advocated.
And ultimately, working people in America will gain no new rights without stoking a hell of a lot of chaos, through strikes and more. But we’ll also gain no new rights without legal demands like the Operating Engineers Local 370 v. Wasden case hanging out there. It is now up to the sisters and brothers in other “right to work” states—Michigan, West Virginia and beyond—to join the fight.
[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]
Bernie Sanders Wasn’t Our First Socialist Mayor: Remembering Milwaukee’s Socialist Party History
As the country’s politics take a right turn, an unlikely progressive wins office as mayor of a major U.S. city. In an era marked by conformity and the primacy of business interests over the common good, he has the temerity to call himself a socialist. Both locally and nationally, his example serves as a beacon of hope for the waning left and a lightening rod of criticism for the resurgent right. His fundamental decency and fealty to the democratic process and the public good see him continually reelected, with most voters regarding him on a first-name basis. He goes on to run a quixotic campaign for President.
If this sounds familiar to fans of Bernie Sanders’ career, it should. But I am describing Frank Zeidler, the socialist mayor of Milwaukee who served three terms from 1948-1960. When the producers of the television series Happy Days wanted to cast a nostalgic look back on the supposedly placid 1950s, they chose to base their sitcom in Milwaukee. Of course, no mention is made that not only is the mayor a socialist, but the state’s junior Senator is the demagogic anti-Communist Joseph McCarthy.
This is a history that’s been hiding in plain sight, given focus by a new book from the University of Illinois Press’ Working Class in American History series. Conservative Counterrevolution: Challenging Liberalism in 1950s Milwaukee, by Tula A. Connell, explores the record of a socialist administration in an era that is popularly thought to be when Americans definitively turned against socialism and abandoned urbanism.
But there was, nevertheless, a right turn in the 1950s, and Connell’s book is a vital study of the roots of modern American conservatism. The election of Scott Walker and the battles over his anti-union attacks and the subsequent recall effort revealed to many outsiders the extreme polarization that have marked Wisconsin politics since before Zeidler and McCarthy shared the stage (A polarization that can be seen in Tuesday’s primary results, where Wisconsin Democrats went strongly for socialist Bernie Sanders and Republicans chose Ted Cruz because he is more reliably conservative than Donald Trump).
Connell’s history documents how Milwaukee business and suburban interests inveighed against the expanded role of government in as an attack on “American free enterprise” and used racial demagoguery to peel off voters from the New Deal coalition. This local right-wing pushback became part of a national network that gave rise to Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan. If Wisconsin DNA is so central to modern conservatism, then today’s polarization of national political discourse was seemingly inevitable.
The public good or the virtue of selfishness?
Milwaukee was an early stronghold of the Socialist Party, furnishing the party with wins for mayor, council, state legislature and even a seat in Congress. In city government, they emphasized honest government and effective public services. Critics on the party’s left derided them as “sewer socialists.” The Milwaukee Socialists wore the term as a badge of honor.
Although, to this day, the Socialist candidate can draw upwards of 20% in first round balloting in Milwaukee’s non-partisan mayoral elections, Zeidler’s election was something of a last hurrah for the party. He ran as part of a liberal coalition and benefited as much from name recognition (his older brother’s tenure as mayor was cut short by his WWII casualty) as it did lingering voter loyalty to socialism.
But his record in office nevertheless contributed significantly to the city’s socialist legacy. Milwaukee’s stock of public housing was expanded dramatically; a lucrative new channel of newfangled television broadcasting was reserved for public education programming; and the city’s tax base was preserved through an aggressive campaign of suburban annexation.
Zeidler’s annexation agenda was particularly crucial for Milwaukee, and represents a road not taken for too many other post-war cities. The combination of white flight, highway construction, suburban development and tax breaks for mortgage interest is a uniquely American tragedy that left great cities blighted and broken down. Zeidler refused to accept that suburbanites could just cut themselves off from responsibility from the wider society. His office organized over 300 annexation votes that incrementally expanded the city by more than 35 square miles. Zeidler’s preferred method to win these votes was through education campaigns about the benefits of pooling resources and the efficiency of Milwaukee government, but he was also not shy about engaging in water wars. Suburbs that insisted upon independence were denied Milwaukee city water and sewer services, among other benefits.
Of course there was a backlash. The suburbs sued, right-wing elements pushed state legislation to make annexation more difficult while some townships merged to form “cities” of their own to forestall annexation by Milwaukee. An “iron ring” of rich suburbs encircled Milwaukee, ultimately producing the same racial tensions and defunding of public services that plagued other American cities.
In fact, much of Zeidler’s agenda was vociferously opposed by a rising right-wing movement. This subject is the heart of Conservative Counterrevolution. Author Tula Connell calls the post-war consensus around full employment and living standards that rose with productivity “a mirage” and documents how modern conservatism “was not newly generated in the 1950s or 1960s but rather represented a resurgence of a deep current in America’s history.”
It is perhaps not surmising that it was small and mid-sized businessmen who first chafed at the New Deal, and were in the vanguard of right-wing opposition. Conservative Counterrevolution’s bête noir is William Grede, who operated a Milwaukee area steel foundry that he (of course!) inherited from his dad. Grede was a viciously anti-union boss, who took the then uncommon step of hiring permanent replacement scabs when his employees went on strike in 1946.
Grede served a term as the president of the National Association of Manufacturers, and, according to Connell, “had a fundraising finger in nearly every organization that challenged perceived encroachments on free enterprise,” including Americans for Constitutional Action, the National Association of Businessmen and the John Birch Society. His philosophy – which can be efficiently summed up by the title of the book he never finished writing, The Virtue of Selfishness – remained far outside the mainstream of Republican policymaking during his lifetime. Today, his brand of selfishness has utterly captured the GOP, thanks in part to the deep pockets of odious men like the sons of Grede’s Birch Society co-founder, Fred Koch.
Although Grede’s and others’ opposition to Zeidler’s public housing program was rooted in a fear of “creeping socialism” and a desire for private profit, his opponents resorted to the most base racism in order to win voters over. His opponent in his third and final election, Milton McGuire, waged a demagogic campaign that focused on the rising number of African-Americans moving to the city. McGuire accused Zeidler of placing billboards throughout the south, to attract new black residents with promises of low cost public housing. Zeidler won re-election handily, but had decided that his third term would be his last.
“The greatest living American”
Zeidler was succeeded by Henry Maier, a conservative Democrat who won office by race-baiting his opponents. His administration abandoned public housing construction, slow-walked civil rights, responded to 1967 riots with a law and order agenda and consolidated power. He remained in office for an unprecedented seven terms. By 2002, research showed that Milwaukee’s racial disparities were the worst in the nation.
One of the reasons Frank cited for not running for re-election in 1960 was his frail health. He was always in poor health, and yet he somehow lived to the ripe old age of 93. He even ran for President as the standard-bearer of the reconstituted Socialist Party in 1976! It was in his capacity as the party’s chairman emeritus that I had the pleasure of getting to know Frank. I always found it fascinating to visit Milwaukee while Frank was still alive; it was a bizarro world where the Socialist Party’s leader was revered as a statesman and warmly greeted as a neighbor. To whit: when I was doing press for the party’s 100th anniversary conference in 2001, a reporter for the Journal-Sentinel asked me what socialists in other parts of the country thought of Frank. I answered that most of us think he’s a really great man. The reporter naturally heard that as “the greatest living American” and put it in the story, embarrassing Frank slightly.
With the racial strife and economic decline of the city that came later, it’s not hard to see how Milwaukee residents look back on the Zeidler years as, indeed, happy days.
[This post first appeared at In These Times.]