What Was Sewer Socialism?

Recent victories for democratic socialist candidates have sparked renewed interest in the 'sewer socialists' of the early nineteen hundreds Midwest, particularly Milwaukee. According to JSTOR Daily, historian Michael E. Stevens examines Daniel Webster Hoan Junior, who became the city's Socialist mayor in nineteen sixteen and served for the next twenty-four years. Rather than revolutionary fervor, Hoan framed socialism as extending existing public institutions—the post office, schools, parks—to utilities, railroads, and factories. His pragmatism worked: he fought utility rate hikes, improved water access and sanitation, and guided Milwaukee to adopt one of the nation's first comprehensive zoning ordinances in nineteen twenty. During the First World War, as prices soared, he purchased surplus Army materials including blankets and canned goods and sold them through city offices at less than half the retail price—proving, as he saw it, that socialism could govern without profit motive. By nineteen thirty-six, when Time magazine called him a Marxist Mayor, his vision of corruption-free, efficient governance had already shaped the Democratic Party's New Deal agenda.

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