Milwaukee—When the Socialist mayor of Milwaukee was informed in 1919 that King Albert of Belgium would be touring the United States to celebrate the end of World War I—with an agreement that permitted Belgium to retain its brutal colonial grip on much of Africa—he was not in a welcoming mood. Faced with a request from local bankers and CEOs, who hoped that he would roll out the red carpet for the monarch, Mayor Dan Hoan replied, “Please do not ask me to invite any king, kaiser, or czar. The people of Milwaukee, in choosing a mayor, do not require of him a forfeiture of self-respect.”

Hoan, who had been elected in 1916 and would serve until 1940 as America’s most prominent Socialist mayor, was just getting started. “Was not the American Revolution and this nation conceived in the wiping out of kings?” he asked the city’s oligarchs.

Did not the America glory in the French Revolution that gave birth to their republic? Did not the people of the new nations created by this war cast off the kings? Can you see no progress in that the workmen of Germany, Austria and Russia by revolution have thrown off their divine kings? The spirit kindled by these revolutions started in America is spreading far and wide and soon all countries will join in discarding autocrats and kings.

It was Hoan’s conclusion that summed up a disdain for plutocracy, which had taken root in the great manufacturing center on the shores of Lake Michigan:

While I mean no disrespect to the Belgian people, whom I love, nor discourtesy to you, yet these are days that try men’s souls. We must take our place with kings, their golden places and satellites, or line up with the rights of the common man. I should go to my grave in everlasting shame were I to boost one iota the stock of any king.… I STAND FOR THE MAN WHO WORKS, TO HELL WITH KINGS.

It is not hard to imagine what Hoan would have thought of the Republican National Convention that has convened in Milwaukee this week to nominate a presidential candidate who is often accused of harboring monarchical tendencies: Donald J. Trump. If Trump wins in November, he’ll enjoy expanded powers of personal immunity, recently bestowed upon him by his handpicked justices on the largely corrupt US Supreme Court . Those powers, critics suggest, will rival those of the “banditti of ruffians” that Thomas Paine complained of when he championed the revolutionary rejection of King George III’s imperial order.

Hoan’s long gone. But the iconic bridge that was named for him spans the eastern edge of Milwaukee’s downtown, where Republicans have gathered in a few square blocks that are been gated off from protests organized by local advocates for economic and social and racial justice. Even before security concerns multiplied, following the jarring attempted assassination of Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday, Republican convention planners had arranged to keep their distance from the Milwaukee that is found beyond the convention center and the hotels and restaurants of the city’s modern downtown.

The Republicans don’t really want to know about the city that Trump labeled “horrible” in remarks last month to GOP members of Congress. And they certainly don’t want to be reminded that they are gathering in a city with a long history of successful Socialist Party governance, or about the young socialists voters have elected to the state legislature, the county board, and the school board in recent years. Trump and his compatriots would rather promote the fact-free fantasy that ”socialism is the mainstream of the Biden campaign”; complaints about how they think Vice President Kamala Harris is the champion of “California socialism”; and the former president’s theories about preventing “foreign Christian-hating communists, socialists and Marxists” from coming to the United States.

But the inconvenient truth—for the Republicans who so enjoy complaining about socialism—is that many of the Christians, Jews, and freethinkers who built Milwaukee in the 19th and early 20th centuries were radicals who read Karl Marx and had helped to foment anti-aristocratic revolts in Germany and other countries. After those revolts faltered in the late 1840s, they fled as immigrant refugees to places like Wisconsin. In Milwaukee, they built a Socialist Party that, from 1910 to 1960, would elect from its ranks generations of socialist leaders.

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Through much of the last century, Milwaukee was America’s laboratory of democratic socialism. The most populous city in the battleground state of Wisconsin has maintained such a reputation in this regard that it earned a mention in the 1992 movie Wayne’s World. Rocker Alice Cooper explained in the movie, “I think one of the most interesting aspects of Milwaukee is the fact that it’s the only major American city to have ever elected three Socialist mayors.”

Republicans noticed as well. They talked a lot about Milwaukee’s socialist history four years ago, after Democrats announced that they would hold their 2020 national convention in the city, as I reported at the time. “No city in America has stronger ties to socialism than Milwaukee. And with the rise of Bernie Sanders and the embrace of socialism by its newest leaders, the American left has come full circle,” warned Mark Jefferson, who was then the executive director of the Republican Party of Wisconsin. “It’s only fitting the Democrats would come to Milwaukee.”

Wisconsin’s Republican US senator, Ron Johnson, said at the time that the Milwaukee convention would provide a “firsthand look” at “the risk of Democrat socialistic tendencies.”

Johnson gets a lot wrong. But he was right to suggest that a visit to Milwaukee can provide insight into the impact of officials with “socialistic tendencies” on municipal governance. There’s a good deal of agreement, among experts on American cities and grassroots Milwaukeeans, that socialism worked quite well under the trio of Socialist Party mayors whose leadership from 1910 to 1960 shaped the city as it is now known. Hoan, the longest serving of those mayors, was widely hailed during his 24-year tenure as one of the nation’s most innovative municipal leaders. Time magazine identified the Milwaukeean in a 1936 cover story (titled “Marxist Mayor”) as “one of the nation’s ablest public servants” and explained that, under his leadership, “Milwaukee has become perhaps the best-governed city in the U.S.”

The mayor proved to be a brilliant financial manager. Indeed, his steadfast refusal to let the city get indebted to big banks during the Great Depression helped Milwaukee to avoid a measure of the misery, suffering, and poverty that buffeted the nation from 1929 into the 1930s. During that period, Hoan’s “sewer socialism” earned praise from President Franklin Roosevelt, and recognition for landmark achievements on issues ranging from improving public health to battling the Ku Klux Klan.

Hoan took on the Klan at a time when politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties were compromising with the racist domestic terrorist organization that sought to extend its reach from the South to Northern cities. If the group’s organizers brought its racism and antisemitism to Milwaukee, the mayor declared in 1921, they would find the city “the hottest place this side of hell for the Ku Klux Klan.”

As I noted when the Democrats decided to hold their 2020 convention in Milwaukee, Hoan’s integrity, along with his managerial skills, would eventually earn him marks as one of the 10 finest municipal leaders in US history. In his groundbreaking 1999 assessment of municipal governance in cities across the country, The American Mayor: The Best and the Worst Big-City Leaders, historian Melvin Holli wrote:

Although this self-identified socialist had difficulty pushing progressive legislation through a nonpartisan city council, he experimented with the municipal marketing of food, backed city-built housing, and was a fervent but unsuccessful champion of municipal ownership of the street railways and the electric utility. His pragmatic “gas and water socialism” met with more success in improving public health and in providing public markets, city harbor improvements, and purging graft from Milwaukee politics.

Socialist Mayors Emil Seidel (1910–12) and Frank Zeidler (1948–60) served before and after Hoan. But Hoan’s tenure was the Socialist Party’s heyday, not just in Milwaukee but across the country. The city’s voters also elected dozens of Socialists to the city council, the school board, the county board, and law enforcement positions such as city attorney and county sheriff. And Milwaukee sent so many Socialists to the legislature during that decade that the party formed the second-largest caucuses in both the state Assembly and the state Senate during the 1920s.

Today, the Wisconsin legislature again has a socialist caucus, led by Milwaukee Democrats Ryan Clancy and Darrin Madison. “We wanted to make sure that we were uplifting bolder ideas and solutions,” says Madison, who won a competitive Democratic primary in August 2022, before scoring an easy victory in November of that year. “That’s something that democratic socialists have always done in Wisconsin.”

Madison is right when he says that Milwaukee socialists have had a national impact.

Seidel would run for the vice presidency on the Socialist Party ticket led by Eugene Victor Debs, which in 1912 won 6 percent of the vote across the country—the party’s best-ever national result. In 1976, Zeidler was the Socialist candidate for president, winning his highest vote total in Milwaukee County.

“Socialism as we attempted to practice it here believes that people working together for a common good can produce a greater benefit both for society and for the individual than can a society in which everyone is shrewdly seeking their own self-interest,” Zeidler told me in the mid-1990s, when we spent an afternoon at the party headquarters in downtown Milwaukee.

By then, Zeidler was an iconic figure in the community, where a towering city administrative center is named the “Frank Zeidler Municipal Building.” It’s located a few blocks from where this year’s convention is being held.

To this day, Milwaukee’s socialist history inspires more pride than fear. Zeidler saw this as a form of political evolution that might even come to influence Republicans.

“There is always a charge that socialism does not fit human nature. We’ve encountered that for a long time. Maybe that’s true,” he explained. “But can’t people be educated? Can’t people learn to cooperate with each other? Surely that must be our goal, because the alternative is redolent with war and poverty and all the ills of the world.”

So, are Republicans evolving? We’re getting an answer this week, as the party convenes in the city where the Socialist Party held its convention in 1932. Commenting 92 years ago, on the occasion of that other partisan gathering, Baruch Vladek, a delegate from New York, wrote of Milwaukee: “If I owned all the real estate in the world, I wouldn’t feel so powerful as I do on the streets of this socialist city.”