Socialist Progressives

because in my experience it definitely fanned out from Milwaukee. Maybe not to the farmers (although many of them voted based on subsidies alone!) but definitely to the working class in the small towns.

Shepherd: Why did the Socialists take root in Milwaukee and not other parts of the state?

Gurda: The background is that you have a couple factors. You have a huge German population and a number of Germans who came here had fled a failed revolt in 1848. So there was at least a kind of intellectual seedbed for leftist ideas. People had read Marx and Lassalle. The Turners, who go way back to the mid-1800s, they were a Socialist organization in the early years. So you have the German intellectual tradition here, and you've got a huge working-class population, so you had a great deal of receptiveness to appeals to class consciousness. You have the shootings of 1886, when at least five demonstrators were shot dead by the state militia marching for the eight-hour workday. The voters did not forget that event. Then you had a guy named Victor Berger, who becomes kind of the presiding genius of the Socialist movement in Milwaukee. You put all of these things together and it was a city ripe for reform.