Social-Democratic Party of Wisconsin

The Social-Democratic Party of Wisconsin (SDPW) was established in 1897 as the Wisconsin state affiliate of the Chicago faction of the Social Democratic Party of America. When that organization merged in 1901 to form a political party known as the Socialist Party of America, the Social-Democratic Party of Wisconsin became the state affiliate of that organization, retaining its original name. The party was responsible for electing the first socialist member of the United States Congress and was the governing party in the city of Milwaukee for many years, electing several long-time mayors.

Socialism was by no means new to Wisconsin, a fair percentage of the émigrés from Germany in the dozen years prior to the Civil War, the so-called "Forty-Eighters," had been exposed to radical ideas and been participants in a continent-wide battle against absolutist monarchy. Milwaukee was, among other things, an enclave of German-American radicalism, with some 24% of the city German born in 1895. it was there that the American Socialist movement sank deep roots.

The first socialist newspaper in Wisconsin appeared in Milwaukee in November 1875, a small sheet called Der Socialist. The first English-language paper appeared the next year, when a weekly called Social Democrat saw print. Both of these publications proved to be short-lived.

Chicago radical publisher Paul Grottkau came to Milwaukee in 1886, bringing with him his newspaper, the German-language tri-weekly the Arbeiter Zeitung (Workers News). This publication continued without interruption until it was sold in January 1893 to a young school teacher named Victor L. Berger and transformed into the Wisconsin Vorwärts ('Wisconsin Forward'). Berger assumed the role of both editor and publisher of the publication, and his emergence in this capacity marked a turning point in the history of the socialist movement in the state. Berger grew his paper by attempting to de-emphasize revolutionary change in favor of incremental reform, and made a conscious effort to forge alliances with the trade union movement of his city and state.

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