The Unsung History of Heartland Socialism
While often overlooked, the spirit of socialism has coursed through the American Midwest ever since the movement emerged in the 19th century. It continues to animate the region’s political landscape today.
Miles Kampf-Lassin
On a midsummer afternoon in June 1918, Eugene Debs stepped into a gazebo nestled under the trees of Nimisilla Park in Canton, Ohio, to deliver the speech that would land him in prison. The Socialist Party leader looked out on a crowd of 1,200 gathered among tamaracks and sugar maples as he castigated imperial war and the capitalist class, calling socialism “the mightiest movement in the history of mankind.”
Socialism “has made it possible for me to take my place side by side with you in the great struggle for the better day,” Debs proclaimed. “I am kin to all that throbs; to be class-conscious, and to realize that, regardless of nationality, race, creed, color or sex … every member of the working class, without an exception, is my comrade, my brother and sister.”
Before speaking to the crowd, Debs went to the local courthouse to visit a group of socialists imprisoned for voicing their political beliefs. Two weeks later, Debs would join them, jailed under the Espionage Act for speaking out against the horrors of World War I in his Canton speech. He remained incarcerated for more than two years and ran for president from his cell on the Socialist Party ticket, garnering nearly a million votes.
Debs was a child of the Midwest, where his commitment to a multiracial working-class movement was forged. He was born in Terre Haute, Ind., and served as city clerk and later a representative in the state assembly. He became a railroad worker and founded the American Railway Union, then helped lead Chicago’s 1894 Pullman strike, known as “the Debs Rebellion.” It was violently broken up by federal forces and resulted in Debs’ first stretch in prison.
While jailed in Woodstock, Ill., Debs was visited by Milwaukee’s socialist newspaper editor Victor L. Berger, who brought a copy of Marx’s Capital. The exchange helped spark a political transformation for Debs, who would spend the rest of his days evangelizing the socialist cause.
This history reflects a reality too often overlooked by contemporary political observers: the spirit of socialism has coursed through the Midwest ever since the movement emerged in the 19th century, and it continues to animate the region’s political landscape.
Far from being the bastion of “coastal elites,” as claimed by some pundits, today an upsurge of organizing efforts are keeping alive a socialist flame that has burned for generations throughout America’s heartland.
As unimpeded industrialization spread across the United States in the latter half of the 1800s, wide swaths of the population faced food shortages, toxic drinking water, run-down housing and a lack of proper sanitation, all while laboring around the clock in factories and worksites that lacked meaningful regulation and safety standards. In the face of these conditions, working people organized under the banner of socialism to call for remedies, including labor rights and less time on the job.
That last demand took center stage May 1, 1886, when 300,000 people nationwide walked off in a general strike to advocate for the eight-hour workday. Three days later in Chicago — a hotbed of the movement — the Haymarket riot led to a number of socialist agitators being hanged. It was soon commemorated as International Workers’ Day.
In Milwaukee, thousands joined the 1886 general strike, shutting down nearly every major factory in the city. Clashes with state militia that followed helped motivate socialist journalist Paul Grottkau to run for mayor while still locked up for his participation. He didn’t win, but his entry inspired others.
In 1910, Socialist Party member Emil Seidel ran for mayor and did win. That same year, Berger became the first socialist elected to Congress where he promoted the nationalization of major industries. In a 1918 article for the Milwaukee Leader, Berger wrote, “Socialism is defined as the collective ownership of the social means of production and distribution. It is the name given to the next stage of civilization, if civilization is to survive.”
In the 1916 election, another socialist, Daniel Hoan, took over stewardship of Milwaukee, serving as mayor for more than two decades. Socialists were elected up and down the ballot, and their efforts to invest in public works, sanitation and housing spawned the idea of “sewer socialism.” In 1948, Milwaukee voted in its third socialist mayor, Frank Zeidler.
Attendees of the 2024 Republican National Convention were reminded of this civic inheritance when at least one homemade sign was posted on a downtown building this July reading, “Welcome G.O.P. to Milwaukee, a Socialist city!”
As sewer socialism was carried out over the first half of the 20th century, hundreds of socialists were elected to public office across the Midwest — including in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio — under the common cause of redistributing wealth and power. The largest-circulation socialist publication in U.S. history, Appeal to Reason, was printed in the prairies of Girard, Kan., and reached 760,000 paying subscribers at its peak.
Following World War II, a vicious Red Scare targeted thousands of socialists across the country and dismantled many of their organizing efforts. But socialists didn’t disappear; many joined other progressive groups and became involved in movements for labor rights, civil rights, gender equality and an end to war and poverty.
In the 1970s, socialists in the Midwest helped launch projects such as Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a labor reform caucus started in Cleveland, and Labor Notes, a Detroit-based organization and magazine advancing rank-and-file unionism.
In These Times was founded in Chicago by socialist historian James Weinstein. In the editorial of the first issue in 1976, Weinstein laid out the publication’s mission: “to speak to corporate capitalism as the great issue of our time, and to socialism as the popular movement that will meet it.” He modeled the newspaper after the Appeal to Reason, and he insisted, as former editor of The Progressive Matthew Rothschild remembered after Weinstein’s death in 2005, that it “not be located in New York or Boston or D.C. or San Francisco but in Chicago, that big Midwestern city with no bullshit.”
The 1980s saw the emergence of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), growing out of the New American Movement and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. DSA threw its support behind the 1988 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson — founder of the Rainbow/PUSH coalition, based in Chicago — whose left-wing challenge to the Democratic establishment included a surprise victory in the Michigan caucus.
Many socialists also actively supported Harold Washington’s successful mayoral campaign in 1983, which helped usher in an era of progressive governance for Chicago.
More recently, socialists played a key (though by no means singular) role in the formation of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), which was elected to leadership of the powerful Chicago Teachers Union in 2010. Under CORE, the union engaged in a historic citywide strike in 2012 that captured the attention of the country and inspired other large-scale walkouts in subsequent years.
The 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns of democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) were instrumental in popularizing socialism among a new generation. Sanders, a lifelong admirer of Eugene Debs, inspired a wave of young people to join DSA, which is now the largest socialist organization in the country — with Midwestern chapters from the Twin Cities to Louisville, St. Louis to Detroit.
While each chapter organizes around its own local issues, those in the Midwest have largely prioritized running candidates for office; supporting labor organizing; and working to protect tenants and win affordable housing. These chapters, along with the rest of DSA, have also been active in mass protest movements, including the racial justice uprisings after the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the ongoing demonstrations demanding an end to the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza.
The impact of this organizing is visible in the current electoral landscape. Chicago boasts a democratic socialist caucus of six members on city council, and the Wisconsin legislature has its own caucus of two Milwaukee socialists. Minneapolis has four socialists on city council, Indianapolis has one and Louisville will soon welcome its first. The Michigan state house, which already has one socialist in office, could see another elected this year. These officials have put forward a vision of municipal socialism in line with their forebears, calling for improved public services, collective ownership, higher wages and economies of care.
At the national level, two of the most leftwing members of Congress are Midwesterners — DSA-endorsed socialist Reps. Cori Bush of Missouri and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.
In fall 2023, DSA chapters across the Midwest engaged in a Strike Ready campaign to support the United Auto Workers’ successful “stand up” strike against the Big Three automakers. Socialists have similarly supported the groundswell of union campaigns at Starbucks stores while growing the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee—a project pioneered during the Covid pandemic in collaboration with the United Electrical Workers — to train workers how to unionize.
In places like Kansas City, Mo., the Twin Cities, Detroit and Chicago, DSA chapters have backed campaigns to institute rent control and provide rights for tenants facing eviction or mistreatment. Efforts like these showcase a strategy of seeking reforms at the local level with the broader goal of ultimately upending capitalist power relations to democratize the economy.
Throughout modern U.S. history, there have been tireless efforts by those in power to stamp out this movement. But as Debs declared in his storied speech in Canton more than 100 years ago: “Every time they strike a blow, they add a thousand new voices to the hosts proclaiming that socialism is the hope of humanity and has come to emancipate the people from their final form of servitude.”
Miles Kampf-Lassin is Senior Editor at In These Times. Follow him at @MilesKLassin
