Daniel Webster Hoan

THE MARCH 2019 ANNOUNCEMENT BY THE ​Democratic National Committee that it planned to hold the party’s 2020 national convention in Milwaukee drew a distinct line of criticism from leading Wisconsin Republicans. “No city in America has stronger ties to socialism than Milwaukee,” Wisconsin Republican Party director Mark Jefferson asserted. “And with the rise of Bernie Sanders and the embrace of socialism by its newest leaders, the American left has come full circle. It’s only fitting the Democrats would come to Milwaukee.” Republican senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said the Milwaukee convention would provide a “firsthand look” at “the risk of Democrat socialistic tendencies.” Democrats laughed off the jibes, noting that almost sixty years had passed since the last Socialist Party mayor of the city, Frank Zeidler, had finished his tenure in April of 1960. Many pundits wrote off the critique of Wisconsin’s largest city as a hotbed of lingering socialist tendencies as an attempt by Republicans to link the contemporary Democratic Party to the “sewer socialist” project that defined Milwaukee during the first sixty years of the twentieth century.¹

But the history of the modern Democratic Party in Wisconsin does contain a Milwaukee socialist thread. Indeed, the party’s great leap forward came when the most successful of the Milwaukee Socialists parted company with the left-wing party of Eugene Victor Debs and Norman Thomas in the mid-1940s and accepted the Democratic nomination for governor of Wisconsin. Daniel Webster Hoan, the longest serving Socialist Party mayor of Milwaukee, waged two campaigns for the state’s highest office as a newly minted Democrat. Those runs renewed the fortunes of a battered and dysfunctional Democratic Party and transformed the politics of the state. Hoan did not win when he ran in 1944 or when he ran again in 1946, and today, his bids are often treated as mere footnotes to a turbulent era of Wisconsin politics that saw the state’s Progressive Party fold its tent, the La Follette dynasty collapse, and Joe McCarthy begin his career in the United States Senate. Yet Hoan played a critical role in reframing the ideals and strategies of Wisconsin Democrats: he moved the state party to the left, convinced it to fully embrace President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, positioned the Democrats as the party of choice for Wisconsinites who had previously voted for Socialist and Progressive Party candidates, and provided his new party with a foundation on which to build toward the electoral breakthroughs of the 1950s. In 1944 and 1946, Hoan offered the Democrats what previous gubernatorial nominees had not: a viable contender for the state’s highest position who had significant support in urban and rural regions.

Hoan was an essential—arguably definitional—figure in transforming what historian William F. Thompson referred to as “a moribund collection of courthouse gangs” into a fighting force. Instead of a band of shiftless partisans that maintained the façade of an organization in order to gather federal spoils when an allied president took office, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin that Hoan jump-started in the 1940s would by the end of the ensuing decade control the governorship, the vast majority of statewide posts, the state Assembly, and a coveted US Senate seat that had been held by two generations of La Follettes. “The plain truth is, if Democrats have any memory, that it was Hoan who revitalized the Democratic Party in 1944, when he agreed to run for governor,” recalled Paul Gauer, a veteran Milwaukee alderman who worked with Hoan in the Farmer–Labor Progressive Federation that served as something of a waystation for the former mayor’s transit from the Socialist camp to the Democratic Party. “It was like a shot in the arm; not only to the state party which had tickets in only seven counties [before Hoan ran], but to FDR and the national ticket as well.”²

This was the result that Hoan had anticipated when he left the Socialist fold and elbowed his way into a conservative state Democratic Party that he believed could become a permanent home for voters who, as he put it, were “interested in the liberal movement, in the establishment of liberal principles, in real social progress and in liberal government.” The process took longer than he had hoped and yielded the great administrator no new position from which to govern. Yet Hoan was right when he suggested that his muscular 1944 bid for the governorship—which saw a fivefold increase in the Democratic vote total—“[made] it increasingly apparent that Wisconsin would be brought victoriously into the Democratic column and [that]