With an eye to the dilemmas and possibilities of having a socialist mayor in New York City, last month I published an article on the lessons of Wisconsin’s so-called sewer socialists, who governed Milwaukee for almost fifty years. It drew more readers than normal — as well as more blowback. To quote one critic, “Victor Berger was the godfather of the ‘sewer socialist’ movement and was also incredibly racist against Black people.”

Another polemical response insisted that white supremacist views were not a personal flaw of Berger’s. Rather, they arose from the sewer socialists’ “appeal to the lowest-common-denominator instincts of the workers whose votes they depended on, including racism.” Such criticisms echo a historiographic consensus, which for over seventy-five  years has painted Berger as America’s prime example of a racist white socialist. Even otherwise sympathetic portrayals of Berger have suggested he remained a bigot his whole life.

Before I started researching Milwaukee’s socialists, I assumed that the consensus view was accurate. And that’s why I was so surprised to stumble across a 1929 obituary of Berger from Milwaukee’s NAACP praising “the very broad and sympathetic views Mr Berger always had regarding us as a race, the unbiased attitude of his paper, The Milwaukee Leader, and his interest in the welfare of all.” How could one square this NAACP assessment with Berger’s infamous 1902 declaration that “there can be no doubt that the negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower race — that the Caucasian and even the Mongolian have the start on them in civilization by many thousand years”? Maybe the Milwaukee NAACP was just saying something polite but inaccurate about an influential dead man?