Victor Louis Berger

• Victor Louis Berger
• Born: February 28, 1860
• Died: August 7, 1929

Socialist leader, editor, member of Congress, was born in Nieder-Rehbach, Austria. His parents, Ignatz Berger and Julia Berger, Jewish in faith and royalist in politics, were prosperous owners of a country inn in Leutschau, Hungary, to which they moved when Victor Berger was seven. They suffered financial reverses but young Berger was educated in private schools and at Vienna and Budapest universities. To avoid mandatory military service he left without a degree and emigrated to the United States in 1878. Members of his family followed soon after; but they did not follow him in his socialist politics, of which they were highly critical.

After working at odd jobs in and around Bridgeport, Connecticut, Berger settled in Milwaukee in 1881 and became part of that city’s large German-speaking population, a significant section of which was freethinking and sympathetic to labor unionism and socialism.

Berger taught in the Milwaukee public schools from 1882 to 1892. (Meta Schlichting, whom he married on December 4, 1897, was the daughter of one of the school commissioners.) From 1892 Berger was involved full time in socialist politics and journalism, editing and publishing labor-oriented organs. His first editorial venture was the Milwaukee Vorwaerts (1892—98).

His first affiliation was with the Socialist Labor party, but he dropped out in the 1890s to form the Social Democratic Society. Berger’s modest program for socialism, Ira Kipnis has noted, called for “government ownership of public utilities, better schools, and public baths. From its stronghold in Milwaukee, the Berger brand of scientific socialism ... spread throughout the growing socialist movement in America, shaping its ideology.” He joined with Eugene Victor Debs and J. A. Wayland in 1897 in the formation of Social Democracy of America. In 1898 they formed the Social Democratic party (SDP). A more lasting achievement was the founding, through the merger of the SDP and a group that had broken away from the Socialist Labor party, of the Socialist Party of America (SPA). In the SPA Berger found his lifelong political attachment.

Before long the Socialist party developed three tendencies: left, represented by Debs; center, personified by the New York lawyer Morris Hillquit; and moderate, advocated by Berger, whose gradualist position became the recognized standard within the party. Berger’s separation of his views from those of revolutionary socialism was clearly shown when, in 1909, he opposed commemoration of the death of Karl Marx and commented: “If I wanted any saints I would prefer to join the Roman Catholic church and get them wholesale.”

Berger was editor of The Social Democratic Herald, a weekly, from 1901 to 1911, when it became The Milwaukee Leader, a daily, and he remained as editor until his death. The Leader prospered until World War I. Before the war, the Socialist party gained strong support in Milwaukee; the city acquired a socialist municipal administration, including Berger as alderman, in April 1910. In November of that year Berger was elected to the United States House of Representatives, the first socialist to sit in Congress.

Difficult times came for both The Leader and its editor in 1917. Berger opposed the entry of the United States into the World War, which he viewed as an imperialist struggle between capitalist groups at the expense of labor. The Leader lost its second-class mailing privilege and Berger was indicted under the Espionage Act. The five “overt” acts with which he was charged were five editorials he had written for The Leader. Berger, who was regarded as an impossible gradualist by many of his socialist comrades, was considered a dangerous radical by the wartime jingoes.

In January 1919 he was found guilty and sentenced to twenty years in Leavenworth. In November 1918 he had been elected to Congress, which now refused to seat him. He won again in a special election but was once more denied his seat, which remained vacant until the end of the term. The Supreme Court reversed his conviction in January 1921. Elected to Congress again in 1922, Berger was allowed to take his House seat. He was reelected in 1924 and 1926 but narrowly defeated in 1928. In that year he supported the Democratic candidate, Alfred E. Smith, for president.

In his first House term, Berger opposed American military involvement in Mexican internal affairs and offered bills prohibiting federal employment of minors, establishing a system of old-age pensions, and repealing the Sherman Antitrust Act. He also spoke up for government ownership of railroads, telephones, and telegraph lines and for woman suffrage. He was instrumental in winning a hearing into the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike of 1912. During his subsequent three terms he advocated abolition of the Senate, proportional representation for the House, repeal of the Espionage Act, recognition of the Soviet Union, public housing, and passage of a strong antilynching bill. On Berger’s departure from Congress in 1929, Fiorello H. La Guardia, then a fellow member of the House, said of him: “Mr. Berger serves our nation in the capacity of a pioneer, popularizing ideas of political and social reform long before they are accepted by many.”

Berger suffered a fractured skull when he was struck by a streetcar in Milwaukee on July 16, 1929; he died of his injuries three weeks later, at the age of sixty-nine. At the time of his accident he was preparing to relinquish his editorship (and part ownership) of The Leader, but intended to retain his post as national chairman of the Socialist party. Though associates found him domineering and intolerant in discussion—and “sublimely egotistic’’—he was regarded in his later years as “the grand old man of socialism.”

Berger’s moderate socialism was attractive to many Americans in the first decade of this century; and it helps to account for the election of several municipal socialist administrations and a fairly large vote in Debs’s campaigns for the presidency. In the 1920s Berger helped to give socialism a certain middle-class respectability by his presence in Congress.

“Victor L. Berger: A Biography” is an unpublished doctoral thesis by E. J. Muzik (Northwestern University, 1960; University Microfilms, 1975). There is no file of Berger’s papers, but material relating to him can be found in collections at Northwestern University, Newberry Library (Chicago), Duke University, Milwaukee County Historical Museum, and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (Madison). See also S. M. Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism, 1910-1920 (1973); The Milwaukee Sentinel, July 17, 1929, and August 9, 1929; The New York Times, August 8 and 9, 1929; I. Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement: 1897-1912 (1952); The American Labor Who’s Who (1925); and The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 1 (1944).