Daniel Webster Hoan Jr.

was Milwaukee’s Socialist mayor from 1916 to 1940—twenty-four years and ten citywide wins, the longest continuous Socialist mayoralty in American history. Waukesha produced him; Milwaukee got the sewers.

He was born in Waukesha on March 12, 1881, the son of the town blacksmith and resident radical. When his father died, teenage Dan quit school, cooked in resort and fraternity kitchens, and entered the University of Wisconsin in 1901 as an adult special student who had never finished high school. He tested whether his father’s socialism was a mistake, decided it was not, and helped found a four-person Socialist Club. As counsel to the State Federation of Labor he drafted Wisconsin’s first successful workmen’s compensation law in 1909, then rode the 1910 Socialist sweep into the city attorney’s office.

As mayor he practiced what came to be called sewer socialism: Garden Homes, a modern sewage plant that sold Milorganite, harbor improvements, and graft scrubbing, often without a Socialist council majority. During World War I he broke with the national Socialist anti-war line, ran draft registration, and co-chaired the Milwaukee County Council of Defense. Time put him on the cover in 1936; a 1993 Melvin Holli survey of scholars ranked him among the ten best American big-city mayors from 1820 to 1993. The Hoan Bridge still spans the harbor he championed.