IN ELECTING DANIEL W. HOAN mayor and in increasing the voting strength of the Social-Democratic minority in the common council, including former Mayor Seidel, alderman-at-large, the voters of Milwaukee have effectually blocked the street railway company's designs to take $2,000,000 a year in added fares from the people and to nullify the referendum vote in favor of municipal lighting.
We should like to have seen a common council elected to back Hoan up and enable the Social-Democrats to carry out their plans for social betterment, but we appreciate that a majority of the voters have not yet come to understand the beneficial policies of the Social-Democratic party. Each returning election, however, shows that the prejudice against Socialism is being gradually overcome. Voters who have habitually voted the Democratic or Republican ticket, and who have partly sympathized with the aims of the Social-Democratic party, are being weaned from their old habits. They are coming to realize the futility of expecting that the capitalistic interests, through their own political organizations, will curtail their privileges or profits that the workers may obtain a larger measure of the wealth which they produce or the public the benefit of service with profit eliminated.
The election of Dan Hoan to the office of mayor is a rebuke to the pewee politics of the "nonpartisan" administration and a recognition of the splendid fight that he has made for the people of Milwaukee in the city attorney's office.
Never was a campaign waged in Milwaukee where more unscrupulous and disreputable tactics were employed by the managing committee of the capitalistic interests, which control the "nonpartisan" political organization and the "nonpartisan" press, than in the last municipal campaign
With one exception, the "nonpartisan" newspapers entered into an agreement to lie in unison and to suppress all news favorable to the Social-Democrats.
The Free Press and The Sentinel and The Daily News in minute detail on the eve of election reported that a speaker who was not even present at a "nonpartisan" meeting was hissed when he displayed the American flag and owed escape from being mobbed only by the interference of the police.
The report of the engineers' society in favor of municipal lighting was garbled, The Free Press even having suppressed it in an endeavor to indicate its gratitude to the street railway interests
The morning before election virtually every death in the city was attributed to typhoid.
The Sentinel actually listed among the victims of typhoid a woman who had died in childbirth and a man who was killed by a beer keg falling on his head and crushing his skull.
In spite of the desperate lying, in spite of the effort to hold the Social-Democrats responsible for typhoid, in spite of the attempt to make the American flag a "nonpartisan" political asset, the voters of Milwaukee defeated the mayoralty candidate of the inner ring of the Merchants and Manufacturers' association.
The street railway company and the allied Wall street interests might have succeeded in their conspiracy against the truth, in their attempt to suppress the reports of Social-Democratic meetings and of professional and civic societies, if it had not been for the presence in Milwaukee of The Leader. Through the medium of The Leader the public was made aware of the conspiracy, when otherwise it would have been absolutely at the mercy of the street railway interests and the inner ring of the Merchants and Manufacturers' association.
It is true that the campaign of falsehood and suppression had its effect. The truth never reached all of the voters. But if it had not been for The Leader it could have reached none of them in time to be effective in the campaign. The moneyed interests would have been able to win a sweeping victory instead of suffering a smashing defeat in the election of the Social-Democratic candidate for mayor.
re: @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social's win against combined efforts of right wing Democrats and the Republicans:
FROM THE ARCHIVES: "The Reds" Come Back, unsigned April 5th, 1916 editorial (1/2)
www.loc.gov/resource/sn8...
