The Shame of Milwaukee

During a 1952 campaign meeting, Milwaukee's Socialist Mayor Frank Zeidler was collared by a fuming woman who demanded to know why he was making her sell her house. Her real estate agent, she sputtered, had warned her to sell "because the mayor was going to move a Negro next door." It was then that Frank Zeidler first became aware of a whispering campaign that in the ensuing four years would grow until it is now the main obstacle to Zeidler's bid for a third term.

Mild-mannered Frank Zeidler behaves more like a conservative burgomaster than a doctrinaire Socialist. He has kept Milwaukee's bonded debt among the nation's lowest, kept its administration almost entirely clear of his fellow Socialists, once refused a council-voted increase in his own salary. He has shown a normal concern for racial problems --which are slight in Milwaukee with a Negro community numbering about 31,000 in a metropolitan population of nearly 1,000,000. Zeidler has created a human rights commission, plumped hard for public housing in Negro districts, and in 1952 (after a maniac--who happened also to be a Negro--shot and killed three white persons) asked the Milwaukee Crime Commission to study Negro economic and social problems.

That record is the basis in fact for the vicious rumor campaign against Zeidler. Among the false charges:

P:That Zeidler has plastered the South with billboards inviting Negroes to Milwaukee, and is therefore responsible for a major migration (actually nonexistent) and a resulting crime wave (Milwaukee has one of the lowest crime rates in the U.S.). Says Zeidler: "There are many people in this town who will swear they've seen those billboards. When you ask them, they'll say it was a neighbor. When you ask the neighbor, he says it was a friend of his brother's. But they are always very specific: the billboards, flaunting my signature, have been seen near the Miami Airport or in Jackson, Miss." The Milwaukee Federated Trades Council recently wrote labor groups in ten Southern states, asking if they knew of any such Negro recruiting for Milwaukee. The answers were negative, except for two Wisconsin employers' associations seeking summer agricultural help from Mississippi. P:That Zeidler's daughter is married to a Negro. In fact, Zeidler has six children, of whom the oldest is a daughter--unmarried at age 15.

P:That Zeidler's sister is married to a Negro. Actually, Zeidler's sister is divorced from a white man, now keeps house for her father.

These charges have been called "shameful" by Alderman Milton J. McGuire, who is Zeidler's opponent in the mayoralty election next week. But McGuire aides have sneered at Zeidler workers for asso ciating with a "nigger lover," and McGuire undoubtedly stands to benefit from the whispering campaign against Zeidler. With some bitterness the mayor links his opponent to the rumors. Says Zeidler: "The rumor is what made possible any candidacy against me. It is one of those things that is very hard to combat. If my opponent leaves any heritage to Milwaukee, whether he wins or loses, it will be racial tension where none existed before."

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