Frank Zeidler, the last Socialist Party mayor of a major U.S. city, passed away over the weekend at 93. Every so often an obituary comes along that strikes the reader with the thought that surely that man died ten, twenty years earlier. Zeidler's obit did that for me. A Socialist Party mayor? Will they next tell us that the last tyrannosaurus rex just died?

Certainly many lower-case "s" socialists still serve as mayors in American cities. But a Socialist Party mayor? That's a real throwback. The party's heyday was in 1912, and even then, it wasn't much of a heyday. That year the Socialists boasted a congressman from Milwaukee, mayors from Schenectady, Milwaukee, Flint, and dozens of other cities, and six percent of the presidential vote. But if six percent was the high-water mark, then the waters never reached very high.

Not so in Milwaukee, where Socialists learned that to win office, and govern effectively, discarding socialist principles was often necessary. In other words, establishing state ownership of the means of production dropped on the list of priorities below regular trash pick-up, clean water, good schools, and safe streets. For a Socialist, this was a dangerous balancing act. If a Socialist adhered to doctrine at the expense of governance, the electorate might throw him out of office. If a Socialist governed at the expense of doctrine, the Socialists might throw him out of the party--as they did to mayors in Canton, Lima, and Lorain, Ohio. By the time Frank Zeidler came along, Norman Thomas's Socialist Party was a shadow of Eugene Debs's Socialist Party, and no longer could afford to eject members that had actually attained office (not that it made sense for Debs's less tiny SP to issue such expulsions).

"One of the most serious errors of the Socialist Party was its failure to behave the way political parties in the United States must in order to be successful," notes historian David Shannon in The Socialist Party of America: A History. "The Socialist Party never fully decided whether it was a political party, a political pressure group, a revolutionary sect, or a political forum." And that, along with the unpopularity of socialism itself, stood as a cause of the Socialist Party's failure as a party. But in Milwaukee, where Frank Zeidler reigned as mayor from 1948 to 1960, and Socialists--including Zeidler's brother Carl, the city's mayor who died at sea during World War II--ruled the city for nearly the entire fifty-year perioed between 1910 and 1960, the party adapted to local conditions and thrived. Tip O'Neill postulated that all politics is local. The Socialists of Milwaukee, who won election after election as the national party faded into history with the Know-Nothings, Greenbackers, and other failed third parties, are proof of this. But now, even the Socialists of Milwaukee are history. All bad things must come to an end.

Frank Zeidler, rest in peace. Socialism, rest forever.

"The Socialist Party never fully decided whether it was a political party, a political pressure group, a revolutionary sect, or a political forum."

The Libertarian Party has a similar problem.