Victor Luitpold Berger (February 28, 1860August 7, 1929) was an Austrian-American socialist politician and journalist who was a founding member of the Social Democratic Party of America and its successor, the Socialist Party of America.
Born in the Austrian Empire (present-day Romania), Berger immigrated to the United States as a young man and became an important and influential socialist journalist in Wisconsin. He helped establish the so-called Sewer Socialist movement, and also sparked the American Socialist Party's nativist turn. In 1910, he was elected as the first Socialist to the U.S. House of Representatives, representing a district in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
In 1919, Berger was convicted of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 for publicizing his anti-interventionist views and was denied the seat to which he had been reelected in the House of Representatives. The criminal verdict was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court in 1921 in Berger v. United States. Berger was subsequently elected to three successive terms in the 1920s, for which he was seated.
Early life Berger was born into a Jewish familySee: Rafael Medoff, Jewish Americans and Political Participation: A Reference Handbook, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2002, p. 330.Mark Avrum Ehrlich, Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture, Volume 1, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009, p. 593. on February 28, 1860, in Nieder-Rehbach, Austrian Empire (modern Romania). Although the borders of interwar Romania do not coincide with modern Romania, it has retained Transylvania entirely. The modern name for Niederrehbach is unclear; it may not have been an urban settlement. He was the son of Julia and Ignatz Berger. He attended the Gymnasium at Leutschau (today in Slovakia), and the major universities of Budapest and Vienna. In 1878, he immigrated to the United States with his parents,Sally M. Miller, "Victor Louis Berger," Historical Dictionary of the Progressive Era, 1890–1920. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988, p. 38. settling near Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Berger's wife, Meta, later claimed that Berger had left Austria-Hungary to avoid conscription into the military.
In 1881, Berger settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, home to a large population of German Americans and a very active labor movement. Berger joined the Socialist Labor Party (then headed by Daniel de Leon). In 1892, Berger became the editor of Milwaukee Arbeiter-Zeitung, and changed its name to Vorwärts!Chronicling America. Browse Issues: Vorwärts! He also served as editor of another paper: Die Wahrheit [The Truth]. Berger taught German in the public school system. His future father-in-law was the school commissioner.
Berger was a member of the Milwaukee Turners and was elected leader of the South Side Turners in 1889.
In 1897, he married a former student, Meta Schlichting, an active socialist organizer in Milwaukee. For many years, she was a member of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents. The couple raised two daughters, Doris (who later went on to write television shows such as General Hospital, with her husband Frank) and Elsa, speaking only German in the home. The parents were strongly oriented to European culture.
Socialist organizing
Berger was credited by trade union leader Eugene V. Debs for having won him over to the cause of socialism. Jailed for six months for violating a federal anti-strike injunction in the 1894 strike of the American Railway Union, Debs turned to reading:
Books and pamphlets and letters from socialists came by every mail and I began to read and think and dissect the anatomy of the system in which workingmen, however organized, could be shattered and battered and splintered on a single stroke [...] It was at this time, when the first glimmerings of socialism were beginning to penetrate, that Victor L. Berger — and I have loved him ever since — came to Woodstock [prison], as if a providential instrument, and delivered the first impassioned message of socialism I had ever heard — the very first to set the wires humming in my system. As a souvenir of that visit there is in my library a volume of Capital by Karl Marx, inscribed with the compliments of Victor L. Berger, which I cherish as a token of priceless value.
In 1896, Berger was a delegate to the People's Party Convention in St. Louis.
Berger was short and stocky, with a studious demeanor, and had both a self-deprecating sense of humor and a volatile temper. Although loyal to friends, he was strongly opinionated and intolerant of dissenting views. His ideological sparring partner and comrade Morris Hillquit later recalled of Berger that He was sublimely egotistical, but somehow his egotism did not smack of conceit and was not offensive. It was the expression of deep and naive faith in himself, and this unshakable faith was one of the mainsprings of his power over men.
Berger was a founding member of the Social Democracy of America in 1897 and led the split of the "political action" faction of that organization to form the Social Democratic Party of America (SDP) in 1898. He was a member of the governing National Executive Committee of the SDP for its entire duration.
Berger was a founder of the Socialist Party of America in 1901 and played a critical role in the negotiations with an east coast dissident faction of the Socialist Labor Party in the establishment of this new political party. Berger was regarded as one of the party's leading revisionist Marxists, an advocate of the trade union-oriented and incremental politics of Eduard Bernstein. He advocated the use of electoral politics to implement reforms and thus gradually build a collectivist society., which notes that Berger "opposed orthodox Marxists, who, in turn, called [Berger] an opportunist". This refers to the revolutionary socialist left wing rather than the "orthodox Marxist" followers of Karl Kautsky, which was the majority tendency in the Socialist Party of this era.
Relative to other contemporary socialist politicians, Berger was a racial conservative. He regularly fought Eugene V. Debs on the subject., later adapted as Berger initially believed Asian immigrants would out-reproduce white Americans and further complicate the socialist movement's cross-racial solidarity. Between 1907 and 1912, he masterminded racially-discriminatory immigration restrictions in the Socialist Party platform. However, by 1924, he opposed bans on immigration from Asia. His views on Jim Crow were only slightly more nuanced: while Berger wrote in a 1902 editorial that "There can be no doubt that the negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower race — that the Caucasian and even the Mongolian have the start on them in civilization by many years," he does not appear to have believed that this justified "the barbarous behavior of American whites towards the negroes". Instead, Berger argued that segregation was a symptom of an elite capture that left the American legal system indifferent to the poor of every race. For a less charitable reading of the editorial, see By the 1920s, Berger had reversed his views on race, stating that a man "cannot belong to a society organized to persecute Catholics, Jews, Negroes and foreigners — and at the same time call himself a Socialist."
Berger was a man of the written word and back room negotiation, not a notable public speaker. He retained a heavy Austrian accent and had a voice which did not project well. As a rule he did not accept outdoor speaking engagements and was a poor campaigner, preferring one-on-one relationships to mass oratory. Berger was, however, a newspaper editorialist par excellence. Throughout his life he published and edited a number of different papers, including the German language Vorwärts! ("Forward") (1892-1911), the Social-Democratic Herald (1901-1913), and the Milwaukee Leader (1911-1929).
First term in Congress
Berger first ran for public office in April 1904 when he campaigned for mayor of Milwaukee, coming in third place with 23% of the vote. That November, he ran for Congress in Wisconsin's 5th congressional district and lost again, but came in second place with 28% of the vote. He finally won in 1910, becoming the first Socialist to serve in the United States Congress.
In Congress, he focused on issues related to the District of Columbia and also more radical proposals, including eliminating the President's veto, abolishing the Senate, and the social takeover of major industries. Berger gained national publicity for his old-age pension bill, the first of its kind introduced into Congress. He announced in November 1911 that he intended to introduce a bill for women's suffrage and back it with a petition bearing one million signatures. Less than two weeks after the Titanic passenger ship disaster, Berger introduced a bill in Congress providing for the nationalization of the radio-wireless systems. A practical socialist, Berger argued that the wireless chaos which was one of the features of the Titanic disaster had demonstrated the need for a government-owned wireless system.
Although he did not win re-election in 1912, 1914 or 1916, he remained active in Wisconsin and Socialist Party politics. Berger was especially involved in the biggest party controversy of the pre-war years, the fight between the SP's centrist "regular" bloc against the syndicalist left wing over the issue of "sabotage". The bitter battle erupted in full force at the 1912 National Convention of the Socialist Party, to which Berger was again a delegate. At issue was language to be inserted into the party constitution which called for the expulsion of "any member of the party who opposes political action or advocates crime, sabotage, or other methods of violence as a weapon of the working class to aid in its emancipation."Amendment to Article 2, Section 6, proposed by William Lincoln Garver of Missouri. John Spargo (ed.), National Convention of the Socialist Party Held at Indianapolis, Ind., May 12 to 18, 1912: Stenographic Report. Chicago: The Socialist Party, , p. 122. Hereafter: 1912 National Convention Stenographic Report. The debate was vitriolic, with Berger, somewhat unsurprisingly, stating the matter in its most bellicose form:Speech of Victor Berger 1912 National Convention Stenographic Report, p. 130.
The regulars won the day handily at the Indianapolis convention of 1912, with a successful recall of IWW leader "Big Bill" Haywood from the SP's National Executive Committee and an exodus of disaffected left wingers following shortly thereafter. The remaining radicals in the party remembered bitterly Berger's role in this affair and the ill feelings continued to fester until erupting anew at the end of the decade.
World War I
Although Berger's views on World War I were complicated by the Socialist view and the difficulties surrounding his Austrian heritage, he supported his party's stance against the war. When the United States entered the war and passed the Espionage Act of 1917, Berger's continued opposition made him a target. He and four other Socialists were indicted under the Espionage Act in February 1918. The trial followed on December 9 of that year, and on February 20, 1919, Berger was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.
During the 1918 United States Senate special election in Wisconsin, Berger ran for the seat despite being under federal indictment. His newspaper, the Milwaukee Leader, had printed a number of anti-war articles, leading the postal service to revoke the paper's second-class mail privileges. Despite these circumstances, Berger won 26% of the vote statewide in an April special election to fill a Senate vacancy, including winning 11 counties, in a three-way race.