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NY Times, Apr. 2 2016
Before Bernie Sanders, There Was Zeidler, a Religious Socialist
On Religion
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
MILWAUKEE — One night in April 1948, when Bernie Sanders was a
6-year-old boy in Brooklyn, Frank Zeidler was elected mayor of Milwaukee
on the Socialist Party line. He would hold the office for a dozen years.
Until Mr. Sanders undertook his presidential campaign, Mr. Zeidler had
been the last prominent and successful Socialist politician in America.
While Mr. Sanders is a secular Jew, though, Mayor Zeidler was a devoted
Christian, who remained active in the Redeemer Lutheran Church here
until his death in 2006 at age 93. As Mr. Sanders brings his quest for a
“political revolution” into the Wisconsin primary on Tuesday, Mr.
Zeidler’s legacy, both religious and ideological, lives on in a series
of public conversations held by his lifelong church.
Perhaps it did not qualify as revolutionary, but on a balmy evening last
month, the line of attendees for a discussion on the topic “Interrupting
Racism” stretched out the back door of the Redeemer church. Hobbling on
canes, hoisting backpacks and bike helmets, clad in hoodies, kente cloth
and down vests, they represented a convergence of races, ages and
political beliefs that is unusual in one of the nation’s most segregated
metropolitan areas.
Eventually, more than 150 people formed discussion circles of five or
six throughout the church’s rooms. For 90 minutes, they spoke, but they
mostly listened about one another’s encounters with racial hate. In one
group, a middle-aged white man admitted his lasting shame at not
confronting a boss who made a racial slur about a black employee.
Across the scuffed parquet of the social hall, a white woman in another
circle spoke of her shopping trips to the affluent suburb of Shorewood,
where she noticed that the police routinely pulled over black drivers.
Such things, she said, left her able only to pray, and then feeling
inadequate in her prayers.
Such discussions were surely in the Zeidler spirit. As a mayor, he
presided over a city begrudgingly accepting African-Americans who had
moved northward in the Great Migration. His home state was so
politically schizophrenic that during Mr. Zeidler’s Socialist heyday,
one of Wisconsin’s senators was the Red-baiting Joseph R. McCarthy.
Even as socialism provided Mr. Zeidler with an ideological lens, the
church supplied the moral teachings that he considered the essential
complement. Far from resisting religion’s voice in the public square, he
welcomed it, as does the program of topical discussions that bears his name.
Continue reading the main story
“My father always said, ‘You do nothing alone,’” said the mayor’s
daughter Anita Zeidler, a senior lecturer in educational psychology at
the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. “And when I need people to
work together with and to make social change, I look to the religious.
Because these are people of good will, who will put effort into doing
what needs to be done.’”
Her father, the son of a barber, graduated from high school just before
the stock market crash in 1929, which set off the Depression and cast
global doubt on the capitalist order. After enlisting in the Army, a
reliable way of getting a paycheck, he washed out of boot camp with
rheumatic fever, often a fatal disease in the era before antibiotics.
During a yearlong convalescence, Mr. Zeidler methodically read books of
political philosophy in search of a belief system. “Essentially, what he
said is that he was drawn to socialism because they believed in
brotherhood and equality and getting things done through democratic
cooperation,” Dr. Zeidler recalled. “It was all about fairness.”
Mr. Zeidler’s decision placed him within a long tradition of socialism
in Milwaukee, tracing back to the liberals and intellectuals who
immigrated here after the failed revolutions in the mid-1850s in Germany
and Austria. They and their descendants proudly and puckishly called
their American version “sewer socialism,” for its practical approach to
solving urban problems.
He eschewed the secular vein in socialism, struggling to reconcile it
with his Lutheran faith. At one point in his young adulthood, while
teaching Sunday school to teenage boys, he was fired by Redeemer’s
pastor for having brought up Darwin and evolution. Decades later, after
the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a congregant placed an American
flag in the sanctuary. Mr. Zeidler responded by installing the United
Nations flag next to it.
In his post-mayoral life, Mr. Zeidler worked as a mediator, even toting
his oxygen tank with him to hear cases in his 90s. Sensing his coming
death, Mr. Zeidler confided to friends at Redeemer that he wanted to be
remembered through “a place where people could gather for civil dialogue
on the topics of the day.”
One problem was that Mr. Zeidler was not wealthy enough to endow such a
place himself. Another was that Redeemer Lutheran had seen its
membership dwindle to about 100. The newly founded Frank Zeidler Center
for Public Discussion held only a handful of events from 2006 to 2010.
But one of Mr. Zeidler’s lifelong friends, a professor named Mildred
Templin, bequeathed about $70,000 to the Zeidler Center. Some of the
money went toward hiring a part-time director, the Rev. Lisa
Bates-Froiland, who became Redeemer’s part-time pastor in 2011. On Ms.
Bates-Froiland’s first day in the two jobs, she held a public
conversation with 200 people, a sign of her intent to resuscitate the
Zeidler Center along with the congregation.
Ms. Bates-Froiland has handed over the center’s leadership to Katherine
Wilson, a scholar who wrote her doctoral dissertation on survivor
testimonies about genocide.
The center has trained 250 facilitators and holds public events monthly
on issues ranging from immigration to gun violence to interfaith relations.
It also conducts private meetings between residents of Milwaukee’s
nonwhite neighborhoods and its mostly white police force.
Most recently, the center has worked in partnership with the Milwaukee
Repertory Theater to convene discussion after performances of its show
“American Song,” which concerns a mass shooting and its aftermath.
Nothing might have pleased Frank Zeidler more than the involvement of
someone like Allan Knepper.
Mr. Knepper, 70, is a self-described “conservative right-wing gun-owner
white guy from the suburbs.” He was active for several years in the Tea
Party movement and said he expected to vote for Ted Cruz in the
Wisconsin primary.
Even so, he had always enjoyed political conversation that crossed
partisan and ideological divides. It was just increasingly hard to find.
So when he spotted an article in The Milwaukee Journal -Sentinel about
Redeemer’s program, he joined a discussion on Wisconsin’s
concealed-carry law.
With Ms. Bates-Froiland coaxing along the conversation, Mr. Knepper
talked about having grown up on an Iowa farm, where hunting was part of
life. Nobody in his family, he said, had ever harmed anyone with a gun.
Under the rules of the Zeidler Center conversations, the other people in
the circle had to listen in silence as he spoke, and pause for a
moment’s reflection before saying anything in response.
And Mr. Knepper had to do the same thing as other people spoke of losing
children to gun violence.
“What I have gotten out of it is the ability to listen to others,” said
Mr. Knepper, a veteran of about 10 Zeidler Center events over four
years. “I have gotten better at explaining what my background and
experience is, and thinking about whether it’s a positive or a negative
in my life. What does someone get from me? I’m a distinct outlier among
all the do-gooders, but I like that role. Because if we are going to
accomplish some of the things we say, if we’re going to talk diversity,
we better be ready for some.”
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