Milwaukee Publishers, LLC - Frank Zeidler - A Liberal in City Government

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An Excerpt From
A LIBERAL IN CITY GOVERNMENT

The campaign put a considerable strain on my wife Agnes and our six small children. It was a trying circumstance for them for their lives were much disrupted. Mrs. Zeidler helped in the campaign committees and also participated with me on radio programs in which we talked over problems of the government of interest to families. One of the factors that tended to dispel the charges of my being a menace to democracy was a picture published in the Journal of Mrs. Zeidler and myself walking on Second Street near our home with the six little children.

A public official comes out of a certain milieu and social background. He has developed loyalties and ideas of values that profoundly affect his decisions on matters of public interest. This fact was as true of me as of any other person ever elected to a position of responsibility and my subsequent actions reflected again and again the background of liberalism from which I had come. No matter how hard the press attacked me, I could not desert the principles and values of liberalism I had acquired in the previous years, and my campaign was unique only in that I was a member of the Socialist Party running on a liberal platform. I was a member of a political group that had found it almost impossible to win election to public office in recent years despite the splendid record of municipal honesty of Socialist officials.

We started with ideals and a mimeograph machine. We had no paid workers, except that Manny Meyers received a small amount for his masterpieces of campaign papers. We had no professional publicity agents, we could not mount razzle-dazzle campaigns, we could not afford billboards. We did have tested liberals, we knew our city and its people, we had speakers, we had the issues and we had the resources of information, so that the charges made against our platform and program could be answered. But above all we had ideals and the philosophy of liberalism that caused our fight for the people against the special interests to take on the nature of a crusade for better government and a better city.

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