Events & Programs
History Revealed: Claiming the City
July 18 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism
Shelton Stromquist
History Revealed
Thursday, July 18, 7:00 pm
In partnership with the East Side Freedom Library.
How workers fought for municipal socialism in the nineteenth century to make cities around the globe livable and democratic – and what the lessons are for today.
For more than a century, “municipal socialism” has fired the imaginations of workers fighting to make cities livable and democratic. Prominent US labor historian, Shelton Stromquist, offers the first global account of the origins of this new trans-local socialist politics. He will present how and why cities after 1890 became crucibles for municipal socialism. Drawing on the colorful stories of local activists and their social-democratic movements in cities as diverse as Broken Hill, Christchurch, Malmö, Bradford, Stuttgart, Vienna, and Hamilton, OH, Prof. Stromquist shows how this new urban politics arose.
Long governed by propertied elites, cities in the nineteenth century were transformed by mass migration and industrialization that tore apart their physical and social fabric. Amidst massive strikes and faced with epidemic disease, fouled streets, unsafe water, decrepit housing, and with little economic security and few public amenities, urban workers invented a local politics that promised to democratize cities they might themselves govern and reclaim the wealth they created. This new politics challenged the class power of urban elites as well as the centralizing tendencies of national social-democratic movements. Municipal socialist ideas have continued to inspire activists in their fight for the right of cities to govern themselves.
Shelton Stromquist is a historian specializing in labor and social history and a lifelong labor and civil rights activist. He is author or editor of seven books, including Frontiers of Labor, Reinventing “The People”, and Labor’s Cold War. He is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Iowa.
From the review by Jonathan Kissam, November 16, 2023:
“In his new book Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism, labor historian Shelton Stromquist describes these achievements as the culmination of decades of agitation around a program that was “essentially identical” to programs pursued by workers around the world. In the decades before the war, the equivalent beacon for working-class parties around the world was Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the Social Democratic Party had won control of the city in 1910. With control of the mayor’s office, the city council, and the county council, the Social Democrats “largely succeeded” in implementing important parts of their program: bringing the street cars and other city services under public ownership, building public markets, parks and swimming pools, establishing free medical dispensaries and hospitals, and providing free textbooks to schoolchildren.
As that list demonstrates, the “municipal socialism” of the book’s title encompasses many things we take for granted today — though they are often under attack. Among the achievements of the labor government of Broken Hill, Australia in 1900 were the paving of streets, improvement of parks, street lighting and a public library. In addition to expanding the public sector to meet the needs of working people, municipal socialists agitated for government oversight to ensure safe and sanitary food and housing, transparency in city government, and expanded voting rights.”