As Donald Trump declares that “America will never be a socialist country” and Democratic Presidential candidates struggle to put a name to their progressive policies, the historian John Gurda would like to add some perspective to how we think about socialism. The term has been “ground into the dust over the years,” he told me, when we met in his home town of Milwaukee, and his aim is to rehabilitate it. “Part of my self-assigned role is to provide some of the context, the nuance, where it makes sense again. Because it’s the straw man, it’s the boogeyman for an awful lot of people.”

Last year, when the Democratic National Committee chose Milwaukee to host its 2020 convention, the executive director of Wisconsin’s Republican Party mocked the decision, noting that, in the twentieth century, Milwaukee, alone among American cities, had elected three socialist mayors. “With the rise of Bernie Sanders and the embrace of socialism by its newest leaders, the American left has come full circle,” Mark Jefferson, the head of the Party, said. But Gurda, who is seventy-two and has spent nearly all of his years in Milwaukee, thinks that the socialism practiced there deserves another look. The record, he said, reveals a “movement calling itself socialist that governed well, that governed frugally, that governed creatively, that served the broader common interest. We abandon that vision at our peril. All this fearmongering about nationalizing industries and taking from the rich—the Robin Hood thing—that’s a gross misrepresentation.”

Senator Bernie Sanders, the only avowed socialist in the Presidential race, delivered a speech on Wednesday that presented his brand of democratic socialism as an unthreatening egalitarianism, in the spirit of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr. He called it “the unfinished business of the New Deal” and recited an “economic bill of rights” that included the right to a living wage, health care, a secure retirement, and a clean environment. “ ‘Socialism,’ ” Sanders quoted President Harry Truman as saying, in 1952, “ ‘is the epithet they have hurled at every advance that people have made in the last twenty years. Socialism is what they called Social Security. Socialism is what they called farm-price supports. Socialism is what they called bank-deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor. Socialism is their name for almost everything that helps all of the people.’ ”

More than sixty years after Truman spoke those words, socialism still is marked by strong connotations and conflicting definitions in the United States. For decades, many Americans defined it in terms of the Cold War, equating the term with state control of the economy and, more often than not, authoritarian rule. Sanders, who first ran for Vermont governor forty-seven years ago, has found a following among a new generation that is not steeped in Cold War ideology. The movement, personified by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is trying to chart a path away from a new Gilded Age of garish inequality and rising economic anxiety. In recent weeks, as I spoke with dozens of voters and political figures in Wisconsin, it was clear from our conversations that the term conjures dramatically different images, from decency to social decay. Some equate socialism with a fair-minded social contract largely underwritten by a market economy, while others think of Stalin’s Soviet Union—or, more recently, Venezuela, where the late Hugo Chávez and the current leader, Nicolás Maduro, ran a prospering economy into the ground under socialism’s banner. As Democrats try to regain Wisconsin and other swing states that they narrowly lost to Trump, in 2016, candidates are eager to redefine the Party as responsive to the needs of working-class people, and Republicans are all too eager to hang a negative label on them.

“Understanding this word is going to be a significant part of the 2020 landscape,” Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth University poll, said, adding, “It’s going to be messy.” As he tries to get to the bottom of voters’ understanding of socialism, he’s finding a series of contradictions. A Monmouth survey published in May found that only twenty-nine per cent of Americans consider socialism compatible with American values, yet fifty per cent believe socialism is “a way to make things fairer for working people.”

A Gallup survey, released in May, found that fifty-one per cent of Americans believe that socialism would be a “bad thing” for the country, while forty-three per cent consider it a “good thing.” Putting it diplomatically, Gallup’s Mohamed Younis noted that American understandings of the term are “nuanced and multifaceted.” In a poll last year, Gallup asked what socialism means. The answers were all over the map. The most common responses, at twenty-three per cent, fell into the category of “no opinion” or “equal standing for everybody, all equal in rights, equal in distribution.” The next most common answer, at seventeen per cent, was “government ownership or control.” Then there were the six per cent who thought socialism meant “talking to people, being social, social media, talking to people.”

In the confusion over meanings, Trump and the Republicans see an opportunity to define the terms of the 2020 election, with socialism serving as epithet and warning. Warming up a crowd of more than ten thousand supporters near Green Bay, on April 27th, Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, said that the President would be running against “a bunch of crazy socialists.” In late May, the Republican National Committee and the Trump Presidential campaign sent an e-mail to supporters calling on them as “Patriotic Americans” to sign an “Official Reject Socialism Petition.” “America was founded on liberty and independence—not government coercion, domination and control,” it read. “We are born free and we will stay free. Stand with President Trump to tell Democrats that America will NEVER be a socialist country!”

Gurda, the historian, likens the Republican tactics to the Red-baiting first used against Milwaukee socialists more than a century ago and perfected in the nineteen-fifties by Wisconsin’s own Senator Joseph McCarthy, who later was censured by the Senate for his unscrupulous ways. The city had three socialist mayors: Emil Seidel, who served two years, starting in 1910; Daniel Hoan, in office from 1916 to 1940; and Frank Zeidler, who served three terms between 1948 and 1960. They were known for clean government, solid budgeting, a focus on public health, including vaccination campaigns and improved sewerage, as well as stronger safety standards in the city’s workplaces and hiring practices that valued merit over connections. More evolutionary than revolutionary, they avoided what Gurda called the “dense ideological thickets that waylaid other leftists.” Garden Homes, completed in 1923, was the first municipally sponsored public-housing project in the country. A key to their popularity was their ability to persuade voters that government was “a coöperative us,” Gurda said, not “a predatory them.”

“The word ‘public’ is used again and again and again and again,” Gurda told me as we sat at a weathered picnic table beside Lake Michigan, near Bradford Beach. “Public parks, which is why I had you meet me here. Public libraries, public schools, a public port, public housing. The term Frank Zeidler used all the time was ‘public enterprise.’ It’s important to underline ‘enterprise,’ because they were as creative as any capitalist, and as aggressive as any capitalist, in trying to create a system that worked for the common man and woman.” Seidel, a patternmaker by trade, was derided by ideological purists as a “Sewer Socialist” for building what would now be called infrastructure. Looking back on his tenure in the nineteen-thirties, Seidel offered a response to the critics, whom he nicknamed “Eastern smarties.”