DSA has invited them into the fold, and thousands joined. The group’s membership has tripled over the past year — to 25,000. It now has 177 local groups in 49 states and the District of Columbia. And DSA members are running for and winning local offices across the country.

Socialists once governed great American cities, helped to define the politics of states across the country, and played a critical role on the national stage. The Socialist Party of Eugene Victor Debs and Norman Thomas had many bases of strength (and exists to this day, along with DSA, Socialist Alternative and a burgeoning array of socialist organizations).

Milwaukee was not just a “hotbed of socialism.” What was then one of the largest and most prosperous of American cities was run by Socialists. The first member of the Socialist Party to govern a major American city, Emil Seidel, took charge of Milwaukee in 1910 (with the poet Carl Sandburg as his aide), two years before he would run for the vice presidency on a Socialist ticket headed by Debs. The Debs-Seidel ticket pulled close to 1 million votes nationally — 6 percent of the total cast in an election year that saw Democrat Woodrow Wilson, “Bull Moose” Progressive Teddy Roosevelt and even Republican William Howard Taft borrow ideas from the Socialists. By the end of 1912, the Socialist Party had elected mayors, city councilors, school board members and other officials in 169 cities from Butte, Montana, to New York City. In several states, the Socialists were so successful that they were no longer seen as a “third” or “minor” party.