Victor Berger was born on February 28, 1860, in Nieder-Rehbach, Austria, the son of Ignatz and Julia Berger. When he was seven his family moved to Leutschau, a small town in the mountains of Hungary, where his father became an inn-keeper of some means.
Victor was educated in private schools and lived for a time with a tutor. Later, he attended government schools and universities in Vienna and Budapest, where his main interests were philosophy, political science, and history.
In 1878 Berger left for America and proceeded to Bridgeport, Connecticut. Here he tried one odd job after another, working as a metal polisher, boiler mender, and leather-goods salesman. About 1881 he moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he became a teacher of German in the public-school system of Milwaukee. Berger was not long in making his influence felt in left-wing political circles in Milwaukee. He was once suspended for ten days from his teaching post because of his radical ideas, but the support of the South Side Turnverein, a social and political club of which he was a member, helped to prevent his dismissal.
He was active in trade-unions, liberal political organizations, and numerous reform movements. In 1892 he founded the Milwaukee German daily, Wisconsin Vorwärts. From that time on, he devoted himself to socialist journalism and politics, and the story of his career is largely the story of socialist political development in America.
The year before Berger arrived in America, the Socialist Labor party had been formed. It was headed by Daniel De Leon, a rigid Marxist theoretically acute but politically inept. Berger joined the party but was one of a minority group which left in 1889. Believing in gradual reform and in all possible cooperation with existing groups, he could not have found De Leon's leadership satisfactory. Neither was he satisfied with the conservatism of the Populists, whom the socialist group in Wisconsin with which he was associated had been supporting. When the Populist majority voted in 1896 to support William J. Bryan for president, Berger and his group bolted.
In 1897 they joined with what remained of Eugene Debs's American Railway Union after the crippling Pullman strike and with J. A. Wayland's Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth to form the Social Democracy of America. In its second year the new organization split over the question of socialist colonization. The majority, under Wayland, were for setting up a model cooperative colony. Berger, Debs, and Seymour Stedman (also of Wisconsin) fought the colonization plan and urged political action within the existing national community. Defeated, they charged the colonizers with packing the convention and withdrew to form the Social Democratic party.
In the meantime there were forces in motion making for a new alignment of radical parties. The ranks of the Socialist Labor party were seriously divided over the problem of dual unionism. De Leon insisted on the necessity of independent socialist trade-unions to rival the American Federation of Labor. Morris Hillquit and others, who believed in cooperating with existing units of that organization, resigned. In 1900 a temporary and precarious cooperation was achieved between the bolting Socialist Labor party group and the Social Democratic party, of which Berger was a leader. The factions carried over their traditional disagreements into the new organization. For all his theoretical belief in cooperation, Berger was not one to go out of his way to compromise. But despite the conflict, the group agreed to nominate Debs for president and polled over 97, 000 votes, while the Socialist Labor party fell to 34, 000. The practical experience of working together in the campaign achieved a unity which discussion had not been able to effect, and in 1901 at the Unity Convention in Indianapolis the Socialist party was born.
Berger, as leader of the Wisconsin Socialist movement, was from the beginning a member of the executive board. During the next decade Socialist strength grew rapidly. The 97, 000 votes the Socialists had polled in 1901 became 400, 000 by 1904, and almost a million by 1912. The Socialists saw themselves in the White House by 1920. Socialism was the coming order. "We are speeding toward it, " wrote Berger in one of his editorials, "with the accelerating velocity of a locomotive. " During this period the Socialist party was active in the trade-union movement.
For years Berger, as a representative of the Milwaukee local of the International Typographical Workers' Union took a prominent part in the Socialist opposition to Gompers in the American Federation of Labor. The "boring from within" was so successful that the 1902 convention of the Federation narrowly defeated a motion to endorse the Socialist platform. It also rejected a resolution offered by Berger in favor of old-age pensions, but endorsed it in 1907. Berger was even more active in local Wisconsin and Milwaukee politics. Much of what he accomplished was done through the medium of newspapers and weeklies. He was editor of the Vorwärts from 1892 to 1898, and of the Social Democratic Herald (1901 - 1911), a weekly which became a daily, The Milwaukee Leader, in 1911, of which he was in charge until his death. In their pages he worked for reform, preaching socialism and attacking non-socialists and socialists as well when they failed to agree with him.
Berger was a firm believer in the ultimate effectiveness of daily education - of showing the people in concrete terms where their interests lay. Whenever a particular issue - a strike, a lay-off, a rise in the price of bread, or an election - afforded an opportunity for making a point, Berger's organization papered the city with handbills and pamphlets.
In 1910 Berger was chosen alderman-at-large. In November he was elected to the Sixty-second Congress, his district comprising fourteen wards in Milwaukee, the city of North Milwaukee, and four towns and villages. His opponent, whom he defeated by a slight plurality, was Henry F. Cochens, a follower of Robert M. La Follette. Berger was the first Socialist to take a seat in the House of Representatives. He served from 1911 to 1913 and ran unsuccessfully for reelection in 1912 and 1914.
From the outbreak of the First World War, Berger's life was influenced largely by it and by the Socialist party's attitude toward it. In 1917 he was one of the Socialist leaders who signed a proclamation and a war program which opposed American entry into the war. In the following months he published numerous antiwar articles, cartoons, and editorials in the Milwaukee Leader. In October 1917 the paper was denied second-class mail rights on order of the postmaster-general under the provisions of the Espionage Act. The order was reviewed and affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1921. In February 1918 Berger was indicted under the Espionage Act along with four other Socialists. A few months before he had been nominated for the Senate on an antiwar program and, although defeated, had polled over 100, 000 votes.
In November 1918 Berger was again elected to Congress from the 5th district of Wisconsin. The sentiment of the country was at that time such, however, that by a vote of 309 to 1 he was denied his seat because of his antiwar position. In December 1918 he and the four other Socialists went on trial in the United States district court for the northern district of Illinois, presided over by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. He was accused of unlawful opposition to the war, and numerous editorials and articles published in the Milwaukee Leader were quoted against him. In January a verdict of guilty was returned, and the struggle began for a new trial, based on the testimony of a juror who charged that the jury had been exposed to prejudice and that the judge himself was not impartial. The motion for a new trial was denied, and the defendants were sentenced to twenty years in the federal prison at Leavenworth. Berger appealed and was released on bail.
In the meantime the governor of Wisconsin had ordered a special Congressional election in December 1919 to determine who was to fill the seat Berger had been denied. Berger polled 25, 802 votes; his nearest opponent, 19, 000. The House of Representatives again refused to seat him, however, on the ground that because of the trial he was ineligible. He was nominated by the Socialists a third time, but the governor decided against another election.
Berger viewed the war as an imperialistic struggle between rival capitalist nations and believed that participation in it by the United States would sacrifice the rights of labor, hinder the advance of socialism, and accomplish nothing. Such was also the official position of the Socialist party; but its ranks were split over the question, and many prominent members resigned, accusing the party of a pro-German bias and asserting that it was dominated by a German faction.
On January 31, 1921, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court's decision against Berger, and in 1923 he again presented himself to Congress and was seated without protest. He served three successive terms and was defeated in 1928 by William Stafford, a long-time rival. He supported Alfred E. Smith for president in 1928, partly because of Smith's opposition to the prohibition amendment. On July 16, 1929, Berger was struck by a streetcar in Milwaukee and suffered a fractured skull and internal injuries; on August 7 he died, survived by his wife and two daughters, Doris and Elsa. At the time of his death he was national chairman of the Socialist party.
Victor Berger was one of those who established the so-called Sewer Socialist movement. He was a founder of the Social Democratic Party of America (later the Socialist Party of America). He also was the first Socialist to take a seat in the House of Representatives. Throughout his life Berger published and edited a number of different papers, including the German language Vorwärts ("Forward"), the Social-Democratic Herald, and the Milwaukee Leader.
Berger supported social reforms as a necessary step in the transition to a socialist society, such as the eight-hour day, child labor laws, federal farm relief, and old-age pensions, and fought for international disarmament. He fought the extremists in local Milwaukee politics as well as those on the national scene. He called himself and his supporters "the constructivists" and his opponents "the impossibilists. " He believed fervently that socialism was on its way and that nothing could stop it; but, and he could never emphasize this enough, he believed it must be achieved not by violence and revolution, but in a peaceful and orderly manner at the polls.
An editorial he wrote in 1906, condemning extremist tactics, puts his position clearly. "We are revolutionary not in the vulgar meaning of the word but in the sense illustrated by history. For it is foolish to expect any result from riots and dynamite, from murderous attacks and conspiracies, in a country where we have the ballot, as long as the ballot has not been given a full and fair trial. We want to convince the majority of the people. As long as we are in the minority, we of course have no right to force our opinions upon an unwilling majority. " "No true Social-Democrat, " he says later, "ever dreams of a sudden change of society. "
Berger was an effective editorial writer but was not an eloquent speaker. He had a rare gift of clear and simple exposition. In party councils he was inclined to be self-assertive and domineering and utterly intolerant of dissenting views. He was sublimely egotistic, but somehow his egotism did not smack of conceit and was not offensive. It was the expression of deep and naïve faith in himself.
On December 4, 1897, Victor Berger married Meta Schlichting, daughter of one of the school commissioners.
