ABSTRACT
Municipal socialism found favorable support through its efforts to reform city finances, establish public ownership of utilities and transportation, and curb the hostility of the police toward workers and their efforts to unionize. But this "sewer" socialism, so-called due to socialist efforts to curb public utilities, never acquired a permanent base of support. As a political force, socialism has never gained more than a small number of adherents in the United States. This record of failure is well documented in the literature. A recent analysis is found in Harvey Klehr's "Leninism, Lewis Corey, and the Failure of American Socialism". Socialism in Reading and Milwaukee faded during the late 1930s. The Bridgeport socialists held power into the 1950s. These few isolated cases constitute the record of socialist success. The failure of socialism as a political force is also due, in part, to the success attained in Milwaukee, Reading, and Bridgeport.
