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 in the September 1943 issue - the one between E.H. Johnson and W.W. 
 Schmidt on the question, 'Will America Become More Nationalist?' I 
 call your attention to the fact that in the first, under the name of 
 Johnson, I conclusively proved that America would. And then, under the 
 name of Schmidt, I showed, unanswerably, that she wouldn't. Very nice 
 debating, if I say so myself." 
  
 Zeidler traced many of his principles to his religion. He was involved 
 all his life with German Lutheran churches. He worked for Lutheran and 
 Catholic institutions in recent decades and participated in ecumenical 
 efforts. He said he felt that clergy and religious groups offered the 
 best hope for solving society's problems, and he was steadfast in his 
 personal religious commitments. 
  
 He approached his involvements in public issues as if they were a 
 religious vocation for him, a way to put his ethics and principles 
 into action. 
  
 Zeidler was first elected to public office in 1938, when he ran as a 
 Progressive Party candidate for county surveyor. He was elected to a 
 six-year term on the Milwaukee School Board as a non-partisan in 1941 
 and re-elected to it in 1947. 
  
 In 1948, Zeidler became Milwaukee's third Socialist mayor, prevailing 
 in an election that offered the most politically potent field in city 
 history. Fifteen candidates ran, among them three who ultimately 
 accounted for 64 years as mayor. But neither Hoan, trying to regain 
 the office he lost after six terms to Carl Zeidler, nor Henry Maier, 
 who served seven terms beginning in 1960, made it to the final 
 election. 
  
 It was Henry Reuss whom Zeidler defeated in the final election by a 
 vote of 124,024 to 92,277. (Reuss, who also lost to Maier in the 1960 
 election, served in Congress from 1955 to 1983, becoming a powerful 
 national political figure.) 
  
 "I think I won primarily because the name Zeidler was so well-known," 
 Zeidler said later. 
  
 The hottest issue in the election was whether the city should borrow 
 money for projects such as public housing. Zeidler, worried about the 
 impact of debt, was more conservative than Reuss on the issue. 
  
 Pat Stawicki, a 50-year employee of the mayor's office, was 18 when 
 she started work there under Zeidler. Phillips served her first term 
 as alderman during Zeidler's third and final mayoral term. Both said 
 Zeidler treated them with a level of respect that they didn't 
 necessarily expect from a man his position. 
  
 Phillips  recalled  her  first  conversation with the mayor as 
 "stimulating, it was intellectual, it was fatherly without being 
 condescending. 
  
 "He had all of my respect and fondness. He was a very special person 
 and so well read in municipal government. Such a brain." 
  
 John W. Kole, a former Milwaukee Journal reporter, who covered both 
 Zeidlers, remembered with amazement a morning routine in Zeidler's 
 office that included letting reporters help him open the mail. 
  
 Improving city service 
  
 Zeidler took over at a time when Milwaukee had an urgent need of an 
 overall updating of its services. The Depression in the '30s, followed 
 by World War II, meant that little had been spent in many years on 
 improvements in either physical structures or the way the city did its 
 work. Add to that the demands of a growing population in the postwar 
 era, and it was clear that improving the nuts and bolts of city 
 services needed to be high on the municipal agenda of the time. 
  
 The city still was collecting garbage in horse-drawn carts when 
 Zeidler came into office. The first fleet of garbage trucks was 
 purchased during his tenure. 
  
 The Fire Department was refurbished with nine new stations; the size 
 of the Central Library was doubled and library branches were created; 
 bridges and streets were rebuilt and repaved; the Milwaukee Arena was 
 built; a new museum was launched. 
  
 He took pride in for many years in the creation of WMVS-TV (Channel 
 10), the first public educational TV station in the state. Although 
 city government played a lesser role, construction of the freeway 
 system began, and County Stadium was built and occupied by the 
 Milwaukee Braves during Zeidler's years in office. 
  
 Many of the areas that had been unincorporated township areas became 
 municipalities,  including  Brown Deer, Glendale, Oak Creek and 
 Franklin. Zeidler warned of creation of a suburban "iron ring" around 
 the city that would leave Milwaukee with no room for growth and nearly 
 all of the area's poor people. Control of undeveloped areas became a 
 hot issue. 
  
 Victory for Zeidler in two annexation battles added what is now the 
 southeast side (Town of Lake) and the northwest side (Town of 
 Granville) to Milwaukee and doubled the city's size from 46 square 
 miles to 92. 
  
 During his tenure, 3,200 units of low-income and veterans housing were 
 built in five projects: Southlawn, Northlawn, Westlawn, Berryland and 
 Hillside. 
  
 Milwaukee's problems of race relations and poverty began to sharpen 
 during Zeidler's mayoral terms. The African-American population grew 
 between 1948 and 1960 from about 17,000, which was 3% of the city, to 
 about 62,000, which was 8% of the city. 
  
 Zeidler was an advocate for public efforts to improve conditions in 
 what were then the relatively small impoverished parts of the city. 
  
 At the 1955 groundbreaking for the Hillside housing project, he 
 decried the conditions that some Milwaukeeans lived in and defended 
 public efforts to help them. 
  
 "If it is the philosophy of any that the forces of government should 
 not be used to overcome these conditions, which private enterprise did 
 not overcome, that philosophy borders on the immoral," he said. 
  
 Sympathetic to the civil rights movement that was growing, Zeidler was 
 subjected in the mid-1950s to a rumor campaign that he had arranged 
 for billboards to be put up in Southern cities encouraging blacks to 
 move to Milwaukee. There was no truth to it. 
  
 'Drain on a guy's energy' 
  
 Zeidler won re-election in 1952 and 1956. On Oct. 6, 1959, he told 
 supporters to look for someone else to run for mayor in 1960. He said: 
 "This job is an awful drain on a guy's energy.... I'm tired all the 
 time. It's a hard thing to swim upstream all the time and carry the 
 banner of progressive ideas." 
  
 Zeidler had had several serious illnesses as mayor, including a virus 
 infection in 1949 that put him in the hospital for seven weeks; 
 surgery to remove a fibrous tumor in his lungs, which took him out for 
 five weeks in 1951, and two rounds of Asian flu in 1957. 
  
 He also was having more trouble politically. Aldermen had soundly 
 overridden some of his vetoes. 
  
 Many political leaders - including then-state Sen. Henry Maier - urged 
 him to run again, but on Oct. 30, he announced he would not run in 
 1960. Maier announced his candidacy the next day. 
  
 Although it would be easy to argue about how much credit Zeidler 
 deserves, Milwaukee at the end of his dozen years as mayor was at a 
 powerful point. The population had reached its highest official level 
 - - 741,324 in the 1960 census, making it the 12th-largest city in the 
 nation, up more than 100,000 from 1950. The economy was booming as 
 Milwaukee's factories turned out the core goods of America's postwar 
 growth. Poverty and crime were low. 
  
 Zeidler was only 47 when he left office. 
  
 In the following decades, Zeidler held only one major office - 
 director of the state Department of Resource Development - under Gov. 
 John W. Reynolds in 1963-'64. He worked as a teacher, labor arbitrator 
 and mediator, and consultant. 
  
  
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  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)