Daniel Hoan

Hoan was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on March 12, 1881, to Daniel Sr. and Margaret Augusta (née Hood) Hoan. Hoan entered the University of Wisconsin in Madison in the fall of 1901.[2] He helped organize the University of Wisconsin Socialist Club in November 1901, a group which consisted of just four members during its first year.[2] Hoan served as secretary of that organization for the 1902/03 academic year.[2]

In 1908 Hoan passed the Wisconsin state bar exam and became a lawyer. A member of the Socialist Party, Hoan moved to Milwaukee where he worked closely with Victor Berger, the editor of The Milwaukee Leader, a socialist newspaper, in trying to persuade the city to adopt radical reforms. These included municipal ownership of utilities, urban renewal programs, and free legal, medical and educational services.

On October 9, 1909, the non-religious Hoan, a member of the Knights of Pythias, married Agnes Bernice Magner (1883–1941), a devout Catholic. She was active in her husband's political campaigns and in women's organizations including the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.[3] They had two children:

• Daniel Webster Hoan III (1910–1988)
• Agnes, later Mrs. Agnes B. Steininger (1915–1993)

Daniel Hoan, a widower since December 28, 1941, married Gladys Arthur Townsend (1901–1952), a divorced Indiana schoolteacher two decades his junior,[4] on April 7, 1944, in Delaware, Indiana. His second wife Gladys died in 1952, leaving him a widower once again. He did not remarry.[5]

Hoan began his political career with his election to city attorney for Milwaukee in 1910. He won the election by a plurality of more than 7,300 votes out of about 59,000 votes cast over Democratic and Republican opponents.[6] This was the same year Emil Seidel was elected mayor of Milwaukee as the first socialist leader of a major city in the United States. Over the next six years, Hoan clamped down on the corruption of public officials.

In 1916 Hoan was elected as mayor of Milwaukee. He remained mayor for 24 years, the longest continuous Socialist administration in United States history. Part of the reason for Hoan's electoral success was his break with the rest of the Socialist Party on the issue of United States entry into the First World War. The Socialist Party opposed entry; Hoan did not. Instead, as mayor, he organized the Milwaukee County Council of Defense on April 30, 1917.[7]

As mayor, Hoan developed a reputation for honest and efficient government.[8][9] He implemented progressive reforms, including the country's first public housing project, Garden Homes, started in 1923. He also led the successful drive towards municipal ownership of the stone quarry, street lighting, sewage disposal, and water purification.

During Hoan's administration, Milwaukee implemented the first public bus system in the United States. This was prompted by dangerous accidents: pedestrians were run over by street trolleys that ran down the middle of the road. Among the victims of such streetcar accidents was Hoan's fellow Socialist, Victor L. Berger, who was killed in 1929.

At the May 1932 convention of the Socialist Party, Hoan ran for national chairman of the party against incumbent Morris Hillquit. In addition to the "constructive Socialists" from Wisconsin, Hoan garnered the support of the young Marxist "militant" faction and the radicals around Norman Thomas, but this bloc was insufficient to unseat Hillquit, who won reelection by a vote of 105–86.[10]

Hoan was president of the United States Conference of Mayors in 1934 and 1935.[11]

After ten years on the governing National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party, Hoan pointedly had his name removed from consideration at the special party convention of 1937. Although Hoan provided no formal reason, convention participants speculated in an Associated Press story which made the front page of The New York Times that Hoan did not wish to be placed in the position of supporting the national organizing drive of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in opposition to the American Federation of Labor.[12]

Hoan was defeated in the Milwaukee mayoral campaign of 1940 and the next year left the Socialist Party and joined the Democratic Party. He ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1944 and 1946. In 1948 he was unsuccessful in his attempt to once again become mayor of Milwaukee when he was defeated by the Socialist Party's candidate, Frank P. Zeidler. Hoan remains the last sitting mayor of Milwaukee to be defeated in a reelection bid.

A highway system was started under his administration, but federal funding was scarce. The system was later expanded to include the Hoan Bridge, which was completed in 1972 but not opened to the public until 1977.

Today, Hoan is remembered as one of the best mayors in Milwaukee's history. A 1993 survey of historians, political scientists and urban experts conducted by Melvin G. Holli of the University of Illinois at Chicago saw Hoan ranked as the eighth-best American big-city mayor to serve between the years 1820 and 1993.[13] In 1999, Holli wrote,

"Although this self-identified socialist had difficulty pushing progressive legislation through a nonpartisan city council, he experimented with the municipal marketing of food, backed city-built housing, and in providing public markets, city harbor improvements, and purging graft from Milwaukee politics. Perhaps Hoan's most important legacy was cleaning up the free-and-easy corruption that prevailed before he took office."[9]

Hoan died on June 11, 1961, at 80 years old, from a heart ailment, in Milwaukee.[14][15]

Hoan's mayoral papers reside with the Milwaukee Public Library, Milwaukee.[16] Additional Hoan papers are located at the Milwaukee County Historical Society.[17] The Hoan Bridge on Milwaukee's lakefront is the most visible monument that bears his name.[18]