 The party was responsible for electing the first socialist member of the United States Congress and was the governing party in the city of Milwaukee for many years, electing several long-time mayors.Socialism was by no means new to Wisconsin, a fair percentage of the émigrés from Germany in the dozen years prior to the Civil War, the so-called "Forty-Eighters," had been exposed to radical ideas and been participants in a continent-wide battle against absolutist monarchy.Milwaukee was, among other things, an enclave of German-American radicalism, with some 24% of the city German born in 1895. it was there that the American Socialist movement sank deep roots.