Mayor served 'the public welfare'

Alan J. Borsuk reports on the death Friday of Frank Zeidler (1912-2006) who served as mayor of Milwaukee from 1948 to 1960.

He held tight to his political principles: He was elected as a Socialist when it was possible to be one and still be in the mainstream in Milwaukee, and he stayed one to the end, when it was a movement on the political margin.

Principle sometimes meant more than family to Zeidler. When [his brother] Carl ran for mayor [in 1940], Frank endorsed [Daniel] Hoan, who had been mayor since 1916, because Hoan was a Socialist and Carl was not.

Among his wide-ranging accomplishments was a 1979 version of Shakespeare's Hamlet "translated into modern verse". He kindly signed my copy at a June 18, 2002 presentation he and local historian John Gurda gave on the political history of Milwaukee.