Biography
Victor Berger Born in Nieder-Rehbach, Austria-Hungary; emigrated 1878. Edited the Milwaukee Leader (1911–29) and built the "Sewer Socialist" machine that made him in 1910 the first Socialist elected to the U.S. House. Indicted Feb 2, 1918 in the Chicago "Trial of Five" before Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis; convicted Jan 8, 1919 and sentenced to 20 years. The House twice refused to seat him (1919, 1920). SCOTUS reversed in Berger v. United States, 255 U.S. 22 (1921), holding Landis should have recused. Re-elected 1922; served three more terms (1923–29). Died Aug 7, 1929 of streetcar-accident injuries. Victor Berger was the first Socialist elected to the United States Congress, representing Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was indicted in February 1918 under the Espionage Act of 1917 for editorials he had published in the Milwaukee Leader opposing U.S. entry into World War I. He was convicted on January 8, 1919 in U.S. District Court in Chicago and sentenced on February 20, 1919 by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis to twenty years in federal prison. Berger had been re-elected to Congress in November 1918 while under indictment; the House refused to seat him on November 10, 1919 and again, after a Wisconsin special election returned him in December 1919. On January 31, 1921, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Berger's conviction in Berger v. United States, holding that Judge Landis's hostility toward Berger's German-American ancestry deprived him of an impartial trial. The federal indictment was dismissed in 1922 and Berger was finally seated in the House in 1923, serving three more terms.
