Making Minnesota Liberal: Civil Rights and the Transformation of the Democratic Party

Making Minnesota Liberal

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Making Minnesota LiberalCivil Rights and the Transformation of

the Democratic Party

Jennifer A. Delton

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis

London

Copyright 2002 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior writtenpermission of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Delton, Jennifer A. (Jennifer Alice), 1964–Making Minnesota liberal : civil rights and the transformation of the

Democratic party / Jennifer A. Delton.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-8166-3922-1 (HC/j : alk. paper)1. Minnesota—Politics and government—1858–1950. 2. Liberalism—

Minnesota—History—20th century. 3. Democratic party (Minn.)—History—20th century. 4. Political parties—Minnesota—History—20th century. 5. African Americans—Civil rights—Minnesota—History—20th century. 6. African Americans—Minnesota—Politics and government—20th century. 7. Minnesota—Race relations—Politicalaspects. 8. Racism—Political aspects—Minnesota—History—20thcentury. I. Title.

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The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

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In memory of my mother,Judy Jaschke Delton


Acknowledgments ix

Preface xi

Introduction: Postwar Liberalism and Antiracism in Minnesota xv

ONE

The Rise and Fall of the Farmer-Labor Party 1

TWO

The New Two-Party Liberalism 19

THREE

Antiracism and the Politics of Unity 40

FOUR

The Black Communities in Minnesota 61

FIVE

An Independent Black Interest Group 79

SIX

Civil Rights in Local Politics 93

SEVEN

Civil Rights in Party Politics 111

EIGHT

The 1948 Election and the Triumph of the Democratic

Political Order 129

Epilogue: Civil Rights and the Fate of Postwar Liberalism 160

Notes 171

Bibliography 211

Index 223

Contents


This book owes its existence to the kindness, interest, and support of

many people. Nell Painter’s guidance, enthusiasm, and unexpected in-

terest in Minnesota politics shaped this book from the beginning. Her

sharp questions and well-placed skepticism have continued to inspire

and guide my writing about politics and race, as well as my teaching.

Over the years Gary Gerstle has offered substantial criticism on various

aspects of this project, which always prompted me to reconsider my ar-

guments and assumptions in ways that made this work stronger. I was

introduced to the central question of this book at the University of

Minnesota in a class taught by Lary May. Lary asked what had hap-

pened to the promise of American politics in the 1940s with such ur-

gency, such investment, that I have wrestled with it ever since. He has

been a wonderful mentor and friend. The folks at the Minnesota His-

torical Society are perhaps the most helpful and attentive people one

can ever hope to meet. Patrick Coleman especially went out of his way

to share with me ephemeral bits of political history and anecdote. To all

these people, and others unnamed, I offer appreciative and humble

thanks. I would also like to thank Skidmore College and especially the

history department for the generous financial support that allowed this

book to be completed. Finally, I dedicate this book to the memory of

my mother, Judy Delton, who had little use for politics, but with all her

heart loved a good story.

Acknowledgments

ix


In July 1948 the mayor of Minneapolis, Minnesota, delivered a speech at

the Democratic National Convention that began the end of southern

white supremacist control of the Democratic party, and paved the way

for the modern, liberal, national Democratic party we know today. The

convention that year had begun in a cloud of resignation. The party

was divided, its leaders uninspired. Northern bosses were prepared to

compromise yet again with southern Democrats in the name of party

unity, and liberals were trying to recruit General Dwight Eisenhower to

run for president instead of Harry Truman. Then, on the third night of

the convention a virtually unknown Hubert Humphrey took the podium

and called on delegates to turn the tide of history and add a civil rights

plank to the Democratic platform. To a surprised audience, Humphrey

declared:

There will be no hedging—no watering down—of the instruments ofthe civil rights program. To those who say that we are rushing this issueof civil rights—I say to them, we are 172 years late! To those who say that this bill of rights program is an infringement of states’ rights, I saythis—the time has arrived for the Democratic party to get out of theshadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.1

In our age of political cynicism it is hard to recapture the genuine

shock, joy, and dismay this exhortation excited on the convention floor.

Since the Civil War the Democratic party had upheld the South’s “Jim

Crow” system of African American disfranchisement and segregation.

Preface

xi

Democratic progressives such as Franklin Roosevelt had always assented

to it in exchange for southern support of their programs. By 1948 demo-

graphic and attitudinal changes had weakened northern Democrats’

willingness to appease southerners. The wartime migration of some two

million African Americans out of the South, where they could not vote,

to northern and western cities, where they could, combined with growing

international attention to America’s “Negro problem,” had forced the

issue into politics, and even induced Truman to support a civil rights

program. But Truman nonetheless promised southern Democrats that

he would not press the issue at the convention and warned liberals to

abstain from doing so as well. Backed by an unlikely coalition of big-city

bosses and liberals, Humphrey broke this crippling tradition of appease-

ment. As the speech ended, exuberant liberals marched up and down

the convention floor, waving banners, cheering, carrying on. Delegates

voted to add the liberal civil rights plank to the Democratic platform.

Outraged Mississippians followed Birmingham police commissioner

Eugene “Bull” Connor out of the convention hall, accompanied by cries

of “good riddance,” and eventually organized behind the presidential

candidacy of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond. Southerners of

course remained in the Democratic party—they had nowhere else to go

until later—but 1948 broke their unassailable power to keep civil rights

out of party politics and platforms.

It has always struck me as curious that a man from Minnesota acti-

vated this momentous turning point in American political history. In

the 1940s, the focus of this book, Minnesota was especially lacking in

what we call today racial diversity. African Americans constituted not

even 1 percent of the population of this mainly Scandinavian, largely

Republican state. And yet Humphrey was part of an active civil rights

and antiracism movement there. In 1947 Minneapolis activists pushed

into being a municipal fair employment law banning racial and religious

discrimination in employment, one of the first in the nation. Dozens of

interracial relations committees and workshops sprouted up in the Twin

Cities in the 1940s, and the Republican governor conducted a series of

investigations into the state of Minnesota race relations. Republicans

and Democrats alike applauded Humphrey’s speech that summer. This

book attempts to explain this unexpected, mainly white activism for

racial fairness.

xii Preface

Minnesotans tend to see this history of antiracism as an indication, if

not a result, of a heightened sense of moral acuity. Non-Minnesotans,

on the other hand, are oblivious to this history at all. Indeed, when I told

easterners I was writing a book about civil rights in Minnesota, I was uni-

versally met with skeptical stares and quips about the brevity of such a

book. Rather than merely insisting defensively that Minnesota does in

fact possess a history of civil rights and antiracist activism, or accepting

blindly a peculiar morality on the part of Minnesotans, I have chosen to

take the skepticism seriously. Why were white Minnesotans interested in

race? What did they get out of it? What did it help them avoid? I ask these

questions not to deflate the good deeds of well-intentioned people, nor

to challenge their sincerity, but rather to more fully understand this

phenomenon. In the end, it is the overt whiteness of the state, the un-

likeliness of civil rights activism there, that makes this story compelling.

Preface xiii


In his failed 1984 presidential bid against Ronald Reagan, Walter Mon-

dale won only his home state of Minnesota and the largely black Dis-

trict of Columbia. It seems appropriate that a Minnesota liberal should

have shouldered this stunning repudiation of postwar liberalism. After

all, so many Minnesota liberals, including Mondale himself, had helped

define and enact the set of ideas and assumptions about “big govern-

ment” that Reagan so gleefully tore down. And it seems fitting that at its

end, it would be African American voters who were postwar liberalism’s

last, loyal adherents, for they too had been a key part of its birth, even in

Minnesota.

This book examines the relationship between the development of what

became known as postwar liberalism and the emergence of antiracism

and civil rights in the largely white state of Minnesota. It focuses on

Minnesota’s political transformation in the 1940s from the regional, third-

party radicalism of the Farmer-Labor party to the national, two-party,

interest-group liberalism of the post–World War II Democratic-Farmer-

Labor party (DFL). Antiracism (educative efforts to stop racism) and civil

rights (legislative efforts to insure racial minorities’ constitutional rights)

were just two of many factors that contributed to the rise of interest-group

liberalism in 1940s Minnesota. But while historians have examined how

political economy, anticommunism, and the cold war shaped this trans-

formation, no one has yet examined how antiracism and civil rights fa-

cilitated it.1 Considering the importance of civil rights to the eventual

demise of postwar liberalism, it behooves us to understand the original,

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Postwar Liberalism and Antiracism

in Minnesota

xv

mutually beneficial context of this relationship as it developed in at least

one northern, prominently liberal, largely white state.

This story also illuminates the origins and development of Minnesota’s

distinctive brand of liberalism. In 1959 political observer William S. White

identified “programmatic politics,” the idea that people voted on national

issues and national platforms, as a midwestern phenomenon, “developed

by the Humphrey people in Minnesota.”2 This generation of Minnesota

liberals, people like Hubert Humphrey, Orville Freeman, Donald Fraser,

Walter Mondale, and Eugene McCarthy, played a prominent role in the

postwar Democratic party on both the state and national levels. They

served as governors, senators, congressmen, and presidential cabinet

members. They defended the welfare state and “state-centered” reform,

meaning reforms and programs initiated and administered by a federal

government—the state—on behalf of its polity. Humphrey was vice

president, a leader in civil rights and Great Society reforms of the 1960s,

and the Democratic presidential candidate in 1968. Mondale was like-

wise vice president and a Democratic presidential candidate. The DFL

party itself was recognized as an unusually active and well-organized

political party at a time when parties were declining in importance.3

While commentators today attribute Minnesota’s fabled liberalism to its

Farmer-Labor past, the postwar DFL was not the natural heir to Farmer-

Laborism, but rather was born out of a clash with it. What continuity

there was between the two traditions is less important for understand-

ing postwar liberalism than the differences that separated them. Min-

nesota’s tiny African American communities also played an important,

though hitherto unexamined, role in the creation of this distinctive brand

of liberalism, mainly by publicizing an issue that tied liberals to national

two-party politics.

Historians generally recognize a shift in political sensibility from a

grassroots, movement-oriented politics in the 1930s to a top-down, man-

agerial style of liberal politics in the years following World War II. But

the substance of that transformation is still open to interpretation. Was

there a “lost opportunity” for class-oriented social democracy or real

racial progress in the 1940s that was stamped out by cold war anticommu-

nism and interest-group pluralism?4 Or did the shift that reduced the

viability of “grassroots” radicalism in American liberalism occur before

the war, during the late 1930s, as liberals made choices about the direc-

tion of the New Deal?5 Or was postwar liberalism the logical, natural

xvi Introduction

fulfillment of 1930s pragmatic, democratic New Deal liberalism?6 How we

interpret this political transformation determines our assessment of both

the limits and promises of state-centered, interest-group liberalism, which

some have blamed for a decline in citizens’ participation in politics.7

The political struggle that occurred between the left-wing and anti-

communist liberals in Minnesota in 1945–48 goes to the heart of these

scholarly debates. The issues that divided the young, idealistic, anticom-

munist Senate candidate Hubert Humphrey from his nemesis, former

Farmer-Labor governor Elmer Benson, between 1945 and 1948 were the

same ones that are currently contested in the scholarship. When did grass-

roots democracy die? What happened to class in American politics? Was

there an alternative to interest-group pluralism? Was consensus a mask

for tyranny? Was anticommunism poisonous to participatory democracy?

Their struggle over the direction of American liberalism is the main

focus of this book. In 1944 the once powerful Farmer-Labor party was

merged with the state’s perennially ineffectual Democratic party in the

name of wartime unity and Franklin Roosevelt’s fourth-term bid for

reelection. The various individuals who participated in the creation of

the new Democratic-Farmer-Labor party did so for different reasons.

Former Farmer-Labor governor Elmer Benson reluctantly agreed to the

merger as a temporary, necessary evil in order to defeat fascism and sal-

vage what was left of the New Deal. For Democratic leader Elmer Kelm,

on the other hand, the merger ended the unfortunate and undeserved

marginality of Minnesota Democrats. For a group of political scientists

from the University of Minnesota centered around the young Hubert

Humphrey, the merger was an opportunity to correct Minnesota’s third-

party regionalism, make the Democrats a truly national party, and usher

in a new kind of politics based on people’s organized economic inter-

ests, not their class, ethnic, or sectional loyalties.

There has long been a tendency to equate the idea of people voting ac-

cording to their economic interests with “class.” Beginning in the 1930s,

observers noted the rise of “class-based” politics, by which they meant

people, workers mainly, were voting on the basis of their economic in-

terests, rather than on the basis of party loyalty or ethnic identity.8 Yet

class-based once held another, different meaning, which was the basis of

Humphrey’s conflict with Benson, and which was erased with his vic-

tory over Benson. For Humphrey, a person’s economic interests were or-

ganized in and represented by interest groups like unions, professional

Introduction xvii

organizations, or business associations, all equally deserving of a voice

in the political arena. For old left-wingers like Benson, on the other

hand, class signified a view of politics as a contest between the ruling

class and the working class. For Benson, the labor movement was not

an interest group but rather an agent in the historical struggle for social

and economic justice; it represented the promise of democracy, not a

finite set of interests. Labor historians such as George Lipsitz and Nelson

Lichtenstein likewise understand class-based as a way of organizing politics

around the working class, which was discredited during the cold war.9

Since the 1970s, class-based, now meaning economic interests and

jobs, has been defined against race- or identity-based politics. So, for in-

stance, some commentators have mourned the decline of “class-based”

politics in the Democratic party, and attributed the defection of working-

class Democrats to the rise of race-based identity politics in the party.10

Likewise, civil rights historians distinguish between those civil rights

activists who emphasized economics and jobs (denoting for them “class”)

from those who focused on race and identity. Timothy Thurber’s recent

book on Humphrey’s civil rights career, for instance, argues that Hum-

phrey, though briefly inveigled in race-based issues like desegregation,

always focused on “class,” meaning jobs and economic opportunity, in

his approach to resolving America’s race problem.11 It is true that Hum-

phrey always focused on jobs and economic opportunities for blacks,

and indeed for all Americans, but whether or not economic opportu-

nity is all that was ever encompassed by the term class-based is one

of the things this book will clarify. In 1940s Minnesota the ideological

distinction between economic interests and class solidarity was clear, if

contested.

The difference between economic interests and class was only one of

many issues that separated Humphrey and Benson and their respective

allies within the new DFL party. They also disagreed about the role of

communists in progressive reform, the efficacy of capitalism, the goals

of a political party, and the burgeoning cold war with the Soviet Union.

These disagreements were not particular to Minnesota politics. They

were the same disagreements that embroiled and eventually destroyed

the left–liberal progressive alliance in America.12 Benson and his left-wing

allies were willing to work with communists to achieve their goals; they

opposed any kind of anticommunism. Humphrey and his supporters

believed that communists alienated otherwise politically active citizens

xviii Introduction

and thus gave strength to conservatives. They embraced a liberal anti-

communism that helped distinguish their brand of welfare statism from

European socialism and that blunted Republican attacks on their loy-

alty. Benson vigorously opposed President Truman’s anti-Soviet, mili-

taristic foreign policy. Humphrey equally as passionately feared the ex-

pansion of Soviet communism and supported Truman’s efforts to stop

it. Benson did not feel that workers’ search for justice could ever be rec-

onciled with corporate interests, whereas Humphrey sought to build

consensus and find common ground between corporations and their

employees.

These differences led to open conflict when the left wing took con-

trol of the DFL party in 1946. For the next two years the two factions

fought an acrimonious battle for control of the DFL party and, as they

both believed, the fate of liberal politics not just in Minnesota, but in

America. The Benson-led left wing attempted to align the DFL with

Henry Wallace’s anti–cold war Progressive party in 1948, which would

have required Truman to run as a third-party candidate in Minnesota,

if indeed he were even on the ballot. In the end Humphrey’s liberal an-

ticommunist faction squelched Wallace’s third-party bid in Minnesota

and drove the left wing out of politics. Events that followed affirmed

Humphrey’s greatest expectations and Benson’s worst fears. Humphrey’s

victory helped establish liberal two-party pluralism in Minnesota and a

national, liberal Democratic party that promoted and defended a wel-

fare state. As Benson had feared, the Left’s defeat in 1948 marked the

end of radical politics and participatory democracy, the rise of what C.

Wright Mills called the “Power Elite,” and the acceptance of polyarchy,

the idea that democracy is best understood as the competition between

groups of elites. Benson’s warnings of the dangers of a military contest

with the Soviet Union foresaw the arms race and the tragedy in Vietnam.13

But the fact that Benson correctly predicted what would happen if

consensus-oriented liberalism triumphed does not mean that he, or the

Left, offered a viable alternative in 1946–48. Those who write about Henry

Wallace’s Progressive party rarely, if ever, mention Benson, even though

he was the Progressive party’s national chairman and before that a leader

of the Progressive Citizens of America, one of the first organizations to

openly criticize Truman’s policies.14 The absence of Benson in stories

about Wallace and the Progressive party, especially those pertaining to

civil rights, speaks to a tendency to emphasize the more forward-looking,

Introduction xix

eastern and southern aspects of the campaign, at the expense of the

agrarian radicals, who were just as active in Wallace’s campaign as the

Paul Robesons of the movement. Old progressives like Benson attached

a different meaning to the Wallace movement than the black and white

southern activists that Patricia Sullivan, for instance, writes about.15 For

African Americans, Wallace was a wedge into national politics, a way to

take advantage of wartime population shifts, the first salvo of a new po-

litical presence. For Benson, on the other hand, Wallace was a defender

of an old, rapidly diminishing, radical, regional, third-party democratic

tradition. The same nationalizing tendencies that made African Ameri-

can concerns no longer merely southern, but rather national, also led to

the evisceration of the regional, third-party tradition that Benson sought

to salvage.16 Thus, it becomes hard to identify precisely what alternative

the Progressive party actually offered and for whom. Moreover, these

competing motivations further hampered the already small movement

that formed the Progressive party. The Left, of course, has always been

weakened by competing visions within it, but in 1948 that weakness was

countered by the peculiar unity of vision among their opponents, the

anticommunist liberals.

The anticommunist liberals’ success in Minnesota illustrates David

Plotke’s analysis of “the Democratic political order.” Plotke argues that

there was something called a Democratic political order that defined

the center and margins of American politics from 1932 to around 1970,

from the New Deal through the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. The

Democratic political order was based on a coherent set of liberal ideas

about the group-based nature of society, the need for an interventionist

state, and the necessity of redistributive economic policies. It was con-

nected to the Democratic party—indeed it had transformed the Dem-

ocratic party from a sectional party of white southerners and northern

machine bosses to a party of organized interest groups and activist gov-

ernment—but it relied less on party structures for its power than on

the agencies and administrative offices of the state, universities, and or-

ganized interest groups. The Democratic political order was established

by a group of what Plotke terms “progressive liberals,” based in the acad-

emy and state agencies, who allied themselves with powerful mass move-

ments like the labor movement to self-consciously create a new political

order.17 Based in the political science department of the University of

Minnesota, Humphrey and his liberal allies were just this sort of progres-

xx Introduction

sive liberal political actors. In the late 1940s their vision of a Democratic

political order was under attack from the Republican party’s conservative,

antistatist politics and from the left wing’s ideology of “class-based” pol-

itics. Progressive liberals like Hubert Humphrey fought back against both

the Right and the Left. Plotke believes the threat from the Left has been

exaggerated by recent historians and that the Republican Right was far

more threatening to liberals than the Left. That assertion holds true in

national politics, but in Minnesota the left wing actually controlled what

was supposed to be the Democratic party, the DFL, and thus presented

a bit more of a threat than Plotke allows. The left wing, however, did

not represent a viable alternative to Humphrey’s vision of a Democratic

political order in part because the political world that had created it

had disappeared and in part because Humphrey’s vision was bolstered

by moral energy and fresh rhetorical ballast supplied by the early civil

rights movement.

The transformation from third-party regionalism to national liberal

pluralism occurred during the same years that Minnesotans embraced

antiracism and became interested, however superficially, in civil rights

as a political issue. The timing was not coincidental. Humphrey’s zeal

for civil rights and white Minnesotans’ apparent openness to it have al-

ways been a little puzzling in this state with such a historically tiny African

American population. The state’s black population of 14,022 hovered

just below one-half of 1 percent of the population during the late 1940s.18

Historians attribute the emergence of race in northern politics to the

sudden wartime influx of black migrants into northern cities, which

led to economic competition, housing conflicts, new voters, violence,

and shifts in political power.19 But Minnesota experienced no great in-

crease in its black population during the war. It experienced no race riots,

no new influx of voters to be courted. Nonetheless, Minnesotans made

racism and civil rights a political issue. As mayor of Minneapolis, Hum-

phrey set up a Human Relations Council to resolve “group” tensions,

and a municipal Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce the

city’s new prohibition on racial discrimination in hiring. In 1948 he

gave the rousing speech at the Democratic convention that secured the

Democratic party’s first civil rights plank and caused southern Demo-

crats, known as “Dixiecrats,” to bolt the party. One explanation for

Humphrey’s embrace of civil rights is that he could afford to support

this controversial issue precisely because there was no significant black

Introduction xxi

population: no black threat, hence no opposition. But there was opposi-

tion, and, moreover, why bother with the issue at all?

Those Minnesotans who identified racism as a problem did so for the

same reasons other Americans embraced antiracism during World War

II: a sense of right and wrong, the paradox of fighting for democracy

while twelve million citizens were denied basic democratic rights, the

migration of black Americans out of the South, where they could not

vote, to the North, where they could, fear of racial strife, and African

American activism. These reasons motivated many Minnesotans to or-

ganize seminars and workshops about racism and religious prejudice,

to study the racial situation in Minnesota, and to prohibit racial dis-

crimination. When they did this, they encountered some resistance, but

they also found support from a wide group of civic officials, politicians,

labor leaders, religious leaders, and industrialists. That the guardians of

society were open to antiracist programs was perhaps because of gen-

uine concern, but it can also be explained by their historical context.

The 1944 merger of the Farmer-Labor and Democratic parties was

the culmination of political-economic processes that had occurred dur-

ing the preceding decades. The Farmer-Labor party (1921–44) had de-

veloped in a political context circumscribed by anti-Catholicism, anti-

Semitism, a rural economy, and a vague sense of anticapitalism. The

Farmer-Labor party was successful in large part because those who sought

to challenge Republican dominance were antagonistic to the Catholic-

dominated, alcohol-imbibing Democratic party. Because the Democratic

party was unavailable to them as a site of political opposition, those

who opposed Republican rule were forced to create an alternative party

based on their identities as “producers” and on what they called class

interests. By the 1940s, however, assimilation and the New Deal Revolu-

tion, which put citizens’ economic interests before their ethnic hostilities

or allegiances, had weakened the ethnic differences and class conscious-

ness that once defined Minnesota politics.

The antiracism activism of the wartime years also contributed to re-

shaping those political divisions by creating a public space for the sym-

bolic cooperation between once competing groups of Minnesotans. The

wartime fight against racism reconfigured concepts of race, color, and

ethnicity in Minnesota by focusing attention on the plight of “the Negro,” a

group that, due to its small numbers, was outside of political competi-

tion. As historian Matthew Frye Jacobson has shown, the antiracism

xxii Introduction

campaigns of World War II, in their particular focus on African Ameri-

cans, had the effect of defining race as solely black, while simultane-

ously redefining hitherto problematic, racialized groups, such as Jews

and eastern European immigrant groups, as “white,” and hence no longer

problematic.20 In Minnesota Jews and Catholics served prominently on

interracial councils that were increasingly less concerned with anti-

Semitism than with antiblack racism. Their participation on these in-

terracial councils affirmed their status as non-problems in a state where

they had once been very problematic. Antiracism activism did not make

previously racialized groups “white,” because they already saw themselves

as white with regard to blacks. But the new humanitarian emphasis on

blacks made their own whiteness more universal and changed the way

they related to and were perceived in politics.

In a state where politics had always been divided along ethnic, reli-

gious, and class lines, cooperation between Yankees and Jews, Lutherans

and Catholics, industrialists and labor leaders in antiracist workshops

and seminars paved the way for new kinds of political alliances that

affirmed Humphrey’s attempts to redefine the Democratic party. No

longer would fears of Catholic domination prevent Minnesotans from

voting for the Democratic party. Antiracist rhetoric and arguments for

civil rights helped deflate anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism, while at

the same time showcasing Humphrey’s vision of pluralistic, state-centered

liberalism. The language of tolerance, diversity, group relations, and re-

spect for others, as well as economic arguments for Fair Employment

legislation, dovetailed with, bolstered, and gave larger meaning to the

language and ideas of the consensus-oriented postwar Democratic order,

which likewise emphasized ideological flexibility, tolerance, and eco-

nomic pragmatism. Antiracism and civil rights enacted the principles of

consensus, flexibility, and pluralism in civic life.

When “race” emerged as a salient issue in Minnesota, moreover, it

provided a bold new position for the anticommunist politics of consen-

sus liberalism. While genuinely committed to the cause of civil rights,

Humphrey also understood that it conferred moral legitimacy and an

aura of courage upon those who embraced it. Humphrey’s fight against

the left wing in Minnesota was for the hearts and minds of progressive

voters. While engaging in what many viewed as old-fashioned anticom-

munism, Humphrey and his liberal supporters could point to their sub-

stantive civil rights record as an indication of their progressive bona fides.

Introduction xxiii

While burdened in Minnesota by the unfortunate label “right wing,”

Humphrey could quote white southerners’ exclamations such as, “If these

people are supposed to be Minnesota’s reactionaries, God save us from

their radicals!”21

The civil rights issue conferred progressive legitimacy not only on

anticommunist liberals but also on the much maligned Democratic party

in which northern liberals like Humphrey intended to base the new lib-

eralism. Historically, most Minnesotans viewed the Democratic party as

the party of corrupt bosses, Catholics, and southern racists. Humphrey

saw civil rights as the means by which liberals could stand up to the re-

actionary forces within the Democratic party, which obstructed not only

black civil rights but also the liberal–labor program of state-centered

social and economic reform. A strong stand against southern Demo-

crats was necessary to insure liberal ascendancy in the party, as well as

to eradicate the deeply held notion in Minnesota and elsewhere that

the Democrats were dominated by white supremacists and conciliatory

machine bosses. Humphrey’s civil rights initiatives in the Democratic

party helped solidify a liberal, administrative, social service state, which

eventually, as historian Sidney Milkis has argued, transferred power

from local party functionaries to academic experts and policymakers in

Washington.22

Antiracism and civil rights were never the major, real political issues

for most Minnesotans in the 1940s. Only a small minority of politically

conscious white and black activists were really concerned with fighting

racism and legislating civil rights. But at those moments when race ap-

peared in the 1940s, in those instances when it entered politics, it did

ideological and political work to which we need to pay attention. It pro-

vided common ground and good will between competing groups of Min-

nesotans, it helped refocus regional politics on a national Democratic

party issue, and it brought a sense of moral mission to the political sci-

entists’ bid for power. Antiracism did not end ethnic tension or class

conflict in Minnesota. Rather, it was one of many historical factors that

reduced the power of those tensions to wholly define political discourse

as they had in the past.

The fact that antiracism and race became political issues at all in the

largely white state of Minnesota in the 1940s challenges the traditional

understanding of racial politics as primarily about the resolution of ten-

xxiv Introduction

sions and inequities between whites and blacks. Minnesota allows us to

see things about race that are obscured in places where the immediate

stakes—housing, jobs, and political power—make the goals of racial pol-

itics fairly obvious. Recent studies of Detroit, Chicago, and other indus-

trial cities that became racial powder kegs during World War II have con-

tributed to our understanding of postwar racial politics, but Minnesota

provides a unique opportunity to explore the larger effect of race, racial

politics, and antiracism in those areas of the nation that do not, appar-

ently, have anything to do with race.

My analysis of the political and ideological work performed by an-

tiracism recognizes that antiracism, even in its most sincere forms, op-

erates in the world in a variety of different ways. In an account of De-

troit’s racial politics in the years following World War II, Thomas Sugrue

reminds readers that the significance and dimensions of racial discrim-

ination and indeed “race” itself depend on the particular economic, re-

gional, political contexts of any given historical moment. He notes that

historians have tended to see race and racism as “transhistorical constants”

rather than historical variables.23 The same holds true of antiracism. The

meaning and significance of antiracism are likewise dependent on po-

litical contexts and historical moments. Yet, historians have generally

seen the struggle against racism as a transcendent mission that moves

history forward but is not of history itself. They frame antiracism and

civil rights in terms of how particular incidents or strategies either con-

tributed to or hindered the ongoing struggle for racial justice. Those

efforts deemed “sincere” become part of a heroic, transhistorical narra-

tive of justice.24 Those efforts that are seen as instrumental, on the other

hand, are dismissed as serving specific political and economic impera-

tives that limit the possibilities for true justice, even as they may incre-

mentally appear to be furthering it.25 Humphrey’s biographers, for in-

stance, celebrate his interest in civil rights for the most part at face value,

noting his progressive, selfless contributions to the struggle for justice at a

time when racism was the norm. On the other hand, others have argued

that because cold war liberals like Humphrey supported civil rights as

part of their espousal of liberal anticommunist ideals, their contributions

to racial justice were limited, flawed by their rejection of class-based

organizing and their faith in economic growth.26 Both interpretations

depend on a transhistorical narrative of racial justice—either Humphrey

Introduction xxv

contributed or hindered the quest for racial justice—rather than ana-

lyzing liberal antiracism as a historical factor that shaped and influenced

the politics of which it was a part.

The intersection of anticommunism, antiracism, and political imper-

atives is about something more than the limits of postwar liberalism. It

is about the power of antiracism as a political catalyst in areas hitherto

unaffected by race. Antiracism in Minnesota redefined liberal political

purpose and reconfigured liberal political alliances. While motivated by

genuine moral outrage, antiracism nonetheless helped redefine liberal

politics in Minnesota and nationally in the Democratic party. This may

well have limited the possibilities of antiracism, and yet it should prompt

us to wonder whether antiracism and civil rights could have fit as snugly

and effectively into white politics in any other way.

Minnesota was not “every state.” It was not typical. Yet its peculiar

political heritage produced Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Wal-

ter Mondale, and a generation of liberals who articulated and fought for

the kind of state-centered, social-welfare reforms that transformed the

Democratic party. That antiracism was a part of this development, in a

state where “race didn’t matter,” tells us something new and important

about the dynamic relationship between antiracism and American pol-

itics in the twentieth century.

xxvi Introduction

To understand the novelty of Hubert Humphrey’s vision of two-party

pluralist politics in Minnesota, we need first to establish what he was

building onto and reacting against. Third-party movements had flour-

ished in Minnesota in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

due to a combination of sectional politics, ethnic divisions, and the ru-

ral economy of the state. The New Deal and World War II disrupted

these conditions and destroyed the political and economic context that

had given rise to the Farmer-Labor party. When this happened, Hum-

phrey and his liberal allies stood ready to instruct Minnesota voters in

their own brand of two-party politics, which they defined in part against

the movement-oriented, regional third-party politics of the past.

“The Impossible in American Politics”

In 1918 the Minnesota Federation of Labor joined forces with the Non-

partisan League, a farmers’ organization from North Dakota. Arthur C.

Townley, a failed flax farmer and founder of the Nonpartisan League,

presided over a frenzied two-day celebration of the endorsement. As

the wiry North Dakotan led farmers in wild cheers of appreciation for

the workers, tears rolled down the cheeks of a St. Paul Street Railway

worker, baby in his arms, wife by his side, as he watched “the impossible

in American politics” come to pass: a farmer–labor alliance. The tear-

stained face of that St. Paul railway worker was first reported in the

Nonpartisan Leader, but it has been mentioned in almost every account

since, so well does it capture the long struggle and deep hopes such an

alliance embodied for ordinary people.1

C H A P T E R O N E

The Rise and Fall of the Farmer-Labor Party

1

Since statehood in 1858, Minnesota had been home to a variety of

self-consciously anti-party, sometimes radical third parties and farmers’

movements, including the Anti-Monopoly party, the Greenback party,

the Peoples’ party, the Prohibition party, any number of Socialist par-

ties, and the Nonpartisan League.2 An Elk River farmer named Oliver

Kelley founded the Patrons of Husbandry in 1867. Otherwise known as

the Farmers’ Grange, it was responsible for the first laws regulating rail-

road rates. Populist leader Ignatius Donnelly, author of the 1892 Pop-

ulist Platform and the fiery anticapitalist dystopia Caesar’s Column (1890),

began his career in Minnesota, serving as a Republican congressman in

the 1860s, and later as president of the Minnesota Farmers’ Alliance.

Several factors contributed to the prevalence of farmers’ movements

in the state. First, nineteenth-century Minnesota was almost completely

rural. Sixty-six percent of the population lived in rural areas in the 1880s.3

The issues that concerned most people in Minnesota were agricultural

issues. Second, the Republican party dominated state politics. This was

in part due to the Civil War, which had branded the Democratic party

the party of treason, but the Minnesota Republican party was powerful

in its own right. The province of wealthy Yankee industrialists, grain

dealers, and railroad magnates, the Republican party also attracted the

votes of Norwegian and Swedish farmers, two of the largest immigrant

groups in the state. The Democrats, on the other hand, were dominated

by a despised Irish Catholic minority. They posed no threat to the Re-

publicans. The power of the Republican party and the irrelevance of

the Democratic party meant that the only political avenues open to dis-

contented farmers were the great agrarian, anti-party protest movements

of the late-nineteenth century.4 Townley’s Nonpartisan League was one

such movement. It had won control of North Dakota’s government in

1916 by running its own candidates in the Republican party primaries.5

Townley’s Nonpartisan League attempted to organize in Minnesota in

1917. However, Minnesota’s rural population made up a smaller major-

ity than North Dakota’s, its economy was becoming more diversified,

and many farmers had already organized in other ways to address their

situations, such as in cooperatives.6 Thus, in order for the League to be

successful in Minnesota it had to win non-rural support, most likely

from the labor movement.

The gulf separating farmers and workers was huge. The two groups

had competing economic interests. Farmers supported inflationary eco-

2 The Rise and Fall of the Farmer-Labor Party

nomic policies to raise the price of their crops. As debtors they benefited

from inflation. Workers, on the other hand, almost always favored lower

prices, and were usually not in a position to be concerned about interest

rates and loans. Moreover, ethnic allegiances still divided Minnesota’s

overwhelmingly immigrant population and deepened the rural–urban

divide. Proportionately, the rural states of the upper Midwest—Min-

nesota, Wisconsin, the Dakotas—were among the most “foreign” in the

nation. In 1880 71 percent of the people in Minnesota were foreign-born

or of foreign-born parents. The majority of voting age males in 1900

were foreign-born.7 The plains of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas

had been virtually uninhabited (by non-Indians) when émigrés from

Norway, Sweden, Germany, and Ireland arrived in the latter half of the

nineteenth century to clear the land and set up farms. Separated by differ-

ent customs, religions, and languages, these groups were thrust into com-

petition for land. In Giants of the Earth, O. E. Rölvaag captures the weird

internationalism that existed out on the plains, as translators tried to

resolve disputes between suspicious Irish, Swedish, Norwegian, and

German settlers, who viewed each other in terms of nationality and Old

World prejudices. Their prejudices were solidified in the inevitable vio-

lence that followed the translators’ failed attempts to sort through com-

peting claims about deeds and stakes.8 Immigration was restricted in

1920, but ethnic identity continued to define the state’s politics, towns,

and newspapers. In 1930, after ten years of immigration restrictions,

over 50 percent of the population was still of foreign-born parentage.9

Until the eve of World War II, German was spoken in New Ulm, Czech

in New Prague, Polish in sections of Winona, and Swedish, Norwegian,

or Danish in any number of counties across the state.10 Ethnic and reli-

gious tensions flourished, especially in the forms of anti-Catholicism

and anti-Semitism. Major political issues such as Prohibition were de-

fined according to ethnic and religious identities, pitting a “dry” Lutheran

majority against a “wet” Catholic minority. Politicians and observers

took it for granted that Scandinavian Lutherans would never vote for an

Irish Catholic Democrat.

While farmers in Minnesota were overwhelmingly Scandinavian (Swe-

dish, Norwegian, Danish) or German, a more polyglot group of Italians,

Finns, Czechs, Poles, Croatians, Lithuanians, Slovakians, Serbs, and Hun-

garians arrived around 1900 to mine the iron ore on the Iron Ranges in

northern Minnesota and to work in the meatpacking plants in the south-


ern part of the state.11 Socialists and labor organizers had a difficult

time organizing across the ethnic lines of workers in the same indus-

tries, let alone bridging the farmer–worker divide. The farmers tended

to be socially conservative, Lutheran, prohibitionist, and settled, whereas

the newer immigrants from Finland and southern Europe, especially

those who became miners and lumbermen, were unmarried, transient,

and wild. They were not churchgoers. The towns on the Range were wide-

open havens of gambling, whiskey, prostitution, and untimely deaths.12

The IWW did well organizing these kinds of men, but it was hard to

imagine what type of leadership could bring together staid Lutheran

wheat growers and hardscrabble miners.

The one thing farmers and workers shared was repression. The grain

dealers, railroad magnates, bankers, and mine owners who controlled

the economy and politics used state power to repress both farmers’ move-

ments and workers’ unions. Violence against rural and labor organizers

reached a peak during World War I with the creation of the Commis-

sion of Public Safety. Formed to quell antiwar activities and monitor

the possibly seditious activities of the foreign-born (who still made up

almost 40 percent of the population), the commission shut down Ger-

man-language presses, condoned mob violence against Nonpartisan

League organizers, vandalized the stores of League supporters, and de-

ported agitators.13 The commission’s flagrant use of red-baiting to whip

up opposition to League organizers would not be forgotten, and was a

major reason that the left wing would so strenuously oppose any kind

of anticommunism in the 1940s. The happy product of this brutal repres-

sion, however, was organized labor’s endorsement of the Nonpartisan

League gubernatorial candidate Charles A. Lindbergh Sr. in the Repub-

lican primary of 1918, the first farmer–labor alliance.

Lindbergh lost the race in the primary, but the Federation of Labor

and the Nonpartisan League sponsored a full slate of candidates in the

general election, which ran under the label “Farmer-Labor.” This slate of

candidates finished ahead of the Democratic candidates in most races.

The unexpected success of the Farmer-Labor ticket led the president of

the St. Paul Trades and Assembly, a Socialist named William Mahoney,

to form the Working Peoples’ Nonpartisan League (WPNL), which he

intended to be the political arm of the Minnesota Federation of Labor.14

At first the WPNL and the Nonpartisan League worked together on an

ad hoc basis, endorsing the same candidates at separate conventions,


and running the ticket in the Republican primary. They chose to run

their candidates in the Republican primary, as opposed to forming a

separate party, because this strategy had secured Nonpartisan League

victories in North Dakota. They used the Republican party because Dem-

ocratic candidates rarely won elections. The Republicans, however, passed

legislation that banned this practice in 1921, and this action forced the

Working Peoples’ Nonpartisan League and the farmers’ Nonpartisan

League to reconsider the nature of their alliance.15

At issue was whether to form a separate third party, a Farmer-Labor

party. League leader Arthur Townley opposed the idea of a separate third

party. He believed that American political history was against the suc-

cess of third parties, and wanted to keep the farmers organized as “a

great mobile voting bloc.”16 Socialist Mahoney, representing the labor

movement, saw the rare opportunity to put labor at the fore of a viable

political organization, and favored a separate party. Despite Townley’s

vigorous opposition to an independent third party, the Nonpartisan

League voted with Mahoney’s forces to support the creation of the

Farmer-Labor party.17 In 1922 a Norwegian dentist from Kandiyohi

County named Henrik Shipstead became the new Farmer-Labor party’s

first U.S. senator. The election also sent two Farmer-Laborites to Con-

gress, and from then on, until 1944, the Farmer-Labor party was the chief

rival of the Republicans. The Democrats were relegated to the status of

a third party.

From the start the new party was divided about its mission. In general,

the rural wing favored using the party to obtain specific, short-term

goals that helped the “common folks” stay out of debt and maintain a

decent standard of living. The party’s two senators, Henrik Shipstead

and Magnus Johnson (elected in a 1923 special election), exemplified

this vision. Both from rural areas, they aligned themselves with western

Republican progressives in the Senate and veered away from the class

consciousness that marked their labor compatriots in the party. The

labor wing, led by William Mahoney, held out an overarching program

of economic justice based on a Marxist critique of capitalism. Mahoney

left the Socialist party in the early 1920s, but he continued to advocate

government ownership of industries and utilities and militant mass strug-

gle. He saw the Farmer-Labor party as the first step toward a national

mass movement against the capitalist order, and allied the Farmer-

Labor party with national progressive organizations like the League for


Independent Political Action (LIPA). A small group of Farmer-Laborites,

including Arthur and Marion Le Sueur and their daughter Meridel,

transcended the rural–urban divide. They came from rural areas and

had been part of the Nonpartisan League, yet they embraced the Social-

ist ideals of mass struggle, class consciousness, and the redistribution of

wealth. Despite their rural, small-town backgrounds, they would almost

always side with the radical labor faction’s commitment to systemic

change. They would later be the core part of the left wing.

The initial clashes between the rural and labor factions of the party

were over organization. Mahoney wanted to merge the independent Non-

partisan League and his own WPNL into a single, efficient, federation

dedicated to educational and political activities. Townley opposed such

a move. He feared that labor unions would dominate the organization.

The party membership, however, voted to merge and formed what would

become the Farmer-Labor Association (FLA) in 1924. Mahoney became

president of the organization, and as Townley feared, labor’s interests

and perspectives began to dominate the party.18 Mahoney’s Minnesota

Union Advocate replaced the Nonpartisan League’s Minnesota Leader as

the official voice of the Farmer-Labor party. While this seemed to be a

victory for those who favored a principled long-term commitment to

economic justice, it weakened interest in the party among rural voters.

The importance of Farmer-Labor governor Floyd B. Olson (1931–36)

lies in how well he united the strained alliance between the farmers and

the workers.

Floyd Bjornesterne Olson, a magnetic, affable Norwegian, was the

Farmer-Labor party’s first governor and most popular leader. Olson pos-

sessed an earthy charm that seemed to transcend all political differences.

Although he was from Minneapolis, he represented, initially, the more

moderate faction of the party. Later he would become an outright rad-

ical, but by then his old-time populist rhetoric, Scandinavian heritage,

and bold commitment to Farmer-Labor principles had endeared him

to rural and urban Farmer-Laborites alike. Not only did he reunite

the farmers and workers in his own party, but he also attracted wide-

spread support among both Republican and Democratic voters. Re-

porters from across the nation were enamored with the populist hero,

whom they invariably described as big, honest, and down-to-earth. “He

is a hard-headed, two-fisted, deep-drinking, humorous, hearty man,

without an ounce of social theory in his head,” began one typical ac-


count.19 Reporters and, indeed, the people of Minnesota seemed to love

that he had grown up in the slums of north Minneapolis, that he had

worked as a lumberjack and flirted with the IWW, that he hung out at

bars to all hours with newspapermen, cigarette girls, and card sharks in-

stead of attending social functions. And they loved that he was a little bit

sheepish about it all.

Olson had won the governorship in 1930 on a deliberately moderate

platform of efficiency in government, but the depression soon radical-

ized both him and the Farmer-Labor party. Forced to deal with the effects

of the depression, Olson worked with advisers, party leaders, and to a

lesser extent the legislature to enact a public works program, protect

farmers from foreclosure, and prohibit labor injunctions. The legisla-

ture eventually adopted his old-age pension and unemployment com-

pensation programs, which were seen as prototypes of the New Deal

programs that Roosevelt eventually proposed and saw passed.20 None of

these accomplishments came easily. Indeed, the stress of cajoling and

fighting the conservative legislature and of holding together the unwieldy

rural-urban, moderate-radical factions of his party eventually killed him.21

His premature death from stomach cancer in 1936, however, elevated his

achievements to near mythic proportions.

During the 1930s, the labor movement became more powerful and

generated new votes for the Farmer-Labor party. As historian Lizabeth

Cohen has shown, the depression overwhelmed ethnic institutions and

prejudices that had sustained ethnic lines in politics, and forced workers

to unite in unions to secure basic necessities for their families and com-

munities. The increasing viability of unions was the first step in recon-

figuring politics away from old ethnic allegiances to what political

scientists referred to as “class,” meaning economic interests.22 While

elsewhere in the nation new unionists revived the Democratic party,

in Minnesota they replenished the ranks of the Farmer-Labor party.

Throughout the 1920s, the Republicans had successfully and notori-

ously stopped union organizing in the state. In Minneapolis, in particu-

lar, a group of businessmen called the Citizens’ Alliance had kept the

city an “open-shop town.”23 The businessmen’s sustained repression in-

cubated a labor movement that needed only economic turmoil and the

legal sanction of section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act in

1933 to spark a powerful rank-and-file movement that looked to the

Farmer-Labor party for political leadership.


In 1934 the Teamsters Union led a series of strikes that broke the Cit-

izens’ Alliance, energized the labor movement, and strengthened workers’

ties to what was seen as the labor movement’s party, the Farmer-Labor

party. A generation of Farmer-Laborites came of political age during

these strikes, manning the soup kitchens, tending the wounded, and

halting traffic into the city. These experiences affirmed and made real the

hitherto abstract idea that there was a fundamental struggle between

the haves and the have-nots. There were three strikes in all between Feb-

ruary and August, which made the summer seem like one prolonged

pitched battle between the Citizens’ Alliance and transportation work-

ers, who had been organized into Teamsters Local 574 by three Trotsky-

ist brothers, Grant, Victor, and Miles Dunne.24 During the strikes, the

city existed in a state of near warfare. Both the workers and the Citizens’

Alliance set up strike headquarters, their own first-aid stations, and elab-

orate communication networks. The Citizens’ Alliance would try to get

food and supplies into the city, while strikers rushed to the scene of any

moving truck or vehicle. On May 22, strikers clubbed two deputies to

death and injured dozens more. On July 20, another riot broke out, and

police and armed deputies fired into the crowd, wounding sixty-seven

and killing two. Governor Olson declared martial law, and the National

Labor Relations Board sent mediators. The eventual settlement was a

huge victory for the Teamsters, as well as the rest of the labor movement,

because it forced Minneapolis employers to recognize unions.

All of these activities radicalized and energized the Farmer-Labor party.

Even the farmers became more radical. Organizers in the Farmers’ Union

revived the old agrarian radicalism in the rural wing of the Farmer-Labor

party, leading farmers’ strikes, called “farm holidays,” dumping milk into

the roads and generally wreaking havoc.25 Olson moved more to the

left, coming to believe that some form of socialism was inevitable in the

United States. By 1934, he was calling for a change in the economic system:

Now, all this destitution that confronts us in this nation must suggest to every thinking man and woman that the system under which we haveoperated is a poor system, that it is a bad system, that a nation can’tendure as has been fittingly said, part rich and almost entirely poor. Andwhat causes it? Why the system itself causes the conditions which existunder it. And so every thinking man and woman must know that thesystem must be changed.26


He considered himself a radical, not a liberal. Although he cultivated an

alliance with New Dealers in the Democratic party, Olson was at the

same time critical of the New Deal’s limitations. He joined the group of

East Coast radicals centered around Common Sense magazine and the

League for Political Action (LIPA), calling for more radical change than,

it seemed, Roosevelt was willing to deliver. His name was tossed around

as a possible presidential contender on a third-party ticket.

Olson opposed all forms of anticommunism and red-baiting. De-

nounced as a communist almost daily, he understood anticommunism

as a conservative scare tactic. Olson believed the real threat to democ-

racy came not from a few communists but from the anticommunists:

“When the final clash comes between Americanism and Fascism, we

will find the so-called Red as the defender of Democracy and the super-

patriot and captain of industry on the side of mass slavery.”27 Real com-

munists, however, Communist party–type communists, were a fact of

life in 1930s politics. Olson dealt with them as other labor leaders had;

that is, he allowed them into the party as part of the “Popular Front”

against fascism, and used their organizational skills and zealotry to fur-

ther his own agenda.28 Personally, however, Olson had little patience

with their self-righteous dogmatism. At one rally presided over by Olson,

a communist shouted, “When the revolution comes, Olson, we’ll get

you,” to which, apparently, the governor replied, “When the Revolution

comes, I’ll be leading it, and you’ll be just a corporal.”29

Olson tried to keep his radical views from interfering with the fragile

rural–labor alliance. He was above all a pragmatist when it came to pol-

itics, and he understood that the fate of the Farmer-Labor party was in

the rural voters’ hands. He reached out to the party’s rural leaders, en-

deared himself to farmers, and tried not to appear to favor one faction

of the party over any other. In other words, he was a politician, holding

together a coalition of farmers, small-town businessmen, and the labor

movement through personal charm and political favors. In 1934, for in-

stance, after the platform committee adopted a platform that called for the

immediate abolition of capitalism and state ownership of mines, power

plants, packinghouses, and all factories except those cooperatively owned

and operated, Olson quickly distanced himself and the party from the

controversial platform. But he did so with a flippancy that preserved his

own reputation for boldness. When asked why he had backpedaled on


the platform, Olson reportedly replied, “Because it scared the hell out of

Minnesota.”30

Despite Olson’s efforts, Farmer-Labor support in the countryside be-

gan to decline in 1934. In 1930 Olson had won all but 6 percent of the

state’s counties; in 1934 he lost 44 percent. Part of this decline was due

to an increase in rural voters who had not voted in 1930 and were react-

ing against the infamous platform and the Teamsters’ strikes. However,

it was also true that New Deal farm programs and agricultural recovery

had alleviated the need for the Farmer-Labor party’s radicalism. After

1935 the national government delivered almost everything the Farmer-

Labor party had promised, only better and more efficiently. Moreover,

whereas New Deal legislation revived the labor movement and tied work-

ers to the Farmer-Labor party, the New Deal’s agricultural programs

seemed to pull farmers away from the Farmer-Labor party. As historian

Richard Valelly has argued, New Deal farm programs not only amelio-

rated the economic conditions that had politicized farmers but also

strengthened the ties between conservative farmers’ organizations and

once radical farmers.31 The Agricultural Adjustment Agency (AAA) was

administered through the already existing infrastructure of the al-

legedly nonpolitical, independent American Farm Bureau Federation.

Loosely affiliated with the university system, the Farm Bureau had become

expert in nonpartisan “pressure group” tactics in the 1920s. Its reputa-

tion in Washington as a “nonpolitical” organization was one reason New

Dealers chose it to administer the AAA. The Farm Bureau was conser-

vative, however. In contrast to the radical Farmers’ Union, which sought

to ally workers and farmers in common cause, the Farm Bureau pro-

moted the idea that farmers had more in common with businessmen

than with workers. Before the AAA came to town, farmers might have

been involved in other organizations, like the Farmers’ Union, coopera-

tives, or Farmer-Labor clubs, or with no organization at all, but now,

with checks and benefits to hand out, the Farm Bureau became the cen-

ter of rural life in a way it had not been before. Farmers came to their

local Farm Bureau to pick up their checks, consult about loan programs,

or just hang out, perhaps perusing the bureau’s antilabor pamphlets.

This likely contributed to the dwindling rural strength of the Farmer-

Labor party.32

Olson’s sudden and premature death in August 1936 was a blow to the

people of Minnesota, who turned out in droves to mourn his passing.


They also delivered a huge sympathy vote for the Farmer-Labor party

that fall, which gave the party both Senate seats, eight out of nine con-

gressional seats, the governorship, and assorted state offices.33 Appar-

ently at the height of its power, the party would lose everything in two

short years.

Elmer Benson was elected governor in 1936 by over 60 percent of the

vote. He had been a senator, but Olson had been planning to run for the

Senate that year, so party leaders had chosen Benson to run for governor.

A Norwegian farmer and banker from the western part of the state, Ben-

son was committed to the struggle against fascism, big banks, railroads,

and anything that threatened the principles and integrity of the Farmer-

Labor movement.34 As governor, Benson restructured the tax system to

protect small farmers and small businessmen, taxing butter substitutes,

chain stores, and mail-order houses. He banned the antilabor Pinker-

ton’s Detective Agency from the state. He used the National Guard to

protect striking workers. These things should have made him a popular

governor, at least among Farmer-Labor voters. However, he lacked the

political charm of Olson and failed to cultivate connections among the

moderate, midlevel party people. A rather prim, self-righteous Lutheran

teetotaler, Benson had no stock of jokes and flatteries.

His most damaging decision was to continue Olson’s Popular Front

alliance with the Communist party. The communists had a strong pres-

ence in Minnesota, mainly in the Congress of Industrial Organization

(CIO), which was a key component of the Farmer-Labor party. Com-

munist organizers ran for Farmer-Labor offices in the late 1930s, and

they made the local Farmer-Labor clubs some of the best-organized po-

litical clubs in the country. Benson got along well with the small group

of urbane communists and Popular Front activists. Because he shared

their political views, because he trusted them, and because he lacked

ties to other groups within the Farmer-Labor party, Benson appointed

communists and so-called communist sympathizers to key positions in

his administration. They did not let him down. In intraparty politics

they stood by his side; they were his loyalists. This exacerbated the al-

ready debilitating factionalism in the party.35

In 1937–38, the years of Benson’s governorship, only conservative Re-

publicans were concerned about communism as an ideological threat to

democracy. Farmer-Laborites, however, were concerned about power

and competition within the party and were increasingly hostile toward


the communist presence in their party. Because the Farmer-Labor party

was structurally intertwined with the labor movement, in terms of fund-

ing, membership rosters, meeting halls, and printing presses, factional

battles within the labor movement often spilt into the Farmer-Labor

party. The labor movement was increasingly divided by clashes between

the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the newly organized CIO, com-

munists, the Trotskyists who controlled the powerful Teamsters Union,

and the railroad brotherhoods. Benson’s close ties to the communists

and the CIO angered these other groups wrangling for power within

the Farmer-Labor party. As Benson’s seeming favoritism fed the CIO’s

power within the party, the AFL officially withdrew from the party and

returned to an official nonpartisan stance.36

The deepest rift in the party remained that between the rural moder-

ates and the labor movement. While rural voters had begun to desert

the party in 1934, rural, small-town Farmer-Labor leaders had managed

to maintain a place in the party. Indeed, the party’s senators and con-

gressmen were from the rural parts of the state. Olson, at least, had al-

ways recognized their existence. Benson, however, ignored the rural

leaders. As labor radicalism and Popular Front internationalism further

alienated their rural constituencies, the leaders of the rural, moderate

wing organized behind small-town newspaper editor Hjalmar Petersen

and plotted to take control of the party in 1938. Petersen had been gov-

ernor for a few months after Olson’s death (because he had been Olson’s

lieutenant governor) and resented how Benson and the Popular Front

activists had rebuffed him when they took office.37

The 1938 primary between Benson and Petersen destroyed the party.

Unconcerned about communism as an ideology, Petersen nonetheless

understood the political uses of anticommunism and anti-Semitism.

Anticommunism and anti-Semitism have a long tangled history. Indeed,

in Petersen’s campaign literature it is unclear what the greater fear was,

a communist takeover of Minnesota or Jews in positions of power. Anti-

Semitism was widespread in Minneapolis during the 1920s and 1930s,

and it proved useful to Petersen.38 Benson, for his part, never addressed

the issues of resentment behind the cranky anti-Semitism and anticom-

munism but rather dismissed the charges as a Republican ploy, as in-

deed they were in part.39 Benson went further, however, and accused Pe-

tersen and his supporters of being reactionaries and fascists, which


exacerbated their feelings of marginality in the party. Benson barely

won the primary.

In the general election, a young Republican lawyer named Harold

Stassen co-opted the Farmer-Labor program of graduated income taxes,

old-age pensions, and unemployment relief, and refashioned the Re-

publican party into a moderate party of reform. Stassen promised to do

everything the Farmer-Laborites had, only more efficiently and without

the communists and factionalism. In his campaign against Benson, he

exploited the raw rifts in the Farmer-Labor party, replaying Petersen’s

charges of anticommunism and allowing Republican functionaries to

exploit anti-Semitism on his behalf.40 Stassen beat the incumbent gov-

ernor with 59 percent of the vote. Benson carried only six counties, a far

cry from his victory of two years earlier.

Just when it seemed things could not be any worse, the Farmer-Labor

party was further divided by the heated debates surrounding U.S. in-

volvement in the war in Europe. There was a strong tradition of isola-

tionism and pacifism within the Farmer-Labor party, especially among

those who had been in the Nonpartisan League and remembered the

repression that accompanied the Great War. Indeed both Farmer-Labor

senators at this time, Ernest Lundeen and Henrik Shipstead, were staunch

isolationists. Lundeen, who died in a plane crash in 1940, was a member

of the anti-interventionist organization America First. In 1940 Farmer-

Labor Senator Henrik Shipstead bolted to the Republican party to protest

Roosevelt’s interventionist position, taking his constituency with him.

The tradition of isolationism in Minnesota prompted a liberal educa-

tional campaign about the interdependence of the nations of the world,

the need for tolerance, and the threat of fascism in Europe.41 Thus, when

the communist-influenced Farmer-Labor Association came out against

U.S. intervention during the period of the Hitler–Stalin pact (August

1939 to July 1941), after so vigorously championing anti-fascist interven-

tionism previously, they betrayed the Popular Front alliance and con-

fused regular Farmer-Laborites.

Benson was among a small group of noncommunist Farmer-Laborites

who followed the so-called communist line and opposed U.S. interven-

tion between 1939 and 1941. This led his enemies to call him a commu-

nist and an isolationist. He was neither. He felt that the conflict over

American intervention was not between “isolationism” and “internation-


alism,” but between two kinds of internationalism: democratic or impe-

rialist. In allying with Britain, France, and a bevy of war-mongering in-

dustrialists, Roosevelt could hardly be said to be on the side of democ-

racy. “I am just as much in favor of defeating Hitler now as I was four

years ago,” Benson wrote to a friend in 1941, “but I doubt if that is the

true aim of those directing the present government.”42 After Germany

invaded the Soviet Union in July 1941, Benson reversed his position, fol-

lowing the “communist line.” Having the Soviet Union as an ally, how-

ever, changed everything for Benson. It meant that the “British Tory

ruling class” and American industrialists would have to contend with

the Soviet Union in organizing the postwar world. It meant the “begin-

ning of a program of world industrial and agricultural democracy.”43

For Benson, that was what the war became about, and he would even-

tually sacrifice his beloved Farmer-Labor party to that promise.

Merger

After 1938, a divided and confused Farmer-Labor party hobbled on with-

out its traditional rural electoral base. The persistent weakness of the

Democratic party insured that the Farmer-Labor party would remain

the second party in the state, but the Republicans in Minnesota were

winning elections by larger margins than Republicans anywhere in the

nation, a fact commented on by the Republican National Committee.44

There were murmurs of a possible merger between the Farmer-Laborites

and the Democrats. State Democrats had long sought a merger. They

were tired of being on the margins of politics and of splitting patronage

positions with Farmer-Laborites. The national Democratic organiza-

tion also favored a merger, since they were tired of having to negotiate

patronage between the two parties. The national party also wanted a

united effort for Roosevelt’s 1944 bid for an unprecedented fourth term.45

Farmer-Laborites had always rebuffed Democratic advances. Not only

was the Farmer-Labor party still pulling in more votes than the Demo-

crats, but most Farmer-Laborites saw their party as a uniquely princi-

pled party dedicated to the pursuit of democracy as represented by the

New Deal. To merge with state Democrats would be to turn the party

over to what many viewed as conservative party hacks.

By 1943, however, a variety of internal aims and outside pressures came

together to prod Farmer-Laborites to consider a merger. First, noncom-

munist, moderate Farmer-Laborites thought that a merger might weaken


the power of the Popular Front left-wingers who controlled the party.

Second, Popular Front activists themselves were pressured by the national

leadership of the CIO and the Communist party to consider a merger

in the interests of New Deal victory and wartime unity.46 A third group

also pushed for merger. They were political scientists at the University

of Minnesota who wrote about and debated the major questions of pol-

itics and government with a fervor demanded of the times in which

they lived. They were committed liberal New Dealers, but they were

outsiders in politics. What eventually drove them into politics was their

frustration with the absence of any political vehicle for their version of

New Deal liberalism.

That this group had any political stock at all was due to a young go-

getter named Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey had been a student at the

university in the late 1930s, taking politics classes from Evron Kirkpatrick,

a young professor who had recently received his Ph.D. from Yale, and

others. After receiving a master’s degree in political science at Louisiana

State University, Humphrey returned to the Twin Cities in the early for-

ties to continue his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. To support his

family, he took a job as an educational director for the WPA (Works

Progress Administration). His work with the WPA introduced him to

labor leaders across the state, who were impressed with his dynamic

speaking style and enthusiasm for the New Deal. He broadened his rep-

utation outside the labor movement by speaking before such organiza-

tions as the Kiwanis clubs, the Hallie Q. Brown House, a settlement house

for African Americans, the League of Women Voters, and the Commit-

tee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. By 1943, his professors and

colleagues at the university were urging him to run for office.

The Minneapolis Central Labor Union (CLU), a clearinghouse for the

city’s AFL unions, asked Humphrey to run for mayor in the 1943 non-

partisan election. The CLU had once played a powerful role in the Farmer-

Labor party, but since the ascendancy of the CIO in the party, they had

retreated to an officially nonpartisan position. The CLU had created its

own political committee for the selection of candidates for city offices,

and in 1943 they were looking for a “new face” to run for mayor, some-

one not associated with the recent factionalism and anticommunism,

someone with appeal beyond the labor movement. On the suggestion

of Vincent Day, an old Farmer-Laborite and trusted political adviser to

the labor movement, they asked the young Humphrey, who agreed.


The CLU financed the campaign. Humphrey’s friends and colleagues

from the University of Minnesota chipped in. Arthur Naftalin, a gradu-

ate student who was writing a dissertation on the Farmer-Labor party,

managed the campaign. Democrats also contributed, attracted by the

fact that Humphrey was not a labor leader. Humphrey’s dynamic rhetor-

ical style stirred the disaffected, while his easygoing personality won

him a wide variety of friends and allies. He was constantly compared to

Floyd B. Olson in his ability to bridge social and ideological differences.

He finished a close second to the Republican-supported incumbent. His

unexpected showing in that election put him in a position to help with

the merger between the Democrats and the Farmer-Laborites.47

There were those who resisted the seemingly inevitable pull into two-

party politics and opposed the merger. The remaining rural moderate

Farmer-Laborites found the idea of being in the Democratic party so

alienating and disturbing that they were forced to turn, with regret, to

the Republican party. Congressman Harold Hagen, for instance, the

only remaining Farmer-Laborite in Washington in 1944, ran for reelec-

tion as a Republican. He still considered himself a “progressive,” but he

did not believe he could win as a Democrat in his solidly rural, Lutheran

northwestern district.48 Also opposed to the merger was that part of the

left wing that believed that the Farmer-Labor party had been a Jeffer-

sonian movement of the common folk against the interests. They were

not beholden to directives from outside organizations. Although these

old Farmer-Labor veterans opposed the merger, they remained in the

merged party in order to continue their struggle for some kind of social

democracy. Elmer Benson was among those who were initially loathe to

turn the Farmer-Labor party over to the two-party system. The larger

aims of the CIO and the Communist party were important enough to

him, however, so that after impassioned letters from his friends and

much anguish, Benson finally relented. He agreed to do it in the name

of wartime unity and Roosevelt’s reelection. Benson was no fan of Roo-

sevelt’s, but a New Deal victory was essential to the survival of the CIO.

The Farmer-Labor party’s resolution for amalgamation of the “Lib-

eral Forces” in Minnesota to form the “Farmer-Labor-Democrat party”

highlighted concerns about the war and the postwar peace process. Drawn

up by an eight-person committee of Benson’s friends and allies, the res-

olution asserted that the fight against fascism and for lasting peace had

to be carried on in the national political arena, and that because a na-


tional third party was not yet feasible, the Farmer-Labor party had de-

cided to merge with the Democrats to most effectively wage that fight.

The resolution also spelled out a domestic platform that guaranteed all

Americans a decent-paying job, medical care, and housing. After the

war, neither the peace process nor the domestic program went the way

they had envisioned, and Benson and his left-wing allies would try to

salvage their old party from the corruption of the Democrats, but by

then it would no longer be their party.49

The new Democratic-Farmer-Labor party (DFL) was finally formed

in April 1944. Humphrey and his academic cohort acted as liaisons be-

tween the two parties, smoothing over disagreements between the Ger-

man Catholic machine boss Elmer Kelm and Farmer-Laborite Benson.

The negotiations put Democratic boss Kelm at the head of the new DFL

party, while left-wing activists John Jacobsen, regional director of the

CIO-PAC and a Communist party member, and Paul Tinge and Robert

Wishart, both of the United Electrical Workers (CIO), made up the ex-

ecutive committee. The real struggle for control of the new party would

be fought out in the county conventions that fall, as former Democrats

and former Farmer-Laborites competed against each other for control

of the county organizations. Left-wingers gained a footing in the three

most populous counties: Hennepin (Minneapolis), Ramsey (St. Paul),

and St. Louis (Duluth and the Iron Range). The new party managed to

win two congressional seats that fall, in both cases former Democrats

from the Democratic stronghold of St. Paul. The state went for Roosevelt,

but just barely.50

A Lost Opportunity?

For the next four years, 1944–48, the liberal Democrats, united behind

Humphrey, waged an anticommunist fight against the left wing for con-

trol of the newly merged DFL party. Some historians argue that there

was a missed opportunity after the war for real structural change that

could have delivered social justice, economic equality, and guaranteed

social services for all Americans. These historians point to government

planning agencies like the National Resources Planning Board and left-

wing movements like those in Minnesota as evidence for the existence

and viability of such ideas in the political sphere.51 The political struggle

for control of the DFL party would at first glance appear to support the

contention that the demise of the Left was not inevitable, that anticom-


munism was used to stamp out a viable political alternative. However,

while it is true that anticommunism and the cold war created a repres-

sive political atmosphere, it does not follow that deeper reforms in the

economic and political structure were a real possibility.

The type of social democracy envisioned by the left wing had already

been routed before the war even started. Historians Alan Brinkley and

Sidney Milkis have shown that New Dealers within the Roosevelt ad-

ministration had already made decisions about governmental organiza-

tion and administration in 1938 that insured a top-down, managerial,

state-centered style of reform, focused on maintaining economic growth

as opposed to reordering the economic structures of power, and that

these decisions marginalized left-leaning plans for a planned economy.52

Historian David Plotke also rejects the idea that there was a liberal re-

pudiation of New Deal reform with the onset of the cold war, arguing

that liberals in the forties staunchly defended their already formulated

state-centered vision of a Democratic political order against attacks from

the Right. Elmer Benson’s brand of class-based labor politics had been

discredited in Minnesota as early as 1938. The left wing had no electoral

base in the state. Although it controlled the party machinery of the DFL

from 1946 to 1948, and although its leader, Benson, commanded memo-

ries of the old Farmer-Labor party in its heyday when it had meant all-

day picnics and democratic struggle, these things could not win statewide

elections; these things could not overcome the Left’s association with

communists and factionalism. It was all liberal Democrats like Humphrey

could do to defend the New Deal gains of the 1930s against right-wing,

antistatist attempts to roll them back.53

Benson’s failed struggle against the postwar liberal Democrats was

nonetheless significant and deserves to be taken seriously. What the left

wing’s control of the DFL party and command of old memories did

was force liberal Democrats like Humphrey to find new ways to explain

old evils like anticommunism, cooperation with business elites, an al-

liance with the British Empire, and a coalition with reactionary south-

ern Democrats. Benson’s struggle for class-based, radical politics is im-

portant, then, not as an untried path or unrealized possibility, but rather

as key to understanding the nature of the political conflict in which

Humphrey developed and argued his ideas about politics and his com-

mitment to racial democracy.


In 1944 the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party’s gubernatorial candidate

Barney Allen traveled around Minnesota rousing citizens to the polls

with statements like these: “Third parties are essential and necessary

whenever the two major parties, as they have at times, offer too little di-

vergence in programs and advocacy . . . ,” and “The two-party system is

preferable and a multiple party system is to be avoided.”1 These statements

were a far cry from the fiery speeches of Farmer-Labor Governor Floyd B.

Olson, which excoriated the rich and denounced capitalism. Written by

political science student and Humphrey adviser Arthur Naftalin, the

speech exemplifies what historians have identified as a fundamental shift

in political sensibility from a grassroots, movement-oriented politics in

the 1930s to the postwar top-down, managerial style of politics.2 What is

curious, even poignant, about the speech, however, is that it was an effort

on the part of academic liberals to explain to Minnesota voters how the

two-party system, bolstered by a responsive federal government, could

in fact fulfill the aims of the old Farmer-Labor party.

These academic liberals, based at the University of Minnesota and

centered around Hubert Humphrey, were what David Plotke has called

“progressive liberals,” political outsiders, experts, who sought to preserve

the beneficent, administrative state embodied in the New Deal reforms

of the 1930s.3 Unlike Farmer-Labor party leaders, these liberals were solidly

middle-class, and they were academics, as opposed to being farmers,

workers, small-business owners, or activists. They facilitated the merger

of the Democratic and Farmer-Labor parties in 1944 in order to make

C H A P T E R T W O

The New Two-Party Liberalism

19

the Democratic party a vehicle for the New Deal and to align Minnesota

politics within the national two-party system. This entailed replacing

the machine politics of the state’s Democratic party and the movement-

oriented politics of the old Farmer-Labor party with their own ideas

about how politics worked. It entailed legitimating the two-party sys-

tem and interest groups in a state that had traditionally eschewed both.

The set of ideas they marshaled to accomplish this task developed into

what became known as interest-group pluralism.

Interest-group pluralism was the theoretical basis of postwar liberal-

ism. It held that politics were best seen as the competition for power be-

tween organized interest groups, which in turn determined the shape of

the state. Pluralists such as Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom were

later faulted for erasing notions of the public interest, “the state,” and

citizen participation from democratic theory.4 Humphrey was not a plu-

ralist in that sense. He always believed in both the public interest and

citizen participation, and indeed, hoped that a responsible two-party

system would protect the public interest against the formless influence

of interest group competition. But his faith in a centralized two-party

system legitimated interest groups in politics and delegitimated the de-

centralized, regional politics of the old Farmer-Laborism.

Political Scientists and the State

Hubert Humphrey was introduced to the ideas that guided his career in

the political science department at the University of Minnesota. In 1937

he took Evron Kirkpatrick’s class on American government. A Yale grad-

uate who had begun teaching at the University of Minnesota in 1935, Kirk-

patrick attracted an engaged group of students, who later became in-

volved in launching Humphrey’s career and reforming the Democratic

party. They included Orville Freeman, later governor of Minnesota (1954–

60) and secretary of agriculture (1960–69), and Arthur Naftalin, later

mayor of Minneapolis. Max Kampelman, who became a diplomat and

Democratic insider, came to Minnesota as a conscientious objector dur-

ing the war. Initially assigned to the army’s starvation experiments at

the university, he remained to get his Ph.D.5 In addition to Kirkpatrick,

other faculty members who influenced Humphrey were William Ander-

son, an expert on federalism, Benjamin Lippincott, Earl Latham, and

Herbert McClosky (who had initially been Kirkpatrick’s student). Latham

and McClosky later became important pluralist theorists. In this regard

20 The New Two-Party Liberalism

it is interesting to note the presence of two other renowned pluralists:

Charles E. Lindblom was a faculty member in the 1940s, and Malcolm

Moos received his M.A. there in 1938.6 Humphrey graduated from the

University of Minnesota in 1939, and received his master’s degree at

Louisiana State University in 1941. He returned to Minneapolis, intend-

ing to get a Ph.D. in political science, but entered politics instead.

These political scientists were part of a long line of reformers who

sought to convince the American public of the beneficence of a strong

central state, fairly administered by trained social scientists, who alone

understood the complexity of modern social and economic problems.7

Like Lester Ward, Charles Beard, and Arthur Bentley before them, they

saw modern society as an interwoven, “interdependent” whole, a “web”

of social relations. In this complex, interdependent world, the traditions

of individualism and decentralization on which American government

had been based were irrelevant and, indeed, dangerous.8 The strength

and persistence of those traditions cast political scientists as reformers

ever preaching the virtues of an efficiently managed centralized state. As

Kirkpatrick saw it, their mission was to teach the individual

to see himself as part of a vast socio-political complex which is the world to-day, to end his isolation, to so stimulate his imagination that he will come to see society as one vast interrelated whole, in which theproblems of geographically or socially remote persons are in somefashion connected to his own. Facts about political institutions and theiroperation are essential to this end, but facts in themselves are valuelessunless fitted into a completed mosaic embracing not only what is, butwhat ought to be.9

Given the eventual repudiation of the “ought to be” aspect of their

profession and the unapologetic turn to empiricism beginning in the

mid-1950s, it is interesting to note Kirkpatrick’s attention to the social

scientist’s responsibility for acting in the world, not merely analyzing it.

Like his New Left critics a generation later, the young Kirkpatrick chas-

tised political scientists for being “blinded by the illusion of objectiv-

ity.”10 Far from being dispassionate recorders of the way things were, the

young Kirkpatrick, McClosky, and Lindblom sought to change the world

they studied.11

The New Deal was the triumph of liberal reformers’ struggle to realize

their ideas in American government. Its celebrated, self-conscious prag-

matism affirmed their arguments that the centralization of government


was not the result of “greed for power,” as its opponents charged, but

rather an imperfect attempt to adapt government to the interdependent

reality of modern civilization.12 In his M.A. thesis, an ode to the New

Deal completed at Louisiana State University in 1940, Humphrey saw the

“trial-and-error” methods of the New Deal as evidence that an enlarged

state need not threaten human agency or democratic processes. He com-

pared the New Deal to a football game, wherein the quarterback, Roo-

sevelt, recognized “that every play, every motion, must be executed by

men, so that even the most perfectly conceived attack may bog down

and fail through imperfect performance.”13 For political scientists in the

1940s, the “social service state” was not the Leviathan of classical politi-

cal theory or Hitler’s Germany, but rather a harmonizing force in a

multigroup society. “Society consists of a multitude of social forces

which pull in every direction,” Kampelman told students in Political

Science 166, “the balancer of these forces, giving it direction, energy is

the state.”14 In this conception the state did not regulate or dictate, but

rather balanced, or integrated, the various interests and groups in soci-

ety. The New Deal government approached conflicts between rich and

poor, farmer and worker, North and South, with a vision of equilibrium

and integration. Siding with no one segment, it worked to harmonize

the whole.15

The idea that the state had an integrative role in society, rather than a

regulatory one, was a recognition of the plural nature of society, and it

was what set the New Deal apart from earlier efforts to tame the excesses

of capitalism. Whereas earlier politicians had sought social peace through

the suppression of disruptive groups, such as labor unions, political sci-

entists believed that the government’s integrative function required it to

recognize the legitimacy of once marginal groups like labor. The incor-

poration of labor’s concerns into the political arena illustrated how a

strong state fostered democracy rather than suppressed it. Political sci-

entists shared the labor movement’s condemnation of concentrated

wealth and power, but they did not see it as an eternal historical injus-

tice (as, for instance, the old Farmer-Laborite Elmer Benson did). Rather,

they abhorred concentrated wealth and power because it created a dan-

gerous social imbalance. The imbalance could be remedied through state-

centered redistributive economic policies, which restored equilibrium

by insuring economic security for all.16 Similarly, they did not see the

labor movement as “a new cultural base for democracy,” as did a group


that Humphrey, lifting from Max Lerner’s It’s Later Than You Think

(1943), identified as “democratic-collectivists.”17 Rather, they saw labor

as another interest group jostling for power in the political arena.

The idea that politics was about the adjustment of conflicting group

interests was not new of course. But whereas James Madison had wor-

ried about the effect of such competition on the public interest (even as

he developed a theory about why Americans need not worry about it),

by the 1930s group competition was seen as a fact of politics. Arthur

Bentley’s The Process of Government (1908) reworked Madison’s fears of

interest-group competition into a positive argument about the group-

based nature of society and politics. In the 1920s English political thinkers

like Harold Laski focused their analysis on groups, as opposed to the

state, arguing that individuals identified more with churches and unions

than with the abstraction of the state.18 Pendleton Herring’s 1929 Group

Representation before Congress is generally seen as the beginning of Amer-

ican pluralism, and its group-based view of politics is taken for granted

in Harold Lasswell’s Politics: Who Gets What Where How (1936). Thus,

even before those works that developed a “group-based” theory of all

political interaction, such as David Truman’s The Governmental Process

(1950) and Earl Latham’s The Group Basis of Politics (1952), most politi-

cal scientists believed that politics was about competing groups of in-

terests.19 But the idea was still anathema to grassroots activists and rad-

icals, not just in Minnesota but throughout the nation.

The New Deal’s recognition of the way politics “really worked”—in

terms of group competition and power—supported political scientists

and liberal propagandists’ contention that New Deal reforms were not

“ideological.” In the fullness of time, we can see that that contention it-

self was part of an ideology, an ideology that I am right now describing.

But what they meant, as they explained so often, was that unlike the

Left, they had no predetermined utopian end, and unlike the Right, they

were not invested in preserving the old order, which they felt was based

on an ideology of “individualism.”20 They positioned themselves against,

not between, ideologues on the Left and the Right. In their minds, both

extremes held a rigid political commitment to ideologies that could not

accommodate the diversity of groups in a democratic society. Even the

briefly influential economic planners and technocrats, who envisioned

a “planned society” wherein the state allotted resources and determined

the production and distribution of goods and services, eventually proved


too rigid for liberals like Humphrey. Liberal proponents of the New

Deal state presented themselves as open-minded, flexible, pragmatic,

and experimental, as opposed to “ideological,” which for them meant

rigid, inflexible, dogmatic. When attacked as confused or inconsistent,

they used those attacks as an opportunity to explain the problem with

ideology and the common sense of their own position.21

The liberal reconception of Left and Right as “ideological” defined a

new center in the American political spectrum that was distinctly more

“left” than anything the nation had seen before, if by left we mean state

responsibility for its citizens’ economic and social well-being. Despite

disagreements with the Marxian Left about the future of capitalism, lib-

eral proponents of the New Deal state shared the Left’s critique of unre-

strained capitalism, its rhetoric of economic justice, and its faith in the

democratic promise of grassroots activism. They saw the main threat to

American democracy as the gray-haired, hard-hearted Republicans and

southern Democrats who feared the empowerment of the federal gov-

ernment and who sanctified the idea of “rugged individualism.” Thus,

before their ideological differences came to a head in the 1940s, left-

wingers and liberals were often allied in political struggles against the

Right.

The rejection of the “ideological” derived in large part from new un-

derstandings of how the economy worked. After 1945 the economic doc-

trine known as Keynesianism would dominate the thinking of Ameri-

can economists and liberals, as well as U.S. economic policy. As theorized

by British economist John Maynard Keynes, Keynesianism held that the

key to economic growth was consumption, or demand, and that gov-

ernments could promote consumption through public spending and

fiscal policy that put money into the pockets of consumers.22 Although

Keynesianism as a doctrine did not become widely accepted until after

World War II, and although New Dealers and academics in the 1930s

were undecided about the actual form of state intervention in the econ-

omy, some of the ideas and assumptions later codified by Keynesianism

were part of the New Deal repertoire, and hence part of political scien-

tists’ thinking about the role of the state and the future of capitalism.

Two ideas especially resonated with political scientists’ self-consciously

nonideological, state-centered, self-mechanized balancing system. The

first was the idea of “purchasing power.” During the 1930s economists

and activists alike began to attribute the cause of the depression to lack


of demand. The problem was not that the factories were not producing,

but rather that no one was buying the goods. As the ubiquitous com-

mentator Stuart Chase put it, “Today we cannot buy back a third of

what our labor, our farms and factories are clamoring to produce.”23

Economists such as George Soule thought economic policy ought to

aim to put money into the hands of would-be consumers, and advo-

cated job security and higher wages. Workers, farmers, consumers, and

their advocates agreed. Their arguments for higher wages and stable in-

comes no longer seemed selfish and divisive because by increasing “mass

purchasing power,” such measures contributed to the economic well-

being of the nation. Both rhetorically and in practice, the idea of “mass

purchasing power” advocated a redistribution of wealth and hence car-

ried the tone of righteous critique so prevalent in the 1930s. But the

idea itself was an acceptance of the capitalist system, a rejection of fool-

hardy “isms.”

The second idea that resonated with political scientists was the state’s

“invisible hand” role in insuring purchasing power for the masses. That

is, the state did not have to interfere in the private business of business

to create economic stability. Rather, it could adjust the context in which

economic activity occurred through public spending, taxation, and other

measures designed to encourage mass consumption.24 For political sci-

entists who saw the social service state as a harmonizer of the whole,

rather than a regulator of the parts, this was both an ideal and a prag-

matic economic policy.

The Two-Party System

Although the conception of the state as an integrative, benevolent force

alleviated some theoretical discomfort, the political scientists at the Uni-

versity of Minnesota, like political scientists in general, worried about

democratic participation in government as government became more

distant, more centralized, and more in the hands of academics like them-

selves. Even as they promoted professional administrators in govern-

ment, political scientists fretted that such experts displaced elected leg-

islators.25 On his graduate school application, young Max Kampelman

wrote that he was interested “in relating the need for ‘experts’ in mod-

ern government with democratic political theory.”26 How to reconcile

top-down managerial government with democratic processes was an

old dilemma, but it was especially acute in the 1940s because of the new


threat of totalitarianism. As William Anderson asked in a 1942 address

to the American Political Science Association, “What right have we . . .

to assume that a highly active, powerful national government will in

the long run be amenable to popular control?” What kept the “modern

trend toward strong executive leadership” from becoming “a drift into

dictatorship”?27 An expert on federalism and local government, Ander-

son devoted his career to studying what happened to local and state

governments when federal administrators took over their functions.28

These concerns led to an interest in political parties. As mediators be-

tween citizens and politics, Congress and the president, and interest

groups and government, parties seemed to facilitate the entire political

process, and might hold the key to keeping those processes democratic.

As political scientist E. E. Schattschneider put it, “The most important

distinction in modern political philosophy, the distinction between

democracy and dictatorship, can be made best in terms of party poli-

tics.”29 Dictatorships tolerated no opposition, while the party system in-

sured organized opposition to the ruling party and preserved citizens’

freedom of association. Pendleton Herring’s The Politics of Democracy:

American Parties in Action (1940), Schattschneider’s Party Government

(1942), and a new edition of Charles E. Merriam and Harold T. Gosnell’s

The American Party System (1940) all opened with statements about

totalitarianism and the importance of parties to democracy. Parties

were a popular topic of study at the University of Minnesota. Ivan Hin-

deraker, later an expert on party politics at UCLA, wrote about changes

in the Minnesota Republican party. Naftalin’s dissertation was on the

Farmer-Labor party. Robert Morlan’s dissertation was on the Nonparti-

san League, which was not a party but temporarily flourished in the

two-party system.30

Kirkpatrick’s students were particularly interested in Harold Laski,

the English pluralist and socialist whose work on parliamentary processes

and party systems supported his larger effort to legislate a socialist pro-

gram into being, a “revolution by consent,” as he called it.31 This suggests

another reason for political scientists’ interest in parties. To the extent

that many political scientists were also liberal reformers, they alleviated

anxiety about the similarities between top-down administrative gov-

ernment and the new totalitarian dictatorships by seeking to enact their

programs through the same institutions and processes that other “pres-

sure groups” used, not from the top down, nor really from the bottom


up, but rather horizontally. The liberal preoccupation with politics and

the political process had led to confusion between liberal political ma-

neuvering and liberal principles. Detractors often accused liberals of

endorsing civil rights, for instance, for “political reasons,” or for the votes

rather than principle. This was a moot point because the liberal principle

was about solidifying a social-service state democratically, through the

party system. Influenced by Laski’s work on England’s disciplined par-

ties, Humphrey, Kirkpatrick, Naftalin, and Kampelman saw the party

system not only as a way to connect citizens to government but also,

potentially, as a way to democratically translate issues into policy. Evi-

dence for this claim lies less in their writings, although it is a theme of

Naftalin’s dissertation, than in their efforts to change the Democratic

party into an “issues-based” party. The person most closely associated

with the idea of “responsible party government” was Schattschneider.

In 1942 Schattschneider published his influential Party Government,

which was later characterized as a manifesto “celebrating party govern-

ment and popular rule.”32 Schattschneider’s insistence that parties could

counter the power of private interest groups and that they defined the

public interest distinguishes him from those who became pluralists. In-

deed, the pluralists criticized his idealism.33 But that difference should

not obscure the ways in which the rhetoric of his ideas—its self-con-

scious pragmatism, its tough-guy pretence of understanding parties as

they actually operate, not as we would like them to be—foreshadowed

a pluralist discourse of politics. His vision was built on the necessary

destruction of such oppositional traditions as anti-party movements,

third parties, and nonpartisanship. Because his ideas were reflected in

Humphrey’s reformation of the DFL, they are worth considering in some

detail.

Arguing against traditional views that partisanship corrupted the

democratic process, Schattschneider explained that the two-party sys-

tem in fact distilled and organized the vast array of competing eco-

nomic and political interests in American society. It created order out of

confusion. It formed majorities out of minorities. It presented the voter

with two clear-cut choices. And, thus, it helped modern government,

which had “grown great by meeting the demands placed on it,” identify

those pressures and demands that represented the public interest.34 Like

almost every political observer at the time, Schattschneider marveled at

the multitude of associations and organizations Americans formed (20,


25–26). For Schattschneider the right to join and organize such groups,

which he called the right of “free association,” was a defining factor of

modern democracy for it involved not only the right to join groups of

one’s own choosing but also the right to organize. As he noted, “People

do not usually become formidable to governments until they are organ-

ized” (28). Moreover, these “voluntary organizations of [the citizen’s]

own creation” provided a link between the individual citizen and his (or

her) government (28). Defined against totalitarian dictatorships, Schatt-

schneider’s concept of “free association” transformed the much-maligned

interest or pressure group from a selfish frustrator of the peoples’ will

into a “voluntary group” that translated that will into government. Schatt-

schneider was wary of pressure groups without the restraining girdle

of centralized parties, but his acknowledgment of them as one of the

“raw materials of politics” legitimated their presence in American poli-

tics at a time when the concept was still being resisted by old Farmer-

Laborites in Minnesota.

Parties and pressure groups countered totalitarian tendencies by cre-

ating what social scientists called “cross-pressures.” Social scientists at-

tributed the rise of totalitarianism in Europe to alienated, disaffected

mass populations who sought security and order in the all-encompassing

ideologies of a Hitler or a Stalin. In explaining why Americans had not

fallen prey to totalizing movements, they pointed to the remarkable

number of organizations in which Americans participated, an observa-

tion first made by Tocqueville. Americans were joiners, they said, join-

ing churches, unions, PTAs, mutual aid societies, professional organiza-

tions, lodges, and baseball teams. The significant feature of these diverse

groups was the shared, overlapping memberships between them. Amer-

icans had not succumbed to any one ideology because they belonged

simultaneously to a wide array of different groups and were thus con-

stantly exposed to various points of view and different kinds of peo-

ple.35 Schattschneider argued that the two-party system encouraged the

“cross-pressure” function in politics. The purpose of parties was to

build coalitions. That process required people with different, perhaps

even conflicting, interests to cooperate and compromise with each other.

What Schattschneider called the “cruel necessities of compromise” were

a good thing because they prevented any one group from capturing con-

trol of the government (62). Revisiting Madison’s observations in the

context of twentieth-century totalitarianism, Schattschneider reminded


readers that the diversity and large numbers of groups in America insured

that no one group could ever constitute a majority by itself.36

Schattschneider tore down the shibboleths of Progressive-era reform-

ers. Mocking the idea that “the people” had somehow wrested the right

to vote from a recalcitrant government, Schattschneider argued that the

competition between power-hungry parties had extended suffrage.37

Whereas reformers saw parties as associations in which citizens were

supposed to have a controlling role, he saw them more as sports teams

that one supported but did not wish to control (59). He proposed a

model “such as that of the ‘good will’ relation of merchant and his cus-

tomers” (60). In this model, earlier reforms that had used the state to

protect members’ rights to control the party—such as direct primary

legislation—were obsolete. In language that reflected the new importance

of consumer-oriented thinking, as well as the attraction of self-regulat-

ing models, Schattschneider likened the party system to the free market

system: “The parties do not need laws to make them sensitive to the

wishes of the voters any more than we need laws compelling merchants

to please their customers” (60).

He dismissed third parties. They were not real parties but merely “ed-

ucational movements” (68). He defined real parties as “an organized

bid for power,” and power as “control of the government” (35). Thus,

unless a party was in control of government, or had created a general

belief that it would take control of government, it was not a real party.

What passed for third parties had failed in America because of the dom-

inance of the two-party system, which in turn was the result of a win-

ner-take-all election system, single-member districts (one district for

each representative in Congress), and the electoral college. The upshot

of this election system was that, unlike in England for instance, there

was no proportional representation of the popular vote, either in con-

gressional elections or in the increasingly important presidential elec-

tions. To win elections—a seat in Congress, the presidency—a party

needed only the slimmest margin of victory; hence the system exagger-

ated the victory of the strongest party while discriminating against lesser

ones. Those so-called third parties that had seen some modicum of suc-

cess were thus always sectional. Their regionally concentrated voting

strength could secure seats in Congress but could not control government.

The sectional nature of these lesser parties insured that they would never

win the presidency, an office that had become more powerful under


Roosevelt’s tenure and was now seen as the main link between the peo-

ple and government.38 The idea that third parties embodied grassroots

hopes for change, that they were a channel for democratic action, had

no place in Schattschneider’s analysis. Nonetheless, he cared about democ-

racy and peoples’ wishes being justly represented in government, and he

offered something just as idealistic in the place of third-party activism:

centralized parties.

For Schattschneider, centralized parties led by informed, responsible

leaders were the most efficient, democratic way to translate the will of

the majority into policy and to curb the power of pressure groups. While

pressure groups represented the interests of different groups of citizens

to their government, the process was only democratic if those interests

were properly distilled and organized into majorities by parties. If not,

if pressure groups influenced individual congressmen, then the will of a

minority controlled policy. “Government by interest groups who have

never dealt successfully with the majority and never submitted them-

selves to an election,” Schattschneider wrote, “is undemocratic and dan-

gerous” (193). Pressure groups had only their own narrow interests in

mind. That was to be expected, hence the need for strong parties. Strong,

centralized parties not only formed majorities out of blocs of minori-

ties but also had the authority to insure that their politicians did not

succumb to pressure groups. It is on this point that Schattschneider

differs with pluralists, who were content to let the competition of interest

groups cancel each other out. Schattschneider adds the mediating force

of parties, which considered the problems of government broadly, sub-

mitted their fate to an election, and were responsible to the public (193).

Although Schattschneider defined a party as “an organized attempt

to get power,” parties in America had never actually controlled govern-

ment as they were supposed to (36). Party lines rarely held on impor-

tant votes: “a straight party vote, aligning one party against the other is

the exception rather than the rule” (130). National party leaders had no

authority in their parties. Local bosses could maintain party discipline,

but they knew little and cared less about public policy or the broad na-

tional issues involved in national government. The bosses’ power, frittered

away on patronage and favors, retarded party centralization. Schattschnei-

der blamed localism, which he held to be “a synthetic product manufac-

tured by the local political machines for purposes of their own” (142).


Despite the fact that party centralization did not describe the actual

working of the American party system, Schattschneider thought it was

possible, and for the same historical reason that it was necessary: the

growth of presidential authority under the New Deal. Only strong par-

ties in Congress could effectively counter the growth in presidential au-

thority. The increase in presidential authority also showed Americans’

willingness to forsake traditions. The very conditions that had given

rise to the New Deal boded well for party government. The New Deal’s

recognition of the interests of labor unions and its use of the state to re-

spond to citizens’ needs heralded a transition from a politics based on

ethnic allegiance or section to what political scientists termed “class poli-

tics,” meaning that voters were starting to vote on the basis of their eco-

nomic interests.39 Political scientists identified the change as the New

Deal realignment, and anticipated a party system organized around the

rational economic interests of organized groups.

Schattschneider’s ideas were important to the liberals at the Univer-

sity of Minnesota. Kirkpatrick served on the American Political Science

Association’s Committee on Parties (1946–50), which was chaired by

Schattschneider and which produced “Toward a More Responsible Two-

Party System.” Published in 1950, this report recommended disciplined,

centralized, issues-based parties to counteract the increasing power of

the presidency and interest groups.40 By then a senator, Humphrey in-

vited Schattschneider to discuss the report with labor leaders, party lead-

ers, and government officials.41 Reflecting on his first year in the Senate,

and particularly his struggles against the southern Democrats, Humphrey

called for more disciplined parties.42 Schattschneider’s analysis of the

pitfalls of nonpartisanship informed Naftalin’s assessment of the Farmer-

Labor party in the Minnesota legislature as well as his efforts to rein-

state party labels in the state’s nonpartisan legislature.43

Together, these ideas about government, the economy, and politics

informed the liberals at the University of Minnesota, who were increas-

ingly disenchanted with the ideological radicalism of the left wing and

the old Farmer-Labor party. The pluralist ideas about the group-based

nature of society and activist government allowed them to adapt the

noble parts of Minnesota’s third-party impulse to a new narrative about

the democratic nature of the two-party system. While critical of third

parties in general, these political scientists did not condemn the fondly


remembered Farmer-Labor past. Rather they reinterpreted it to fit their

conception of the two-party system. A good example of this reinterpre-

tation is Naftalin’s dissertation, “A History of the Farmer-Labor Party in

Minnesota,” which presented a model for understanding third parties as

catalysts within the two-party system and illustrates how these soon-to-

be politicians adapted Minnesota’s third-party tradition to a new two-

party present.

Naftalin saw the Farmer-Labor party as a success but not for the same

reasons that old Farmer-Laborites did. Old Farmer-Laborites saw their

party as the triumph of “the people” against “the interests.” For Naftalin,

the Farmer-Labor party’s success represented the triumph of the two-

party system. In his theory of political change Naftalin posited that when

the two major parties became moribund and neglected the interests

and needs of ordinary citizens, then these citizens organized a move-

ment, often in the form of a third party, in order to put their interests

and needs back into the political arena. As the movement or third party

gained voters and influence, one of the two major parties would embrace

and adapt the hitherto neglected demands of the movement in order to

effectively compete against the other party.44 In this way the two-party

system was flexible and able to effectively accommodate change.

Naftalin criticized the Farmer-Labor party’s misguided belief in class

solidarity as an organizational category. The labor organizers who helped

organize the Farmer-Labor party in the 1920s tried to overcome the deep

ethnic antagonisms between Irish and German Catholics and Scandina-

vian Lutherans by bringing together farmers, workers, and other people

on the basis of a class solidarity defined against the railroads, mills, and

Republican party. Naftalin emphasized the difficulty labor leaders had

in sustaining class solidarity between workers and farmers. The organi-

zations that were supposed to bring the two groups together often ended

up exacerbating the divisions between them by pitting the two groups

against each other in intraparty battles over the direction of organiza-

tion and strategies.45

The unlikely hero of Naftalin’s dissertation was A. C. Townley, founder

of the successful farmers’ organization the Nonpartisan League, the fore-

runner of the Farmer-Labor party. For many, Townley epitomized the

messianic shirtsleeves orator of a bygone era, part buffoon, part dema-

gogue, and all salesman.46 For Naftalin, however, Townley was an unro-


mantic pragmatist, who recognized that the farmers in the Nonpartisan

League were not a movement but an interest group. Naftalin praised

Townley’s efficient, centralized methods of organizing North Dakota

farmers as an independent “mobile voting bloc,” which worked within

the existing two-party system.47 Naftalin attributed the Nonpartisan

League’s remarkable success to Townley’s decision not to form a sepa-

rate third party. Instead, Townley had created a tightly controlled, inde-

pendent organization of dues-paying members, which would deliver

members’ votes to the candidates and parties who supported their pro-

gram. Echoing Schattschneider’s analysis of pressure groups and parties,

Naftalin praised Townley’s understanding that to be effective, the Non-

partisan League had to remain independent from any one political party.48

Naftalin’s interpretation of Townley and the Nonpartisan League not

only validated the two-party system, it located the idea of the interest

group within the framework of an indigenous American protest move-

ment. Providing a usable past for the much maligned interest group

was essential as the political scientists sought to rebuild a two-party

system in this three-party state.

Political Science in Action

These ideas about nonideological politics, interest groups, and parties

informed the political scientists’ attempts to build a noncommunist,

“issues-based” liberal Democratic party in Minnesota. As mayor of Min-

neapolis (1945–49) and DFL Senate candidate (1948), Humphrey self-

consciously cultivated a demeanor of ideological flexibility modeled on

Franklin Roosevelt’s celebrated pragmatism. Humphrey excelled at cross-

class cooperation and principled compromise. It is what he chose to

publicize about himself, and what political observers noticed about him.

His publicist for his 1948 senatorial campaign wrote:

He is the damndest paradox in politics I have ever seen. Although calleda labor candidate, he gets ten times as many invitations to speak beforebusiness groups as he does labor groups. Also unusual in a politician, heseems determined to take a point of view opposite that of his audience.49

A New Republic article on the up-and-coming mayor likewise gushed

about him as “a surging political paradox whom liberals elected but con-

servatives like.”50 Here then was a politician who practiced the flexibility,


the pursuit of consensus, the fair-minded juggling of competing interests

that political scientists deemed necessary to the democratic processes of

the new social-service state.

The centrality of Schattschneider’s ideas in Humphrey’s political uni-

verse can also be seen in liberals’ constant attention to the merits of the

two-party system. In part this was due to the Left’s attempt to align the

DFL with Henry Wallace’s Progressive party in 1948, a situation to which

I will return in later chapters. But it also helped make two-party Demo-

cratic liberalism stick in this state that had always channeled its reformist

zeal into third-party movements. Humphrey and DFL party organizers

were lecturing about the limitations of third parties in 1946, before Wal-

lace announced the formation of the Progressive party, and into the

1950s, long after the defeat of Wallace’s third party.51 Early DFL cam-

paign materials showed an unusual concern with justifying the two-party

system and clarifying the separate role of independent pressure groups.

Naftalin’s 1944 speech for DFL gubernatorial candidate Barney Allen,

which began this chapter, for instance, was a nineteen-point summa-

tion of his dissertation, reiterating the reasons a two-party system was

preferable to either a multiparty or one-party system.52 Likewise, Hum-

phrey’s speeches explained how the two-party system was the best po-

litical route to insuring the gains citizens had made through the Farmer-

Labor party. In speeches Humphrey claimed that the national New Deal

state was the realization of Farmer-Labor efforts and hopes. He ex-

plained to voters that a third party had been necessary in the 1930s, but

now that the interests of the Farmer-Labor party’s old constituencies—

farmers, workers, and the lower-middle classes—were being addressed

within the framework of the two-party system, a third party was no

long necessary.53

A desire to legitimate the party system also informed liberals’ cam-

paign to reinstate party labels in the Minnesota legislature. Reformers

had banned party labels in the legislature during the Progressive era.54

The new liberals, however, felt the nonpartisan system undermined party

prestige and responsibility. Echoing Schattschneider, they argued that

without a centralized authority that organized various pressure groups

into a coherent coalition, the individual legislator became a “sort of free-

lance artist.”55 Without the dependable support of other party members,

an individual legislator succumbed to local or regional pressures that

forced him or her to change positions, and thus confused the voter.


Naftalin argued that the nonpartisan system helped conservatives main-

tain their power, and cited it as the major factor in the Farmer-Labor

party’s failure to get its main reforms through the Minnesota legislature.56

Resistance from the Left

The conflict between the left wing and Humphrey is remembered as

being about Truman’s anti-Soviet foreign policy and anticommunism.

And it was. But fundamental disagreements about political organiza-

tion existed even before the cold war became an issue. Reflecting the

tough, no-nonsense pragmatism of the postwar years, the political sci-

entists frankly endorsed the idea that parties were about interests. They

scoffed at the notion that parties embodied ideals. As they lectured to

citizens’ groups across the state, “ideals” were merely a rationalization, a

mask, for the interests that parties represented.57 Elmer Benson and the

Left, on the other hand, believed a true party, an effective party, embodied

a set of ideals that inspired loyalty and dedication. They had deplored

the sacrifice of Farmer-Labor principles in the pursuit of votes. They

had opposed the “All-Party Political Committees” that swept Floyd B.

Olson into office in the 1930s.58 Especially for the old Farmer-Labor Left,

a party was not so much a political organization as a mission. As Susie

Stageberg described it, “We felt that in the Farmer-Labor party we were

at the very grass roots of human endeavor and aspirations and that

through our medium the humblest might voice his needs.”59 Farm leader

John Bosch saw the Farmer-Labor party as “a crusading force, rather

than just a political organization or political aspirance.”60 They believed

in a Jeffersonian, localized way of organizing politics that was somehow

connected to geography, even as they endorsed vaguely socialistic ideas

about a large state.

The disagreement about the purpose and scope of a party can be seen

in the different interpretations of the 1944 merger. Humphrey and his

liberal allies understood the merger between the Democratic and Farmer-

Labor parties as part of the New Deal political realignment, which ended

the sectionalism of the nineteenth-century party system and made the

Democrats a national party.61 For Humphrey, and political scientists

and historians after him, the programmatic approach embodied by the

New Deal represented a new kind of politics based on people’s economic

interests, not their class or sectional loyalties. Through state-centered

economic policies and programs, the New Deal could represent the


interests of several different groups of people, farmers, workers, small-

business owners, African Americans, without actually having to unite

them within a movement-oriented rubric of protest. Historical particu-

larities in Minnesota had resulted in something called a Democratic-

Farmer-Labor party, but the liberals who would define Democratic pol-

itics in Minnesota understood that the DFL party was really a revived

Democratic party. Minnesota had shed its third-party anomalies and

joined the rest of the northern states in a two-party, pluralist system

based on programmatic interests rather than class, ethnicity, or section.62

Conversely, Benson and the old Farmer-Labor Left viewed the merger

as a necessary sacrifice in the fight against fascism. They had assented

to the merger in the name of wartime unity, but in their mind it was a

temporary stopgap until a real third-party movement could be restored.63

Like the political scientists, they supported Roosevelt’s New Deal, even

sacrificing their beloved party for it, but unlike the political scientists,

they understood it as a first step to making the United States a true so-

cial democracy. They believed the New Deal was about helping the “have-

nots” in their historic battle against the rich and powerful in American

society.

Almost everything about Benson’s old Farmer-Labor party was an

affront to the ideas of the political scientists. The failure to distinguish

between labor leaders and party leaders embroiled the Farmer-Labor

party in the labor movement’s messy factionalism.64 Benson’s ideologi-

cal rigidity prevented the reconciliation of competing viewpoints in the

party and drove away those voters and interest groups with whom he

disagreed.65 This left the party weakened and dangerously, according to

Schattschneider’s analysis, of one ideological perspective. Communist

infiltration of the party under Benson’s leadership further alienated

voters and groups who had once been loyal to it.

For their part, the left-wing faction of the new DFL party resented

Humphrey’s much vaunted ideological flexibility, which they saw as old-

fashioned political opportunism. Benson despised this quality in Roo-

sevelt as much as Humphrey admired it.66 Left-wingers denounced Mayor

Humphrey’s consensus-building rhetoric and his efforts to reconcile

corporate interests with workers’ needs.67 They believed that any recon-

ciliation in which corporations retained control of the power and wealth

was automatically against workers’ best interests. They opposed Hum-


phrey’s conflation of the DFL with the national Democratic party and

reminded Minnesotans of the corruption of the two-party system in

general and of the Democratic party in particular.68 They recoiled at

the idea of the DFL party as a “mobilizer of majorities” and held on to

the notion that their DFL party might yet lead the fight for real social

democracy.

Thus, even before the cold war and anticommunism forced the left-

wing faction to organize behind Henry Wallace’s anti–cold war Pro-

gressive party, issues of political organization and philosophy divided

the Left and the new liberals. When combined with third-party memo-

ries, the strength of the Left, while not great, was great enough to force

Humphrey and his liberal allies to fight for their vision of politics. In

doing so, they would be forced to more clearly articulate what was new

about postwar liberalism.

The Consequences and Possibilities of Two-Party Liberal Pluralism

Humphrey’s vision of a strong central state held in check by the demo-

cratic competition of interest groups in the two-party political arena

was eventually realized in Minnesota. Originating in the pages of academic

treatises, it was strengthened and honed as Humphrey and his liberal

allies defended it against the conservative Right and the radical Left,

justified it within the memory of a third-party tradition, and exercised

it in the political arena. Humphrey’s style of liberal politics was thus a

heightened, more intense version of the Democratic political order that

David Plotke describes in his book. Humphrey’s style of liberal interest-

group politics would be labeled, variously, “egghead,” “programmatic,”

or “issues-oriented.” The term programmatic was usually deployed to dis-

tinguish it from traditional machine politics. In 1959 journalist William S.

White identified programmatic politics as people voting on national is-

sues and national platforms, and saw it as a midwestern phenomenon,

“developed by the Humphrey people in Minnesota.”69 Political scientist

John Fenton classified states’ political traditions as either patronage-based

or “issues-oriented.” By “issues-oriented,” Fenton meant that there existed

an informed electorate that was able to relate governmental programs

to specific candidates and parties, and vote according to a set of issues

that affected their lives. Fenton noted that the idea that the competition

of interest groups and responsive government created an informed


citizenry was a happy ideal, seldom fulfilled, except in Minnesota and

Wisconsin.70 Fenton does not mention it, but those were both states

with strong third-party traditions.

Since the 1960s, interest-group pluralism and the managerial “social-

service” state have come under attack. Most famously, Theodore Lowi

attacked liberals for their moral failure to clearly define the state itself.

Lowi argued that while postwar liberals justified the need for an activist

state, they purposefully and necessarily left the final form of the state to

be decided by the competition of private interest groups. This led to a

crisis in public authority during the 1960s. The state and the so-called

public sector had expanded, but with no clear sense of what they stood

for and hence with no clear sense of legitimacy. The government itself

was ultimately reduced to little more than another interest group.71 Grant

McConnell likewise criticized the dominant role of interest groups in

American politics as the illegitimate interposition of unaccountable pri-

vate power in ostensibly public institutions.72 The liberal pluralist un-

derstanding of politics also led to the increased power of the presidency

at the expense of Congress and the parties. Historically Congress and

the parties had been representational institutions that, however incom-

pletely, connected citizens to the democratic process of government and

stood as a check against presidential power. Arguing that administrators

and managers in the presidential office could more effectively meet the

organized needs of individual citizens, Roosevelt and his administration

successfully restructured and empowered the executive branch of gov-

ernment, thus neutralizing Congress and the parties. Many political sci-

entists now point to the decline in the importance of parties as a major

reason for citizen apathy about politics.73 Indeed, an elitist, top-down,

consensus-oriented postwar liberalism, propagated by liberal ideologues

who were blind to their own ideologies, has been blamed for much that

has gone wrong in America since the 1960s.

The undemocratic consequences of liberal pluralism have diverted

historians’ attention from the possibilities interest-group pluralism held

for civil rights activists and those Americans interested in combating

racism and group prejudices. Although Democratic interest-group theo-

rists never developed theories for understanding racism and civil rights

in American society, their ideas about the state and the group-based

nature of society overlapped and interacted with the ideas, rhetoric,

and political context of civil rights activists and antiracism educators.


Civil rights activists looked to an activist federal government for anti-

lynching and fair employment legislation. They tried to organize African

Americans around economic interests, namely fair employment, in the

same way farmers organized around parity, and unions around opposition

to the Taft-Hartley Act. They pinned their hopes for political recogni-

tion on the winner-take-all two-party electoral system in which black

Americans voting together in a couple of key northern states could de-

cide the presidential election. Moreover, antiracist educators found Hum-

phrey’s pluralist ideas about politics similar to their own ideas about

“intergroup relations.” Like the liberal discourse on politics, the rhetoric

of “intergroup relations” sought to bridge differences and resolve con-

flicts between different groups in American society. Like the liberals,

intergroup educators looked to the federal government to help amelio-

rate conflicts between groups through redistributive economic policies

that would restore harmony and equilibrium among the groups. The

relationship between civil rights, pluralism, and the postwar Democratic

party is a complicated one, which for our purposes begins during World

War II, when Minnesotans suddenly and inexplicably became interested

in intergroup relations and antiracism.


In the years surrounding World War II a wave of tolerance and under-

standing swept over Minnesota’s civic consciousness. The Republican

Governor Edward Thye created an interracial commission to educate

Minnesotans about the perils of racism and religious prejudice. Civic

and religious groups encouraged citizens to take a “Pledge of Unity,” to

never judge a whole group on the delinquent actions of a few, and to

treat all people according to their individual worth. Even farm journals

decried racism.1 Civic officials attributed the sudden urgency about race

relations to a combination of Scandinavian moral acuity and farsighted

efforts to prevent racial violence of the sort occurring in Los Angeles

and Detroit. But Scandinavians were no more moral than other Ameri-

cans about this issue, and Minnesota was hardly the racial powder keg

they imagined. Unlike other northern cities, neither Minneapolis nor

St. Paul saw large increases in their black population during the 1940s.

In 1940 there were 9,928 Negroes in the state. By 1950 that number had

risen to 14,022, still about one-half of 1 percent of the state population.2

Detroit’s African American population, on the other hand, increased

from 150,000 in 1940 to 220,000 in 1950.3

In addition to the 9,928 Negroes, the Governor’s Interracial Commis-

sion included as populations of concern 12,528 Indians, 550 Chinese, and

1,447 Japanese Americans, who had been relocated to Minnesota by the

War Relocation Authority after Pearl Harbor.4 Despite widespread dis-

crimination and prejudice, there had been no reported incidents of vio-

lence involving any of these groups during the war. Nonetheless there

C H A P T E R T H R E E

Antiracism and the Politics of Unity

40

was a tremendous amount of interest in these tiny groups of newly iden-

tified “racial” minorities that was distinct from earlier concerns about

“national” or “religious” minorities in a state where as late as 1930 more

than 50 percent of the population was foreign-born or of foreign-born

parentage, and where the most common forms of discrimination were

anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism.5

Antiracism education reconfigured concepts of “race,” “color,” and

“ethnicity.” In Minnesota, where ethnic, religious, and class tensions had

defined politics, this reconfiguration had the effect of softening these

old tensions. Although ultimately shallow, attention to “the Negro” formed

an oasis of cooperation between once quarreling groups of Minnesotans,

bringing together Catholics and Lutherans, Jews and Christians, Yan-

kees and eastern Europeans, and labor and management. This coopera-

tion on interracial panels and antiracist workshops did not completely

erase differences between these groups, nor was it the only factor in di-

minishing once implacable divisions. Nonetheless, it did contribute to

transforming Minnesota’s political landscape in ways that comported

with Humphrey’s vision of liberal, group-based politics.

Antiracism Education in Wartime America

Wartime concerns about domestic unrest and violence and the need to

unify a diverse population sparked a vigorous government-directed pub-

lic awareness campaign against racial and religious bigotry. Historian

Daniel Kryder has argued that this official interest in racism did not

arise from a genuine desire for racial justice but rather was motivated

by the need to mobilize industrial production and preserve party power.6

Nonetheless, social scientists in the emergent field of “intergroup rela-

tions” were delighted by the government’s unprecedented recognition

of the dangers of racial and religious prejudice.7 The army consulted

the NAACP about training American troops to respect the cultures in

the areas of the world where they would be stationed. The Office of War

Information gave Hollywood directors strict guidelines about avoiding

racial and religious stereotyping in their films, and offered suggestions

about how to incorporate racial and ethnic minorities into scenes.8 Or-

ganizations like the Bureau of Inter-Cultural Education in New York

distributed pamphlets, filmstrips, and “how-to” instructions for inter-

group workshops to schools, churches, civic organizations, and libraries

throughout the country.9


These educational materials reprinted themes from two widely dis-

tributed books by anthropologists, Ruth Benedict’s Race: Science and

Politics (1940) and Ashley Montagu’s Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The

Fallacy of Race (1942). Gunnar Myrdal’s landmark An American Dilemma

(1944) was also a much cited text in the field of intergroup relations, al-

though its weighty sociological data and 1,483 pages kept it from being

read by a popular audience, as the other two books were.10 Echoing the

Myrdal thesis, educators and activists argued that racism and religious

bigotry contradicted the “Judeo-Christian” and democratic principles

that guided American life. Thus, the deleterious effects of racism were

borne not only by its victims but also by the moral foundations of the

nation.11 In addition to moral damage, racism and bigotry also threatened

national security. Japanese and German propaganda exploited Ameri-

can racial tensions in their broadcasts to colonial peoples in Asia and

Africa. Such propaganda could as well be used to arouse resentment

and anger in America’s own racial minorities. Racism also contradicted

the government’s war aims as stated in the Atlantic Charter, and thus un-

dermined the credibility of American leadership in the postwar world.12

Racial categories in America were already in upheaval when wartime

antiracist educators set out to expose the racist fallacies that had legiti-

mated eugenics experiments, immigration restrictions, and other dis-

criminatory legislation. As Matthew Frye Jacobson has shown, whereas

once there had been many “races” in the United States, defined as Celts,

Hebrews, Slavs, Teutons, Anglo-Saxons, Mediterranean, and other now

antiquated categories, during the first half of the twentieth century these

once racially distinct categories were gradually collapsed into a larger

race called “Caucasian.” There they became “white,” as opposed to Celt

or Hebrew, and an “ethnicity,” as opposed to a “race.”13 This was a grad-

ual process, begun by anthropologists like Franz Boas as early as 1900 in

response to the grossly racist pseudoscientific theories about fixed racial

hierarchies. Scientific racism held that something called race, manifested

in physical characteristics, determined human beings’ moral character

and mental capacity and could be scientifically ranked according to worth.

Boas attacked these theories by proving that there were no biological

differences between these so-called races. Rather, what differences ex-

isted were the result of different cultural practices and environments.

There were physical differences among human beings, such as skin color

or hair texture, which could be classified in terms of “race,” but there

42 Antiracism and the Politics of Unity

were only five or even as few as three main divisions that could be rec-

ognized as “races.” Moreover, these divisions denoted physical differ-

ence and had nothing to do with the moral, intellectual, or psychological

traits of individual people, nor, given the history of migration in the

world, were they pure or fixed. By the 1930s, anthropologists and sociol-

ogists were arguing that so-called racial categories were fluid, mutable,

and socially determined by things like antimiscegenation laws and eco-

nomic imperatives.14

Ruth Benedict and wartime antiracist educators favored a model of

humanity that featured just “three great races”: Caucasian, Negroid, and

Mongoloid. As Jacobson notes, this slimmed-down model of the human

races contributed to the collapse of formerly distinct biological “races”

into culturally determined ethnicities, as well as the creation of one great

physically defined white race.15 The unintended consequence of this for

American race relations was to draw even more rigidly the biological

and categorical divide between “white” and “black,” even as it was argued

that biological differences such as skin color were meaningless.

Although wartime antiracism educators retained a concept of race as

denoting physical traits, they did not believe that physical differences

were important in understanding race and racism in American life.

Rather, they believed that political and economic interests dictated race

relations. As Benedict pointed out, racial persecution was not about race,

it was about persecution.16 In order to stem racial conflict one had to

understand conflict, not race. Conflict between groups was rooted in

national rivalries, defense of the status quo by the rich, poverty, unem-

ployment, and war (Benedict, Race, 237–38). Conflict occurred when-

ever one group of people—defined according to race, class, or reli-

gion—was forged into a class by discrimination practiced against it.

Discrimination kept minority groups outside the mainstream, scape-

goated as “an out-group,” isolated and exploited. Such scapegoating re-

sulted in an economically exploitable group of people but also created a

hatred that distracted other exploited groups from the real source of

their problems, and thus upheld the status quo (Benedict, Race, 245).

Montagu concurred: “All over the world under conditions of economic

stress ‘race’ prejudice has become a powerful weapon with which minor-

ity groups have been beaten.”17

The solution to American racial tension, then, was to “minimize con-

ditions that lead to persecution” (Benedict, Race, 244). Wartime antiracist


educators explicitly did not focus on race but, rather, like their counter-

parts in political science, on fixing and ameliorating the economic con-

ditions, the imbalances, that led to conflict:

While we raise Negro standards of living, of health, and of education in the South, therefore, it is necessary also to raise the standards of theSouthern poor whites. Until we have “made democracy work” so that thenation’s full manpower is drafted for its common benefit, racist perse-cution will continue in America. Until housing and conditions of laborare raised above the needlessly low standards which prevail in manysections of the country, scapegoats of some sort will be sacrificed topoverty. Until the regulation of industry has enforced the practice ofsocial responsibility, there will be exploitation of the most helpless racialgroups, and this will be justified by racist denunciations. (Benedict,Race, 247)

Like the political scientists, Benedict and others looked to the state, to

the national government, to propose programs that would fix these

conditions:

It is hard to see how this responsibility for the whole can be taken todayexcept by the national government, and in the past decade state regula-tion has increased, national treasuries all over the Western World havebeen opened for the relief of the unemployed, and compulsory old-ageinsurance is in operation in many nations. These and other nationalundertakings can be used to minimize economic discrimination.(Benedict, Race, 247–48)

Thus, even though antiracist ideas underscored the physical differences

between white and black, their overall purpose was to emphasize the

underlying economic bases of inequity and discrimination in American

society and to call upon the state to fix that situation. While faulting anti-

racist educators for reifying a biological concept of race, historians have

largely ignored the more important economic analyses that undergirded

their theories about race and racism.

The economic analysis of racism and the recognition of the state in

fixing economic conditions supported the black struggle for fair employ-

ment. In 1941, in response to African American labor leader A. Philip

Randolph’s threatened “March on Washington,” President Roosevelt es-

tablished the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to enforce

a temporary ban on discrimination in employment in government-

contracted industries.18 Virulent opposition to the committee mobi-


lized civil rights activists, who not only struggled to insure the effective-

ness of the temporary wartime FEPC but also anticipated the postwar

need for a permanent committee banning employment discrimination

in all industries.19

The argument for a permanent FEPC blended political scientists’ un-

derstanding of a responsive state and antiracist educators’ arguments

about the economic basis of racial conflict. FEPC proponents warned

that American GIs would be returning and seeking reemployment at

the precise moment when the war jobs that had lifted America out of

the depression were to be curtailed. The result would be unemployment.

Since black workers, as the last hired, were likely to be the first fired,

there would also likely be racial tension. Newly mobilized African Amer-

icans who had put their resentments on the back burner while they

fought for democracy abroad were not going to passively accept its ab-

rogation at home. Drawing from the Keynesian model of demand eco-

nomics, FEPC proponents argued that the solution was for the state to

insure black Americans continued access to jobs, which would in turn

create a new group of consumers whose “purchasing power” would con-

tribute to the economic growth necessary to avoid economic depres-

sion, and hence racial and economic conflict. Testifying in favor of a

permanent FEPC law, Beulah Whitby argued, “If full employment were

granted to Negroes alone, their buying power and practices would create

a revenue greater than all the revenue from our exports, which is one of

our most substantial sources of national income.”20 Or as Benedict offered,

“National prosperity, however thin you cut it, has two surfaces: ability

to sell, means ability to buy; employment means production.”21 By mak-

ing consumers out of economically deprived groups, the government

could maintain productivity and at the same time alleviate dangerous,

disruptive racial tensions.22

Wartime antiracism activism and the civil rights fight for fair em-

ployment, then, overlapped with the political scientists’ understanding

of purchasing power, productivity, and a responsive, democratic state

that balanced society’s competing interests for the good of the whole.

Indeed, Montagu’s challenge to Americans to fulfill the promise of Amer-

ican democracy reveals a specifically pluralist understanding of democ-

racy: “It is a fundamental tenet of democracy that it must balance the

interests of all its component groups and citizens.”23 Additionally, the

reconceptualization of what were once considered finite racial groups


into fluid, culturally shaped, white, ethnic groups corresponded to po-

litical scientists’ view that ethnic allegiances had become less important

in understanding American politics since the “New Deal Revolution”

had reorganized national politics around economic issues.24

Race and Ethnicity in Minnesota

Even before World War II, liberal-minded and religious Minnesotans

had been concerned with intergroup tension and religious bigotry. Eth-

nic and religious divisions had always informed life in Minnesota, with

its large foreign-born population. In 1900 there were 261,026 foreign-born

males of voting age, as opposed to 245,768 native-born voters. In 1920 65

percent of Minnesota’s population was foreign-born or of mixed native

and foreign-born parentage. In 1930, after a decade of immigration re-

strictions, over 50 percent of Minnesotans were still of foreign-born or

native and foreign-born parentage.25 Minnesota’s population consisted

mainly of Germans, Swedes, and Norwegians, with significant enclaves

of Danes, and then a diverse mix of Finns, eastern European Jews, Irish,

Croatians, Slovenians, Poles, and Italians, who arrived after 1900.26

The antagonisms between the different groups were sometimes vio-

lent, as in the smashing of German-language presses during World War

I, as well as the deportation of antiwar, socialist Finns, Italians, and Slavs.27

But their main effect was on state politics. The conflict between the Scan-

dinavian Lutherans in the powerful Republican party and the minority

Irish Catholics in the ineffectual Democratic party dictated the charac-

ter of Minnesota politics. Ethnoreligious divisions were solidified in the

all-consuming battle over Prohibition in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries, as Irish Catholics fulfilled stereotypes held of them

and defended their right to drink against moralistic Scandinavian pro-

hibitionists.28 Even within the otherwise progressive Farmer-Labor party,

anti-Catholicism was rampant because of the perceived conservatism and

hierarchical character of Catholicism, what one publication called “the

clerical-fascist element in the hierarchy of the Roman-Catholic church,”

and because of Farmer-Laborites’ own zealous, dry Protestantism.29

Perhaps the most virulent form of prejudice was anti-Semitism, which

was especially common in Minneapolis, the state’s largest city and finan-

cial center. Minneapolis Jews were barred from country clubs, restau-

rants, and neighborhoods. Civic organizations like the Rotary, the Ki-

wanis, the Lions Club, and the Minneapolis Automobile Club refused to


accept Jews. Crosses were burned on the lawns of Jews who moved into

certain restricted neighborhoods. The Jewish population was concen-

trated in the slums of north Minneapolis in neighborhoods adjoining the

black areas. Jews were involved in state politics, particularly the Farmer-

Labor party, and this led to the overt use of anti-Jewish tactics in the

Farmer-Labor primary and the general election in 1938. In a 1946 article,

left-wing activist and journalist Carey McWilliams called Minneapolis

“the capital of anti-Semitism in the United States.”30

Anti-black violence was rare, due to the small, isolated black popula-

tion. As elsewhere, however, it took the form of mobs and lynching. It

demanded official intervention. But in the decades leading up to World

War II, only two major incidents occurred, which I will discuss in the

following chapter. Anti-black violence, then, while horrific, did not con-

sume civic energies or inform daily life in the way that anti-Catholicism

or anti-Semitism did.

Many different groups were involved in what were variously and in-

terchangeably seen as “racial,” “ethnic,” “religious,” “nationality,” or “so-

cial” tensions. Organizations founded to help the foreign born and alle-

viate tensions between immigrants and the native born often referred to

these problems as “racial.” The Edward F. Waite Publication Fund for

Works on Race and Race Relations, for instance, published a book about

St. Paul’s “Festival of Nations,” the introduction to which described St.

Paul as a “laboratory for racial adjustment.”31 The book’s publicist hailed

its “importance to about two-hundred agencies in the United States which

are working to bring about better race relations.”32 St. Paul had only a

tiny population of what we might now consider “racial” minority groups—

about 4,000 blacks and 300 Asian Americans—but it did have a thriv-

ing and diverse population of first- and second-generation immigrants.

Similarly, a section in the WPA’s Minnesota: A State Guide titled “Racial

Groups” opens with a discussion of the Scandinavians, then goes on to

the Danish, the German, and the rest.33 Writing in The Nation, Sinclair

Lewis detailed the “racial misconceptions” held of the Swedes by their

employers.34 A similar ambiguity marked definitions of “white.” People

on the Iron Range, for instance, referred to the town of Virginia as a

“white” town to distinguish it from other towns on the Range with large

southern European populations, which, apparently, were not considered

“white.”35 Although the author of a 1937 study of the Twin Cities uses

the U.S. census categories of “nativity,” rather than race, to describe


“foreign-born whites,” his repeated use of the phrase “non-white racial

groups” suggests the lingering semantic possibility of white racial groups.36

In a state where the so-called racial or cultural problems had to do

with immigrant groups and religious tensions, the place of African Amer-

icans was uncertain. The St. Paul International Institute’s Festival of Na-

tions illustrates the confusion over how American-born African Amer-

icans fit into a nationality-oriented model of cultural diversity. Black

Minnesotans first participated in the Festival of Nations in 1934.37 They

were grouped with the Indians as part of the “American” peoples, as

opposed to the European-born participants, which suggested that African

Americans were somehow indigenous to America. The Indians re-cre-

ated the first Thanksgiving, while the African Americans sang Negro

spirituals. In 1936, African Americans were represented by a procession

featuring Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, James Wel-

don Johnson, Marion Anderson, and a group of young tap dancers, still

as indigenous Americans. There was no mention of black Americans’

African roots. On the eve of war in 1939 the European immigrant groups

argued that they too were Americans and, in a counterintuitive move,

voted to do away with the separate “American” designation for Indians

and Negroes. Thus it was that the black participants moved into the In-

ternational Village permanently, next to the Swedes. But they still re-

tained the idea that they originally came from the American South. The

Negro exhibit re-created an old southern mansion surrounded by arti-

ficial magnolia trees, which were draped with live moss shipped up from

Louisiana. They served southern fried chicken and corn pone, which,

insisted organizer Alice Sickels, were as foreign to the American palate

as Russian Houtzi and “fattigman’s kakir.”38

Sickels’s discussion of the institute’s “Negro friends” in her memoir

about the Festival of Nations reveals further the unarticulated confu-

sion between African Americans and the European immigrant groups.

She recalls how the institute had chartered a boat for their annual dance,

only to discover that the boat barred Negroes. They refused to hire such

a boat. Notes Sickels, “it was as though we had been told we must leave

our Scottish friends at home.”39 But it was highly unlikely that any boat

would have in fact barred Scots. That kind of discrimination happened

only to blacks and Jews in Minnesota in the 1930s. Sickels’s incorpora-

tion of the Negro group into her narrative about nationality groups al-

lowed her to illustrate how genuinely committed her organization was


to the principles of diversity. Defending and befriending the small but

overtly discriminated-against population of Negroes enacted the stated

principles of diversity. It had the additional effect of clarifying the African

Americans’ position as a race, something distinct from the European

nationality groups.

Blackness and the Problem of Race

Over the course of the war the words race and racial came to refer to

Negroes and “the colored races,” which also included Asian Americans

and American Indians. The foreign-born population was shrinking, its

children assimilating and transforming mainstream society, a process

helped along by the war’s rhetoric of unity. The 1950 census did not

cross-classify according to nativity as had earlier censuses, citing the de-

clining importance of the foreign-born population.40 The process of as-

similation was guided by antiracist redefinitions of racial groups to just

three main divisions of black, white, and yellow. This model reclassified

the foreign born as “white.” But “white” was not really perceived as a

race, because discrimination and prejudice were not practiced against

whites. Wartime discussions of race and race relations were aimed at

fixing problems like discrimination and prejudice, and thus, as Benedict

said explicitly, “race” came to be redefined in terms of social disadvan-

tage. At the point when the new biological racial category of “Cau-

casian” enveloped formerly racialized categories like “Hebrew” and “Celt,”

then, the category of “race” was redefined to mean only the persecuted

colored races. Since whiteness was not seen as problematic in the same

way, it became a de-raced, naturalized state of being.41

Of the so-called colored races, the African American group became

most closely associated with the terms race and racial issues. This was

because antiracism measures correctly identified that the most disrup-

tive and egregious incidents of racial violence and discrimination in-

volved African Americans. The weakest link in the chain of wartime

unity was that between blacks and non-blacks, and thus more energy

was expended on this problem. In Minnesota, where anti-Semitism and

anti-Catholicism were rampant, African Americans were the only group

that employers explicitly refused to hire and that unions barred from

membership. Employers’ main explanation for their refusal to hire blacks

was that their white employees would object. White workers, in fact,

did protest when employers tried to introduce black workers, while


apparently willing to work with other racial groups. Employers who

hired Japanese Americans during the war noted that their employees

“draw the line on Negroes.”42 The Urban League reported an incident

where a vocational school hired a Negro youth under the impression

that he was an Indian. When the school realized its mistake, it withheld

employment from the youth, fearing the reaction of its employees. Ap-

parently neither employers nor employees would have had a problem

with an Indian.43

Antiracist organizations in Minnesota thus emphasized the urgency

of the race problem in terms of the Negro situation. The Governor’s In-

terracial Commission, created in 1943 to study racial trends in the state

and identify potential unrest, and consisting of Catholic, Jewish, Protes-

tant and black leaders, explicitly identified the status of the Negro as the

most urgent topic of study.44 At the suggestion of antiracist activist Fa-

ther Francis Gilligan and Urban League Secretary S. Vincent Owens,

the first order of business for the new commission was a survey of the

employment situation for Negroes in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Du-

luth.45 The commission’s first two studies were The Negro Worker and

The Negro and His Home. These were followed by The Mexican and The

Indian. Father Gilligan explained that the commission focused on the

Negro group because they had suffered most from economic discrimi-

nation and thus merited extra attention.46

Focusing on African Americans as the most urgent component of the

race problem had the effect of de-problematizing, de-racializing, the

category “nationality group.” Thus, immigrant groups became “white”

during the war, not only as the result of assimilation and wartime unity

but also because to the extent that “race” was a problem, to the extent

that it demanded attention, it was with regard to the continued mis-

treatment of African Americans. By joining together to address the “race

problem,” once problematic groups, such as Irish Catholics and Jews,

for instance, defined themselves as outside the problem, not a group

needing to be helped, hence not a racial group at all. This was most

overtly true of Jews, who had long straddled the religious and racial

categories.

In its first years the Governor’s Interracial Commission entertained

the idea of doing a pamphlet titled The Jew in Minnesota, to follow the

successful Negro Worker in Minnesota and The Negro and His Home. The


commission appointed a committee to study the issue, and in October

1945 the committee presented their proposal for the pamphlet on Jews.

At this meeting Rabbi Aronson said that members of the Jewish group

objected to developing the pamphlet at this time. Their stated reasons

concerned the scope and cost of such a project. They recommended in-

stead that the commission just make a formal statement about the evil of

anti-Semitism. As a result, the recommendations for the pamphlet were

tabled, to be discussed later.47 Over the next three years, the commission

periodically returned to the issue of the Jewish group; each time the

discussion was put off. Finally in February 1948, after work on The Mex-

ican and The Indian was under way, the commission decided to skip the

Jewish project altogether, stating in its minutes:

The question of a study of the Jewish group in Minnesota will not beundertaken because of members of that faith objecting to the studybeing made by an interracial group. There was some talk that otherreligious groups should be studied if such action was for the Jewishfaith.48

This was not an isolated incident. Whether or not Jews were best seen

as a religious minority, like the Catholics, or a racial minority was a

topic of debate among Jews and the members of the new interracial

groups. Labor leader Rubin Latz, for instance, sent Mayor Humphrey

an article that he felt showed, contrary to the position taken by others on

Humphrey’s staff, that Jewish people “do have racial problems different

from Catholics.”49 His contention was supported by the many reports of

overt anti-Semitism that equated Jews with blacks. Salesmen for the

Minneapolis Auto Club apparently advertised to potential customers

that they excluded “Jews and Niggers.” Graffiti likewise often conflated

the two groups.50

Nonetheless, in thwarting a study of the “Jew in Minnesota,” the Jew-

ish group backed out of the problematic racial category, in governmen-

tal circles anyway, leaving it to the persecuted colored races, the Negro,

the Mexican, and the Indian. Note, however, that while neither discrim-

ination against the small numbers of Negroes and Mexicans nor dis-

crimination against the federally governed Indian tribes had affected

Minnesota politics, anti-Semitism had. Anti-Semitism had been used

repeatedly against the Farmer-Labor party, communists, and other rad-

icals in the political arena. Although black people in Minnesota suffered


qualitatively worse forms of economic discrimination, the issue of anti-

black discrimination had no historical impact in Minnesota politics in

the ways that ethnic and religious tension had.

When antiracist activists identified discrimination against blacks as

the most serious problem and defined cultural tolerance programs around

blackness, they ended up drawing a sharp line between race and some-

thing that was now seen as ethnicity, where it had always been ambigu-

ous and inconsistent before. Thus, for instance, projects that started out

being about intergroup unity, where blacks were just one group among

others, ended up with blacks being singled out to illustrate the impor-

tance of that unity. Cultural tolerance activities often worked by uniting

and mobilizing an ethnically and racially diverse population around a

single project. The end result, the exhibit or festival, was less important

than the process of putting it together. In November 1945, for instance,

fourteen organizations pooled resources to sponsor the “Races of Man-

kind” exhibit at the Walker Art Center. Based on the Ruth Benedict pam-

phlet of the same title, the exhibit endorsed the idea that there were just

three races, white, black, and yellow, that they were essentially, scientifi-

cally, all the same, and that nationalities and Jews were not races.51

About 3,500 people attended the exhibit, but the organizers maintained

that the real value lay in how the project had brought people of different

backgrounds together. They emphasized that over one hundred people,

“Japanese-Americans, Negroes, Jews, Norwegians, Swedes, and Anglo-

Saxons,” worked for over ten days to get the exhibit in shape, proving

that people of all different racial, ethnic, nationality, and religious groups

could cooperate.52 Given Minnesota’s history of anti-Semitism and Yan-

kee social dominance, such cooperation between Jews, Norwegians, An-

glo-Saxons, and Catholics was noteworthy. But the accompanying radio

program, titled “Minorities and Community Living,” focused on the

black communities. The radio show featured Cecil Newman, the editor

of Minneapolis’s most activist Negro newspaper, The Minneapolis Spokes-

man. Newman’s mission was to make the black presence felt in the Twin

Cities. He stated that programs like “The Races of Mankind” showed

that whites had finally started to pay attention to the problems of blacks

in the Twin Cities. This comment brought forth hearty assents from

the white moderators of the radio show. While Newman’s point was

correct, it also recast the interracial program in terms of black and white,


thereby reinforcing the consolidation of previously antagonistic ethnic

groups into whiteness.

The Governor’s Interracial Commission likewise illustrates how the

overdue focus on African Americans brought together once quarreling

ethnic and religious groups. Headed by Father Francis J. Gilligan, it in-

cluded a rabbi, a bishop, two other reverends, two representatives from

the Urban League, a doctor, a businessman, and two Protestant women

from the settlement house movement. The commission created a public

space for representatives of previously hostile groups to work together

to address a community problem, which came to be specifically identified

as racial. Unlike interracial groups in the 1960s, which stressed communi-

cation between white officials and black leaders, these early panels fo-

cused on preventative measures from above, and the communication

was between different kinds of whites. As Lutherans, Irish Catholics,

Jews, and Yankee Protestants discussed the plight of the Negro, old eth-

nic and religious tensions, once the focus of social concern, began to re-

cede. The “Negro problem” became the new focus of social concern and

political positioning.

Fair Employment and the Eclipse of Class Hostility

In addition to interracial educational organizations and programs, many

Minnesotans embraced the movement for some kind of permanent Fair

Employment Practice Committee (FEPC), preferably at the federal level,

but in lieu of that, at the state or municipal level. Like the antiracism

educational efforts, the movement for fair employment laws brought

together Lutherans, Catholics, Jews, and Yankee Protestants, as well as

whites and blacks, but it also brought together people of different ideo-

logical concerns, specifically representatives of the business community,

the humanitarian antiracist community, and the labor movement. Busi-

ness leaders, charitable institutions, and union leaders cooperated over

the issue of fair employment for blacks in a way that helped destroy the

neat class dynamic that had previously shaped Minnesota politics.

Antiracist activists had been introduced to fair employment and labor

issues partly through their involvement in resettling Japanese American

internees in Minnesota. In the spring of 1942 the War Relocation Author-

ity (WRA), which was in charge of interning seventy thousand Japanese

Americans in barbed-wired “relocation centers,” began a campaign to


resettle the interned Nisei in “normal communities” in that citadel of

normalcy, the Midwest. In St. Paul the WRA approached the International

Institute; in Minneapolis it met with a committee of people from the

YWCA, the YMCA, the Civilian Defense Council, and various welfare

agencies, which eventually formed the Minneapolis War Relocation Com-

mittee.53 The task for these committees was to find employment for a

scapegoated racial group, while at the same time making sure “that the

presence of the new settlers will cause no disturbance in the community

to which they will go.”54

Following the lead of Benedict and Montagu, resettlement organizers

stressed the connection between economic competition and racial prej-

udice. They required the Nisei to be paid the same rate as white work-

ers. They wanted to avoid creating resentment among white workers

against the Japanese Americans for undercutting wages. The fair wage

also prevented the Nisei themselves from feeling exploited. Just as im-

portant for resettlement organizers was explaining to the community at

large their efforts to prevent economic rivalry. Genevieve Steefel, the

head of the Minneapolis War Relocation Committee and later a promi-

nent civil rights activist in Minneapolis, explained the committee’s ed-

ucative agenda in a report on the experiences of the Japanese Americans

in Minneapolis. Steefel told of a woman who called the Employment

Service looking for a “Jap” maid. A WRA-trained volunteer took the call,

and, as Steefel intoned, “the process of re-education began at once.” The

volunteer corrected the offensive slur (“Yes, we place Japanese Ameri-

cans.”) and proceeded to classify the job the caller want to fill “in its

proper wage bracket based on the payment being offered to Caucasians

for work of equal skill and responsibility.” When the caller expressed

outrage at the higher-than-expected wage, the volunteer explained that

the city could not permit the Japanese Americans to undercut the wages

of local workers, since that would breed resentment both against the

new settlers and among them. Steefel concluded that despite the disap-

pointment of the caller, “the equal pay for equal work standard was

maintained, and thus one of the foundations for good race relations

was laid.”55 There followed a series of similar anecdotes about misguided

citizens ready to exploit Japanese American labor, unwittingly exacer-

bating racial tensions, until the trained committee volunteer explained

the principles of good race relations. Steefel proudly noted the untroubled


relationship between the Nisei and whites in Minnesota, despite the

sudden influx of fourteen hundred Japanese Americans into the state

and the almost constant anti-Japanese propaganda in the press and on

the radio.56

Resettlement volunteers had gotten involved with the project through

their churches, community organizations, or local civilian defense organ-

izations, but their experiences awakened them to the problem of em-

ployment discrimination and economic injustice. Many joined the post-

war fight for a permanent federal FEPC, where they in turn became

involved with the labor movement.

The Minnesota Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the

various sympathizers surrounding the Communist party had long rec-

ognized the importance of integrated unions and black civil rights. Dur-

ing the 1930s the Farmer-Labor party had touted the importance of in-

tegrated unions in building a strong labor movement, and even sent a

representative to the National Negro Council in 1936.57 Farmer-Laborites

had helped organize the first integrated union in the state in 1935, the

International Hotel and Restaurant Workers Miscellaneous Workers,

AFL Local 665. Most unions in the state still barred blacks from mem-

bership in the 1940s. When the Governor’s Interracial Commission sent

out questionnaires inquiring about unions’ membership practices, only

109 out of 450 responded.58 Nonetheless, those unions most interested

in the FEPC and an integrated labor movement were also the most ac-

tive in state politics. The Minneapolis Central Labor Union (AFL), for

instance, which funded a large part of Humphrey’s mayoral campaign

and helped reorganize the DFL party, created the Committee on Hu-

man Relations. With an annual budget of $11,200 in 1946–47, it was

larger than the Mayor’s Council on Human Relations, as well as the

Minneapolis FEPC (to be discussed in chapter 6). The Central Labor

Union also gathered data about discrimination in unions and helped

form the Joint Committee for Fair Employment Opportunity, which

worked to get local retail stores to hire black clerks.59 While most rank-

and-file unionists were unlikely to support the FEPC, union leaders did,

and worked hard to change their members’ racial attitudes.

The FEPC provided a concrete, practical goal for citizens and activists

of many different motivations and backgrounds. It was part of the labor

movement’s vision of a social welfare state. It conformed to liberals’ ar-


guments that securely employed Americans would create a new consumer

base that would ensure productivity. It thus also conformed to the busi-

ness community’s desires for productivity and social peace. Thus, its

proponents emphasized, fair employment had a wide base of support

from all segments of society—businesses, religious groups, civic organ-

izations, and unions. This widespread, albeit shallow, support for fair

employment legislation proved that it was not another of the labor move-

ment’s radical, utopian, class-dividing causes but rather sound economic

policy, which would insure racial peace and thus benefit all classes of

society. Emphasizing the social and economic benefits of FEPC and racial

tolerance was a favorite strategy of antiracist activists during the war.

Intergroup educators, New Deal liberals, unionists, young moderate Re-

publicans, Jewish organizations, and various church groups all empha-

sized that eradicating racism was, as one pamphlet put it, “one issue on

which all agree.”60

The real unity that would emerge out of this activism, however, was

not so much interracial, which remained elusive, but rather ideological

and social. The Governor’s Interracial Commission’s study of Negro

workers in Minnesota highlighted instances where normally competing

forces in society came together successfully to stymie racism. In one case,

the Urban League approached a laundry about hiring a black woman.

The socially responsible owner of the laundry agreed to, but the white

women who worked there refused to work with the new employee. To-

gether the employer and the Urban League held at least two meetings in

which they brought in a cross section of society to dissuade the white

women of their racism: “a clergyman pleaded with them on the basis of

religion, a federal official on the basis of patriotism; a union official on

the basis of fairness.” Ultimately the women agreed to return to work.

The authors of the study noted that such scenes had happened more

than once.61

Educating a racist rank and file brought a sense of cooperation to

one of the most enduring and violent antagonisms in Minnesota, that

between management and labor. The Republican-created Governor’s

Interracial Commission took a positive view of labor unions. The com-

mission believed that the union’s organization, elected leaders, philoso-

phy, and conditions of membership made it a valuable vehicle for both

“educating white workers and disciplining them if they refuse to work


with Negroes.”62 Likewise, businessmen, who had rarely shared audiences

with left-leaning labor leaders in the 1930s, were suddenly turning up at

lectures and forums alongside CIO leaders. A 1943 University of Min-

nesota seminar on racial and cultural democracy, for instance, invited

both the president of the state CIO and Republican munitions manufac-

turer Charles Lilley Horn to speak about minorities in the workplace.63

Appearing on race-relations panels together was beneficial to both unions

and management. An interest in race relations highlighted each group’s

commitment to the public good. For unions, business support of the

FEPC affirmed the nonradical nature of governmental intervention in

the economy, while for businessmen, this common ground with unions

showed their interest in working together to maintain social peace.

In this game, however, unions had more to lose. The success of the

labor movement and the Farmer-Labor party in the 1930s had lain, in

part, in the ruthlessness of Republican capitalists, who put profits be-

fore the welfare of workers’ families. The labor movement flourished

when conservative Republicans were amoral and greedy. But when a

munitions manufacturer like Charles Lilley Horn embraced the cause

of race relations, he humanized the Republican businessman. President

of the Federal Cartridge Corporation, Horn had gone beyond the rec-

ommendations of the wartime FEPC when he hired a thousand black

workers at the new federally contracted Twin Cities Ordnance Plant in

New Brighton, thereby making himself a hero in the field of race rela-

tions.64 Horn’s flesh-bound face, his rotund, vested torso, and his fresh-

cut boutonniere made him the very essence of a fat-cat capitalist. But

after speaking out against racism, he joined union leaders at podiums

across the city. President Roosevelt even appointed him to the wartime

FEPC.

It is hard to judge Horn’s sincerity or motivation with regard to his

FEPC activities. His company journal indicates that he was an old-fash-

ioned Ford-style paternalist, who saw his employees as “family.” His

rants against federal taxation and “big government” and his monitoring

of radicals in the labor movement suggest his conservatism. In one in-

stance, Horn wrote to a prominent citizen in the small town of Askov,

saying that while reviewing a list of individuals who had signed a peti-

tion in support of the Revolutionary Workers Party, he had discovered

that 45 people in Askov, a town of 312, had signed it.65 An ammunition


manufacturer, Horn opposed early attempts to register firearms (except

in the case of aliens, in which case such a law might be justified).66 He was

a lifelong wildlife conservationist. He saw himself as an “individualistic

industrialist,” in complete and personal control of his workforce, as op-

posed to the new corporate executives, who did not actually own their

corporations, merely worked for them.67 Despite his antiradicalism, he

was sometimes sympathetic to the needs of labor. As an arbitrator in a

building services employees wage dispute in 1947, he awarded the em-

ployees a slightly higher increase than the public fact-finding commis-

sion had recommended.68

In addition to his service with the federal FEPC, Horn was a member

of the Urban League, and a friend of black editor Cecil Newman. Ac-

cording to left-wing African American activist Nellie Stone Johnson,

Horn tried to get her a job at the federal court, and also cleared away

her communist past with the FBI and the CIA.69 On the other hand,

however, his company journal contained racially offensive jokes and

offered only one statement about “fair play,” which avoided mentioning

African Americans.70 He declined to contribute to Humphrey’s Council

on Human Relations.71 He did not publicize his work on behalf of blacks

among white people. And none of the eulogies upon his retirement men-

tioned his prominent role in wartime race relations.

Although his own motivations are ultimately unclear, the beneficial

effects of his racial polices on his old-fashioned “individualistic indus-

trialist” ethos are clear enough. Horn’s hiring of black workers allowed

him to publicly reassert the power and authority of the businessman.

Speaking before a seminar on racial and cultural democracy, he said

that a single powerful businessman could do more to stop racial discrim-

ination than any movement. As a factory owner, he could hire a thou-

sand Negroes and promote them into skilled jobs. When white workers

refused to work when he moved blacks into skilled positions, Horn went

out to the plant, stuck his head in the door and said, “Anybody who

wants to walk can get the hell out of here.” He never had any trouble

after that, he said.72 The statement is as much about Horn’s power over

his workers as it is about his interest in black welfare. And yet he was

feted by a new generation of militant black leaders, as well as by labor

leaders. At the war’s end, the Twin Cities Ordnance Plant at New Brighton

was closed, and as workers were being laid off there, including the thou-

sand black workers he had hired during the war, Horn saw fit to restate


the employment policy of the Federal Cartridge Corporation, his main

plant in Anoka:

The company for many years, has followed a consistent policy ofemploying Anoka residents in the Anoka plant. . . . This policy will becontinued, believing that it is the best policy to keep our own residentsbusy. There is no intention of bringing in others from the outside.73

Neither Cecil Newman nor the FEPC organizations mentioned what

might have happened to those black workers who were presumably laid

off. It is safe to say that few, if any, lived in Anoka.

Horn was the most idiosyncratic businessman who endorsed the FEPC,

but he was not the only one. Of the businessmen who became involved

in the struggle for the FEPC, most were not business owners as Horn

was but rather executives of major corporations. The vice president and

general counsel of Pillsbury Mills Corporation, Bradshaw Mintener, was

on the executive board of the Minnesota Council for Fair Employment

Practice, as well as the Mayor’s Council on Human Relations, alongside

representatives from the CIO and the AFL. Businessmen who testified

on behalf of a statewide FEPC included Mintener; Alfred Wilson, vice

president of Honeywell Corporation; York Langton, extension manager

of Coast to Coast Stores; Stuart Leck, president of James Leck Construc-

tion; George Jensen of Kelvinator Corporation; and others.74 They sup-

ported the FEPC in the name of social peace and economic prosperity.

The majority of Minnesota businessmen, however, opposed the FEPC.

The Minnesota Employers Association organized opposition to local

FEPC efforts. They argued that an FEPC brought unwarranted “govern-

ment control” and “police machinery” into businesses. They argued that

it would bring Negroes into Minnesota and thus cause unrest where

none existed now. They also argued that some jobs required discrimina-

tion: “Discrimination is simply American freedom to do business free

of governmental control.”75 This kind of opposition, however, was fo-

cused around issues of governmental control of businessmen and thus

served to affirm older ideological divisions. Although successful in pre-

venting a statewide bill until 1955, opposition to the FEPC ultimately

emphasized the virtue and social responsibility of those businessmen

like Horn and Mintener, who acted in the spirit of social cooperation

and helped destroy the neat class division on which the state’s Farmer-

Labor party and labor movement had rested.


Conclusion

The activism around antiracism education and the FEPC in Minnesota

was widespread, in that it encompassed different kinds of groups, but it

was shallow, in that it was never a major issue for any except a few of

these groups. It made Minnesota a more tolerant place perhaps, but

more significantly it helped reconfigure the old ethnic and class lines

that had hitherto defined the state’s political alliances. The New Deal,

assimilation, and wartime mobility had already lessened the importance

of ethnic and class identity in Minnesota politics and set the stage for

new political concerns. The antiracism programs furthered that process

by bringing together in councils and workshops groups that had previ-

ously been antagonistic. Ethnic and class tensions did not disappear.

Indeed, politicians would continue to consider ethnic and class loyalties

in campaign strategies simply because the past persists in people’s lives.

But as categories for organizing politics, ethnicity and class solidarity

were less relevant than they had once been, and this allowed a new gen-

eration of liberals to overcome old political divisions that had once sep-

arated, for instance, Irish Catholic Democrats from Lutheran Farmer-

Laborites, rural from urban, and workers from management.

Antiracist theorists, the war, and FEPC activists helped to change con-

ceptions of ethnicity, class, and politics. So too, however, did black ac-

tivism itself. As we have seen in two separate cases, the reason that inter-

racial organizations began to focus on the African American situation

was at the behest of Cecil Newman, a new militant kind of black leader,

quite unlike anyone the rather staid black communities of the Twin Cities

had ever seen before. The same tumult that led white antiracists to re-

define the nature of “race” also created an opening for black activists

with connections to the labor movement and a strong sense of political

independence and economic justice to organize black citizens to fight

for an expansive, democratic, welfare state of the sort the political sci-

entists were celebrating in their classrooms at the university.


Hubert Humphrey’s programmatic politics and wartime antiracism pre-

sented an opportunity for black Minnesotans. After the war, a new gen-

eration of black leaders, with roots in the labor movement and New

Deal arguments about federal responsibility and economic inclusiveness,

attached their hopes to Humphrey. They were attracted not only to

Humphrey’s interest in civil rights but also to his ideas about state-cen-

tered reform, economic growth, and national interest groups, which

supported their own efforts to guide Minnesota’s tiny black communi-

ties from isolation to participation.

Black Life before the New Deal

The most important fact about Minnesota’s African American popula-

tion was its small size. Between 1910 and 1940, the black population rose

from 7,084 to 9,928, on the average hovering just below one half of 1

percent of the state population.1 In 1940, 4,646 African Americans lived

in Minneapolis, .9 percent of the city’s population. In St. Paul there were

4139, 1.5 percent of the city’s population.2 Between 1940 and 1950, the

population rose to 14,022, a 41 percent increase, but still only one half of

1 percent of the total state population. These small numbers can be at-

tributed primarily to the lack of available jobs, a shortage due to the ab-

sence of a major industrial base in the state and discriminatory hiring

policies. The small population meant that the black communities had

very little presence in or impact on local life and politics.

As elsewhere, black Minnesotans faced discrimination and racial ha-

rassment. Despite antidiscrimination laws, restaurants and clubs refused

C H A P T E R F O U R

The Black Communities in Minnesota

61

to serve them, swimming pools were segregated, and restrictive covenants

barred them from neighborhoods.3 The main form of racial discrimina-

tion in Minnesota was economic. Employers simply refused to hire black

workers, outside a few circumscribed areas. The few jobs open to black

Minnesotans in the first half of the twentieth century were in the service

industries and on the railroads. In 1926, 80 percent of African American

men in Minneapolis worked as porters, janitors, and night watchmen.

In 1930, two-thirds of African American workers in Minneapolis were

employed in three hotels as waiters, maids, or housemen.4 At the same

time, however, racism was not necessarily the defining feature of black

life in Minnesota, especially in the countryside. Era Bell Thompson and

Nellie Stone Johnson both grew up in rural Minnesota, where their fam-

ilies were the only African Americans around, and they recall that they

were treated like everyone else in Minnesota’s polyglot countryside.5

Racial violence was rare compared to elsewhere in the United States,

but when it occurred it was just as vicious. In 1920, a large mob ab-

ducted three black circus workers from a Duluth jail. They had been ar-

rested for allegedly assaulting a local girl. The crowd held a mock trial

in the street and hung them from the light posts. The governor dispatched

troops immediately to restore order, and an investigation was begun. Of

the eighteen members of the mob indicted for murder and rioting, only

two were convicted, and only for rioting. The case resulted in much

soul-searching and the passage of Minnesota’s antilynching law the fol-

lowing year.6 An attempted lynching in Anoka in September 1931 was

foiled when officials moved the black suspect to a Minneapolis jail.7 In

July 1931 a black World War I veteran moved into an all-white neigh-

borhood, and a mob of four thousand besieged and stoned his house

for four days. The situation was eventually diffused by civic leaders, who

convinced the man to sell the house, although apparently he stayed in

the neighborhood.8

African Americans fought discrimination and violence. Attorney Frank

Wheaton won election to the state house in 1898 and authored a law

banning discrimination in bars. In 1917 African American lawyer J. Louis

Ervin won an acquittal for a black man accused of murdering a white

man.9 NAACP chapters were founded in St. Paul (1913), Minneapolis

(1914), and Duluth (1920), and successfully fought racial identification

in crime reporting and the screening of D. W. Griffith’s inflammatory

Birth of a Nation.10

62 The Black Communities in Minnesota

Several organizations helped blacks deal with employment discrimi-

nation. Before World War I, African American churches, particularly

Pilgrim Baptist and St. James AME in St. Paul, and two St. Paul barbers,

S. E. Hall and his brother O. C. Hall, acted as employment agencies.

The Hall brothers cultivated relationships with their industrialist clients

in order to secure jobs for black workers.11 By 1923, however, neither the

churches nor the barber brothers could meet the demands of incoming,

unemployed migrants. O. C. Hall turned to the Community Chest for

relief, but was told he needed an organized social agency staffed by pro-

fessionals to qualify for Community Chest funds.12 Hall approached the

National Urban League. The Chamber of Commerce objected to the or-

ganization, fearing that it would attract even more black migrants, and

refused to let the Community Chest fund it. After several months of ne-

gotiation, and promises on the part of black leaders to curb the further

influx of southern migrants, they finally got the St. Paul Urban League

off the ground in 1923.13

The Urban League was an interracial organization, consisting of white

philanthropists and industrialists and a small group of Twin Cities black

professionals. It was fully staffed, busy, and funded, and became the state’s

most active organization for black welfare. While most job seekers con-

tinued to use the Hall brothers’ barbershops, the Urban League sought

to convince Twin Cities employers to adopt hiring and upgrading poli-

cies for blacks. In the late 1920s, St. Paul’s Ford Plant agreed to hire

blacks in proportion to their population (after reemploying the original

workforce that had been laid off), which they apparently did, maintain-

ing and upgrading ten blacks in the paint and glass division.14 Several

other companies maintained ten black workers, suggesting that the Ur-

ban League had convinced them to adopt a similar hiring policy. Min-

neapolis Moline Company (manufacturers of farm equipment), North-

land Greyhound Lines, and an unspecified mail-order house all employed

ten black workers. The American Radiator Company employed two

hundred blacks as machine moulders.15 Only at Moline, however, which

hired black machinists, was there any indication that these positions

were skilled. The League also sponsored population surveys, research on

race relations, and a wide array of educational services, including job

interview and health improvement classes.16

Two settlement houses, the Phyllis Wheatley House in north Min-

neapolis and the Hallie Q. Brown House in St. Paul, also helped relieve


the problem of discrimination. Whereas the Urban League had been

the product of concerned black businessmen, the settlement houses

were the fruit of white Christian women. The idea for a Phyllis Wheatley

House was first suggested by the Women’s Cooperative Alliance, an um-

brella organization of women’s groups grappling with the problem of

juvenile delinquency. The Alliance requested the Women’s Christian As-

sociation (not to be confused with the YWCA) to undertake the building

of a settlement house for Negro youth. The Community Fund supported

the house, while a board of white Christian women governed it. The

Hallie Q. Brown House had a similar history. Named after the black ed-

ucator and founder of the National Association of Colored Women, the

Hallie Q. Brown House was founded by the St. Paul YWCA and the St.

Paul Urban League, who wanted a “non-sectarian” meeting place for

Negro girls. The St. Paul YWCA was strictly segregated at this time, but

the Christian women in charge agreed with the Urban League that some-

thing had to be done about the potential delinquency of working and sin-

gle Negro girls.17 Both houses advertised themselves as places of “whole-

some supervised recreation” for Negro youth, particularly girls, but

both gradually began to offer more services and facilities. In addition to

the music lessons, hygiene seminars, and health and dental clinics, the

houses provided full-day day care for working mothers, an employment

bureau, job training programs, and a place for different associations

and groups to gather, including the NAACP, the Federation of Colored

Women’s clubs, and the Industrial Girls Council.

Despite organizations that tied them to larger national institutions,

the black communities in the Twin Cities were relatively isolated. The

NAACP branches in St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Duluth had few resources

and few members, and were constantly in the process of reviving.18 Re-

nowned African American men and women who once lived in Min-

nesota departed early in their careers to cultivate their talents elsewhere.19

Indeed, the black communities were like the rest of Minnesota in the first

half of the twentieth century, largely parochial, bound together through a

network of social clubs, fraternities, and church groups, with their artis-

tic and ambitious citizens fleeing to find fame and fortune in the East.

Sinclair Lewis’s biting observations of life in Gopher Prairie could apply

as well to the small, insular black communities in the state. Black life in

St. Paul was dominated by a few prominent families who lived on “oat-

meal hill,” the bluff around the western part of the downtown area: the


Neals, the Halls, the Hickmans, families that “came up in ’63.”20 News-

papers swelled with their guest lists, their vacations, and their Rotary

Club activities. Editorials castigated the inhabitants of the Rondo area

whose raucous behavior and loud dance halls reflected ill on the race.

On the one hand, the middle-class preoccupation with respectability

and their networks of fraternal organizations were strategies for surviv-

ing in a racist society. Black leaders aimed to preserve black peoples’

good reputation in order to curb reaction against them.21 On the other

hand, however, these institutions created a way of life from which a

younger generation yearned to escape. Era Bell Thompson, a black woman

from North Dakota, remembered anticipating the big city life of St. Paul

and being disappointed at the “stuffiness” and narrow world views of the

St. Paul blacks she met. She had to move to Chicago to find the vibrant

African American life she had read about in The Defender.22

The Depression, the New Deal, and the Labor Movement

The depression and the New Deal changed this world of segregated

provinciality. In a familiar story, the depression overwhelmed the re-

sources of charitable organizations that funded Twin Cities black or-

ganizations. St. Paul’s Community Chest welfare program, for instance,

was designed to serve forty-eight hundred needy families, but by 1932

fourteen thousand families in Ramsey County (St. Paul) needed some

form of relief. The Community Chest slashed its funding to the Urban

League, from $3,953 in 1930 to a low of $2,267 in 1934. Between 1931 and

1937, the average grant to the Urban League was $2,700, even though the

average amount raised by the Community Chest remained stable at

$806,000. While the Community Chest continued to fund the Hallie Q.

Brown House at a steady rate of around $4,500, it was an inadequate

amount for dealing with the disproportionate increase in black unem-

ployment.23 A 1936 study of relief rolls in St. Paul found that 62 percent

of the black population was on relief, compared to 23 percent of the

white population.24 Another study showed that fully 90 percent of all

black families in Ramsey County needed relief.25

New Deal programs to relieve unemployment widened the activities

of the black settlement houses, integrating them within a growing net-

work of federal social services. Programs like the Civil Works Adminis-

tration (CWA), 1933–34, and later, after 1935, the Public Works Adminis-

tration, the National Youth Administration, and the Work Projects


Administration provided funds for day cares, libraries, and educational

programs at the houses. These programs found jobs for unemployed

African Americans, in many cases jobs that were formerly denied to

black workers. They served as a jolt from Washington to disrupt long-

standing “traditions” that circumscribed which racial and ethnic groups

could work in which jobs. Among the seventy-two positions secured for

black workers through the CWA in 1934, for example, were the first black

nurse, hospital file clerk, and bookbinder.26 CWA projects hired blacks

as skating instructors, librarians, housing surveyors, and, later, WPA

projects hired semiskilled construction workers. The Head Resident’s

report indicated that settlement house workers were counting on these

New Deal programs to open up previously closed employment areas,

and hence to “go a long way in conquering prejudice.”27 Instances of

racial prejudice in New Deal programs brought immediate protest and

organization.28

During these years, the settlement house adopted a broader and more

politically relevant educational program. Moving beyond instructions for

washing babies, the Phyllis Wheatley House sponsored a weekly forum

devoted to world events and national political and economic issues. Or-

ganized in part by Selma Seestrom, a left-wing Farmer-Laborite, the Fo-

rum, as it was called, sponsored debates about the Negro and Commu-

nism, the Negro and the labor movement, Pan-Africanism, the Spanish

Civil War, Ethiopia, and race relations in America. Participants recall

that the Forum was a place where individuals from different parts of the

black community came together to discuss and debate racial problems

in the city.29

Like the New Deal, the labor movement also brought African Ameri-

cans into mainstream civic and political life. Unions in Minnesota had

long barred black workers, and few African Americans wanted to organ-

ize segregated auxiliary unions. By the late 1930s, however, the Congress

of Industrial Organizations (CIO) recognized that racial division impeded

organizing, and began to integrate their unions. The Minneapolis Cen-

tral Labor Union (AFL) likewise began to educate their members about

the ways in which racism kept workers divided and wages low.30

The first integrated union in the state was the Miscellaneous Workers,

Local 665 of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees International Union

(AFL), formed in 1935. The local was started at a picnic sponsored by

either the Bulgarian-Macedonian Workers’ Club or the Swedish Workers’


Club.31 Reflecting the assimilatory possibilities of union building, the

union’s principal organizers included George Naumoff, a Croatian émi-

gré from Macedonia and elevator operator at the Minneapolis Athletic

Club; Swan Assarson, a Swedish-born Socialist; Bob Kelly, a local com-

munist and bellhop at the Curtis Hotel; Anthony Brutus Cassius, waiter

and head of the all-black waiters union at the Curtis Hotel; and Ray

Wright, a Finnish activist. They were leaders of existing unions who

wanted to organize the miscellaneous hotel workers—the elevator oper-

ators, maids, and receptionists, many of whom were black, most of whom

were women—in order to strengthen their own bargaining power against

the hotels’ management. Cassius’s waiters’ union was, at the time, suing

the Curtis Hotel for wages equal to those of white waiters at other hotels,

and trying to threaten the Curtis with a complete shutdown. To carry

out that threat, they needed to organize the vast body of unorganized,

miscellaneous workers. After the picnic, Naumoff enlisted Nellie Stone

Johnson, a service elevator operator at the Athletic Club, and Albert

Allen, the athletic coordinator at the Athletic Club, to recruit black

members for the new union.

Cassius, Allen, and Johnson differed from the established black lead-

ership in Minnesota. Whereas black leaders in the Urban League had

worked with white businessmen to secure jobs for black workers, these

unionists would work with the labor movement for economic security

and jobs for all workers. What the labor movement gave them that the

Urban League could not was, oddly, a sense of individuality. It integrated

them into local politics as actors, not wards or pawns. Together, Cassius,

Allen, and Johnson illustrate the broad diversity of motivations and

ideologies that informed black involvement in the labor movement.

A waiter at the Curtis Hotel in Minneapolis, Cassius got involved in

organizing unions after discovering that white waiters at other hotels

made about fifty dollars a month more than the black waiters at the

Curtis. After being rebuffed by the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union,

which did not accept black workers, Cassius organized the Hotel and

Restaurant Waiters’ Union, local 614, an all-black local, which the Hotel

and Restaurant Employees International (AFL) chartered in 1930. As head

of local 614, Cassius sued the Curtis Hotel, demanding not only equal

pay with white waiters at other hotels but back wages as well. The hotel

scoffed at the idea of the black union finding support among white

unions to strike, but Cassius cultivated the support of the Teamsters, the


most powerful union in the city after 1934, and secured as attorneys for

the suit two activists of the left wing of the labor movement, Ralph Hel-

stein and Douglas Hall.32 Helstein and Hall publicized the plight of the

tiny black union and introduced Cassius to members of other unions to

garner support for a possible strike on the part of the black waiters. They

eventually won their case against the Curtis in 1940 without striking. The

waiters attained a thirteen-thousand-dollar wage increase on par with

white workers’ wages, and thirty-five hundred dollars in back wages.33

During the years that 614’s suit was fought out, Cassius became involved

in the labor movement and local politics. He manned soup kitchens

during the Teamsters’ 1934 truckers strike, served as a delegate to the

1936 Farmer-Labor convention, hung out at the Bulgarian-Macedonian

Workers Club on Third Avenue, and registered black voters. He met

daily for coffee with organizer Bob Kelly at a nearby Greek sweetshop to

discuss how to organize the ethnically and racially diverse domestic and

miscellaneous workers in the hotel industry.

For Cassius, the idea of organizing into unions represented progress

and educated thinking, a way to crawl out of the confines of menial labor

and fulfill one’s individual potential. For him, the labor movement pro-

vided opportunity for educated black men to be leaders, not peons. As a

waiter, Cassius was just another subservient black man, but as a union

leader, he was a powerful individual who took on the executives at the

Curtis Hotel and won. His scraps with the management of the Curtis

repeatedly cost him his job and even brought the FBI down on him, but

this harassment only strengthened his identity as a successful union

leader. (The Central Labor Union always got him his job back.) As he

proudly notes, just about everyone in the labor movement was interro-

gated by the FBI. In his recollections of his organizing days, he high-

lights his central role in events by contrasting himself with the lumpen,

reluctant-to-organize black waiters:

I thought “This can’t be right, we working here ’cause our faces are black for seventeen dollars a month.” So I attempted to organize, whichwas very difficult because black people were afraid of organizations.The only organizations that they knew anything about was the churchesand a few lodges, and it was awful hard to sell it to them. But throughpersistence and effort and having a few blacks in the Curtis Hotel whohad finished high school [I] was able to talk to them and get some kindof understanding.34


As part of the labor movement, he was a mover of history, defying

the passive destiny to which, he felt, his racial identity bound him. In

relating his story, Cassius inserts himself personally into labor history.

He shared a room with the Reuthers. He was in San Francisco when

Harry Bridges was indicted. He heard Samuel Gompers speak. In a state-

ment that conflates the labor movement’s success with his own, Cas-

sius recalled his role in the labor movement: “I had the potential, if

I’d stayed in the labor movement, of being a great man, a big man

anyway.”35

When Cassius left the labor movement to open a nightclub, his con-

nections to the labor movement proved key to his success as a business-

man. Cassius fought a long, drawn-out battle against city hall for a liquor

license. In this battle, his experiences in labor politics and his friends in

the labor movement helped him negotiate the pitfalls of city politics.36

The fight against city hall depleted the money he had saved to buy the

bar, so that when he eventually got the license, more than a year later, he

had to find a bank to lend him money. Here again his experience in the

labor movement helped him. He went to Midland Bank, which had lent

black editor Cecil Newman some money, and told one of the vice pres-

idents he needed to borrow ten thousand dollars. He recalls that they

laughed at him, but after a few minutes alone with the bank’s president,

Cassius was able to secure the loan. He recalls that the president of the

bank told him, “I believe you’ll make it. Everybody else that’s in the

labor movement’ll make it and I like your style.” Once again, Cassius set

up the story so that his identity as a union leader was the key factor of

his success. The bankers laughed at the idea of a black man getting a

loan, but as a union leader he walked out of the bank with ten thousand

dollars.37

Albert Allen, one of the principal organizers and president of local

665, shared Cassius’s desire to escape a strictly racial identity, and like

Cassius, he found an identity as a labor leader. That Allen ended up as a

union leader was ironic, since he regarded himself as “anti-union,” as a

strict “individualist,” who believed fervently in starting out at the bottom

and clambering to the top by sheer force of one’s own ability. Through-

out his oral history remembrances, Allen draws a distinction between

being “an individual” and being a Negro. A star tennis player in high

school, Allen recalls that as an athlete he was treated as “an individual,”

but off the tennis court he became “one of those, well there was a deroga-


tory term, but I would say here it was Negro.”38 When Allen went to

work at the Minneapolis Athletic Club, he tried to recapture that indi-

vidual, nonracialized identity. He worked his way up to a prominent

position as the athletic coordinator at the Athletic Club, in which he

arranged strategic tennis and handball matches between executives, po-

tential clients, and buyers. It was a position that made him feel like an

integral part of the wheelings and dealings of the high-powered busi-

ness world. The other black employees looked up to him as someone

who had leapt out of the confines of prescribed black work.39

It was as a labor leader that Allen became most empowered as an in-

dividual. Allen’s prominent place in the Athletic Club prompted Swan

Assarson, a Swedish organizer, to approach him about helping to organ-

ize the miscellaneous hotel workers. Allen reluctantly attended an orga-

nizing meeting. He was discomfited by the dark room and “foreign-

born” organizers, recalling that there was “no power here.” But because

the organizers had identified him as the man to whom the other Negro

workers looked for their cues, he agreed to help organize blacks at the

Athletic Club on the condition that they “come in just as individuals”

like everyone else. Allen remained ambivalent about the labor move-

ment until the day a boss, upon hearing of Allen’s new role, remarked

that he had always thought Allen was smarter than the foreign-born

troublemakers.40 This remark galvanized him to finally accept the labor

movement. His was no epiphany about solidarity but rather a desire to

show his boss that he was a force to be reckoned with, that he was smarter

than the other workers. Unlike Cassius, Allen remained in the labor move-

ment, and subsequently organized and headed Clerical Workers Union,

Local 3015 at the airport. He was president of the Minneapolis NAACP

from 1946 to 1949, and a member of the Minneapolis Fair Employment

Practices Committee in the 1950s. Like Cassius, he attributes his success

in life to the labor movement, and the opportunity it gave him to be an

individual.

Unlike Cassius or Allen, who saw the labor movement in terms of

their own success, Nellie Stone Johnson saw it as a collective struggle for

economic and racial justice. For her, the problems of racism and sexism

were systemic, to be met and overcome through a political program of

economic independence and job security. Like Cassius and Allen, how-

ever, she reaped from the labor movement an alternative and more sat-


isfying career. Johnson loved organizing and the mechanics of local pol-

itics; she built her life around these activities and wants to be remembered

for them.41

Johnson came to Minneapolis in 1925, found work as an elevator op-

erator at the Athletic Club, and helped organize the union. The labor

movement quickly became her life. She took advantage of the movement’s

labor education programs, traveling to Chicago for seminars and work-

shops. She printed pamphlets and bulletins for other unions. She marched

in rallies and strikes. The union paid for her classes at the University of

Minnesota, where she became involved with the Communist party.

As a unionist, Johnson became involved in the Farmer-Labor Associ-

ation (FLA), the left-wing “educational” arm of the Farmer-Labor party,

which endorsed, funded, and campaigned for Farmer-Labor candidates.42

Here Johnson discovered that politics was a real avenue for social and

economic change. The Minneapolis labor movement controlled the

Farmer-Labor party after 1938, largely through the Farmer-Labor Asso-

ciation, and so organized labor’s agenda of full employment, health in-

surance, job security, and affordable housing was on the state’s political

agenda. As an involved member of her union and the FLA, Johnson

would have seen the issues she was working on and the candidates she

helped pick becoming part of the political mainstream. As black civil

rights emerged as a social issue during the war, Johnson was one of the

activists who tied it to full employment and thrust it into the political

arena.

Johnson entered politics herself by running successfully for a seat on

the Minneapolis Library Board in 1945. Swan Assarson, Local 665’s busi-

ness agent, wanted her to run for school board, but the Central Labor

Union had already put together their slate for school board. So Johnson

decided to go for the library board. She recalls that Hubert Humphrey,

running for mayor that year, also encouraged her to run because she

would speak about issues of labor and equality “from experience.”43 In-

deed, according to Johnson, she campaigned alongside Humphrey, each

benefiting the other.44 Most of her support came from the academic

community, and Johnson regrets more rank and file did not support

her. The Minneapolis Tribune’s list of city candidates significantly did

not include a photograph of Johnson, as it did of most of the other

candidates, although it did list her credentials as unionist and the fact


that she had the labor endorsement.45 She won the seat by a large mar-

gin and became the first elected black official in the city. She served for

six years.

Johnson transcended the ideological and factional struggles that were

tearing the labor movement apart in the late 1940s. An AFL union

member, she nonetheless ran off strike sheets for the CIO (“Oh if [AFL

president] Bill Green had caught up to us at the time he’d have excom-

municated us, gosh.”46). Despite her links to the Communist party, she

adored the anticommunist Humphrey, personally and for his political

agenda of a fully employed welfare state. In the 1948 election, while the

Progressive party and the DFL party were tearing each other down, John-

son worked for both; she wanted Humphrey to win, but she wanted

him and the Democratic party to incorporate the values and agenda of

the Progressive party.47 She saw this as simple pragmatism, and she prided

herself on this kind of pragmatism and political savvy. After the elec-

tion, she quit the Progressive party and dedicated herself to working

within the Democratic party. She later opened a small tailoring shop in

Minneapolis but found her life’s meaning in trying to build a multira-

cial Democratic party.

Despite their differences, Cassius, Allen, and Johnson saw the labor

movement as an integrative force, something that pulled a closed and

secluded black community into the political and social mainstream, both

in the opportunities the movement presented for individual black or-

ganizers and in the agenda for which they fought. Nor were they alone.

Other black unionists included Maceo Littlejohn, Hector Vassar, and

Maceo Finney, who organized the Dining Car Employees Union, local

516, chartered by the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders

International Union (AFL) in 1938,48 and Frank Alsup, who helped or-

ganize the South St. Paul packing plants for the CIO in the late 1930s.

They took their experiences in the labor movement into the Urban

League, the NAACP, churches, lodges, and settlement houses. Littlejohn

held the first mass meeting of the Joint Labor Negro Council at the

Phyllis Wheatley House in March 1940, at which the exalted leader of

the Ames Lodge of Elks spoke about his difficulties in obtaining a job at

the Speed-O-Lac Paint Company.49 Cassius worked evenings for the

Urban League with no pay, after his shift was over, and lectured at the

Phyllis Wheatley House about the importance of black workers joining

unions. Frank Boyd’s union activities got him thrown off the deacon’s


board at Pilgrim Baptist church, but he continued as an active member

of the church, which greatly enhanced his reputation as a unionist and

as a Baptist.50

The Urban League and the settlement houses also recognized the labor

movement as an important component of the struggle for racial justice

in Minnesota. At the 1938 meeting of the National Federation of Settle-

ments, social workers from the Phyllis Wheatley House heard the direc-

tor of the Hull House affirm the role of the labor movement in the suc-

cess of their own work: “Those of us who have advocated Social Security

and other reforms must bow our heads in recognition that none of our

proposals became law until organized labor backed them.” This partic-

ular speech was excerpted for Phyllis Wheatley workers, along with a

four-point plan to work with the labor movement.51 The social workers

invited black and white labor activists to speak at the settlement houses.

Representatives from the Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union, the Trotskyite

wing of the Teamsters, the CIO, the Minneapolis Central Labor Union,

the Farmer-Labor party, and others spoke at the Hallie Q. Brown and

Phyllis Wheatley Houses in the late 1930s. The publications of new or-

ganizations like the Minnesota Negro Council contained schedules of

Farmer-Labor party events alongside poems by Richard Wright and ed-

itorials about racial pride.52

The labor movement’s influence in settlement houses and the Urban

Leagues contributed to the idea that Negro citizens had to form their

own organizations in order to gain participation in economic life. The

labor movement illustrated what could be accomplished when apparently

powerless individuals united to improve their situation. It is no coinci-

dence that the black leaders most insistent on organizing as Negroes

came out of the labor movement.

Foremost among these was Cecil Newman, a Pullman porter-turned-

unionist-turned-newspaper editor from Kansas City, who made a crusade

out of organizing Twin Cities blacks into an effective political force.

Newman began publishing the Minneapolis Spokesman out of a barber-

shop in southeast Minneapolis in 1935. Black newspapers in the Twin

Cities had been floundering, but Newman quickly made his paper one

of the main sources for news about the Twin Cities black community

among both blacks and interested whites. While reporting the news of

the black community, he also used the paper to promote black citizens’

full participation in industrial, civic, and political life.53 His editorials


echoed the views of people like Mary McCleod Bethune, Pittsburgh

Courier editor Robert Vann, Walter White, Robert Weaver, W. E. B. Du

Bois, and A. Philip Randolph. Like them, Newman understood that the

New Deal’s legitimation of the federal government and the labor move-

ment had changed the goals and machinery of political organization in

a way that potentially benefited black Americans.54

Newman exhorted his black readers to organize in some way, any

way. “Let’s Form a Club, Slogan of the Hour,” one headline declared,

suggesting that the clubs then form a federation for getting employment

from establishments that take Negro money.55 Another headline an-

nounced the ponderous slogan of the Minneapolis Council of Negro

Organizations, “Every Minneapolis Negro in Some Organization in 1941.”

Much of the paper’s main news concerned with new organizations, like

the Cosmopolitan Club, the new and improved Minneapolis NAACP, and

a variety of joint Negro–labor, interracial, civil rights committees. The

paper reported diligently on the achievements of these organizations,

urging Twin Cities Negroes to participate and scolding those who did

not.56 The idea of organizing as Negroes was, in a way, a new wrapping

for the longstanding quest for unity within black communities, which

had over the years become mired in compromise, acquiescence, and

conformity. The idea of organizing, on the other hand, suggested bold ac-

tion, opportunity, and struggle. The new black leaders contrasted the

idea of “organizing” with the complacency of wealth and parochialism.

For Newman and the columnists in his paper, the isolation of being

black in Minnesota, middle-class pretensions, and complacency were

intertwined. While effectively organized blacks in Chicago, Detroit, and

New York were taking advantage of the political and economic changes

of the 1930s to fight for racial justice, the blacks in the Twin Cities

seemed to be content with their lot. Newman blamed the old Negro

elite, who had for too long legitimated their leadership by presenting

themselves as the “thinking” or the “better element of Negroes.” It was

the older, comfortable families, with their ice cream socials and silver

tea sets, who refused to participate in the larger movement for racial

equality that was elsewhere sweeping the nation. In their comfortable

complacency, they supported segregation because they profited from it.

Spokesman columnist Nell Dodson Russell contrasted the elite’s obses-

sions with small-town respectability with active Negroes’ pursuit of racial

justice and economic independence. She was particularly sarcastic about


the older black community’s genteel pretensions: “We believe that the

porter in the Fourth National Bank who sends in an item about his sis-

ter visiting him from Lynch Creek, Georgia has just as much right on

the social page as Mrs. Sylvester K. Podunk, who is a pain in the neck

anyway.”57

Newman characterized the kind of Negro organizations he advocated

as different from traditional, middle-class organizations. The new Ne-

gro organizations would cut across class lines, bringing together old

families with new migrants. Negroes would “stick together, the profes-

sionals rubbing elbows with the workers.” They would be boldly inte-

grationist, seeking white allies, not benefactors. Several editorials de-

clared that the time was ripe for a movement of interracial brotherhood

in the Twin Cities. They would be less stodgy and more confrontational.

Newman celebrated in particular Negro organizations which de-em-

phasized the social and fraternal aspects of clubs, and stressed rather

political activism, such as the Cosmopolitan Club, a new multiracial

club at the University of Minnesota. Readers affirmed that the historical

moment for cross-class organization among Negroes was at hand. One

reader urged an “All Negro Day,” where Twin Cities Negroes of all classes

would stop fighting and work together.58

Were the Twin Cities’ Negro elite as complacent as the younger gen-

eration of black leaders painted them? After all, older members of the

elite, like the Hall brothers and the Hickmans, participated in these new

organizations. The Twin Cities Observer, edited by Republican Milton

G. Williams, targeted an older, more genteel readership and seems at

first glance to affirm Newman’s assumptions. It was preoccupied with

guest lists and church news. It periodically called for purges of “men

and women of ill-repute and total disregard for the future of the race.”59

On the other hand, the Observer reported on national and international

political events, and proudly boasted that it had the northwest’s only

Negro correspondent in Russia. It reported on events in Africa and other

colonized areas, a feature absent from the Spokesman. Like the Spokes-

man, the Observer followed and encouraged the formation of new Negro

organizations, with the noticeable difference being that the Observer

paid more attention to the organization of all-black cooperatives and

all-black organizations than the Spokesman, which celebrated interracial

organizations. Politically, the Observer followed Republican party poli-

tics, while the Spokesman tended toward the New Deal wing of the


Democratic party, but both editors recognized that Negro interests tran-

scended party affiliation. The readership of the two papers overlapped;

many readers wrote to both. Thus, the members of the older generation

of Negro elite were not nearly so complacent or parochial as Newman

and the younger generation of black leaders drew them, but their contin-

ued concern with morality and respectability made them easy foils for a

younger generation of blacks worried about their own provinciality.

Newman was sensitive about the parochial insularity of Minnesota’s

black communities. When New Yorker George Schuyler compared the

complacency of Twin Cities Negroes with that in other like-sized com-

munities, Newman complained that visitors were always telling Twin

Cities Negroes that they were not doing enough, concluding, “It is our

belief that Twin Cities Negroes are superior in many respects to those of

other communities.”60 Newman nonetheless worried about the connec-

tion between local organizing and national life. On a 1945 radio show he

lamented that the best black Twin Citians left the state, that there was

nothing to keep them here.61 By 1948, however, Newman believed that

the New Deal state made Washington the political center of the nation,

and this gave African Americans in Minnesota some political relevance:

Life on a community level, while it never receives the publicity or atten-tion that national activities get, is very important. Those communitieswhich are the most advanced send the best men to Washington, andbecause of their higher development contribute most to our nationalculture.62

Newman thought the Twin Cities were an important incubator of

national talent. By 1946, St. Paul natives Anna Arnold Hedgeman and

Roy Wilkins were in New York on the front lines of the civil rights move-

ment. Clarence Mitchell Jr., who had come to St. Paul in 1939 to head

the St. Paul Urban League, had gone to Washington to work for the

wartime FEPC. Whitney Young, who had begun work with the St. Paul

Urban League in 1946, would move east shortly.

World War II intensified black Minnesotans’ identification with a na-

tional civil rights movement. During the war, black newspapers in the

Twin Cities placed their stories and reporting in a national context. Ed-

itors and writers saw the increasing activities of Twin Cities blacks as

part of a national struggle for civil rights. No longer were black Min-

nesotans just supportive observers of a struggle going on in New York


and Chicago. Black papers in the Twin Cities buzzed with local and na-

tional stories of FEPC cases, local black soldiers abroad, the activities of

blacks across the nation fighting for a double victory, and American

wartime propaganda about interracial unity. Whereas earlier black news-

papers reprinted articles from the Defender, the Crisis, and the Courier,

soon articles from the Minneapolis Spokesman were being reprinted in

the Crisis.63 Newman himself was writing for Opportunity and Negro

Digest.64 Black Minnesotans were participating as delegates in national

organizations, like the Democratic and Republican parties, the CIO,

and Washington’s new bureaucracies. Clarence Mitchell resigned from

the St. Paul Urban League to take a position with the Office of Produc-

tion Management. Frank Boyd and Nellie Stone Johnson were on the

committee that merged the Farmer-Labor and Democratic parties in

1944.65 Negro organizations in the Twin Cities participated in A. Philip

Randolph’s March on Washington Movement, demanding equal access

to wartime jobs and the desegregation of the armed forces. Readers

wrote to urge the Spokesman’s readers to write to their congressmen to

support the antilynching legislation, arguing that “the bill concerns us

even if we in Minnesota are removed.”66

Local protests against discrimination occurred more regularly. The

Minnesota Negro Defense Committee, headed by two black unionists,

fought for the desegregation of the Minnesota National Guard and pro-

tested discrimination in the defense industries. Black organizations

protested the Mun Hing Restaurant for oversalting black patrons’ food.

A Reverend Nelson from St. Paul traveling through Texas refused to

move into a Jim Crow car, citing to Texas authorities the recent Supreme

Court decision on interstate travel. The Spokesman reported instances

of racial discrimination as unpatriotic.67

Newman played a role in the hiring of a thousand Negro workers at

the Federal Cartridge plant in Minneapolis. In an article for Opportunity,

titled “An Experiment in Industrial Democracy,” Newman described

how Charles Lilley Horn, the president of the Federal Cartridge Corpo-

ration and the first paid subscriber to the Spokesman, willingly complied

with the president’s order barring discrimination. Horn contacted New-

man about finding appropriate, reliable Negro workers. Newman, in

turn, suggested that they use the Urban League, which was set up for

exactly this kind of placement.68


On one level, Newman’s mediating efforts resemble the barber O. C.

Hall’s solicitations of Louis J. Hill for jobs for new migrants. Newman

differentiated his ties to Horn from past practices, arguing that the fed-

eral government stood behind his mediation. Furthermore, Horn was

not engaged in any “maudlin sympathy of the Negro,” but hired them

on the premise that “Negro workers are citizens and thereby entitled to

all of the rights and privileges of taxpayers—which include the right to

work and earn a living.”69 Newman’s contempt for “maudlin sympathy”

was calculated to separate his generation of politically savvy activists

from an earlier, more conservative generation of black leaders who kow-

towed to white industrialists. Thus, while Newman flattered and ex-

tolled his friend Horn, a conservative Republican, he also urged blacks

to look to Washington rather than to industrialists for economic change.

Wartime changes in Minnesota’s black communities are strikingly

encapsulated by a comparison of the Minneapolis Spokesman before and

after the war. Before the war, a staff of three people ran a six-page paper.

It was of a uniform print and carried a lot of local social news and baby

pictures. The advertising was sedate, of small print, and sparse. By 1946,

the paper had increased to ten pages, and the staff had increased to

seven. Changes in the layout and font design gave it a more vibrant

look, echoed in the urgency and excitement of the stories of local events,

protests, and meetings that crowded its pages. There were more photo-

graphs and more regular columns. Fashion tips and record reviews re-

flected greater black participation in a consumer economy. Department

stores now took out half- and quarter-page ads, instead of two-inch

squares. Vivid illustrations of their merchandise and catchy slogans re-

placed what had previously been just a list of merchandise and prices. A

more modern layout and fancier font mirrored the emergence of a more

modern, cosmopolitan black readership.

Newman looked forward to making the black political presence felt

in Minnesota in the postwar years. Minnesota’s black communities had

not grown much during the war, and Newman knew that he could not

wield black votes in Minneapolis as black leaders could in places like

Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. He understood, however, that the new

emphasis on organized interest groups, the federal government, and the

black vote in American politics nationally made even African Ameri-

cans in Minnesota politically relevant.


Humphrey and his liberal allies elaborated their ideas about “issues-

based” politics and interest groups as an alternative to the politics of

both the Farmer-Labor party and the Democratic machine. Their ideas

about political organization resonated in Minnesota’s black communi-

ties, but for different reasons. For black activists like editor Cecil New-

man, they provided a language for black integration into American po-

litical and economic life and a way for African Americans in Minnesota

to participate in an increasingly active national black movement for

civil rights based on fair employment.

World War II, Migration, and the Black Vote

World War II reinvigorated black activism. Memories of dashed prom-

ises and violence after the previous war spurred many African Ameri-

cans to use this war to fight for a “double victory” abroad and at home.1

The NAACP’s membership rose from 50,560 in 1940 to slightly less than

450,000 in 1946.2 The new activism of World War II involved African

Americans from all strata of society. At the start of the war, black organ-

izations protested the defense industry’s refusal to hire black workers.3

In January 1941 labor leader A. Philip Randolph proposed that these var-

ious Negro organizations organize a march on Washington to prompt

government action on discrimination in defense employment and in the

armed services. The resulting March on Washington Movement, or

MOWM, was in the words of one historian, a “spontaneous involve-

ment of large masses of Negroes in political protest,” a genuinely mass

C H A P T E R F I V E

An Independent Black Interest Group

79

movement.4 The threatened march prompted President Roosevelt to

ban employment discrimination in government-contracted industries,

just six days before the scheduled march. Executive order 8802 set up

the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to enforce the ban

on June 25, 1941. Randolph called off the march but kept the MOWM

going. The victory enhanced the prestige of the movement. Its members

brought instances of discrimination to the attention of the overworked

FEPC and fought the administrative finagling over the FEPC, as south-

ern congressmen tried to remove it from the executive branch.5 Ran-

dolph helped organize large rallies in support of the FEPC, most notably

in Madison Square Garden, but also in cities across the nation, includ-

ing St. Paul in 1942.6

In September 1943 Randolph organized a professional lobbying group

called the National Council for a Permanent FEPC. Whereas the MOWM

had been a mass movement, the National Council for a Permanent FEPC

was a clearinghouse of information for over one hundred local councils

across the United States, including two in the Twin Cities. The National

Council instructed its branches how to make alliances with other organ-

izations in their communities, how to write letters, what to do (“DO use

the sports page . . .”), and what not to do (“DON’T write a threatening

letter”).7 Veterans of the MOWM staffed the new organization. Some his-

torians lament the shift from a mass, direct-action, all-black movement

to the staid lobbying of the National Council for a Permanent FEPC.8

The shift was, however, part of an effort to take advantage of the geo-

graphic changes in the black population to organize a black voting bloc.

Between 1940 and 1950, almost two million black Americans migrated

out of the borders of the old Confederate states to find work in northern

and western shipyards, munitions plants, and other parts of a booming

wartime economy. An additional 400,000 southern black soldiers fought

overseas.9 The black population in Illinois doubled between 1940 and

1950, from 387,000 to 646,000. California’s black population more than

trebled, from 124,000 to 462,000. Ohio went from 339,000 black residents

to 513,000; Michigan, from 208,000 to 442,000; and New York, from

571,000 to 918,000.10

These large numbers of black migrants meant new votes. Black lead-

ers in the North had long sought to organize an effective national Negro

voting bloc that would deliver votes to politicians according to the can-

didates’ stands on Negro, labor, and social-welfare issues.11 Blacks could

80 An Independent Black Interest Group

not vote in the South, but they could once they left and settled in the

urban North and West. This changed national politics. As sociologist

Henry Lee Moon explained it, black voters’ political influence in national

elections lay not in their numbers, which were still comparatively small,

but rather in their “strategic diffusion in the balance-of-power and

marginal states” whose electoral votes were essential to the winning can-

didate.12 In the 1944 presidential election, there were twenty-eight states

in which the margin of victory was within 5 percent of the popular

vote. In twelve of these states, the potential Negro vote was greater than

5 percent. These states were Ohio, Indiana, New York, New Jersey, Penn-

sylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia,

and Kentucky, whose combined electoral total was 228. Furthermore,

Moon continued, “an alert, well-organized Negro electorate” could be

decisive in at least seventy-five congressional districts in eighteen states.13

The infusion of new black voters meant that both parties, and any third

parties, would have to appeal to the “Negro vote.” For the Democrats in

particular, the influx of voters meant that the urban northern vote with

an electoral total of 228 was potentially more useful in a presidential

election than the South’s 127 electoral votes.

The transformation of black southerners into northern urban voters

brought with it a corresponding expansion of Negro interests. Labor

and social-welfare issues, such as price controls, full employment, pub-

lic housing, and expanded social security programs, became as impor-

tant to civil rights activists as antilynching measures and the poll tax.14

Lynching and the poll tax had galvanized national civil rights activism

in the 1930s, and they remained significant issues, but with many more

blacks now living in the North, the focus of civil rights activities ex-

panded.15 The two most urgent issues were housing and employment.

The lack of building materials combined with the increased migration

to cities and restrictive covenants within these cities led to widespread

housing shortages. In larger cities, like Chicago, Los Angles, and Detroit,

minorities were crammed into slums, their attempts to move out met

by violence.16 Even in smaller cities like Minneapolis the housing short-

age focused attention on who got housing, and where it was.17 For the

most part, the housing problem was dealt with as a local, community

issue, case by case.

Employment discrimination, on the other hand, emerged as a na-

tional issue with implications beyond the lives of disadvantaged blacks.


Although employment had always been an issue within minority com-

munities, an expected decrease in production and an influx of available

workers lent immediacy to the issue of fair employment after the war.

Laying off black workers to hire returning white GIs could exacerbate

already tense relations and lead to more rioting. The FEPC also com-

plemented liberal ideas about state-centered reform. Activists saw it as

part of a broad postwar program in which the federal government in-

sured prosperity and economic health through interventions into the

economy. National leaders feared that the economy would slip back into

depression as the war industries contracted at the same time soldiers re-

turned home looking for work. Economic planners looked to an econ-

omy based on consumer goods to stave off depression, but that required

that people have jobs that paid them enough to purchase large-ticket

consumer items like cars, washers, and refrigerators. As Secretary of Com-

merce Eric Johnston put it, “You can’t sell a refrigerator to a family that

can’t afford electricity.”18 “Purchasing power” was the main idea behind

a proposed full-employment bill, which would have required that the

government take some action to maintain full employment.19 One of

the original drafts of the 1946 full-employment bill guaranteed every

American “the right to a useful and remunerative job.”20 The aims of

the FEPC and full-employment activists thus overlapped. Both sought

to foster postwar prosperity “by making customers out of low income

groups,” regardless of race or ethnicity.21

By the end of the war, Democratic and Republican politicians were

paying attention to these developments. New York’s Republican Gover-

nor Thomas Dewey adopted a statewide FEPC in 1945, which had rela-

tively stringent penalties and a generous appropriation of $352,000 a

year.22 The Republican party added a plank supporting a federal FEPC

in its 1944 platform. In January 1946, Congress began hearings on a per-

manent federal FEPC. Moderate Republicans and liberals also renewed

the fight against the poll tax and for a federal antilynching law.

Cecil Newman and Black Politics in Minnesota

Minnesota was not one of the “balance-of-power” states that Moon had

identified as key to the election; its black population was simply too

small. Nonetheless, the importance of racial issues and the FEPC in na-

tional politics spurred black political activity in the Twin Cities. A flurry


of activities enveloped the Twin Cities as a Fair Employment Practice

bill made its way through Congress in early 1946. Radio stations broad-

cast shows about the FEPC bill.23 The Communist party sponsored an

FEPC rally featuring William Patterson and local labor activists Robert

Wishart and Nellie Stone Johnson. The Minnesota Council for a Perma-

nent FEPC and local churches sponsored another rally, which featured

A. Philip Randolph (although he cancelled at the last minute due to ill-

ness), Mayor Humphrey, and two former St. Paul residents, Anna Arnold

Hedgeman and Clarence Mitchell Jr., both working for national civil

rights organizations.24 As black Minnesotans in heretofore isolated black

communities organized to fight for jobs, they became part of a national

black community, in a way that they had not been when black civil

rights were defined around issues of southern violence.

Newspaper editor Cecil Newman articulated a strategy for how black

Minnesotans could effectively participate in this revival of civil rights

activism. Newman tied civil rights to the maintenance of New Deal

state-centered reform and reinforced the idea that national politics, and

politics in general, were relevant to the lives of black Minnesotans. In

part, the idea of a strong central state was something around which he

could mobilize black votes—votes that could then be promised to those

candidates who supported black interests in a strong government. But

Newman understood that the tiny black vote in Minnesota was not en-

ticing enough to make this strategy successful. Cultivating a strong,

public alliance with white liberals who were fighting for a New Deal wel-

fare state, however, was a way to bring the once isolated black commu-

nities of Minnesota into the mainstream of American politics.

As editor of two of the three black newspapers in the Twin Cities, the

Minneapolis Spokesman and the St. Paul Recorder, Newman spoke with

a self-conscious sense of authority.25 He hired an outspoken columnist

named Nell Dodson Russell, who articulated even more clearly than

Newman the agenda for what she termed an “independent” black poli-

tics. Born and raised in Minneapolis, Russell had gone to Baltimore and

Chicago to establish her writing career, reviewing sports and theater for

the Baltimore Afro-American in 1938–39, the Chicago Defender in 1939,

and the People’s Voice from 1942 to 1944. She returned to Minneapolis in

1945 to write for the Minneapolis Spokesman.26 Like Walter White, Henry

Lee Moon, Gunnar Myrdal, Robert Vann, Robert Weaver, and A. Philip


Randolph, Newman and Russell urged black citizens to take advantage

of the new demographic realities resulting from black migration out of

the South during the war. Like the people in the new Democratic-Farmer-

Labor party, they were intensely interested in political organization.

In Humphrey’s vision of “independent” groups and positive, central-

ized government, Newman and Russell found a way out of the provincial

ignominy of minority politics in Minnesota. Humphrey shared with

black citizens an interest in stronger federal government.27 Humphrey’s

arguments for a strong federal government tended to be directed against

nineteenth-century individualism, while black activists’ arguments were

aimed at the doctrine of states’ rights, which southerners used to protect

segregation and suffrage restrictions.28 After the war, however, “individ-

ualism” and “states’ rights” became inseparable as southern Democrats

and conservative Republicans cooperated in slashing New Deal programs

and repealing wartime federal control over governmental agencies.

Newman consistently articulated black citizens’ interest in a strong

federal government. He monitored congressional attempts to dismantle

federally controlled agencies, noting any transfer of power away from

the executive branch of the government and to the southern-dominated

Congress.29 “The only time when Negroes north or south get any real

benefit from federal funds is when Uncle Sam administers such funds

himself,” he wrote.30 He lambasted conservative Republicans who joined

southern Democrats to prevent legislation that gave more power to the

federal government, regularly criticizing the National Association of Man-

ufacturers (NAM) and Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. He followed the

Republicans’ attempts to dismantle the Office of Price Administration

(OPA). He condemned the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act throughout 1947.31

Newman’s antipathy towards the Republican party was not based on

its civil rights record, which was stronger than the Democrats’, but rather

on Republican opposition to a strong federal government. A white Taft

supporter once wrote to Newman, explaining that he understood that

Negroes would not support Senator Taft because of Taft’s lukewarm po-

sition on the FEPC. Newman replied that Taft’s position on the FEPC

was the least of his offenses to the black citizen.32 What was objection-

able about Taft was his contention that the transference of power from

the states to the federal government was inefficient and arbitrary, and

would end in totalitarianism.33


Humphrey’s vision of national pressure groups and independent po-

litical organization also offered an alternative to localized, moralistic

racial politics based on white philanthropy. Newman was disgusted with

the way that traditional black politics based on white goodness con-

stantly reinscribed the color line. He saw the political emphasis on race

as parochial and detrimental, and filled his paper with anecdotes illus-

trating the artificiality of race and blackness in America. A story about a

white man who wanted to sit in the back of a southern bus with a black

friend, for instance, has the white man explain to the bus driver that he

looks white because his father was white. As he leaves the bus, he adds,

“so was my mother,” revealing the irrationality of set racial categories.

Another story told of a group of kids playing “race riot.” There were not

enough black kids to make it even, so some of the white kids volun-

teered to be black. This was reported with a comment about how much

more children know than adults.34 These were the usual kinds of stories

interracial relations groups used to educate the public about the fictional

nature of race. They underscored the idea that racial identity in and of

itself was not a basis for political activism.

Nell Russell was likewise critical of anyone claiming a right to any-

thing on the basis of race. She attacked the way black citizens seemed to

graciously accept the rhetorical bones tossed their way by white politi-

cians: “All a candidate has to do is mutter something about 13,000,000

Negroes, Democracy, and getting us out of the kitchen, and he is pro-

claimed our hero.”35 She praised industrialist Charles Horn for “telling

Negroes to stop letting whites carry them around on a platter and do

something for themselves.”36 She criticized white liberals for constantly

categorizing Negroes as “downtrodden.”37 What was Russell’s alternative

to race-based identity politics? “We should organize ourselves into a

solid unified voting bloc and pressure group that will have them all los-

ing sleep.”38 There was a potential contradiction in the idea of organiz-

ing as blacks in order to de-race politics, but, in fact, being an effective

pressure group symbolized integration if politics was defined around the

competition of pressure groups. The idea of an interest group, a group

of individual citizens organized around a common economic interest,

legitimized black political organization and at the same time provided a

basis for organization that was not necessarily racial. Organized around

rational economic interests like, for instance, fair employment, black


citizens were no different from farmers, workers, or veterans; they were

asking no special favors on the basis of their race, but like other eco-

nomic groups, looking to the government only to protect their eco-

nomic interests. In Humphrey’s analysis of parties, pressure groups

were not the irrational, corrupting forces people had once denounced

them as, but rather the basis of a rational self-regulating political sys-

tem based on free association. This meant that the “black vote,” once

condemned by white citizens as a source of political chicanery, was a le-

gitimate pillar of the democratic process.

The key to making black votes legitimate and effective was maintain-

ing their “independence.” The black vote had to remain enticingly aloof

from any one party to insure its bargaining power and to defuse accusa-

tions of corruption. Black leaders across the nation considered “inde-

pendence” a sign of political “maturity.”39 No longer could black voters

be bought for a turkey or a patronage post. Pittsburgh Courier editor

Robert Vann very pointedly supported Wendell Willkie in the 1944 pres-

idential elections to remind New Dealers that they could not count on

the black vote.40 Newman likewise fostered the independence of the black

vote. He reminded white and black readers alike that black votes could

not be taken for granted. He covered equally the activities of the local

Republican, Democratic, Communist, and Socialist parties. He explained

that black voters were no longer affixed to the party of Lincoln, but nei-

ther were they Democrats. Black voters would support the New Deal

inasmuch as it represented an expansion of federal government activity,

but they felt no loyalty to the party of white supremacy.41 When Oscar

Ewing of the Farm Security Administration told an Urban League meet-

ing that any Negro who did not vote for Truman would be a “traitor to

his race,” Newman was horrified, as were, he noted, Urban League offi-

cials, who had long pursued a policy of “independence.”42 Newman crit-

icized the dissension in the NAACP, when executive secretary Walter

White asked W. E. B. Du Bois to resign after Du Bois publicly endorsed

Wallace and the Progressive party.43 Newman thought both White and

Du Bois were out of line and dragging “politics” into an organization

whose political independence was essential to effective black political

organization.

Newman’s preoccupation with political independence was part of a

trend in American politics in the late 1940s, as new restrictions curtailed


the political activities of organized pressure groups, mainly labor unions.

These restrictions came from outside organized groups—in a series of

congressional acts, including the Hatch Act, the Corrupt Practices Act,

and the Taft-Hartley Act—and inside, as nonpartisan groups adopted

their own restrictions on political activities in order to prevent faction-

alism and conflict within the organization.44 This was especially true in

Minnesota, where Humphrey and his allies were trying to extricate the

DFL party from union control, and some union leaders themselves

were trying to extricate their unions from DFL politics. The idea of po-

litical “independence” suffused the Minnesota political landscape. Rural

papers, like the Midland Cooperator and the Farmers’ Union Herald,

were adamant in their “independence,” and like Newman, covered fairly

and equally different politicians’ stands on issues that affected their

readers, in this case, co-ops and parity.

The idea of political independence also affirmed the individuality of

black voters. The idea of individuality was part of Newman’s and Rus-

sell’s agenda to free black voters from both a racially determined destiny

and their historical ties to the Republican party. This seems contradic-

tory: for the Negro bloc vote to be effective, after all, all black voters had

to vote as a racially determined mass. Newman did not stress that angle,

however. Rather he focused on the idea of free association and that black

voters held a diversity of beliefs and could not be taken for granted:

“Negroes come in all political stripes, and would even support the Ku

Klux Klan if they were let in,” he wrote in a carefully situated article on

a page featuring balanced representation of Republican and Democratic

news.45 The basic idea of independent nonpartisan interest groups, as

Humphrey learned at the university and as political scientists reiterated

endlessly, was that the interest group supplied information on which

individual citizens based their political choices. Interest groups did not

dictate a “party line,” but rather informed their members, who then ra-

tionally assessed the candidates and the issues and voted accordingly.

The scheme assumed free will and individuality. This appealed to New-

man and Russell, who above all sought to live in a world where black

people were, simply, individuals. Thus, Newman pointedly aired politi-

cal divisions in his paper. They were a good measure of black individu-

ality, as well as his own political “independence.”46 For instance, in 1948

Russell regularly attacked Henry Wallace’s politics in her column, but


these attacks were carefully balanced with letters from readers criticiz-

ing Russell’s views and her lack of “independence,” and editorials sup-

portive of Wallace.47

Emphasizing black diversity in the name of his own independence

also allowed Newman to transcend political differences within the black

communities. Much like white liberals at the time, Newman saw himself

as the pragmatic juggler of different viewpoints and strategies. What,

then, were these other political strategies and viewpoints? There were at

least two alternatives to the independent interest group strategy put

forth by Newman and Russell: the trade union philosophy of Nellie

Stone Johnson and the Republican partisanship of Milton G. Williams,

the other black editor in the Twin Cities. Neither Johnson nor Williams,

however, opposed Newman’s politics. Indeed Newman and Johnson were

apparently close allies and friends. Nor did Newman stamp out either

of these other viewpoints, rather he incorporated them, albeit John-

son’s to a greater extent than the Republicans’.

Labor activist Johnson sought to secure civil rights legislation through

the labor movement.48 She was less concerned about making a black

presence felt in politics than with insuring the prominence of labor is-

sues in Minneapolis politics, and honing black workers’ power in the

labor movement. Unlike Newman, Johnson left no written evidence of

her thinking at the time. In interviews since, however, she continually

emphasizes that her work as an activist has always been geared to eco-

nomic organization and based in the trade union movement.49 Her for-

ays into politics and elected office (the Minneapolis library board) were

to promote the labor movement and jobs. Johnson criticizes the black

community for not being more invested in the labor movement, and

claims that black leaders missed the “first round, which was the hard-

hitting economic things that came out of the thirties and into the for-

ties,” adding that “the whole organization around economic issues has

been going downhill ever since.”50

Johnson was part of the left wing in local politics. She was on the left-

wing controlled Hennepin County DFL executive council, as well as the

Farmer-Labor Association. Johnson’s white acquaintances were left-

wingers: CIO lawyer Douglas Hall, Farmer-Laborite Susie Stageberg,

Professor Theodore Brameld, socialist Swan Assarson, and unionist Rubin

Latz. She joined Wallace’s Progressive party during the 1948 election.

Despite her devotion to the labor movement and her roots in the left


wing, however, Johnson largely ignored the developing struggle between

the left wing and Humphrey’s anticommunist liberals. While Johnson’s

left-wing cohorts vigorously fought against Humphrey’s pluralist poli-

tics and the impending cold war, she remained committed to the FEPC,

unions, and jobs. While critical of the cold war and anticommunism,

she refused to allow them to detract from economic issues. Unlike her

friends on the Left, she supported Humphrey, who was likewise com-

mitted to the FEPC and jobs. Indeed, she seems puzzled by the division

in the DFL.51 Johnson saw herself as a pragmatist and would work with

whomever was leaning her way. Ultimately this strategy ended up affirm-

ing Humphrey’s vision of politics, in which the labor movement was

just one interest group of many. As the left wing was expunged, the only

place left to work for economic justice and jobs was in the Democratic

party, which Johnson admits was less than satisfactory.

Newman and Johnson both focused on jobs and employment. The

difference between the two was that while Newman saw the political

arena as the key to jobs, for Johnson, the labor movement was the best

avenue to better jobs. It was a small difference, and one of emphasis,

since Newman also recognized the value of the labor movement, and

Johnson the importance of politics. Although this same difference was

the cause of the factional fight between the left and anticommunist

wings of the DFL party, it did not divide the black communities and it

did not divide Newman and Johnson, who had the same goals. Some

black Twin Citians complained that Newman set himself up as a “dicta-

tor for Negro rights,” but few in the civil rights movement disagreed

with his emphasis on jobs and fair employment.52

Newman’s main competition, ideologically and in terms of readers,

came from the Republican Twin Cities Observer. The two papers fought

over who had the higher circulation numbers, which was really about

who had the better political strategy. More than anything else, Newman’s

careful cultivation of “independence” was aimed at breaking black ties

to the Republican party. For Newman, the Observer represented the

old style of black politics, where black leaders delivered black votes to a

machine in exchange for patronage appointments and favors. In 1948,

for instance, the Observer endorsed ex-Minnesota governor Harold

Stassen in the Republican presidential primary.53 This endorsement

dumbfounded the writers at the Spokesman; it was a purely tradition-

bound, patronage-induced choice. Stassen had a lackluster civil rights


record and had accepted segregation in the Minnesota Home Defense

Force during the war.54

There was something old-fashioned about the Observer. Like the

Spokesman, it supported the FEPC and other civil rights measures, but

it conveyed no sense of the new wartime opportunities. Dense with local

matters, it reported the kind of society and church news that Russell

sneered at in the pages of the Spokesman. In the summer the paper de-

voted a column to fishing and resort news, admonishing readers who

vacationed up north not to act “too big city” in rural areas.55 It was not

just society news that seemed local and unchanging but political issues

as well. Whereas the Spokesman was consumed with the fate of federal

wartime agencies and what remained of the New Deal, the Observer

discussed local state issues, which had been issues since before the war.

For instance, several vociferous editorials attacked the imbalance between

urban and rural political power. Minnesota’s constitution gave greater

proportional representation to rural areas, which meant that rural legis-

lators dominated the state legislature out of proportion to the shrinking

rural population they represented. The Observer was angry that urban

taxes were spent on rural schools and roads instead of in the cities.56

The Observer did not frame issues in terms of federal government

powers. Unlike the Spokesman, for instance, the Observer did not see the

antilabor Taft-Hartley Act as an attack on black workers, and avoided

writing about it, except for an occasional ambivalent editorial.57 Although

the Observer supported many of the same issues as the Spokesman—the

FEPC, minimum wages, fair housing, and the like—it did not frame

them in terms of federal government responsibility. When Republican

Senator Joseph Ball wrote to the Observer explaining his objection to

minimum wages as unnecessary federal government intervention, Mil-

ton Williams responded that the issue was about inflation, not govern-

ment jurisdiction.58 This was different from Newman’s encompassing

defense of the minimum wage as part of a strong federal government.

Newman would have agreed with Ball that it was precisely an issue of

government jurisdiction.

The deepest disagreement separating Newman and Williams was ul-

timately partisan. Black Republicans regarded the Democratic party as

the party of white supremacy and states’ rights. Although Newman

wielded the concept of political independence like a shield to deflect asso-

ciation with southern Democrats, both editors knew that at election time


there were only two parties to choose from: one contained southern

white supremacists, the other did not. Newman rebutted that conserva-

tive Republicans were just as obsessed with states’ rights as southern

Democrats.59 He conflated conservative Republicans like Taft with south-

ern Democrats, showing how they both opposed the FEPC. The Ob-

server, however, drew a distinction and asserted that ultraconservative

Republicans were better than bigoted, reactionary southern Democrats.60

But Republican Williams was playing a game from the past. The whole

idea behind independent interest groups was that if they became part of

a coalition, they could influence party agendas. In this vision the parties

were empty vessels whose programs and agendas were shaped by the

competition and coalition building of the groups within them. In 1928

the northern, urban groups in the Democratic party challenged south-

ern control of the party for the first time when they made Catholic Al

Smith the Democratic presidential candidate.61 With the rise of the

labor movement in northern cities during the 1930s, the urban ethnic

vote shifted to what Humphrey and political scientists called a “class”

basis, and labor became an influential part of the Democratic party.62

By the late 1940s northern labor and southern racists were locked in

battle for control of the Democratic party. Newman saw black interests

best served by the labor movement and hoped to build a coalition with

labor within the Democratic party.

Like Humphrey, then, Newman attacked traditional Democratic pol-

itics. These attacks not only affirmed his independence but also con-

tributed to liberal northern efforts to change the Democratic party. Like

black editors across the nation, he reminded readers of Truman’s alle-

giance to the South, noting his appointment of southerners to cabinet

positions, such as South Carolinian James Byrnes to be secretary of state.63

Northern Democrats’ gestures to black voters were meaningless so long

as southern Democrats controlled important committees in Congress.

To emphasize this, Newman printed the following from Senator James O.

Eastland of Mississippi: “What can the Negro of the north get by voting

for a Democratic President when the machinery and important chair-

manships of committees are controlled by those of us who are pictured

as fascists and southern reactionaries?”64 The prospect of having to rely

on Negro votes for Democratic victories distressed southern Democrats,

who told blacks that they should stay in the party of emancipation.65

Southern Democrats’ frank racism allowed Newman to maintain a


staunch nonpartisanship and educate his readership about the value of

political independence, while at the same time trying to bring about

the kind of political party that would meet black interests.

Several factors gave life to Newman’s articulation of an “independent

black pressure group.” These included black Minnesotans’ previous or-

ganization around jobs and employment, the emergence of the FEPC as

a political issue, the new demographic importance of the “black vote,”

and Humphrey’s vision of liberal interest-group, pluralist politics. The

significance of an independent black interest group for Newman was

not in the number of votes it could deliver, which was insignificant, but

rather in the way that it connected Minnesota African Americans to a

larger national black community, and in the alliances it could make with

white liberals in Minnesota. The reason Newman was able to influence

politics at all was because of the increasing visibility of the issue of civil

rights in Minnesota politics. In Minnesota, black votes did not matter,

but civil rights could. How civil rights became integrated into Minnesota

politics is the subject of the next two chapters.


In 1945 Hubert Humphrey was elected mayor of Minneapolis, a city of

540,000. As mayor he formed a Council on Human Relations and set up a

municipal FEPC, making Minneapolis one of a handful of places to en-

force prohibitions on racial discrimination in employment.1 Humphrey’s

biographers rightly celebrate his mayoral civil rights initiatives as part

of a lifelong interest in civil rights, part of what made him a decent hu-

man being and moral politician. Many people at the time, however,

were puzzled as to its meaning. One concerned citizen inquired of the

Human Relations Council, “Does all this activity in the field of human

relations constitute a pose? Does it have political involvements?”2 In

fact it did, but not of the partisan sort. Humphrey’s forays into race re-

lations, while sincere, also functioned to bolster his particular vision of

politics.

Flexibility and Its Discontents

For the two-party system to function as a mechanism for democratic

participation, citizens and politicians had to practice ideological flexi-

bility, recognize the plural nature of society, and build toward a consensus

between groups. Humphrey showed how well these ideas could work in

the political arena when he became mayor of Minneapolis in 1945. His

actual campaign for mayor seemed to violate the precept that politicians

not be beholden to any one group, because it was funded, backed, and

made possible by the Minneapolis labor movement. The Hennepin

County CIO, the AFL’s Central Labor Union, and the independent rail-

C H A P T E R S I X

Civil Rights in Local Politics

93

road brotherhoods formed the United Labor Committee, which pro-

vided Humphrey with the institutional apparatus, the campaign work-

ers, the publicity, and the funding for his second mayoral campaign.3

This was because the new DFL party was not yet structurally equipped

to provide any of those things in 1945. The work of creating a real, struc-

turally viable party separate from its interest group clients lay ahead. In

the meantime, Humphrey necessarily relied on the United Labor Com-

mittee. Headed by the Minneapolis Central Labor Union’s new presi-

dent George Phillips, the committee spent fifteen thousand dollars on

the ostensibly nonpartisan Minneapolis city elections, the great bulk of

which went toward Humphrey’s campaign. Humphrey promised to re-

solve the housing shortage, fight crime, create jobs for returning vets,

reform the police department, and improve the condition of the city’s

hospital. He won the election by over thirty thousand votes.

After becoming mayor, Humphrey distanced himself from the labor

movement that had put him in office. This upheld the separation be-

tween politicians and the interest groups they were supposed to bal-

ance. But it was also good politics in 1940s Minneapolis. Despite, or

perhaps because of, labor’s active role in Minneapolis’s politics, the city

remained a Republican stronghold. Humphrey’s affable, bridge-build-

ing oratory, however, and his familiarity among Rotarians and church

members won over many normally Republican voters. He cultivated

friendships with the Republican businessmen who ran the city. He ap-

pointed Bradshaw Mintener, general counsel for Pillsbury Mills and a

Republican, to several new municipal committees, including the Council

on Human Relations. Two years later, Mintener campaigned for Hum-

phrey’s second term, proclaiming that he never discussed politics with

the mayor, and that they had agreed to work together on a nonpartisan

basis.4 Humphrey consulted John Cowles, publisher of Minneapolis’s

two papers, the Star-Journal and the Tribune. Cowles arranged for him

to meet John Pillsbury of Pillsbury, grain merchant F. Peavey Hefflefinger,

and Lucian Sprague, president of the St. Louis and Minneapolis Rail-

road. Humphrey assured Cowles that while he supported the unions’

programs and aims, he would not sell his soul to their leadership. “I am

not, if elected, Labor’s mayor or their special representative,” he wrote

to Cowles.5 As mayor, his decisions were often influenced by a need to

prove he was not “Labor’s mayor.” When Humphrey reorganized the

94 Civil Rights in Local Politics

police department, for instance, he chose the businessmen’s favorite, Ed

Ryan, a graduate of Hoover’s FBI school, over labor leaders’ favored

candidate. It was a rebuff to labor, and Humphrey would refer to it re-

peatedly to show that he was not controlled by labor.6

Organized labor, however, was central to the DFL party. Humphrey

could not write off the labor vote, nor did he want to. In the labor disputes

that marked the postwar years of economic readjustment, Humphrey

stood by the unions. Workers at Honeywell Regulator Company, steel-

workers, telephone operators, meat packers, hospital workers, and teach-

ers fought their employers during these years for wage increases to offset

reduced working hours and to meet soaring postwar inflation.7 Humphrey

believed firmly in labor’s right to strike and often found himself at odds

with the Republican businessmen he was trying to cultivate. Many busi-

nessmen were upset when Humphrey allowed strikers to picket North-

western telephone company in 1947, in flagrant disregard of the Stassen

Labor Act, which prohibited mass picketing. As mayor, Humphrey should

have called in the police to disband the picketing, but he did not. He ex-

plained that the telephone company needed to be taught a lesson about

collective bargaining. When the Cowles-owned Minneapolis Star scolded

him for not enforcing the law, Humphrey explained to Cowles that his

reason for not calling in the police was to avert rioting.8

Under the mantle of “unity,” Humphrey reintegrated the labor move-

ment and unions into city politics as just another group, just another

constituency. In a Minneapolis Morning Tribune piece titled “City’s

Progress Linked to Unity Among Citizens,” Humphrey lauded Min-

neapolis’s great future as government, industry, and labor worked to-

gether as a team.9 On the one hand, this legitimated labor’s interests in

the political arena. It painted unions—once signifiers of violence, dis-

ruption, and foreign-born organizers—with the brush of respectability,

which made Republicans and other citizens less resistant to them. On

the other hand, however, painting the unions with the brush of re-

spectability stripped them of their radical potential. Humphrey’s bold

endorsement of former communist and CIO leader Robert Wishart for

alderman, while brave, also erased the radical legacy of Wishart’s work.

Calling Wishart a “well-known, capable, and efficient labor leader,” as if

he were a nine-to-five man, Humphrey emphasized his work for the

blood bank. Avoiding the word “union,” he noted that Wishart’s “organ-


ization of employees at the Honeywell plant” was generous in its civic

contributions.10 This transparent effort to make a controversial labor

leader palatable to the middle classes was a common tactic in American

politics. And indeed Humphrey should be applauded for sticking with

his friend even as members of his own DFL party were red-baiting the

union leader. Nonetheless, the effect of such assimilatory, integrative

tactics was to marginalize those who saw the labor movement as a force

of progress, not another brick in the foundation of the status quo.

Humphrey’s zeal for compromise and cross-class cooperation an-

gered left-wingers, who correctly surmised that it undermined their

own influence in the DFL party and Minnesota politics. In addition to

Farmer-Labor veterans like Elmer Benson, Marion Le Sueur, and Susie

Stageberg, the left wing consisted of unionists, a few academics, and a

small, but—as the phrasing went—highly organized group of commu-

nists. Communists had been a key part of the labor movement since the

1930s and were well ensconced in the DFL party after the merger.11 Any

liberal entering Minneapolis politics during the 1940s had to contend

with both the communists and the established politics of anticommu-

nism. Humphrey’s tangles with Minneapolis communists from 1945 to

1948 made him a lifelong anticommunist and help explain his long sup-

port of the Vietnam War. Initially, however, Humphrey hoped to avoid

the communist issue altogether by using the same techniques of con-

sensus and affability that he used with the businessmen.

Secure in their power, businessmen could afford to flirt with Hum-

phrey’s liberal consensus politics. The left wing, however, was increas-

ingly insecure and defensive. Their hopes for real structural changes in

American society were proving to be unfounded. Criticism of the So-

viet Union was widespread. For Elmer Benson, who had supported U.S.

intervention in the war only after it was clear that the United States

would be fighting with the Soviet Union, the U.S.–Soviet wartime alliance

had signified that the United States was at last outgrowing an irrational

fear of socialistic governments. The Truman administration’s anti-Soviet

stance beginning in 1946 signaled, for Benson, a revival of red scare tac-

tics and militaristic bombast. Against this backdrop, Humphrey’s easy

cooperation with corporate heads and monied Republicans became yet

another indication of the increasingly constrictive political opportunities

for the left wing.12 They could not afford to compromise anything.


Wary of Humphrey’s politics, the left wing began to organize against

him in 1946. DFL chairman Elmer Kelm had announced his resignation

in fall of 1945, which meant that a new chairman would be chosen at the

1946 DFL state convention in March. Humphrey assured the Demo-

cratic National Committee that a left-winger would not be elected new

chairman.13 Soon after the outgoing chairman announced his resigna-

tion, however, John Jacobsen, a secret communist and regional director

of the CIO’s Political Action Committee (PAC), warned his allies that

“it would be disastrous to permit him [Humphrey] to be elected state

DFL chairman.”14 Jacobsen, William Mauseth, communist head of United

Electrical Workers local 1146 and the Minnesota CIO-PAC, Marian Le

Sueur of the Hennepin Farmer-Labor Women’s Club, Selma Seestrom

of the DFL Association, and Elmer Benson began organizing to take

over the DFL party in precinct and county caucuses. Most caucuses were

poorly attended, which allowed a well-organized group of concerned

people to gain control. In Minneapolis and St. Paul, where DFL caucuses

were well attended by unionists, there was as yet no organized opposi-

tion to left-wingers. Most DFLers were uninterested in or unconscious

of whatever conflict existed between Humphrey and the left wing. Al-

though debates raged over the United States’ relationship to the Soviet

Union and the dismantling of wartime programs, most people had not

yet drawn hard lines over these issues.

At the convention the Left mobilized its supporters and, as Humphrey

supporter Eugenie Anderson saw it, hijacked the party. A Red Wing

housewife and later an ambassador to Denmark, Anderson recalled to

interviewer Arthur Naftalin (who had also been present at the conven-

tion): “The methods they used, the way they marched up and down the

aisle, and kept their eye on everybody, and the way they vilified Hum-

phrey’s character, said the most outrageous things against him, against

you, against me, against all of us. . . . It woke me up. It woke Humphrey

up.”15 In the end Benson, Le Sueur, St. Paul lawyer Francis Smith, and

Orville Olson, a secret communist and head of the Independent Voters

of Minnesota, got themselves appointed to the DFL executive commit-

tee. No Humphrey supporters were selected for party offices. Dismayed,

Humphrey consulted his friend Robert Wishart about getting at least one

representative on the executive board. Wishart convinced the Left to ac-

cept one Humphrey man, and they made Orville Freeman state secretary.


The left wing’s coup at the 1946 convention prompted Humphrey to

adopt an anticommunist position. Although Anderson and Naftalin

had been urging Humphrey to take a stand against communists in the

DFL for the past year, Humphrey had always demurred, believing that

he could bring the interests of the left wing into the DFL party, as he

might those of any other group. He wanted to avoid what he called an

“ideological” struggle within the DFL, and as a party leader, he posi-

tioned himself above factional squabbling. This Rooseveltian posture

became untenable after the 1946 convention. Around the same time,

Anderson read liberal activist James Loeb Jr.’s famous New Republic let-

ter, which called for liberals to condemn communist tactics in the “pro-

gressive movement” in light of tensions with the Soviet Union in Eu-

rope.16 Anderson invited Loeb to Minneapolis to discuss the situation in

Minnesota. In August 1946 Loeb met with Evron Kirkpatrick, Naftalin,

Anderson, and Humphrey in Minneapolis, and apparently convinced

Humphrey to openly oppose the communists in the left wing.17 The

same group traveled to Washington in January 1947 to participate in

the founding of the liberal anticommunist group, Americans for Dem-

ocratic Action (ADA), with such people as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Rein-

hold Niebuhr, and labor leaders Walter Reuther and David Dubinsky.18

Humphrey made his first remarks condemning communism abroad

and in Minnesota at an AFL union conference shortly after Loeb’s visit

in August 1946.19 He made a second speech against communism two

days later before a group of UN supporters. Baffled by this apparent

red-baiting from an otherwise liberal politician, DFL supporters wrote

worried queries demanding an explanation.20 Humphrey replied that

he was not red-baiting but rather trying to build an “honest, progressive

party.”21

Humphrey’s openly anticommunist position intensified the struggle

in the DFL party. Humphrey and his supporters became known as the

“right-wing” faction, although they called themselves “labor-progressives.”

There followed a two-year struggle for the hearts and minds of DFL

voters, in which the leaders of both factions planted rumors, riled emo-

tions, harassed opponents, and monitored the activities of their respec-

tive supporters. In this atmosphere of factionalism, surveillance, and

worried recantations about communist pasts, Humphrey created the

Mayor’s Council on Human Relations. About every three weeks, left-

wing activists, liberal anticommunists, and the executives of Minneapo-


lis’s major corporations sat down to discuss interracial problems over

lunch at the Hotel Dyckmann’s Normandy Room.

The Mayor’s Council on Human Relations

Humphrey created the Mayor’s Council on Human Relations in February

1946, shortly after assuming office. The intended purpose of the Coun-

cil on Human Relations was to reduce social tensions caused by racial

and religious discrimination. The council researched racial and reli-

gious discrimination in Minneapolis, educated the public about the ill

effects of discrimination, monitored literature and movies for racist

content, helped write the FEPC ordinance, and investigated a few indi-

vidual cases of discrimination. Funded entirely through private contri-

butions and staffed by unpaid volunteers, the Mayor’s Council on Hu-

man Relations hovered somewhere between government agency and

philanthropic group.

Humphrey preferred to see the council as a government agency. Min-

neapolis had a “weak-mayor” form of municipal government, the result

of Progressive-era reforms.22 Humphrey tried to expand the powers of

the mayor through a new city charter, which gave the mayor full execu-

tive power, restricted the role of city council to legislation, and abol-

ished the independent administrative boards.23 Opposition to the new

charter was strong, however, and it was not adopted while Humphrey

was mayor.24 Instead, Humphrey increased his governing powers by ap-

pointing voluntary councils of concerned citizens, such as his Council

on Human Relations. As his assistant described it:

Humphrey often extended his influence where he had no power byasking the community itself to do a job that he had no authority toundertake himself. The creation of the Mayor’s Council on HumanRelations was such a move.25

Humphrey saw the council as a model for government action. In seek-

ing tax-exempt status for contributions to the council, he argued that

the program in human relations would normally be “carried out and

financed by the city itself,” were public funds available for the purpose.26

Most people assumed that it was a municipally funded agency.27 Hum-

phrey’s positioning of the council as a government agency allowed him

to illustrate the benefits of government to the public without actually

having to wage a political fight to secure funding for the council. The


mayor’s name on the council and Humphrey’s insistence that it was

government gave it the symbolic authority of an official government

agency. The mayor received credit for the council’s accomplishments,

which, in turn, solidified Humphrey’s vision of active government and

enmeshed race in strategies for “positive government.”

Like the Republican Governor’s Interracial Commission, the Mayor’s

Council on Human Relations brought together a broad cross section of

the public. Humphrey’s public, however, was more diverse than the Re-

publicans’ rather stodgy committee of churchwomen, philanthropists,

and Urban League officials. Humphrey appointed young unionists, ac-

tivists, journalists, and educators, individuals of widely varying ideologies

and concerns. Council member Douglas Hall, the general counsel for

the Minnesota CIO, was not just a union representative but a left-wing

activist, part of the opposing faction of the DFL. Genevieve Steefel, a

wealthy civil rights activist, and Rubin Latz of the Central Labor Union

were active in left-wing organizations that anticommunist liberals iden-

tified as “commie-front.” Editor and former unionist Cecil Newman,

the only black member, was younger and more militant than the Urban

League leaders who usually represented blacks on government commit-

tees. Humphrey also appointed Pillsbury executive Bradshaw Mintener,

General Mills attorney Durwood Balch, and presidents of smaller man-

ufacturing companies.28

The ideological diversity of the council eased several of the mayor’s

political quandaries. Anchored by grain executives, the council indicated

to all that he was not “labor’s mayor.” At the same time, it fulfilled two

of the labor movement’s goals: fair employment and activist govern-

ment. Through the Council on Human Relations, Humphrey could cul-

tivate the Republican cronies who controlled the city without offending

his main constituency in the labor movement. More significantly, the

Council on Human Relations siphoned off the Left’s most energetic,

noncommunist supporters to augment Humphrey’s own efforts in the

civil rights field. Humphrey appointed Hall, Steefel, and Latz to the coun-

cil because they were among the most active, militant civil rights leaders

in Minneapolis. Their exclusion from the council would have called into

question Humphrey’s sincerity about human relations. By including them,

however, he won grudging respect from noncommunist left-wingers.

This was not politicking for Humphrey; he believed that the incorpora-

tion of protest into one of the two major parties was the essence of the


democratic political process. Humphrey understood that civil rights ac-

tivists like Latz and Steefel had joined so-called communist-front groups

because those organizations fought most strenuously for minorities’

civil rights. The Independent Voters of Minnesota, a front group headed

by communist Orville Olson, included some of the best-known civil

rights activists in the state: Frank Boyd of the Brotherhood of Sleeping

Car Porters, Genevieve Steefel, attorney Hyman Edelman, and others

who would find their way onto the Mayor’s Council on Human Rela-

tions. Humphrey did not attack civil rights workers with communist

connections but rather sought them out as allies in the struggle against

racism.29

The calm professionalism and apparent cooperation among the ide-

ologically diverse members of the council offered an alternative to the

increasing rancor in the political arena. The records of the Mayor’s Coun-

cil on Human Relations disclose no ideological hostility, no political

discomfort, none of the bile-filled bickering that was prevalent within

the DFL at the same time. To be sure, there were disagreements on the

council, especially pertaining to the apportionment of resources. In a

conciliatory memo to the members of the council Humphrey admitted

that some of the council’s difficulties “may even involve partisan poli-

tics.”30 But this was not the same as the name-calling and vituperation

that occurred in DFL caucuses and newspapers from 1946 to 1948.

Council members’ involvement in messy political controversies im-

pinged little on the work of the council itself. Douglas Hall, for instance,

served faithfully on the Mayor’s council even as he clashed with the mayor

over the issue of communism in the DFL. Hall was the CIO’s general

counsel who had succeeded in procuring equal wages for black work-

ers.31 He was a staunch left-wing activist who had joined the Commu-

nist party briefly in the 1930s, dropped out, but remained opposed to

red-baiting in all of its forms. In 1946 Hall ran for Congress as the DFL

candidate from Minneapolis’s fifth district. This presented a problem

for Mayor Humphrey. As a prominent DFL leader, Humphrey was ex-

pected to endorse the DFL congressional candidate, especially in his

own district. Humphrey, however, had just stated his opposition to com-

munists and communist sympathizers in the DFL party. Hall was widely

known to be a “communist sympathizer.” In a five-page memo concerning

the “Doug Hall Problem,” Orville Freeman argued that were Humphrey

to endorse Hall, it would confuse liberals looking for anticommunist


leadership and appear as though Humphrey had backed down under

left-wing bullying:

[W]e have been taking an anti commie stand, we are known for it. Wehave been fighting. Then suddenly we go along with one of their leaders.We have decided on a policy—we must follow it, too [sic] change whenthe attack starts is to be routed in confusion, to be a prey of indecision.32

Freeman concluded that if Humphrey were to decide to endorse Hall,

then he should have Hall sign a statement reading, “I am not now and

never have been a member of the Communist party,” and indicate sup-

port for the U.S. policy of armed forces in Europe.33 Humphrey ago-

nized over the decision and finally decided not to endorse Hall. This

brought forth a hail of condemnations from the left-wing, liberal ac-

tivists, and regular supporters of the DFL, who accused the mayor of

dividing the party and playing politics. Throughout the controversy,

however, Hall participated as usual on the Mayor’s Council on Human

Relations. His presence at the Normandy Room luncheon meetings and

his activities on behalf of the mayor indicated that the unsavory politics

of anticommunism would not disrupt city business. Similarly, Sam Davis,

the Communist party candidate for governor in 1934 and editor of the

left-wing Minnesota Labor, was nonetheless invited to participate in the

council’s activities.34

The carefully crafted ideological diversity of the Mayor’s Council on

Human Relations undermined the left-wing idea that there was a fun-

damental conflict between corporate interests and the people. Working

together against racism diminished the animosity between ideological

combatants, at least in the public eye. While left-wing activists argued

that the interests of the people and those of corporate leaders were fun-

damentally irreconcilable, Humphrey used his Council on Human Re-

lations to show that there were in fact areas of agreement between all

sectors of society.35 Humphrey’s “Community Self-Survey” suggests just

how central social cooperation was to his program of interracial rela-

tions. One of the main tasks of the Mayor’s Council on Human Relations

was to collect data on racial discrimination and strife in Minneapolis,

from which information they would develop solutions. Rather than us-

ing trained social scientists, however, Humphrey decided to employ a

“community self-survey of human relations,” whereby community lead-

ers and citizens would collect the data themselves, under guidelines de-


veloped at Fisk University. This system involved white citizens, usually

removed from the ravages of racial prejudice, in a hands-on, eye-open-

ing educational experience, which was supposed to be more effective in

inspiring action than pamphlets and statistics.

Chaired by Pillsbury executive Mintener, the self-survey committee

consisted of a broad cross section of the community, bringing together

civil rights activists, corporate executives, churchwomen, and unionists,

thereby creating the crucial “cross-pressures” that held American society

together. Minneapolis was known to have one of the most broadly rep-

resentative sponsoring groups in the country and had recruited the largest

number of people for the data-collecting phase of the project, over six

hundred out of a community of half a million.36 This methodology, how-

ever, while useful in educating white participants, usually failed to yield

objective facts on which sound public policy could be based. Sociologist

Stuart Chapin urged Humphrey to do the project right and use trained

social scientists, or at least have a tighter advisory committee.37 But as

the publicity for the self-survey proclaimed, the project’s emphasis was on

“the cooperative local inquiry,” rather than “results of the survey itself.”38

Humphrey and his publicists spoke about the success of the Council

on Human Relations in terms of how it had brought together people

of various opinions. They lauded the council’s concrete achievements,

namely the FEPC, but they positively relished the idea that the council

included Republicans and was, indeed, headed by the Republican gov-

ernor’s brother.39 In an article about Humphrey’s civil rights achieve-

ments, his assistant noted exuberantly that “most of the [Human Rela-

tions] Housing Committee, including the chairman, were real estate

men!” In a more subdued tone he observed that the council’s committee

on employment “had a preponderance of employers and was chaired by

a vice-president of Pillsbury Mills.”40 The real estate men had recom-

mended passage of a prohibition to restrictive covenants, while the em-

ployers supported the FEPC. By emphasizing these points as the terms

of success, Humphrey and his publicists were extolling a new kind of

activism, which was based in cooperation and persuasion, not conflict

and confrontation.41

Behind this consensus-building activism were the ideas about

government-coordinated cooperation between competing sectors of so-

ciety that Humphrey had celebrated in his thesis. Humphrey’s ideolog-

ically diverse Council on Human Relations reestablished his position of


Rooseveltian juggler—identified with no one faction but reconciling

the interests of all—at a time when he was in fact heading his own fac-

tion in the DFL party.

The FEPC

The Minnesota Fair Employment Practice Council first proposed a mu-

nicipal FEPC for Minneapolis in December 1945. Humphrey endorsed

the proposal and urged the city council to pass it. At a well-attended

public hearing on the bill, held on February 13, 1946, no one openly op-

posed the ordinance. When liberals on the city council moved to include

private business as well as government offices and unions, however, con-

servatives tabled the bill, and the city council failed to act.42 Humphrey

created the Council on Human Relations soon thereafter, combining

the most experienced FEPC activists on the left with representatives of

business. In July another proposal was brought before the city council,

and the Mayor’s Council on Human Relations met regularly with mem-

bers of the city council over concerns about the proposal.43 In January

1947, two proposals stood before the city council. One covered city gov-

ernment and contractors only, while the other, sponsored by the Coun-

cil on Human Relations, covered businesses and unions and also pro-

posed an FEP committee to screen complaints and recommend for

prosecution. CIO leader Wishart and left-winger Hall fought vigorously

for the Mayor’s Council on Human Relations’ version of the bill and

eventually garnered enough support to pass the bill on January 31, 1947,

by a vote of twenty-one to three.44

The ordinance prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, creed,

color, national origin, or ancestry in hiring, conditions of employment,

compensation, promotion, and union membership on city premises. It

created a Commission on Job Discrimination to investigate complaints

and recommend violators for prosecution. The fine for violation was

one hundred dollars or ninety days in jail. The justification for the bill

was to protect the public welfare of the inhabitants of Minneapolis, since

studies had linked job discrimination and unemployment to a wide va-

riety of social evils ranging from juvenile delinquency to rioting.45

The Mayor’s Council worked hard to keep FEPC “above politics.” Pro-

ponents argued that the FEPC was good for all: postwar prosperity re-

quired full employment, which by definition meant fair employment,

and society had to fix the conditions that led to social unrest.46 A more


popular argument was that banning discrimination was the moral, fair

thing to do. Minneapolis Star reader Maryedith Kyle echoed many when

she responded to a you-cannot-legislate-tolerance editorial with the ob-

servation that you cannot legislate honesty or virtue either.47 Both ar-

guments emphasized that the FEPC was for the larger public good, as if

this somehow put it outside of politics. When Republicans accused Hall

of using the proposed FEPC ordinance as a “political issue” in the elec-

tion, the Reverend Reuben Youngdahl, head of the Mayor’s Council on

Human Relations (and brother of the Republican gubernatorial candi-

date Luther Youngdahl), met with anxious Republicans to assure them

that “it was the purpose and desire of the Mayor’s Council to keep [the

FEPC proposal] from becoming a political issue and to treat it as simply

a matter of sound public policy.”48 Humphrey denied that there was

anything political about the FEPC, pointing out the utter absence of a

black vote in Minneapolis.49 He rhetorically diminished Minneapolis’s

already miniscule black population to make the point that he acted out

of principle, not “politics.” The FEPC was not the result of “Negro pres-

sure,” he told one interviewer, since there were only 6,500 Negroes in a

city of 525,000.50 That human relations could lift Humphrey above the

political fray depended on its being a nonpolitical issue, one that be-

nefited all of society and was not associated with one group.

While Humphrey sought to disclaim black pressure, black activists in

Minnesota, organized as an independent interest group according to

Humphrey’s own ideas of proper political organization, were struggling

to put civil rights into politics. Cecil Newman seized on the competition

between Humphrey and the left wing to integrate black interests into

politics. Newman reported on the crowd that thronged to the city coun-

cil hearings in support of the ordinance, noting that a diverse set of

groups were there in force: the NAACP, the Communist party, the Amer-

ican Legion, the AFL, and the CIO.51 Newman had long reported the

political diversity among blacks, giving equal coverage to the Republi-

can, Farmer-Labor, Communist, and, later, DFL parties. In the heated

political climate of 1946, however, this kind of coverage took on addi-

tional meaning. Under the guise of maintaining the paper’s “political

independence,” Newman pitted the various groups against each other

in his coverage of their FEPC activities. As the left wing was preparing

to take over the district caucuses, for instance, Newman covered the

Communist party’s FEPC/Lenin Memorial rally, advertising it in feature


stories, interviewing its organizers, and reporting on its message.52

Whereas the diversity of groups supporting FEPC represented social

unity for white politicians, for Newman, it provided the means by which

to make blacks’ presence felt in the political arena.53

That white politicians could benefit from civil rights put black news-

papers and black leaders in a position to confer legitimacy on politicians

who were seeking to be sincere and “above politics.” Newman published

requests for new subscriptions so that all of the readers, black and white,

knew which prominent political figures were reading the paper.54 This

fostered competition between white politicians for positive coverage in

the paper, which in turn conveyed to black readers and white politi-

cians alike the sense that black voters were part of the political game.

What did white politicians get out of positive coverage in Newman’s

paper? There were votes. Not a lot, of course, but in a local election on

local issues, five thousand committed voters could only help. The Negro

vote was not the only vote sought, however. A large number of white

churchgoers and unionists had been made aware of the fair employment

issue and were concerned about political “sincerity.” Newman’s paper

offered politicians legitimacy and a certain moral sanctity that came

from taking the risk of supporting the FEPC, which was, despite the

support of enlightened executives, still largely opposed by powerful busi-

ness forces.55

Assessing the FEPC

The fight for the FEPC brought black actors into the political arena in

ways that Newman had hoped. But the actual benefit of the FEPC for

black Minneapolitans was less clear. When it was finally set up, the FEPC

was haphazardly administered. The city council made no appropria-

tions until December 1947, when they gave the FEPC $3,475 (before De-

cember, the Mayor’s Council on Human Relations funded it). Compared

to the FEPC laws in New York State, Massachusetts, and Connecticut,

the Minneapolis ordinance was weak, although it compared well to

Chicago’s, which excluded labor unions.56 Of the twenty-one cases filed

with the Minneapolis FEPC in its first year, only four were settled satis-

factorily, with the company admitting wrong and promising to amend

its policies; the rest were either tabled or still being processed.57 A survey

of employers who had hired black employees for the first time showed

that only 43 percent attributed their decision to the city FEPC, while an


overwhelming 86 percent credited the Urban League with convincing

them to hire a black employee.58

The Minneapolis FEPC worked hard on its limited resources. Be-

tween June 1947 and May 1950, the FEPC handled 115 cases. According

to the 1950 Report on Operations, approximately 40 percent of those

were settled “satisfactorily,” which meant that the complainant had re-

ceived the position or was satisfied with the company’s commitment to

follow a policy of nondiscrimination in the future. About 25 percent of

the cases were dismissed, the commission having determined that the

complainant had been denied employment for a valid reason. Eight per-

cent of the cases were dismissed because the commission lacked juris-

diction. In 21 percent of the cases, discrimination could be neither proven

nor disproven, and they were deferred pending further evidence. Sixty-

six percent of these cases were brought by African Americans, 20 per-

cent by Jewish complainants, and 5 percent by American Indians. Three

cases concerned discrimination against Catholics, while complainants

in three additional cases claimed discrimination because they were not

Lutheran, not Jewish, or not Catholic.59 These last scattered cases sug-

gest the legacy of old religious divisions now superseded by the obvious

racial division implied by the seventy-six black complainants. By 1953,

80 percent of the cases would be brought by African Americans.

Headed by NAACP board member Wilfred Leland, the new commis-

sion included civic leaders, corporate executives, and lawyers who also

sat on the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the Minnesota

Jewish Council, the NAACP, or the Urban League. Significantly, however,

unlike either the Governors’ Interracial Commission or the Mayor’s

Council on Human Relations, the roster of the FEPC listed no union

leaders, even though labor had figured prominently in establishing the

FEPC. Disenchanted labor leaders criticized the FEPC’s ineffectiveness.

Local 1139 of the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers protested

the inadequacy of the commission, noting that the Minneapolis school

board employed only one Negro among its twenty-three hundred teach-

ers. Minneapolis labor had fought hard for the FEPC and resented that

its efforts had come to naught.60 Cecil Newman likewise criticized the

premature and unwarranted celebration of the FEPC in an editorial in

the Minneapolis Spokesman.61

The commission reminded critics of its scarce resources and the

tremendous opposition to its existence. Despite those impediments,


however, it felt the statistics showed success. The NAACP and the Ur-

ban League defended the commission’s work. The unpaid commission

members worked hard. They took each complaint seriously, discussed it

thoroughly, and interviewed all parties concerned. The amount of time

and energy put into the investigation of each case is astounding, even as

it ultimately validates criticism that liberals saw racial problems in terms

of incidental occurrences. One example will illustrate.

On April 18, 1949, the commission met to discuss the case of Edwin

Patten, who had initially been denied employment as a chef at the Cur-

tis Hotel, had then secured the job with the help of the FEPC, but had

then been fired after four days of work for stealing a customer’s case of

watches. Patten admitted taking the case of watches from the guest, a

watch salesman, but he claimed it had been a practical joke and that he

had returned the watches. He believed his firing was related to the head

chef ’s racial resentment. The commission interviewed the manager of

the hotel, the head chef, the union head, Patten himself, the watch sales-

man, and the police and detectives who had investigated the stolen

watches. One member said that if it were true about the practical joke,

there were no grounds for discharge; another felt that the practical joke

created a disturbance that was grounds for dismissal. The Curtis Hotel

said they would hire another black chef; they just did not want Patten.

After discussing the case, the commission decided to conduct more in-

vestigation, including interviewing six waiters who worked with Pat-

ten, checking Patten’s record at the University of Iowa, checking his po-

lice record in Des Moines, where he had been jailed for assault, checking

reasons for his discharge from the Veterans Administration, and asking

the Curtis Hotel to hold off on its dismissal until they could complete

their investigation.62 While this case raises questions about privacy, it

also indicates that commission members were fair-minded, generous,

and committed to their work.

FEPC members approached discrimination on a case-by-case basis,

seeking evidence of an employer’s intent to discriminate. When they

discovered wrongdoing, they insisted it stop, thus achieving resolution.

Their critics, including some unions but not all, saw the problem more

systemically. They pointed out that Negro workers were being squeezed

out of wartime jobs, and that there were no Negro teachers at all in

Minneapolis. Indicative of the case-by-case philosophy of the FEPC,

Wilfred Leland responded that no one had brought a complaint against


the Minneapolis school board.63 This was an early skirmish in a new de-

bate about whether discrimination was incidental or systemic, whether

it was proven by employer intent or statistical imbalance, and whether

it should be resolved through a color-blind standard or a color-specific

remedy.64 The division in this debate did not correspond with earlier

divisions between labor and management. Indeed, it occurred within

unions, civil rights groups, and the new organizations charged with im-

plementing antidiscrimination laws.

Criticism of the FEPC and labor leaders’ absence from it would ap-

pear to contradict the idea that antiracism and civil rights activism dis-

placed old ideological and class tensions as formerly contentious groups

united to address the problem of racism. However, criticism of the FEPC

was part of new, postwar debate, wherein the positions were staked out

along new ideological lines, with new political alliances. Radical unions

and enlightened management worked together for it. Moreover, al-

though social unity was forgotten on the actual FEPC, it was crucial in

establishing and publicizing it. As Louis Ruchames showed in his 1953

study of state FEPCs, the most successful activists were those who

brought together the most segments of society. The FEPC’s promise of

social unity, manifested in the diversity of groups supporting it, as-

suaged fears of its radicalism, while also stressing its benefit to all social

groups.65 That labor was part of creating the FEPC, even though it was

overlooked in the FEPC’s implementation, helped change Minnesota’s

political landscape.

Humphrey responded defensively to complaints about the council

and the FEPC. 66 He regarded his human relations initiatives a success.

For Humphrey, progress was indicated less by the actual resolution of

specific minority problems than in the fact that human relations pro-

grams provided an arena for the peaceful resolution of potentially ex-

plosive racial troubles and that they raised public consciousness about

racism. Consciousness-raising was the thrust of most “inter-racial rela-

tions” programs. The Minnesota Council of Churches’ Inter-racial Va-

cation Visits programs, for instance, eschewed the idea of a “fresh-air

project,” connoting the rehabilitation of impoverished black youth, but

insisted instead that these Negro children were “ambassadors of their

race,” who would begin to erase the antidemocratic prejudices of rural

Minnesotans.67 Since most activists agreed that the root of the racial

problem was white ignorance, any organization that enlightened white


prejudices was by definition successful. Enlightening white individuals

about prejudice had the added benefit of enlightening them about labor

unions and liberalism, which would be important in rebuilding a liberal,

noncommunist DFL party, especially in rural areas where antiunionism

ran rampant.

The civil rights activities of these years benefited Minneapolis blacks

to the extent that they focused attention on the city’s hitherto ignored

racial discrimination. This created momentum and hope for black ac-

tivists who sought a political role in municipal life. But the cumber-

some case-by-case strategy of an underfunded municipal agency barely

dented the structural problems of black underemployment, and the

overtly paternalistic forms of such agencies alienated the African Amer-

ican population. Well-intentioned civil rights legislation, which included

a statewide FEPC in 1955, failed to strengthen the black communities’

political power in the state. When black interests stood in the way of

white interests like urban renewal and freeway building, for instance,

the black communities were unable to protect their interests. The depth

of the Twin Cities’ racial problems would not be truly recognized until

the racial riots so feared in the 1940s actually erupted in Minneapolis

and St. Paul in the 1960s. Similarly, although white workers seemed to

accept the FEPC in the abstract in the 1940s, in that Minneapolis expe-

rienced none of the resistance so prevalent in other cities that tried to in-

tegrate their workforces, this did not mean that they harbored no racism

toward blacks. Their racial animosity was revealed in the 1960s, when

the issue of black civil rights affected their jobs and neighborhoods.

In the 1940s, however, civil rights was an issue that could help build

consensus for Humphrey—so long as it remained mostly an abstract

issue and so long as it was seen as outside of politics. Of course, as black

leaders understood, civil rights was a political issue almost everywhere

else in the country. It was connected to new black urban votes and the

burgeoning cold war with the Soviet Union. And it was about to force

the Democratic party wide open.


When Hubert Humphrey testified before a U.S. Senate committee about

the FEPC, the Democratic senator from Louisiana told him that the

Negro population in the Twin Cities was so small that it did not consti-

tute an economic problem, as it did in the South. Humphrey admitted

this was so but added, “I don’t have to say these things to be elected

mayor.” The old senator replied, “Maybe you’re thinking of greener

fields.”1 Humphrey denied this, claiming that all he wanted to be was

mayor of Minneapolis. But the fact that he was in Washington, having

this conversation with a southern Democrat suggests that he was al-

ready positioning himself in national politics.

Civil rights became an increasingly important, albeit largely sym-

bolic, issue in postwar party politics, not just in partisan positioning

but also in defining divisions within the parties. New northern black

votes exacerbated tensions between northern and southern Democrats.

Democrats had managed to operate effectively despite potentially dis-

ruptive differences over civil rights by avoiding congressional debate

about the issue.2 After the war, a new generation of liberals embraced

the issue in part because they believed in it, but also because they hoped

to make the Democratic party the party of activist, progressive govern-

ment, which required an explicit, public stand against the southern Dem-

ocrats. Such a stand indicated to new black voters that northern Demo-

crats were serious about civil rights, and thus urban machine bosses

interested in those new black voters supported liberals’ civil rights agenda.

The civil rights issue also illuminated tensions within the Republican

party. Republicans were divided between moderate internationalists and

C H A P T E R S E V E N

Civil Rights in Party Politics

111

old-guard, midwestern isolationists. The cold war eventually marginal-

ized the isolationists, but they did not give up their position easily. Even

after Truman persuaded Michigan Republican Arthur Vandenburg of

the need for an active, interventionist foreign policy, others, like Min-

nesota Senator Henrik Shipstead, had to be unseated.3 While supportive

of socially progressive domestic policies and critical of the capitalist

motives behind cold war internationalism, the old isolationists tended

to be xenophobic in their attitudes toward the rest of the world. Inter-

nationalists used the wartime antiracist ideals of tolerance and under-

standing to paint the isolationists as provincial, backwards, and ignorant,

while making their own appeals for global capitalism and free trade ap-

pealingly progressive. Wielding the pluralistic language of brotherhood,

the internationalists also sought to win over the hearts, minds, and mar-

kets of developing nations.4 Their pluralistic rhetoric and concerns about

cold-war economic competition translated into a vague rhetorical sup-

port of civil rights legislation.

Up-and-coming politicians in Minnesota grasped the implications of

civil rights in party politics. Humphrey, a Democrat, and Harold Stassen,

a moderate, young Republican, both used the issue to solidify their own

positions within their respective parties and to position their parties in

national politics. As each tried to prove his own sincerity on the issue,

often by impugning the other’s, civil rights became part of the political

discourse of Minnesota.

Enlightened Tolerance in the Republican Party

A person reading the Minneapolis Tribune in 1947 would have thought

that Republicans were at the fore of civil rights activities. Indeed, we

cannot fully appreciate Minnesota’s changing political landscape with-

out examining how civil rights emerged also as an issue for Republi-

cans. Before Harold Stassen’s serial presidential campaigns made him a

political curiosity, he was considered the most promising politician to

come out of Minnesota since Floyd Olson. He was young, urbane, in-

ternationalist, and ambitious. He had single-handedly wrested control

of the Minnesota Republican party away from the white-haired, isola-

tionist old guard when he became Minnesota’s “boy-governor” in 1938

at the age of thirty-one.5 Co-opting the Farmer-Labor, New Deal program

of social service government and promising to rid the state of corrup-

tion, he defeated Farmer-Labor governor Elmer Benson by one of the

112 Civil Rights in Party Politics

largest margins in state history. His internationalism and acceptance of

the New Deal state made him seem enlightened and liberal, hardly a Re-

publican at all. As governor, Stassen bypassed the old Republican party

horses and picked administratively efficient moderates like himself to

run for Republican offices. Like Humphrey, he cast himself as a fair ar-

biter of government, “above politics,” willing to cooperate with all, bring-

ing order and consensus to politically mired government.6 But Stassen

was no liberal. His 1939 Labor Relations Act required a ten-day waiting

period before striking, and prohibited sympathy picketing.7 Although

he eschewed the state Republican organization, he had ties to East Coast

internationalist Republicans like the Rockefellers and Thomas Dewey

(before he alienated them), and received support from New York million-

aires John Hay Whitney and Alfred Vanderbilt. He opposed federally

subsidized housing to alleviate the postwar housing crunch, which even

conservative Republican Robert Taft supported. The Nation commented

on Stassen, “He has managed to combine in remarkable degree liberal-

ism in the abstract with conservatism in the concrete.”8

Stassen embraced antiracism and internationalism as an indication

of his new brand of moderate, socially cooperative Republicanism. The

virtuous area that floats above the corrupted swamp of party politics is

a coveted place in American political discourse. As one columnist put it,

without a trace of irony, “Non-Political Speeches Effective in Cam-

paign.”9 In Minnesota that place had historically been the domain of

the Farmer-Labor party and its broadly humanitarian goals of eco-

nomic and social justice. Economic justice and social security had been

“outside,” or “above,” politics because neither Republicans nor Demo-

crats were addressing those issues before the 1930s. With the success of

the New Deal, however, these issues became proper “political issues,” the

focus of political competition. Antiracism, the United Nations, and in-

terracial education were examples of new, vaguely humanitarian issues

identified by Stassen as “outside politics,” and hence signifiers of social

cooperation. Governor Edward Thye (whom Stassen chose to replace

himself after he joined the Navy during the war) created the Governor’s

Interracial Commission in 1943. He also sponsored Alice B. Sickels’s pro-

posal for an International Park celebrating Minnesota’s racial diversity,

declared statewide “interracial weeks,” and spoke on the importance of

race relations to local groups.10 Thye’s successor, Luther Youngdahl

(elected in 1946, after Stassen chose Thye to run for Senate), supported


a permanent federal FEPC and also a state FEPC for Minnesota. He de-

segregated the Minnesota National Guard in 1948. Youngdahl’s interest

in better race relations came out of his Christian interest in humankind

rather than Republican principle, but humanitarian politics had always

been the hallmark of the Farmer-Labor party, not of the Republicans.11

While Thye and Youngdahl’s antiracism was sincere, if also politically

useful, Stassen’s own interest in antiracism was more transparent, more

frenzied, and somewhat belied by the anti-Semitism of the 1938 guber-

natorial election.12 From the start, Stassen pursued the Republican pres-

idential nomination, focusing his energy on two related, nationally rel-

evant issues—the United Nations and interracial relations. They were

new, moral, and, most importantly, national concerns, which allowed

him to transcend both traditional party politics and Minnesota.13 A pro-

ponent of Wilsonian cooperation and international goodwill, Stassen

positioned himself against the old guard of the Republican party, ap-

pealing to younger, concerned, even idealistic voters. As apparent facili-

tator of harmonious race relations, he positioned his party against the

archaic prejudices of the Democratic party.

Committed to American leadership in the postwar world, Stassen

sought to destroy traditional isolationism. Devoted to Wendell Willkie’s

“One World” vision of international cooperation, he participated in the

founding of the United Nations in San Francisco in April 1945. In April

1947, he met with Joseph Stalin at the Kremlin to discuss, among other

things, international control of atomic energy.14 Behind slogans of world

peace and prosperity lay the same rationalizing order that Stassen had

brought to his administration of Minnesota government. He wanted to

transcend petty ethnic and national disputes, devious diplomacy, secret

pacts, and the resulting economic disasters of rising tariffs and devalued

currencies in order to create a stable economic environment by which

living standards could be improved, profits made, and war avoided.15

After obligatory statements about universal human rights, the meat of

this internationalist program was coordination and regulation of air-

ports, seaports, banking, and trade, in short, creating a stable economic

order in which the United States, as the only nation with a viable eco-

nomic infrastructure after the war, would be the first to profit.16

The strongest resistance to this vision of international economic coop-

eration came from isolationists within Stassen’s own party in Minnesota.

Senator Henrik Shipstead was one of only two senators who voted against


the ratification of the United Nations Charter in 1945; earlier he had op-

posed Roosevelt’s intervention in World War II. Shipstead had been the

first Farmer-Labor senator in 1922. He remained in the Farmer-Labor

party until that party’s support of Roosevelt’s interventionist policies

forced him into the Republican party in 1940, where he headed the isola-

tionist faction. Shipstead was a classic midwestern progressive Republi-

can: to the left on domestic issues, antimonopoly, pro-union, an advocate

of public-owned utilities and railroads, and xenophobic on international

relations.17

In 1946 Stassen selected Thye to run against Shipstead in the Repub-

lican Senate primary, which became a referendum on midwestern isola-

tionism. For Stassen, it was a chance to prove his leadership to the inter-

nationalist Republican party heads in New York. Already campaigning

for the 1948 presidential nomination, he announced the upcoming pri-

mary battle between the isolationist Shipstead and internationalist Thye

first to the New York Herald Tribune, and only later in Minnesota.18 Ship-

stead accepted the challenge and fought what would be the last serious

campaign for traditional anti-imperialist isolationism in Minnesota.

Denouncing the “Anglo-Russo-American alliance” for preserving “rival

imperialisms” and forcing peacetime military training on the American

people, Shipstead warned of “all such schemes which would transform

our constitutional form of government into an international superstate

dictatorship such as Mr. Stassen advocates.” He beseeched Minnesotans

to stop “the power and money of the big Eastern internationalists” from

dragging America into World War III.19

Shipstead’s words embodied not only traditional xenophobic fears of

international involvement but also the old Farmer-Labor critique of

eastern monopolists, big-moneyed lords, and Wall Street. It was, in fact,

the same Farmer-Labor rhetoric that the left wing was deploying against

Humphrey in their struggle within the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party.

Like Humphrey, Stassen used the cooperative language of interracial

and international brotherhood to marginalize the traditional populist

rhetoric of the old Farmer-Laborites. Like interracial cooperation, inter-

national cooperation promised peace, prosperity, and liberation from

irrational prejudices. It trumped older economic critiques to which

those who resisted the tide toward cold war internationalism appealed.

In 1946 Stassen began his 1948 presidential nomination bid by head-

ing the national coordination of American Brotherhood Week. “Stassen


Heads Drive for Racial Equality,” read the tag in the Minneapolis Tri-

bune.20 This project received prominent coverage in the Tribune, while

Humphrey’s efforts to pass a municipal FEPC were all but ignored in

the Minneapolis papers.21 Stassen also traveled to Washington to speak

before an emergency meeting of the National Council for a Permanent

FEPC in January 1946.22 Editor Cecil Newman protested Stassen’s invita-

tion to the meeting. Stassen had done nothing for blacks in Minnesota,

Newman claimed, and his antilabor policies as governor actually hurt

them. Newman allowed that some Republicans were sincere in their

FEPC support. But Stassen was not one of them.23

Heading national brotherhood week and offering tacit support to the

FEPC gave Stassen national attention, while also highlighting the Dem-

ocrats’ inadequacies on this issue. Minnesota politicians often positioned

themselves on racial issues through images of the Democratic South. The

South appeared regularly in the Minneapolis dailies during the 1940s.

From throwaway snippets about southern race obsessions to detailed

reports on lynchings, the papers were fascinated by the strange land be-

low the Mason-Dixon line.24 As portrayed in the pages of the Minneapo-

lis Tribune and the Minneapolis Star-Journal, the South was a land of law-

less demagoguery, characterized by “the brutality and barbarism of a

type of crime which has been hideously identified with this country for

years.”25 The Minneapolis papers reported racial problems as southern

problems. They editorialized about the Scottsboro case and southern

lynchings.26 Articles like “Southern States Are Cheating Negro Veterans

of GI Benefits” affirmed the idea that racism was a southern peculiarity.27

But racial discrimination occurred frequently in Minneapolis. Black

children were barred from Minneapolis summer camps, and black home

buyers were limited by restrictive covenants.28 But these stories were re-

ported as isolated incidents. For most Minnesotans, racism was a south-

ern phenomenon. And the South was Democratic.

Images of race and the benighted South had been part of Minnesota’s

cultural and political discourse since the Civil War, but the emergence

of race and civil rights as issues after World War II gave them new rele-

vance. The Minneapolis Tribune and the Minneapolis Star-Journal were

owned by Republican businessman John Cowles Sr.29 Cowles and exec-

utive editor Gideon Seymour supported the moderate internationalist

Stassen faction of the Republican party in Minnesota, and the north-

eastern establishment of the party nationally.30 The Minneapolis papers


favored a bipartisan, increasingly anti-Soviet foreign policy and vigilantly

covered “Labor’s Troubled Front” during the postwar strike wave. Their

editorials frequently attacked “labor bossism.”31 The papers also cov-

ered issues of race, discrimination, and southern demagoguery. Despite

left-wing criticism to the contrary, Cowles’s interest in racial discrimi-

nation seems genuine. As renowned journalist Carl T. Rowan recalled,

Cowles led by example, hiring Rowan as a reporter for the Tribune in

1948 when no other major paper even looked at the young African Amer-

ican’s resume.32 Cowles treated Rowan as an equal, inviting him to so-

cial events when others at the paper refused. When Rowan proposed

that he travel down South to research a series about being black in post-

war America, the paper unexpectedly approved it. The series, “How Far

from Slavery,” ran in 1951 to great acclaim.

However sincere Cowles’s opposition to racism, his papers’ coverage

of racial issues and the South nonetheless upheld a traditional partisan

bias that tied Minnesota Democrats by virtue of party loyalty to an-

cient, irrational racial hatreds. Stories about southern racism exploited

Democrats’ vulnerability (the South) and at the same time propagan-

dized Republican enlightenment and moderation. In the pages of Min-

neapolis papers, southern racism and political corruption were insepa-

rable, and both were connected to the Democratic party. Articles about

the poll tax and southern blacks’ attempts to vote in the recently banned

“white primaries” reminded readers that black people did not vote in

the solidly Democratic South.33 The paper followed Democrats’ internal

struggle over white supremacy, as southern Democrats “prepared to carry

their battle for ‘white supremacy’ to the party’s national convention” in

1944.34 Stories of lynching trials revealed that southern Democrats ac-

cused northern Democrats of “meddling” and “interference” in the trials,

charging that northerners were pandering to northern Negro votes by

prosecuting southerners.35 This would appear to exculpate northern Dem-

ocrats who were fighting for racial justice down South, but at the same

time, the suggestion of political motivations had the effect of dragging

northern Democrats into the mire of southern politics, reemphasizing

that racism was a Democratic problem.

The Tribune’s coverage of Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo con-

trasted Bilbo’s corrupt, racist demagoguery with the Republican party’s

evenhanded moderation and dignity. Bilbo led efforts to expatriate black

Americans to Africa. He wrote “Dear Dago” and “Dear Kike” letters to


correspondents who had written to him about the FEPC. He called for

violence against blacks who tried to vote in the “white primary,” which

was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1944.36 He received

kickbacks from war contractors. As one editorial noted, Bilbo was good

for the Republicans because he was “a continuing advertisement of the

worst side of the Democratic party.”37 In January 1947 a bipartisan effort

was made to unseat Bilbo on the basis of his intimidation of Negro vot-

ers and his illegal dealings with war contractors. The bipartisanship of

the effort, however, was muted in the Star-Journal. For three days the

paper headlined the Bilbo fight, beginning with “GOP Sets Battle to

Stop Bilbo,” on January 2. On January 3, the large headline read, “Battle

to Bar Bilbo Ties Up Senate,” while directly underneath was “Knutson

[Republican congressman from Minnesota] Offers Tax Cut Plan; Be-

nefits Worker, Earner, Aged,” implying that while Democrats were im-

peding congressional business, Republicans were staying on track with

beneficial tax cuts for the aged.38 But Knutson’s tax cuts were a direct at-

tack on the New Deal, and Knutson, moreover, was allied to southern

Democrats in his opposition to a larger federal, or as he called it, “com-

munistic,” government. On January 4 the headline read, “Bilbo Fight to

Finish Voted by Republicans,” over a UP release that featured Republican

Robert Taft as the calm upholder of congressional decorum and recti-

tude.39 Throughout the rest of the week the paper kept the Bilbo battle

alive in numerous cartoons and editorial comments.

The Minneapolis press, then, supplemented Republicans’ attempts to

reap political gain from Democratic disrepute. Civil rights and racial is-

sues were useful to the Republicans as long as they were cast in terms of

southern corruption and Christian brotherhood, in other words, as long

as they could be used against Democrats and isolationists.

Humphrey and the Democratic Party

Humphrey and the Minnesota liberals who formed Americans for Dem-

ocratic Action (ADA) were part of a larger group of young, largely aca-

demic, northern liberals who sought to remake the Democratic party in

what they saw as the tradition of the New Deal, a coalition of groups

who “view their government as a partner.”40 As historian Sidney Milkis

and others have shown, Roosevelt had begun the process of replacing

the Democratic bosses with his own administrative agencies and social

service networks during the New Deal.41 While the Roosevelt revolution


began the transformation, the inherent inertia in state organizations

and party structures resisted it, so that old-style Democrats still held

positions of power in the party (and, indeed, would continue to until

party regulations were rewritten in 197242). As their declining status in

the party became clearer, especially over issues like civil rights, old-style

Democrats jealously guarded what remained of their power from lib-

eral upstarts and especially labor unionists. The ADA saw the labor

movement as perhaps the most important part of the new Democratic

party. Even as Humphrey tried to marginalize the labor movement in

Minneapolis politics, he was trying to make it a “full-fledged partner” in

the national Democratic party. This was not a contradiction. Humphrey

defined the labor movement’s role as a partner in, not a leader of, a

party based on issues and government-fostered economic opportunity.43

This vision necessarily excluded the southern Democrats, who were hos-

tile to labor unions and expanded government powers. While Republi-

cans emphasized southern domination of the Democratic party, north-

ern liberals like Humphrey used civil rights to show that the Democratic

party was confronting its southern reactionaries.

Humphrey built his national reputation as a liberal Democrat on his

interest in “human relations.” He testified about the Minneapolis FEPC

before the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare in June 1947.44

In one frenzied month in early 1948, he spoke before civil rights ac-

tivists in Kansas City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Omaha, and New York

City.45 He was the national chair of the National Committee for Fair

Play in Bowling, an organization connected to the Detroit CIO that sought

to instill tolerance among the rank-and-file working class. For all of

these activities he sought national publicity. As Humphrey put it to

columnist Frank Kingdon, “I have an unholy desire to communicate to

eastern audiences.”46 All of the articles that were written about the dy-

namic, up-and-coming young mayor of Minneapolis stressed his work

in “human relations.”47 This publicity helped Humphrey’s political ca-

reer, but his career was inseparable from the existence of a liberal Dem-

ocratic party. Humphrey traveled around the country speaking about

civil rights not just to fulfill his own personal ambitions but to convince

party leaders of the importance of “liberalizing” the Democratic party,

which meant, specifically, standing up to the southern Democrats.

As Humphrey saw it, the civil rights issue was but a means of identi-

fying and isolating those elements that stood in the way of what he re-


ferred to as a “real, liberal Democratic party.”48 Humphrey’s call for civil

rights made the South the new evil against which liberals waged battle.

Instead of eastern banks and monopolists, the old evils of Farmer-Labor

days, Humphrey rallied outrage against southern demagoguery. This

displacement is captured in the phrase “civil rights over states’ rights,” a

play on the old Farmer-Labor slogan “human rights over property rights.”

For New Dealers like editor Cecil Newman and Humphrey,“states’ rights”

and “property rights” were virtually interchangeable since both inhib-

ited the expansion of federal power. Vilifying the South, then, tightened

the association between postwar liberalism and a beneficent federal state,

while at the same time nullifying Republican efforts to identify the Dem-

ocratic party with white supremacy and ignorance.

Southern white supremacists were not the only Democrats who stood

in the way of a liberal Democratic party. Although the Democratic Na-

tional Committee (DNC) understood the importance of new black voters

to the Democratic party, they did not share liberals’ somewhat theoret-

ical vision of an issue-oriented, liberal party, nor did they understand

what was at stake in the left-liberal debate over communism. For anti-

communist liberals, the most effective way to neutralize communist in-

fluence in progressive organizations was to co-opt the issues that attracted

progressives to communists, such as civil rights. But that required a view

of politics as being about issues. Traditional Democrats viewed politics

in terms of power and patronage. The DNC, moreover, was staffed by

an entrenched Democratic hierarchy. As late as December 1947, Hum-

phrey had to remind the DNC to send materials to the key labor papers

in Minnesota.49 Many Democrats identified the “disturbing signs of a

transformation of the party along Socialist or class lines” with “radicals”

like Humphrey.50 Moreover, the DNC constantly evaded Humphrey’s

requests for money to fight the well-organized left wing in Minnesota.

“We need organizers. We need money,” Humphrey pleaded in September

1947, painting the communist threat as starkly as possible.51 Humphrey

tried everything to wring support from the DNC: he consulted public

relations experts on how to deal with machine Democrats, he cajoled,

he flattered, he threatened. Humphrey spent $4,500 of his own money

to support the Democratic party in Minnesota.52 Still, the DNC largely

ignored him.

What bothered Humphrey most was that the DNC considered Min-

nesota, and more to the point, Humphrey himself, to be unimportant


and irrelevant in the upcoming 1948 election.53 Humphrey was trying to

build a Democratic party in Minnesota that was aligned firmly and

squarely with the national party, and yet that national party ignored

him and the ideological threats to its own existence. Humphrey wrote

to Howard McGrath and Gael Sullivan, the DNC chairman and execu-

tive secretary, about their rebuffs: “Am I, and are my people out here in

Minnesota . . . to be disregarded by the National Committee and to be

cast aside as rather unwanted personnel?”54 Local Democrats told Hum-

phrey that the national party did not care about what was going on in

Minnesota. If that was the case, Humphrey asked, why be loyal to the

Democratic party at all? In a letter to Sullivan, Humphrey wrote:

I have something to contribute in politics. . . . I believe that I have madesufficient contacts throughout the country so that my presence withinthe Democratic party is of some little importance.55

At once pandering and defiant, this statement sheds light on Hum-

phrey’s participation in the civil rights fight at the Democratic conven-

tion in July 1948. The “contacts throughout the country” to which Hum-

phrey referred were in large part connected to his civil rights activities.

Humphrey’s national ties were with a small group of northern liberals

and labor leaders whose growing power in the Democratic party poten-

tially threatened the leadership of the DNC. Humphrey was trying to

gain acceptance from the Democratic leaders while at the same time chal-

lenging their leadership.

Aggravating these problems in Minnesota was the DNC’s method of

dispensing patronage and money. Finances were funneled through a

Democratic operative named Stephen Harrington and a group of St.

Paul Democrats who resented Humphrey’s upstart attitude and liberal

views and refused Humphrey’s requests for money. Ironically, Humphrey

had originally supported the decision to set up the independent finance

committee through the St. Paul bosses in 1946, since it removed Demo-

cratic money from the left wing, then in control of the DFL. Harring-

ton, a veteran of Edward Crump’s Memphis machine, was no friendlier

to Humphrey’s faction.56 Indeed, Harrington and the St. Paul Demo-

crats were so put off by Humphrey and his allies that they apparently

struck a financial deal with the left wing in January, following the left

wing’s announcement that it would take the DFL party into Wallace’s new

Progressive party. Baffled, Humphrey wrote to the head of the DNC,


“Now, get this Gael, this same Orville Olson [with whom Harrington

had struck a deal] is campaign manager out here in Minnesota for the

Wallace forces. What the hell is going on? Frankly I don’t understand

this kind of politics and at the present moment I am sick and tired of

it.”57 Humphrey railed against the deal-making politics and weird loyal-

ties of the Democratic machines. Bad local machines, he wrote, stood

“squarely in the road blocking the way to decent, liberal, national poli-

tics.”58 He knew this from personal experience as well as American po-

litical history. Humphrey and the ADA turned to unions and liberal or-

ganizations for funding, which further exacerbated their relationship

with old Democrats in Minnesota.

Minnesota Democrats worried that Humphrey’s reckless liberalism,

especially on civil rights, strained the cohesion of the Democratic party.

Loyal to their southern counterparts, they were perfect targets for the en-

lightened Republican press. In 1941 St. Paul Democrats invited Theodore

Bilbo to speak at their annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner.59 In 1948

Mississippi Senator John Sparkman spoke at the dinner. In the name of

partisan unity, Minnesota Democrats opposed bringing civil rights into

the political arena. Shortly after Truman endorsed a broad program of

civil rights reforms, including an antilynching law and a permanent

FEPC, Democrat E. J. Larsen wrote to a friend:

I think Mr. Truman is the most badly advised President since old ManTaft. Just why in Missouri he had to spring that Nigger business rightnow is fine proof of the amateur management of his advisers.60

Significantly, Larsen was an ardent New Deal Democrat. He felt, how-

ever, that civil rights had never been part of Roosevelt’s program, and

that it threatened to destroy that program by sowing division in the

party. In this he was correct. Truman’s bid for the black vote and his en-

dorsement of federal enforcement of civil rights were new.61

Old Democrats were also wary of the idea of “good government,” or

“issues-oriented politics,” which they rightly understood was an attack on

patronage. Charles Munn, secretary to Democratic Congressman William

Gallagher, identified himself as someone who “believes that political

patronage is an American institution to maintain interest and concern

in our democratic government by the rank and file of the electorate.”

He was complaining to Stephen Harrington that the DNC no longer

took seriously its duty to secure party loyalty at the grass roots through


patronage.62 Munn’s suspicions have since become the subject of many

treatises on the transformation of the Democratic party, which trans-

ferred power from local party functionaries to academic experts and

policymakers, and eventually led to the weakening of parties in Ameri-

can political life.63

Humphrey and his liberal allies saw the St. Paul bosses, like the south-

ern Democrats, as accidents of historical contingency, holdovers from

an earlier era when ethnicity and stubborn loyalties determined party

affiliation. The leaders of the ADA saw themselves as the Democratic

party. When a schoolboy wrote to Humphrey requesting information

on the Democratic party, Humphrey sent him a copy of the ADA pro-

gram, remarking that he did not have a copy of the Democratic plat-

form handy, but that most Democrats followed the ADA.64 Unfortu-

nately for ADA liberals, “most Democrats” were not thinking like them.

But by exploiting new northern black votes and the balance-of-power

strategy outlined by Henry Lee Moon, the ADA liberals hoped to trans-

form the Democratic party from within.

Civil Rights and the Democratic Party in the Countryside

As in most midwestern states, Minnesota’s rural counties were tradi-

tionally rock-ribbed Republican. During its years of existence, the Farmer-

Labor party (1923–44) had disrupted rural Republican dominance. Dur-

ing those years rural voters, who represented over half of the state’s

population, flitted between Republicans and Farmer-Laborites. By the

1940s, anticommunism, antilaborism, and prosperity had put farmers

firmly in the Republican camp. The disappearance of the Farmer-Labor

party in 1944 also contributed to the resurgence of the Republican party

in rural areas, as those rural Farmer-Laborites reverted to the Republi-

can party. Explaining his decision to run as a Republican in 1944, ninth-

district Farmer-Labor Congressman Harold Hagen wrote, “I cannot

win as a Democrat.”65

If the DFL was to become a viable party in Minnesota, it would have

to address the historic absence of and prejudice against the Democratic

party in rural areas. Though steadily decreasing, the rural population

still represented half of the state’s population in the 1940s.66 DFL organ-

izers hoped to revive and build on what remained of the old Farmer-

Labor organizations, as well as tap into the established network of farm-

ing cooperatives, then under attack from Republicans. As it turned out,


Truman and Secretary of Agriculture Charles Brannan’s liberal farm

programs brought farmers into the Democratic party in the 1948 elec-

tion. But DFL organizers could not have counted on that in 1946 when

they began preparations for the election. What they did know was that

there was tremendous antipathy to the labor movement and Hum-

phrey’s “big-city” demeanor in the countryside, which was stoked and

cultivated by Republicans.

Republicans exploited recurrent tensions between farmers and the

labor movement left over from the Farmer-Labor blowout of 1938 and

given new life by the postwar strike wave. Railroad companies, mills,

and business groups publicized what they saw as the selfish excesses of

the labor movement in rural papers across the state. The Great North-

ern Railway Company ran full page ads in the Farmers’ Union Herald

professing to be anxious to provide maximum boxcar requirements for

the 1948 crop but warning that there might be a shortage of boxcars due

to recent strikes.67 An American Iron and Steel Institute ad headed “More

Headaches for the Farmer” showed the long-suffering farmer working

overtime to clothe and feed the needy throughout the world, as well as

the folks at home, while steelworkers wanted yet another wage increase,

even though they were “already among the highest paid wage-earners in

America.”68

DFL organizers and their union allies countered these conservative

claims and attempted to deflate rural voters’ rancor toward the labor

movement.69 In lecture series, conferences, and pamphlets, they empha-

sized the common economic interests of farmers and workers, summed

up in the slogan: “Better wages for workers means better incomes for

farmers.”70 Organized labor’s drive for higher wages and job security

helped farmers. Labor, in turn, supported farm price supports, which

kept farmers’ incomes high enough so that they and their families could

buy the farm machinery and consumer goods that workers produced.

In addition to arguments about purchasing power, DFL organizers

found “intergroup relations” to be useful in rehabilitating labor’s tarnished

image in the countryside. Beginning in 1946, the United Labor Committee

for Human Rights sponsored filmstrips, movies, and lectures around

the state to educate individuals about “the human error of racial and re-

ligious bigotry.” The head of the committee, Hubert Schon, believed

that the activities helped the labor movement’s reputation among non-

labor groups, especially in rural areas, since people regarded them as


“an unselfish community enterprise” sponsored by organized labor.71

In November 1947, Schon reported on the committee’s rural activities:

Rural audiences are very interested with a human rights programsponsored by organized labor. Without exception at the eight meetings I have held, people have raised the question, Why does labor sponsor ahuman rights program? and favorable responses have occurred.72

Schon took labor’s human rights program into nonpolitical sites, like

churches, schools, PTAs, and civic clubs. The program’s leaders were

talking not about labor’s interests, but rather about something of inter-

est to all of society. Worried about Humphrey’s labor connections, one

rural adviser suggested that the DFL adopt Republican Governor Luther

Youngdahl’s successful tactics of choosing issues like human relations

that showed he “is putting people ahead of politics.”73

Schon helped organize the Northwest Farmer and Workers Education

Conference, an effort to reunite farmers and workers in anticipation of

the election. Humphrey was the opening speaker, while James Patton,

the president of the national Farmers’ Union provided the keynote. The

conference included people from the cooperative movement and from

both the left and right wings of the labor movement. Civil rights ac-

tivists served on the planning committee and participated in the confer-

ence as resources. In addition to Schon, the planning committee included

unionists Nellie Stone Johnson and Rubin Latz, Anna K. Schwarz of the

Mayor’s Council on Human Relations, William Seabron of the Urban

League, and Samuel Schiener of the Minnesota Jewish Council. Invited

as resources were Cecil Newman, editor of the Minneapolis Spokesman;

Albert Allen, union leader and head of the Minneapolis NAACP; the

Urban League’s S. Vincent Owens; and Genevieve Steefel and Wilfred

Leland from the Minneapolis Fair Employment Practices Committee.74

Of these, Johnson, Seabron, Newman, Allen, and Owens were black, a

fact they would have said was not pertinent to anything. However, five

black leaders at a farmers’ education conference suggests the importance

of intergroup relations to reestablishing farmer-labor relations.

Farm and cooperative papers paid attention to racial and religious is-

sues. In early 1947 the Midland Cooperator reviewed the book Color Blind,

a story about white and Negro hostesses at the Stagedoor Canteen, a

dance hall that admitted servicemen of all races. The reviewer com-

mented that prejudice was based in exploited labor, observing that the


cooperative movement “by its profession of equality of all men as con-

sumers who serve themselves, is trying to get at the economic basis of

wage serfdom and Jim Crow.”75 Other articles included a critique of the

racial theories of fascist groups in the United States, and a story of a Ne-

gro vet in North Carolina who won a Cadillac in a Kiwanis Club lottery,

which was never delivered after the Kiwanis learned the winner was

black.76 The Farmers’ Union Herald attacked the South’s support of the

Klan in an article in September 1948, and ran cartoons showing how

racism subverted democracy.77

Their interest was not in black people per se but in facilitating a gen-

eral attitude of tolerance and open-mindedness. The rural readers of

these papers would probably never interact with the state’s black popu-

lation, even as cooperators. There was no mention of a new black-owned

cooperative store in St. Paul’s Rondo area, which black newspapers

lauded.78 Organizers, however, wanted rural audiences to understand

the principles of tolerance and healthy intergroup relations because

these principles could be applied as well to the antilabor situation in the

countryside. Rural Methodist minister Edward A. Day appreciated the

connection between racism and antilabor prejudice when he wrote to

thank the Central Labor Union for its human relations programs, and

remarked that “one of the big problems any liberal minister in a rural

community faces is how to get farmers and small business people to

think in interdependent rather than in anti-labor (and often in anti-

coop and anti-racial) terms.”79

These efforts helped lay the groundwork for Humphrey’s 1948 Senate

campaign. Humphrey’s staff worried constantly about his popularity in

the countryside.80 One of the main problems was Humphrey’s connec-

tions to the labor movement. Wrote small-town judge Vincent Hollaren,

“if I were you I would not let the impression get out into the rural areas

that you were being run by the labor crowd. Let them endorse you and

pass the word along among each other; but to shout it to the farmer

that you were the choice of the Unions will do no good.”81 Humphrey’s

advisors likewise worried that labor’s radio programs were being picked

up in the country and damaging his campaign.82

The ideas in intergroup relations programs informed the way Hum-

phrey and his supporters viewed and ultimately resolved the conflict

between farmers and workers. For instance, they talked about the farmers’

rancor toward organized labor as immutable, eternal, and irrational.


“But remember, the farmer has a native suspicion of Labor Unions” re-

minded one writer.83 An activist from Indiana commented, “Most of

our Indiana farmers have no love for labor, and neither they nor I can

explain the reason for this except that there has never been a common

basis on which they could reach a mutual understanding.”84 Such in-

grained emotional prejudices prevented the two groups from coming

together to protect their shared economic interests and made farmers

vulnerable to conservative divide-and-rule strategies that pitted labor

against rural interests. To eradicate these ancient antagonisms, Humphrey

and the DFL organizers borrowed solutions from their own intergroup

relations programs. Humphrey, for instance, identified one of the causes

of the prejudice as the lack of interaction between the two groups: “The

main problem is the isolation of the two groups. They rarely get a

chance to see each other on a friendly basis. Isolated, they stand hostile

or at least suspicious.”85 This was a popular explanation for any preju-

dice, particularly racial prejudice. The thrust of much civil rights activ-

ity was providing opportunities for the two races to mingle naturally,

such as in the “Inter-Racial Vacation Visits,” sponsored by Twin Cities

churches, which placed black children in farm homes for a couple weeks

in the summer.86 Likewise, Humphrey’s suggestion was to try to get the

trade unionist together with the farmer, where they could talk. As one

writer noted, much of the prejudice could be dispelled in private conver-

sation.87 Educational programs were another popular solution to over-

coming prejudice and racism, and many advisers and organizers saw ed-

ucation as the key to freeing rural people of their antilabor prejudices.88

The point here is not that rural organizers or farmers were interested

in a few thousand African Americans in the Twin Cities. They were not.

Rather, DFL party-builders were interested in how the ideas of toler-

ance and understanding might bring farmers into a liberal Democratic

party. Farmers and workers had tolerated each other when they were in

the Farmer-Labor party. They had understood their common interests

then. But they had understood their interests in terms of solidarity against

the East and monopoly capitalism. As that rhetoric became irrelevant,

DFL organizers brought the farmer and worker together through an

educational campaign about tolerance, which emphasized common

economic interests in a strong state, rather than a class-based move-

ment. The language of human rights and the understanding of preju-

dice and tolerance provided an alternative, new way of thinking about a


farmer–labor alliance that was neither movement-based (as the old

Farmer-Labor party had been), nor driven by ethnic prejudices (as the

old Farmer-Labor party had been), but rather based on tolerance and

fostered by education. In talking about the farmer–labor conflict in terms

of prejudice, politics and the experiences of the Farmer-Labor party fell

out of the picture, and farmers and workers were able to reforge a loose

coalition on the basis of their interests in Washington, and not their

identities as common folk. Thus, to the extent that activists like Schon

saw antiracism as a way to decrease the farmers’ animus toward the labor

movement, antiracism was a tool in efforts to reforge a farmer–labor

coalition in the Democratic party.

Democrat Humphrey and Republican Stassen were both rising stars

in their respective parties in the 1940s. Unlike past Minnesota politi-

cians, neither was identified with farming interests. Rather each tried to

position himself in a relevant position with regard to his party’s future

needs. Although both Humphrey and Stassen used civil rights to plot

their futures in national politics, civil rights per se played very different

roles in the futures each imagined. For Stassen and most Republicans,

civil rights was useful to divide Democrats and defeat isolationism. It

was useful only so long as it remained a moral issue about correct and

civilized behavior, and only so long as the Democrats were identified

with white supremacy. Republicans had no argument about how black

civil rights fit into their political program, or how their party might

address the problems of African Americans. For liberal blacks and

northern New Deal Democrats, on the other hand, civil rights were

connected to the debates raging around the shape and scope of the fed-

eral government, and inextricably bound to liberal northern Democrats

attempts to subdue the South’s influence in the party. During the 1948

election, civil rights would also become enmeshed in the heated debates

over Truman’s cold war policy and anticommunism, as Henry Wallace

embraced civil rights to bolster his third-party campaign and his argu-

ments against Truman’s anti-Soviet policies.


Hubert Humphrey became Minnesota’s first Democratic senator in

1948 by reforging the old Farmer-Labor coalition of farmers, liberals,

and workers in a new kind of Democratic party, which manifested polit-

ical leverage in terms of organized votes, not control of party machin-

ery or patronage. To reshape Minnesota’s Democratic party in this way,

Humphrey had to eliminate both the left wing and the old Democrats

from leadership in the DFL party. The civil rights issue helped him de-

legitimate their influence and realize his own vision of a liberal Demo-

cratic party based on economic issues and interest groups, not section,

class, or ethnicity.

The National Context: The Democrats’ “Northern Strategy”

The central problem for Democrats in 1948 was how to insure that the

“unhappy alliance” of southern white supremacists, northern city bosses,

liberals, and workers would continue to function in the election year.

The common assumption was that Roosevelt had held these disparate

forces together through his enormous personality and political charm.

With Roosevelt gone, and a Kansas City machine boss at the helm of

the party, most observers expected the party to dissolve.1

In November 1947 Clark Clifford, President Truman’s political strate-

gist, wrote a forty-three-page memo to the president, outlining an elec-

toral strategy for the fragmented party. Clifford suggested that Truman

move to the left on domestic issues to appeal to voters in key “pressure

groups” as boldly as possible. The groups he singled out were farmers,

C H A P T E R E I G H T

The 1948 Election and the Triumph of the

Democratic Political Order

129

organized labor, liberals, Negroes, Jews, Catholics, and Italians.2 New

on the list of targeted “pressure groups” were black voters. Although

many African Americans had voted for Roosevelt and the New Deal, the

Democratic party had never specifically courted the black vote.3 The

1948 election was different, however. As Clifford explained:

Unless the Administration makes a determined campaign to help theNegro (and everybody else) on the problems of high prices and housing—and capitalizes politically on its efforts—the Negro vote is already lost.Unless there are new and real efforts (as distinguished from mere polit-ical gestures which are today thoroughly understood and strongly resentedby sophisticated Negro leaders), the Negro bloc, which, certainly inIllinois and probably in New York and Ohio, does hold the balance ofpower, will go Republican.4

Clifford assured the president that “[a]s always, the South can be con-

sidered safely Democratic and in formulating national policy, it can be

safely ignored.”5

Another reason Truman paid attention to civil rights was the third-

party candidacy of Henry Wallace. Wallace’s decision to run against Tru-

man in 1948 briefly revived the left wing and further exposed the fiction

of Democratic “unity.” A solid New Dealer who had formerly been sec-

retary of agriculture, vice president, and secretary of commerce, Wal-

lace opposed Truman’s hostile position toward the Soviets.6 Like many

progressives after World War II, Wallace had hoped the United States

would take the lead in planning a peace that would carry economic pros-

perity to common people around the world—a kind of international

New Deal. Attaching American international involvement to the com-

mon man’s revolutionary progress allowed progressives to embrace an

American internationalism untainted by imperialism.7 But Truman’s

“get tough” attitude toward the Soviet Union, begun with his withdrawal

of American lend-lease aid to the Soviets in May 1945, dashed their

hopes for a revolutionary century of the common man and turned many

against Truman.8

Truman’s policies gradually won acceptance among liberals as the

Western allies wrangled with the Soviets over Berlin and Greece, and as

communists took over one eastern European nation after another. But

liberals still opposed militaristic solutions to the conflict, such as the

Truman Doctrine of April 1947. After Truman unveiled the Marshall

Plan to rebuild Europe in June 1947, many liberals endorsed his biparti-

130 The 1948 Election

san foreign policy. The humanitarian goals of the Marshall Plan and its

explicit promise to fight “hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos” echoed

wartime ideals of an international New Deal. Moreover, the Marshall

Plan represented the activist and practical initiatives of a strong federal

government. Among its main opponents were conservative Republicans

who opposed the power such a plan gave to the federal government and

the taxation needed to support it. For liberals like Hubert Humphrey

who sought to legitimate federal power at home, the Marshall Plan played

a key role in domestic as well as international politics.9

Despite the humanitarian promise of the Marshall Plan, Wallace and

other progressives, including Elmer Benson and old Farmer-Laborites

in Minnesota, continued to oppose Truman’s anti-Soviet policies. They

believed that the common people of the world would reap no benefit

from American capitalism unless it was tempered by cooperation with

the Soviet Union. They believed that the Marshall Plan inflamed anti-

communism, since it was justified as a means to prevent communism

from taking root in Western Europe. For the Left, Truman’s anticom-

munist foreign and domestic policies went beyond betrayal of liberal

wartime aspirations; they threatened civil liberties at home and world

peace abroad. The bipartisan support for Truman’s foreign policy made

a third party the only alternative. Wallace announced his decision to

run as a third-party candidate in December 1947, and his supporters

quickly organized the Progressive party, the national chairman of which

was Elmer Benson.

The Progressive party offered a remedy to what many viewed as the

Democratic party’s increasing conservatism after Roosevelt’s death. It

grew out of the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA). Founded in De-

cember 1946, the PCA combined the CIO-funded National Citizens for

Political Action Committee (NCPAC) and the Independent Citizens Com-

mittee for Arts, Sciences, and Professions (ICCASP).10 Headed by New

Dealer C. B. Baldwin, the group originally included CIO leaders Philip

Murray and Jack Kroll, civil rights activists like Clark Foreman and

Mary McCleod Bethune, and in Minnesota, Benson. Like Americans for

Democratic Action (ADA), the PCA sought an alternative to the Jim

Crow, machine-dominated Democratic party. But unlike the ADA, they

welcomed communists into their organizations and had strong organiza-

tional ties to southern civil rights organizations like the Southern Con-

ference for Human Welfare (SCHW). The SCHW had organized Wallace’s

The 1948 Election 131

successful tour of the South in the fall of 1947, during which Wallace

defied segregation, ate and traveled with blacks, and spoke before inte-

grated audiences. While northern ADA liberals worried about incorpo-

rating civil rights in the Democratic program, Wallace was down South,

in the dragon’s mouth, getting pelted with rotten eggs and tomatoes for

his stand against white supremacy.11

Clark Clifford had anticipated that Wallace would run, and planned

to squelch any threat he might pose by keeping the focus of the cam-

paign on domestic issues, recasting Truman as a friend to labor and

progressives, and dismissing Wallace as a communist dupe.12 The fact

remained, however, that Wallace was free to take strong stands on civil

rights, which underscored Truman’s inability to do so. Wallace’s defiance

of Jim Crow endeared him to black citizens and spotlighted Truman’s

subservience to southern Democrats. Unlike either Truman or Clifford,

the anticommunist liberal–labor coalition in the ADA was obsessed with

Wallace and the threat he posed to liberal politics.13 They saw civil rights

as Wallace’s one legitimate issue, and knew that their own actions had

to match his.14 They pressured Truman to support a strong civil rights

proposal and made civil rights a test of his liberal sincerity.

Thus, with an eye toward northern black votes, the potential threat of

Wallace, and the pressure of northern liberals, and with assurances from

Clifford that the South “had nowhere else to go,” Truman proceeded

with what might, in hindsight, be called the “northern strategy.”15 On

February 2, 1948, five months before the Democratic convention, Tru-

man asked Congress to enact the recommendations of his Presidential

Commission on Civil Rights. These included abolishing the poll tax,

making lynching a federal crime, establishing a permanent federal FEPC,

prohibiting segregation in interstate commerce, and establishing a civil

rights division in the Justice Department.

Southern Democrats reacted more violently than Clifford or Truman

had expected. Mississippi Senator James Eastland held up the president’s

proposal as proof that the government was now controlled by organ-

ized “mongrel minorities” out to “Harlemize” the nation.16 Representa-

tive Eugene Cox of Georgia sputtered that “Harlem is wielding more

influence than the entire white south.”17 The Conference of Southern

Governors cancelled about a half million dollars in contributions to the

Democratic National Committee (DNC) and demanded futilely that the


DNC condemn the president’s civil rights message.18 In March, the south-

ern governors pledged to withhold their electors from any candidate

supporting civil rights: “The southern states are aroused and the Demo-

cratic party will soon realize that the South is no longer in the bag.”19

Truman began to backpedal.

Shortly after the southern Democrats announced their intentions to

bolt the party if the presidential candidate supported a civil rights pro-

gram, the ADA began to organize northern and western Democrats to

fight for a strong civil rights plank in the Democratic platform at the

convention.20 Minneapolis mayor, Senate candidate, and ADA vice chair

Humphrey led the national effort. Humphrey stressed the “strategic,”

that is, electoral, importance of standing up to the South, arguing that

“this is one of those fortunate instances where the only realistic political

alternative is also the best moral alternative.”21 ADA chair James Loeb

agreed that it was essential that civil rights be defended at the national

convention: “If any serious compromises are made on this issue, the

position of the northern and western liberals would be impossible.”22

Loeb asked Humphrey to convince prominent Democrats to sign a pe-

tition supporting a Democratic civil rights plank, to be released to the

press. He felt that Humphrey’s identity as a Democratic mayor of a

northern city would create the impression that the wellspring for civil

rights was coming from regular Democratic party members, not just

the ADA. He insisted that the petition originate in Minneapolis, on

Humphrey’s mayoral stationary (although he offered to pay the ex-

pense), and that they hold a press conference in Minneapolis.23

The DNC, while mindful of black votes, did not want to destroy the

party over the issue.24 Its leaders proceeded to patch up the damage

caused by Truman’s February civil rights proposals and worked out a

compromise plank with southern Democrats in the name of party

unity. They settled on a “harmony plan,” endorsing the vaguely worded

1944 Democratic plank that proclaimed the Democratic party’s support

for “freedom and democracy” for all.25 They warned the ADA not to di-

vide the party by making an issue of it. Initially Humphrey and other

ADAers on the platform committee heeded the warning in the interest

of party unity, but under pressure from labor, black delegates, and their

own consciences, they decided to take the issue to the floor for a vote.26

The ADA’s Biemiller resolution endorsed Truman’s February civil rights


proposals. Southern delegates had their own “civil rights” plank, the

Moody resolution, which prohibited the federal government from any

action on civil rights that interfered with states’ rights.

On the third night of the convention, Humphrey took the podium

and urged Democrats to adopt the ADA’s strong civil rights plank: “the

time has arrived in America for the Democratic party to get out of the

shadows of states’ rights to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of

human rights.” The crowd went wild, and northern and western dele-

gates passed the ADA’s plank, 651½ to 582½.27 The Mississippi and half

of the Alabama delegation walked out of the convention, accompanied

by catcalls and cries of “good riddance.”28 The remaining southerners

nominated Georgia Senator Richard Russell for president; later, many

backed the States’ Rights (“Dixiecrat”) party and its presidential candi-

date, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond. The dramatic hoopla

around this series of events—the behind-the-scenes fight, the speech,

the roll call, and finally the bolt by the Mississippians and Alabamans—

revived what many had thought was a dead party. As one journalist put

it, “The death of the Democratic party has been postponed due to cir-

cumstances beyond the control of its leaders.”29 The convention-floor

fight and resulting liberal victory quelled whatever threat Wallace may

have still posed to the Democrats. And while Clifford had not anticipated

the desertion of the Dixiecrats, Humphrey’s speech insured that the

African American vote in key northern industrial states made up for the

loss of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina.

The State Context: Reforming the DFL

The liberal revival of the national Democratic party was essential to

Humphrey’s plans for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party in Minnesota,

as well as his own Senate campaign. For a majority of Minnesotans, the

Democratic party still signified Catholics, southern Bourbons, and cor-

ruption. There had never been a Democratic senator elected in Min-

nesota. Democratic congressmen had been elected in those areas where

the Irish and German Catholic minority had settled, but the Senate was

a statewide election. When the national party, then, rallied around the

civil rights plank in July 1948, finally standing up to the southerners, it

went a long way to convincing Minnesotans that the Democratic party

was finally turning a corner. Humphrey operatives reported favorable

reaction to the speech: “in visiting some Republicans, the comment


was, ‘Well I’ve always been Republican, but when I heard Humphrey

talk, I was proud I lived in Minnesota. . . . Anyone who takes a stand on

that touchy issue is all right.’”30 The civil rights victory proved especially

important in Humphrey’s ongoing struggle against the left wing.

Humphrey and the Left

The ADA waged an increasingly public anticommunist campaign against

the left wing of the DFL party beginning in early 1947. In March 1947

Orville Freeman charged that the DFL Association was controlled by

the Communist party, and clarified to the public that the association

was not officially connected to the DFL party, which was in the process

of purging communists from its ranks.31 At its first convention in June,

the ADA announced that its chief purpose was to rid the DFL party of

communists and their sympathizers, and make the DFL, as they would

reiterate so often, “a clean, honest, progressive party.”32

At stake in the ADA’s efforts to oust the Left was not only Humphrey’s

vision of an issues-oriented, liberal party in a two-party system, but

also, more immediately, the power of organized labor in national poli-

tics. Since taking control of the House in 1946, Republicans had been

trying to restrict labor’s power in politics. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed

over Truman’s veto in June 1947, symbolized the resurgent antilabor

politics. Labor leaders sought to defeat those who supported it. One of

the bill’s coauthors, Republican Senator Joseph Ball, was seeking reelection

in Minnesota, and most people believed that the popular Humphrey

was the only person who could defeat him. CIO president Philip Mur-

ray and William Green of the AFL supported Humphrey’s bid for the

Senate nomination.33 But the left wing in the DFL opposed Humphrey’s

plans to run against Ball. The executive board of the DFL Association

explained that they “sought leadership that understands this difference

between the people and corporations,” and issued a statement against

Humphrey concluding, “By your associations and your record you have

ruined any chance of your being an acceptable progressive candidate in

the 1948 election. We urge that . . . you retire from the scene as an aspi-

rant to a higher office until you definitely and conclusively change your

political friends and orientation.”34 Even before that point, however,

Humphrey would have refused to run under the left wing’s auspices.

Although the ADA’s intentions to defeat Ball were politically sound,

its tactics were abrasive and off-putting. Throughout the latter half of


1947, ADA organizers compiled lists, recruited organizers, and engaged

in a series of schemes to oust the Left. Organizers Arthur Naftalin and

Max Kampelman were both writing dissertations about how the Com-

munist party had taken over liberal organizations in America. For all

the repulsion they felt for actual communists, Naftalin and Kampelman

seemed fascinated and even envious of their organizational prowess,

and they modeled their own takeover of the DFL on the tactics of the

communists in the left wing.35 They justified their methods as the only

defense against communists. One had to fight fire with fire.

Like the Communist party, the ADA was a small hyperdisciplined

group that sought control of party machinery. It made no pretense of

being a mass movement. Its leaders consisted of the associates and friends

of the core group that started the organization. They recruited with an

eye toward organizational viability, seeking especially representatives

from labor, farmers’ groups, and other “special interest groups.”36 The

top of the organizational structure was composed of Humphrey’s close

friends from the University of Minnesota, Arthur Naftalin, Orville Free-

man, Max Kampelman, George Demetriou, Evron Kirkpatrick, and Eu-

genie Anderson, who had formed the ADA as Humphrey’s Senate cam-

paign base.37 Other leaders included Dorothy Jacobsen, a professor at

Macalester College; Eugene McCarthy, a professor at St. Thomas Col-

lege in St. Paul; Jack Jorgenson, a Teamster leader from Minneapolis;

Walter Lundberg, a researcher at Hormel Institute who organized in

southern Minnesota; Gerald Heaney, a Duluth lawyer who organized

the northern, Iron Range part of the state; and Curtiss Olson, a state

legislator in the northwestern part of the state. Naftalin and Freeman

kept this group as small and closed as possible, following the advice of

the national ADA political committee that “extreme care must be taken

in selection of officers, sponsors, and the controlling executive of any

special campaign committee.”38 They worked closely with labor leaders

in the AFL, CIO, and railroad brotherhoods, but they kept them at arms

length, a mutually agreed on position due in part to new restrictions on

political activities on the part of interest groups.

In their larger recruitment efforts, ADA organizers relied on recom-

mendations from friends and proven supporters, rather than on mass ral-

lies.39 They labored over deciding who was “okay” and who was “commie-

line,” sifting through stationery headings and party listings for signs of

an individual’s past support of left-wingers.40 They demanded public


statements from their supporters who had previously been involved in

known front organizations.41 Freeman put his wife to work on an enor-

mous project of cross-referencing the names of people on selected “front”

organizations with the party officers of each county. The following memo

excerpt illustrates the organizational zeal that consumed Freeman:

I believe it is essential that a consolidation of the lists of people bothgood and bad, be made. It is my suggestion that such a list be preparedon a state-wide basis, to include a separate compartment for each countyand separate cards for every known individual in said county. All pos-sible information pertinent to the individual involved should be includedon this card. It should be maintained up to date and continually supple-mented. Enclosed you will find a list of people on the State CentralCommittee of the DFL party. Those marked “O.K.” or “B” (bad) in ink,are to the best of my knowledge definitely good or bad. The same mark-ings in pencil indicate people tentatively good or bad. No markingsindicate no knowledge regarding the individual concerned.42

The generational and class differences between the young ADAers

and the state’s citizens made it difficult to determine who was “reliable”

and who was not. They were most comfortable recruiting university

students, whose young minds were bedazzled by their professors and

untouched by old pre-war political battles. Walter Mondale was one

such student who joined the ADA. Many of the Minnesota ADA organ-

izers were graduate students or professors, like Eugene McCarthy, then

a professor of sociology at St. Thomas College.43 The task of establish-

ing loyalty was complicated by the fact that often no hard lines divided

“Left” and “Right” supporters. Activists and voters traipsed between the

two factions. Among the vast citizenry in the state, friends remained

friends even though they opposed each other on the caucus floor.44 Cit-

izens’ cavalier attitude toward the conflict exacerbated the anxieties of

the leaders of both factions, who were fixated on a person’s associations

and constantly demanding explanations thereof. ADA organizers wor-

ried that local politicos and citizens did not fully appreciate the dangers

of communists and fellow travelers, that they would naively accept help

from some infiltrator.45

ADA leaders often had strained relations with people who sympa-

thized with, or were ambivalent about, the Left. Freeman’s relationship

with his father-in-law, James Shields, a Wallace activist, was tense, with

Freeman interrogating the man at family dinners about his political al-


legiances.46 Humphrey’s relationship with DFL Congressman John Blat-

nik was similarly fraught with tension. Many of Blatnik’s constituents

in the left-wing stronghold of the Iron Range were Wallace supporters.

Blatnik himself was reticent about Truman’s foreign policy and did not

officially endorse the Marshall Plan. He privately claimed to support

Humphrey, and Humphrey openly endorsed him, but his supporters

were disparaging Humphrey, suggesting that Humphrey was working

for Blatnik’s defeat.47 Nor did Blatnik endorse Humphrey in the DFL

Senate primary. He hoped to avoid offending supporters of Humphrey’s

left-wing opponent James Shields.48 Humphrey demanded “a clearcut

statement” from Blatnik on where he stood with relation to himself. “I

want Blatnik to come out for me a 100 percent,” he wrote to Gerald

Heaney.49

The ADA adopted the communists’ logistical strategies for taking

over organizations. Organizers agreed on an agenda before attending a

caucus or convention, and then packed the caucuses with their own

people, who were instructed beforehand to “follow their leaders.”50 ADA

leaders tried to assuage doubts citizens had about the ethics of this kind

of political maneuvering, which, after all, was what so many found ab-

horrent about the communists. They assured their members that it was

customary for groups to organize on behalf of some previously deter-

mined program in advance of party conventions, that this was “part of

everyday American politics and is entirely ethical.”51 Caucusing before-

hand in this way did indeed have a long history in America, usually as-

sociated with backrooms and cigars. In an effort to dampen the ire of

those who were unconvinced such tactics were ethical, the ADA tried to

mute its presence in politics. This secretiveness made them resemble

the communists even more, as their own description of their activities

indicates: “the extensive activities of the so-called ‘right wing’ DFL move-

ment . . . while in effect, ADA inspired and ADA-led, was presented to

the public as simply the activities of various individuals.”52

The general public was discomfited by the ADA’s methods. Letters

poured into the mayor’s office, castigating the ADA for dividing the

party.53 The left-wing UE (Local 1139) Call (CIO) urged Humphrey to

tell “his ADA friends” to cease and desist.54 ADA leaders like Heaney

and Naftalin were seen as fanatical and rigid, excluding many who would

be helpful to Humphrey’s campaign. One Humphrey supporter reported

a rumor that Naftalin had appeared in Duluth with two armed guards.55


To overcome the consequences of ADA zealotry, Humphrey and the

ADA operated a “good-cop, bad-cop” scenario, with Naftalin, Freeman,

and their minions doing the aggressive organizational work, and Hum-

phrey mopping up behind them, assuaging the hurt feelings and re-

building consensus. It is testimony to Humphrey’s political charm that

most people dissociated him from the local excesses of the ADA, even

though he was the state director and national vice president of the or-

ganization. Humphrey’s aides cultivated this dissociation. In one in-

stance, left-winger Walter Frank came to the mayor’s office to complain

that the ADA was red-baiting him. Ignoring Frank’s arguments that

Humphrey was responsible for the ADA’s actions since his office was

used to organize ADA activities, the mayor’s assistant referred Frank back

to the people who called him a communist, saying that he could not

understand what this had to do with the mayor.56

People wrote to Humphrey divulging, as if he did not know, that his

organizers were excluding people from meetings and bullying old Farmer-

Laborites. Humphrey professed shock over such occurrences, assuring

outraged citizens that he “would do everything in my power not to per-

mit any of my personal friends to in any way damage our political

structure.”57 When Clara Watson wrote to Humphrey describing the

“highhanded and undemocratic management” of the Rice County DFL

convention, he acknowledged the seriousness of her charges, regretted

that anything unsavory had happened, and stated his own firm belief in

“free and open conventions.”58 He reminded her that “a political party is

bigger than any one particular meeting. . . . I urge that you will maintain

confidence in the party, and that above all, you stand by your progres-

sive principles. We need people today who will fight for the liberal

cause.”59 He responded thoughtfully to those who were angered by the

resurgence of anticommunism, explaining how this was a different kind

of anticommunism that worked in the name of liberalism rather than

against it, that it continued Floyd B. Olson’s mission.60 He exchanged

reading lists, did small favors, and responded thoughtfully to old friends

and acquaintances who leaned to the left or supported Wallace.61 He

saw them as important components of the liberal movement, and, po-

tentially, on his side.

Following Wallace’s December 1947 announcement that he would run

for president in a third party, Elmer Benson attempted to align the DFL

party with the Progressive party, essentially undoing the 1944 merger


and, if successful, forcing Truman (or the Democratic candidate) to run

as an independent in Minnesota. This decision strained Wallace sup-

porters’ loyalty.62 Wallace was one of the few progressives still popular

among farmers and rural voters, as well as unionists and progressives.

Many had hoped that he would challenge Truman for the Democratic

nomination within the Democratic party. His decision to form a sepa-

rate party, however, threatened to divide the liberal vote, allowing a Re-

publican president to preside over a potentially Republican congress.

Benson’s decision to align the DFL with a marginal third party was even

more troubling, effectively removing the DFL from any real political

power. The decision forced many Wallace supporters who were repulsed

by Truman and the ADA’s anticommunist tactics, but who nonetheless

feared a Republican victory, to forsake Wallace and work with the Hum-

phrey camp. Humphrey welcomed them, dashing off sympathetic let-

ters praising Wallace’s legacy.63

While Humphrey cultivated ties to former Wallace supporters, Naf-

talin and Freeman prepared a legal argument for barring Wallace sup-

porters from party activities. Following the procedures and guidelines

of the DFL constitution, they set up a steering committee made up of

ADAers.64 This committee adopted a resolution prohibiting “third party

adherents” from participating in the DFL party, on the basis of (1) the

DFL constitution, which clearly, and legally, established the DFL’s affili-

ation with the national Democratic party; and (2) the announced in-

tentions of the Wallace officials in Minnesota to “abrogate these provi-

sions and substitute the national third party for the Democratic party.”65

Freeman sent the resolution out to all county chairmen, concluding, “If

any difficulty is anticipated in your county in carrying out the terms of

this resolution, please notify this office by wire.”66 In Hennepin County,

the left wing’s main base of support, Freeman sent out his carefully coded

lists of “Bad” people, called “squeeze-out lists” to the “okay” precinct

chairmen and women.67 He assured hesitant supporters of their “moral

obligation” to prevent the participation of openly declared third-party

supporters in DFL activities, explaining that as these officials supported

a “movement to divert our party from its constitutional course, there is

no question of our right to protect our party.”68

Meanwhile, Wallace supporters were also churning out lists and pam-

phlets, and organizing their supporters to pack caucuses.69 The left wing

focused on foreign policy and Truman’s militaristic policies. They con-


nected their cause to the long struggle against concentrated wealth and

power fought by the Granger movement, the Greenback party, the Pop-

ulists, the Nonpartisan League, and the Farmer-Labor party, and con-

demned Truman and Humphrey for betraying those legacies.70 The left

wing reminded Minnesotans that the DFL party was “a coalition of 80%

Farmer-Labor and 20% Democratic,” and asked whether the Democratic

tail would wag the Farmer-Labor dog.71 They argued that the Wallace

movement was heir to the glories of past democratic movements, while

the Democratic party was, well, the Democratic party, which meant

southern Bourbons, anticommunist Roman Catholics, and political

chicanery.

The left wing tried to tie Humphrey to the sort of anticommunism

that had characterized the old Hjalmar Petersen faction of the Farmer-

Labor party. In the 1938 Farmer-Labor primary Petersen’s red-baiting

against Elmer Benson had drawn on a tradition of anti-Semitism. Ben-

son had pointed to these anti-Semitic tactics to persuade voters of Pe-

tersen’s illiberality. Benson associated Humphrey’s anticommunism

with the same sort of illiberality, and started rumors in Duluth, alleging

that Humphrey had made anti-Semitic remarks. Upon hearing of this,

Humphrey wrote to Samuel Scheiner, director of the Minnesota Jewish

Council and frequent correspondent with the Mayor’s Council on Hu-

man Relations, about the danger of these rumors. Scheiner in turn wrote

to the man who reported the accusation, Jewish leaders in Duluth, and

DFL leaders, attesting to the falseness of the rumor and describing Hum-

phrey’s work against bigotry of all sorts.72 Scheiner had quelled rumors

about the political use of anti-Semitism before, understanding the way

anti-Semitism and accusations of anti-Semitism fanned hatred.73 Ben-

son’s accusations against Humphrey, whether heartfelt or politically

motivated, were part of an old way of doing politics, which liberal an-

tiracists were trying to eliminate from political discourse.

Both factions were duly prepared for the April 30 precinct caucuses,

where the delegates to the county conventions would be selected. Both

had “squeeze-out lists” and coached organizers to orchestrate their mem-

bers. Pro-Humphrey unions, which by April included the railroad broth-

erhoods, the AFL, and all but the most resistant CIO unions, distributed

the ADA’s sheets with the information about the caucuses.74 On April

30, ADA-advised precinct chairmen and women required participants

to disclose whether they were supporting Wallace before they could enter


the caucus site. Some precinct chairs moved the caucus site, telling only

their own supporters. Wallace supporters simply held their caucuses at

their own sites. Thus there were two sets of delegates for the county

conventions, each claiming a legal right to attend the conventions.75 Trou-

ble erupted in several counties when Wallace supporters attempted to

attend the county conventions in May. The most heated situation was in

St. Louis County, which includes Duluth and the left-wing stronghold

of the Iron Range. In this convention, the ADA “regulars,” as they called

themselves, tried to ban Wallace delegates from the hall but were over-

come; the Wallace people crowded into the room, shouting and “waving

their arms,” as one shocked Democrat recalled.76 The crowd of Wallace

supporters “threatened violence.” Others reported shouting matches,

spitting, and name-calling. The Wallace supporters eventually held their

own rump convention in the Pompaigne Room of Duluth’s Spalding

Hotel.77

The result was that there were two DFL parties between the time of

the conventions in May and when the left wing finally left the DFL

party in June. Throughout May the two argued their legitimacy in the

courts and in their papers. Both focused on the legal aspects of the situ-

ation, whether the DFL was in fact tied to the national Democratic party

and whether the credentials of a certain county were in order. In June,

the left wing departed the DFL and hastily pulled together a Progressive

party in the state, but their marginality in the political process was ex-

posed. Humphrey won the DFL primary against left-wing candidate

James Shields, 200,850 to 26,295. Benson subsequently ran as the Pro-

gressive candidate for the Senate against Humphrey, but withdrew after

Wallace publicly endorsed Humphrey.78

Although the ADA’s conspiratorial, ideologically driven tactics at-

tracted many citizens to the political process, they were not the kind of

politics Humphrey wanted to reinforce. The aura of conspiracy, potential

violence, and ideological dedication were things that the liberal leaders

of the ADA were trying to excise from American politics. They empha-

sized that the communist-backed left-wing threat justified their use of

such tactics, that it was a one-time deal. Against this backdrop of dis-

reputable political tactics, Humphrey turned to newly organized black

voters, many of whom were Wallace supporters, to provide him with a

kind of political redemption. That Humphrey was able to appeal to


black voters was due to the meaning Wallace held for Minnesota blacks,

which was different than what Wallace meant to the left wing.

Wallace in the Black Communities

For white left-wingers, Wallace represented old dreams of grassroots,

class-based politics. For black Minnesotans, Wallace represented a ticket

into national, interest-group politics. The Twin Cities black press ignored

the struggle within the DFL party. Although both the Republican Twin

Cities Observer and Cecil Newman’s Minneapolis Spokesman closely fol-

lowed Wallace’s campaign, neither paper was interested in the intra-

party skirmish in the DFL party. Their discussions of Wallace and the

Progressive party were in the context of national politics. They criticized

Humphrey’s anticommunism and reported on blacks in Wallace’s Pro-

gressive party, but neither mentioned Benson or his attempt to align the

DFL with the Progressive party. To read the pages of the Twin Cities

black papers in 1948, one would have no idea of the ideological battle

that consumed the souls and energies of Minnesota’s white liberals.

Wallace, however, was a different story. While blacks in Minnesota

had little use for the old Farmer-Laborite Benson, they held Wallace in

high regard. Wallace had begun his campaign in the Deep South, where

he openly flouted Jim Crow and where angry white southerners pelted

him with rotten vegetables. Withstanding these attacks proved his polit-

ical sincerity. Moreover, for savvy unionists like Nellie Stone Johnson

and Frank Boyd, the Wallace candidacy was a way to pull the Demo-

cratic party leftward and northward.79 Like black editors around the na-

tion, Newman took advantage of Wallace’s popularity to emphasize the

new black vote in the North. Newman hired a young journalist from

the University of Minnesota named Carl T. Rowan to track and report

black Minnesotans’ opinions about the presidential race. Rowan began

his straw poll of the black voters in Minnesota in January 1948, and

from the start Wallace was the overwhelming favorite. On January 20,

1948, the Minneapolis Spokesman headlines announced boldly that “Wal-

lace Leads Poll.” Of the first 85 voters who registered opinions, 48 sup-

ported Wallace, while Dewey was second with 17, and Truman third

with 15. Ex-Governor Harold Stassen, who was seeking the Republican

nomination, received 3. On February 13, Truman finally pulled ahead of

Dewey, 55 to 53, but Wallace by then had 171. On February 27, Wallace


had 340 votes, and Truman was firmly second with 121. The final poll

was taken in March (with a promise to resume the poll closer to elec-

tion time) and indicated that Wallace continued to garner 55 percent of

the final 1,044 votes, Truman 22 percent, and Dewey 19 percent, with the

remaining undecided.80 Although the number of people polled was small,

the results nonetheless trumpeted black support for Wallace. Black Wal-

lace supporters admired Wallace’s “uncompromising stand on racial

matters.”81 Others mentioned his interest in peace. They admitted that

Wallace’s chances were futile, but as one voter put it, “If I throw my

vote away it’s okay, that’s what it would amount to if I voted for anyone

else.”82

The poll affirmed the idea of black political independence, indicating

that 87 percent of black voters regarded themselves as “independent”

and “voted for the man,” not the party. Closer to the election, the paper

emphasized this further when noting that many black voters in the state

would be supporting Republican Luther Youngdahl for governor, Pro-

gressive candidate Henry Wallace for president, and Democrat Hubert

Humphrey for senator.83 (Newman persisted in calling DFL candidates,

like Humphrey, “Democrats,” as opposed to DFLers, which is an indica-

tion of his focus on national politics.) This “independence” complicated

the primary vote, since one had to vote either in the DFL or Republican

primary. Newman editorialized about the problem, ignoring the fight in

the DFL between Progressive Senate candidate Shields and Humphrey,

and emphasizing that in the general election, voters could cross over.84

Newman appreciated the choice that Wallace’s candidacy gave black

voters. He credited Wallace for his forthright stand for “democratic

principles,” writing, “Wallace has never, to the knowledge of this paper,

ever failed the Negro.” Newman consistently condemned the red-baiting

attacks on Wallace, including those from Humphrey and ADA organiz-

ers, and sought to clarify Wallace’s attraction among black voters. In

one editorial, Newman noted that eight thousand had recently turned

out to hear Wallace on a cold, stormy night in Minneapolis. Assuming

the communists could round up about two thousand, he posited, what

explains the other six thousand?85 Another editorial declared that those

Negroes who assured whites that they would not vote for Wallace repre-

sented a “new trend in Uncle Toms.” For Newman, Wallace’s attraction

lay in his political sincerity. While “hacks” of both parties mouthed


principles of American democracy, Wallace was the only politician who

had the conviction to stand by these principles.86

Newman’s dedication to the idea of black political independence was

sometimes strained by his desire for a strong Democratic party based

on northern constituencies. While giving full coverage to Wallace’s pop-

ularity among blacks, Newman questioned the value of a third party

premised on foreign policy: “If Mr. Wallace feels the justification of a

third party is based mainly on the need for a peace party, he first un-

derestimates the importance of the domestic scene and secondly he un-

justly criticizes the Truman Administration.”87 In another essay, New-

man wrote more succinctly, “Why should a division over the merits of

the Marshall plan overshadow such issues as price control, and ade-

quate housing program, a revision of the Taft-Hartley Act? It should

not!”88 He reminded readers that while they were indebted to Wallace

for making civil rights so prominent in the election, this did not mean

that they had to vote for him.89 Spokesman columnist Nell Dodson Rus-

sell had even more vehement reservations about Wallace. Russell thought

Wallace was insincere, and that he used the moralism of civil rights to

pander to white liberals and blacks. When Wallace came to Minneapolis

in February, she had a heated exchange with him, in which she questioned

his sincerity on the civil rights question.90 Russell was in the Minneapo-

lis ADA, and although she balanced her anti-Wallace criticisms with an

equally consistent criticism of Humphrey’s anticommunism, many read-

ers criticized Russell for her anti-Wallace “propaganda.” Albert Allen,

union leader and president of the Minneapolis NAACP, wrote a scathing

letter condemning Russell’s partisanship, signing off with “yours for

more independent political thinking.”91 Newman published all of these

viewpoints, which, regardless of his personal political position, allowed

him to show the thriving political debate that was the hallmark of po-

litical independence and, he hoped, relevancy.

The question of whether black voters should vote for candidates just

because they were black provided an opportunity for Newman to edu-

cate black voters on the workings of independent interest-group poli-

tics based on issues, not race or ethnicity. In New York and California,

the Progressive party was running black candidates against liberal Dem-

ocrats, like Helen Gahagen Douglas of California, who supported all

the same important domestic issues as the Progressive candidates and


had a better chance of winning. Newman instructed readers to judge

candidates according to their records and stands on the issues, not their

race. He noted that Douglas had a better record on social welfare and

labor issues that benefited black citizens than the blacks already in Con-

gress, namely Oscar DePriest of Chicago and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of

New York. Chicago’s black politicians represented an older style of ma-

chine politics, which offered little to blacks in places like Minnesota.92

To the extent that Wallace and the election touched on local politics,

it was local black politics, between old black Republicans and new, self-

styled black “independents,” who were often Democrats. Just as Hum-

phrey was trying to reeducate white Democrats and old Farmer-La-

borites about using organized votes as political leverage, rather than

control of party machinery and patronage, Newman was also reeducat-

ing black voters, trying to pull them away from traditional Republican

allegiances and into a state of political independence, where they could

be a swing vote. The Republican Twin Cities Observer also praised Wal-

lace’s “friendliness to Negroes” but figured that Wallace was doomed to

lose. Since the Democrats were, as ever, beholden to the South and di-

vided, the paper forecast a Republican victory and endorsed an “out-

standing citizen of our own state,” Harold Stassen, on the basis of his

proven tolerance and United Nations work.93 The Observer’s endorse-

ment of Stassen flabbergasted the writers at the Spokesman, who saw it

as an example of stubborn machine loyalties. If black voters were going

to go Republican, they should at least endorse New York Governor

Thomas Dewey, who had enacted a statewide FEPC. The Spokesman’s

poll indicated that black support for Stassen in the Twin Cities was al-

most nonexistent, and that the majority of black Wallace support came

from normally Republican voters, a fact Newman pointedly emphasized

to show that Republican strength among blacks was waning.94

For Newman, the important thing about Wallace was that he forced

Truman to stand up to the South, which in turn won black Republicans

to Truman’s side. The minute the Dixiecrats began to throw rocks at

Truman, Newman noted, his stock began to rise among Negroes, who

left Dewey, not Wallace.95 Rowan likewise recalled that Truman’s stand-

ing up to the southerners indicated to black voters a real commitment

to racial justice. Truman risked more politically than Wallace.96 This

change in voter opinion represented, in Newman’s words, “the growing


political maturity of the masses of Negroes, the rank and file who look

to independent political action as the hope of the group.”97

Humphrey and his ADA organizers recognized that Wallace’s popu-

larity among blacks was quite a different phenomenon from white, left-

wing support of Wallace. Black support for Wallace, and Newman’s care-

ful structuring of it in his newspaper, worked in conjunction with

Humphrey’s style and understanding of politics. Blacks, after all, did not

seek control over a party but rather sought to influence the party with

their votes at a national level. By responding to organized black pres-

sure and supporting black civil rights, Humphrey showed black voters

and liberal activists alike the potency of interest-group politics.

While fighting the anticommunist, behind-the-scenes battle against

white Wallace supporters, Humphrey reached out to black Wallace sup-

porters. He did not need their votes as much as the liberal legitimacy

their support conferred on him and the Democratic party, especially

among Wallace supporters. Newman played up this angle, and Humphrey

responded in kind. In April Newman ran a column addressed to Min-

nesota Democrats about Republican Governor Luther Youngdahl’s

attempts to desegregate the National Guard, and the runaround the

Democratic administration in Washington was giving him. Youngdahl

had written to Democratic Secretary of Defense James Forrestal asking

if federal funds would be withheld upon his desegregation of the Min-

nesota National Guard, but he had received no reply to his “courteous

letter.”98 The article emphasized that Youngdahl approached the issue

“on the broad premise of human rights,” but that Minnesota blacks,

who had overwhelmingly supported Roosevelt in the past three elec-

tions, would see it as a partisan issue if the Democratic administration

did not answer Youngdahl promptly. Humphrey immediately sprang

into action on behalf of the kind of Democratic party he wanted to see.

Humphrey wrote a long letter to Forrestal urging him to “comply with

Governor Youngdahl’s request,” and also to end segregation in the U.S.

armed forces in order to give some substance to the administration’s

professed interest in human rights.99 He also telegrammed his help to

Youngdahl, releasing the telegram to the “minority group papers,” radio

stations, and the dailies.100

Humphrey and his staff tracked Wallace’s popularity among blacks.

His office collected clippings on states’ rights, Wallace, and the Demo-


cratic party from black newspapers across the country.101 They arranged

for black speakers and organizers to help galvanize the black communi-

ties behind Humphrey’s program.102 They kept black editors apprised of

their efforts on behalf of human rights. In February, Humphrey sent

Newman a “letter” (more like a press release) stating his endorsement of

Truman’s ten-point program on human rights, which Newman pub-

lished.103 The mayor also wrote a long, more personal letter to Newman,

detailing his recent activities in the “field of human relations.”104 These

ranged from helping the mayors of Philadelphia, Kansas City, and Om-

aha set up FEPC legislation to his chairmanship of the National Com-

mittee for Fair Play in Bowling, an organization connected to the CIO.

He referred to their “mutual friends,” concluding, “I just offer these notes

to you, Cecil, because from time to time I hear some idle rumor or gos-

sip that I am letting down on my enthusiasm for such programs.” Crossed

out on the draft was another conclusion, which read, “Maybe you can

see fit to prepare a little article on this sometime.” In March Humphrey

wrote to Lester Granger for information about Wallace’s inattention to

black problems.105 In April, George Demetriou, Humphrey’s secretary and

ADA organizer, sent Newman Granger’s article on Wallace and Dwight

McDonald’s scathing Wallace: The Man and the Myth. Both pieces ques-

tioned Wallace’s sincerity about civil rights and made much of Wallace’s

tenure as secretary of agriculture when southern blacks had been de-

nied all Agricultural Adjustment Administration benefits. Demetriou

wanted to know where Newman really stood on this issue, “as one po-

litical man to another.” “I know that you don’t want to stand in the way

of any good that Wallace may do on the matter of civil rights, but I would

like to know, just between you and me, what do you think of Henry

Wallace and his past record?” Demetriou wrote.106 In May Humphrey

sent a cloying letter of appreciation to Nell Russell for one of her anti-

Wallace columns, praising her plain and straightforward talk and clos-

ing humbly with the wish that he could live up to her confidence in

him.107 ADA organizer Eugenie Anderson also wrote to the Spokesman

in praise of Russell’s anti-Wallace articles, and requesting to renew her

subscription, as did Orville Freeman.108 Closer to the election, Hum-

phrey attended rallies at the Hallie Q. Brown House and Phyllis Wheat-

ley House. Like Truman, who became the first U.S. president to cam-

paign in Harlem, Humphrey set a first by campaigning in the Twin

Cities’ small black neighborhoods.109


Humphrey backed up his solicitations for support and publicity by

working hard to make the Democratic party acceptable to black voters,

and by extension, white liberals. Humphrey’s speech before the Demo-

cratic National Convention on July 14 accomplished that goal almost

overnight. Humphrey returned to Minneapolis a hero. A crowd of two

thousand, with bands and banners, greeted him at the train station, and

more cheering citizens lined the route to the reception at the Nicollet

Hotel. Their signs trumpeted Humphrey as a champion of human rights.

Humphrey drove home the point that the Democratic party was now a

liberal party, headed by a liberal president, by telling the crowd that

came to greet him, “I want to tell you that the plank the convention

finally adopted was the one the President hoped to have.”110 This was

untrue. Truman had opposed the ADA plank, but one of the reasons

Humphrey had delivered the speech was to be able to return to Min-

nesota and proclaim Truman a liberal.111 James Shields, a Wallace sup-

porter, reminded a group of railroad workers that “the Democrats have

no intention of doing anything concrete to insure anti-lynch legislation,

anti-poll tax laws, creation of a real FEPC or ending segregation in the

armed forces,” but these words were drowned out in the hoopla and

hometown pride over Humphrey’s speech.112

People around the nation wrote and telegrammed the newly famous

mayor. The hate mail was racist and malicious, affirming the need for

civil rights. The supportive mail was just as emotional, and highlights

further the powerful responses the issue provoked in whites and blacks

alike. Humphrey supporter Percy Villa captured the tone of many let-

ters when he wrote simply, “If I loved you any more I would need an-

other heart.”113 Ten housewives from Chicago wrote to thank him for

the truth. A Baptist preacher prophesied that God had chosen Humphrey

to be a martyr to the cause of human rights. A descendent of a lynch

victim looked forward to the day she could vote for Humphrey for pres-

ident. An eighty-three-year-old white Republican from Indiana switched

to the Democratic party, explaining that he always felt that the colored

race was treated unfairly. Humphrey received warm letters from Twin

Cities’ black leaders, including Urban League official William Seabron,

who wrote, “It’ll guarantee Negro support of the Democratic Party,”

and the head of the Hallie Q. Brown House, Myrtle Carden, who offered

her help in his campaign.114 The Twin Cities Observer, leaders of the

Elks, and Wallace supporters also sent their thanks.


The Minneapolis Spokesman featured a huge headline, “Humphrey

Wins Battle for Real Civil Rights Plank!” and underneath, “Humphrey

Made Us Proud!” The long article reflected Newman’s efforts to make

Twin Cities blacks part of a national black constituency: “People in this

state who heard Humphrey praise civil rights over states rights are thrilled

that Minnesota has such leadership to offer the nation.”115 Previous is-

sues of the paper had criticized Humphrey’s anticommunism and the

ADA’s weird attempt to get Eisenhower to run for the Democrats, but

this speech exonerated Humphrey from these wrongs and won him the

paper’s highest praise: “To our mind that which is the best tradition of

FDR is represented by Mayor Humphrey.” A large part of Humphrey’s

attraction among blacks was his national reputation as a civil rights ac-

tivist, which imparted to them the sense of being a part of national pol-

itics. The Spokesman’s endorsement of Humphrey read, “Negroes of

America have their eyes glued on the Minnesota Senate race; they want

to see Humphrey elected.”116 By August 1948, Truman was the over-

whelming favorite among Minnesota black voters, according to the

Spokesman’s poll. Truman now commanded 68 percent of the voters

polled, and Wallace just 12 percent, compared to March when Truman

had had only 22 percent to Wallace’s 54.117

Humphrey and Old-Style Democrats

Humphrey’s speech and strong record of civil rights made the Demo-

cratic party appealing to ADA liberals, unionists, and black voters who

shared his idea of what politics should be. As Humphrey described it,

the civil rights fight laid the groundwork for a real liberal Democratic

party, “not a hodge-podge of sections held together by a Roosevelt or a

Wilson.”118 Old Minnesota Democrats, however, looked askance at the

jettisoning of southern Democrats and resented the ADA’s coup of their

party. In part the ongoing conflict between Humphrey liberals and old

Democrats was about personalities and power. The ADA liberals were

young, brash, know-it-all types who, as one observer noted, wanted

“things done right now and in their own way.”119 They were impatient

with the lingering presence of bygone battles and with those they termed

“has-beens.”120 And in purging the Left, they had also put themselves in

control of the party. But even if the source of the animosity was per-

sonalities and competition for power, there were important distinctions

between the two different generations of Democrats that signified the


fundamental transformation of the Democratic party nationally and in

Minnesota.

The liberals’ caricature of the old Democrats was not completely accu-

rate. True, the old Minnesota Democrats were based in heavily Catholic

St. Paul. They practiced a machine-style politics that relied on patron-

age and brokering and that had developed in a sectionally divided, eth-

nically defined Democratic party. But they were not averse to the New

Deal. Like the left wing and the ADA liberals, many old Democrats

thought of themselves as rightful heirs to the New Deal legacy.121 And,

moreover, they were not blind to the centralizing forces about which

political scientists had written. They had organized something called

the Midwest Conference, which attempted to coordinate local political

activities in different regions with national DNC programs.122 They rec-

ognized the nationalizing forces in American politics and tried to adapt

the Democratic party to it. Many supported Humphrey’s efforts to do

just that, seeing in Humphrey the makings of a natural politician. But

they were neither old-time progressives (for then they would have been

Farmer-Laborites) nor beneficiaries of an academic education that ex-

plained the bounties of the social service state. Their understanding of

politics came from their experiences filling post office positions, secur-

ing favors, and protecting their resources. These things allowed them to

build a party in Minnesota but left them singularly unprepared to oper-

ate within the Democratic political order’s state agencies and social ser-

vice networks. The ADA liberals, on the other hand, had learned about

the emerging social service state and the new interest groups that sup-

ported it at the very universities that were indispensable to its develop-

ment.123 And, moreover, they saw themselves as historical actors on whose

shoulders fell the responsibility for sustaining and justifying that polit-

ical order.124

In this regard, a particularly festering problem between the ADA and

the old Democrats during the 1948 election was their different under-

standings of the threat posed by Wallace, which led to an open clash be-

tween the ADA and the DNC over Truman’s candidacy. Minnesota ADA

leaders were reluctant to endorse Truman in 1948. They were disappointed

by his apparent backpedaling on the issue of civil rights, and they felt

that Truman’s conservatism undermined their own appeals to Wallace

voters. They considered other options, including General Eisenhower

and federal judge William O. Douglas.125 St. Paul Democrats, who had


favored Truman as vice president in 1944 while liberals like Humphrey

had supported Wallace, were outraged by this breach of loyalty. They

complained to the DNC, requesting support for their own Truman–

Barkley clubs and questioning the loyalty of the ADA to the Democratic

party.126 This led to belabored assurances from Humphrey and Freeman

to the DNC, explaining once again their problems with the Wallace

forces.127 Even those old Democrats who supported Humphrey did not

quite understand the liberals’ concern about Wallace. At the height of

the battle between the left- and right-wing factions in the DFL, Humphrey

supporter E. J. Larsen wrote to the chairman of the DFL suggesting that

they amend the party constitution to rename the party simply the “Dem-

ocratic party,” which would have alienated all those old Farmer-Labor

progressives Humphrey hoped to persuade to his side.128 All of this con-

firmed to the ADA that the old-style Democrats did not appreciate the

threat Wallace posed to a Democratic victory in the fall, that they did not

understand what historians since have recognized, that the Democratic

party had to forsake traditional loyalties in order to become a truly na-

tional party. As Humphrey put it to Chester Bowles, “they [the DNC]

need us more than we need them.”129 With the 1948 victories of Hum-

phrey and other ADA Democrats, like Helen Gahagen Douglas of Cali-

fornia and Paul Douglas of Illinois, the liberals became an increasingly

influential and powerful bloc in the Democratic party, later embodied

in the rational, “egghead” politics of Adlai Stevenson.

In Minnesota Humphrey’s allies would continue to wrangle with tra-

ditional Democrats, but the DFL party itself was eventually rebuilt ac-

cording to the liberals’ pluralist vision of politics. In building a party

around organized economic groups, Humphrey’s supporters made the

DFL palatable to those who disdained Irish Catholics and machine bosses.

While many Minnesotans remained wary of Catholics, and while politi-

cians still paid attention to religious affinities, anti-Catholicism no longer

exerted the political influence it once had. As Eugenie Anderson re-

called, anti-Catholicism was not an issue after the merger, in part, she

surmised, because of Humphrey’s popularity among Catholics and his

work against racial and religious discrimination.130 The best evidence

for the diminishing importance of religious divisions in Minnesota pol-

itics, however, is simply the fact that the Democratic party after 1948

offered a real, viable alternative to the Republicans. Rural and urban,

Catholics and Lutherans, wet and dry could all vote for and participate


in the new issues-oriented DFL party, precisely because it was organized

around new economic issues, not old religious rivalries or machine bosses.

Humphrey’s Senate Campaign: New Liberalism or Old Politics?

Humphrey and the ADA won control of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor

party in June 1948, when the left wing withdrew to form a separate Pro-

gressive party. Their cutthroat tactics displaced older Democrats as well,

and Humphrey supporters took control of all the major offices of the

DFL. Eugenie Anderson later recalled that the ADA disbanded in Min-

nesota shortly thereafter, since it had in effect become the DFL party.131

Humphrey’s triumph at the national convention helped him overcome

the perpetual lack of funds and gave him the positive national publicity

that the Cowles-owned press in Minnesota did not.132

Humphrey ran for the Senate on a clearly defined set of issues that

encompassed urban and rural concerns alike. The DFL platform sup-

ported a statewide FEPC, the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, the Mar-

shall Plan, the United Nations, maintaining a “dynamic” peace, and

farm price supports at a flexible 80 percent of parity. It opposed sales

taxes, tax reductions for iron ore companies and oleomargarine pro-

ducers, and attempts to tax farm coops.133 It appealed explicitly to the

farm vote, on which the ADA liberals felt particularly vulnerable.

For all their brash new ideas about “issues-oriented politics,” how-

ever, when it came to campaigning, Humphrey and his organizers em-

ployed the same tried-and-true techniques that politicians had always

used. Minnesota had changed enough to allow a new kind of politician

into the game in 1948, but they still had to play by the old rules. So they

promised patronage posts. They exchanged favors for favors.134 They

tapped the DNC for jobs, exemptions, or scarce resources for “friends.”

“My friend J. G. Meyers of J. Gruman Iron & Steel Co. in North Min-

neapolis needs bar, structural and plate steel,” wrote Humphrey to the

DNC. “Can you assist?” Meyers was, Humphrey said, loyal to the party

and had friends.135 They sidestepped laws about political contributions.

Humphrey urged the Hotel and Restaurant Employees International

Union to hire old Farmer-Labor radical Howard Y. Williams “to keep

old F-Lers with natural sympathy for Wallace in line.” The union hired

Williams, but, mindful of the Taft-Hartley restrictions on political ac-

tivity, clarified that Williams was working for the union, although his

free time was his own to do with what he wished.136 Likewise, Humphrey


prodded the DNC to pay the salary of Darrell Smith, a CIO-PAC veteran

working for Humphrey.137 But though the flatteries and quid pro quos

were old-style politics, much of the work these favors accomplished

would eventually solidify the social service administrative state at the

expense of party influence. Getting around the Taft-Hartley Act, for in-

stance, was ultimately about cultivating and maintaining labor’s and

liberals’ influence in the Democratic party. Similarly many of Humphrey’s

earlier requests to the DNC were about convincing reluctant labor lead-

ers that the Democratic party was receptive to their interests, and that

he, Humphrey, had clout in the party.138

Humphrey’s organizers also paid attention to ethnic allegiances and

religious prejudices of voters. While they sought to overcome a politics

shaped entirely by these kinds of loyalties, they also understood that

many people made sense of their worlds through these familiar identi-

ties and prejudices. So Humphrey appeared at the all-Finnish picnic,

the Swedish picnic, the Yugoslav picnic. He was photographed with groups

of traditionally attired Norwegians.139 He exploited his Scandinavian

ancestry.140 He petitioned the DNC for appropriate nationality group

speakers. When a market researcher wrote in exasperation that a group

in the southeastern part of the state was “urging people to vote against

you because you are Catholic,” and asked him to tell her what church he

belonged to, Humphrey shared her exasperation with people’s preju-

dices but nonetheless responded with information about his Methodist

upbringing and current church.141 Despite their diminishing signifi-

cance in political discourse, “the Scandinavians,” “the Catholics,” and

“the Finns” were still categories that conveyed meaning and had to be

considered in campaign strategy. But these categories were never the

substance of liberals’ politics. They were rather the flotsam that Hum-

phrey’s organizers had to wade through to establish their politics. They

were serious about beating Joe Ball. They knew the significance of a

Humphrey victory for American liberalism. As the pragmatists they

fancied themselves to be, and as the social scientists they were, they ac-

commodated peoples’ misguided but understandable need to cling to

old group identities, even as they introduced them to what they, the

liberals, understood to be the real substance of political competition—

the issues. And they explicitly and publicly did not exploit ethnic and

religious hatreds. Their appeals played to the innocuous comfort of

ethnic pride.


Similarly, to the extent that old Farmer-Labor symbols still defined

people’s worldviews, especially in the countryside, and to the extent that

the New Deal had used the same symbols, Humphrey’s campaign em-

ployed familiar tropes about monopolies and malefactors of wealth.

“Co-ops help the entire country by combating monopoly,” he orated at

rallies, and went on to attack taxation schemes as another in a long his-

tory of monopolists’ ploys to put small farmers out of business.142 His

supporters condemned Senator Ball as a representative of “created wealth”

and “dollar greed.”143 Humphrey traveled the Minnesota countryside,

speaking at county fairs, community picnics, rallies, and farm shows.

DFL organizer Byron Allen marveled at Humphrey’s persuasive manner

with farmers.144 The campaign’s public relations emphasized the grass-

roots aspect of their organizing, how Humphrey traversed the state in

an old Ford with a speaker blaring. He climbed up on haystacks to de-

nounce high prices. He spoke from street corners instead of auditori-

ums.145 Humphrey identified the DFL as part of the Farmer-Labor legacy,

praising the great Farmer-Labor governor Floyd Bjornesterne Olson at

every stop. Humphrey himself was constantly compared to Olson. But

although the rhetoric and the hard work of grassroots organizing was

the same, the structure of the DFL party, its meaning, and its constituen-

cies were different from those of the old Farmer-Labor party.

Humphrey’s organizers were not organizing a movement but rather

mobilizing interest groups in the Democratic party. They conducted

this campaign according to their pluralist understanding of interest

groups and politics. They dealt with representatives from the CIO, AFL,

Farmer’s Union, and farm co-ops separately, choosing who they thought

best represented a particular group after consultation and research.146

They did not attempt to draw these leaders into any kind of a move-

ment but rather kept them at arm’s length while they (the ADA leaders)

coordinated the disparate interests into a political coalition. They picked

the issues carefully to avoid clashes between constituent groups, as op-

posed to uniting the disparate groups under a common cause.147 Unions

and farmers’ groups, which had once played an active role in the struc-

ture of the Farmer-Labor party, withdrew into more passive positions

as nonpartisan,“independent” interest groups, as outlined in E. E. Schatt-

schneider’s analysis of the two-party system.

Humphrey’s most important support in the countryside came from

the farm cooperatives, whose leaders understood the proper relationship


of organized groups to parties and the political system.148 In contrast to

the Nonpartisan League and the Farmers’ Union, farm cooperatives had

historically eschewed political activity, addressing their problems through

self-help and cooperation.149 However, in 1946 an organization called

the National Tax Equality Association (NTEA) tried to pass legislation

that taxed the patronage rebates of Minnesota’s purchasing, producing,

and marketing cooperatives at corporate tax rates. Cooperative leaders

worried that a Republican Congress and a Republican president would

pass the NTEA’s anti–co-op legislation. So, on the basis of a clearly de-

fined economic interest, they reluctantly decided to enter, temporarily,

the maelstrom of partisan politics. They compiled lists of rural con-

tacts and newspapers for Humphrey’s campaign. They wrote to their

clients for names and assessments of local political situations. And they

helped the liberals select a candidate to run against Republican Congress-

man Harold Knutson.

But they helped in a hushed, secretive manner, not as a bold move-

ment for farmers’ rights but rather as an interest group. One coopera-

tive leader, thanking someone for the names of “non-Wallaceite” con-

tacts for the Humphrey campaign, wrote, “As you appreciate, of course,

we are simply being helpful to these folks and are not involved in the

matter as far as our office responsibilities are concerned or that of the

MAC.”150 Another cooperative official, who sent editors of rural papers

a news release announcing the candidate who was to run against Knut-

son, wrote, “I am sure you are aware that we have done some work in

securing this man as a candidate but I believe it just as well in your

comments or releases in the press that the Minnesota Association [of

Cooperatives] should be left completely out of the story.”151 While giv-

ing contacts and information to the DFL, cooperative leaders stressed

the importance of a vigilant nonpartisanship in their newspapers. Co-

operative leaders insisted that they could not endorse candidates, since

their members represented a healthy variety of political thought: “[Mem-

bers] do not look upon Midland as a political organization. If they did

it would be torn to pieces in no time at all.”152 Cooperatives existed for

specific purposes on which their memberships were agreed, and should

therefore stick to those purposes. As individuals, however, cooperators

could actively engage in politics to protect their interests as coopera-

tors.153 Their papers did not rile people into action with emotional ap-

peals to class but motivated them with admonitions of civic responsi-


bility. They talked not about politics but rather about economic issues

as they affected the cooperator. They informed readers and members

about the issues, so they would make their own rational political choices.

It was a far cry from the “red blooded, class-conscious fighting farmers

organization” that the Farmers’ Union had once brought to the Farmer-

Labor party.154

Humphrey became Minnesota’s first Democratic senator when he

defeated Ball, 729,494 to 485,801. DFL candidates swept the polls in city

and country alike, unseating twenty-three-year incumbent Republican

Congressman Harold Knutson. Even Truman won the state. The farm

vote was the big surprise for Democrats that year. Wallace supporters

had divided liberals in New York and Pennsylvania, throwing those two

important states to the Republicans. The Democrats made up for that

loss, however, by winning midwestern farm states like Minnesota.155 In

large part this was due to Truman’s farm policy. But in Minnesota, Hum-

phrey’s reorganization of the DFL party according to what he called

“the issues,” and his ousting of the left wing were key to Democratic

success.

After becoming senator, Humphrey and the ADA continued the fight

for an “issues-based” Democratic party. In Minnesota this meant fighting

for party labels in the Minnesota legislature. In Washington it meant

translating the recommendations of the American Political Science As-

sociation’s 1950 report, “Toward a Responsible Two-Party System,” into,

as Kampelman put it, “political action.” Now Humphrey’s legislative

aide, Kampelman invited E. E. Schattschneider to meet with labor lead-

ers, lawmakers, party leaders, and governmental officials about reform-

ing the party system.156 As Kampelman put it in a letter to Schattschneider,

“both Senator Humphrey and the ADA are committed to the principle

that political parties ought to be made into ‘issue’ parties and that they

must be more responsible to those issues.”157 After a year spent fighting

southern Democrats over cloture (a measure to limit filibustering), Sen-

ator Humphrey placed great hope in party reform to overcome south-

ern Democrats. In the American Political Science Review, Humphrey at-

tacked “the persistence of certain archaic procedures and the lack of

effective party discipline, which make for frequent criticism and serious

concern on the part of those interested in maintaining not only the dig-

nity of the Senate but its efficiency and its response to the public will.”158

Their efforts eventually led to the 1972 reforms of the Democratic party,


although the goal of a “responsible two-party system” continued to elude

them.

Conclusion

The triumph of state-centered, interest-group pluralism in 1948 was not

inevitable. Certainly Humphrey and his liberal allies did not think it

was. They poured their souls into making sure America had a demo-

cratic liberal political system. They overcame entrenched powers and

built a powerful, liberal Democratic party in Minnesota, where none

existed before. They integrated the state DFL party into national poli-

tics. They helped redefine the national Democratic party’s focus from

sectionalism and machine bosses to organized economic groups. They

helped make racial equality and black civil rights legitimate political is-

sues. Their victory changed the way politics operated in Minnesota.

After 1948, Humphrey’s allies and supporters manned the positions of

power in a new DFL party organized around clearly defined economic

groups, not religious allegiances, bosses, or left-wing ideologies. Feel-

ings of anti-Catholicism still existed, but they did not prevent people

from voting for Democrats. Old-fashioned Democrats still existed, but

they did not define DFL issues. Left-wing ideologies still existed but not

in mainstream politics. Old political tactics still existed but in the ser-

vice of a new political vision. Republicans still dominated state politics

but within a two-party, pluralist system.

Civil rights was essential to the liberal victory in Minnesota and na-

tionally. The issue tied Minnesota liberals to national two-party politics.

It illustrated the sincerity of their intentions to transform the Democratic

party. It softened their anticommunist tactics. DFL organizers explicitly

credited the DFL’s embrace of civil rights as key to defeating Wallace

and the Republicans.159 Wallace’s candidacy forced liberals to force Tru-

man to forsake the South, which insured not only African American votes

for the Democratic party but also progressive Minnesotans’. ADA liber-

als effectively divided and isolated the left wing by claiming as their own

its forward-looking, cosmopolitan, nationalizing, civil rights aspects,

and discarding its old, agrarian, provincial, anticapitalist populism.

The 1948 election continues to fascinate historians, not just because

of Truman’s surprise upset victory, but also because it marked a whole

series of beginnings and endings. It was the left wing’s last stand in

mainstream politics. It marked the decline of party-based voting and the


rise of issue-based voting. It began the Democratic party’s transition

from white supremacy to civil rights. It solidified Roosevelt’s “New Deal

Revolution.” All of these beginnings and endings fulfilled and affirmed

liberals’ pluralistic understanding of American political history and de-

velopment. It was as if it had all unfolded according to some cosmic

plan. But in fact liberals worked hard in 1948 to insure that this would

indeed be the development of American politics.


Somebody asked me . . . what I thought was going to happen whenwe founded the DFL Party. I said I thought by now we would havetaken over the whole country. And I did. At the time, I thought ourpolitics were so good, so pure, so equality-minded that it didn’tmake any difference where we went, people would flock to us. Thathasn’t been the case.

Nellie Stone Johnson, labor activist, in 1991

In this book I focused on what the civil rights issue did for white liber-

als in the 1940s. By 1968, of course, civil rights was in fact undoing the

work it had done so effectively back in 1948. It was creating dissension,

not unity. It was undermining liberals’ influence in the Democratic party,

not solidifying it. And it was exposing the fallacy of liberal assumptions,

not affirming them. George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Al-

abama, ran stronger than anyone expected among the northern white

working classes in the 1964 Democratic primary, and again in his third-

party presidential bid in 1968. Richard Nixon’s strategists exploited the

resentment traditional white working-class and southern Democrats

felt toward liberals and African Americans. In his infamous “southern

strategy,” Nixon hinted that Democrats had “gone too far” with civil

rights. The Left also attacked liberals. It was a new Left by 1968, but the

charges were familiar. Liberals focused too narrowly on overt instances

of racial discrimination. They ignored capitalism’s structural inequities.

Liberal anticommunism destroyed other, more radical, more democratic

E P I L O G U E

Civil Rights and the Fate of Postwar Liberalism

160

movements for racial justice. And, most disarmingly, liberals’ legislative

agenda for civil rights reflected the flawed assumptions of their interest-

group pluralism. Even African Americans joined the attack, charging

that the liberals delivered too little, too late, and blaming them for unful-

filled expectations that had led to an increase in militancy and violence.

For a while, though, it had seemed as if liberals could hold together

the unwieldy coalition of white workers, African Americans, and white

southerners within a Democratic party that was being transformed from

the defender of white supremacy to the upholder of black civil rights.

Throughout the 1950s, Humphrey and other liberal Democrats contin-

ued the fight for federal legislation against racial discrimination in em-

ployment, a fight focused on amending the rules of congressional debate

to prevent southern filibuster.1 They tried to accommodate the civil rights

movement within Democratic party politics. It was Humphrey who

maneuvered the omnibus Civil Rights Act of 1964 through the Senate,

finally securing the long-sought fair employment legislation (now called

“equal opportunity employment”). Liberal Democrats passed the Vot-

ing Rights Act (1965) and made available federal funds for urban renewal,

education, job training, and antipoverty programs known as the “Great

Society.” But Humphrey’s consensus style of politics, once so brash and

new, began to seem old and compromising, especially when it resulted

in working relationships with segregationists like Lester Maddox and

Richard Russell.

Humphrey continued to speak eloquently and sincerely for racial jus-

tice, but by 1964 his liberal pragmatism required him to uphold party

unity rather than challenge it. It was Humphrey and Walter Mondale,

then Minnesota’s attorney general, who worked out the compromise

with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party (MFDP) at the 1964

Democratic convention. The MFDP delegation had overcome violence

in Mississippi in order to represent themselves in the Democratic party.

Predictably, southern Democrats threatened to bolt if the MFDP was

seated. President Lyndon Johnson chose Humphrey to deal with the

controversy, dangling before him the vice presidential spot. Humphrey

and Mondale offered to seat two MFDP delegates (chosen by the admin-

istration) and promised to end segregation in the Democratic party by

the time of the next convention in 1968. A sharecropper named Fannie

Lou Hamer, speaking in a voice more pure than theirs, responded, “We

didn’t come all this way for no two seats.”2

Epilogue 161

Hamer’s response, her very presence, underscored how removed the

liberals had become from their original sense of moral purpose. With

Johnson’s Great Society in the offing, liberals had in large part achieved

their ideals, which were never about racial justice per se but rather about

state-centered, democratic liberalism. For Humphrey and many white

liberals, racial justice was the happy outcome of a fair and stable politi-

cal system. They now had to defend that political system from the forces

unleashed in realizing it. These forces included not only the unexpected

depth of white racism and black anger but also the unexpected hum-

bleness of people like Fannie Lou Hamer and many others, for whom

justice seemed to be about so much more than the organization of in-

terests in the political arena. If representation of her interests was all she

wanted, she could have waited another four years, because Humphrey

was good on his promise to change the racist rules governing the Demo-

cratic convention. But Hamer sought something more, something that

could not be captured in an interest group, and indeed, something that

made the whole idea of organized economic interests seem small-minded

and bureaucratic.

The so-called New Left understood the difference between liberals

like Humphrey and activists like Hamer in terms of a managerial, top-

down liberalism that was about maintaining order versus an authentic,

grassroots movement that was about disrupting power.3 There is much

truth in that characterization, and yet it reduces liberal idealism to

hegemonic manipulation. In fairness to postwar liberals, there had once

been a moral purpose to their quest for order. The twin threats of fas-

cism and communism, which extended the total power of the state in

unprecedented ways, had once made the idea of economic interest groups

in a two-party system the rock on which democracy might be salvaged

in modern capitalist society. But now these threats were obsolete. The

threat of communism lingered, of course, but even before the 1960s, the

cold war had changed it from a metaphysical nightmare into an inter-

national political rivalry. Next to the humble dignity of the southern free-

dom struggle, the moral imperatives that once justified the quest for

state-centered liberalism were forgotten, as were the economic-oriented

policies of the early civil rights initiatives.

Since the 1980s, journalists, Democrats, and academics have mourned

the disappearance of New Deal, economically oriented issues, such as

162 Epilogue

jobs, full employment, and health insurance. Some blame postwar lib-

erals for emphasizing racial policies at the expense of the economic,

class, or “structural” issues once so vital to the New Deal Democratic

party. For many, the defection of white working-class Democrats in the

1980s was not merely the result of white backlash against black gains.

Rather it had to do with the so-called rights revolution, which refocused

activism around securing legal protections for individuals in assorted

minority groups, including not just African Americans but also Native

Americans, Asian Americans, the handicapped, prisoners, women, and

others.4 This led to the rise of so-called identity politics, where interests

were staked out on the grounds of past suffering.

Perhaps the most famous indictment of rights-based liberalism in

the Democratic party was Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary Edsall’s Chain

Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics

(1991). The Edsalls argued that liberalism flourished in the Democratic

party between 1932 and 1964 because “race,” meaning civil rights, was

not a partisan issue. No one party was identified with civil rights. Dur-

ing these years, Democrats dealt with civil rights under the New Deal

rubric of enlarged economic opportunities for all; the focus was on eco-

nomic issues, the Democratic party organized according to “class” in-

terests. After 1965, liberal Democrats, including for a time Humphrey,

sought to fulfill the spirit of the 1964 civil rights act by enacting policies

designed to achieve not merely equality of opportunity but, as Presi-

dent Johnson proclaimed in 1965, “equality of result.” The new race-

based policies tracked black employment figures, removed obstructions

based on race, and actively integrated colleges, workplaces, and even

the Democratic party. Civil rights became solely identified with the

Democratic party. Traditional white working-class Democrats, who made

up the bulk of Democratic electoral support, resented liberals’ attention

to minority groups. Whereas once white working-class union members

had been the cherished base of the Democratic party, they now felt

chastised and marginal. At the 1972 Democratic convention, liberals passed

new rules about party government, which required delegations to include

a certain number of women, blacks, and other minority groups. This

hardened feelings of estrangement between traditional white working-

class Democrats and educated white liberals. Republicans exploited the

rift, infusing what the Edsalls call “the traditional ideological partisan

Epilogue 163

divide” (over the role of the federal government) with racially coded

messages, and splitting off lower-class white southerners and white eth-

nic workers.5 They recommended that Democrats shift the focus back

to economic issues and away from race-based policies.

The Edsall thesis was widely criticized in the civil rights community.

Its apparent acceptance of white working-class racism as a political given,

and its blaming liberals’ demise on “race” rather than racism indicated

that this entire line of thinking was part of the problem, not a path to

its solution.6 Historians questioned the Edsalls’ premise that there was

once some kind of affable golden era when white working-class Demo-

crats accepted civil rights if they were wrapped in the New Deal package

of economic opportunity. Studies since show that the New Deal coali-

tion never truly represented black interests, that tremendous tension

always existed between white-working class Democrats and blacks, even

before race-based policies, which was why, indeed, liberals had to resort

to such seemingly extreme policies in the first place.7

The reasons the economically oriented issues and ideas disappeared

from the Democratic party are many and varied, and have less to do

with liberal mistakes than with the history of race and racism in Amer-

ica, which changed the nature of every issue it touched. The FEPC, for

instance, embodied the sort of economically oriented New Deal policies

liberals believed in. At its theoretical base was the idea of purchasing

power. It promised to make economically marginal black citizens into

consumers, thereby integrating them into society. Proponents argued

their case in terms of its economic benefits to society, often hinting at a

great as yet unexploited market, rather than the benefits to black people

per se. In theory, “fair employment” was almost identical to “full em-

ployment.” Both sought government-secured employment in the name

of purchasing power and economic growth. Although the FEPC reflected

liberals’ economic agenda, the hate-filled, racist resistance to it imbued

it with a moral transcendence. Because it involved “race,” the FEPC auto-

matically became about much more, both for white southerners who

opposed the bill, and humanitarian liberals who supported it. What the

Edsalls seem to miss is that once “race” becomes part of a discussion, it

changes the discussion. Whether it begets anger and resentment, or in

the liberals’ case, genuine empathy, guilt, and righteousness, “race,” which

can take the form of an African American person, a law affecting racial

164 Epilogue

minorities, or a case of discrimination, automatically reshapes the orig-

inal context of the discussion.

In the 1940s black leaders like A. Philip Randolph, Henry Lee Moon,

and Cecil Newman saw the idea of organizing into an interest group

like farmers and workers as the key to integrating black economic inter-

ests into the political mainstream. Black voters by themselves were not a

large enough voting bloc to command the power that the labor move-

ment, for instance, did, but they could build coalitions with other groups

that shared their economic concerns. It is this idea that the Edsalls iden-

tify as the key to Democratic success between 1932 and 1964. The idea of

a black interest group, moreover, seemed to affirm the quest for a world

where the color of one’s skin did not matter. As the recollections of Al-

bert Allen and Anthony Cassius showed, one of the aspirations behind

the goal of economic autonomy was the opportunity to escape from a

circumscribed category, and to achieve an individual identity—to be

judged by the content of one’s character, not the color of one’s skin. To

realize this nonracial identity, however, Negroes had to organize as Ne-

groes. Furthermore, while African Americans hoped to become political

actors in a color-blind political arena, white liberals often needed them

to be black, which meant marginal to political competition and social

victims to be helped. Thus, while Newman sought to show the public

that black voters made a difference in politics, white politicians sought

to assure the public that their interest in civil rights was not a response

to black votes. Despite the economic underpinnings of the FEPC, the

value of civil rights and antiracism for white liberal politicians like Hum-

phrey depended on civil rights being a moral issue. Nellie Stone John-

son remembers that Humphrey treated her as any other activist in the

movement, which meant that he saw her as politically useful: “Hubert

was hanging on to me as much as I was hanging on to him,” she recalls,

not without pride.8 For someone who was herself using politics to fight

for change and equality, this would have been gratifying, and Johnson

spun it in the most gratifying, nonracial, way—that Humphrey was in-

terested in her because she was a delegate to the Central Labor Union. It

could be argued, however, that Johnson’s blackness in fact prevented

Humphrey from treating her like a real political actor, which might

have meant red-baiting her. She was, after all, a communist. But a black

communist was not the same as a white communist. The sociological

Epilogue 165

and moral significance of Johnson’s blackness automatically lifted her

out of the political arena of 1940s Minnesota. Political marginality con-

ferred a political immunity.

The need to convince voters that their interest in civil rights was not

“political” prevented liberal politicians from articulating how black vot-

ers fit into a Democratic party based on organized economic interests.

Absent the peculiar historical circumstances that made black voters rel-

evant in 1948, liberal interest in civil rights became more of an impedi-

ment than a help. By 1953 union leaders preparing for Humphrey’s 1954

reelection noted, prophetically as it turns out, that the rank and file

thought that Humphrey was working more for southern blacks than

his Minnesota constituents.9

The Record of Racial Progress in Minnesota

Despite its limitations, in the end the federal civil rights legislation that

Humphrey helped enact improved the social and economic status of

African Americans. Despite the continuing existence of racism, the ac-

tivism of the 1960s produced real, tangible changes in American life.

Was the civil rights activism in Minnesota similarly effective? Did African

American Minnesotans benefit from the flurry of civil rights activism

that solidified the DFL and catapulted Humphrey into national politics?

Did all of the concern about curbing racial tensions in the 1940s and

1950s inoculate Minnesota from the racial confrontations of the 1960s?

The record of progress is mixed in Minnesota. On the one hand, white

liberals continued to support human relations councils and interracial

educational programs. They passed and enforced a statewide FEPC law

in 1955 and a housing act in 1957. On the other hand, however, the com-

missions and committees that dealt with minority issues continued to

be underfunded and understaffed. In 1963 the Council on Human Rela-

tions was still subsisting on funds it raised by itself. 1n 1960, 41 percent

of St. Paul black families had incomes under $4,000, and the median

income of non-whites in Minneapolis was $4,598, two-thirds that of

whites.10 Moreover, African Americans were never politically strong

enough to protect their real interests when those interests stood in the

way of white interests such as an interstate freeway system.

Throughout the 1950s African Americans and civil rights activists

had criticized the inadequacies of the FEPC and the housing laws, but it

was the construction of the freeways that awakened the black communities

166 Epilogue

to their lack of real power in the state. Nearly two thousand non-white

families, mainly African American, were displaced by new freeways that

were built through black neighborhoods in St. Paul and Minneapolis in

the early 1960s.11 In St. Paul about five-sixths of the black population of

eight thousand lived in an area two miles long and half a mile wide

along Rondo Avenue. Beginning in 1958, the construction of I-94 split

the community down the middle, took up one-seventh of the land, and

displaced 14 percent of St. Paul’s non-white population.12 The Rondo-

St. Anthony Improvement Association was organized to fight for help

in relocating. They feared that while white residents of the area would

have little trouble finding housing in other parts of the city, the black

residents were largely restricted to this so-called black area, where the

housing shortage was already acute because of urban renewal and free-

way construction. In 1958 the Housing Authority estimated that seven

hundred new public housing units would be available, but five hundred

families displaced by urban renewal were already on the waiting list for

these units. Moreover, the Housing Authority’s Relocation Office was

funded to assist only those families displaced by urban renewal, not by

the freeway. To perform that assistance, they needed $30,000 from the

city or the Highway Department, which was not forthcoming. The as-

sociation appealed to the mayor’s office and then to Governor Orville

Freeman, who expressed concern, set up commissions to investigate,

and eventually appropriated $25,000 for relocation assistance. But the

city government offered no help. The Highway Department compensated

displaced families fairly generously, which many felt was a payoff for the

city’s failure to recognize the problems of relocation.13 As a result, a ma-

jority of displaced blacks remained in the ghetto area. The Urban League

felt that an opportunity to relieve ghetto overcrowding and achieve res-

idential integration had been missed, and that the ghetto had in fact

been solidified. At the same time, the freeways gutted African American

communities, destroying stores, newsstands, bars, and thoroughfares

that had once created neighborhood cohesion. Sociologist William Julius

Wilson has blamed these sorts of urban renewal and freeway programs

for the crisis of inner-city black neighborhoods today.14

The civil rights legislation and the various human relations commis-

sions failed, then, to result in real black political power, which had been

one of Newman’s priorities. They also failed to prevent the riots they

had been created to prevent. Arthur Naftalin, who was so prominent in

Epilogue 167

the establishment of postwar liberalism in the DFL party, was mayor of

Minneapolis when riots broke out in the summer of 1966 and 1967. Like

Humphrey, Naftalin emphasized human relations when he became mayor.

In 1963 he asked the city council to appropriate $35,000 for the Commis-

sion on Human Relations to provide it with a real staff and a formal gov-

ernmental structure.15 The city council granted some funds but not

enough to carry out Naftalin’s recommendations, which included relo-

cation assistance, job training programs, welfare assistance, and initia-

tives to stop police brutality. The 1966–67 riots damaged property in

north Minneapolis black neighborhoods and further soured relations

between whites and blacks. In St. Paul, a disturbance at a dance on Labor

Day weekend in 1968 led to two days of looting and fires in the Summit-

University area.

The riots of 1966–68 brought forth a wave of commissions, investiga-

tions, and self-castigation on the part of white liberals. The numerous

investigations into the causes of the riots emphasized that the problem

was an economic one between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” but they

laid the ultimate blame on white racism.16 The prosperous white major-

ity had moved out to the suburbs, leaving the city to the poor, the elderly,

and racial minorities. City leaders failed to allot resources to programs

and recommendations that might have helped solve the economic prob-

lems that underlay the rioting. Investigators also pointed to a newly rec-

ognized, but quickly admitted, problem: white liberal paternalism. One

report after another listed white liberals’ paternalistic programs and elit-

ist attitudes as a major cause of mistrust and miscommunication be-

tween white experts and the people they were supposed to be helping.17

They recommended that white leaders cultivate ties with “indigenous”

members of the black communities and listen to their voices. In ex-

plaining the failure of earlier human relations programs, one report

noted that “the primary concern has been the ‘success’ of the program,

rather than the success of the people that were to be served,” which cap-

tured perfectly the work performed by those 1940s-style human rela-

tions programs.18 Mayor Naftalin and other DFLers struggled to stay

relevant in the changing civil rights atmosphere. They admitted past

wrongs and encouraged “indigenous” voices. But they still held them-

selves up as the sensible, bold, middle way between the extremes, be-

tween the violence on the one hand, and conservative reaction on the

other. Unfortunately, the riots and liberals’ renewed efforts to solve the

168 Epilogue

problems exacerbated an already divisive atmosphere. The consensus

and unity such human relations activities had fostered among liberals

in the 1940s were as absent from Minneapolis in the 1960s as the old

Farmer-Labor radicals.

The issues of racial justice and black civil rights were not merely an an-

cillary result of liberal activism but, rather, central to the establishment

and legitimation of the Democratic political order in postwar American

politics. The instrumentality of civil rights for white liberals lay in the

concrete reality of black votes, the moral authority civil rights conferred

on “sincere” politicians, and, as I have tried to show throughout this

book, in the language and ideas behind civil rights, which matched and

affirmed the foundational ideas of that Democratic political order. The

dynamic relationship between civil rights and postwar liberalism legiti-

mated both in the political life of the nation. Or it did at least for while,

until the language and ideas of civil rights resulted in real expectations

on the part of African Americans and a real backlash from white work-

ing-class Democrats. The dynamic relationship between antiracism and

postwar liberalism reminds us how deeply embedded, how present, is-

sues of race are in American politics, even in those places where race

does not seem to matter.

Epilogue 169


Preface

1. A copy of the speech is reprinted in Humphrey, The Education of a PublicMan, 458–59.

Introduction

1. See, for instance, Valelly, Radicalism in the States; and Haynes, DubiousAlliance.

2. William S. White, “The Democrats in Pre-Convention,” Washington Post, Sept.28, 1959. Political scientist John Fenton later affirmed White’s observation, notingthat the healthy interaction of competing interest groups, responsive government,and informed citizens was a happy ideal, seldom fulfilled, except in Minnesota andWisconsin (Fenton, Midwest Politics, 100). See also Hrebrenar and Thomas, eds., In-terest Group Politics in the Midwestern States.

3. The historic strength of the DFL party was recently noted in “MinnesotaDemocrats Racing against Time,” New York Times, Sept. 10, 2000, 30.

4. See, for instance, Nelson Lichtenstein, “From Corporatism to Collective Bar-gaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era,”in Gerstle and Fraser, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 122–52; IraKatznelson, “Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity?” in Gerstle and Fraser, eds.,The Rise and Fall, 185–211; Lipsitz, Class and Culture in Cold War America; May, TheBig Tomorrow. On the constriction of civil rights possibilities in the early cold warera, see Sullivan, Days of Hope, 221–75; Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion, 18–35;and Lichtenstein and Korstad, “Opportunities Lost and Found.” Others see merely anarrowing of political possibilities, without making the case that there was some al-ternative; see Fowler, Believing Skeptics.

5. Brinkley, The End of Reform; Milkis, The President and the Parties; Valelly,Radicalism in the States; and Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order.

Notes

171

6. See, for instance, Schlesinger, A Thousand Days; and Hamby, Beyond the NewDeal.

7. On the poisonous effects of interest-group pluralism, see, especially, Lowi,The End of Liberalism.

8. See Holcombe, The New Party Politics; Lubell, The Future of American Politics;and Cohen, Making a New Deal.

9. Lipsitz, Class and Culture; and Lichtenstein, “From Corporatism to CollectiveBargaining.”

10. See, especially, Edsall and Edsall, Chain Reaction; and Shafer, Quiet Revolution.11. Thurber, The Politics of Equality.12. On the ideological arguments that divorced the Left from liberals in the 1940s,

see, especially, Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age; and Diggins, The Riseand Fall of the American Left.

13. Mills, The Power Elite; Lowi, The End of Liberalism, 101–24; “polyarchy” is de-scribed in Fowler, Believing Skeptics, 186–94. For Benson’s predictions, see Benson,“Politics in My Lifetime.”

14. See Sullivan, Days of Hope, 221–75; Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion, 22–24, discussing the formation of the Progressive party with no mention of ElmerBenson.

15. Sullivan, Days of Hope.16. On the nationalizing tendencies that led to the decline of third-party radi-

calism, see, especially, Valelly, Radicalism in the States. On the nationalization of the“race problem,” see, especially, Lubell, The Future of American Politics, 86–105.

17. Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order, 1–10, 92–127.18. In 1940 there were 9,928 Negroes in Minnesota. By 1950 the number of African

Americans in the state had risen to 14,022, still about one-half of 1 percent of thestate population. Figures from U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of the Population:1950, vol. 2, pt. 23, table 14, p. 45.

19. On wartime racial politics, see Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 409–28, 997–1026; Dalfiume, “The Forgotten Years of the Negro Revolution”; Sitkoff, “Racial Mil-itancy and Interracial Violence in the Second World War”; Kryder, Divided Arsenal;Reed, Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement; and Sugrue, The Origins ofthe Urban Crisis, 16–31.

20. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color.21. Quoted in DFL Independent Newsletter, Jan. 12, 1947, 3.22. Milkis, The President and the Parties, 98–124, 146.23. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 8.24. Examples include Sullivan, Days of Hope; Kelley, Hammer and Hoe; Dittmer,

Local People; Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle; Morris, The Origins of the Civil RightsMovement; Weiss, Whitney Young and the Struggle for Civil Rights; and Tushnet,Making Civil Rights Law.

25. Here I refer mainly to those critiques of postwar liberal civil rights efforts asserving the ends of the cold war, capitalism, or the social service state, limited bytheir pursuit of civil rights through legislative means, including Marable, Race, Re-form, and Rebellion, 18–35; Gerstle, “Race and the Myth of Liberal Consensus”; Sug-rue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 5–11; Hodgson, America in Our Time, especially,473–78; and Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights.

172 Notes to Introduction

26. In Sullivan’s Days of Hope, Humphrey and the Americans for Democratic Ac-tion (ADA), in their opposition to Wallace and support for Truman, ended the hopeto which the title refers.

1. The Rise and Fall of the Farmer-Labor Party

1. This scene is described in Morlan, Political Prairie Fire, 191. Morlan cites theNonpartisan Leader, Apr. 8, 1919.

2. The following description of agrarian movements relies on Hicks, The PopulistRevolt; Saloutos and Hicks, Agricultural Discontent in the Middle West, 1900–1939;Nye, Midwestern Progressive Politics; Mayer, Floyd B. Olson; Gieske, Minnesota Farmer-Laborism; Mitau, Politics in Minnesota; and Morlan, Political Prairie Fire.

3. Holmquist, ed., They Chose Minnesota, 8.4. Lass, Minnesota, 122–23; Mitau, Politics in Minnesota, 6–10. On the party system

in the late nineteenth century, see McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy;and the roundtable discussion, “Alternatives to the Party System in the Party Period,1830–1900,” featuring Ronald Formisano, Mark Voss-Hubbard, Michael Holt, andPaula Baker, in Journal of American History 86 (1999): 93–166.

5. On the rise of the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota, see Morlan, PoliticalPrairie Fire, 22–75. In its six years in power, the Nonpartisan League enacted most ofits platform, giving women the vote in 1917.

6. On the cooperative movement in Minnesota, see Keillor, CooperativeCommonwealth.

7. U.S. Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1901, table 9,p. 20.

8. For instance, Per Hansa, the protagonist, tells his kinfolk about the new groupof settlers in the area: “These folks were Irish, he explained; their women were terri-ble trolls, with noses as long as rake handles. . . . They were much uglier than Indi-ans, and spoke so fast it sounded like this” (Rölvaag, Giants in the Earth, 138–39).

9. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, vol. 3,pt. 1, table 2, p. 1187. Also, Minnesota: A State Guide, compiled by the Federal Writers’Project of the Works Progress Administration, 74–75.

10. A useful overview is in Holmquist, ed., They Chose Minnesota. For informationon the foreign-born populations of the Twin Cities, see Schmid, Social Saga of TwoCities, 129–86.

11. On the ethnic composition of the Iron Range, see the unexpectedly fascinat-ing Landis, Three Iron Mining Towns, 23–24, originally published in 1938; and Sirja-maki, “The People of the Mesabi Range.”

12. The character of these mining towns is described in Landis, Three Iron MiningTowns, 18–25, and throughout. The image of the tearful railway worker surroundedby his family is significant in this regard, as the Nonpartisan League sought to counterimages of wild, unsettled workers.

13. On the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety, see Chrislock, Watchdog ofLoyalty. On antilabor repression, see also Betten, “Riot, Revolution and Repressionin the Iron Range Strike of 1916”; Haynes, “Revolt of the Timber Beasts.” On anti-League violence, see Morlan, Political Prairie Fire, especially, 152–82.

Notes to Chapter 1 173

14. The origins of the Farmer-Labor party are discussed in Valelly, Radicalism inthe States; Naftalin, “A History of the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota”; and Gieske,Minnesota Farmer-Laborism.

15. Valelly, Radicalism in the States, 35.16. Naftalin, “A History of the Farmer-Labor Party,” 71, quoting the Minnesota

Leader, Mar. 11, 1922. Naftalin wrote this dissertation in the midst of the politicalstruggle against Benson’s left-wing faction, and his interpretation is influenced bythat struggle, as I will discuss in chapter 2.

17. Valelly, 35–46, Radicalism in the States; Naftalin, “A History of the Farmer-Labor Party,” 71–72.

18. On the Farmer-Labor Association’s pervasive role in the party, see Holbo,“The Farmer-Labor Association”; and Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 10–11.

19. From Carter, American Messiahs, 89. See also Anderson, Puzzled America,255–70; J. O. Meyers, “Governor Olson of Minnesota,” The Nation 133 (Nov. 18, 1931):539–40; and Walker, American City. Governor Olson, and the press’s enthrallmentwith Olson, bears no small resemblance to the current fascination with GovernorJesse Ventura, also a large, honest, down-to-earth, third-party, populist-type hero.

20. Mayer, Floyd B. Olson, 93–164; Gieske, Minnesota Farmer-Laborism, 147–50.21. Olson’s ill health and death are movingly described in Mayer, Floyd B. Olson,

143–45, 289–301.22. The labor movement’s role in diminishing ethnicity in politics is discussed in

Lubell, The Future of American Politics, 48–54; Cohen, Making a New Deal, 251–360;and Lipset, Political Man, 325.

23. On the Citizens’ Alliance and antilabor activity, see Walker, American City,177–98; Millikan, “Maintaining Law and Order”; and Rachleff and Quam, “KeepingMinneapolis an Open Shop Town.”

24. On the 1934 strike, see Walker, American City, 198–268; Valelly, 103–18; Solow,“War in Minneapolis”; Dobbs, Teamster Rebellion; Le Sueur, “What Happens in aStrike”; and the series of oral histories conducted by the Minnesota Historical Society’sRadicalism in Minnesota project, cited in Radicalism in Minnesota, 1900–1960: ASurvey of Selected Sources (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1994), 27–45.

25. See Shover, Cornbelt Rebellion; and “The Corn Belt Cracks Down,” New Re-public, Nov. 22, 1933, 36–38.

26. Reprinted in Youngdale, ed., Third Party Footprints, 244–45.27. Reprinted in Youngdale, ed., Third Party Footprints, 245.28. On the still contentious issue of communism in the Farmer-Labor party, see

Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 12–33; and Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism,257–65. Haynes and Klehr have since collaborated on several well-researched bookson the activities of American communists and their ties to Moscow. See Klehr,Haynes, and Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism; and Klehr andHaynes, Venona.

29. Mayer, Floyd B. Olson, 253.30. Carter, American Messiahs, 56.31. Valelly, Radicalism in the States, 85–102. See also Tweton, The New Deal at the

Grass Roots.32. During the 1930s, Farm Bureau membership increased, while Farmers Union

membership decreased, or stayed the same. See Tontz, “Memberships of GeneralFarm Organizations, United States, 1874–1960”; and Valelly, Radicalism in the States,

174 Notes to Chapter 1

100. On the Farm Bureau, see McConnell, The Decline of Agrarian Democracy,44–54.

33. Control of the Minnesota legislature, however, continued to elude the party.See Naftalin, “The Failure of the Farmer-Labor Party to Capture Control of theMinnesota Legislature.”

34. For favorable portraits of Benson, see Shields, Mr. Progressive; and A. I. Harris,“Benson: Labor Governor,” New Republic, Nov. 3, 1937, 360–62. For a less favorabledescription, see Haynes, Dubious Alliance.

35. On details of communism in the CIO and Farmer-Labor party in the 1930s–40s, see Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 12–33, 71–106; Klehr, The Heyday of AmericanCommunism, 257–65; and an excellent oral history interview with Sam Darcy, theCommunist party educational director for Minnesota, in the Oral History Collectionat Minnesota Historical Society.

36. On the competing factions within the labor movement, see Haynes, DubiousAlliance, 34–46.

37. See Keillor’s biography, Hjalmar Petersen of Minnesota, 143–69.38. I will return to the importance of anti-Semitism in Minneapolis in the fol-

lowing chapters. On this issue, see McWilliams, “Minneapolis, the Curious Twin”;and Gordon, Jews in Transition, especially, 43–68.

39. In his efforts to discredit Benson and the left wing, Hjalmar Petersen wasaided by Republican businessmen like William McKnight of Minnesota Manufactur-ing and Mining (later 3M), who opposed Benson’s tax policies. See Keillor, HjalmarPetersen of Minnesota, 160–62.

40. See the infamous Are They Communists or Catspaws? written and publishedby Republican auditor Ray Chase, who was later sued for slander. See Gordon, Jewsin Transition, 51–52.

41. On isolationism in Minnesota politics, see Keillor, Hjalmar Petersen of Min-nesota, 170–90. For examples of internationalist educational efforts, see the Leagueof Women Voters’ The Woman Voter, for 1939–44 and beyond; and the University ofMinnesota’s radio series program “The World We Want,” sponsored by the Key Cen-ter for War Information (later the Bureau for Current Affairs). Transcripts are in theUniversity of Minnesota Department of Political Science Papers, box 14, Universityof Minnesota Archives.

42. Elmer Benson to Howard Y. Williams, Oct. 20, 1941. Benson’s many exchangesconcerning the war can be found in the Elmer Benson Papers, box 16, MinnesotaHistorical Society.

43. Quoted in “Farmer-Labor Party to Quit Isolationism,” by Gordon Roth, PM,Aug. 29, 1941. Friends warned Benson not to change his position too suddenly, lest itconfirm to all that he was enthralled by the communists. Abe Harris to Elmer Benson,July 15, 1941, Benson Papers, box 16.

44. See “A Statistical Analysis of the 1946 Election,” Papers of the National Repub-lican Party, microfilm, Series A, Reel 1, pt. 2; and White et al., eds., Minnesota Votes.

45. The best discussion of the merger is in Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 107–24.46. The CIO’s Sidney Hillman and the Communist party’s Earl Browder both

ordered Popular Front Farmer-Laborites to work for merger in 1943. See Haynes,Dubious Alliance, 109–14.

47. On this election, see Solberg, Hubert Humphrey, 88–96; and Haynes, DubiousAlliance, 102–5.


48. “I cannot win as a Democrat. Since the Farmer-Labor party is being dissolved,I naturally have to go some other place.” Harold Hagen to Sig Walstrom, Jan. 28,1944, Harold Hagen Papers, box 3, Minnesota Historical Society.

49. “Resolution,” Feb. 14, 1944, Francis Smith Papers, box 1, Minnesota HistoricalSociety.

50. Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 114–18. Roosevelt received 52 percent of the vote.See White et al., Minnesota Votes, 24.

51. See, for instance, Ira Katznelson, “Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity?”and Nelson Lichtenstein, “From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining,” both inGerstle and Fraser, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order; Lipsitz, Class andCulture in Cold War America; Lichtenstein and Korstad, “Opportunities Found andLost”; and Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, who talks about the ways postwardecisions created the urban crisis.

52. See Brinkley, The End of Reform, 137–74; and Milkis, The President and theParties, 3–17, 98–146.

53. This point is argued in detail in Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order,191–99.

2. The New Two-Party Liberalism

1. Arthur Naftalin for Barney Allen, “Politically, This I Believe . . .” [1944], ArthurNaftalin Papers, box 20, Minnesota Historical Society.

2. Analyses of this shift in political sensibility include Valelly, Radicalism in theStates; Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age; and May, ed., Recasting America,1–18.

3. See Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order, especially 162–89.4. See Lowi, The End of Liberalism, 72–79; and Fowler, Believing Skeptics, 176–210.5. On Humphrey’s years at the University of Minnesota, see Solberg, Hubert

Humphrey, 68–87; Humphrey, The Education of a Public Man, 59–60; and Kampel-man, Entering New Worlds, 54–61. Kirkpatrick left the university in 1947 to join theState Department. See “History of Department of Political Science,” by WilliamAnderson, University of Minnesota Department of Political Science Papers (here-after cited as DPSP), box 14, University of Minnesota Archives.

6. On Latham, see Humphrey, Education, 74. Lindblom took part in KUOM’s“The World We Want” radio series, where he was introduced as a faculty member.See transcripts in DPSP, box 14. On Moos, see William Anderson to Joseph Harris[undated, 1940], DPSP, box 11.

7. See Seidelman, Disenchanted Realists, 19–23. See also Wiebe, The Search forOrder, 1877–1920, 11–43; Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science, 1–47;and Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory.

8. See, for instance, Kirkpatrick and Christensen, The People, Politics and thePolitician, 1–2.

9. Kirkpatrick and Christensen, The People, 2; italics in original. Kirkpatrick re-peated this passage often. It also appears in his “Report on W. E. Mosher’s Introduc-tion to Responsible Citizenship,” DPSP, box 11; and again in Kirkpatrick, “Report ofthe Committee of the American Political Science Association on War-Time Changesin the Political Science Curriculum,” 1143.


10. Kirkpatrick and Christensen, The People, 1. The critiques against APSA and thepluralists include Surkin and Wolfe, eds., An End to Political Science; Lowi, The Endof Liberalism, 38–54; and Fowler, Believing Skeptics, 176–94.

11. The Political Science Department faculty participated in a public educationradio series sponsored by the Key Center for War Information (later the Bureau forCurrent Affairs). See transcripts of “Political Prospects for Postwar Reconstruction,”transcript radio panel featuring Evron Kirkpatrick, Charles Lindblom, Elio Mona-chesi, and Edgar Wesley, [1943]; “Bureaucracy,” with William Anderson, Evron Kirk-patrick, and Lloyd Short (all of the Political Science Dept.), broadcast Mar. 17, 1944;“Political Prospects for Postwar Reconstruction,” with Kirkpatrick and others, Feb.22, 1944; “Are Democracies Following the Road to Serfdom?” with William Andersonand Herbert McClosky, Apr. 27, 1945; and “What Is the Full Employment Bill?” Oct.10, 1945; all in DPSP, box 14.

12. This was a common argument at the time; it can be found in such pro–New Deal works as Wallace, New Frontiers; and Roosevelt, Looking Forward. Interms of its currency at the University of Minnesota, see Humphrey, The PoliticalPhilosophy of the New Deal, 16; and Lloyd Short in University of Minnesota, KeyCenter of War Information, Special Bulletin no. 70, “Bureaucracy,” with WilliamAnderson, Evron Kirkpatrick, and Lloyd Short, broadcast Mar. 17, 1944, p. 4, DPSP,box 14.

13. Humphrey, Political Philosophy, 16.14. Kampelman lecture, “State Essence,” Max Kampelman Papers, Lecture Notes,

box 5, Minnesota Historical Society. See also Humphrey, Political Philosophy, 11–12.On political scientists’ conception of a benevolent, integrative state, see Seidelman,Disenchanted Realists, 69–74, and throughout. On general ideas about the state inthe 1930s–40s, see Brinkley, The End of Reform, especially 31–85; and Plotke, Buildinga Democratic Political Order, 162–89.

15. Humphrey, Political Philosophy, 56.16. Humphrey, Political Philosophy, 88–90.17. Humphrey, Political Philosophy, 32, lifting whole paragraphs from Lerner, It’s

Later Than You Think, 20–21.18. Fowler, Believing Skeptics, 198; Latham, “The Group Basis of Politics: Notes

for a Theory,” 376–97.19. Truman, The Governmental Process; MacIver, The Web of Government; and

Latham, The Group Basis of Politics. Lowi, The End of Liberalism, 75, says that agroup-based view of politics was conventional wisdom by 1948.

20. On postwar liberal refutation of “ideology,” and embrace of “pragmatism,”see Pells, The Liberal Mind, 138–82; and Fowler, Believing Skeptics, 4–17. For examples,see Wallace, New Frontiers, 19–34; Humphrey, Political Philosophy, especially 13–17;and Schlesinger, The Vital Center.

21. For discussion of the liberal rebuttals to accusations of confusion and indi-rection, see Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order, 164–65; for examples, seeHumphrey, Political Philosophy, 13–17.

22. On Keynesianism, see Brinkley, The End of Reform, 7–8, 128–31; and Hodgson,America in Our Time, 78–82. Alvin Hansen, who articulated Keynesianism for Pres-ident Roosevelt, and Walter Heller, the Keynesian chairman of Economic Advisorsunder Kennedy and Johnson, had been economists at the University of Minnesotain the 1930s (Hansen) and 1950s (Heller).


23. Stuart Chase, “The Economy of Abundance,” in Bingham and Rodman, eds.,Challenge to the New Deal, 139–42, quote on p. 140. See also Brinkley, The End of Re-form, 70–71.

24. Brinkley, The End of Reform, 66. Brinkley likewise identifies these two ideasas ideas that later became part of Keynesianism.

25. See, for instance, “Bureaucracy,” “Is Free Enterprise Necessary for Democ-racy?” and “Political Prospects for Postwar Reconstruction,” all from “The WorldWe Want” radio series; see transcripts in DPSP, box 14.

26. University of Minnesota application, box 5, Kampelman Papers.27. Anderson, “The Role of Political Science,” 12.28. See Anderson, Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations: A Budget of Sug-

gestions for Research; and Anderson, “The Commission on Intergovernmental Rela-tions and the United States Federal System.”

29. Schattschneider, Party Government, 1.30. Hinderaker, “Harold Stassen and Developments in the Republican Party in

Minnesota, 1937–43”; Naftalin, “A History of the Farmer-Labor Party in Minne-sota”; and Morlan, “The Political History of the Nonpartisan League, 1915–1922.”

31. Kampelman, “Harold Laski.” Kirkpatrick’s student Carroll Hawkins was writ-ing a dissertation on the political thought of Laski.

32. Murphy, “People and Pedagogues,” 172.33. See Pomper, “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System? What, Again?”;

and Ranney and Kendall, Democracy and the American Party System, especially,500.

34. Schattschneider, Party Government, 30–31. Subsequent page references aregiven parenthetically in the text.

35. On the “cross-pressure” function of group activity, see MacIver, The Web ofGovernment, 421–30; Truman, The Governmental Process, 1–45; Lipset, Political Man,74–80; as well as Schattschneider, Party Government, 33. The idea remains relevanttoday, although the context is no longer totalitarianism but decline of “civil society.”See Putnam, Bowling Alone.

36. Schattschneider, Party Government, 62; and Truman, The GovernmentalProcess, 274–76.

37. Schattschneider, Party Government, 48. See also Myrdal, An AmericanDilemma, 452–522, which discusses the importance of the two-party system todemocracy in contrast to southern one-party rule.

38. On the plebiscitary presidency, see Schattschneider, Party Government, 53;and Milkis, The President and the Parties, especially 260.

39. An early statement of the transition from sectional to “class” politics is Hol-combe, The New Party Politics. See also Schattschneider, Party Government, 115–21;Key, Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups, 269–79; and Lubell, The Future of AmericanPolitics, 29–60.

40. See Schattschneider, The Struggle for Party Government, 1–4; American Polit-ical Science Association Committee on Parties, Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System, 15–25. Kirkpatrick later repudiated the report and the committee; seeKirkpatrick, “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System: Political Science, PolicyScience, or Pseudo-Science?” American Political Science Review. On the many critiquesof the report, see Hinderaker, Party Politics, 44–49.


41. Memo “Meeting Political Science Association on Party Responsibility heldon April 6, 1949,” Kampelman Papers, box 9.

42. Humphrey, “The Senate on Trial,” 650–51.43. Naftalin, “The Failure of the Farmer-Labor Party to Capture Control of the

Minnesota Legislature.”44. Naftalin, “A History of the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota,” 25–28.45. Naftalin, “A History,” 111.46. See, for instance, the portrayal of Townley in Saloutos and Hicks, Agricultural

Discontent in the Middle West, 1900–1939, 162.47. Naftalin, “A History,” 71.48. Naftalin, “A History,” 117, 140.49. Darrell Smith to Archie Robinson, Feb. 3, 1948, Hubert H. Humphrey Papers,

Mayor’s Office Files (hereafter cited as MOF), Political Files (hereafter cited as PF),box 25, Minnesota Historical Society.

50. Dale Kramer, “Young Man in a Hurry,” New Republic, June 16, 1947, 14–16.51. “Third Party in American Politics,” handwritten notes for the League of Women

Voters Institute, Oct. 18, 1946, Humphrey Papers, MOF, box 26; and “Improvementof Party Organization: Specific Resolutions,” Jan. 31, 1953, Donald Fraser Papers,box 5, Minnesota Historical Society.

52. Arthur Naftalin for Barney Allen,“Politically, This I Believe . . .” [1944], NaftalinPapers; see also another speech written for labor leader Rubin Latz [1945], HumphreyPapers, MOF, PF, box 25.

53. Humphrey, “What’s Wrong with the Democrats?”; “Address by Mayor Hum-phrey—January 10, 1948—Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” Humphrey Papers, Senate Cam-paign Files (hereafter cited as SCF), box 2; “Excerpts from Address before HennepinCounty Democratic-Farmer-Labor Convention—May 14, 1948” and “Third Party inAmerican Politics,” handwritten notes for the League of Women Voters Institute,Oct. 18, 1946, both in Humphrey Papers, MOF, box 26; Humphrey to C. O. Madsen,Mar. 4, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, box 25; and “The Structure and Operation ofAmerican Political Parties,” [undated, ca. 1950] lecture outline by Humphrey, DFLState Central Committee Papers, box 26, Minnesota Historical Society. See also letterconfirming Freeman’s address to the League of Women Voters of Minneapolis on“Our Two-Party System—Pattern of American Politics,” Mrs. T. O. Everson to OrvilleFreeman, July 2, 1948, DFL State Central Committee Papers, box 1.

54. See Mitau, Politics in Minnesota, 57–79; and Adrian, “The Origins of Minne-sota’s Nonpartisan Legislature.”

55. “Statement in Support of Party Designations,” Eugenie M. Anderson Papers,box 13, Minnesota Historical Society; and “Party Labels Urged,” DFL Newsletter,Mar. 1949, DFL State Central Committee Papers, box 3. Compare to Schattschneider,Party Government, 6–9.

56. See Naftalin, “The Failure of the Farmer-Labor Party.” They finally achievedtheir goal in 1973.

57. See, especially, Humphrey’s handwritten notes for League of Women Votersspeech, “Third Party in American Politics,” Oct. 18, 1946, Humphrey Papers, MOF,box 26.

58. See Resolution against All-Party Political Activity in Farmer-Labor Women’sClubs of Minnesota, Report of the Convention, 1934, p. 18, Arthur (Spot) Reier-


son Papers, box 1, Minnesota Historical Society. Also Elmer Benson, interview byLucile Kane, Russell Fridley, and James Borman, June 4, 1963, Minnesota HistoricalSociety.

59. Susie Stageberg,“As a Woman Sees It,” undated [1944?], Susie Stageberg Papers,box 2, Minnesota Historical Society.

60. John Bosch to Elmer Benson, Feb. 5, 1941, Benson Papers, box 16.61. See Burnham, “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” 7–

28; and Lubell, The Future of American Politics, especially 44–60.62. See Press Release, from Mayor’s Office, May 12, 1948, about Humphrey’s ad-

dress to Steelworkers of America, CIO, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 26; Kam-pelman’s draft of a speech against Henry Wallace, June 25, 1947, Humphrey Papers,MOF, PF, box 25; Humphrey, “What’s Wrong with the Democrats?” “Address byMayor Humphrey—January 10, 1948—Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” Humphrey Papers,SCF, box 2; and “Excerpts from Address before Hennepin County Democratic-Farmer-Labor Convention—May 14, 1948,” Humphrey Papers, MOF, box 26.

63. See the Farmer-Labor party’s “Resolution,” Feb. 14, 1944, box 1, Francis SmithPapers, Minnesota Historical Society. The resolution to form the “Farmer-Labor-Democrat party” stated that the fight against fascism and for lasting peace had to becarried on in the national political arena; since a national third party was not yetfeasible in 1944, the Farmer-Labor party had agreed to merge with the Democrats inthe name of anti-fascism. See also Benson’s denial that the Democratic party carriedon Farmer-Labor principles and his contention that the national Democratic partysought to destroy the Farmer-Labor party, in Benson, interview.

64. For a description of this overlap, see Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 34–46; andNaftalin, “A History,” who sees the unions’ “educational associations” as vulnerableto communist takeover, 117–25.

65. Naftalin, “A History,” 303, 330–39.66. See Elmer Benson to Irene Paull, Oct. 3, 1941, and Benson to Howard Y.

Williams, Oct. 20, 1941, Benson Papers, box 16.67. For left-wing statements to this effect, see “Why the DFL Doesn’t Win Elec-

tions,” Minnesota Leader, Feb. 28, 1948, 4–5 (the Minnesota Leader was published bythe left wing’s DFL Association); State Executive Board of the DFL Association, “AnOpen Letter to Mayor Humphrey,” Feb. 12, 1948; a letter from Harold Fossum et al.,to George Phillips [n.d., 1946]; and “Resolution to Oppose Hubert Humphrey,” Hum-phrey Papers, MOF, box 26. On left-wing disenchantment with Humphrey, see alsoHaynes, Dubious Alliance, 129; Solberg, Hubert Humphrey, 94–97.

68. See Benson, “Politics in My Lifetime,” 154–60; Benson, interview; “How LeftIs the DFL Ass’n?” and “Joe Ball Must Have Sincere Opposition,” both in MinnesotaLeader, Nov. 1947, 8.

69. William S. White, “The Democrats in Pre-Convention,” Washington Post, Sept.28, 1959.

70. Fenton, Midwest Politics, 100. See also Hrebrenar et al., eds., Interest GroupPolitics in the Midwestern States.

71. Lowi, The End of Liberalism, especially, 55–124.72. McConnell, The Decline of Agrarian Democracy; and McConnell, Private Power

and American Democracy.73. See Milkis, The President and the Parties, 9–13.


3. Antiracism and the Politics of Unity

1. See foreword to the Governor’s Interracial Commission, The Negro Worker inMinnesota. The “Pledge of Unity” was sponsored by the St. Paul Council on HumanRelations and the National Conference of Christians and Jews. The commission en-dorsed the pledge in 1944; see Minutes, July 28, 1944, vol. 1, Governor’s HumanRights Commission, Minutes, 1943–67, Records, Minnesota Department of HumanRights, Minnesota Historical Society. See also National Conference of Christiansand Jews (Minneapolis) letter to “fellow citizen,” 1944, with other antiracism mate-rials in Genevieve Steefel Papers, box 13, Minnesota Historical Society. On rural in-terest, see “Danger Signal for American Democracy,” Farmers Union Herald (St.Paul), Sept. 17, 1948; and “Dancehall Democracy,” Midland Cooperator (Minneapo-lis), Jan. 8, 1947, 2.

2. The total state population in 1940 was 2,792,300, whereas in 1950, it had risento 2,982,483. Population figures from U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of the Popu-lation: 1950, vol. 2, pt. 23, table 14.

3. Figures from Moon, Balance of Power, 148.4. Governor’s Interracial Commission, The Negro Worker, 3.5. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, vol. 3,

pt. 1, p. 1187. See also Minnesota: A State Guide, compiled by the Federal Writers’Project of the Works Progress Administration, 74–75.

6. Kryder, Divided Arsenal, x-xiv, 1–24.7. For concerns about unity, see, especially, Annals of the American Academy of

Political and Social Science, Minority Peoples in a Nation at War, vii-viii. On Amer-icans’ mixed interest in racism during World War II, see Kryder, Divided Arsenal;Blum, V Was for Victory, 182–220; Dower, War without Mercy, 118–79; and Reed,Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement. A more hopeful picture was presentedby McWilliams, Brothers under the Skin, 3–58.

8. See “Report of the 34th Annual Meeting of the NAACP,” Jan. 4, 1943, NAACPPapers, reel 14. On the OWI, see Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, 82–112.

9. Typical titles included “Are These Americans?” “Out of Many—One,” andRuth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, “The Races of Mankind” (New York: Public AffairsCommittee, Inc., 1943). The Public Affairs Committee published a pamphlet seriesthat included many pamphlets on race relations, including Alfred McClung Lee,Race Riots Aren’t Necessary, Public Affairs Pamphlet No. 107 (New York: Public AffairsCommittee, Inc., 1945); Maxwell Stewart, The Negro in America, Public Affairs Pam-phlet No. 95 (New York: Public Affairs Committee, Inc., 1945); and others.

10. Benedict, Race: Science and Politics; Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth;and Myrdal, An American Dilemma. Other popular titles included Moon, ed., Primerfor White Folks; McWilliams, Brothers under the Skin; and the journal Common Ground,published by the Common Council for American Unity from the 1930s to the 1950s.

11. Myrdal, An American Dilemma, xlv-lix.12. Myrdal, An American Dilemma, lix. Many antiracism pamphlets took their

lead from Myrdal. On concerns that America’s race problem would be turned againstit, see Dower, War without Mercy, 164–80; and Annals of the American Academy ofPolitical and Social Science, Minority Peoples, 149–221.

13. See Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 1–12.


14. Jacobson, Whiteness, 98–109; see also Benedict, Race; Boas, Race and Demo-cratic Society, which includes essays from 1910 to the 1930s; and Baker, Negro-WhiteAdjustment.

15. Jacobson, Whiteness, 91–109.16. Benedict, Race, 230–31. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically

in the text.17. Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth, 184.18. On the March on Washington Movement and the wartime FEPC, see Gar-

finkel, When Negroes March; Kryder, Divided Arsenal, 55–131. See also Myrdal, AnAmerican Dilemma, 852; Dalfiume, “The Forgotten Years of the Negro Revolution,”98–99; Terkel, “The Good War,” 335.

19. On opposition to the FEPC, see Garfinkel, When Negroes March, 79, 102; A.Philip Randolph, “March on Washington Movement Presents a Program for theNegro,” in Logan, ed., What the Negro Wants, 145; and “8802 Blues,” The Nation,Feb. 22, 1943, 248–50.

20. House Committee on Labor, To Prohibit Discrimination in Employment, 78thCong., 2d sess., on HR 3986, HR 4004, HR 4005, June-July 1944, 68.

21. Benedict, Race, 247–48.22. See House Committee on Rules, To Prohibit Discrimination in Employment

because of Race, Creed, Color, National Origin or Ancestry. Hearings, 79th Cong., 1stsess., on H.R. 2232. Mar. 8, Apr. 19–20, 25–26, 1945, 1.

23. Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth, 185.24. See Lubell, The Future of American Politics, 29–60; and Lipset, Political Man,

325. For full discussion, see chapter 2.25. U.S. Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1901 (Wash-

ington, D.C., 1902), 20; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the UnitedStates, 1920 (Washington, D.C., 1920), 46; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Censusof the United States: 1930, vol. 3, pt. 1, p. 1187.

26. See Holmquist, ed., They Chose Minnesota.27. On postwar repression and anti-German violence, see Chrislock, Watchdog of

Loyalty; and Morlan, Political Prairie Fire, 152–82.28. On Prohibition in Minnesota politics, see Naftalin, “A History of the Farmer-

Labor Party in Minnesota,” 73–74; and Elmer Benson, interview by Lucile Kane,Russell Fridley, and James Borman, June 4, 1963, Minnesota Historical Society.

29. Quote from The Protestant, Mar.-Apr. 1946, 3, Elmer Benson Papers, box 20,Minnesota Historical Society. On anti-Catholicism in the Farmer-Labor party, seeNaftalin, “A History,” 73–74. See also Carl Ross’s analysis of the 1948 election forThe Worker, where he accuses the Roman Irish of the red-baiting that defeated theLeft, as well as other anti-Catholic materials in Oscar and Madge Hawkins Papers,Minnesota Historical Society.

30. On anti-Semitism in Minneapolis, see Gordon, Jews in Transition, especially43–68; McWilliams, “Minneapolis: The Curious Twin”; and Berman, “Political Anti-Semitism in Minnesota during the Great Depression.”

31. Quote from transcript of radio broadcast, “Around the World in St. Paul,”broadcast Mar. 6, 1946, 2. The program was part of the University of Minnesota’s radioseries “The World We Want.” Transcripts in Department of Political Science Papers(hereafter cited as DPSP), box 9, University of Minnesota Archives. The book wasSickels, Around the World in St. Paul.


32. Transcript, “Around the World in St. Paul,” 3.33. Minnesota: A State Guide, 77–80.34. Lewis, “Minnesota: The Norse State,” 426.35. Landis, Three Iron Mining Towns, 23–24.36. Schmid, Social Saga, 129, 172.37. Sickels, Around the World in St. Paul, 95. Spangler, The Negro in Minnesota,

126, reports 1944 as the date Negroes were first featured in the festival, reflecting theimportance of the war in changing race relations, but Sickels describes the earlyAfrican American exhibits in the 1930s.

38. Sickels, Around the World, 108, 126, 236. See also Minneapolis Spokesman, Jan.16, 1942, and Apr. 21, 1944.

39. Sickels, Around the World, 193.40. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of the Population: 1950, vol. 2, pt. 1, xvi.41. This view is at odds with current interpretations, which see the naturalized

state of whiteness as the basis of its oppressive nature. See, for instance, Lipsitz, ThePossessive Investment in Whiteness, 1–23. On the wartime transformation of ethnicgroups into “white,” see Jacobson, Whiteness, 96–138.

42. Governor’s Interracial Commission, The Negro Worker, 45.43. Governor’s Interracial Commission, The Negro Worker, 27.44. Governor’s Interracial Commission, The Negro Worker, 4.45. Governor’s Interracial Commission, Minutes, Feb. 16, 1944, in Governor’s

Human Rights Commission, Minnesota Department of Human Rights, Records,Minnesota Historical Society.

46. “Racial and Cultural Democracy: Summary of Class Proceedings, 1943–44”in Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Apr. 25, 12th Meeting,in DPSP, box 5.

47. Governor’s Interracial Commission, Minutes, Oct. 29, 1945.48. Governor’s Interracial Commission, Minutes, Feb. 16, 1948.49. Rubin Latz to Humphrey, Mar. 11, 1948, Hubert H. Humphrey Papers, Mayor’s

Office Files (hereafter cited as MOF), box 16, Minnesota Historical Society.50. On the Minneapolis Auto Club, see Samuel Scheiner to Wilfred Leland, Nov.

11, 1947; graffiti reading “Jews and Negroes Are Subhuman,” sent to Mayor’s Councilon Human Relations on Feb. 25, 1947; see also Scheiner correspondence about H. P.Mudgett’s reports on anti-Semitism in Sleizer’s Bar, Apr. 9, 1947; all in HumphreyPapers, MOF, box 16.

51. For a discussion of the traveling exhibit, see Jacobson, Whiteness, 106–9.52. “Minorities and Community Living,” transcript of broadcast, Dec. 12, 1945,

for the University of Minnesota’s “The World We Want” series, DPSP, box 9.53. This component of the Japanese American internment experience has only

recently been written about. See Brooks, “In the Twilight Zone between Black andWhite”; Shaffer, “Opposition to Internment.” My information comes from theMinneapolis Committee on Resettlement of Japanese Americans, Papers; and theSt. Paul Resettlement Committee, Papers, Minnesota Historical Society. Many of the Nisei who resettled in Minnesota came to learn Japanese at the U.S. WarDepartment’s Japanese Language Camp; see Ano, “Loyal Linguists: Nisei of WorldWar II Learned Japanese in Minnesota.” See also Myer, “Japanese-American Re-location.”

54. “Report of the Special Committee on the Resettlement of the Japanese-


Americans, Oct. 23, 1942, International Institute,” St. Paul Resettlement CommitteePapers, box 1.

55. “Equal Justice under the Law: The Japanese-American Resettles in Minne-sota,” by Genevieve Steefel for the Committee for the Resettlement of JapaneseAmericans, July 1943; see also “Script for Radio Broadcast, June 17,” on O.C.D. Workfor the Nisei, prepared by Genevieve Steefel, [1943]; both in Minneapolis Committeeon Resettlement of Japanese Americans Papers, box 2.

56. “Equal Justice Under the Law,” 11.57. See, in particular, Anthony Brutus Cassius, interview by Carl Ross for Hotel

and Restaurant Workers Local 665 project, 1981, Minnesota Historical Society; NellieStone Johnson, interview by Carl Ross for Hotel and Restaurant Workers Local 665

project, 1981, Minnesota Historical Society; and Nellie Stone Johnson, interview byCarl Ross et al., Mar. 1, 1988, Minnesota Historical Society.

58. Governor’s Interracial Commission, The Negro Worker, 38.59. See “Activity Report of the United Labor Committee for Human Rights,”

“CLU Resolution, March 26, 1947,” and “Joint Committee for Employment Oppor-tunity Statement,” in Central Labor Union of Minneapolis and Hennepin County,Central Labor Union Records, box 43, Minnesota Historical Society.

60. National Conference of Christians and Jews, letter to “fellow-citizens,” [1944],in Steefel Papers, box 13.

61. Governor’s Interracial Commission, The Negro Worker, 33.62. Governor’s Interracial Commission, The Negro Worker, 33.63. “Racial and Cultural Democracy,” DPSP. For information on Charles Horn,

as he liked to see it, see Newman, “An Experiment in Industrial Democracy.”64. Governor’s Interracial Commission, The Negro Worker, 12; Newman, “An Ex-

periment,” 55; and Liepold, Cecil E. Newman, 94–100. The figure of one thousandworkers was in times of “maximum production,” and constituted more than 20 per-cent of the adult African American population in the state. Spangler, The Negro inMinnesota, 125, reports that at its peak, the plant employed 1,200 Negroes. See alsoMinneapolis Star, Oct. 17, 1945.

65. Charles Horn to Hjalmar Petersen, Nov. 21, 1946, Hjalmar Petersen Papers,box 19, Minnesota Historical Society. See also correspondence between Horn andthe state Republican party, indicating Horn’s monitoring of union newspapers, Re-publican State Central Committee Papers, box 4, Minnesota Historical Society. Onhis economic conservatism, see the Federal Cartridge Corporation’s journal, TheMonark, a biweekly “factory and feature medium for maintenance of good fellow-ship and high morale among all personnel of the organization,” which featured ser-mons by Horn, bowling scores, news of employee hobbies, and kitchen tips. See alsoDypwick, “Fun Pays Dividend.” For an example of Horn’s concern about federaltaxation, see “Sound Advice from President Charles L. Horn,” The Monark, Aug. 16,1946, 3; and “Stop Government Spending,” Feb. 21, 1947, 2. Nellie Stone Johnsonmentions a union at the Twin Cities Ordnance Plant in the interview by Carl Rosset al., Mar. 1, 1988, 30, but I have found no evidence of such a union.

66. “Anti-Firearms Movement,” The Monark, Jan. 30, 1941, 1.67. Dypwick, “Fun Pays Dividend,” 21.68. “Building Employees Win Boost,” Minneapolis Star, Mar. 29, 1947.69. Johnson, Nellie Stone Johnson, 155.70. “Fair Play,” The Monark, Mar. 26, 1942.


71. Charles Horn to Hubert Humphrey, Dec. 30, 1946, Humphrey Papers, MOF,box 16.

72. “Racial and Cultural Democracy,” May 15 meeting, DPSP.73. “Company Policies Remain the Same Says Pres. Horn,” The Monark, Aug. 24,

1945, 2. On the closing of the Twin Cities Ordnance Plant, see “Many Have Trans-ferred Back to Home Plant Since TCOP Shutdown,” The Monark, Sept. 7, 1945, 3. In1947 the New Brighton plant was operating a small arms salvaging program with aworkforce of seven hundred, 90 percent of which were veterans. It is hard to saywhether or not black workers were rehired by this plant. See “Arms Plant’s RevivalSure,” Minneapolis Morning Tribune, July 17, 1947, 13.

74. Testimony in Support of a Minnesota Fair Employment Practice Bill, sub-mitted to the Labor Committee of the Minnesota State Senate, Feb. 10, 1949, SteefelPapers, box 13.

75. Otto Christenson, “Fair Employment Practices Act, communication fromOtto Christenson to the Minnesota League of Women Voters, Nov. 21, 1949” (St.Paul: Minnesota Employers Association, 1949), 10, at Minnesota Historical Society.

4. The Black Communities in Minnesota

1. The total state population in 1910 was 2,075,708, while in 1940 it had risen to2,792,300. Figures from the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of the Population:1950 (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1952), vol. 2, pt. 23, p. 44, table 14.

2. Governor’s Interracial Commission, The Negro Worker in Minnesota, 3. For1930s population, see Schmid, Social Saga of Two Cities, 172.

3. On discriminatory practices, see Spangler, The Negro in Minnesota, 90–95.4. Spangler, The Negro in Minnesota, 107, citing a Minneapolis Urban League

study; and Governor’s Interracial Commission, The Negro Worker in Minnesota, 21.5. Thompson, American Daughter; Johnson, Nellie Stone Johnson. See also

Hedgeman, The Trumpet Sounds; Fairbank, Days of Rondo; and Taylor, “GrowingUp in Minnesota.”

6. Spangler, The Negro in Minnesota, 100, referencing the Duluth Herald, June15, 16, 1920; see also Ethel Ray Nance, interview by David Taylor, May 25, 1974, Min-nesota Historical Society; and William Maupins, interview by David Taylor, July 31,1975, Minnesota Historical Society.

7. “Anoka Lynching Balked,” Minneapolis Star, Sept. 7, 1931.8. Hall, “Roman Holiday in Minneapolis,” Crisis, 38 [40] (Oct. 1931): 337–39.

This account is affirmed by “End of Race Row Believed Near,” Minneapolis Tribune,July 18, 1931. See also “Home Stoned in Race Row,” Minneapolis Tribune, July 15,1931; “Crowd of 3000 Renews Attack on Negroes’ Home,” Minneapolis Tribune, July16, 1931; “4000 Assemble Near Negro’s Home,” Minneapolis Tribune, July 17, 1931.Schmid, Social Saga, 187, indicates that after the Tribune reported that Lee wouldmove, the NAACP issued a statement, reported on July 20, 1931, saying that hewould not move. Schmid reports that he in fact stayed in the house, with no newdemonstrations.

9. Spangler, The Negro in Minnesota, 71.10. Spangler, The Negro in Minnesota, 92. See also David Vassar Taylor, “The

Blacks,” in Holmquist, ed., They Chose Minnesota, 73–91.


11. On the Hall brothers, see S. E. Hall, interview by David Taylor, Dec. 19, 1970,Minnesota Historical Society; S. E. Hall, interview by Ethel Ray Nance, May 1975,Minnesota Historical Society; and Young, “History of the St. Paul Urban League,”19–20.

12. Young, “History of the St. Paul Urban League,” 22.13. On efforts to keep migrants out of the Twin Cities, see Spangler, The Negro in

Minnesota, 67, who cites an interview with Cecil Newman and J. Louis Ervin. Shortlyafter the St. Paul Urban League was formed, it expanded to include Minneapolisand was renamed the Twin Cities Urban League; however, they separated again inthe 1930s, only to be recombined in the 1940s. See Young, “History of the St. PaulUrban League,” 35–36; Spangler, The Negro in Minnesota, 105; and Hall, interview byTaylor.

14. Young, “History of the St. Paul Urban League,” 40; and Governor’s InterracialCommission, The Negro Worker, 21–22.

15. Young, “History of the St. Paul Urban League,” 41.16. Young, “History of the St. Paul Urban League,” 34–39; Governor’s Interracial

Commission, The Negro Worker, 21–22.17. “Phyllis Wheatley House, 1924–1934,” tenth anniversary booklet, in Phyllis

Wheatley Community Center Papers, box 1, Minnesota Historical Society. For fur-ther information on white women’s Progressive-era activity, see Stuhler, ed., Womenof Minnesota; and Onqué, “History of the Hallie Q. Brown Community House,” 18.

18. On NAACP accomplishments, see Spangler, The Negro in Minnesota, 92. Oninactivity and revivals, see NAACP materials, Curtis C. Chivers Papers, 1924–76,Minnesota Historical Society; and NAACP St. Paul Branch, minutes and relatedrecords, 1904, 1905, 1934–42, Minnesota Historical Society.

19. The list includes Urban League leaders Roy Wilkins, Clarence Mitchell, Whit-ney Young, and Anna Arnold Hedgeman; photographer Gordon Parks; journalistCarl T. Rowan; writer Era Bell Thompson; saxophonist Lester Young; artist HenryBannarn; and others. David Taylor argues that at the turn of the century the presenceof John Q. Adams, the editor of the Western Appeal, made St. Paul a thriving blackintellectual center, attracting leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington,and William Trotter; see David Taylor’s “Booker T. Washington and the Western Ap-peal,” unpublished manuscript in David Taylor Papers, Minnesota Historical Soci-ety. Cecil Newman, editor of the Minneapolis Spokesman, expressed regret that Min-nesota Negroes of “national reputation” were forced to leave the state, in a radioprogram titled “Minorities and Community Living,” Dec. 12, 1945, for the Universityof Minnesota’s “The World We Want” series, transcripts in Department of PoliticalScience Papers (hereafter cited as DPSP), box 9, University of Minnesota Archives.

20. Hall, interview by Taylor. “Oatmeal hill” reportedly referred to the lighterskin color of blacks in this solidly middle-class area, as opposed to “Cornmeal Valley,”the area west of Dale Street, where the southern migrants settled, the term referringto a southern food staple. For pictures of this insular black community, see TwinCities Observer, 1940s; St. Paul Echo, Northwestern Bulletin, 1920s. See also descrip-tions of St. Paul black life in Thompson, American Daughter, 159–64.

21. On the problem of respectability and protest, see Higginbotham, RighteousDiscontent; and Gaines, Uplifting the Race.

22. Thompson, American Daughter, 159–64.


23. Onqué, “History of the Hallie Q. Brown Community House,” 35; Young, “His-tory of the St. Paul Urban League,” 34.

24. Cited in Governor’s Interracial Commission, The Negro Worker, 15–16. “White”included all ethnic groups, including Mexican; American Indians were dealt withseparately.

25. Onqué, “History of the Hallie Q. Brown Community House,” 35, cites a find-ing that 90 percent of black families in Ramsey County (St. Paul) were on relief, ascompared to 33 percent of all families in Ramsey County.

26. Phyllis Wheatley House, Annual Report, 1933–34, Phyllis Wheatley Commu-nity Center Papers, box 1.

27. Phyllis Wheatley House, Annual Report, 1933–34.28. “Why Send Our CCC Boys South?” Minneapolis Spokesman, Jan. 19, 1940;

and Onqué, “History of the Hallie Q. Brown Community House,” 40.29. See calendars, Phyllis Wheatley Community Center Papers, box 1; and An-

thony B. Cassius, interview by Carl Ross, Dec. 1, 1981, 35, Minnesota Historical Society.30. See The Union Advocate, throughout the 1930s; Central Labor Union radio

program called “Racial Presentation” (1943) in Central Labor Union of Minneapolisand Hennepin County, Central Labor Union Records, box 38, Minnesota HistoricalSociety. See also pamphlets in box 1, Duluth CIO Industrial Council Records, Min-nesota Historical Society.

31. On the creation of Local 665, see Cassius, interview by Ross; and Albert Allen,interview by Carl Ross, June 17, 1981, Minnesota Historical Society; and Johnson,Nellie Stone Johnson, 80–86.

32. Cassius, interview by Ross. Helstein would end up becoming president of theUnited Packinghouse workers, CIO, while Douglas Hall would become involved withthe left wing of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, running for Congress in 1946.

33. See “Waiters Win $13,000 Wage Increase,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Mar. 1,1940; and A. B. Cassius to Central Labor Union, Mar. 8, 1940, Central Labor Unionof Minneapolis and Hennepin County, Central Labor Union Records, box 11. Othersources differ. The Minnesota Negro Council’s News and Reviews indicates that in1933, black waiters at the Curtis earned $18.00 a month, and “after several wage nego-tiations in 1938, the men now receive $62.50 per month with other favorable stipu-lations” (News and Reviews, May 22, 1938); still another source, the MinneapolisSpokesman, Aug. 8, 1940, reported Cassius as saying that Negro waiters were earning$21.00 per month, and after he won the lawsuit, they were making $86.00 per month.

34. Cassius, interview by Ross, 3; brackets in transcript.35. Cassius, interview by Ross, 29, and throughout.36. On his battle against city hall, see Cassius, interview by Ross; Minneapolis

Spokesman, June–Aug., 1947; and the Minneapolis Tribune, July–Aug., 1947. TheCowles-owned Minneapolis papers were sympathetic to Cassius, because they hadthemselves waged a steady battle against the city council to change the liquor licens-ing rules, the strange result of prohibitionists and organized crime. The licensingprocedures in Minneapolis prohibited most citizens from acquiring a liquor license,let alone a black man.

37. Cassius, interview by Ross, 13–14.38. Albert Allen, interview by Carl Ross, June 17, 1981, 2. Unless otherwise indi-

cated, the account in the text is from this interview.


39. Nellie Stone Johnson, interview by Carl Ross, May 1981, 5, Minnesota Histor-ical Society.

40. Allen, interview, 6–10.41. The following account is from three interviews with Nellie Stone Johnson, by

Carl Ross, Nov. 17, 1981, May 1981, and Mar. 1, 1988; and Perry, “The Good Fight.” Seealso Johnson, Nellie Stone Johnson, 71–93.

42. On the Farmer-Labor Association, see Holbo, “The Farmer-Labor Associa-tion”; and Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 10–11.

43. Johnson, Nellie Stone Johnson, 129.44. Johnson, Nellie Stone Johnson, 130. No Humphrey biographers have mentioned

this side-by-side campaigning.45. “Spotlight Glares on City Candidates,” Minneapolis Tribune, May 13, 1945, 3L.46. Nellie Stone Johnson, interview by Carl Ross et al., Mar. 1, 1988, 28, Minnesota

Historical Society.47. Johnson, Nellie Stone Johnson, 137–39.48. Littlejohn apparently approached the Railroad Brotherhoods first, but they

refused to accept blacks into their unions, so they unionized with the hotel andrestaurant workers. See Cassius, interview by Ross, 17.

49. Minneapolis Spokesman, Mar. 15, 1940.50. Johnson, interview by Ross et al., Mar. 1, 1988, 6–7.51. Resume—National Federation of Settlements—Pittsburgh, June 1–5, 1938,

box 1, Phyllis Wheatley Community Center Papers.52. Minnesota Negro Council, News and Reviews, Industrial number v. 1, no. 4

(May 22, 1938), 1.53. See Liepold, Cecil Newman. On Newman’s appeal to white readers, see Rich-

ardson, “Twin Cities Spokesman.”54. On black intellectuals and activists in the 1930s, see Kirby, Black Americans in

the Roosevelt Era.55. Minneapolis Spokesman, Mar. 15, 1940.56. “47 Men and Women Meet at Dreamland Cafe to Organize Council of Negro

Operations,” Minneapolis Spokesman, May 3, 1940; “NAACP Drive,” MinneapolisSpokesman, May 31, 1940; “Slogan of the Minneapolis Council of Negro Organiza-tions: Every Minneapolis Negro in Some Organization in 1941. Join Up!” Minneapo-lis Spokesman, Feb. 14, 1941.

57. Minneapolis Spokesman, Feb. 2, 1940; Minneapolis Spokesman, Mar. 15, 1940;Minneapolis Spokesman, Aug. 22, 1947. See also “As I See It,” Minneapolis Spokesman,Feb. 15, 1946. Newman affirmed, “there is no reason for any Twin City Negro not tobe in the NAACP,” Minneapolis Spokesman, May 3, 1940.

58. “Let’s Form a Club, Slogan of the Hour,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Mar. 15, 1940;Joseph Albright letter, Minneapolis Spokesman, Mar. 15, 1940; announcement of local516 Dining Car Employees Union meeting, Minneapolis Spokesman, Jan., 19, 1940;announcement of radio show “Brotherhood Hour,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Jan. 19,1940; and Herbert Howell, “All Negro Day,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Mar. 14, 1941.

59. Twin Cities Observer, Apr. 27, 1945, and elsewhere.60. “We’re Not Doing So Bad,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Feb. 16, 1940.61. “Minorities and Community Living,” Dec. 12, 1945, for the University of Min-

nesota’s “The World We Want” series, transcript in DPSP, box 9.62. Minneapolis Spokesman, Sept. 24, 1948.


63. Newman proudly pointed out in 1940 that the Crisis had reprinted articlesfrom the Minneapolis Spokesman three times in the past ten months; MinneapolisSpokesman, July 19, 1940. The Minneapolis Spokesman continued to reprint articlesfrom the black press but also began to include articles from the liberal white pressas well.

64. Newman, “Experiment in Industrial Democracy.”65. Minneapolis Spokesman, Mar. 15, 1940, Apr. 14, 1944, and Apr. 21, 1944; Minne-

apolis Spokesman, Apr. 18, 1941.66. Minneapolis Spokesman, Feb. 8, 1946; “Randolph to Speak at Three Rallies,”

Minneapolis Spokesman, Apr. 21, 1944; “FEPC Schedules Mass Meetings,” MinneapolisSpokesman, Jan. 18, 1946; and Minneapolis Spokesman, Jan. 19, 1940.

67. On the National Guard, see Spangler, The Negro in Minnesota, 122–23;and “Discrimination Must Stop in the Defense Industry,” Minneapolis Spokesman,May 30, 1941, and June 20, 1941; Minneapolis Spokesman, July 4, 1941; Minneapo-lis Spokesman, June 27, 1941; “Manager of Farmers Union Fires Girl Because ofNegro Friends,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Jan. 10, 1941; Minneapolis Spokesman, Mar.1, 1946.

68. Newman, “Experiment”; and Leipold, Cecil E. Newman, 94–100.69. Newman, “Experiment,” 53.

5. An Independent Black Interest Group

1. On black Americans during World War II, see Franklin, From Slavery to Free-dom, 560–604; Kryder, Divided Arsenal; Blum, V Was for Victory, 182–220; White, AMan Called White; Dalfiume, “The Forgotten Years of the Negro Revolution”; Gar-finkel, When Negroes March; Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy and Interracial Violence inthe Second World War”; and Reed, Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement.

2. Dalfiume, “The Forgotten Years,” 100.3. These organizations included the NAACP, the Committee for Participation

of Negroes in National Defense, the National Negro Congress, and local defensecommittees. See Dalfiume, “The Forgotten Years,” 98, citing the Pittsburgh Courier,Dec. 1940–Feb. 1941; White, A Man Called White, 186–94; Adams, “Fighting forDemocracy in St. Louis,” Missouri Historical Review, 61–62.

4. Quote from Garfinkel, When Negroes March, 8. The organization of the marchis recounted in Garfinkel, When Negroes March, 37–61; White, A Man Called White,186–87; and Kryder, Divided Arsenal, 53–78. The goals of the march are in A. PhilipRandolph, “March on Washington Movement Presents a Program for the Negro,” inLogan, ed., What the Negro Wants, 133–62.

5. On administrative contests, see Kryder, Divided Arsenal, 74–87; and “8802

Blues,” The Nation, Feb. 22, 1943, 248–50. In 1944 the FEPC was transferred to Con-gress, where southern Democrats and conservative Republicans filibustered requestsfor appropriations. See White, A Man Called White, 193–94.

6. Garfinkel, When Negroes March, 95–96; Minneapolis Spokesman, Apr. 28, 1944,Feb. 8, 1946.

7. National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Committee, Manual ofStrategy.

8. Garfinkel, When Negroes March, 145.


9. Randolph, “March on Washington,” cites four hundred thousand southernblack soldiers (157); see also Kryder, Divided Arsenal, 289. On wartime migrations,see Kryder, Divided Arsenal, 88–132; Sugrue, The Origins of Urban Crisis, 17–55; andLemann, The Promised Land.

10. See Kurian, ed., Datapedia of the United States, 1790–2000, 18–21. Minnesota’sblack population increased modestly from 9,928 to 14,022.

11. See John Kirby, Black Americans in the Era of Roosevelt, 152–217; “The NegroVote,” Opportunity, 1936, 302–4; Randolph, “March on Washington,” 133–62, espe-cially, 147–49. Myrdal also placed great hope in the vote: “The Northern vote mightbecome the instrument by which the [N]egroes can increasingly use the machineryof federal legislation and administration to tear down the walls of discrimination”(An American Dilemma, 440).

12. Moon, Balance of Power, 198.13. Moon, Balance of Power, 198–99.14. In 1944, representatives of the twenty-five largest mass black organizations is-

sued a statement outlining Negro interests, which makes the point that Negro in-terests were not just about lynching and poll tax now, but rather closely aligned tothose of organized labor. White, A Man Called White, 263–64. See also Hamiltonand Hamilton, The Dual Agenda, 43–71.

15. White, A Man Called White, 23–173, in which White discusses his work withthe NAACP in the 1930s. See Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, for grassroots civil rights move-ments in the South in the 1930s. Lynching remained an issue, as a lynching wave sweptacross the South in 1946 and 1947; discussed in White, A Man Called White, 322–28;reported in the Minneapolis Spokesman and the Minneapolis Tribune, 1945–47.

16. Sugrue, The Origins of Urban Crisis, 33–88; Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto.White saw housing as one of the most important frontiers of civil rights, and theNAACP began a campaign against restrictive covenants in 1945, but these were localfights. See White, A Man Called White, 304–5; and Tushnet, Making Civil RightsLaw, 81–98.

17. See, for example, “187 Families Must Leave Homes at Sumner Field,” Minne-apolis Star, May 21, 1947, 20; “Mayor to Ask Council’s OK on City Housing Authority,”Minneapolis Star, May 22, 1947, 29; “Small Town Housing,” Minneapolis Star, June16, 1947, 12; and “Persuasion Keynotes Drive on New Home Race Bias,” MinneapolisStar, Jan. 4, 1947.

18. Quoted by S. Vincent Owens in a radio discussion of the FEPC bill, “ShouldWe Support Federal Legislation to Establish a Fair Employment Practices Commis-sion?” University of Minnesota, General Extension Division, Bureau for CurrentAffairs, bulletin no. 129, p. 5, Department of Political Science Papers, box 9, Univer-sity of Minnesota Archives.

19. On the struggle for a full employment law, see Bailey, Congress Makes a Law.20. Bailey, Congress Makes a Law, 57. These words were rejected by conservatives

and did not appear in the final bill.21. Radio discussion of the FEPC bill, University of Minnesota, General Extension

Division, Bureau for Current Affairs, bulletin no. 129, “Should We Support FederalLegislation to Establish a Fair Employment Practices Commission,” 3.

22. For chart of state FEPC laws, see Blood, Northern Breakthrough, 147.23. Transcript of the United Labor Committee Program, Jan. 19, 1946, Genevieve

Steefel Papers, box 13, Minnesota Historical Society; WTCN featured journalists


Nell Dodson Russell, Minneapolis Spokesman; Janet Kroll, American Jewish World;and Brenda Ueland, Minneapolis Daily Times, in February to talk about the FEPCbill in Congress. See Minneapolis Spokesman, Feb. 1, 1946.

24. On the Communist rally, see “Nellie Stone to Introduce Speaker at LeninMeeting,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Feb. 1, 1946. Five hundred attended, according tothe Minneapolis Spokesman, Feb. 6, 1946. On the Randolph rally, see MinneapolisSpokesman, Feb. 8 and 15, 1946; Minneapolis Star, Feb. 8, 1946, Feb. 9, 1946, Feb. 11,1946, Feb. 12, 1946; Feb. 14, 1946; Feb. 15, 1946. The FEPC rally coincided with NationalBrotherhood Week. See also Kesselman, Social Politics, 196.

25. The other major black newspaper was Milton G. Williams’s Republican TwinCities Observer. The Governor’s Interracial Commission listed Newman’s papers asthe only black papers in the state; see The Negro Worker in Minnesota, 52. In 1948, theMinneapolis Spokesman’s circulation was 3,570. As Newman pointed out, however,newspapers in the tightly knit black communities got passed around from family tofamily, or were read at settlement houses and bars. Circulation from N. W. Ayers &Son’s Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals, 1930–69 (Philadelphia: Ayers, 1969).

26. See Burckel, ed., Who’s Who in Colored America, 450.27. On the promise of a strong federal government for black Americans, see Kirby,

Black Americans, 13–47.28. On the racial politics of “state’s rights,” see Key, Southern Politics in State and

Nation.29. “All People Benefit from Spending Programs,” Minneapolis Spokesman, July 26,

1940; “AKA Women Oppose Transfer of Job Control to States,” Minneapolis Spokes-man, Feb. 1, 1946; “The Importance of Executive Orders,” Minneapolis Spokesman,Aug. 6, 1948.

30. “Health Insurance Needed,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Apr. 8, 1949.31. On OPA, “Battle against Inflation,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Feb. 8, 1946; “Na-

tional Elk Lodges . . . ,” Feb. 15, 1946, 1; and “Kudos for Chester Bowles,” Feb. 15, 1946,6. On Taft-Hartley, Minneapolis Spokesman, Aug. 29, 1947, and Sept. 5, 1947.

32. Letter from Phillip Stranson, Minneapolis, Mar. 24, 1948, and Newman’s reply,“An Honest Conservative,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Apr. 2, 1948.

33. “An Honest Conservative,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Apr. 2, 1948.34. Minneapolis Spokesman, July 30, 1948, and Oct. 31, 1947.35. Nell Russell, “As I See It,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Feb. 15, 1946.36. Minneapolis Spokesman, Sept. 26, 1947; this was an editorial opposing Henry

Wallace, whom she thought blacks looked to as a kind of savior.37. Minneapolis Spokesman, Sept. 24, 1948.38. Minneapolis Spokesman, Feb. 15, 1946.39. See, for example, Randolph, “March on Washington,” 145–48; and Moon, Bal-

ance of Power, 7–12. The NAACP and the Urban League constantly worried abouttheir political independence. See, for instance, the reply of the Urban League’s LesterGranger to Humphrey’s request for assistance, Lester Granger to Hubert Humphrey,Mar. 25, 1948, Hubert H. Humphrey Papers, Mayor’s Office Files, box 16, MinnesotaHistorical Society.

40. Like Cecil Newman, Vann wanted to de-race black politics, writing for Op-portunity in 1937 that “too much legislation requested for us as Negroes because we are Negroes may prove our undoing in later years”; quoted in Kirby, Black Amer-icans, 139.


41. “Negro Vote Independent,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Nov. 17, 1947.42. “Urban League, NAACP, and Politics,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Sept. 17, 1948.43. “Dissension in the NAACP,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Apr. 16, 1948.44. On the Taft-Hartley Act, see Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order,

226–61.45. Minneapolis Spokesman, June 4, 1948.46. “Independent Vote Important,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Oct. 15, 1948; “Tru-

man Makes Comeback,” Oct. 22, 1948.47. See Russell column in Minneapolis Spokesman, Feb. 20, 1948, Mar. 5, 1948,

and July 23, 1948; see Albert Allen letter attacking Russell’s “pandering,” MinneapolisSpokesman, Mar. 12, 1948.

48. Nellie Stone Johnson, interview by Carl Ross, Nov. 17, 1981, Minnesota Histor-ical Society, 26.

49. See Johnson, interview by Carl Ross, Nov. 17, 1981; “Seminar by Nellie StoneJohnson, with Carl Ross, et al.,” Mar. 1, 1988. Perry, “The Good Fight.” See also John-son, Nellie Stone Johnson.

50. Johnson, interview by Carl Ross, Nov. 17, 1981, 8. See also Perry, “The GoodFight.”

51. See Johnson, Nellie Stone Johnson, 104–8.52. Quote from Anthony Cassius, interview by Carl Ross, 1981, Minnesota Histor-

ical Society, 37.53. Twin Cities Observer, Mar. 5, 1948.54. Minneapolis Spokesman, June 4 and 18, 1948. Stassen had a strong record in

terms of antiracism education, but he never followed through with civil rights legis-lation, and Newman understood the difference.

55. Twin Cities Observer, June 10, 1948. There were several black resorts in northernMinnesota, run by black entrepreneurs. Resorts were segregated. A common expla-nation for the segregation was the large number of southerners who vacationed onMinnesota lakes.

56. “Tax editorial,” Twin Cities Observer, Feb. 6, 1948. See also, “The deep southisn’t the only section that makes a mockery of constitutional voting guarantees,”Twin Cities Observer, Feb. 6, 1948. Curiously, the Minneapolis Spokesman never men-tioned this issue in any of its discussions of the black vote.

57. See, for instance, Twin Cities Observer, Oct. 31, 1947. This particular editorialworried that Taft-Hartley might interfere with an arrangement between the musi-cians union and the recording industry, which set aside a percentage of royalties fora fund for unemployed musicians. The Taft-Hartley Act rolled back organized laborrights as stated in the Wagner Act of 1935. The act passed in 1947 over labor protestsand Truman’s veto.

58. Twin Cities Observer, Jan. 9, 1947.59. Minneapolis Spokesman, July 2, 1948, 4, in an article about the Republican

Convention.60. Twin Cities Observer, Sept. 30, 1948.61. On the shift of power in the Democratic party, see Key, Southern Politics;

Lubell, The Future of American Politics, 29–60; Burnham, Critical Elections and theMainsprings of American Politics. These analyses of the shift remain basically unchal-lenged, though historians since have filled in the details.


62. Lubell, The Future of American Politics, 29–60. Lubell frames the idea of “class”politics, of voting one’s pocketbook, as part of the assimilation of an ethnic popula-tion trying to get into the middle class.

63. See Minneapolis Spokesman, Feb. 9, 1940, attacking John Nance Garner; andMinneapolis Spokesman, Feb. 15, 1946.

64. Minneapolis Spokesman, Feb. 15, 1946. For a detailed analysis of the congres-sional rules and structures that allowed southern Democrats to stymie New Deallegislation and still remain in the Democratic party, see Bensel, Sectionalism andAmerican Political Development.

65. Moon printed a passage of the hearings on a petition for cloture on the FEPC(which would have disallowed a filibuster), in which Louisiana Senator John Over-ton gives a lengthy soliloquy on how swell the Republicans have been to the Negro,concluding, “We [Democrats] do not want the Negroes in the party. They do notbelong in the Democratic party”; quoted in Moon, Balance of Power, 24.

6. Civil Rights in Local Politics

1. The states of New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts had fair employmentlaws by 1947. These were all places with substantial black populations. Chicago,Wisconsin, Indiana, Milwaukee, and Cleveland also had fair employment laws butwith no enforcement powers.

2. Gladys Hart Peterson to Reuben Youngdahl, May 16, 1946, Hubert H. Hum-phrey Papers, Mayor’s Office Files (hereafter cited as MOF), box 16, Minnesota His-torical Society.

3. See Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 119.4. WTCN Campaign Speech by Bradshaw Mintener, May 10, 1947, Humphrey

Papers, MOF, Political Files (hereafter cited as PF), box 25.5. Quoted in Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 124. Humphrey to John Cowles, Feb. 14,

1945, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 21.6. Humphrey to Vincent Halloran, Mar. 3, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF,

box 25. On the controversial appointment of Ed Ryan as police chief, see Humphrey,The Education of a Public Man, 95–97; and Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 122–23.

7. See the Minneapolis Tribune and the Minneapolis Star, 1946–48. Both Cowles-owned, they reported extensively on labor strife, featuring a regular column called“On the Labor Front” and inviting editorials on such questions as “Are Strikes Nec-essary?” (Minneapolis Star, Feb. 13, 1946, 18).

8. Solberg, Hubert Humphrey, 105; Minneapolis Star, May 5, 1947, 1, 11; May 6,1947, 1.

9. “Report by the Mayor: Articles Written by Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey . . . ,”Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 25.

10. Talk by Mayor Humphrey on behalf of the candidacy of Robert Wishart [1947],Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 25.

11. On communism in the Farmer-Labor party, see Haynes, Dubious Alliance,12–33; and Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism, 257–65.

12. See Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 125–31.


13. For a detailed description of events leading up to the 1946 convention andthe convention itself, see Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 131–36.

14. Quoted in Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 129.15. Eugenie Anderson, interview by Arthur Naftalin for the Hubert Humphrey

Oral History Project, July 14, 1978, 33, Minnesota Historical Society. See also Kampel-man, Entering New Worlds, 65–66; and Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 136.

16. Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 139. Loeb letter in New Republic, May 13, 1946, 699.17. Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 139.18. Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 139. On the founding and history of Americans for

Democratic Action, see Gillon, Politics and Vision; Hamby, Beyond the New Deal,147–68.

19. Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 140.20. See, for example, Humphrey to David Smilow, Mar. 26, 1947, and Humphrey

to Clarence Madsen, Mar. 26, 1947, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 25. On whetheropposing communism was “red-baiting,” Humphrey wrote to Madsen, “If I have tochoose between being called a red-baiter and a traitor, I’ll be a red-baiter.”

21. Humphrey to Clarence Madsen, Mar. 26, 1947.22. The city council and independent administrative boards, appointed by the

city council, determined taxation, laws, licensing, districting, and spending, whilethe mayor controlled only the police department. See Altshuler, A Report on Politicsin Minneapolis. See also Dubious Alliance, 122–23.

23. Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 123; see also Minneapolis Tribune, Feb. 18, 1946, 10;Feb. 23, 1946, 8. There are extensive files about the city charter in the papers of theDepartment of Political Science, University of Minnesota Archives.

24. The labor movement opposed the new city charter on the grounds that alabor-friendly mayor would not always be in office; see editorial forum about thecity charter, Minneapolis Star, Feb. 23, 1946, 8. Humphrey used labor’s opposition tothe plan as yet another instance showing his independence of the labor movement.

25. Shore, “One City’s Struggle against Intolerance.”26. Humphrey to Gael Sullivan, Aug. 27, 1947, Humphrey Papers, MOF, box 16.

See also the Council on Human Relations’ fundraising letter, Oct. 1947, which alsospeaks of the council’s situation as temporary, Humphrey Papers, MOF, box 16.

27. See, for instance, the description of the council in Leipold, Cecil E. Newman,80; and several letters from irate citizens objecting to taxpayers’ money being spenton the organization, including Edsall Beery to Humphrey, n.d., and Humphrey toEdsall Beery, Sept. 15, 1947, Humphrey Papers, MOF, box 16.

28. These presidents included George Jenson of the Nash-Kelvinator Refrigera-tor Company, Stuart Leck of the James Leck Company, and others. Humphrey also tried to appoint retailer Donald Dayton, who refused, citing conflict of inter-ests as his stores were a focus of FEPC campaigns. Donald Dayton to Humphrey,June 4, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, box 16. See also Charles Horn to Humphrey,Dec, 30, 1946; Humphrey to Charles Horn, Jan. 2, 1947, Humphrey Papers, MOF,box 16.

29. These individuals are listed on the stationery of the Independent Voters ofMinnesota (IVM). Humphrey’s campaign workers went through the stationery ofthe IVM, marking those people that needed to resign from the organization becauseof its communist-front status. They did not mark the names of civil rights folks. See


memo, n.d. [1948], Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 26. On Humphrey not red-baiting civil rights activists, see Johnson, Nellie Stone Johnson, 104–8.

30. Humphrey memo to members of the Council on Human Relations, Feb. 19,1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, box 16.

31. Hall had been Anthony Cassius’s lawyer in his successful suit against the CurtisHotel. See Anthony B. Cassius, interview by Carl Ross, Dec. 1, 1981, Minnesota His-torical Society. See also Nellie Stone Johnson’s recollection of Hall in Johnson, NellieStone Johnson, 90–91.

32. “Doug Hall Problem,” Orville Freeman to Humphrey [Oct. 12, 1946], Hum-phrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 26.

33. “Doug Hall Problem.” See also Theodore Slen to Humphrey, Aug. 29, 1946, andE. J. Larsen to Theodore Slen, Mar. 27, 1946, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 26.

34. Humphrey to Sam Davis, Sept. 25, 1946, Sam K. Davis Papers, 1919–80,149A67B, Minnesota Historical Society. On Davis’s communism, see Haynes, Dubi-ous Alliance, 43.

35. The left-wing argument that there were fundamental differences betweengrain executives and regular people was spelled out in “Statement Adopted by StateExecutive Board of the DFL Association—Feb. 12, 1948, An Open Letter to MayorHumphrey,” Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 26, as well as in the Minnesota Leader,the left wing’s newspaper. See, for instance, “Joe Ball Must Have Sincere Opposi-tion,” Minnesota Leader, Nov. 1947.

36. See Harding, “Community Self-Surveys.”37. F. Stuart Chapin to Humphrey, Oct. 12, 1946, Humphrey Papers, MOF, box 16.38. “Minneapolis Community Self Survey (Scope and Coverage),” Humphrey

Papers, MOF, box 16.39. “Why the Boom Is On for Humphrey,” Minnesota Outlook, Apr. 24, 1948, 5.

Minnesota Outlook was Humphrey’s campaign paper, published by Freeman.40. Shore, “One City’s Struggle against Intolerance.”41. FEPC activists across the nation included the recognized leaders of respectable

society, businessmen, churches, and so on in their struggle, with good results. SeeKesselman, The Social Politics of FEPC, 128; Smith, Freedom to Work, 146–49.

42. Minneapolis Spokesman, Jan. 4, 1946; Blood, Northern Breakthrough, 99; “FEPCRuling May Cover Business,” Minneapolis Star, Feb. 14, 1946, 18. See also “Steps inSecuring Adoption of Minneapolis Fair Employment Practice Ordinance,” cited inBlood, Northern Breakthrough, 99.

43. Minutes of the Mayor’s Council on Human Relations, July–Sept., 1946, Hum-phrey Papers, MOF, box 16.

44. Minneapolis Star, Jan. 3, 1947, 19. Fourteen liberals and twelve conservativessat on the nonpartisan city council.

45. “Minneapolis FEPC Ordinance,” reprinted in Blood, Northern Breakthrough,147.

46. See Transcript of the United Labor Committee Program, Jan. 19, 1946, SteefelPapers, box 13.

47. “If education alone could change the inherent qualities of people we wouldnot need a police force or law making bodies,” Kyle wrote. She was a columnist forthe Twin Cities Observer, but her remarks were standard. See letters to editor inMinneapolis Star, Feb. 7, 1946, 10 (two letters for FEPC); see also Feb. 8, 1946, 14.


48. Minutes of Meeting, Mayor’s Council on Human Relations, Sept. 4, 1946,Humphrey Papers, MOF, box 16.

49. See “Twin Cities Makes Progress in Solving Race Problem,” Minneapolis Star,June 10, 1947, editorial page; “Mayor Makes Plea for Minority Groups,” MinneapolisStar, June 19, 1947, 1; Hubert Humphrey to Charles Johnson at the Minneapolis Star,Dec. 11, 1947, in response to editorial in the paper that accused Humphrey of stoop-ing to get the black vote. Minutes of Meeting, Human Relations Council, Sept. 4, 1946,Humphrey Papers, MOF, box 16.

50. “Twin Cities Make Progress in Solving Race Problems,” Minneapolis Star, June10, 1947, editorial page.

51. “Crowd Supporting Demand for Mpls FEPC Throngs Council Hearing,” Min-neapolis Spokesman, Feb. 15, 1946.

52. See ads in Minneapolis Spokesman, Jan. 18, 1946; “Communist Vets Met inAll-Day Conference,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Jan. 18, 1946; “William Patterson toSpeak at Lenin Memorial Meeting at CIO Hall,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Jan. 25,1946; “Nellie Stone to Introduce Speaker at Lenin Meeting,” Minneapolis Spokesman,Feb. 1, 1946; “500 at Lenin Memorial Meeting,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Feb. 6, 1946.

53. See, for instance, “State Negro Vote a Factor,” Minneapolis Spokesman, May 3,1940; “Publisher’s Corner,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Aug. 8, 1947; “Truman Makes aComeback,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Oct. 22, 1948.

54. See, for instance, note about Mabeth Paige Hurd, “good friend and subscriber,is Republican . . .” Minneapolis Spokesman, Nov. 17, 1947; and Orville Freeman’s sub-scription request, June 18, 1948.

55. On opposition to the FEPC, see Christensen, “Fair Employment PracticesAct,” Nov. 21, 1949.

56. “Early State and Municipal Fair-Employment-Practice Laws,” in Blood,Northern Breakthrough, 145.

57. “Cases Handled by Fair Employment Practice Committee to Date,” May 1,1948, Human Relations files, Humphrey Papers, box 16. See also Blood, NorthernBreakthrough.

58. See survey in Blood, Northern Breakthrough, 89.59. Fair Employment Practice Commission, “Report on Operations,” June 1, 1947–

May 15, 1950, Amos Deinard Files, Minneapolis Fair Employment Practices Commis-sion Records.

60. Enoch Johnson, President Amalgamated Local 1139, to Amos Deinard, Minne-apolis FEPC, July 18, 1949, Deinard Files

61. Minneapolis Spokesman, Nov. 25, 1949.62. Minneapolis FEPC, Minutes of the Meeting of Apr. 18, 1949, Deinard Files.63. “Resolution” from Local 1139; and Wilfred Leland to Enoch Johnson, July 27,

1949, Deinard Files.64. See Moreno, From Direct Action to Affirmative Action.65. Ruchames, Race, Jobs, and Politics.66. See, for instance, Humphrey to Angus Clarke Jr., Jan. 12, 1948, Humphrey

Papers, MOF, box 16.67. Congregational Congress of Minnesota to “Friend,” June 5, 1947, on behalf of

the Inter-Racial Relations Vacation Visits Program, Denzil Carty Papers, box 3, Min-nesota Historical Society.


7. Civil Rights in Party Politics

1. “Mayor Makes Plea for Minority Groups,” Minneapolis Star-Journal, June 19,1947, 1–2.

2. Richard Bensel examines how Democrats used the committee system in Con-gress to avoid civil rights debates on the floor and maintain what he calls a “bi-polarDemocratic majority.” See Bensel, Sectionalism in American Political Development,175, 230–51. See also Martin, Civil Rights and the Crisis of Liberalism, 61; and Berman,The Politics of Civil Rights in the Truman Administration, 7–8. There is some indica-tion Republicans supported the effort to get anti-poll tax and antilynching legisla-tion out of committee and onto the Senate floor in order to exploit the Democrats’Achilles heel. See “Anti-Poll Tax Bill Wins House Support,” Minneapolis Star-Jour-nal, July 16, 1947, 4; “House Votes Poll Tax Ban,” Minneapolis Star-Journal, July 22,1947, 2; “Unity Begins at Home,” Minneapolis Tribune, Jan. 19, 1946, 4. The Minne-apolis Spokesman likewise took this position; see “Joseph Ball Forces Democrats toTake Stand on FEPC,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Jan. 4, 1946.

3. On Republican isolationists, see Griffith, “Old Progressives and the Cold War”;Lubell, The Future of American Politics, 227–44; and Moos and Kenworthy, “Dr. Ship-stead Comes to Judgment,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1946, 22–27.

4. On civil rights and cold war competition, see Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights,18–78.

5. See Hinderaker, “Harold Stassen and Developments in the Republican Partyin Minnesota, 1937–43.”

6. See Mitau, Politics in Minnesota, 18–23; and Stassen, Where I Stand.7. Williams, “Harold Stassen: Fake Liberal,” 757. See also Rodell, “Harold Stassen:

The Biggest Tory of Them All,” 7; and the left-wing “Miners Are Determined ThatStassen Slave Act Be Killed, Says Mauseth,” Minnesota Labor, Feb. 1, 1946.

8. Quoted in Abels, Out of the Jaws of Victory, 53.9. Minneapolis Morning Tribune, May 9, 1944, editorial page.

10. Alice L. Sickels, “A Post War Project Proposing to Establish a Folk Arts Cen-ter . . . and An International Park . . . ,” [St. Paul: 1943]; “Governor’s Address at StateFair Grounds on Interracial Groups” [1944], in Minnesota, Governor (1943–1947:Thye), Records, 1944, Minnesota Historical Society.

11. See Esbjornson, A Christian in Politics, 182–87.12. The main evidence of the campaign’s anti-Semitism is the infamous Are They

Communists or Catspaws? written and published by Republican auditor Ray Chase.See also Gordon, Jews in Transition, 51–52.

13. On Stassen’s nationally focused politics and presidential strategy, see Hinder-aker, “Harold Stassen”; and Abels, Out of the Jaws, 50–71.

14. “Vets Hear Story of Stassen-Stalin Meeting,” Minneapolis Star, May 9, 1947,21; “Stassen Reports on Stalin Visit,” Minneapolis Star, June 25, 1947, 25.

15. “A United Nations Government,” in Peaslee, ed., Man Was Meant to Be Free,43–56, reprinted from the Saturday Evening Post, May 22, 1943.

16. On expectations of U.S. economic leadership, see J. B. Condliffe, “Obstaclesto International Trade,” National Planning Association Pamphlet no. 59 (Apr.1947) (Washington, D.C.: National Economic and Planning Association), 12. Seealso McCormick, America’s Half-Century, 72–124; and Maier, “The Politics of Pro-ductivity.”


17. On midwestern progressive Republicans, see Mulder, The Insurgent Progres-sives in the United States Senate and the New Deal, 1933–1939; and Griffith, “Old Pro-gressives and the Cold War.” The other “no” vote on the UN charter was from anotherof the western Republican progressives, California Senator Hiram Johnson.

18. Rodell, “The Biggest Tory,” 7–9. See also M. W. Halloran, “Shipstead MayRun on UNO Issue,” Minneapolis Star-Journal, Feb. 28, 1946, 1.

19. Quotes from Moos and Kenworthy, “Dr. Shipstead Comes to Judgment,” 25.20. “Stassen Heads Drive for Racial Equality,” Minneapolis Tribune, Jan. 11, 1946, 13.21. “Stassen to Launch Brotherhood Observance Here,” Minneapolis Star-Journal,

Feb. 15, 1946, 17, with photo.22. “FEPC Meeting to Hear Stassen,” Minneapolis Tribune, Jan. 12, 1946, 1. His

speech on the FEPC can be found in Peaslee, ed., Man Was Meant to Be Free, 81–84.23. “Cecil Newman Protests Stassen’s Invite to Emergency Meeting,” Minneapolis

Spokesman, Jan. 18, 1946.24. See, for instance, “Here’s the Key to Happiness in the South,” a list compiled

by a northern girl who married a Louisianan and moved south; number one is“never mention the Negro problem,” followed by number two, “never speak of theCivil War or Eleanor Roosevelt,” Minneapolis Star-Journal, Jan. 1, 1947, 16; and “FirstFourth,” a sarcastic snippet about how the town of Vicksburg celebrated its firstFourth of July since the Civil War in 1947, Minneapolis Tribune, July 18, 1947, 6.

25. Quote from “Lynchings at the Half-Way Mark,” Minneapolis Tribune, July 8,1931.

26. Minneapolis Tribune, June 28, 1931, editorial about Scottsboro; Homer Smithletter to Minneapolis Tribune, July 5, 1931 (Smith, a black communist, wrote to defendthe Communist party against the paper’s charge that it was exploiting the Scottsborocase); Minneapolis Tribune, “Lynching at the Half-way Mark,” July 8, 1931, 12; “Bilboof Mississippi,” July 18, 1931, 20; “Posseman Subdues Negro Protesters,” July 19, 1931, 3.

27. “Civil Liberties Belong to All Americans,” Minneapolis Tribune, July 29, 1947, 4.28. “Mayor, Race Council Order Investigation of Bar Bias Charge,” Minneapolis

Tribune, July 15, 1947, 11; “Camps Deny Policy of Bias,” Minneapolis Tribune, July 26,1947; “Persuasion Keynotes Drive on ‘New Home’ Race Bias,” Minneapolis Star-Journal,Jan. 4, 1947; “U.S. Housing Probe Set,” Minneapolis Star-Journal, July 23, 1947.

29. John Cowles and his brother Gardner Cowles later became financial playersin Washington politics and financed some of Humphrey’s 1968 campaign. See Sol-berg, Hubert Humphrey, 326.

30. See, for instance, “Stassen and the GOP,” Minneapolis Star-Journal, Feb. 9,1946, 8.

31. See, for instance, “Council Labels,” Minneapolis Star, May 29, 1947, editorialpage; “Bossism Is Bossism Whatever the Label,” Minneapolis Star, May 9, 1947; “Par-tisanship at City Hall,” Minneapolis Star, May 5, 1947, 14; “Political Dictatorship andthe Eighth Ward,” Minneapolis Star, May 6, 1947, 18; “50% of State Says Unions TooPowerful during War,” Minneapolis Tribune, Aug. 12, 1945, 1; “Here’s the Evidence ofLabor Bossism,” Minneapolis Star, May 16, 1947, 6; “Steel and the Law,” MinneapolisTribune, Jan. 14, 1946, 4, which compliments the CIO’s restraint but spells out thepaper’s disagreement with it.

32. Rowan, Breaking Barriers, 77–83. In 1947 left-winger Sam Davis criticizedCowles, the owner of three papers, for having no Negro employees. See Sam K.


Davis to Cecil Newman, Feb. 8, 1947, Sam Davis Papers, 149A67B, Minnesota Histor-ical Society. Newman did not print the accusation in his paper.

33. “Southern Negroes’ Voting Luck Varies,” Minneapolis Tribune, May 3, 1944, 7.See also “Unity Begins at Home,” Minneapolis Tribune, Jan. 19, 1946, 4.

34. “Supremacy Issue to Face Democrats,” Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, May 21,1944, 7; “Solid South May Get New Deal from Administration,” Minneapolis Tribune,May 4, 1944, 4; “Elections Dim Dixie ‘Revolt,’” Minneapolis Tribune, May 4, 1944, 6.

35. “28 Lynching Defendants Freed; Trigger Man Hails ‘Justice,’” MinneapolisStar, May 22, 1947, 8; “Northern Meddling Charged in Lynch Trial,” MinneapolisStar, May 29, 1947, 3.

36. Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 813; White, A Man Called White, 89, 269;“The Bilbo Case,” Minneapolis Tribune, Jan. 4, 1947, 4. On Bilbo, see Key, SouthernPolitics in State and Nation, 238–53; and Dittmer, Local People, 19–40.

37. “Tangle of Politics May Give Bilbo His Senate Seat,” Minneapolis Star-Journal,Jan. 2, 1947, 14.

38. Minneapolis Star-Journal, Jan. 3, 1947, 1.39. Minneapolis Star-Journal, Jan. 4, 1947, 1.40. Quote from Hubert Humphrey, “What’s Wrong with the Democrats?” The

Progressive, Apr. 1948, 8. The Progressive, originally founded by Robert La FolletteSr., and published in Madison, Wisconsin, was a regular mouthpiece for non–NewYork-based liberals.

41. Milkis, The President and the Parties, especially 52–74; and Plotke, Building aDemocratic Political Order, 128–34. See also Burner, The Politics of Provincialism.

42. See Shafer, Quiet Revolution, which examines how African Americans andwomen rewrote the party rules at the 1972 convention to break up the old boys net-work. This led to the disastrous candidacy of George McGovern, and Democratssince have been trying to figure out how to get back their old boys constituency. Seealso Edsall and Edsall, Chain Reaction.

43. Humphrey, “What’s Wrong with the Democrats?” 8.44. Minnesota Council for Fair Employment Practice, “Minneapolis Fights Dis-

crimination,” [1947], Hubert H. Humphrey Papers, Mayor’s Office Files (hereaftercited as MOF), box 16, Minnesota Historical Society.

45. Humphrey to Cecil Newman, Feb. 9, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, box 16.46. Humphrey to Frank Kingdon, Feb. 17, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, Political

Files (hereafter cited as PF), box 25. See also Humphrey to Earl Bester, Feb. 18, 1948,box 25; and Humphrey to Wilfred Leland, Mar. 7, 1947, Humphrey Papers, MOF,box 16, in which he worried that they were “missing the boat on national publicity,”and ordered Leland to write some articles about the council’s work.

47. Kramer, “Young Man in a Hurry,” New Republic, June 16, 1947, 14–16; “Hum-phrey in Minnesota,” New Republic, Oct. 18, 1948, 8; Morison, “The Amazing Mr.Humphrey,” The Nation, Oct. 30, 1948, 489–91.

48. Humphrey to Chester Bowles, July 28, 1948; and Chester Bowles to Humphrey,July 22, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 26.

49. “Editors in Minnesota—particularly labor editors—tell me they are not get-ting material from the Democratic National Committee. Will you put the followingon the list?” This request was followed by a list of labor papers. Humphrey to JackRedding, DNC publicity, Dec. 4, 1947, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 27.


50. Gerald Reilly, “Stand on Senator Ball Held Democratic Test,” Sunday Star(Washington, D.C.), Sept. 5, 1948.

51. Humphrey to Gael Sullivan, Sept. 4, 1947, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 27.52. Walter Quigley to Humphrey, 1947; Humphrey to Gael Sullivan, Oct. 4, 1947,

Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 27. The ADA’s budget that year was only $18,000.53. Humphrey to Gael Sullivan, Jan. 7, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 27;

Humphrey to Howard McGrath, May 18, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 28.54. Humphrey to Howard McGrath, May 18, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF,

box 27.55. Humphrey to Gael Sullivan, Apr. 19, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 27.56. On the Harrington question, see Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 145; also Orville

Freeman to Gael Sullivan, Dec. 30, 1947; and Orville Freeman to J. Howard Mc-Grath, Sept. 13, 1948, Democratic-Farmer-Labor State Central Committee Papers(hereafter cited as DFLP), boxes 1 and 2, respectively, Minnesota Historical Society.

57. Humphrey to Gael Sullivan, Jan. 7, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 27.See also Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 194–95.

58. Humphrey, “What’s Wrong with the Democrats?”59. Minneapolis Spokesman, Mar. 28, 1941. The Farmer-Labor party protested

Bilbo’s presence in the state.60. E. J. Larsen to John Moriarity, Feb. 14, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box

25. Even after Truman won in November, Larsen continued to warn the DFL not tostick out its neck on the Negro problem. See E. J. Larsen to Barney Allen, Mar. 15,1949, Byron (“Barney”) Gilchrist Allen Papers, box 2, Minnesota Historical Society.

61. Truman recalled that when Strom Thurmond was reminded that Trumanwas only carrying out Roosevelt’s platform, Thurmond replied, “I agree, but Trumanreally means it.” Abels, Out of the Jaws, 84; and Truman, Memoirs, 183. Rooseveltnever proposed federal enforcement of civil rights. That was the distinction south-erners made in evaluating 1948.

62. Charles Munn to Stephen Harrington, Aug. 26, 1946, DFLP, box 1.63. Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order, 128–161; and Milkis, The Presi-

dent and the Parties, 52–74.64. Humphrey to Lowell Scheel, May 28, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 25.65. Harold Hagen to Sig Wahlstrom, Jan. 28, 1944, Harold C. Hagen Papers, box

3, Minnesota Historical Society. See also Hagen to Andrew Trovaton, Feb. 18, 1944,Hagen Papers, box 3.

66. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1952, 30.67. Farmers Union Herald (St. Paul), Sept. 3, 1948.68. Farmers’ Independent (Bagley, Minn.), Feb. 7, 1948.69. See letters from Clifford Bouvette, Ione Hunt, and other rural DFL county

chairs in Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, boxes 25 and 26, and in DFLP, box 1. See also Roland Muller to Humphrey, Sept. 28, 1948; and Karl Rolvaag to Humphrey,Sept. 20, 1948, Humphrey Papers, Senate Campaign Files (hereafter cited as SCF),box 1.

70. See, for instance, “Facts for Farmers,” published by Minnesota Labor’sLeague for Political Education, and “A Liberal Program for Minnesota’s 1949 Legis-lature,” Minnesota Association of Cooperatives Papers, box 3, Minnesota HistoricalSociety.


71. Quotes from “Annual Activity Report of the United Labor Committee of Min-nesota for Human Rights, Apr. 1946 to Mar. 31, 1947,” Central Labor Union of Min-neapolis and Hennepin County, Central Labor Union Records (hereafter cited asCLU Records), box 43, Minnesota Historical Society.

72. “Activity Report of the United Labor Committee For Human Rights,” [Nov.12, 1947], CLU Records, box 43.

73. “He is smart enough to know that if he hammers on these topics he makesfriends who believe that he is putting people ahead of politics. . . . Men who seem deadset against him have swung over because of his sincere talks on Youth, etc. etc. . . .”Vincent Hollaren to Humphrey, [Mar. 1, 1948], Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 25.

74. See Conference Program, The Second Annual Northwestern Farmer andWorkers Education Conference, Sept. 27–28, 1947, Minnesota Association of Coop-eratives Papers, box 3.

75. “Dancehall Democracy,” Midland Cooperator (Minneapolis), Jan. 8, 1947, 2.The book was Margaret Halsey, Color Blind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946).

76. “Could Happen Here,” Midland Cooperator, Jan. 22, 1947, “Negro Wins, Losesand Wins Auto in Carolina Drama,” Midland Cooperator, July 23, 1947.

77. “Danger Signal for American Democracy,” Farmers Union Herald (St. Paul),Sept. 17, 1948.

78. There was no mention of this store, at least in the selection of papers I exam-ined, which was not comprehensive. For information on the store, which was or-ganized by a black social club called the Credjafawns, see the Twin Cities Observer,1946–47, and “Successful Co-op in St. Paul,” Eyes Magazine, June 1946, 13–15.

79. Edward A. Day to George Phillips, Dec. 24, 1948, CLU Records, box 43. Seealso Day’s earlier letter to Phillips, similarly noting how the human rights programplaced labor in “a deservedly more favorable light with many misinformed and con-fused but sincere people,” Day to Phillips, Oct. 7, 1947, CLU Records, box 43.

80. See, for instance, Karl Rolvaag to Humphrey, Sept. 20, 1948, Humphrey Papers,SCF, box 1.

81. Vincent Hollaren to Humphrey, [Mar. 1, 1948], Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF,box 25. See also letters in DFLP, box 1, from county chairmen in rural areas, echoingidea that unions alienate farmers; and the County Demographic Surveys completedby DFLP, box 8.

82. Walter Lundberg to Humphrey, Jan. 28, 1948; and undated memo to Hum-phrey about labor’s radio programs, in Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 25.

83. Vince Halloran to Humphrey, [Mar. 1, 1948], Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF,box 25; see also R. S. Cowie to Herbert [sic] Humphrey, Sept. 29, 1947, HumphreyPapers, MOF, PF, box 28.

84. Robert Jewell to Humphrey, Sept. 30, 1947, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 28.85. Humphrey to Robert Jewell, Oct. 31, 1947, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 28.86. See “Inter-Racial Vacation Visits,” sponsored by the Race Relations Committee,

Minnesota Council of Churches, in Phyllis Wheatley Community Center Records,box 7, Minnesota Historical Society.

87. R. S. Cowie to Herbert [sic] Humphrey, Sept. 29, 1947, Humphrey Papers,MOF, PF, box 28.

88. R. S. Cowie to Herbert [sic] Humphrey, Sept. 29, 1947; and Robert Jewell toHumphrey, Sept. 30, 1947, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 28.


8. The 1948 Election and the Triumph of the Democratic

Political Order

1. “Effects of a New Deal Victory,” US News and World Report, July 23, 1948, 19;see also Clark Clifford’s “Memorandum for the President,” Nov. 19, 1947, analyzed inYarnell, Democrats and Progressives; and Andrew Biemiller, “Memo on Political Rec-ommendations,” for Americans for Democratic Action, July 14, 1947, Hubert H.Humphrey Papers, box 28, Minnesota Historical Society. On the 1948 election, seealso Donaldson, Truman Defeats Dewey; Sitkoff, “Harry Truman and the Election of1948”; Abels, Out of the Jaws of Victory; and Hartmann, “The 1948 Election and theConfiguration of Postwar Liberalism.”

2. Clifford, “Memorandum,” quoted in Yarnell, Democrats and Progressives, 33.3. On blacks and the New Deal, see Kirby, Black Americans in the Age of Roose-

velt: Liberalism and Race; Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln; Moon, The Balanceof Power; and Lubell, The Future of American Politics, 81–99.

4. Clifford, “Memorandum,” 12–13, quoted in Yarnell, Democrats and Progres-sives, 35.

5. Clifford “Memorandum,” quoted in Sitkoff, “Harry Truman and the Electionof 1948,” 597.

6. On Wallace’s disagreement with Truman, see Markowitz, The Rise and Fallof the People’s Century, 161–99; and Hamby, Beyond the New Deal, 87–119.

7. Markowitz, The Rise and Fall, 51–52. For Wallace’s vision of an internationalNew Deal, see his “Century of the Common Man” speech, given May 8, 1942,reprinted in Vital Speeches, June 1, 1942, 482–85.

8. On the origins of the cold war, see Paterson, On Every Front; and LaFeber,America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945–1990. On American liberals response to Tru-man’s foreign policy, see Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age; and Hamby,Beyond the New Deal, 87–119.

9. Markowitz, The Rise and Fall, 232. Humphrey and his cohorts in Americansfor Democratic Action spoke of the Marshall Plan as a kind of international goodwillprogram; see “Statement of the ADA on the Marshall Plan,” July 16, 1947, HumphreyPapers, Mayor’s Office Files (hereafter cited as MOF), Political Files (hereafter citedas PF), box 28.

10. Hamby, Beyond the New Deal, 159–61, and Sullivan, Days of Hope, 234–36.11. Sullivan, Days of Hope, 244–47.12. Markowitz, The Rise and Fall, 266–71; and Abels, Out of the Jaws of Victory,

30–31.13. Truman, Clifford, and the DNC discounted Wallace as a threat; they main-

tained that the real threat was from the Republicans; see Yarnell, Democrats andProgressives, 28–45; Abels, Out of the Jaws of Victory, 30–31. Markowitz also sees Wal-lace as not much of a threat because of the internal contradictions of his politicalvision; see Markowitz, The Rise and Fall, 266–67. In his memoirs, Truman treatsWallace as a threat to emphasize his beleaguered, “lonely” candidacy; Truman, Mem-oirs, vol. 2, 184.

14. Sitkoff, “Harry Truman and the Election of 1948,” 606; and Gillon, Politicsand Vision.

15. The “northern strategy,” as opposed to the Republicans’ successful “south-ern strategy” of the 1970s, where Republicans Nixon and Reagan appealed to white


southerners’ resentment at the Democratic party’s embrace of civil rights. SeePhillips, The Emerging Republican Majority.

16. Congressional Record, Feb. 1948, quoted in Sitkoff, “Harry Truman and theElection of 1948,” 601.

17. Quoted in Abels, Out of the Jaws of Victory, 10.18. Sitkoff, “Harry Truman and the Election of 1948,” 602; Abels, Out of the Jaws

of Victory, 10–12.19. Abels, Out of the Jaws of Victory, 13.20. Sitkoff, “Harry Truman and the Election of 1948,” 607. These efforts are re-

counted most recently in Thurber, The Politics of Equality, 54–64.21. Humphrey to New York Mayor William O’Dwyer, Apr. 29, 1948; see also an-

other run of letters to the same effect, dated June 10, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF,PF, box 28.

22. James Loeb to Humphrey, Apr. 14, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 28.23. Loeb to Humphrey, Apr. 14, 1948.24. On the DNC’s reluctance to endorse civil rights, see Redding, Inside the

Democratic Party, 140–41.25. On the Democrats’ negotiations over this issue, see Berman, The Politics of

Civil Rights in the Truman Administration, 107–11; Thurber, The Politics of Equality,59–61; and Sitkoff, “Harry Truman and the Election of 1948,” 610–12.

26. Sitkoff, “Harry Truman and the Election of 1948,” 611–12; Solberg, HubertHumphrey, 11–17 (Solberg begins Humphrey’s biography with the 1948 convention).

27. Fuller, “The Funeral Is Called Off”; Berman, The Politics of Civil Rights, 108–14; Sitkoff, “Harry Truman and the Election of 1948,” 611. The Moody resolution wasdefeated 925 to 309; for the roll calls on the planks, see Runyon, Verdini, and Runyon,comps. and eds., Sourcebook of American Presidential Campaign and Election Statistics,1948–1968, 31–33.

28. Bendiner,“The Rout of the Bourbons,” The Nation. Among those who walkedout was Eugene “Bull” Connor.

29. Bendiner, “The Rout of the Bourbons,” 91; see also Fuller, “The Funeral IsCalled Off.”

30. Ione Hunt to Humphrey, Aug. 9, 1948, Democratic-Farmer-Labor State Cen-tral Committee Papers (hereafter cited as DFLP), box 2, Minnesota Historical Society.

31. Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 164.32. Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 164. See also “Will the D-F-L Party of Minnesota

Be a Clean, Honest, Decent Progressive Party?” written by Arthur Naftalin for the1948 precinct caucuses, copy in Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 25.

33. Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 155–56.34. See “Statement Adopted by the State Executive Board of the DFL Associa-

tion,” Feb. 12, 1948; and “Resolution Opposing Hubert Humphrey,” [1948], Hum-phrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 26.

35. Naftalin, “A History of the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota”; Kampelman,“The Communists and the Congress of Industrial Organizations”; Robert Morlan,another ADA organizer, was writing his dissertation on the Nonpartisan League,which had also used some of the same methods, and in fact may have been themodel followed by the communists.

36. “Plans for Political Organization,” undated [1947]; and “Minutes State BoardMeeting,” Oct. 19, 1947, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 28.


37. Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 138–39.38. ADA National Political Committee, Memorandum, Jan 3, 1948, Humphrey

Papers, MOF, PF, box 28. See also Gerald Heaney to Orville Freeman, Apr. 27, 1948,suggesting small meeting, with no labor, no DFL, just ADA to discuss recent prob-lems, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 26.

39. “She has lists of old party workers. . . . She knows those who are sympatheticto the ADA program,” Bill Leland to Humphrey, Feb. 10, 1948; and “I am enclosing alist of Minnesota labor people suggested by three of our ADA members to be invitedto the July 30 luncheon,” Doris Tullar to Humphrey, July 17, 1947. These and manyother letters of recommendations and lists of possible recruits are in HumphreyPapers, MOF, PF, boxes 25 and 28.

40. See, for instance, Eugenie Anderson to Arthur Naftalin, [no date]; Naftalinto Anderson, Sept. 25, 1946; and George Demetriou to Humphrey, Apr. 28, 1948;Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 28.

41. “Attached is a letter from the IVM with some names marked by me. Thesepeople should write public letters resigning,” George Demetriou to Humphrey, Apr.20, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 26.

42. Memo to Doris Tullar, ADA, Reverend John Simmons; and Humphrey fromOrville Freeman, [no date, early 1948]; Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 25.

43. See Gillon, The Democrats Dilemma, 17–31, 32–36. Naftalin developed a courseat the university called “Field Work in American Politics” in 1947 in which studentsgot credit for participating in party activities or political campaigns, and writing areport about it. Course description and syllabus Department of Political SciencePapers, box 9, University of Minnesota Archives.

44. See, for instance, Florence Frederickson’s description of their caucus, Fred-erickson to Humphrey, Apr. 4, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 26.

45. ADA National Political Committee, Memorandum, Jan. 3, 1948, HumphreyPapers, MOF, PF, box 28.

46. See Orville Freeman to Gerald Heaney, Aug. 29, 1947, Humphrey Papers,MOF, PF, box 25. James Shields would run against Humphrey in the DFL Senateprimary.

47. Gerald Heaney to Humphrey, Mar. 16, 1948; Humphrey to Heaney, Mar. 23,1948 (Heaney was the ADA organizer in Duluth); Humphrey to John Blatnik, June21, 1948; and Blatnik to Humphrey, July 1, 1948; Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, boxes25 and 26.

48. Gerald Heaney to Humphrey, July 9, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF,box 26.

49. Humphrey to Blatnik, June 21, 1948; and Humphrey to Gerald Heaney, June22, 1948; Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 26.

50. See plans for taking over the American Veterans Committee, [Bob Gannonto Orville Freeman], Apr. 14, 1947, Orville L. Freeman Papers, box 1, Minnesota His-torical Society; and announcement for taking over the Young DFL Association, 1947,DFLP, box 1, and reprinted in Shields, Mr. Progressive.

51. “Political Plans of the ADA,” [undated, 1947], Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF,box 28.

52. ADA Officers Report, [1948], Minnesota chapters, DFLP, box 1.53. See, for instance, Morris Greenberg to Humphrey, Dec. 11, 1947; Clara Wat-

son to Humphrey, May 16, 1948; and Eugenie Anderson to Humphrey, Aug. 28, 1948;


Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, boxes 25, 26, and 28; Gerald Heaney to Humphrey,Jan. 3, 1948, indicating dissatisfaction with ADA among rank and file, DFLP, box 8.

54. UE (Local 1139) Call, Jan. 1948, 2.55. Bob to Bill-Hubert, May 24, 1948; Matt Pelkonen to Humphrey, Dec. 14,

1947; also Martin McGowan to Humphrey, Dec. 22, 1947; Humphrey Papers, MOF,PF, box 26.

56. Incident recorded in an untitled transcript of an exchange between left-winger Walter Frank and Humphrey’s secretary Bill [Simms], July 9, [1947], Hum-phrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 28. See also Burt Bowler to Humphrey, Apr. 26, 1948,Humphrey Papers, box 26.

57. Humphrey to Burt Bowler, May 11, 1948; Democrat Bowler had written toHumphrey about Naftalin’s rudeness to him; Bowler to Humphrey, Apr. 26, 1948,Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 26.

58. Clara Watson to Humphrey, May 16, 1948; Humphrey to Watson, May 18, 1948;and Humphrey to Wm. Felton, May 18, 1948; Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 26.

59. Humphrey to Watson, May 18, 1948.60. See, for example, Humphrey to David Smilow, Mar. 26, 1947; and Humphrey

to Clarence O. Madsen, Mar. 26, 1947; Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 25.61. Humphrey to Feike Feikema, May 11, 1948; and Humphrey to Matt Pelonen,

Dec. 16, 1947; Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 26; Humphrey to Les Hurt, Sept. 9,1947, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 28; Humphrey to Paul Harris, Sept. 15, 1948,Humphrey Papers, Senate Campaign Files (hereafter cited as SCF), box 1.

62. Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 168–72.63. See Humphrey to Barney Allen, Jan. 15, 1948; and Freeman to Harold Barker,

Jan. 2, 1948; Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 25.64. See Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 173, 183, for description.65. Orville Freeman to All County Chairman, Apr. 19, 1948, Humphrey Papers,

MOF, PF, box 26.66. Freeman to All County Chairman, Apr. 19, 1948.67. Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 184. Some of these lists are in DFLP, box 1.68. Orville Freeman to Florence Frederickson, Apr. 1, 1948, and Apr. 21, 1948,

DFLP, box 1.69. Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 179–93.70. “How Left Is the DFL Association?” Minnesota Leader, published by the DFL

Association, Nov. 1947, 8. See other issues for years 1947–48.71. James Youngdale to the Minneapolis Star, May 7, 1948, unpublished letter in

Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 25.72. Gerald Heaney to Humphrey, Feb. 23, 1948; Humphrey to Scheiner, Feb. 27,

1948; and Scheiner to Polinsky et al., Feb. 27, 1948; Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF,box 25.

73. See “Anti-Semitism Not an Issue,” Samuel Scheiner’s letter to the editor,Minneapolis Star-Journal, June 6, 1947, 18.

74. Textile Workers Union of America, Precinct Caucus flyer, and others, box 3,DFLP. On the unions’ position and support of the Humphrey faction, see Haynes,Dubious Alliance, especially, 206–9.

75. The left wing in Hennepin County sought an injunction preventing theseating of “right-wing” delegates at the county conventions. The district court judgedthat the “complaint is a political matter in which the court should not intervene but


which should be decided by the political procedures provided therefore by the ap-propriate political party organizations”; court statement, May 11, 1948, HumphreyPapers, MOF, PF, box 25. Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 203–4.

76. T. J. Doyle to “Levi,” May 15, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 25.77. Gerald Heaney to Humphrey, May 17, 1948, DFLP, box 1. According to Heaney,

the left wing had 203 attendees, compared with the ADA’s 303, although apparentlythe newspaper suggested the two conventions were the same size.

78. Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 210.79. Nellie Stone Johnson, interview by Carl Ross, Nov. 17, 1981; and Johnson,

Nellie Stone Johnson, 137–43.80. These figures and the following descriptions are from the Minneapolis Spokes-

man, Jan. 30; Feb. 6, 13, 20, 27; Mar. 19, 1948.81. Minneapolis Spokesman, Mar. 19, 1948.82. Minneapolis Spokesman, Jan. 30, 1948.83. Minneapolis Spokesman, Aug. 13, 1948; Aug. 20, 1948; Sept. 10, 1948.84. “Humphrey and Youngdahl,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Sept. 10, 1948.85. Minneapolis Spokesman, Feb. 6, 1948; “The Wallace Phenomenon,” Minneap-

olis Spokesman, Mar. 3, 1948.86. Minneapolis Spokesman, May 7, 1948; Feb. 27, 1948; see also Sept. 10, 1948.87. Minneapolis Spokesman, Feb. 27, 1948.88. “The Plight of the Liberals,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Mar. 12, 1948.89. Minneapolis Spokesman, Sept. 17, 1948.90. “The Way I See It,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Dec. 19, 1947; Carl T. Rowan,

“Wallace Clashes with Columnist on Race Issue,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Mar. 5,1948; “The Way I See It,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Mar. 5, 1948.

91. Albert Allen to Minneapolis Spokesman, Mar. 12, 1948.92. “Will the Third Party Defeat Itself?” Minneapolis Spokesman, May 21, 1948;

and especially, “Negro Congressman from California?” Minneapolis Spokesman, June4, 1948.

93. Twin Cities Observer, Mar. 5, 1948; the Observer stressed the chaos in theDemocratic party throughout the election year. See Sept. 30 cartoon of Humphreybeing forced to support Truman.

94. Minneapolis Spokesman, Jan. 30, 1948; Oct. 22, 1948.95. “Truman Makes Comeback,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Oct. 22, 1948.96. Rowan, Breaking Barriers, 83.97. Minneapolis Spokesman, Oct. 22, 1948.98. Minneapolis Spokesman, Apr. 16, 1948.99. Humphrey to James Forrestal, Apr. 26, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, box 16.

100. Humphrey to Luther Youngdahl, June 24, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF,box 16.

101. See clippings and subscription lists in Civil Rights files, Humphrey Papers,MOF, PF, box 25.

102. Humphrey to Cecil Newman, Sept. 21, 1948, and Humphrey to Albert Black,Nov. 8, 1948, Humphrey Papers, SCF, box 2.

103. Minneapolis Spokesman, Feb. 6, 1948.104. Humphrey to Cecil Newman, Feb. 9 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, box 16.105. Humphrey to Lester Granger, Mar. 23, 1948, and Granger to Humphrey, Mar.

25, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 27.


106. George Demetriou to Cecil Newman, Apr. 1, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF,PF, box 27.

107. Humphrey to Nell Dodson Russell, May 28, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF,PF, box 26.

108. Minneapolis Spokesman, Mar. 12, 1948; July 2, 1948.109. Minneapolis Spokesman, Oct. 22, 1948, for announcement of Humphrey at

Hallie Q. Brown. This was just a week before Truman went to Harlem on Oct. 29;see Sitkoff, “Harry Truman and the Election of 1948,” 613.

110. “2,000 Cheer for Mayor,” Minneapolis Tribune, July 18, 1948.111. Abels, Out of the Jaws of Victory, 99, sees it as given and obvious to all that

Truman opposed the strong plank, in explaining why the South bolted if it “knew”Truman opposed the plank.

112. “Democrats ‘Rights’ Plan Called Failure,” Minneapolis Tribune, July 18, 1948.This was right next to the story of Humphrey’s exuberant homecoming, a placementconsistent with the Republican paper’s emphasis on Democratic skullduggery.

113. Percy Villa to Humphrey, July 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 25.Letters about speech in Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, boxes 25 and 28.

114. Myrtle Carden to Humphrey, [July 19, 1948]; William Seabron to Humphrey,July 1948; Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 25.

115. Minneapolis Spokesman, July 16, 1948.116. “Send Humphrey to Washington,” Minneapolis Spokesman, Oct. 29, 1948.117. Minneapolis Spokesman, Aug. 13, 1948.118. Humphrey to Chester Bowles, July 22, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF,

box 26.119. Curtiss Olson to Barney Allen, Dec. 20, 1948, Byron “Barney” Gilchrist Allen

Papers, box 1, Minnesota Historical Society.120. Orville Freeman to Humphrey, Jan. 24, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF,

box 28; and “Let’s Not Run Has-beens,” Orv to Bill, n.d. [1948], Humphrey Papers,MOF, PF, box 26.

121. E. J. Larsen to John Moriarity, Feb. 14, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF,box 25.

122. Information on the Midwest Conference is in DFLP, box 1.123. See Plotke, especially, 109–12.124. Plotke, especially, 109–12. See also Humphrey to Mr. Wendell Berge, Mar. 8,

1948: “Even out here in Minnesota we get the sense that this is one of many solemnhours in the history of mankind,” with reference to the ADA, Humphrey Papers,MOF, PF, box 28.

125. On the Truman debacle, see Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 196–201; and Hamby,Beyond the New Deal, 209–39. On Minnesota ADA’s conflicting feelings, see DarrellSmith to Gerald Heaney, Jan. 6, 1948; and Hubert Humphrey to Leon Henderson,Mar. 28, 1948; Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 28; Humphrey to Chester Bowles,July 28, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 26.

126. Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 196–201; Orville Freeman to Byron Allen et al.,Dec. 13, 1948, Allen Papers, box 1.

127. Orville Freeman to Senator McGrath, [n.d., draft, 1948], DFLP, box 2; Hum-phrey to Gael Sullivan, Apr. 19, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 27.

128. E. J. Larsen to Harold Barker, Apr. 19, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF,box 26.


129. Humphrey to Chester Bowles, July 28, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF,box 26.

130. Eugenie Anderson, interview by Larry Hackman, Mar. 11, 1973, for the JFKLibrary, at Minnesota Historical Society.

131. Eugenie Anderson, interview by Arthur Naftalin, July 14, 1978, MinnesotaHistorical Society.

132. The Cowles press endorsed Ball. Humphrey to James Loeb Jr., Apr. 27, 1948,Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 28.

133. DFL Platform, 1948, DFLP, box 1.134. “Orv tells me that Leonard and Earl are looking for a new car. I will see if I

can’t give you a lift on this,” Humphrey to Larson, Loevinger, and Lindquest, Apr. 13,1948, Orville Freeman’s employers, who were concerned about the time Freemanwas putting into Humphrey’s campaign, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 26.

135. Humphrey to Robert Moore, July 9, 1947, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box27. See also Humphrey to Gael Sullivan, Oct. 13, 1947, box 27, about a security clear-ance for Kirkpatrick, who was seeking a job in the State Department.

136. Humphrey to Hugo Ernst, May 18, 1948; and Howard Williams to Humphrey,June 8, 1948; Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 26.

137. Humphrey to Gael Sullivan, Sept. 11, 1947, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box26. Humphrey presents Smith to Sullivan as an able organizer, not as CIO-PAC.Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 156, identifies Smith as a CIO-PAC veteran secretly paidby the CIO.

138. Humphrey requested that Robley Cramer, editor of the Minneapolis LaborReview, be told that the DNC, “at my recommendation,” got his pal the OPA job.Humphrey to Richard Nacy, June 10, 1946, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 27.

139. Dick Silvola to Orville Freeman, June 18, 1948, DFLP, box 1; Humphrey toGerald Heaney, June 22, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 26.

140. Arthur Naftalin to Humphrey, Aug. 9, 1948, Humphrey Papers, SCF, box 2.141. Kathryn Roth to Humphrey, May 9, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF,

box 26.142. Speech, Hubert Humphrey, undated [1948], Humphrey Papers, SCF, box 1.143. [Unknown] to Humphrey, Oct. 27, 1948, and others, Humphrey Papers, SCF,

box 1.144. Byron Allen to Robert Handschin (Farmers Grain Terminal Association),

Aug. 18, 1948, DFLP, box 8.145. U.S. News and World Report, Nov. 4, 1948.146. Doris Tullar to Humphrey, July 17, 1947, “I am enclosing a list of Minnesota

labor people suggested by three of our ADA members to be invited to the July 30

luncheon you discussed with Eugenie the other evening.” Curtiss Olson to DorisTullar, ADA secretary, Sept. 22, 1947, recommending Emil Morberg of Oslo, Minne-sota, for ADA membership; Humphrey to Curtiss Olson, Oct. 15, 1947. Olson wastheir “insider” representative for the rural northwestern ninth district; Jack Jorgensento Humphrey, Feb. 4, 1948, recommending Bert Milaca; Gerald Heaney to Humphrey,Dec. 6, 1947, “I am enclosing a list of names of persons who helped make our meetingin Duluth [ADA] . . . a success.” These and others are in Humphrey Papers, MOF,PF, box 28.

147. This was Clark Clifford’s advice to Truman for the 1948 campaign, describedin Barton Bernstein, “The Ambiguous Legacy: The Truman Administration and


Civil Rights,” in Bernstein, ed., Politics and Policies of the Truman Administration,283.

148. For a detailed account of this, see Haynes, “Farm Coops and the Election ofHubert Humphrey to the Senate.”

149. See Keillor, Cooperative Commonwealth; and Saloutos and Hicks, Agricul-tural Discontent in the Midwest, 1900–1939, 56–86, 286–320.

150. Frank Paskewitz to Frank Shilston, July 10, 1948, Minnesota Association ofCooperatives Records, box 6, Minnesota Historical Society; see also M. W. Thatcherto Humphrey, June 16, 1948, Humphrey Papers, MOF, PF, box 27.

151. Harry Peterson to R. S. Gilfillian, editor, Farmers Union Herald (St. Paul),Aug. 6, 1948; see also Hjalmar Petersen to Harry Petersen, Oct. 8, 1948, assuringPetersen that he did not mention Petersen’s name or association, Minnesota Associ-ation of Cooperatives Records, box 5.

152. “The Policy of Politics,” Midland Cooperator (Minneapolis), Aug. 25, 1948.153. “Cooperators as Individuals Urged to Take Part in Politics,” Midland Coop-

erator, Sept. 29, 1948; “Those Political Ads,” and “Some for Ball; Some for Hum-phrey,” Midland Cooperator, Oct. 27, 1948.

154. Quoted in Saloutos and Hicks, Agricultural Discontent, 231, from the FarmersUnion Herald (St. Paul), Sept. 1929. See also Shover, Cornbelt Rebellion (1965).

155. On the role of the farm vote in Truman’s election, see Lubell, The Future ofAmerican Politics, 158–178; Donaldson, Truman Defeats Dewey, 215–20; and Republi-can National Committee, “The 1948 Election, A Statistical Analysis,” May 1949, 9, 19,Papers of the Republican Party [microform], series A, reel 1, pt. 2.

156. Memo, “Meeting Political Science Association on Party Responsibility Heldon Apr. 6, 1949,” Max Kampelman Papers, box 9, Minnesota Historical Society.

157. Max Kampelman to E. E. Schattschneider, May 20, 1949, Kampelman Papers,box 9.

158. Humphrey, “The Senate on Trial,” 650–51.159. See Lee Loevinger to Barney Allen, Mar. 12, 1949, Freeman Papers, box 1. See

also “Freeman Cites Achievements in Civil Rights Field,” Press Release, Nov. 1, 1956,Freeman Papers, box 3.

Epilogue

1. Thurber, The Politics of Equality, 67–87.2. Quoted in Thurber, The Politics of Equality, 158. On the MFDP at the 1964

convention, see also Dittmer, Local People, 272–302.3. Gitlin, The Sixties, 133–35.4. See Edsall and Edsall, Chain Reaction, 4–5. On the development of “rights-

based liberalism” in the late twentieth century, see also Brinkley, The End of Reform,10. See also Brown, States of Injury, which offers a cogent critique of the limitationsof rights-based reform from a radical feminist perspective.

5. Edsall and Edsall, Chain Reaction, 3–31. The idea that civil rights ended Demo-cratic hegemony has become standard. See also Dionne, Why Americans Hate Poli-tics; MacInnes, Wrong for All the Right Reasons; and Brown, Minority Party.

6. See, especially, Reed and Bond, “Equality: Why We Can’t Wait.”7. See Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics”; Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto;

and Gerstle, “Race and the Myth of Liberal Consensus.”

Notes to Epilogue 209

8. Johnson, Nellie Stone Johnson, 105.9. Memo to Hubert Humphrey, June 16, 1953, Orville L. Freeman Papers, box 2,

Minnesota Historical Society.10. St. Paul Urban League, “The 1968 Labor Day Weekend in St. Paul,” 36; and

Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations, “Special Report,” 2.11. See Minnesota Human Rights Department, “Report of the Legislative Interim

Commission on Housing Discrimination and Segregation Practices” (n.d. [1957]),Minnesota Human Rights Department Records, Minnesota Historical Society; andF. James Davis, “Freeway Exodus,” a Research Report, Aug. 1, 1962, at MinnesotaHistorical Society. By 1960, the African American population in Minneapolis hadrisen to 11,782, and in St. Paul to 8,240.

12. St. Paul Urban League, “The 1968 Labor Day Weekend,” 37.13. St. Paul Urban League, “The 1968 Labor Day Weekend,” 38.14. Wilson, When Work Disappears.15. “Blueprint for Action in Human Relations,” Outline of a Special Message by

Mayor Arthur Naftalin, presented to the Minneapolis City Council, Aug. 9, 1963,Minneapolis Civil Rights Department Records, Minnesota Historical Society.

16. “A Report by the Minneapolis City Council’s Commission on Human Devel-opment to the City Council” [1966], ii, Minneapolis Civil Rights Department Records,Minnesota Historical Society.

17. “Special Report of the Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations,” Aug. 1967,and “A Report by the Minneapolis City Council’s Commission on Human Develop-ment to the City Council” [1966], in Minneapolis Civil Rights Department Records.

18. “A Report by the Minneapolis City Council’s Commission on Human Devel-opment to the City Council” [1966], 38.

210 Notes to Epilogue

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Index

223

African Americans: Democratic partyand, 91–92, 130; discrimination and,61, 81–82; divisions among, 88–91;Republican party and, 89–91; votesof, 80–81, 86–88; World War II and,79–82

African Americans (Minnesota), 40–41,61–92, 166–69; concern about, 49–50,52–53; discrimination against, 61–62;divisions among, 74–76; Duluthlynching, 62; in Festival of Nations,48; Interstate 94 and, 166–68; in labormovement, 66–74; population, 61;and Truman, 150; and HenryWallace, 87–88, 143–50

Agricultural Adjustment Agency(AAA), 10

Allen, Albert, 69–70, 125, 145

Allen, Byron (Barney) G., 19

Alsup, Frank, 72

American Farm Bureau Federation, 10

American Political Science Association:Committee on Parties (1946–50), 31;“Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System” (1950), 31, 157

Americans for Democratic Action(ADA), 118, 119, 123; anger against,138–39; civil rights and, 133–34;Democratic party and, 150–53;founding of, 98; in Humphrey’s

Senate campaign (1948), 135–43;Henry Wallace and, 151–52

Anderson, Eugenie, 97, 98, 136, 148, 153

Anderson, William, 20, 26

Anti-Catholicism, 3, 46, 152, 154

Anticommunism, 9, 12, 18

Anticommunism, liberal, xx, xxiii, 98,101–2; in 1948 election, 135–36, 139

Antiracism, xxi–xxii, xxiii, xxv, 41–46;conceptions of race and, xxi–xxii,49–53; in rural areas, 124–28

Anti-Semitism, 3, 12, 46, 51, 141

Ball, Joseph, 90, 135

Benedict, Ruth: Race: Science andPolitics (1940), 42, 43–44, 45

Benson, Elmer A., xvii, 96, 97, 131, 139;anti-Semitism and, 141; communistsand, 11–12; as governor, 11–12; mergerand, 16–17; in 1938 election, 12–13;Progressive party and, xix–xxx, 139–40, 142; World War II and, 13–14

Bentley, Arthur, 23

Bilbo, Theodore, 117–18

Blatnik, John, 138

Bosch, John, 35

Boyd, Frank, 72, 77, 101

Cassius, Anthony Brutus, 67–69

CIO (Minnesota), 11, 16, 55

224 Index

Civil Rights Act (1964), 161

Class-based politics: definitions of,xvii–xviii; demise of, xxi, 18, 155

Clifford, Clark, 129–30, 132

Communist party, 9, 11–12, 16

Cooperatives, 155–57

Cowles, John, 94, 116–17

Davis, Sam K., 102

Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, xvi,xvii, 133–43; Farmer-Labor principlesof, 34, 155; farmers and, 127–28;formation of, 17; left wing and, 97–98; party labels and, 34–35; in ruralareas, 124–25; schism in, xix, 101–2,140–42

Democratic National Committee(DNC), 120–22

Democratic party (Minnesota), 121–23,134, 150–53; merger with Farmer-Labor party, 14–17

Democratic party (national), xvi, xx,118–23; civil rights and, 111–12, 133–34;divisions in, 111, 119–20, 123, 129–31;1948 election, 129–34; perceptions of,xxiv, 116–18; redefinition of, xxiii; theSouth and, 119–120

Dewey, Thomas, 82

“Dixiecrats,” 134

Douglas, Helen Gahagen, 152

Douglas, Paul, 152

Du Bois, W. E. B., 86

Ervin, J. Louis, 62

Ethnicity: in Minnesota, 3, 46, 154; inrelation to race, 47–53. See alsoImmigrant groups (Minnesota)

Edsall, Thomas B. and Mary, 163–64

Fair Employment Practices Committee(FEPC), 44–45, 53–59, 80, 82–83;businesses and, 59; criticism of, 107–9; Minneapolis FEPC, 55, 104–10;philosophy of, 82, 164

Farmer-Labor Association, 6, 71

Farmer-Labor party: blacks and, 55;decline of, 10; depression and, 7–8;divisions in, 5–6; isolationism of, 13–

14; merger, 14–17; 1938 election, 12;origins of, 4–5

Farmers, 123–24, 155; workers and, 3–4

Farmers’ movements, 2

FEPC. See Fair Employment PracticesCommittee

Festival of Nations (St. Paul), 47, 48

Fraser, Donald, xviFreeman, Orville, xvi, 20, 101–2, 167;

1948 election and, 136–38, 141–43

Freeway construction: effects on blacks,166–67

Giants of the Earth (Rolvaag), 3

Governor’s Interracial Commission,50–51; unions and, 56–57

Hagen, Harold, 16, 123

Hall, Douglas, 100, 101–2

Hallie Q. Brown House, 63–64

Hamer, Fannie Lou, 161–62

Hedgeman, Anna Arnold, 76, 83

Herring, Pendleton, 23

Hinderaker, Ivan, 26

Horn, Charles Lilley, 57–59, 77–78, 85

Hotel and Restaurant EmployeesUnion (Local 665) (AFL), 66–67

Human Relations. See Mayor’s Councilon Human Relations (Minneapolis)

Humphrey, Hubert: Americans forDemocratic Action and, 98, 138–39;anticommunism and, 98–99, 101–2;antiracism and, xxiii–xxiv; blacksand, 84, 142–43, 147–50; Catholicsand, 152, 154; Civil Rights Act (1964),161; consensus politics of, 33–34, 100–101, 126, 128, 139–40; DFL and, xvi,15–16, 34, 97–99, 101–2, 150–59; DNCand, 120–22, 151–52; ethnic vote and,154; Farmer-Labor legacy and, 34,155; farmers and, 125–28, 155; FEPC(Minneapolis) and, 105–9; HumanRelations and, 99–106, 119–20;Nellie Stone Johnson and, 71; labormovement and, 93–96; left wing and, xvii, 35–37, 135–43; as mayor,93–96; mayoral campaign (1943),15–16; New Deal and, 22–23;

Index 225

Humphrey, Hubert (continued): NewLeft criticizes, 162; programmaticpolitics of, xvi, 37, 119–23, 155–59;Senate campaign (1948), 126, 153–59;southern Democrats and, 133, 157;speech at Democratic convention(1948), 134, 149; at University ofMinnesota, 15, 21; views on parties,27; Wallace supporters and, 140

Immigrant groups (Minnesota), 3, 47–49; politics and, 46, 154. See alsoEthnicity

Interest group pluralism, 20; critiquesof, 38

Interest groups, 27–28, 91, 155

Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 42

Japanese-Americans, 53–55

Johnson, Nellie Stone, 58, 70, 77, 88–89,125; Communist party and, 71–72, 83

Kampelman, Max, 20, 22, 25, 27, 157;1948 election and, 136

Kelm, Elmer, 17, 97

Keynesianism, 24–25

Kirkpatrick, Evron M., 20, 21, 27, 98, 136

Knutson, Harold, 118, 156, 157

Laski, Harold, 26

Lasswell, Harold, 23

Latham, Earl, 20, 23

Latz, Rubin, 100, 125

Left wing, 35–37, 96–97, 140–42

Leland, Wilfred, 108

Le Sueur, Marion, 6, 96

Le Sueur, Meridel, 6

Lewis, Sinclair, 47

Liberalism (postwar), 33–34, 160–61,162–66; explanations of, xvi–xxii, 18;left wing and, xviii–xix, 35–37;political scientists and, 19–21

Lindbergh, Charles, Sr., 4

Lindblom, Charles E., 21

Loeb, James, Jr., 98, 133

Lundeen, Ernest, 13

Mahoney, William, 4, 5, 6

March on Washington Movement(MOWM), 79–80

Mayor’s Council on Human Relations(Minneapolis), 94, 102–4, 98–106

McCarthy, Eugene, xvi, 136

McClosky, Herbert, 20

McWilliams, Carey, 47

Minneapolis Central Labor Union, 15,55, 66, 94

Minneapolis Spokesman, 73–76, 78, 146;compared to the Twin Cities Observer,90–91, 146; 1948 election and, 143–44;reaction to Humphrey speech (1948),150

Mintener, Bradshaw, 94, 100, 103

Mississippi Freedom Democratic party,161

Mitchell, Clarence, Jr., 76, 77, 83

Mondale, Walter, xvi, 161

Montagu, Ashley: Man’s MostDangerous Myth (1942), 42, 45

Moon, Henry Lee, 81

Moos, Malcolm, 21

Myrdal, Gunnar: An AmericanDilemma (1944), 42

NAACP (National Association for theAdvancement of Colored People):in Minneapolis and St. Paul, 62, 64,79

Naftalin, Arthur, 16, 19, 20, 27, 97, 98, 167–68; DFL caucuses and, 140–42; dis-sertation on the Farmer-Labor party,32–33; 1948 election and, 136, 138, 139

National Council for a PermanentFEPC, 80

New Deal, 18, 21–24, 31; blacks and, 65–66; effects of, 10, 35–36

Newman, Cecil, 52, 58, 60, 73–78, 100,105–6; and Charles L. Horn, 77–78;1948 election and, 144–50; politicalstrategy of, 83–92

Nixon, Richard, 160

Nonpartisan League, 1, 2, 4, 32–33

Olson, Floyd Bjornesterne: communistsand, 9; as governor, 6–7; memory of,155; 1934 strike and, 8; radicalism of,8–9

Olson, Orville, 97

226 Index

Petersen, Hjalmar, 12, 141

Phyllis Wheatley House, 63–64, 72

Political parties, 27–33

Political repression, 4, 7

Political science: New Deal and, 21–24;pluralism and, 23, 26–27, 38–39; two-party system and, 25–32

Progressive party (1948), 131–32, 139–40;explanations of, xix

Race: conceptions of, 42–44, 47–48, 49–53, 85; Jews and, 50–52

Randolph, A. Philip, 79–80, 83

Republican party (Minnesota), 2, 112–18; cooperatives and, 156; divisionsin, 111–12; in rural areas, 123–24

Rolvaag, Ole: Giants of the Earth, 3

Rowan, Carl T., 117, 143–44, 146

Russell, Nell Dodson, 74, 83, 85;criticism of Henry Wallace, 145

Schattschneider, E. E., 26; invited toWashington, 157; Party Government,27–31; on third parties, 29–30

Scheiner, Samuel, 125, 141

Seestrom, Selma, 97

Shipstead, Henrik, 5, 13, 112, 114–15

Smith, Francis, 97

Soule, George, 25

Stageberg, Susie, 35, 96

Stassen, Harold, 13, 89–90, 112–16

Steefel, Genevieve, 54, 100, 101, 125

Taft-Hartley Act, 84, 87, 135, 154

Teamsters Union (Local 574), 8

Third parties: demise of, xx; prevalenceof, 2

Thompson, Era Bell, 65

Thye, Edward, 40, 113, 115

Townley, Arthur C., 1, 5, 32

Truman, David, 23

Truman, Harry S., 129–30; civil rightsand, 132–33

Twin Cities Observer, 75–76, 89–91, 146

Twin Cities Ordnance Plant, 57, 58

University of Minnesota, Department ofPolitical Science, 15, 20–21, 25–27, 136;views on Farmer-Labor party, 31–32

Urban League (St. Paul), 63, 73

Wallace, Henry, xix, 130, 131–32; blacksand, 143–50

Wallace, George, 160

Wheaton, Frank, 62

White, Walter, 86

Wilkins, Roy, 76

Williams, Milton G., 75, 88–91

Wishart, Robert, 95, 97

World War II, 41; blacks and, 76–77

Working Peoples’ Nonpartisan League(WPNL), 4–5

Young, Whitney, 76

Youngdahl, Luther, 113–14, 147

Jennifer A. Delton is assistant professor of history at Skidmore College.

Her current research concerns the cultural and political history of anti-

racism programs in corporate America.

Popular Farmer-Labor Governor Floyd B. Olson at his desk, 1936. For manyprogressives in the 1930s, Olson personified the radical possibilities of third-partymovements. Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society.

Hubert Humphrey (right) with left-leaning New Dealer Henry Wallace when theirpolitics still matched, 1944. Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society.

New liberals and old-style Democrats, circa 1945. Left to right: Hubert Humphrey,Evron Kirkpatrick, Harry Truman, Arthur Naftalin, and Elmer Kelm. Courtesy ofthe Minnesota Historical Society.

Industrialist Charles Lilley Horn with employees, 1944. Note his spatsand boutonniere. Horn hired one thousand African American workersat his government-contracted plant during the war. Courtesy of theMinnesota Historical Society.

African American labor activist NellieStone Johnson, 1943. With labor’sbacking, Johnson won election to theMinneapolis library board in 1944,becoming the first elected black officialin Minneapolis. Courtesy of theMinneapolis Public Library,Minneapolis Collection.

Minneapolis Spokesman founder andeditor Cecil Newman, 1946. In thepages of the Spokesman and on thenew municipal interracial committees,Newman called for a more active blackpresence in Minneapolis politics.Courtesy of the Minneapolis PublicLibrary, Minneapolis Collection.

Announcement for a Communist-sponsored rally at which African Americanlabor activist Nellie Stone (later Nellie Stone Johnson) was a featured speaker,1946. Note also the presence of CIO leader Robert Wishart, who would later be aHumphrey ally. Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society.

Labor activist and businessman Anthony Brutus Cassius, from the centennialedition of the Minneapolis Beacon, 1956. Courtesy of the Minneapolis PublicLibrary, Minneapolis Collection.

Anthony Cassius (left) at his bar, the Cassius Club Café. In 1947 Cassius fought theMinneapolis city council for a liquor license. From the centennial edition of theMinneapolis Beacon, 1956. Courtesy of the Minneapolis Public Library,Minneapolis Collection.

Labor activist and Minneapolis NAACP president Albert Allen, from thecentennial edition of the Minneapolis Beacon, 1956. Courtesy of the MinneapolisPublic Library, Minneapolis Collection.

William Green (AFL), Hubert Humphrey, and Walter Reuther (CIO) seal the fateof American labor at the ADA convention in 1948. Courtesy of the MinnesotaHistorical Society.

Left-wingers Elmer Benson and Susie Stageberg at the Progressive–DFLconvention, June 1948. Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society.

Mayor Humphrey emphasizing the importance of antiracist ideals, 1948. Courtesyof the Minnesota Historical Society.

Humphrey’s triumphant return to Minneapolis after his civil rights speech at theDemocratic National Convention, July 1948. Courtesy of the Minnesota HistoricalSociety.

Documents

Making Minnesota Liberal: Civil Rights and the Transformation of the Democratic Party