In the 1930s, Minnesota had two main parties: Republicans and Farmer-Laborers.
Founded toward the end of World War I, the Farmer-Labor Party was an outgrowth of the progressive Nonpartisan League, which took power in North Dakota using the Republican ballot line and had set up a national headquarters in Saint Paul. The FLP united not just its namesake agrarians and urban proletariat, but, in the spirit of the Popular Front, social democratic reformists with revolutionary Marxists.
In 1930, the Farmer-Labor Party won the governorship with the legendary Floyd Olson, a left-wing Hennepin County Attorney who had caused a stir by forcefully defending a group of Minneapolis workers accused of dynamiting an anti-union contractor's home. Olson permitted communists and socialists to participate in the Farmer-Labor Party, often to the chagrin of populist liberals, but he also jettisoned controversial planks from the FLP platform like recognition of the USSR, public ownership of key industries, and (odder in retrospect) unemployment insurance and a 40-hour work week. A useful reminder that things seem a lot less radical when you already have them.
Olson is remembered for his shrewdness and keen sense of the Farmer-Labor projects constantly fluctuating constraints. As governor, he enacted progressive taxation, a moratorium on farm foreclosures and built the FLP into a very powerful political force, at least within Minnesotas borders. In 1932, third-party advocates urged Olson to take the Farmer-Labor Party nationwide and run for president as its nominee. Acutely aware of the dearth of third-party organization in just about every state except Minnesota, Olson demurred and instead cut a deal endorsing the Democratic nominee, progressive New York Gov. Franklin Roosevelt.
Olson went on to play a decisive role in the 1934 Minneapolis Trucker Strike, though on whose behalf he acted depends on who you talk to. To Trotskyists, whose fellow travelers masterfully organized the strike, Gov. Olsons decision to bring in the Minnesota National Guard was a betrayal that resulted in the arrest of labor leaders, and allowed trucks to move. But to Farmer-Labor devotees, the National Guards real objective was to protect the striking Teamsters from the violent, business funded Citizens Alliance; a maneuver which allowed Olson to broker a resolution that achieved formal union recognition. Lest his left-wing critics doubt Olsons bonafides, at that years FLP convention, the governor tested the bounds of his popularity by allowing a stridently socialist platform and proclaiming, Now I am frank to say I am not a liberal I am what I want to beI am a radical.
Floyd Olson was in the midst of a campaign for U.S Senate when he died unexpectedly from stomach cancer in the summer of 1936. He was just 44. The Farmer-Labor Party was never quite the same. A nasty power struggle broke out between his successors, Hjalmar Petersen and Elmer Benson, who managed to hold the Governors Mansion for all of two years until moderate Republican Harold Stassen took over in 1938. As war with the Axis powers neared, Minnesotas isolationist undercurrents came to the fore and brought anti-Roosevelt Republicans to power.
By 1940, the FLP had lost every seat they once held in Minnesotas Congressional delegation and their lone U.S Senator, Henrik Shipstead, had become a Republican to bolster the GOPs anti-war wing. Meanwhile, the American Federation of Labor, a onetime ally of the FLP, had split, confusing the party even further; and with the Democratic-led New Deal at its zenith, the need for corresponding farmer-labor parties around the country felt all the less urgent. Just as Soviet Russia had been seriously tested by Stalins pursuit of socialism in one country, the FLP was learning the hard limits of third-partyism in one state.
As Minnesotans are usually reluctant to admit, our Land of 10,000 Lakes figure may or may not include some exaggerations. In the early 1940s, if the Farmer-Labor Party was a pond, then the Minnesota Democratic Party was a puddle. Since the 1860s, Minnesota Democrats had struggled to shake their party's association with the Confederacy, which took the lives of nearly 3,000 Minnesotans in the Civil War. Democrats hadnt won a statewide race since 1914, after which they were buried by the FLP as the main opposition to Minnesota Republicans, their support base confined to the Irish ghettos of St. Paul and Minneapolis. But now, as the Farmer-Labor Party faded fast, Minnesota Democrats gained new relevance. With Republicans in control of the Governors Mansion and both U.S. Senate seats, it was increasingly clear that Minnesota wasnt quite big enough for two left of center parties.
In 1944, FDR, gearing up to campaign for an unprecedented fourth term, insisted that Minnesotas Democrats and Farmer-Laborers merge. FLP stalwarts like Susie Williamson Stageberg vehemently opposed a fusion party but was outnumbered by her peers. Elmer Benson, to this day Minnesotas most radical governor, was now out of office and represented the Farmer-Labor Party in negotiations with the Democrats. In April 1944, the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party was born.
The next year, the new partys prime spokesman came through in the profile of Hubert H. Humphrey, who was decisively elected mayor of Minneapolis. Humphrey was an effective leader who made no secret that he was a partisan of the DFLs Democratic wing. Being the most prominent elected DFL official in Minnesota at the time, he showed up to give a keynote address at the 1946 party convention in St. Paul, but was booed off the stage by Farmer-Labor diehards who werent about to cede control to Humphreys upstart liberal faction.
Tensions grew over the next two years, as Humphrey burrowed in his heels and formed a diaper brigade of young party moderates, mostly constituted by himself and DFL Executive Committee Member, Orville Freeman. The dynamic was characterized by a 1947 official party letter to Humphrey, the first draft of which was written by Freeman with a congratulatory tone. But when the Farmer-Laborers who still dominated the Executive Committee went through it with their red pens, all references to outstanding leadership were struck from the text.
A year later, in 1948, the ambitious Mayor Humphrey made it his mission to take one of Minnesotas Senate seats back from the Republicans. But first, he had to get through his own partys left flank. Humphrey activated his liberal anticommunist organization, Americans for Democratic Action, to red-bait radical Minnesotans out of political life. As a leaflet from Humphreys faction posed: Will the D-F-L party of Minnesota be a clean, honest, decent, progressive party? Or will it be a Communist-front organization?
To truly weed out the left, Humphreys crew would need to win control through the labyrinthine party caucus system. Ahead of the April 30 DFL caucuses, Orville Freeman organized a parallel formation of anticommunists, most of whom had never attended a party meeting, to complete the purge. In Hennepin County, Lester Covey, the County chair and an ally of Humphreys, rearranged the caucus locations to favor the Democratic wing. The move outraged party radicals, who opted to hold their own caucuses at individual precincts per tradition. But Humphreys faction won the night. As Minnesota historian Rhoda Gilman noted, Using tactics borrowed directly from the leftists of the party, they swept the DFL all the way to the state convention in the Spring of 1948.
Humphrey struck his most decisive blow by exploiting a hemorrhage over the partys presidential nomination. For well over a decade, the presidential question had been non-controversial for Farmer-Laborers who readily endorsed FDR, often with reciprocal support. It was his initiative, after all, that brought the two rival parties together. But with Roosevelt gone and Nazism defeated, the DFL, along with the broader Popular Front, had lost its common purpose.
Harry Truman, who inherited the Presidency in 1945 after FDRs death, was deeply unpopular among Farmer-Laborites who viscerally remembered how he was forced onto the ticket in 1944 to replace a man even more of their ilk than Roosevelt, Vice President Henry Wallace. In 1948, Wallace left the Democrats to rehabilitate the dormant Progressive Party as its presidential nominee. His campaign attracted what was left of the Popular Front, communists and social democrats unhappy with Trumans initiation of the Cold War, tepidness on Civil Rights and failure to marshal burgeoning strike activity into a cohesive movement. Naturally, Wallaces campaign drew a great deal of support from the DFLs left, including from Elmer Benson who served as campaign manager. Despite this, Hubert Humphrey was not only able to secure the DFL Presidential nomination for Truman, but used the party Steering Committee to disqualify Wallace supporters from Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party participation.
Having been banned from the official DFL convention in Brainerd, the Farmer-Labor left held their own protest convention in Minneapolis as the Progressive Democratic Farmer Labor League where they nominated Wallace and Senate candidate James Shields. This was their last gasp. After a round of legal jousting, Humphrey and Truman made the DFL ballot line, cementing the Democratic wings dominance over every aspect of the party but the last two words in its name. Over the next several decades, bitterness among old Farmer-Laborites grew, over both the purge and their own decision to fuse with Democrats in the first place. Elmer Benson, who lived to 89, decried Humphrey as a war criminal and ballyhoo artist in one of his final interviews and expressed regret over the 1944 merger: I think it was a mistake because the party became part of a larger party thats been taken over by political hacks.
In retrospect, its hard to imagine the Farmer-Labor left maneuvering their way into some better outcome. Aside from North Dakota, which is still home to the North Dakota Democratic-Nonpartisan League Party, there were very few factions of radicals across the country sharing state parties with Democrats for the Farmer-Laborers to coordinate with. The Progressive Party may have felt like it could be built into a national alternative for a time, but it netted a mere 2% of the vote in 1948 and collapsed from infighting a few years later. And while it was likely a better move for the FLP to remain independent of the Democrats, its not at all clear that they would have retained second party status and not been overtaken by Humphrey and his coterie anyway.
Some argue that by merging, the Farmer-Laborers did bring the Democrats leftward, at least on the issue of civil rights, which Hubert Humphrey boldly embraced from his mayoralty onwards. This may somewhat explain the DFLs position today, one or two notches to the left of the average state Democratic Party, as displayed by Minnesotas recent universal school meals law and Gov. Tim Walzs pronouncements on trans rights. That would likely be cold comfort to the original Farmer-Laborers and their vision for a cooperative commonwealth. Such a vision, however, is increasingly popular across America once again, including in Minnesota where voters have elected over ten current Democratic Socialist officeholders using the DFL ballot line. Ever so often, DFL moderates float shortening the name to Minnesota Democratic Party. But with changing political winds and dedicated organization, perhaps one day an opposite edit will come about and allow the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party to rise again.
Sources:
Books:
Articles:
Podcasts:
Read more:
How Hubert H. Humphrey Purged the DFL of Socialists - Racket - Racket