Hubert H. Humphrey, a giant of Minnesota politics, was one of the most influential liberal leaders of the twentieth century. His political rise was meteoric, his impact on public policy historic. His support for the Vietnam War, however, cost him the office he most sought: president of the United States.
Born in Wallace, South Dakota, in 1911, Humphrey was deeply influenced by his public-spirited father and the daily hardships of farming and small-town life in the Upper Midwest. When the Great Depression struck, the young Humphrey interrupted his college education at the University of Minnesota to help his father run the family drug store.
The experience made a lasting impression. Looking back in 1971, Humphrey declared he learned more about economics from one South Dakota dust storm than in all his years in college. Though he valued the educational benefits of his early years, in the late 1930s Humphrey had bigger things in mind. Returning to the University of Minnesota, he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science, added a master’s degree from Louisiana State University, and returned to Minneapolis. There, he began an almost instantaneous political rise.
Minnesota was in a time of political transition. The state’s Farmer-Labor Party, a coalition of progressives, populists, and socialists, had dominated politics for much of the 1930s. By the 1940s, it was in decline. The smaller Democratic Party lacked the strength to compete with the Republicans. Humphrey—outgoing, a gifted (if notoriously long winded) speaker, and possessing a sharp political intelligence—soon developed a following. He wasted no time applying a lesson he had learned in political science class: power goes to those who seek it.
In 1944, Humphrey took two crucial steps toward the power he sought. First, he was elected mayor of Minneapolis. He brought a reformer’s zeal to the office, establishing the city’s first fair-employment commission and effectively challenging the city’s ingrained discrimination against Jews. But it was the merger of the Democrats and Farmer-Laborites, a move he actively supported, that created an organization strong enough to support Humphrey’s larger ambitions.
The seeds Humphrey sowed in 1944 were fully harvested in 1948. His impassioned address to the Democratic National Convention, broadcast on nation-wide radio, won broad liberal acclaim (and a walkout by segregationist delegates). “The time has arrived,” he famously declared, “for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of state’s rights and walk forthrightly in the bright sunshine of human rights.”
Back in Minnesota, the two wings of the DFL split over the emerging Cold War. A staunch anti-Communist, Humphrey supported an aggressive approach to the Soviet Union and repression of Communists at home. Emerging victorious from the internal battle with the Farmer-Laborites, Humphrey was elected to the U.S. Senate, soundly defeating Republican incumbent Joseph Ball.
It was in this campaign that Minnesotans first encountered Humphrey as the “happy warrior”—an irrepressible politician with a genuine love of people and an uncanny talent for remembering the names and circumstances of folks from Grand Marais to Blue Earth and every place in between.
Humphrey’s arrival in the Senate as a rising liberal star was initially greeted with hostility by the Democrats’ entrenched Southern bloc. In response, Humphrey accepted the guidance of the Senate majority leader, Lyndon Johnson. He proved an adept student. He developed relationships across political parties and ideologies and—without sacrificing his core principles—learned how to use the system.
From the 1950s until his selection as Lyndon Johnson’s vice president in 1964, Humphrey’s marriage of liberal conviction and political know-how yielded legislation on issues ranging from food stamps, civil rights, and the Peace Corps to arms control and humanitarian foreign aid. Near the end of his career, a poll of one thousand congressional staff named him the most effective U.S. senator of the previous fifty years.
This remains his greatest legacy. In 1968, the fierce division over the Vietnam War cost him the presidency and the respect of a new generation of political activists. Re-elected twice to the Senate, Humphrey persisted, an unabashed liberal in an era of diminished belief in government. Humphrey died from pancreatic cancer in 1978, honored by world leaders and mourned by thousands of Minnesotans.