In his youth a hobo, a radical, a soldier, and a scholar, Karl Rolvaag became an adroit politician—a key builder of the Democratic Farmer–Labor (DFL) Party. He served eight years as lieutenant governor and four years, 1963–1967, as Minnesota’s thirty-first governor.
Though a moderate in office, Karl Rolvaag received a radical political education that not even Floyd B. Olson could match. His father, novelist and scholar Ole Rølvaag, held leftist views, and his mother came from a family of South Dakota populists. After his father’s death, in 1931, Rolvaag roamed the West, working in mines, harvest crews, and lumber camps. He considered joining the Communist Party, and did join the radical union Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies).
After six years Rolvaag returned to his hometown, Northfield, and to St. Olaf College, where he studied history, played football, and was elected senior class president. As World War II loomed, he co-founded a campus pacifist group, Patriots for Peace. Upon graduating, in 1941, he was drafted into the Army, where he became a tank commander and saw extensive service in Europe after D-Day, earning a Silver Star, a Purple Heart (from friendly fire, he said), and two Croix de Guerre. He then studied history and political science at the University of Minnesota. He did graduate work in Norway, where he associated with the radical Norwegian Labor Party.
A DFLer, Rolvaag ran for Congress, and lost, in 1946, 1948, and 1952, and worked for the DFL as party chair, 1950–1954, traveling extensively to build the party statewide. He was a great friend and ally of DFL governor Orville Freeman. He was elected Lieutenant Governor (alongside Freeman, as governor) in 1954, 1956, 1958, and 1960 (when Freeman was defeated.) In 1962 he became the first Minnesota governor elected to a four-year term when he beat incumbent governor Elmer L. Andersen in the closest statewide election in Minnesota history, decided by ninety-one votes.
In office, despite an unfriendly legislature, Rolvaag achieved expansion of state community colleges and vocational schools, improved conservation, the restoration of Fort Snelling, and better resources for developmentally disabled people. Rolvaag also appointed Walter Mondale to the US Senate as a replacement for Hubert Humphrey.
While he had some legislative successes, DFL party leaders doubted Rolvaag’s popularity, and there were rumors he had a drinking problem. In the party’s 1966 convention, Lieutenant Governor Sandy Keith defeated him for party endorsement. Rolvaag then crushed Keith in the primary, leaving the DFL divided. Rolvaag narrowly lost re-election to Republican Harold LeVander.
President Lyndon Johnson appointed Rolvaag ambassador to Iceland, where he served two years. He returned to electoral politics in 1972, elected to Minnesota’s Public Service Commission after defeating the incumbent chair. He served five years, but the alcoholism that had bedeviled him most of his adult life took an increasing toll. In 1977 he resigned to concentrate on his health; by then he had been through treatment four times. In November of 1978 he told reporter Steve Berg that he had been sober for eleven months, the longest such stint he could remember. Rolvaag died on December 20, 1990, at age seventy-seven.