Henrik Shipstead forged an independent path through Minnesota politics as a mayor, state representative, gubernatorial candidate, and four-term US senator. Serious yet personable, he opposed big business and was one of the staunchest non-interventionists in Senate history, vigorously criticizing American militarism as well as entry into the League of Nations, World Court, and United Nations.
Born in rural Kandiyohi County in January 1881, Shipstead was the eighth of twelve children in the Norwegian immigrant family of Saave and Christine Shipstead. He grew up listening to his politically minded father criticize big business, consumerism, and modernity while extolling the virtues of simple farmers. As a young man he was encouraged by a friend to apply to Northwestern University Dental School, from which he graduated in 1903.
Later that year, Shipstead returned to western Minnesota and set up a practice in Glenwood. In 1910, at age twenty-nine, he was recruited by both of Glenwood’s rival political factions to run for mayor. He was twice elected, without opposition, to one-year terms. After refusing a third term in order to return full-time to dentistry, he was nominated and elected to the state House of Representatives in 1916.
In 1917, during Shipstead’s term as a state representative, some Glenwood residents decided to form a chapter of the Nonpartisan League (NPL)—an association of progressive farmers and workers. When conservative town residents balked at giving the farmers a space to organize, Shipstead rented them a hall in his own name. His actions on behalf of the NPL endeared him to many but nonetheless made him a more controversial figure.
In 1920, Shipstead unsuccessfully sought the governorship as an NPL-endorsed independent. Two years later, he was nominated by the new Farmer‒Labor Party to run against incumbent Republican US Senator Frank B. Kellogg. Enjoying added name recognition from his previous statewide campaign, he easily won the three-way contest with 47 percent of the vote, including large majorities in western and northern Minnesota as well as working-class wards in the Twin Cities.
In the Senate, Shipstead emerged as a progressive advocate for farmers, workers, and small-business owners. He pursued agricultural and labor reform, natural resource preservation, inland waterway navigability, non-interventionism, rural electrification, and banking reform. His most lasting legislative accomplishments included a nine-foot shipping channel on the Mississippi River, federal protection of the sacred Pipestone Quarry, and the Shipstead-Newton-Nolan Act. Passed in 1930, the act protected what is now the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness from damming and logging.
During the 1934 campaign, as Shipstead was facing a left-wing primary challenge from Congressman Francis Shoemaker, a raucous state convention of the Farmer‒Labor Party adopted a stridently left-wing platform that explicitly called for an end to capitalism. While Shipstead had serious reservations about capitalism and had long supported cooperative business ventures, the new platform contained proposals that he viewed as the result of creeping socialist and communist influence.
In 1940, six years after winning reelection on the platform he now criticized, Shipstead upended the Minnesota political world by leaving the Farmer‒Labor Party and returning to the Republicans. In announcing his switch, Shipstead stressed that it was the Farmer‒Labor Party—not he—that had changed.
After rejoining the GOP he reaffiliated with the left-wing of the party, alongside figures including Senators Lynn Frazier and Hiram Johnson. He remained adamantly opposed to war and belligerent internationalism even as other Minnesota Republican leaders, including Harold Stassen and Joseph Ball, worked to shift the party in that direction.
When World War II came, Shipstead vigorously opposed American entry. Though he voted in favor of declaring war on Japan after Pearl Harbor, he would argue for the rest of his career that the war had been the fault of Western elites. He was one of only two senators to vote against the United Nations Charter, which he saw as an attempt by powerful countries to control less powerful ones.
After failing to win reelection to a fifth term, Shipstead retired to his farm in western Minnesota in 1947. Falling short in the GOP primary for the seat he had held for the last twenty-four years was a spectacular ending for a man who had spent most of his career as “the most popular and enduring public figure in the State.”