1936 saw four different candidates who were neither Democratic nor Republican win states in the Midwest. Okay, thought most people, that's interesting, but it's probably a fluke. Plus which, they'd never amount to anything if they didn't unite their forces.
Four years later, hundreds of people gathered in Des Moines to proclaim that the American farmer deserved and needed a party that would fight for them. They came together to nominate George W. Norris, a Senator of unimpeachable record on that front, and saw him win seven states and nearly four million votes. They were no longer a fluke.
But across the nation, even as Agrarian Justice solidified its support in the Farm Belt, it retreated from the states outside it. In California, it folded into the Golden Dawn Party. In Texas, the Lone Star Party. The pattern repeated itself across the nation - whenever there was a larger Longite party in a state, it would absorb that state's branch of the American League.
In short, unless there were a lot of cross-nominations - not an impossible scenario, but an unlikely one - Agrarian Justice was simply no longer a factor on the Presidential level. Its only power would come in the Capitol and in the state houses of the Midwest.
And it took to that reality with aplomb.
---
But there was one thing that could have killed the Aggies before they began, and that was becoming a joke. Already, radio shows and political cartoons outside the Heartland mocked them - a 1937 Vanity Fair cover depicted Henry Wallace, who had left the Roosevelt White House to become a founding member of what would later be called Agrarian Justice, dancing with a cornstalk, while Fred Allen's radio show lampooned Midwesterners through the corn-obsessed Senator Magnus Anderson (played by the New York-raised Kenny Delmar). But even that paled in comparison to what might have happened had John R. Brinkley gotten into power.
John R. Brinkley was a quack. With no legitimate medical education and a degree from a diploma mill, he set up shop in Milford, Kansas after seeing a newspaper ad saying that the town was in need of medical professionals. To his credit, Brinkley was apparently quite effective at first, paying good wages and nursing victims of the Spanish flu back to health. But before not too long, he discovered that he could make even more money by marketing the transplantation of goat testicles into humans as a virtual panacea. He charged quite a bit of money for the procedure - $750 per operation, which was slightly less than the average cost of a new car. But while the best-off of his patients could at least report that they had not been harmed by the procedure, the worst-off... well, suffice it to say that by 1942 Brinkley had been sued more than a dozen times for wrongful death.
He had first turned to politics in 1930, shortly after his medical license had been revoked. Then, he had run for Governor of Kansas as an independent, coming close enough to victory that the elected governor himself stated that, had several thousand write-in votes which spelled Brinkley's name unusually been counted, he would have won. He had tried again two years later and won nearly a quarter of a million votes, more than 30% of the voting population.
Shortly thereafter, he moved to Texas, stung by the revocation of his medical license and in search of a new source of profit. He discovered that in the "border-blasting" radio, a way to flout American broadcast regulations by placing powerful transmitters just over the border. But eventually even that was shut down, and he found himself moving back north, (officially) broke and vengeful.
But he did have one recourse left to him. In an era of skepticism of the federal government, many in rural Kansas saw him as unfairly victimized, even a hero. And in 1942, he decided to take advantage of that. Nobody knows how he got his seed cash - certainly he had more of it than he could plausibly have raised himself, and the consensus is that he managed to somehow hide much of it from the IRS - but he spent quite a bit of it criss-crossing Kansas, campaigning for one last shot at the Governorship. But this time, he was running as a member of a larger party. This time, he was a member of Agrarian Justice.
Only two things stood in his way. One was William H. Burke, a farmer and former Democratic candidate who ran against Brinkley in the primary. The other was a young college football star and Army reservist who saw a Brinkley governorship as the greatest threat in the race to the people of Kansas, even as other members of Frank Carlson's campaign debated targeting Burke and the moderates who might swing away from him.
And when Brinkley lost in the primaries, and then Burke in the general, a number of people started paying close attention to a lively, intelligent, campaigner by the name of Bob Dole.
---
A few hundred miles north-by-northeast of Kansas, another state was at a political fork in the road.
Minnesota had thoroughly swallowed the Agrarian Justice Kool-Aid. Agrarian Justice - and its predecessor, the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party - had been powerful for more than two decades. In 1942, both of the state's Senators, more than half of its federal Representatives, and a supermajority in both houses of the Legislature were held by members of Agrarian Justice. Depending on how you measure it, Minnesota could be counted as the most regionalist state in America in 1942.
But there was one office that Agrarian Justice had never managed to hold in Minnesota. When Governor Floyd Olson stepped down to run on Huey Long's ticket, a 29-year-old up-and-coming District Attorney had shown up to take his place. And for six long years, a Republican - albeit a lowercase-p progressive - had held the Governorship of Minnesota. Harold Stassen's reign was predicated on the fact that his government fit more-or-less right into the Agrarian Justice mainstream: supporting farmers, unions, and farmers' unions; overhauling the government to increase transparency and decrease corruption; and backing and building upon Roosevelt's New Deal programs at a time when even Roosevelt seemed to be backing away from them. Where Stassen and Agrarian Justice disagreed - most notably, on foreign policy, where Stassen was a committed internationalist and Agrarian Justice supported isolationism - Stassen kept quiet about it, and the Governor of Minnesota didn't have much say on foreign policy anyway.
Meanwhile, Senator Ernest Lundeen was having his own issues. A staunch isolationist, Lundeen had long been dogged by rumored Nazi ties. He regularly made speeches that inveighed against preparedness with virulently Anglophobic rhetoric. Pro-Nazi propagandist George Viereck regularly visited his office to check whether Lundeen had put those speeches into the Congressional Record.
This was not considered disqualifying. Back in Minnesota, there were a lot of voters - especially German-American voters - who saw the war as Britain trying to drag America into protecting her investments, as a conflict that the United States had no place in. The fact that the FBI was allegedly investigating Lundeen looked disqualifying to many easterners, but to many Minnesotans it looked like a witch-hunt.
Rumor has it that a plan to assassinate Lundeen by sabotaging a plane he was on was drawn up by J. Edgar Hoover himself. In the end, though, a more subtle approach was taken. Late one January night, two FBI agents came by Lundeen's Washington residence with a number of documents. The next day, Lundeen announced that he would not be running in the 1942 election.
The substitution of federal Representative Paul John Kvale for Lundeen was pulled off with little controversy. Kvale was a longtime Farmer-Labor Representative from a Farmer-Labor family, and had retained his base as a member of Agrarian Justice. But Stassen was generally popular, had crossover appeal, and largely kept quiet about foreign policy. After he handily won the nomination of the brand-new National Union Party of Minnesota, the choice - for many Minnesotans - was clear.
Stassen's elevation to the Senate had a number of results, both on the state and national levels. Just one of those effects was a power vacuum in the Governor's Mansion.
From the beginning there was one natural candidate - Hubert Humphrey. A teacher at the University of Minnesota, Humphrey had been elected to the position of Mayor of Minneapolis as a non-partisan candidate. His political affiliation was always fluid - a New Dealer who admired Huey Long, Humphrey had attended the inaugural Agrarian Justice convention in Des Moines. But Humphrey was also an internationalist, and politically quite resembled Governor Stassen, to whom he was considered something of a protégé. Beyond that, Humphrey was only 31 years old, and had only served in office for a year.
But he was an unparalleled public speaker and debater. In his year as mayor, he had been very successful - not only did he reform policing and fight prejudice against Black and Jewish Minneapolitans, he also built up a progressive movement that could continue his work after he was gone. He was popular among Stassenites and Agrarianists alike.
Humphrey was ambitious, and it didn't take much convincing to get him to run. The details were ironed out - an ad hoc apparatus called the North Star Party (not to be confused with the later North Star Party in Alaska) would nominate Humphrey for Governor and take no other action. Both the National Union Party and Agrarian Justice would endorse Humphrey.
The plan worked.
Four years later, hundreds of people gathered in Des Moines to proclaim that the American farmer deserved and needed a party that would fight for them. They came together to nominate George W. Norris, a Senator of unimpeachable record on that front, and saw him win seven states and nearly four million votes. They were no longer a fluke.
But across the nation, even as Agrarian Justice solidified its support in the Farm Belt, it retreated from the states outside it. In California, it folded into the Golden Dawn Party. In Texas, the Lone Star Party. The pattern repeated itself across the nation - whenever there was a larger Longite party in a state, it would absorb that state's branch of the American League.
In short, unless there were a lot of cross-nominations - not an impossible scenario, but an unlikely one - Agrarian Justice was simply no longer a factor on the Presidential level. Its only power would come in the Capitol and in the state houses of the Midwest.
And it took to that reality with aplomb.
---
But there was one thing that could have killed the Aggies before they began, and that was becoming a joke. Already, radio shows and political cartoons outside the Heartland mocked them - a 1937 Vanity Fair cover depicted Henry Wallace, who had left the Roosevelt White House to become a founding member of what would later be called Agrarian Justice, dancing with a cornstalk, while Fred Allen's radio show lampooned Midwesterners through the corn-obsessed Senator Magnus Anderson (played by the New York-raised Kenny Delmar). But even that paled in comparison to what might have happened had John R. Brinkley gotten into power.
John R. Brinkley was a quack. With no legitimate medical education and a degree from a diploma mill, he set up shop in Milford, Kansas after seeing a newspaper ad saying that the town was in need of medical professionals. To his credit, Brinkley was apparently quite effective at first, paying good wages and nursing victims of the Spanish flu back to health. But before not too long, he discovered that he could make even more money by marketing the transplantation of goat testicles into humans as a virtual panacea. He charged quite a bit of money for the procedure - $750 per operation, which was slightly less than the average cost of a new car. But while the best-off of his patients could at least report that they had not been harmed by the procedure, the worst-off... well, suffice it to say that by 1942 Brinkley had been sued more than a dozen times for wrongful death.
He had first turned to politics in 1930, shortly after his medical license had been revoked. Then, he had run for Governor of Kansas as an independent, coming close enough to victory that the elected governor himself stated that, had several thousand write-in votes which spelled Brinkley's name unusually been counted, he would have won. He had tried again two years later and won nearly a quarter of a million votes, more than 30% of the voting population.
Shortly thereafter, he moved to Texas, stung by the revocation of his medical license and in search of a new source of profit. He discovered that in the "border-blasting" radio, a way to flout American broadcast regulations by placing powerful transmitters just over the border. But eventually even that was shut down, and he found himself moving back north, (officially) broke and vengeful.
But he did have one recourse left to him. In an era of skepticism of the federal government, many in rural Kansas saw him as unfairly victimized, even a hero. And in 1942, he decided to take advantage of that. Nobody knows how he got his seed cash - certainly he had more of it than he could plausibly have raised himself, and the consensus is that he managed to somehow hide much of it from the IRS - but he spent quite a bit of it criss-crossing Kansas, campaigning for one last shot at the Governorship. But this time, he was running as a member of a larger party. This time, he was a member of Agrarian Justice.
Only two things stood in his way. One was William H. Burke, a farmer and former Democratic candidate who ran against Brinkley in the primary. The other was a young college football star and Army reservist who saw a Brinkley governorship as the greatest threat in the race to the people of Kansas, even as other members of Frank Carlson's campaign debated targeting Burke and the moderates who might swing away from him.
And when Brinkley lost in the primaries, and then Burke in the general, a number of people started paying close attention to a lively, intelligent, campaigner by the name of Bob Dole.
---
A few hundred miles north-by-northeast of Kansas, another state was at a political fork in the road.
Minnesota had thoroughly swallowed the Agrarian Justice Kool-Aid. Agrarian Justice - and its predecessor, the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party - had been powerful for more than two decades. In 1942, both of the state's Senators, more than half of its federal Representatives, and a supermajority in both houses of the Legislature were held by members of Agrarian Justice. Depending on how you measure it, Minnesota could be counted as the most regionalist state in America in 1942.
But there was one office that Agrarian Justice had never managed to hold in Minnesota. When Governor Floyd Olson stepped down to run on Huey Long's ticket, a 29-year-old up-and-coming District Attorney had shown up to take his place. And for six long years, a Republican - albeit a lowercase-p progressive - had held the Governorship of Minnesota. Harold Stassen's reign was predicated on the fact that his government fit more-or-less right into the Agrarian Justice mainstream: supporting farmers, unions, and farmers' unions; overhauling the government to increase transparency and decrease corruption; and backing and building upon Roosevelt's New Deal programs at a time when even Roosevelt seemed to be backing away from them. Where Stassen and Agrarian Justice disagreed - most notably, on foreign policy, where Stassen was a committed internationalist and Agrarian Justice supported isolationism - Stassen kept quiet about it, and the Governor of Minnesota didn't have much say on foreign policy anyway.
Meanwhile, Senator Ernest Lundeen was having his own issues. A staunch isolationist, Lundeen had long been dogged by rumored Nazi ties. He regularly made speeches that inveighed against preparedness with virulently Anglophobic rhetoric. Pro-Nazi propagandist George Viereck regularly visited his office to check whether Lundeen had put those speeches into the Congressional Record.
This was not considered disqualifying. Back in Minnesota, there were a lot of voters - especially German-American voters - who saw the war as Britain trying to drag America into protecting her investments, as a conflict that the United States had no place in. The fact that the FBI was allegedly investigating Lundeen looked disqualifying to many easterners, but to many Minnesotans it looked like a witch-hunt.
Rumor has it that a plan to assassinate Lundeen by sabotaging a plane he was on was drawn up by J. Edgar Hoover himself. In the end, though, a more subtle approach was taken. Late one January night, two FBI agents came by Lundeen's Washington residence with a number of documents. The next day, Lundeen announced that he would not be running in the 1942 election.
The substitution of federal Representative Paul John Kvale for Lundeen was pulled off with little controversy. Kvale was a longtime Farmer-Labor Representative from a Farmer-Labor family, and had retained his base as a member of Agrarian Justice. But Stassen was generally popular, had crossover appeal, and largely kept quiet about foreign policy. After he handily won the nomination of the brand-new National Union Party of Minnesota, the choice - for many Minnesotans - was clear.
Stassen's elevation to the Senate had a number of results, both on the state and national levels. Just one of those effects was a power vacuum in the Governor's Mansion.
From the beginning there was one natural candidate - Hubert Humphrey. A teacher at the University of Minnesota, Humphrey had been elected to the position of Mayor of Minneapolis as a non-partisan candidate. His political affiliation was always fluid - a New Dealer who admired Huey Long, Humphrey had attended the inaugural Agrarian Justice convention in Des Moines. But Humphrey was also an internationalist, and politically quite resembled Governor Stassen, to whom he was considered something of a protégé. Beyond that, Humphrey was only 31 years old, and had only served in office for a year.
But he was an unparalleled public speaker and debater. In his year as mayor, he had been very successful - not only did he reform policing and fight prejudice against Black and Jewish Minneapolitans, he also built up a progressive movement that could continue his work after he was gone. He was popular among Stassenites and Agrarianists alike.
Humphrey was ambitious, and it didn't take much convincing to get him to run. The details were ironed out - an ad hoc apparatus called the North Star Party (not to be confused with the later North Star Party in Alaska) would nominate Humphrey for Governor and take no other action. Both the National Union Party and Agrarian Justice would endorse Humphrey.
The plan worked.
