The Accidental Senator
The Farmer-Labor battle over who would succeed the larger-than-life Floyd B. Olson (NwCL ‘15) as governor of Minnesota was contentious. As governor, Olson had worked his way through several major labor battles, from a trucker’s strike in 1934 to a demonstration by farmers who brought their starving cattle to the Capitol lawn to demand feed appropriations. But, his biographer suggests, he was weary of the project of keeping the Farmer-Labor Party together: the AFL was battling militant local unions, communists in the partner were alternately fighting and collaborating with more traditionalist trade union leaders, and rural activists tangled with Olson appointees and political pros over patronage.
Because Governor Olson was expected to run against then Senator and Republican Thomas Schall (SPCL ‘04) in 1936, Farmer-Labor talk turned to the question of his successor. While the Lieutenant Governor Hjalmar Peterson was considered an early favorite, his barely disguised political ambition, independence from party traditionalists, and his apparent distaste of the urban radicals who led the labor side of the Farmer-Labor coalition eventually ruled him out. Some professional party insiders then turned to Commissioner of Banks Elmer Benson as Olson’s likely replacement for Governor. While party loyalists worked on talking up this obscure, mild-mannered but conscientious bank administrator into a potential candidate for governor, Olson played coy about whether he would support Benson to succeed him as governor.
Then, the unthinkable happened. Senator Schall, who was legally blind, was run over by an automobile while crossing the street in Washington, D.C. on December 22, 1935. Although Olson had coveted the seat, he issued an immediate statement that he was not going to appoint himself, creating a frenzy among the various camps of the Farmer-Labor Party about who would be appointed. Olson apparently had misgivings about appointing Benson, a favorite of the traditionalist faction of the Farmer-Labor Party, but a candidate with limited political experience. However, the pro-Benson forces tried to pressure the Governor by putting out an issue of the Farmer-Labor newspaper, the Minnesota Leader, the night before the planned announcement, declaring that Benson was Olson’s choice.
Although Olson had invited his former secretary, Judge Vince Day, to his office to be told he had the seat (much to his reluctance), Olson’s secretary Herman Aufderheide was confronted in the Governor’s office by newsmen incensed that the Minnesota Leader had seemingly been given a “scoop” on the appointment of Benson. Calling the ringleaders of the Benson story to his office, Olson finally capitulated to appointing Benson to avoid an interparty rupture.
As Benson told the story, he had read rumors of others Olson was considering for appointment, including State Senator Victor Lawson, who had opposed a Farmer-Labor merger with the Democratic Party for fear that the party would be “swallowed up” by the Democrats. Yet, Benson first learned of his appointment when he was called in by one of Olson’s allies the day of the announcement. Benson relates that when he got the call to come, his mother told him not to accept the appointment, because if he did, “they’re going to say some awful things about you.”
About five minutes after Benson had seen the Minnesota Leader story, Olson called him for the first time about the appointment and simply said “You better come over here. I think the newspapers want to take some pictures.” And with this request, Elmer Benson learned that he had been appointed to the United States Senate to fill Senator Schall’s seat.
A Radical at the Capital
Benson was born on April 2, 1895, to Tom Benson, an early supporter of the progressive-radical Farmer-Labor Party and his wife Dora, who was also known as a freethinker and granddaughter of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He served from 1918-1919 as a private in the Army and graduated from St. Paul College of Law in 1918. Benson then returned to Appleton, Minnesota, in 1922 to serve as a cashier in a local bank and a volunteer with the Swift County Farmer-Labor organization. Due to his party work in Swift County, Benson was appointed Commissioner of Securities in 1932, and in 1933, he was appointed Commissioner of Banking, where he began reforms to lift burdens on rural bankers.
After completing Schall’s term in the Senate, Benson returned to run for Governor to succeed Olson, who had died of pancreatic cancer on August 22, 1936. Benson was elected in a landslide over Republican Martin Nelson, his roommate at St. Paul College of Law, in November 1936. His victory rode a wave of Farmer-Labor success that installed six Farmer-Labor Congressmen, captured all of the state’s constitutional offices, and installed a majority in the Minnesota House.
Benson’s platform was one of the most radical legislative agendas in state history. It included increased support for the unemployed, farmers, public education and labor, funded by a progressive tax system. Benson also advocated for state ownership of railroads, mines, and some other businesses; a state civil service system; and income-tax financed state aid to public schools. As governor, he unsuccessfully pleaded with President Franklin Roosevelt to continue public works spending to ensure jobs for the unemployed in 1937, when Roosevelt was convinced by his advisers that the Depression was ending and that no more spending was needed. He also championed the idea that individual income should be limited by law through taxation of amounts over $25,000, a position which he claimed President Roosevelt had championed.
Benson’s most radical proposals were not enacted into law because the Republican-controlled Senate blocked efforts by the Farmer-Labor-controlled House, and, Benson recalls, the Archbishop threatened to organize the Catholic Church against his tax plan. Yet, during his brief two-year tenure, he eliminated state taxes on homesteads, organized county welfare boards, created a worker’s compensation insurance system, and formed a state geographic board.
Benson also employed his gubernatorial powers on behalf of labor in significant protests. In January 1937, he ordered that state officials provide food and shelter to timber workers on strike in northern Minnesota. When the Newspaper Guild went out on strike that year, he deployed the National Guard to protect the strikers. He also defended strikers against the notorious Pinkerton Agency, hired by employers through the country to infiltrate unions and break strikes, by revoking Pinkerton’s business license; and he ordered Albert Lea’s sheriff to release strikers from jail before himself taking charge of labor-management talks.
Accused by Republicans of encouraging intimidation by protest groups, and disparaged for his support of the emerging CIO labor organization and communist participation in the Farmer-Labor Party, Benson was challenged in the primary by Hjalmar Peterson, Olson’s rejected heir-apparent who had filled out Olson’s governorship upon his death.
Though he defeated Peterson in the primary, Benson’s political fortunes were weakened by the challenge, and upstart Republican Harold Stassen, then Dakota County Attorney, defeated him for the Governorship on November 8, 1938. That campaign, which re-established the Republican Party as dominant in Minnesota, was one of the ugliest in Minnesota history, marked by charges that Benson’s government was corrupt and that he was a Communist sympathizer under the influence of Jews.
Funded by the presidents of Hormel, General Mills, and other prominent Minnesota businessmen, Republican newspaper editor Edward Chase published a pamphlet distorting the features of four Jewish Benson aides alleged to be Communists, and charged Benson’s allies with orchestrating the visit of “anti-Christian” poet Langston Hughes to the University. Chase also kept in touch with the University’s Dean of Student Affairs Edward E. Nicholson, who reported to him on “Jewish communists” on campus. Benson could not escape red-baiting even from the Stassen campaign, and his angry outburst at a Lutheran pastor who asked him if he was a Communist did not help his cause. He went down to a stunning loss to Stassen, the youngest person ever elected Governor.
Life as the Party Elder
Following the defeat of the Farmer-Labor Party in 1938, Benson and other Farmer-Labor leaders began with greater urgency to consider an alliance with the Democratic Party. Benson unsuccessfully ran for Senate in 1940 against Senator Henrik Shipstead who had left the Farmer-Labor Party after his election to join the Republicans, and 1942, in a four-candidate race, he was defeated by Republican Joseph H. Ball.
In April, 1944, Benson led the party into a merger with the smaller Democratic Party whose best-known leader was Minneapolis Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey, who ultimately became the long-time United States Senator from Minnesota, Vice President (1965-69) and Democratic candidate for president in 1968. However, conflicts between the Farmer-Labor progressives and the Democratic liberals continued, with the Farmer-Labor Party led by Benson assuming control of the DFL’s main committee in 1946, only to be displaced by Humphrey’s Democratic allies in 1948.
Humphrey’s allies at the time included young Arthur Naftalin (the first Jewish mayor of Minneapolis, from 1961-69), Orville Freeman (Governor from 1955-61, and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, 1961-69) and Walter Mondale (U.S. Senator 1964-76, Vice President 1977-81, and unsuccessful presidential candidate in 1984). Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, then a professor at the University of St. Thomas, and later a presidential candidate in 1968, was among the Democrats joining in the fray on the Humphrey side, though Benson later admired him for his anti-Vietnam War stance. Benson and many of his followers left the DFL after that.
In the years preceding World War II, Benson was tagged an isolationist for continual warnings about war, a position Benson had shared with Governor Olson. Benson took pains to distinguish his stance on entering World War II from what he termed “pro-Hitler isolationists,” some of whom he admitted were members of the DFL Party. He described himself as an internationalist, who viewed revolutions against reactionary regimes as necessary reforms, and later in his life, he excoriated politicians that “played ball” with multinational corporations in propping up “reactionary regimes” leading to unnecessary wars in Korea and Vietnam, a stance described by some as “cold-war liberalism” but by Benson as “fascist.”
Benson served as the chairman of the National Citizens Political Action Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) from 1944-1946. He aligned himself with the Progressive Party in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and was national chairman of its effort to help elect former Vice President Henry Wallace who ran on the Progressive Party’s ticket for president against Harry S. Truman in 1948. In that campaign, Wallace advocated more friendly policies toward the Soviet Union, more support for the United Nations, and arms control. Benson continued to speak out against the “military-industrial complex” late in life.
Benson never got over the rift in the DFL Party. He was dismissive throughout his life of the modern leaders of the DFL Party, rejecting popular views that Humphrey was responsible for the founding the DFL. Benson claimed that President Roosevelt had first approached him about the idea of a merger between the Farmer-Labor and the Democratic Parties. He suggested that Orville Freeman was a fascist and that Humphrey was a political chameleon, playing into corporate conservative voices in the state while at the same time accepting support from communists in the Farmer-Labor Party and left-wing unions to secure his election as mayor in 1945.
Humphrey, for his part, characterized the Farmer-Labor Party’s leadership at the time of the merger as not the “traditional agricultural populists” but as the “left-wing, more urban Marxists” that had “parasitically attached” themselves to the populist tradition. His political autobiography mentions Benson only twice, once as the head of the “left-wing Farmer-Laborites” who denounced Humphrey’s Democratic faction as fascist, and a leader who “lacked Olson’s personal affability and political prowess” who was unable to prevent the conflict between “the doctrinaire Marxists and the reform-minded Progressives.”
Personal life
Elmer Benson largely retired from public life in the early 1950s, but he lived on in Appleton until his death in 1985. He was married to Frances Miller in 1922 and they had two children.
Even toward the end of his life, Benson remained true to his views. In 1980, he wrote:
The challenge before us is to include again a radical presence within our political processes and debates, with sharper attention to solutions for major crises around such goals as tax equality, halting inflation, stabilizing our farm economy, and achieving full employment. We must go beyond the old New Deal in our reform imagination. … Failure to come to grips with this problem is apt to mean a continuation, by default, of the center/far right coalition, always with the danger of overt fascism emerging, in the name of “liberalism,” out of some serious crisis.
References
*The quotations in this biography are taken from the references below.
Elmer Benson, Politics in My Lifetime, Minnesota History 154 (Winter 1980)
Gov. Elmer Austin Benson, National Governors Association.
Tom O’Connell, Benson, Elmer (1895-1985), MNOPEDIA.
Zac Farber, Politics of the Past: Anti-Semitic Red-Baiting Swayed ’38 Governor’s Race, Minnesota Lawyer, Sept. 22, 2016.
Hubert H. Humphrey, The Education of a Public Man: My Life and Politics (1991)
George M. Mayer, The Political Career of Floyd B. Olson (1951)
Minnesota Historical Society, Oral History Interview with Elmer Benson (March 28, 1969)
100 Who Made a Difference (William Mitchell College of Law, 2001)