The Minnesota Farmerâ€"Labor Party (FL) was a left-wing American political party in Minnesota between 1918 and 1944. Largely dominating Minnesota politics during the Great Depression, it was one of the most successful statewide third party movements in United States history and the longest-lasting affiliate of the national Farmerâ€"Labor movement. At its height in the 1920s and 1930s, party members included three Minnesota Governors, four United States Senators, eight United States Representatives and a majority in the Minnesota legislature.
In 1944, Hubert H. Humphrey and Elmer Benson worked to merge the party with the state's Democratic Party, forming the contemporary Minnesota Democraticâ€"Farmerâ€"Labor Party.
Background
The Minnesota Farmerâ€"Labor Party emerged from the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota and the Union Labor Party in Duluth, Minnesota, on a platform of farmer and labor union protection, government ownership of certain industries, and social security laws. One of the primary obstacles of the party, besides constant vilification on the pages of local and state newspapers, was the difficulty of uniting the party's divergent base and maintaining political union between rural farmers and urban laborers who often had little in common other than the populist perception that they were an oppressed class of hardworking producers exploited by a small elite. According to political scientist George Mayer:
- "The farmer approached problems as a proprietor or petty capitalist. Relief to him meant a mitigation of conditions that interfered with successful farming. It involved such things as tax reduction, easier access to credit, and a floor under farm prices. His individualist psychology did not create scruples against government aid, but he welcomed it only as long as it improved agricultural conditions. When official paternalism took the form of public works or the dole, he openly opposed it because assistance on such terms forced him to abandon his chosen profession, to submerge his individuality in the labor crew, and to suffer the humiliation of the bread line. Besides, a public works program required increased revenue, and since the state relied heavily on the property tax, the cost of the program seemed likely to fall primarily on him.
- At the opposite end of the seesaw sat the city worker, who sought relief from the hunger, exposure, and disease that followed the wake of unemployment. Dependent on an impersonal industrial machine, he had sloughed off the frontier tradition of individualism for the more serviceable doctrine of cooperation through trade unionism. Unlike the depressed farmer, the unemployed worker often had no property or economic stake to protect. He was largely immune to taxation and had nothing to lose by backing proposals to dilute property rights or redistribute the wealth. Driven by the primitive instinct to survive, the worker demanded financial relief measures from the state."
The Minnesota Democratic Party, led by Hubert Humphrey, was able to merge the Farmerâ€"Labor party with the Minnesota Democratic Party on April 15, 1944. Since 1944, the two parties together make up the Minnesota Democraticâ€"Farmerâ€"Labor Party.
- Governors of Minnesota who were Farmerâ€"Labor
- Floyd B. Olson (1931â€"1936)
- Hjalmar Petersen (1936â€"1937)
- Elmer Austin Benson (1937â€"1939)
- United States Senators from Minnesota who were Farmerâ€"Labor
- Henrik Shipstead (1923â€"1941); later became a Republican
- Magnus Johnson (1923â€"1925)
- Elmer Austin Benson (1935â€"1937)
- Ernest Lundeen (1937â€"1940)
- United States Representatives from Minnesota who were Farmerâ€"Labor
- William Leighton Carss (1919â€"1921, 1925â€"1929)
- Ole J. Kvale (1923â€"1929)
- Knud Wefald (1923â€"1927)
- Paul John Kvale (1929â€"1939)
- Henry M. Arens (1933â€"1935)
- Magnus Johnson (1933â€"1935)
- Ernest Lundeen (1933â€"1937); had previously served as a Republican Representative (1915â€"1917), also served in the Senate
- Francis Shoemaker (1933â€"1935)
- John T. Bernard (1937-1939)
References
Further reading
- Benson, Elmer A. "Politics in My Lifetime." Minnesota History 47 (1980): 154-60. online
- Garlid, George W. "The Antiwar Dilemma of the Farmer-Labor Party." Minnesota History (1967): 365-374. in JSTOR
- Gieske, Millard L. Minnesota Farmer-Laborism: The Third-Party Alternative (1979) 389pp
- Haynes, John Earl. Dubious alliance: the making of Minnesota's DFL Party (U of Minnesota Press, 1984)
- Haynes, John Earl. "Farm Coops and the Election of Hubert Humphrey to the Senate." Agricultural History (1983): 201-211. in JSTOR
- Haynes, John Earl. "The new history of the communist party in state politics: The implications for mainstream political history." Labor History (1986) 27#4 pp: 549-563.
- Hyman, Colette A. "Culture as Strategy: Popular Front Politics and the Minneapolis Theatre Union, 1935-39." Minnesota History (1991): 294-306. in JSTOR
- Lovin, Hugh T. "The Fall of Farmer-Labor Parties, 1936-1938." Pacific Northwest Quarterly (1971): 16-26. in JSTOR
- McCoy, Donald R. Angry voices: Left-of-center politics in the New Deal era (1958; reprint 2012)
- Mayer, George H. The Political Career of Floyd B. Olson (1987)
- Mitau, G. Theodore. "The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Schism of 1948." Minnesota History (1955): 187-194. in JSTOR
- Sofchalk, Donald G. "Union and Ethnic Group Influence in the 1938 Election on the Minnesota Iron Ranges." Journal of the West (2003) 42#3 pp: 66-74.
External links
- Article on the Minnesota Farmerâ€"Labor party from The Progressive Populist
- Minnesota Farmerâ€"Labor
- Farmerâ€"Labor information page
- The Farmer Labor Party 1918â€"1924 Organizational history of attempts to form a national Farmerâ€"Labor Party. Marxist Internet Archive. Retrieved May 26, 2006.
- TOWARD THE COOPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH: AN INTRODUCTORY HISTORY OF THE FARMERâ€"LABOR MOVEMENT IN MINNESOTA (1917â€"1948). 232 page online copy of Thomas Gerald O'Connell's 1979 Phd thesis from The Union Institute.
- Luoma, Everett E.: The Farmer Takes A Holiday. Exposition Press, 1967.
