Chapter 19
A SLOW-MOVING, hard-thinking moose of a man named Stassen (which in Minnesota is pronounced Stossen), is one of the most interesting and valuable personalities in the United States. Late in 1945 Captain Harold Edward Stassen, three times governor of Minnesota and a liberal Republican white hope for 1948, left the Navy after more than two years’ hard service. So, like millions of other young Americans, he returned to the national scene unemployed in a manner of speaking, with the tremendous experience of the war behind him, and the uncharted world of a turbulent peace ahead. What next for Stassen? There are many people who would like to know the answer.
Stassen is six feet three and weighs 220 pounds without a cubic inch of fat. He has a big skull with sparse, sandy hair. His step is quiet; he pauses a long time between questions, so that you can fairly listen to the muscles in his big head working; his large clear eyes stare straight at you, with the look of a man very sure of himself, but not quite so sure of others. If you think of him as a kind of King of the Woods, but as stalking instead of being stalked, the analogy is not so far-fetched, because he is one of the best rifle shots alive. At the University of Minnesota he made a target record that has never been excelled.1
He believes in three things: (1) himself; (2) world peace; and (3) the people—if you give them an even break. What is more, he probably believes in these things in this order.
The Minnesota moose, like most men who appear simple, is far from being so; “simple” men are seldom simple. He can be ruthless in political dealings—if ruthlessness is necessary in a fight on principle—and yet he is one of the kindest men alive. He operates a good deal on hunch; yet he is the least impulsive human being anybody ever met. He is somber, with a lot of Scandinavian mysticism; but he can laugh with the best, and he was easily the most popular American at the San Francisco Conference, where his record was outstanding. The word went around that while a delegate Stassen was “running for president in 1948”; but this didn’t detract from the quality of his performance.
The extreme right, even in his native Minnesota, distrusts and dislikes him; so does the extreme left. He is above all a reasonable man of the middle. But don’t think this means he is not capable of vigorous leadership. He came out for an international organization with real teeth before Roosevelt did; he is one of the very few politicians to date who has had the guts, and real faith in America, to suggest that we might give up some of our own precious national sovereignty. And this from a Minnesota Republican—the representative of a state where not to be an isolationist had long been considered the kiss of death.
Stassen is not, oddly enough, a phenomenal vote getter in the sense that, say, Saltonstall in Massachusetts is a great personal vote getter—for instance a shift of 4 per cent in the last two Minnesota elections would have beaten him—but he certainly knows how to exert power, once he has it. This faculty is closely associated with three of his prime qualities, candor, courage, and a great gift for taking the public at large into his confidence.
Consider for instance the Ball episode in 1940. Senator Ernest Lundeen2 was killed in an airplane accident, and Stassen, as governor, appointed his friend Joseph H. Ball, a St. Paul newspaperman who had never held public office and had no party standing or support, to be his successor. People thought that Ball had been appointed purely as a stopgap, and that the governor himself would run to succeed him in 1942 when the senate term expired; in other words that the two had made a deal. Besides, they said, Ball couldn’t win; the Old Guard didn’t like him and he was virtually unknown to the state at large. But Stassen wanted him to be a senator; he liked his views and his record and he thought that it was time that Ball, as a useful citizen, should not only write but “get in and pitch.” So what did Stassen do? To forestall opposition to Ball, he calmly announced—two years in advance!—that not only was he appointing him, but that he would support him for re-election. He said in effect, “Not only are you going to accept this man; I’m sticking with him and so will you.” And two years later Ball won.
To tell another story I must dive briefly into the confused inner by-ways of Minnesota politics. But it is perhaps worth telling because it illustrates in one episode Stassen’s forthrightness, his political ruthlessness, and his conscientious sense of public duty.
In early 1942, almost a year ahead of time, Stassen told the people that he would definitely run for governor again; simultaneously he added that if elected he would only serve four months of the two-year term! As soon as the legislature had completed its session, he declared, he would resign and seek active service in the Navy. “This is a young man’s war, and I want to help fight it,” he said. That Stassen should win an election in which he publicly warned the electorate in advance that he would serve only four months out of twenty-four is a startling enough example of his popularity. And not only did he win himself, but it was a triple victory, because he pulled Joe Ball in as senator and also, as lieutenant governor, his friend Edward J. Thye.
Now in regard to Thye more should be told. Of course since Stassen was going to serve only a few months, the real election issue was the choice of lieutenant governor, who would automatically succeed him. And the lieutenant governor at that time was a man named C. Elmer Anderson, whom Stassen did not want as his successor. Anderson was a worthy enough small businessman in Brainerd, an upstate town, but little else. The story was that he had been elected in the first place for one reason only, that the Scandinavian vote is large and his name was Anderson. Also he was a sympathizer of the Old Guard, according to the Stassenites. In any case Stassen decided to get rid of him, and he picked Thye, a sturdy farmer but an unknown quantity politically, to run against him. This meant in turn that the Stassen crowd had to campaign against Anderson, their own lieutenant governor. Anguished howls from the betrayed Anderson camp reverberated through the state. But Stassen’s motive was of the best, to leave Minnesota in good hands. Also, of course, he was serving to perpetuate his own machine.3
Thye, to bring this story ahead, came into national prominence in 1946 when, as Stassen’s candidate, he beat Henrik Shipstead, one of the most famous of the old isolationists, in the primary race for the Senate, and proceeded to election in November. He will be a moderate liberal in the Senate’s new Republican majority.
One key to Stassen’s character is certainly his seriousness. This young giant—he is only forty today—is no wisecracker. I have met him only twice, but each time these qualities—earnestness, seriousness—were the first things I felt. The basis of much of his success is a belief that people, the great mass and bulk of people, can be convinced on a serious issue. What a real leader should do, he thinks, is above all to give the people a chance to inform themselves; his first duty is to interpret issues to the people, and give them the opportunity to take sides, even if he himself is beaten; the leader, he feels, should be one who concentrates in himself the deep inner yearnings of the people, their own unexpressed impulses and desires. Out of this comes what is probably his greatest asset: that his actions follow resolutely his own reigning body of conviction.
Now I shall attempt briefly to tell the story of Harold Stassen, but first there must be a line or two on his native Minnesota.
Background on the North Star State
Minnesota is a state spectacularly varied, proud, handsome, and progressive. The French explorers came in first, and then both French and English fur traders; the British flag flew over some trading posts until 1815, as if two wars had not been fought. It had a lumber era and a railroad era, and its economy today is based on grain, milling, dairy farms, and the largest deposits of iron ore on earth—it is Minnesota which is the basic source of wealth for such relatively distant phenomena as Big Steel. There are at least six different Minnesotas geographically, and its racial stock is a mixture of Yankee, Irish, Germans in great number, Poles and Czechs, Italians, and above all Scandinavians—Swedes and Norwegians in particular. Minnesota is also the Lutheran state par excellence. It is a state pulled toward East and West both, and one always eager to turn the world upside down; a state with a highly virile liberal tradition, where 37 per cent of the voters are classed as “independent,” and where both the steelmakers and farmers’ co-operatives wield great power; and a state where the two chief cities, Minneapolis (milling, Scandinavian, Republican by and large) and St. Paul (railroads, Catholic Irish, Democratic by and large) are famous rivals.
The natural result of all this is to make Minnesota extremely volatile politically. For instance Elmer A. Benson was elected Farmer-Labor governor in 1936 by roughly 250,000 votes; two years later, Stassen beat him by an almost identical majority. Another point of importance is the state’s unique electoral system. Anybody can enter a Minnestoa primary by paying a small fee, and it is the only state in the union, except Nebraska, where the legislature is elected on a non-party basis. Running for the legislature in Minnesota (and also for municipal and judicial offices) you do not file as a Democrat or Republican or Farmer-Laborite; the primaries are open and these distinctions do not exist. (But candidates for governor and federal offices do wear a party label and do run on party tickets.)
The state was overwhelmingly Republican till the early 1930’s; then came Roosevelt who carried it all the four times he ran. On a state level the Farmer-Labor party, an offshoot of the Non-Partisan League in North Dakota, had begun to climb rapidly, following the agrarian miseries of the depression; its leader was a remarkable man, Floyd Olson, who was elected governor three times, serving from 1930 to 1936. Olson, an able radical, died of cancer during his third term; his successor was his first disciple, Elmer Benson. It is a shame to have to foreshorten so drastically one of the most fascinating episodes in recent American history. Benson was a kind of Henry Wallace to Olson’s FDR. Olson had got himself surrounded by a riffraff of Communists, Trotskyists, labor crooks and other undesirables. But, a man with charm, fists, and force, he could boss them. Benson, one of the most high-minded men alive, was not quite strong enough to do so.4 His record was good enough, but the Farmer Labor party itself began to disintegrate. Also Benson lost control of labor in the towns. There came an angry, vicious upsurge of strikes, vandalism, and gang assassination. An AF of L local, the celebrated Teamsters 544, ran wild, and farmers couldn’t get their produce in. The fabric of government seemed almost at the point of being ripped apart.
It was at this juncture that Stassen—only thirty—entered the big pit for the first time, as a clean-up candidate for governor.
Early Life and Works
Harold E. Stassen was born in West St. Paul on April 13, 1907. His father was a German of Czech descent (the grandfather came to the United States from Austria in 1871); his mother, by name Mueller, was born in Germany but had some Norwegian blood. For Stassen’s future career, this was a perfect political and biological combination, since it meant both German and Norwegian votes.
The father, William Stassen, is still alive. He is a truck farmer living near West St. Paul, who still wears overalls when he comes into town. He had three other sons besides Harold, all of whom live today in the St. Paul area. One, William, is a metal worker; another, Arthur, drives a milk wagon; the third, Elmer, is a grocer. Nothing aristocratic about the Stassens! These are good men close to the earth, who work with their hands. In Stassen’s first campaign literature a particular point was made that two of the brothers were members of local AF of L unions, William in the Sheet Metal Workers Local 76, Arthur in the Milk Drivers 546.
Harold went to the public schools, then worked his way through the University of Minnesota, emerging after six years with a law degree. He was an exceptionally brilliant and pertinacious student, and his industry was colossal. He never joined a fraternity, and was never a “big man” on the campus in the undergraduate sense of the term. He had to earn a living, and the tough Czech-Norwegian-German strain began to show. He worked as a Pullman conductor, as a laborer in a bakery, as a pigeon salesman. Also, his ambition was considerable from the beginning. Friends say that while still an undergraduate he told them that he intended to be governor of Minnesota before he was thirty-five. He made it at thirty-one. (But while still in college he didn’t know whether he would be Republican or Farmer-Labor.)
He set up law practice in 1929, entered politics at once, and in 1930 was elected county attorney for Dakota County. His partner, Elmer J. Ryan, an Irish Catholic, is still, incidentally, his closest friend—people who dislike him say that Ryan is his only friend. Because, as we shall see, this Stassen is a lone wolf, who chooses among men warily. Ryan got so close to him by campaigning for him when he had a short siege of tuberculosis; Stassen still has one damaged lung.
Dakota County is a tough and rowdy spot; it includes South St. Paul and the stockyards and was a wide-open haven of gangsters, but this didn’t faze Harold Stassen, as a half-forgotten episode reveals; when I asked him to name some of the turning points of his career, he mentioned this first of all. The milk farmers in the county were up in arms, since milk prices had collapsed; highways were blockaded, and farm trucks were waylaid and the milk spilled out. A meeting was held, and an outside agitator urged further violence. Someone said, “But what about the county attorney?” The answer came, “Lynch him!” But it happened that the county attorney, young Mr. Stassen, was sitting quietly in a back row; he had entered the meeting place unnoticed, wanting to see what went on. It was the most difficult decision of his life to get up, announce himself, walk to the platform, and say that if anybody wanted to lynch the county attorney, he was right there in the room. Stassen then placated the gathering. Moreover he promised that if they would be temperate a bit longer, he would represent them in litigation without fee. Eventually he got an agreement in eleven counties and raised the price of milk by 25 per cent.
But already he was looking outward. For instance he began early in the 30’s to cultivate a group of country editors and the-county weeklies are very influential in Minnesota. They reach grass-roots via the most personal kind of old-style journalism. By ones, twos, or threes, Stassen would invite such editors to “visit” with him. He was looking outward in other directions too. It is surely an indication of his character that at twenty-six he fought—and won—a hard case before the Supreme Court in Washington.
Following the Republican debacle of 1932 came the Republican debacle of 1936. All seemed lost to the party in Minnesota, as Elmer Benson swept the state for a fourth consecutive Farmer-Labor victory. A Republican acquaintance of Stassen’s exclaimed sourly, “Let’s quit, and give Minnesota back to the Indians.” Stassen said, “We can’t quit.” Someone plaintively put in,
“But we haven’t got a candidate—who can possibly beat Benson in 1938?” Stassen replied, “I’ll take the rap, if necessary.”
Almost at once he got to work, but very quietly. In August, 1937, he called on Roy E. Dunn, Republican national committeeman, a veteran political strategist, and one of the ablest men in Minnesota. He asked Dunn a million questions about politics on the gubernatorial level, but not by any gesture did he disclose that he had any serious aim for the job himself. He was too young. He was unknown outside Dakota County. No one would take him seriously. On Thanksgiving day he asked Dunn to dinner, announced calmly that he intended to run for governor, and asked him to help manage his campaign. It was as if an understudy at the opera should invite Melchior to coach him for the role of Tristan, while Melchior was still singing it.
This put Dunn in a quandary. He couldn’t take on Stassen’s campaign without giving up the national committee; also, he didn’t want to do anything against either of the two other Republican candidates, each of whom had strong party claims for support. One was Martin A. Nelson, who had been beaten by Olson in both 1934 and 1936 and who, having held the party together during the lean years, wanted his reward. Indeed, before Stassen had popped up, the organization had begged Nelson to run once more.
I asked Minnesota friends who finally did manage Stassen’s campaign. Reply: “Stassen.”
That 1938 campaign was one of the most blistering in local annals. As I write I have the literature from both sides before me. And it is worth describing briefly because this was Stassen’s first important run and it tells a good deal about him. That he wanted Dunn’s assistance is not uninteresting. He wanted advice from a professional. Yet he himself ran in the most nonprofessional manner possible. He was willing enough to accept assistance from the Old Guard—on his own terms, with no strings attached—but he knew that people were sick and tired of the Old Guard. They wanted new faces. And he made them want his own.
First came the primaries. The regular Republican organization did not support Stassen at first. The fat boys thought he was muddying the waters, splitting the vote. He paid no attention to them, campaigning all over the state in an ancient Ford until people began to wake up. Then came a crucial need for money. Stassen and his crowd were penniless. The big money of the millers and the steel men was wary. Nobody wanted to waste a campaign contribution on an untried outsider, a youngster of thirty. Yet everybody wanted unity and above all a winner. So the money waited. After a while Stassen was told bluntly that if he could hold out for three more weeks, funds might be forthcoming. In three weeks, the Old Guard thought, they would know how much of a chance he had. He replied, “I’ll eat hamburgers on a side road to economize.” The three weeks passed, with Stassen clearly out in front, and substantial help was then forthcoming.
One eminent Old Guardist first became convinced that Stassen would win following an organization dinner at Sauk Centre for all the candidates. Stassen’s speech was superb; he ran away with the performance. Then photographers came with the coffee. Young Stassen couldn’t be found to be photographed. He was at the front door, shaking hands with the crowd outside. The next day, practically every citizen of Main Street boasted of having met him “personally.” This, one might add, is a technique that he still follows. Instantly after a speech he darts to the nearest door and greets the folks who weren’t able to get inside.
Stassen got a Buick, with dictaphone, to help in the remainder of the campaign. The story is that when it was over a spot on the front seat was worn off where, dictating in back, he would stretch a long leg forward, rubbing the upholstery.
Now for another item. The Farmer-Labor party was at this time seriously split. On his side of the primary, Benson had opposition too, in the person of a remarkable creature named Hjalmar Petersen of Askov, the rutabaga center of the world. An old-style isolationist, Petersen led one wing of the Farmer-Laborites. Thousands of Republicans switched party and went into the Benson-Petersen primary instead of their own—thinking that the really important thing was to beat Benson, whereupon any Republican could win the subsequent election.
Stassen gained as a result, since most of the deserters were anti-Stassenites. Even Republican money went into the Farmer-Labor primaries to beat Benson, who was thought of as anti-Christ at least. In a way Stassen won the primaries, and later the governorship, because a lot of Republicans voted Farmer-Labor !5
Stassen and Benson ran it off in a fierce, gouging campaign. Benson was beaten for several reasons that had little to do with Benson, mostly the gang warfare in Minneapolis. Also this was the year when progressives had a hard time everywhere; La Follette was beaten in Wisconsin and Frank Murphy lost in Michigan; there was a temporary national swing away from Roosevelt. Also Stassen’s campaign pledges were substantial, intelligent, and attractive. He promised (a) real jobs instead of the WPA, (b) reform of the civil service, (c) economy in administration, (d) labor peace. Besides, people liked him. This sandy hulk was something new.
The campaign was unpleasant in that some of his supporters—but never Stassen himself—went in for some Jew-baiting. Benson is about as Jewish as Greta Garbo, but he had several Jewish secretaries and friends, and these were unmercifully slashed at. One campaign song went as follows:
Hi ho, hi ho
We join the CIO
We pay our dues
To the goddam Jews
Ho hi, hi ho.
Then a big worthy in the Republican party, Ray P. Chase, who is still a conspicuous Minnesota officeholder, published a pamphlet under his own name—I am looking at a copy now—called Are They Communists or Catspaws? It was frankly and defiantly labeled “A Red-Baiting Article,” and it sought to tie Benson in with the Communists and other stuff and oddments. Stassen had no responsibility for this pamphlet—indeed he disavowed it late in the campaign—but to an extent he was its beneficiary.
Anyway he won, and won thumpingly. One of his first acts as governor was to appoint a Democrat as a private secretary, presumably to help keep Republican office seekers out! This man’s political courage and extreme independence are never to be ignored.
Progress toward the National Scene
So Harold Stassen became governor of the splendid state of Minnesota at the age of thirty-one. Then came the “ninety days.” The state never saw anything quite like them. He booted out the crooks, sent several Benson holdovers to jail for corruption, and saw a Labor Conciliation Act through the legislature. He reorganized the state government and created the job of state “business manager”—the first such job in America. Economy, a rational approach, moderation, security plus opportunity were his watchwords.
But it is time now to consider Stassen from a broader angle. He became a national figure almost overnight; a political child-in-arms, he somehow got himself into the federal scene. Partly this was because his local record was so good. But what else? How account for his amazingly quick and sweeping rise?
In 1939, during his first term, he was elected chairman of the Governors’ Conference, a considerable honor; the next year he brought the conference to Duluth, in his own state. He went east once or twice, and political writers sought him out as a kind of curio. They came to stare, and went away to admire. At a Gridiron Club dinner, the redoubtable Paul McNutt was the chief speaker on one side, Stassen on the other. And in a speech packed with humor (which is not usually pronounced in him) the Minnesotan all but obliterated McNutt.
In the summer of 1939, Roy Dunn, the national committeeman, got a long distance call from Henry P. Fletcher, counsel of the Republican National Committee. Fletcher spoke from the offices of his friend Sam Pryor, the Connecticut leader. “Can you come to New York?” Fletcher asked Dunn. “When?” Dunn replied. “As soon as you can,” said Fletcher. In New York Fletcher and Pryor told Dunn, “It’s time to talk about this man Stassen. What would you think of him as keynoter for the next [1940] convention? We want a young man and someone from the West. But is he a free lance, or is he bound to anybody?”
Dunn traveled back to St. Paul and sounded out Stassen, who was naturally pleased, and then wired New York, “Governor answered all questions satisfactorily.” So it came about that a man who was too young to run for president himself became keynoter at the Philadelphia convention that nominated Willkie. (He was at the time thirty-three and by constitutional limitation a president must be thirty-five.)
Then an astonishing thing happened. By inflexible tradition, the keynoter at a national convention is a kind of neutral, and in particular is supposed never to support anybody himself until balloting has begun. Meanwhile, however, Stassen and Willkie had become friends. The intermediary who first interested the governor in Willkie was the late columnist Raymond Clapper. Clapper drifted through Minnesota about six weeks before the convention and had a long talk with him. One of his friends asked him later what he had asked Stassen about. “I didn’t ask him a darned thing,” Ray replied. “I’m up to my neck for Willkie, and all I did was tell Stassen that Willkie ought to be the nominee.” Also John Cowles of the Minneapolis Star-Journal had a good deal to do with promoting Willkie sentiment.
On that vivid day in June, 1940, when Stassen made his keynote speech, the Minnesota delegation was split three ways: seventeen out of twenty-two for Vandenberg, the rest divided between Bob Taft and Dewey. Someone said, “Where does Stassen stand?” The answer came, “He has one foot in Taft’s camp, one in Dewey’s, and a third with Willkie.” The night before the balloting, the governor sat in informal conference with the four Minnesota newspapermen who had covered him from the beginning. The newspaper men split 2–2 for Willkie, but there was no hint from Stassen himself as to his preference, no indication of any kind. Then he spent some hours with Dunn. Though he said nothing specific, Dunn thought that he was going to come out for Dewey. But at 10:55 the next morning he told Dunn that he would support Willkie. Dunn was thunderstruck. If he had let Dunn know a little in advance, things might have gone more smoothly. But a meeting of the Minnesota delegation had been set for 11 A.M. which gave Dunn only five minutes to break the news and smooth things over. Stassen forthwith announced to the delegation that he would work for Willkie, and this caused literal pandemonium; one woman screamed, “You can’t do that!” and people practically pulled each other’s hair. Dunn asked, “Are you speaking only for yourself, or for the delegation?” “For myself,” Stassen replied. Then at noon—just one hour later—it was announced that he had become Willkie’s floor manager! This must have been known to Stassen; but he never told his own crowd about it. Finally at 4 P.M. he asked Dunn to swing the entire delegation to the Willkie candidacy.
A lone wolf? Yes. Ruthless? Yes. But—no one influenced Stassen in this course of action except Harold Stassen. Some Dewey people—and also some Minnesota politicians—have never forgiven him for what they call this doublecross.
There is a poignant footnote to this tale, in that Stassen and Willkie fell out later. Willkie stopped in Minneapolis on his round-the-world flight in 1942, and John Cowles arranged a dinner where they met, but both were somewhat cool; Cowles worked hard to get Willkie to write Stassen a nice letter, but he wouldn’t. Later Stassen reviewed Willkie’s book One World, criticizing it, and Wendell felt affronted. In 1944, though Stassen was out in the Pacific, his enthusiasts pushed him into the Wisconsin primaries as a presidential candidate, and the new lieutenant commander said that he would accept the nomination if he got it, which hurt Willkie badly. Willkie’s theory about this was that the Old Guard feared he might win in Wisconsin, and hence produced Stassen to draw off the liberal-internationalist vote, such as it was. Actually, Stassen outran Willkie in this race, and Willkie never quite forgave him.
Stassen went into the Navy, as we know, early in 1943; previously he had been a reserve officer. He waited till the Minnesota legislature adjourned its session; then he signed bills till midnight, resigned the next day at noon, and left the state house in uniform at 4 P.M. A remarkable item is that the Navy was able to accept him, since he had been tubercular. But Secretary Knox had wanted him acutely for a long time; the Navy badly needed first-class administrators. Stassen became flag secretary and assistant chief of staff to Admiral Halsey, and his record was distinguished, though he did not see much actual fighting. Halsey is reputed to have said at first that he didn’t want “any damn politicians” in his fleet; later, they became warm friends.
Personal Qualities of Stassen
His wife, whose maiden name was Esther Glewwe, was a childhood sweetheart. She is an unassuming woman of great sweetness of character, who has developed step by step with her husband; they have two children, Glen (aged nine) and Kathleen (three and a half), and live in a small house in South St. Paul financed in part by a modest FHA mortgage. Before that, the Stassens had lived in a five-room cottage. The plain people of Minnesota are a frugal lot, and the governor was criticized for “ostentation” when he moved; the new house was called “Stassen’s palace.” The charge is ridiculous. Nothing could be further from, his character than ostentation, and the house is the kind that anybody might buy whose salary was $8,500 a year, which is what he got as governor.
Stassen has no private means, and so far as one can tell he has utterly no interest in money for money’s sake. If he wanted to be rich he could quit politics tomorrow and easily earn a hundred thousand dollars a year at law.
He is a Baptist. He drinks little, and smokes not at all; he eats carefully, and likes a lot of milk. He can relax in a second, and sleep anywhere. He seldom goes to the theater or to the movies or to the great Minneapolis symphony. He reads a good deal, but mostly on strict vocational lines. One book—on some such topic as German war guilt, say—will send him to another. He writes every word of his speeches, which indeed have a highly individual style.
I asked several times in Minnesota who his best friend was, and the nonserious answer I got was “Stassen!” Probably those closest to him are Elmer Ryan, a long-time companion named Radebaugh, a dentist who was chairman of the Republican state committee during his administration, and—until recently at least—Joe Ball. But nobody gets too close. He has the greatest admiration for men like J. Russell Wiggins6 in St. Paul and Gideon Seymour in Minneapolis, two of the ablest newspapermen in the country, but he holds everybody off to some extent. “Just when you think you’re really close to Harold,” one friend told me, “he trips you up.” The retreat into sudden enigmatic coldness is never explained. Then two weeks later he will be warm again.
His chief defect, most of his associates think, is his intense ambition, which serves to make him seem too calculating. Next to this is the seeming coldness. He is not in the least shy, but he is reserved, and some old acquaintances say that he lacks “human” spark.
Like practically all good politicians he is a superlative brain picker. What he likes to listen to—above all—are facts. He seldom talks much in a group; but he is a formidably acute and spacious synthesizer. He drove some of his own experts mildly crazy at San Francisco; they would pass him notes suggesting courses of action; he would read them carefully but never make any sign of reply at all.
One of his positive qualities is of course courage. Another is his stubborn determination, his fixity. He has a divine capacity never to be bored by what he is doing. Other people, fatigued at grappling with an issue, may drop by the wayside; he holds on to the finish. He is full of Teutonic thoroughness. And he is very seldom diverted by side issues. Call him a Fascist, call him a Communist—he will pay absolutely no attention, but continue to plug steadily down the middle. Nor will he go down the line for anybody, except out of deep conviction. It is impossible for him to pretend.
He thinks more slowly than any other man I have ever met in public life. I asked him a question in San Francisco; he swung one big leg over the other, cupped his chin in a fist, and stared levelly out of the window for what must have been sixty seconds before uttering a word. But when he finally does answer, it’s usually something worth waiting for.
Then there are other qualities, for instance his spectacularly good memory. In the summer of 1945, he reported to the Governors’ Conference at Mackinac on the San Francisco charter. He spoke for an hour and a half, without notes. Two governors told me later quite independently, that this was the finest intellectual performance they had ever heard.
Stassen is an excellent executive and administrator; once he assigns duties, he seldom interferes. He is methodical in the extreme; for instance, in the old days, his campaign speeches lasted twenty minutes each, almost to the second. He knows politics inside out, and he is that rarest of things, a spontaneous and natural leader; this is one reason why the die-hards are always fearful of what apple carts he may upset. And, above all, he has the ability to visualize the moods and needs of the average citizen. He has faith in the people and their good will, plus frankness in telling them—even if he doesn’t tell his intimate advisers—what he’s going to do.
Another of Stassen’s traits is self-confidence; another is his consistency (few people have ever seen him out of character); another is his directness, his rapidity of pace. Consider the following, which is from the first paragraph of the first big speech he ever made on international affairs, in Washington in 1943:
In response to your invitation, I bring you tonight a message from the Middle West. It is this … The overwhelming majority of the people of the Midwest know that the walls of isolation are gone forever.
Stassen has made enemies on both sides in Minneapolis, if only because he is a liberal. Old Guard Republicans think of him as a kind of half-adopted pinko who has forced his way into the house, who has made the party in Minnesota a springboard for his presidential aspirations. Left wingers on their side are apt to dig up the past and say that he once campaigned in Nebraska against George Norris, and never once had a word to say for Loyalist Spain, whereas Benson stuck his neck out on Spain and took a severe beating for so doing. They assert that his tax program has favored the steel company, that Minnesota is one of the few states with no enabling act to take advantage of federal housing, and that his famous labor law is antilabor. Finally, they point to the way he entered the Minnesota scene, taking advantage of a labor crisis to “ride roughshod over opposition”; they hint ominously that this is a “Fascist” pattern, that he could seek to become a dictator.
The main provision of the labor law is to provide a mandatory ten-day cooling-off period before any strike may be declared—a thirty-day period if the governor decides that the industry involved is “vital to the public interest.” Labor, naturally, claims that this bill nullifies its most precious prerogative, the right to strike, but in practice it has worked out fairly well, and few moderates want it changed. In all fairness to Stassen it should be pointed out that he put this bill through to forestall passage of another much worse. And—something not to be ignored—the CIO itself supported him in both 1940 and 1942, though it would probably not support him now (and though one reason for its support was that his opponent, Petersen, was an isolationist).
Criteria of “liberalism” may differ, but if you take a broad view I heard expressed in Minneapolis and categorize people into four classifications—radical, liberal, conservative, reactionary—it is impossible to think of Stassen except in category number two.
What Next?
I met Stassen for the first time at a party in New York given by Sinclair Lewis in 1943. The room was filled with people who had spent all their lives studying foreign affairs. Who was this amiable, slowspoken youngster listening with such intent interest? Then people began to ask him questions. It was not surprising that he should be so interested in technical European matters; what struck everybody was that he knew so much, and knew it with such precision. Someone asked him why the old League had failed. “For three reasons,” he answered succinctly, and then named them without hesitation: point one, point two, point three. What was impressive was his unrehearsed command of a subject that seemed very remote from Minnesota.
A few weeks later came the speech in Washington which I quoted above. A Republican governor from the Middle West forthrightly stated that isolationism in the Middle West was dead. Maybe he was wrong; time alone can tell; the point is (a) he believed it, and (b) dared to say so. This was the speech in which he sketched a program not merely for a world “organization” but for a “permanent United Nations government,” which out-Roosevelted FDR. At about this time a group of Republican old-timers, meeting him in Washington, pleaded with him not to go so far. He “was driving himself out of public life.” Stassen replied, “Okay. If you fellows win, Hitler will be boss of the United States, and I’ll be delighted to be out.”
As an officer in the Navy, Stassen could not of course continue speechmaking. But on March 8, 1945, just before the San Francisco Conference, he made an astonishing talk in Minnesota that, so far as I know, outreaches anything in the field ever said by an American politician. He hit at the shibboleth of national sovereignty, saying that all of us are “citizens of the world,” and suggesting
that we do not subscribe to the extreme view of nationalist sovereignty, that we realize that neither this nation, nor any other nation, can be a law unto itself in the modern world, and that [italics mine] we are willing to delegate a limited portion of our national sovereignty to our United Nations organization.
He went on to qualify himself and deny that he favored setting up any super-state; he was not advocating any abrogation of the American right to be independent. But, he proceeded, “true sovereignty rests in the people, and the people know that for their own future welfare they must exercise a portion of that sovereignty on a world level in place of a nationalist level.” And, “the extreme principle of absolute nationalistic sovereignty is of the Middle Ages and it is dead.”
Stassen’s appointment by Roosevelt as a delegate to San Francisco flabbergasted him. He is said to have felt that to accept it would be a political liability; yet he announced, “It is as much my duty to take an assignment to work for a successful peace as to work for a successful war.” At once he set out to build a kind of bridge between himself and the rest of the party, and he saw that the conference might be a vehicle toward his dearest aim—liberation of the Republican machine from its stick-in-the-mud backwardness in social policy and foreign affairs.
Stassen got out of the Navy, and ever since has been putting in titanic labors all over the country—writing articles, making countless speeches, meeting friends—to further (a) what he believes in; (b) his run for the presidency in 1948. The difficulties are immense, for, by ordinary rules, it would seem that he has to take two sides at once—be “conservative” enough to win the nomination in an Old Guard convention, and then “liberal” enough to beat the Democratic candidate, if nominated. But Stassen does not work by ordinary rules. What he has done—with prodigious, never-ceasing energy—is to keep pounding away at the Republican party from within, to vitalize it, bring it up to date, pump fresh air into its tight corners, make it an authentic contemporary force.
His friends think that, in 1948, he can make a first-class race. They say that he got Minnesota out of just the kind of mess that the United States as a whole may find itself in; they claim that he is just the man to hang on to the real gains of the Roosevelt revolution, and yet scour out the barnacles and sediment; they adduce his courageous vision on international policy; and they think that, with luck, he can get more labor votes than any other American, more farm votes, more Republican votes, more internationalist votes, and the service vote to boot.
But Stassen cannot win with Stassen alone. Without an organization the case is hopeless. So he has set up “Republican Open Forums” all over the country, which are “Stassen clubs”; William H. Vanderbilt, a former governor of Rhode Island, is helping to raise money; hundreds of associates are hard at work. The Stassen forces suffered a severe defeat in Nebraska in June, 1946, when Senator Hugh Butler won re-election; they won a weighty victory when Thye beat Shipstead in Minnesota. The Old Guard observes most of this with contempt. They don’t concede Stassen one chance in a million; they will stop at nothing to beat him down; and they know that the better are prospects of Republican victory in 1948, the less are Stassen’s own chances for the nomination—since, if victory is certain, there is no temptation to choose any but the “safest” candidate.
1 Once he and a friend, also a superlative shot, hung some tinsel ornaments on another friend’s head, and then shot them off in an exhibition shoot. “The act was a sensational success from the point of view of the spectators but the school authorities stopped it after one performance.” Charles Van Devander in the New York Post, February 13, 1943.
2 Incidentally Lundeen’s widow later married another isolationist senator, Holman of Oregon.
3 An item in minutiae is that some Old Guardists, hating Stassen, were delighted to vote for him on the chance that Anderson might squeeze in too, since on Stassen’s resignation Anderson, their own man, would then be governor. But it all came out Stassen’s way.
4 Today this worthy character is president of the National Citizens Political Action Committee.
5 A specialist in complexities might be interested in further details. Many Republicans thought at the last moment that Hjalmar would beat Benson (as a result of their support), and they hastily sought to close the money bags and switch ranks again, on the ground that (as the campaign was turning out) Petersen might after all be harder for them to beat. The mind bends under the weight of this. Minnesota, as I have said, is an extremely volatile state politically. The main point to seize is that Stassen profited enormously from (a) fedupness of Republicans at the Old Guard; (b) Farmer-Labor loss of prestige and self-division.
6 Mr. Wiggins recently became assistant to the publisher of the New York Times.