Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party merged with the state Democratic Party in April 1944. Thus was the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party born.
Working from inside the Democratic Party, Hubert Humphrey helped engineer the merger. The Farmer-Labor Party was riddled with Communists. Humphrey knew it, but he had no trouble working with them. At the time he was a Popular Front kind of guy with no enemies to the left.
Packing the 1946 party caucuses, Communists promptly took over the DFL in Hennepin County (including all of Minneapolis) and in the state. Then Minneapolis Mayor Humphrey could not even get elected a delegate to the state convention. Communists picked up no fewer than 120 of the 160 Hennepin County delegates. In Minneapolis’s Second Ward, both Humphrey and his ally Arthur Naftalin (future Minneapolis mayor and father of Paul Butterfield Blues Band keyboardist Mark Naftalin) went down to defeat.
Humphrey was nevertheless named a delegate at large to the state party convention, where he was to serve as keynote speaker. As Humphrey rose to speak, however, he was shouted down as a “fascist” and “warmonger.” In his meticulous 1984 biography Humphrey, Carl Solberg records: “A beefy sergeant at arms shouted at him, ‘Sit down, you son of a bitch, or I’ll knock you down.’ He was not allowed to finish his speech.” Solberg comments: “It was an outright coup.”
Solberg adds: “The totally organized left wing took command of the DFL convention….They passed resolutions excoriating Winston Churchill for his ‘iron curtain’ speech…” Talk about history rhyming.
The party’s rising star, Humphrey had been elected mayor of Minneapolis in 1945. He organized a successful counterattack on the Communists to throw them out of the party. By 1948, the task was more or less complete and Humphrey was on his way to national prominence.
Orville Freeman was one of Humphrey’s right-hand men in the counterattack. He lived a classic Minnesota life that was interrupted by his service in the southwest Pacific during World War II. He was shot in the jaw by a sniper while he led a patrol on Bougainville Island in 1943. He spent eight months in a military hospital, partially paralyzed and relearning how to speak. He went on to be elected Minnesota’s first DFL governor and to serve as Secretary of Agriculture in the Kennedy administration.
Now Minneapolis appears to be ground zero of the revolution fomented by the radical left and its shock troops among the Antifa/Black Lives Matter gang. They are idiot Marxists who substitute the categories of race for the categories of class in the service of the revolution.
Their local supporters are already embedded in our political institutions. Fifth District Rep. Ilhan Omar sits in Congress and comes to town occasionally to rouse the rabble. Former Nation of Islam hustler Keith Ellison burrows from the inside as Minnesota Attorney General. Tim Walz mouths the obligatory platitudes and shibboleths as nominal leader of the state. Amy Klobuchar — the most popular Democrat in the state — has gone along for the ride. From Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey to Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, what a falling off was there!
We are witness to some highly illuminating revolutionary theater. It is sound and fury signifying something. Which side are you on?
By contrast with the Democrats who confronted the Communists in the post-1946 battle, every Democrat in town is is either on board with, or afraid of, our gang of radicals. There is no pushback. The Star Tribune should serve as he voice of civic responsibility at this moment of crisis, yet the publisher, editors, reporters and columnists are the useful idiots of the riot brigades. As I have observed over the years, we could use a man like Hubert Humphrey again.
