His impassioned address to the Democratic National Convention, broadcast on nation-wide radio, won broad liberal acclaim (and a walkout by segregationist delegates). The seeds Humphrey sowed in 1944 were fully harvested in 1948. But it was the merger of the Democrats and Farmer-Laborites, a move he actively supported, that created an organization strong enough to support Humphrey’s larger ambitions.
He brought a reformer’s zeal to the office, establishing the city’s first fair-employment commission and effectively challenging the city’s ingrained discrimination against Jews. First, he was elected mayor of Minneapolis. In 1944, Humphrey took two crucial steps toward the power he sought. He wasted no time applying a lesson he had learned in political science class: power goes to those who seek it. Humphrey-outgoing, a gifted (if notoriously long winded) speaker, and possessing a sharp political intelligence-soon developed a following. The smaller Democratic Party lacked the strength to compete with the Republicans. The state’s Farmer-Labor Party, a coalition of progressives, populists, and socialists, had dominated politics for much of the 1930s. Minnesota was in a time of political transition. There, he began an almost instantaneous political rise. Returning to the University of Minnesota, he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science, added a master’s degree from Louisiana State University, and returned to Minneapolis. Though he valued the educational benefits of his early years, in the late 1930s Humphrey had bigger things in mind. Looking back in 1971, Humphrey declared he learned more about economics from one South Dakota dust storm than in all his years in college. The experience made a lasting impression. When the Great Depression struck, the young Humphrey interrupted his college education at the University of Minnesota to help his father run the family drug store. His support for the Vietnam War, however, cost him the office he most sought: president of the United States.īorn in Wallace, South Dakota, in 1911, Humphrey was deeply influenced by his public-spirited father and the daily hardships of farming and small-town life in the Upper Midwest.
His political rise was meteoric, his impact on public policy historic. Humphrey, a giant of Minnesota politics, was one of the most influential liberal leaders of the twentieth century.
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