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GARY: Minnesota may be the only state in the nation that doesn't have Democrats or Republicans. Instead, we have IRs and DFLers. The IR label dates back to the '70s, when Minnesota Republicans were trying to separate themselves from Watergate. The DFL label dates back to the '40s.

50 years ago today, April 14, 1944, Minnesota Democrats and Minnesota Farmer-Laborites voted to merge, creating the DFL party. Today, we're going to discuss how that merger came about, and it is a fascinating story. One that's filled with charges of red baiting and Communist manipulation, a story that includes some charges that Hubert Humphrey was actually a Republican spy and that Orville Freeman and Don Fraser were fascist Brownshirts. A lively story, and one that still affects Minnesota politics today.

Our guests today have both researched and written about this merger. Historian John Haynes joins us from Washington, DC. Mr. Haynes is the author of The Dubious Alliance, The Making of Minnesota's DFL party, a book published in 1984 by the University of Minnesota. John Haynes is now with the Library of Congress.

In his former life, he was a tax policy advisor to Minnesota governors, Wendell Anderson and Rudy Perpich. Are you with us there, Mr. Haynes?

JOHN HAYNES: Yes, I am, Gary.

GARY: Great. Joining us here in the studio is Minnesota Public Radio political commentator Betty Wilson, who, before retiring in 1991, spent about 20 years covering politics for the Star Tribune. Betty wrote an interesting article about the merger for the February issue of Law and Politics. Thanks for coming by, Betty.

BETTY WILSON: Thank you, Gary. Hello, John.

JOHN HAYNES: Hello, Betty.

GARY: John Haynes, first of all, give us a sense of who the players are here. Set the scene, if you will. Can you give us a short description of the three major parties, the Democrats, the Farmer-Laborites and for that matter, the Republicans?

JOHN HAYNES: Sure. Well, let's start with the Republicans because the Republican Party dominated the state at that time. And the Republican Party then really was Harold Stassen's party. He had been elected governor in 1938 by a huge margin. He was a highly effective and very popular governor.

He made the Minnesota Republican Party of that era into a sort of moderate progressive party dedicated to the sort of efficient administration of many of the reforms and welfare policies of the Farmer-Laborites of the 1930s. It really was a sort of clean government party that had a very wide appeal in the state.

The farmer-labor party was, by the mid-1940s, before the merger, a still powerful but spent force. It was tired. It had no new ideas. It had really been badly hurt by its reputation in the late 1930s for both a great deal of patronage abuse in state government and for its aura of class conflict and violence. It was badly divided between its anti-communist wing and its popular front wing that included a significant contingent of communists.

The chief figure in the farmer-labor party was Elmer Benson, who had been a US Senator for a brief time and then governor of Minnesota from 1936 to '38. It was Benson that Stassen had defeated in 1938.

And the Democratic Party really has been the third wheel of Minnesota politics ever since World War I. It had done very badly. It usually came in a poor third behind either the Republicans or the farmer-labor rights. It had perked up a bit in the 1930s because it received a significant share of federal government patronage, but it still hadn't been able to produce much in the way of votes.

It had high ambitions after the Farmer-Laborites tended to fall apart in the late '30s that it could pick up their constituency very easily, but it didn't. Its vote rose, but not very much. Even by 1942, the Farmer-Laborites were still getting twice as many votes as the Democrats. There was also sort of an ethnic split between Democrats and Farmer-Laborites

The Democratic Party was still led mostly by Irish Democrats, Irish Americans, and to a certain extent, also German Catholics. The Farmer-Labor party's chief constituency tended to be Scandinavian Lutherans. And it was difficult to work out an arrangement where all of these groups could live together.

GARY: Is it fair to say that, in general, the Democrats were kind of the more moderate group, the Farmer-Laborites, more radical? Is that a fair characterization?

JOHN HAYNES: Well, yes, but there's an awful lot of overlap there. The Farmer-Labor party had, of course, its radical wing. But really, from the mid-30s onward, the Farmer-Labor party was essentially a New Deal party. There certainly were still some radicals left in it, but really, there was a consensus behind New Deal liberalism.

The Democratic Party, I suppose, was a more Conservative Party, but it was a loyal supporter of the National Democratic Party and of FDR, as well.

GARY: Now, Betty, in terms of the current political makeup, how does the Democrat DFL party-- do different wings factions still exist today? Have they carried on?

BETTY WILSON: Gary, I think it's interesting. There was sort of a resurgence of the Farmer-Laborites that came in, paved the way for Paul Wellstone's senate campaign. A group of those people were his early supporters, and they contributed a lot to his grassroots campaign that got him elected in 1990.

GARY: So this isn't just old, moldy history that we're talking?

BETTY WILSON: Oh, no. And then you also still have a presence in the DFL party. Tom Kelm is the son of Elmer Kelm, the first state DFL chairman, and he was head of the Democratic Party then, too. And Tom Kelm, we still hear him speaking out for what he calls the moderate position in the DFL party.

GARY: Well, OK. Why did the merger occur?

BETTY WILSON: There were several reasons. Both parties, as John Haynes has told us, both Farmer-Labor and the Democratic Party, were on the decline. They saw the Republicans in power. The only way to recapture that part of themselves was by unifying.

And there was also another factor, Franklin Roosevelt was running for re-election as president about that time, and it looked like he was going to be in trouble. He was going to have a hard fight. He needed every state. He needed Minnesota. So the White House got behind this merger, and they provided a lot of support, a lot of muscle there, that at times, when the talks, merger talks, were floundering, the White House, somebody from there would come to Minnesota and get the parties back together again.

GARY: Would that merger, John, have occurred without the intervention of the White House?

JOHN HAYNES: I think it would have been a great deal more difficult to bring about without the active participation of the White House. By themselves, the Farmer-Laborites and the Democrats, I think, had too many divisions. It was really-- particularly, the leadership of the Farmer-Labor party was, in large part, driven by a desire to make sure that FDR won the state in 1944.

That was the source of the CIO's strong backing for merger. And without that, I don't think it would have come about. So I think both the need for a unified Liberal Party to back FDR in 1944 and the White House role as mediator between the two factions was extremely important.

BETTY WILSON: And then, of course, Gary, remember, another big factor, you had this newcomer on the political scene, Hubert Horatio Humphrey, who was just a political Dynamo. He was at the time, he was called the spark plug of the merger movement. Certainly, you got to question, how much could have they done without him?

GARY: Now, of course, down through history, Humphrey has become kind of the God of the DFL party. But reading the materials that you folks have put together, there was quite a long time there, where he was not only not all that well liked, but actually hated. Why was that?

BETTY WILSON: Well, there was this extreme mistrust on both sides. By the way, the two factions were both headed by small-town bankers, which is interesting. John told us about the ethnic differences. Elmer Benson was an Appleton banker. Elmer Kelm of Chanhassen was also a small-town banker.

And Humphrey was perceived as being more on the side of the Democrats. And it was a time when there was a lot of mistrust, and he came in for that, too.

GARY: Now, he was accused of being a red baiter. Is that true, John? I mean, is he guilty?

JOHN HAYNES: Well, he was certainly accused of being a red baiter. It depends on what you mean by the term. I certainly wouldn't use that term because to me, it means when you say someone's a Communist when they aren't. Well, Humphrey did say a number of people were Communists, but they were.

There was a substantial Communist presence in the popular front wing of the farmer Labor Party, and they entered the DFL after the merger. It's a little difficult for people today to take such statements seriously. It's as if communists were something that existed only in people's imaginations.

But actually, the Communist Party had a significant presence in Minnesota. It was politically strong in the Farmer-Labor party and through a number of key officials in the CIO unions of that day, particularly the united electrical workers. And after the merger, particularly in 1948, really, from 1946 to '48, there was a very harsh and angry battle for control of the DFL party between a popular front faction, which had a very large Communist leadership, and the anti-communist faction, which was under the leadership of Hubert Humphrey.

GARY: Did any of the people who ended up running Minnesota in one way or another, who reached-- who were elected to office, were they Communists, or were any Communists actually represent us in Washington?

BETTY WILSON: Not really. The Elmer Benson faction, of course, the Farmer-Laborites faction, they were backing Henry Wallace, by the way, in that 1948 election. And Elmer Benson became chairman of the Wallace campaign, and he lost, of course, as we know, to Harry Truman.

I suppose how deep the Communist infiltration was there depends on how deep you think it was in the Henry Wallace campaign. And by the way, John Haynes, I understand you've unearthed some good documents in Russia recently that expanded on that presence of the communists here.

JOHN HAYNES: That's true, Betty. One of the things that has occurred since the collapse of the Soviet Union is that the former Soviet archives, now under the control of the Russian government, have become open, particularly an archive called the central party archive, which has the records of the Communist International, which supervised foreign Communist parties.

Also, at that archive are the records of the American Communist Party, which were shipped secretly to the Soviet Union over a series of years. And those records, while not complete, are quite large and are now open. I've made two trips to Moscow to examine those records, and I may make some more.

Part of what I found will be published in a book next year. But part of what I found dealing with Minnesota is appearing right now in an article in the latest issue of Minnesota history, put out by the Minnesota Historical Society, dealing with documents on Minnesota politics in the 1930s that I found.

GARY: Well, was Joe Stalin running the party here then? Would he send over a letter to tell him what to do, or were they pretty much on their own, or how did that work?

JOHN HAYNES: Well, the American Party was under very tight control by the Communist International and Moscow. It was not an autonomous party. It was heavily subsidized by Moscow, and its affairs were tightly regulated. You will find, in the Moscow archives, thousands and thousands of pages of testimony by Minnesota-- by American Communist officials who regularly journeyed to Moscow to report on their activities.

They were cross-examined by Soviet officials as to what they were doing, and they were given instructions. You'll also find files of directives from Moscow to the American Party about what they should do and why they should do it.

GARY: Our guest today, John Haynes, who is a historian with the Library of Congress now, and he has written a book about the merger of the Farmer-Laborites and the Democrats in Minnesota, a merger that occurred 50 years ago today. Well, actually, the official papers were filed 50 years ago tomorrow.

Today, they each had separate conventions to approve the merger, creating the DFL party in the state of Minnesota. Betty Wilson is also with us, and she's written about the merger. And we thought we'd spend the hour today talking a little history and giving folks, giving me, if no one else, a sense of what this was all like. We've got a listener on the line with a question or comment. Hi.

JOHN: Yeah, my name is John. I'm calling from Brainerd. I had a question regarding FDR's links to a Communist party. He wasn't quite the big shooter he thought, and he kind of got duped. Hey, Chad.

GARY: Well, I don't know what the end of that was all about, but did FDR have any links to the Communist party, John?

JOHN HAYNES: None that I know of. The attitude of Communist toward FDR varied from time to time, depending upon their policy line. Roosevelt's own attitude toward the American Communist Party was one of disdain. And there are no links that I know of.

There was a period when the American Communist Party, Earl Browder, its head, thought he had a link with FDR. There was a woman he dealt with that he thought was a friend of FDR, and who was his go-between. Actually, that woman was a fraud who fooled Earl Browder. She had no links of any substance with the White House.

GARY: Another caller is on the line. Let's hear what they have to say. Hi.

SPEAKER 2: Am I on?

GARY: You bet.

SPEAKER 2: The participants, both excellent, are talking rather specifically about communists being involved in the beginning of their discussions. When there was approach, the question of name names or be specific as to who was a Communist, they become very vague. In friendly fashion, I'd like to hold their feet to the fire and say, can you name specific names of people who were communists and who were involved in the parties?

GARY: All right, seems like a reasonable question.

BETTY WILSON: Well, from what I read, it was mostly that some of the leaders of the Farmer-Labor party were accused of being pawns of the Communist infiltrators, rather than any Communist out front being in the leadership. And Elmer Benson, of course, bitterly denied that.

And I should also mention that one of the people I talked with was Nellie Stone Johnson. She's still active in the DFL party. She was a strong labor union member then, and she says, well, you got to remember that back in those days, too, if you were for things that were considered radical then, like civil rights, people would accuse you of being communistic. So she discounts that, but on the other hand, as John said, there certainly was a strong presence.

GARY: John, were there some people who were overtly Communist party members?

JOHN HAYNES: Well, there were both overt and covert members. I'll be happy to give some names if he wants some. At the time of the merger, Leonard Lagerman, the Secretary treasurer of the state CIO, was a secret party member. There was William Mathias. He was an active CIO leader and Farmer-Labor and later DFL figure.

He was head of UE local 1146, which was the second largest local in the state. He was also a secret party member. He had been a secret member of the National Central Committee in the 1930s.

There was Anthony Demaio, who was regional director of the UE, Ilmar Koivunen, who was the vice president of the CIO and head of the Woodworkers Union in the state. Sam Davis, the editor of the CIO's state newspaper.

GARY: Why was it that Hubert Humphrey and his faction saw it necessary, thought it necessary, to eliminate these people from the party after the merger?

JOHN HAYNES: Well, they didn't think it was necessary, really, until after 1946, because it wasn't until '46 that the really harsh factional lines began, and that's connected to a change in Communist Party attitudes and the development of the Cold War.

Once President Truman adopted a policy of opposing Soviet expansion in Europe, the American Party and those who supported a Popular Front line became hostile to Truman and became strong supporters of breaking with Truman and undertaking a political campaign to support a presidential candidate who would take a different line on Cold War attitudes. And they did that by backing, later in 1948, Henry Wallace.

In 1946, at the DFL convention, the Popular Front essentially took control of the DFL party, and Hubert Humphrey and his allies then faced a choice. The price of continuing to be effective in the DFL was either to fight the current leadership, that is, the new Popular Front leadership, or to accept their foreign policy line.

And Humphrey, after a bit of thought about it, decided that he was unwilling to support their foreign policy stance. He was unwilling to do so, and so his only other choice was either to get out of politics or to fight them.

GARY: Let's hear from another listener here with some thoughts on this. Hi.

SPEAKER 3: Hi. Actually, my question is kind of in line with the line of talk here. I was wondering, if you could put Humphrey's career a little bit more in context for people that aren't that familiar with it, where was he at when the merger occurred? And then how would the historians there assess the impact of both the merger and his choices on his career later?

GARY: Betty.

BETTY WILSON: Humphrey was a political science instructor at Macalester College then, and there were a whole bunch of these early DFLers, whose name later became very prominent in the DFL party, who were mostly in the university circles, University of Minnesota and Macalester. You had Eugene McCarthy at that time, too. And you had--

GARY: Freeman Naftalin.

BETTY WILSON: Yes, Naftalin, by the way, was at one time Star Tribune or Tribune reporter, and he was Humphrey's aide during those merger talks. The significance of the merger, the fusion, too, for Humphrey was it sets the stage for his own political career because the year after the merger, 1944 and 1945, Humphrey was elected mayor of Minneapolis. And that was when his political career was launched.

And he had run two years before that and got defeated. He had decided that the only way that he was going to win public office was to have a united party, strong united party, backing him. That did happen. And then, as John told us, there was this 1946 thing, where the Humphrey people and his allies woke up and discovered that the radicals, as they saw them, the Farmer-Laborites, were taking over the party.

So there was a convention at Brainerd, where the Humphrey people outorganized them. And some say it was a purge, that they purged the Elmer Benson faction out of the party. The Humphrey people deny that. But then the next thing that happened was, then, Humphrey was elected to the Senate in 1948. Without this merger, it's doubtful that Humphrey would have-- that we would have had a Hubert Humphrey as we know him.

GARY: Now, Orville Freeman is another big Minnesota name. He, of course, became governor in the '50s, served a couple of terms, and then went on to be US Agriculture Secretary. John, what role did he play in this? Now, he was pretty intimately involved in the merger and then the development of the party early on.

JOHN HAYNES: Well, Freeman played a extremely important role after the merger. I don't think his role in the merger itself was particularly important. He was an old friend of Humphrey. They had known each other at the University of Minnesota in the late 1930s. And after Humphrey was elected mayor, he made Freeman, I think, director of veterans affairs for the city.

And then in 1946, one of the few items that the Humphrey faction got out of the DFL convention, so really sort of as a consolation prize, was that Freeman was made Secretary of the DFL. And he then became, really, the organizer of the Humphrey wing of the party. Humphrey, of course, was the chief personality, the man who ran for office, the charismatic leader of that wing of the party, but it was Orville Freeman who organized it.

They were a very effective combination of Humphrey as the outside man and Orville Freeman as the inside man. And it was that combination that allowed the Humphrey faction to win control of the party in 1948.

GARY: Now, we also hear the names Don Fraser used in connection with the early days of the DFL, Walter Mondale. Were they pretty much spear carriers early on, or were they central figures?

BETTY WILSON: They were a little bit younger. They were students then, but certainly, they cut their teeth in the early DFL party days.

JOHN HAYNES: Yes, they really come in the 1946, 1948 factional battle. 1944 is a bit too early for them.

GARY: Right. We're talking about the merger that created the DFL party. It occurred 50 years ago today, or at least the stage was set for the official merger today. Today, 50 years ago, the Democrats held a convention and approved merging with the Farmer-Laborites. And the Farmer-Laborites were holding their own convention, approving a merger with the Democrats.

The official papers were filed at the Secretary of State's office 50 years ago tomorrow, creating the DFL party in the state of Minnesota. Today, we're discussing some of the issues that came up at the time, some of the personalities involved. Our guests today, historian John Haynes, who's joined us from Washington, he's now with the Library of Congress, has written a book called The Dubious Alliance, The Making of Minnesota's DFL Party.

And longtime Minnesota journalist, Betty Wilson, who recently wrote a very interesting article about the merger for the February issue of Law and Politics. Back to the phones and other callers on the line. Hi.

SPEAKER 4: Hi. I had occasion to meet some of these people, Humphrey and Mondale and Fraser, and I've been a resident in the city since the early '70s, and I just had some comments on which I'm curious about your comments. Reference these people in this issue you're discussing about the Communist Party thing or affiliation.

I don't think any of those types of Communists-- although if they may have been a bit opportunistic, I think from the beginning, that there was a-- back in those times, the '40s and '50s, there was always an effort to organize, and I think they needed to organize to gain all the power they could, in whatever way, to really try to do some improvements in the city and the state. Just from some of the background information that I've read and some comments that I've heard from them, some of the elements that were very powerful in the city at the time.

But I think in the celebration of 50 years, the DFL is a bit facetious because is I think it is with any party or machine like this, it's interesting they-- I mean, this discussion about an a Communist affiliation, I don't think it was relevant back then, but I think now, it is. As of about the '70s, I knew a lot of the people coming off the campus, coming out of the West Bank.

I don't think they were particularly academic, but the similar crowd as the war Vietnam protesters and such. They really made a career of political involvement and, really, have had an influence in the city, particularly during the Fraser years. And you're seeing articles in the papers now, The Star Tribune and both the two weekly papers in the city, one this week about the landlords and about the city's worst landlord being the city itself, the largest--

GARY: So your point here is that Humphrey and his contemporaries were not Communists, and I think both Betty and John made that clear earlier, but that people in the party now, DFL party now, are leaning in that direction. Is that what you're suggesting?

SPEAKER 4: It points in that direction.

GARY: What do you think, Betty?

BETTY WILSON: I can't speak to that. I have not seen any evidence of that. I do find it an interesting irony that some of the people in the Democratic Party wing, the Humphrey wing of the party, were so anticommunist then and used that against their political adversaries there then, the Farmer-Laborites, the Bensons wings.

And then a decade later, of course, it was the Nixon Republicans who used that against the Democrats again during the Cold War. And so it was sort of a reversal of sides there. John Haynes, you were here for quite a long while, served under both Governor Anderson and Governor Perpich. Did you get the sense that the party was drifting further and further to the left?

JOHN HAYNES: Well, certainly, in the time that I was active in the DFL in the late '60s and '70s, there certainly were plenty of radicals, new leftists, new politic types who were active in the DFL party, and I was in the faction that opposed them. But that's not the same thing as we're talking about with the role of the Communist in the Farmer-Labor party and the early history of the DFL.

The Communists were not just unorganized radicals who had radical ideas. They were a highly disciplined and tightly controlled political organization that was directly tied to the nation's chief foreign policy enemy. And that's not the same thing at all as the more liberal wing of the DFL today.

GARY: Now, I'm kind of interested, too-- well, we're talking primarily here, of course, about the DFL, the merger and the DFL over history, but I'm also interested in Minnesota Republicans, and that's really where we started this program. They have been, over the years, well, for quite a long while, a major national force.

Harold Stassen was a legitimate presidential aspirant at one point. Have cut a pretty wide swath. Now, has that party changed over time in terms of its philosophy and approach?

BETTY WILSON: Well, remember, Gary, that in 1952, General Eisenhower sort of got his national kickoff for his presidential campaign here in Minnesota in Minnesota's presidential primary. Harold Stassen was, of course, a presidential aspirant then, but in the presidential primary, Eisenhower bowled him over, and so Minnesota made history then.

And it was sort of a moderate group. You look back in those days, and it was almost a matriarchal party. You had Rhoda Lund, Elizabeth Heffelfinger, Gladys Brooks, who were very strong leaders in those days, and certainly, they considered themselves moderates.

Then we get down to the 1980s, early 1980s, and I think we all know the story there, how the Republican Party has just been torn apart over the-- between the Christian right, the old moderates, and the Christian right, or the Reagan right-wingers that formed an alliance with them. So yes, it's changed markedly.

GARY: Now, John, I noticed in your book, it was just noted in passing that John Blatnik, when he was elected to Congress from Minnesota's eighth district, which historically has been thought of as a DFL stronghold, he defeated a Republican. Did it used to be a Republican stronghold?

JOHN HAYNES: Well, I wouldn't call it a Republican stronghold, but it was a sharply divided district. Republicans and Farmer-Laborites were very closely divided in that district for a number of years, and it shifted back and forth. In fact, I think until Blatnik took the seat, the Republicans want it more often than not.

GARY: How could that be, with all that strong labor element up there?

JOHN HAYNES: Well, part of it has to do with the complicated labor politics of that area. Keep in mind that the Republicans who won tended to be Republicans of the Stassen mole. They were progressive Republicans. They also had strong labor ties. The Republicans who-- I don't remember their names right now, but the Republican Congressman who won a number of elections in that district had very strong ties to the AFL unions in Duluth, and there was a substantial Republican faction in the AFL unions in Duluth.

Now, today, that seems as if, how could that possibly be true? But that was the situation in that era. There was a substantial Republican presence in the AFL. Part of it was also linked to the question of the CIO because the CIO, when it arose in the mid and late 1930s in that area, was so strongly aligned with the Farmer-Labor Party. The rival AFL unions tended to back the Republicans as a continuation of this internal labor argument between AFL supporters and CIO supporters.

GARY: So we not only had dueling political parties and dueling political factions, but dueling labor groups, as well. Sounds like. Let's go back to the phones. Another caller is on the line. Hi.

SPEAKER 5: Yes, I'm calling to ask a question about-- I didn't hear the previous part. I'm in my car, but when was the Farmer-Labor party organized? And did it just end then 50 years ago?

GARY: OK, good question. First of all, how did the Farmer-Laborites get started, John?

JOHN HAYNES: Well, it started as a sort of ad hoc arrangement in 1918. There had been an extremely strong Republican primary of a split between those who supported the American war effort and those who were hostile to it and involving the nonpartisan league, which was a sort of populist farm organization of the era. The candidates backed by the nonpartisan league had been defeated in the Republican primary, and they decided to have a second go at it in the general election.

And they arranged a joint ticket with the AFL unions in Minnesota. And since it was a combination of farmers backed by the nonpartisan league and labor unions backed by the AFL, they decided to call the ticket the farmer-labor ticket. And it did extremely well. It came in ahead of the Democrats, who were badly split by the war, as well.

And after they did so well, that sort of ad hoc arrangement evolved into, within a year or two, in the formation of an official Farmer-Labor party, which continued until the merger in 1944.

GARY: And then it just disappeared?

JOHN HAYNES: That's correct.

GARY: But the Farmer-Labor Association, now, that was a different outfit, right?

JOHN HAYNES: Yes. Minnesota politics in those days was somewhat complicated. You had both a party organization and a informal organization called the Farmer-Labor Association. Until the formation of the DFL, essentially, for all practical purposes, the Farmer-Labor Association was the Farmer-Labor party. Normally, association-backed candidates would win the Farmer-Labor primary, though that didn't happen in all cases.

After the merger, the Farmer-Labor Association continued, essentially, as a factional organization for the Popular Front Elmer Benson wing of the Farmer-Labor contingent that went into the DFL.

GARY: We're talking about the merger of the Farmer-Labor rights and the Minnesota Democrats, a merger that created the DFL party. Each party held a separate convention 50 years ago today to approve the merger, and that was the culmination of several attempts to merge the two parties. And the next few years were rocky, but by 1948, the DFL party, as we know it, had won a major victory.

Hubert Humphrey was elected to the Senate. Eugene McCarthy was elected to Congress. Big election for the DFL party and the state of Minnesota. Betty, there were, for a long time, three parties in the state of Minnesota before the merger. What, if anything, could we learn from that experience in terms of three-party politics today? Is there room for a third party again today, do you think?

BETTY WILSON: I think we can learn that it's pretty difficult to have three parties in a state because the Democratic party and the Farmer-Labor party, that was one thing that spurred their fusion was both were declining. And the powers had decided that only through unity could they be a viable party, one viable party, one single, unified party.

GARY: What if the Republicans, though, hadn't been so strong at that time? Do you think that merger would have gone through?

BETTY WILSON: Well, there is another element in here, too. And the Farmer-Labor party, the zenith of its power, of course, was when Floyd B. Olson was elected governor in 1930, then 1932 and 1934, and then he died, of course, in 1936. And the Farmer-Labor party sort of collapsed then because it was his personality, maybe, that had so much to do with the Farmer-Labor party.

Then there were all these factions that moved in and took over. So it was-- I think, as John Haynes told us earlier, it was a party that was sort of burned out.

GARY: John, do you think the third party movement could survive again, could be revived again, or as Betty points out, there just aren't enough voters to go around?

JOHN HAYNES: I think a third party could only be viable in Minnesota or in any other state, for that matter, only when the politics of the era come into turmoil and the existing parties are not set up or institutionally cannot express some deeply felt political drive that is out there, and there needs to be a vehicle. I think when that occurs, a third party can arise and be the vehicle for whatever that political upheaval is.

That is what happened in 1918. Essentially, there was a great deal of political unrest in Minnesota. But the Democratic Party, which was, in a sense, the opposition party of that era because Republicans dominated the state at that point, could not be the vehicle for that turmoil because it was itself so deeply split over the war issue and so tightly tied to President Wilson and national war policies that it couldn't be the opposition party for that upheaval.

So the result was the formation of the Farmer-Labor party, which became, then, the instrument of that political discontent. If something like that were to happen again, yes, you could certainly get a third party.

BETTY WILSON: Gary, if anything, I think the trend is going in the opposite direction. Rather than seeing another party, a third party, there's a lot of speculation that we're seeing the demise of the two political parties, that people are getting turned off more and more by political parties. They just don't want anything to do with them. If they get excited about politics, they rally around a candidate, rather than a party.

GARY: Now, this is something else I want to ask the two of you. Of course, the politicians were all excited about this merger, and the intrigue, and the backbiting, and the factionalism, and so on and so forth, but did the average person on the street much care about any of this? Was this big news when it happened?

JOHN HAYNES: Well, I tend to think that it was not really a particular matter of popular concern. After all, the war was on. If you were to ask most people what was important at the time, they would have talked about the war. Politics was something that was a second priority in terms of people's public attention at that time.

The merger was extremely important and extremely exciting to people who were interested in politics. I think to average citizens, it was a sidelight.

GARY: Let's go back to the phones. Another caller is on the line. Hi.

SPEAKER 6: Yeah, good morning. I was listening with interest about Communists, known Communists in the DFL party. I was in political science in 1946 at the university and have known, for many years, all of the players. Most of us, of course, were away at the wars, so we weren't involved in '44 in the merger of the parties.

However, in 1948, at the state convention in St. Paul at the St. Paul Hotel, there were many delegates from the North, usually with Finnish names, my apologies to them for being a little ethnic here, that almost got control of the DFL. They were about 30%, 40% of the delegates. If they weren't card-carrying comrades, they were at least cheating the party out of their dues.

Got to keep in mind that during that period, that was the early days of Joe McCarthy and the Cold War, that nobody went around showing their Communist Party membership qualifications to anybody. But there were two men on our state DFL ticket at that time, Francis Smith from Saint Paul, an attorney who ran for attorney general and did get the endorsement, and a man by the name of Thomas McDonald from Minneapolis, who was running for treasurer.

And if these two weren't card-carrying members, they were sure cheating the party out of their dues. And so the people that really beat the Communist group back was, as it's been mentioned earlier, Humphrey and Freeman. And Rolvaag was back from Norway then in 1947, and he had a large part of that.

And many of the names that we know today, McCarthy, of course, did. And remember, there were many part members of the DFL that were Catholics. And in those days, in the context of this time, no Catholic could be a Communist. And so that sounds strange today, I know, but that's 40, 45 years ago.

And so, as was the chairman of the farmer-labor party, Kelm, who was the father of the famous Kelm brothers who are still with us today in politics in Minnesota.

GARY: Thanks for your recollection, sir. Appreciate it. Let's go to another caller. Hi. Hello.

SPEAKER 7: Yes.

GARY: Yes. Go ahead, sir.

SPEAKER 7: Yeah, I'm calling from Cannon Falls. I was an observer at the Hennepin County convention in the late '40s, at which, so to speak, the Communists were kicked out. And I've always been skeptical whether it was a principled move or just a power grab.

I was not a delegate. I attended as an observer because I was curious after hearing recruiters at the University of Minnesota Law School urge people to attend the meeting to kick out the communists, and then tell them that they would have to pay their dues to the recruiter in order to join the party. But if the communists didn't get kicked out, they would get their dues handed back to them.

And it struck me that what was happening was that there was, being drawn into the party at that time, people who had an interest more in a fight, in observing a fight, than in acting from principle. And then the recruiters also, of course, when they received the dues, became trustees for the party and had no power to give the money back. Whether they did or not, it struck me that there was an underlying dishonesty to the thing. My other--

GARY: OK, you got one more point there, quickly.

SPEAKER 7: Yes, I have in mind an attorney named Wyman Smith, for whom I had respect, and he later went on to become a respected municipal attorney in the North Hennepin municipalities. But he was kicked out as a part of that convention, and I think the party lost some talent. He never again became active, and I can't believe that he was a Communist.

GARY: John, principle or just power play?

JOHN HAYNES: Well, I think on both sides, both were involved. If you look at the tactics used by both factions in the 1948 factional fight, I don't think either faction has any particular claim to have played with extremely nice and high-minded rules. It was a political fight, and they both fought in accordance with normal political rules.

I don't think there was anything unusual in the activities of both sides. For example, there's certainly plenty of recruiting by both factions for the caucuses, which is hardly anything unusual. For instance, the labor movement, which was divided in '48 about that fight, a number of union locals provided the funds necessary on both sides for the registration fees of delegates and the cost of sending delegates to conventions.

They had to pay their own ways. And the unions would reimburse-- that is, popular-front-aligned unions would reimburse popular front delegates. Anti-communist-aligned unions would reimburse the anti-communist delegates. Let me say one thing about kicking people out of the party. I would not use that term about what happened in 1948 because there was a fight for control of the party as to where it was going because it was the announced plan of the Popular Front faction that if they won control of the DFL party, the DFL party would be disaffiliated from the Democratic Party and would become part of Henry Wallace's New Progressive Party.

And so there was a question as to, well, does that make them infiltrators from the Progressive Party, or does that make them DFLers who are trying to take the party somewhere else? In Hennepin County, for example, there never was a single Hennepin County DFL convention in 1948. There were dual caucuses held by each faction, and each refused to recognize the legitimacy of the other's caucuses.

And they had dual conventions. And there was a question of which convention, then, is the real DFL party? In a sense, both ignored the other. Then at the state convention in 1948, I think it's quite clear that the Humphrey faction won control of the party. They got the majority of delegates elected statewide.

So the other faction simply didn't show up. They weren't thrown out. They never came. And then they had their own separate convention, and it became a question of, whose candidates were going to win the DFL primary? That really was going to decide who was the real DFL party, and the Humphrey faction won.

GARY: I think we've got time for one more caller here. Let's go back to the phones one more time. Hi.

SPEAKER 8: Hello.

GARY: Yes, go ahead, sir.

SPEAKER 8: I'm from Grand Rapids, and recently, there was a local segment on the labor strife in Minneapolis, well, of other cities. And I'm wondering what part or how that would affect the Farmer-Laborites and Democratic parties at that time and what part Floyd Olsen had in that.

GARY: OK, we've just got a few-- just a minute or so to take that one on. John, do you want to try that?

JOHN HAYNES: Well, certainly, one of the major political issues of the 1930s was how state government would respond to a number of violent labor conflicts in the state. One of Floyd Olsen's great achievements politically is that he managed to conduct the role of the state in such a way that the striking workers, particularly in the large teamster strike in Minneapolis, but also in a number of other strikes, that the state government was not perceived as an enemy. That state government was perceived as at least neutral or even friendly, without, at the same time, seeming to become a partisan of the strikers, and so offend those who were hostile to the strike.

GARY: Betty, very briefly, if people want more information, want to learn more about this, what's the best course? You head over to the Historical Society or? Besides reading your article.

BETTY WILSON: I would say go get John's book. It's the Bible. It really is. That's one place. And then the Historical Society, yes.

JOHN HAYNES: Yeah, I think Minnesotans ought to keep in mind that the Minnesota Historical Society, in that institution, they have one of the best-run in the country. It is a very fine institution, and its collection of historical documents and papers is truly magnificent.

GARY: Thanks so much, both of you, for coming in today. Appreciate it. John Haynes, joining us from Washington, DC, the author of The Dubious Alliance, The Making of Minnesota's DFL Party. He is now a historian at the Library of Congress.

And, of course, Betty Wilson, Minnesota Public Radio political commentator, longtime reporter for the Star Tribune. Has just written an interesting article about the merger in the February issue of Law and Politics.