Donald Wright Narrator

Jim Mulrooney Warren Gardner Interviewers

January 25, 27, 1974 Minneapolis, Minnesota

Donald Wright -DW Jim Mulrooney -JM Warren Gardner -WG

JM: This is January the 25th, and we’re in the home of Mr. Donald Wright in Minneapolis and talking to him about his own career as a legislator and about Governor [Floyd B.] Olson. Interviewing are Mr. Jim Mulrooney and Warren Gardner.

Would you tell us something about your own background and your education, and then your career and how you got into politics?

DW: Yes. I was born right here in Minneapolis. I was in the Glenwood Avenue area, and now I’m living in what is called Bryn Mawr; been in this area of the city all my life. I attended North High School in Minneapolis, and knew Floyd B. Olson there just as a student, nothing very close or personal with him.

I went through night law school. My father was a lawyer. My father had been a member of the legislature in 1909 and 1911, so I was kind of brought up in an atmosphere of law and government and politics, and as a young man took an active part in the local improvement associations and such like, hanging around the fringes of political meetings and so forth, which at that time were usually out in people’s homes or in the backyards.

I met Floyd Olson really in an intimate way the first time as students of the same night law school, and we were together very frequently, of course, every evening during sessions in the school, and for a good many bull sessions after the classes closed at some chicken shack or hamburger joint or someplace before we went home.

JM: Were both of you married then, or neither of you?

DW: I was not married then, and I don’t think he was, but I don’t know about that. I never had any personal contact with his family, or his wife. I never knew any of them.

So, I sort of drifted into politics in about 1924. I was asked to take charge of a political campaign in the then Tenth Congressional District for the Republican Party, and I did that. I wanted to be a

candidate for the legislature, but a pretty good friend of my father’s and our family was the representative from this district. We’re sitting now in the same district as it was then.

That gentleman, Mr. Frankie Nimocks, died, and then I became a candidate to succeed him, and it was in the election year of 1926, so I served a first term in the legislature in 1927. Now, at that time, if my memory is correct, Theodore Christianson had just become governor, and so I was in the legislature continuously thereafter for forty-four years: in the House of Representatives until 1935, and then in the Senate.

Again, wanted to be senator, but Sherman Child was senator from our district, and he was a very confident man and a very well respected man, and I waited out the opportunity, or I should say the opportunity didn’t come until Sherman Child decided to voluntarily retire, and then I ran for the Senate and was elected, and then was there for the remainder of my activity in the legislature.

JM: What kind of committees and problems did you really address yourself to as a representative and a senator all those years? Were there sort of special areas that were your pet areas?

DW: No, there were no special areas, and I’m sorry I never had any special areas that I was barnstorming in as a member of the legislature. I’ve always felt a criticism of those who do. Some people get elected to legislature because they’re, for example, schoolteachers, and forever after that they can see nothing except schools through their legislative gun sights.

I never had any particular ambition or any particular thing that I was sponsoring as a member of the legislature. Of course, in forty-four years of service, I can’t tell you how many different committees in the House and Senate that I’ve been chairman of. I can make a list of them, I guess.

JM: Well, that’s an awfully long tenure.

DW: I remember the first year that I was in the Senate there was a very close division between the so-called, in those days, liberals and conservatives, and I think we had thirty-seven conservatives, if my memory is correct. I think there were thirty-eight committees, and so every conservative had to be chairman of something.

I’m not bragging about it particularly, and I could brag about it a little bit. I was made chairman of the Senate Committee on Temperance, liquor control it’s called now, something else now I guess, but that was my first assignment in the Senate, was chairman of that committee. And, I was chairman of the Public Highway Committee for a while, and then—

JM: That’s a hot one.

DW: Yeah. It was hot in those days, too. Then I was chairman of the Public Welfare Committee in the Senate.

I: That’s another hot one.

DW: That is a hot one, yeah.

Well, there was something else in between there. From the very first day that I was in the Senate, I was a member of the Tax Committee, as I was trying to tell you. They were short of manpower on our side, and I became a member of the Tax Committee in 1935, and I continued as a member of that until I was retired from the Senate, and finally I got to be chairman of the Senate Tax Committee. I can’t tell you when that was, maybe 1950 or 1960, or somewhere along there.

In my last years in the Senate, my principal efforts were with respect to tax legislation, you know. Yeah. I did have a great deal to do with the passage of the sales tax law in Minnesota.

JM: If we go back to the time when you and Floyd Olson were acquainted as law students together, how would you describe him at that time? What kind of characteristics did you notice and even did some of your other colleagues notice in him? Was he aggressive?

DW: Well, he never missed a class that I can ever remember of. He never missed a class. He had access to the law offices of a lawyer by the name of Frank Larrabee.

JM: Larrabee?

DW: Yeah. Wasn’t that the man’s name?

JM: Yeah.

DW: Frank Larrabee. My father was a lawyer, and of course that’s where we did our homework, so to speak, without having to go down to the law library at the courthouse, which a lot of the boys did. I think Floyd took some of the boys over to the law office that he had access to, and I know I took some of the boys over to my father’s law office late in the afternoon, and you know, the evenings when we didn’t have class and all that. So no, he was just a natural good student.

JM: Did he talk about politics, going into it as a career in those days?

DW: Not that I ever remember, no. I don’t remember that. Although he was affiliated with a, well, I don’t think I should say he was affiliated with it. He attended the political conventions of his group, and he was active, more or less active in politics while he was in the law school.

JM: Was he Non-Partisan League?

DW: Yes, he was. That group was all an offshoot of the Non-Partisan League.

JM: Could I ask, do you know as to whether or not Governor Olson’s family was poor? Would you rate them, regard them as a poor family?

DW: I think so.

JM: You would?

DW: I think they were, yeah.

JM: Why do you say that? Did he eat enough?

WG: Did he work during high school, that sort of thing?

DW: I couldn’t tell you that. I knew a young man who lived very close to our family over there on Newton Avenue North, just off of Glenwood, and his name was Leonard Larson, and his father was here from Sweden or somewhere; an immigrant. There weren’t too many people there who could read and write very well. Leonard Larsen’s mother either was a cousin or something of Floyd’s mother, I think. Anyway, they were acquainted.

Although Floyd’s family lived way up in North Minneapolis and Leonard was down here this way, from what Leonard had just dropped to me in casual conversation, I think their family was, well, I don’t know what you’d call poor in those days, but I certainly don’t think they were affluent at all, as we weren’t, either.

I was in night law school even though my father was a lawyer. In those days, you didn’t have to have all these college degrees to get to be in a law school. I remember later on, later years, looking back over the situation and looking over all the lawyers that were in the Senate, I think one time I counted more than half of them that were night law school graduates. [laughs]

JM: Yeah, that wasn’t rare, was it?

DW: It was not rare, no. There was Tom Welch of Buffalo [Minnesota]. He’s still living. He was chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Beldin Loftsgaarden, St. Paul, he was chairman of the Judiciary Committee while I was there, and there were all fellows in between there, you know.

JM: Even a governor went to night law school, yeah.

DW: He was in night law school, yes, and he was a good student. Floyd Olson was a hell of a good lawyer, too.

JM: That’s what others have said. What would you say about that? Would you say a word or two about his law abilities?

DW: Yes, he was an able lawyer. He was an able lawyer, and...

WG: Was he a good courtroom man?

DW: Yes, he was a good trial lawyer. He was well respected and a good trial lawyer and he could handle himself wherever he was found. He was the kind of a fellow who could think on his feet, and he knew his book law pretty well, too.

JM: Now, as Hammond County attorney, he really achieved quite a reputation, didn’t he?

DW: Yes, he did, and I think, it is my belief that he was one of the best county attorneys we ever had, and I believe that he was absolutely and impeccably honest in the performance of his job as county attorney.

JM: What about that Birkeland murder business? Do you think those are trumped up charges?

DW: I don’t know anything about that. If I ever cut any law classes in the night law school, it was criminal law. I’ve never had any interest in criminal law, and I’ve never had a criminal case in Hennepin County. With Floyd being county attorney and me being a practicing lawyer, we had nothing in common at all. I never had a criminal case. I’ve had a lot of chances to have them, but I just didn’t like that branch of the law and didn’t have to do it, so I didn’t take it.

He knew the county attorney’s office is not entirely devoted to criminal law. Their civil responsibility is attorneys for the county board, and other administrative departments of the county government is a hell of a big branch of their work. They had not only criminal law but civil law, municipal law, and government law.

JM: You’ve been in the Republican Party all your life. Is it possible at some point in his career Olson could have been a Republican?

DW: I think he was at heart.

JM: Do you really?

DW: Yes.

JM: How would you explain that?

DW: Well, I explain it this way: Floyd knew the fundamentals of it. He knew that in order to have a successful, operating country, you had to have jobs for people to work at. Floyd knew that. He was not for tearing down the establishment, if you want to put it that way. That’s the way you put it nowadays.

I know one lawyer told me just within the last couple of years that some young fellow, a very smart young fellow came to work in their law firm, and he worked about two months and then he quit. “Why did you quit?” “Well, everybody here is for the establishment and I’m against it,” so he left. [laughs]

WG: Chose the wrong career, didn’t he?

DW: No, Floyd was never against what is now said to be the establishment. He knew you had to have employers if you were going to have jobs. He knew you had to have people working if you’re going to survive. If you would dig far enough, you might find somebody else with this idea, because I believe there was a time when some of the real left-wingers in the Non-Partisan

League, or the Farmer-Labor, as it got to be known, criticized Floyd because he was too friendly with big business, or with business, let’s say that.

JM: Yeah, you’re right.

DW: Isn’t that correct?

JM: Yes.

DW: Yeah. If Floyd had lived that political movement that he was the titular head of when he was governor would have had an entirely different history, I believe. The minute Floyd died the wolves took over that organization, beginning with his own private secretary, who may still be living. I don’t know whether he is. Roger Rupchak? Isn’t he, is he still alive?

JM: I don’t know if he’s alive.

DW: Well, it’s not important.

JM: He was his personal—

DW: Well, he was the governor’s secretary, as I recall. God, he was really a revolutionist in my opinion.

JM: More than Howard Williams?

DW: You mustn’t say that now, but I can’t prove that, right? Nobody ever could.

JM: Was he more radical than Howard Williams?

DW: Oh, yes. He didn’t have half as much brains, I don’t think.

JM: Do you think Williams was more talented, then?

DW: Yeah.

JM: In your comments about Governor Olson being for the establishment, this is a quote of Governor Olson’s in 1935. He said, “You bet your life I’m a radical. Capitalism is dead on its feet, and a new system of government ownership with production for use must be formed by a radical party.” Now, that doesn’t sound like a guy who was in favor of the establishment.

DW: Well, he’s got the word production in there, hasn’t he? Yeah. He knew it had to be, but he just wasn’t satisfied with who was going to run it, I think.

But he was a fundamental—it’s just the same today. It’s the same thing today. Oh, I haven’t been in the Capitol since I was defeated for reelection to the Senate during the time that the legislature

was in session, but you got the same thing. Floyd was sincere. There were a lot of people in that movement that were sincere in trying to have government do something for the people.

My idea is just the opposite of that. I always followed the idea that the best thing the government can do for the people would be to please keep their goddamned hot hands off of them, let them do it for themselves, but give them a good, smooth ocean to roll on.

I remember Floyd’s production for use. Nobody was ever able to find out what that really meant, and I don’t think we know now what it means, what he meant by it, but that was just a political phrase.

JM: How did you people in the legislature feel when you heard speeches like that one and others, where he did come out for a position of government ownership? Did you all treat it as political rhetoric, mostly?

DW: Yeah.

JM: Nobody really got serious about it?

DW: No.

JM: Now what about this Citizens’ Alliance?

DW: The Citizens’ Alliance?

JM: He was always locked in with groups of employers.

DW: That was Mr. S. Stockwell, Citizens’ Alliance. His wife was, well, I’d almost call her a Communist, but I don’t know. That’s probably unfair. Stockwell was government ownership of public utilities.

JM: Well, that was the opposite, though. I think this alliance was the ones who wanted to oppose that.

DW: Oh, was it?

JM: They were the opposition to Stockwell.

DW: I don’t remember what it was.

JM: The Citizens’ Alliance were a group of mostly Minneapolis businessmen who opposed Governor Olson’s—

DW: Oh, yeah. No, maybe it was the forerunner of the Minnesota Employers’ Association and all that. Now I’m on the right track. Yes, I recall that now. If Mrs. Wright was down here, she’d tell you about that.

JM: Was your position different from those people? For example, I mean, you people in the legislature on the conservative side of the aisle wouldn’t go as far right as the Citizens’ Alliance, who really came out very, very, very hard against the governor and felt that he was almost a Communist. I mean, did you people share that sort of attitude, that you thought he was so radical that he was almost in cahoots with the Communist sympathizers, or did most people share your own view, do you think?

DW: Well, it was a political game, and you have to have two sides, and each side has to have a motto just like we have today and so forth. I never personally believed, and I think there were many others who never personally believed that Floyd ever believed that stuff, or ever would allow it to be accomplished. It was a campaign slogan, and that’s the way he kept the boys together and so forth. Production for use, what the hell is it? I don’t know what.

They made big business out of whatever they could put their fingers on to downgrade the other side. There were a good many people in his party, let’s call it his party—it wasn’t his party. They just picked him up and made him the leader of it, and he was a damn good leader for them. If it hadn’t been for him, they might have got somebody worse to have been elected, because Floyd understood the fundamentals and so forth.

It’s like every other political party. Compare it a little bit in your own minds with what goes on today down in Washington, how some of these tramps get tangled up, get into the front office. I’ll be goddamned if I know, but they did it for Floyd Olson. Don’t forget that. Just like today. The minute Floyd died, why, Jesus Christ, I think those gold horses up on top of the Capitol are still there, but I don’t know how the hell they stayed there; just some terrible thing. They were all right while Floyd was there, but Jesus. You all knew it, but there’s nothing you can do. You didn’t have any proofs of anything, and you couldn’t say it openly, you know? Floyd never would stand for that kind of stuff. Not by a damn sight, no.

JM: You see him as a man of certain principles that were sort of fundamental to all that.

DW: Yes, I do.

JM: A lot of that was rhetoric. But you don’t see him as a political opportunist who just cashes in on this and this and this?

DW: No.

JM: You saw him as a man with certain assumptions and principles.

DW: Oh, yeah. No, he had a political party, and they were out to get political power. They got it for a while, and it killed it. After Floyd died, the political party died because they didn’t know how to handle power. They still had the power, didn’t they?

JM: Sure.

DW: Who the hell was the governor?

JM: [Hjalmar] Petersen.

DW: Hjalmar?

JM: And then Benson.

DW: Hjalmar and then Benson, yeah. Well, there you go.

JM: What’d you think of Benson?

DW: He was from out of here, out west.

JM: Appleton or somewhere, yeah.

DW: Yeah. Well, Benson was really a Communist at heart, until he got into the money, and then he changed around and stuff. He did get into money, you know. I don’t think it was Benson. He had a partner. What was his partner named? Weren’t they into real estate or banking or something? He had a partner by the name of, oh, God, I don’t know what his name was. We got into this bank fold-up, and the partner went out and bought up a lot of the assets of these so- called bankrupt banks, and time changed and the paper got to be worth something, and the partner and Hjalmar, they really got in the bucks, you know.

JM: Yeah. Would Olson have won that Senate race in ’36 when he died, do you think? He was running for the Senate that year. Was it [Thomas D.] Schall that was—

WG: I think Schall was dead by that time.

JM: Yeah, I think he was, too.

WG: Senator Schall died in 1935, didn’t he?

DW: I don’t know. I don’t know dates.

JM: Well, anyway, Governor Olson was nominated by the Farmer-Labor Party to run for the Senate in 1936. Do you think he would have won that campaign for the U.S. Senate?

DW: Oh, God, I can’t tell you. Schall was dead. Who the hell did we have that could run? I’m sorry. I don’t know.

JM: I don’t recall either.

DW: Who did get to be senator then? Benson, didn’t he?

JM: Yeah. He appointed the—

DW: The state was getting, even in those days, let’s see, when did Floyd die?

JM: August 22, 1936.

DW: Thirty-six, and the legislature had been sitting in that year, then.

JM: No, they would have sat in ’35.

DW: Sat in ’35.

JM: Again in ’37.

DW: They sat in ’35.

JM: That would have been your first term in the Senate, then, wouldn’t it?

DW: Yeah.

JM: That would have been his last legislature.

DW: The Federal Government had passed the Social Security Act, and the big argument was, is that a constitutional measure or is it not, and so forth. That went on in the Senate, and how much was it going to cost, and so forth and so on. I remember I took up the cudgel immediately for financing it in the ’35 session. Old age assistance: how much it was going to cost? Well, it never could get more than sixteen million, they said. What the hell is it now? I don’t know, one hundred and sixteen million or something through the state’s end of it, I mean?

That was the principal reason why I was interested in a sales tax. I knew we were going to have to have more revenue to do that, and I always figured, although Clyde Mackenzie and some of the better brains around there were just going to bet the whole goddamn capital that that law was unconstitutional, but they were wrong, and I figured it was going to stand the gap in the Supreme Court, so we had to have a special session then in the fall of 1936, I think.

JM: That’s right, yeah.

DW: Well, there were only three people in the Senate that knew what the hell was in that Federal act, and it was Mike Galvin and me, and then I think Fred Norton that had taken time enough to study the act. Christ, it was a book, with all the several chapters, one for aid to dependent children, old age assistance, and all the rest of it. So, the financing of it, well, we were able to finance it for a while, but then the goddamn thing ran away. We had to get some more money someplace.

JM: What about the Mortgage Moratorium Act, why do you think it—

DW: That was in the House of Representatives, the Moratorium Act, and I had been law-officing with a man by the name of Erickson, James Erickson, whose father was from Little Falls [Minnesota]. His father was from Fergus Falls [Minnesota], a member of the House of Representatives, and he was really the author of Minnesota’s Mortgage Moratorium Act.

JM: What about Harry Peterson?

DW: That must have been 1933.

JM: Did Harry Petersen have anything to do with that one?

DW: Wasn’t he attorney general?

JM: Right.

DW: Well, he didn’t have a vote in the legislature.

JM: No, I mean in the drafting.

DW: I don’t recall whether he did or not, no.

JM: You’re right, though. He surely didn’t vote.

DW: I don’t know if—

JM: But in the legislature?

DW: Oh, I would assume that Mr. Erickson, Leonard Erickson of Fergus Falls, was in conference with the attorney general. Got to be the normal thing, yes, I would expect that, yeah.

JM: That bill have a hard time in the House?

DW: No, it didn’t have a very hard time.

JM: What did you think of that whole farm holiday movement that that supported? Certainly because they wanted to keep their farms. Did you think they were a bunch of radical farmers out there, or did you tend to sympathize with their plight?

DW: Well, you had a great deal of sympathy for the honest ones, yeah, but again, the movement, and the scalawags got a hold of that and, you know, no. Some of these had to be put up somewhere, yeah. I don’t know whether private business would have handled it or not; they probably would. Notwithstanding this mortgage moratorium deal, there were many, many large money-loaning institutions, and they were the great bulk of them that owned these mortgages, insurance companies and many others.

The last thing they wanted was the land, you know. I know one man, who just died a couple years ago, I think he was eighty-three years old when he died, and he was hired by one of those insurance companies to go out and renegotiate loans all over Minnesota and North Dakota.

JM: In other words, to keep people on that—

DW: Without respect to any law or anything. They just wanted these people to get in a position where they could earn enough money to pay the interest, and hell, that was a natural thing, wasn’t it? [laughs]

JM: Well, that’s how they make money, isn’t it?

DW: Why, yes. Sure. But the Mortgage Moratorium Act was a good law. It did all right.

JM: You supported that?

DW: Oh, yes. Well, I certainly wasn’t against it, so I think I supported it. I can’t think right now of any organization or any consolidated opposition to that bill. Was there?

JM: Not that I know of.

DW: Well, I don’t know of any either.

JM: I don’t think there was.

DW: No, I don’t think so either.

JM: Or if there was, it was very small.

DW: After all it was a fair bill. It didn’t let anybody off the hook. It just spread it out, and tried to put it in the hands of the court, didn’t it?

JM: Yes.

DW: To make an equitable provision for the payment and so forth, and it was all right.

JM: Harry Petersen says that there are even some who wanted to go a lot further than they went in that, and that was about the only opposition.

DW: Oh, I have no doubt about it. They wanted to cancel the damn mortgages. That would be Roger Rupchek and some of those monkeys, there’s no question about that now.

JM: He said his view and others that he thought were in the legislature thought that was a fair bill.

DW: Well, I think so.

JM: Well, it stood up in the United States Supreme Court.

DW: Oh, yes. I think it’s all right. Leonard Erickson of Fergus Falls of the House—

JM: Is the one that authored it, yeah.

DW: God damnit, he was the House author of it. I thought it was his idea to start with.

JM: Well, it could very well have been. I don’t know that it wasn’t.

DW: Yeah.

JM: What did you think of Vince Dunne?

DW: Vince Dunne.

JM: Vince Day. Excuse me.

DW: Oh, Vince Dunne. I was going to say he’s a racketeer. [laughs] Oh, Vince Day. He was a private secretary to Floyd for a while, wasn’t he?

JM: Yes.

DW: Although he’s not the guy I’m—

JM: Yeah, you were talking about Dunne.

DW: Private secretary a while back. I wasn’t talking about Vince Day.

JM: Yeah, that’s right.

DW: Well, I thought Vince Day was okay. Day was made judge, wasn’t he, by Floyd? Roger Rupchek got to be secretary?

JM: Yeah, that might have been. I don’t know about that. That may have been. Vince was made a judge.

WG: Yeah, you’re right.

DW: A district court judge. Oh, Vince Day. He was more like Floyd than any of the rest of those guys.

JM: Was he?

DW: Yeah. He was no radical. Vince Day was okay.

JM: You think, then, that really what Olson had was a kind of mixed bag of people around him, some that were pretty much like himself and some that were out looking for a way to implement—

DW: Well, I don’t like to have you put it that way. I don’t like to say that Floyd also had this and that.

JM: The party, then?

DW: I would say the mixed bag chose Floyd for their leader. I don’t think that, if Floyd had known what the hell kind of a bag it was, he would have ever been the leader, and that’s my own personal opinion about it.

It’s like I said before, when you get into one of these things how are you going to stop them? They’re all flock and what do you do? They’ve all got votes, and you can’t kick them in the teeth and so forth, huh? The great mystery today is how they could get so goddamn many of them into Washington at the same time. I can’t understand it yet. I don’t know.

JM: We may never.

DW: Yeah, may never. I don’t know.

JM: How about, [Henry George] Teigan?

DW: Teigan. I never knew him except by name. I couldn’t say anything about him. He was a wild one, wasn’t he? Then there was another one. I don’t know.

JM: Abe Harris. You know him, of course.

DW: Oh, Abe? Yeah, I know him very well.

JM: What’s your attitude about him?

DW: Well, I thought he was a very clever opportunist.

JM: He was a close advisor of the governor, wasn’t he?

DW: Yeah, I guess he was on the inside track, and then there was the lawyer that Floyd made a Supreme Court judge. I was trying to think of the name this morning after you called up. Can’t think of it.

JM: Yeah, that’s okay. How about Senator A.J. Rockne? You remember, from Zumbrota [Minnesota]. He was an arch-critic and opponent, political opponent of Governor Olson. Do you remember some of those fiscal feuds which occurred between those two? Yeah, I think he was the head of the Finance Committee wasn’t he?

DW: Oh, God, yes. He was chairman of the Finance Committee in the Senate when I came in the Senate. He was there for a long time after that, chair of the Finance Committee. He certainly was an opponent of everything that that Floyd’s party was for, or most everything. I guess pretty near everything. No, he wasn’t either.

There was a senator from—and I’m not saying this trying to get you off the track—from Beltrami County who was on the other side of the fence from us. You see, my memory gets bad. His name was—I’ll have to get a book. He was an outstanding one in Floyd’s group in the Senate. He was no great speaker, I think. He was a railroad engineer. Oh, God, nice man. He was on the Finance Committee, one of the members of the Finance Committee when Rockne was chairman, so they got along like two peas in a pod, you know? They were just fine. No, I never heard Rockne, except on the floor of the Senate. I don’t remember ever hearing Rockne do any takeoffs on the governor. Gentlemen, we did not do things that way in those days.

JM: That’s a difficult thing for us to realize, isn’t it?

DW: We did not do it. You would no more mention the name of the governor of the state on the floor of the Senate than you would deride Jesus Christ on the floor of the Senate. It was not done. That was not protocol, that’s all. As long as I was there, it was never done. I don’t mean that I had too much to do with it, but I mean, the kind of fellows that were in there then that I learned my lessons from taught you different than that. I was raised in a different kind of family. You didn’t do those things. The office of representative in the House and a member in the Senate was a dignified office. You didn’t talk to people like that. Goddamn, some of the things that go on over there now would drive me nuts. I can’t understand it.

JM: Well, that’s true, there was a certain—

DW: They just didn’t do it, that’s all.

JM: There was a real respect for people’s positions, even if they were different.

DW: That’s right. You didn’t agree with them, why, they had a right to their opinion, and the newspaper reporters and everybody else kept their tongue off of them. I tell you it’s even got into the United States Senate now. Well, anyway, you were talking about?

JM: Senator Rockne.

DW: Rockne. I knew him quite well, because goddamn it, he was there a long time. I think he was in the House of Representatives when my dad was, about 1911 or shortly after that. Rockne had an inborn hatred for the cities. I tell you, he was from Zumbrota, and all crime and iniquity originated in Minneapolis and St. Paul. That’s where it was. He was a naval man. He was a naval parliamentarian.

He was a naval man, but he had his friends, and when they defeated Harry for election, reelection to the Senate up in Beltrami County—I got the first name now, but I haven’t got the last one—

they should have been ashamed of themselves. Harry brought more goddamn money into that starving, poor, drainage ditch-tax-ridden community up there, than anybody could possibly get out of Heaven. He saved the goddamn northern Minnesota area, Harry Bridgeman did, and he saved it because he was a god-dang close friend of Rockne’s in the Senate. They were pals. They were friends. Those bills that were passed before I was a member of the Senate: refinancing, all of that stuff up there, all the bond issues, and taking this big area and making a game preserve out of it and assuming the tax load and all that. Of course we were all very happy that it was done, but it was done by—Bridgeman is the name I’m trying to think of, Harry Bridgeman. It was done through Rockne and Bridgeman, and Rockne knew it.

He knew the situation up there and so forth that you had to be awful careful, because in those—I don’t suppose it’s any different than it is now. I know it isn’t, in fact. We just have an example of it here in the newspaper here last week. Maybe television boys picked it up. I remember a man who in later years was chairman of the Finance Committee. He was a very good friend of mine. I never served on the Finance Committee. That’s the one committee in the Senate I never was a member of, the Finance Committee, and I never wanted to be. I got to be chairman of the Rules Committee or anything I wanted with my seniority standing, but I didn’t want that committee. This man said to me—he was from Mankato, they have the Bemidji area Teachers’ College in Moorhead—and he was telling me his troubles one day. He was chairman of the Finance Committee, because I was of taxes, and we tried to keep a little liaison between us because we were going to have to raise the money that they wanted to spend. “Well, if the Bemidji Teachers College is going to get this, by God, the Mankato College is going to get it.” “Well, does the Mankato Teachers College need this?” “Well, that doesn't make any difference. They’re going to get it.”

Now you saw something in the papers the other day about the distribution of this Federal aid?

JM: Oh, the money back from the Federal Government?

DW: Yeah. Reimbursement?

JM: No.

DW: No, not reimbursement.

JM: No, the federal program of giving money back to the states. Federal sharing.

DW: Federal sharing. It’s been pushed in the township. They have no goddamn use for it, they just put the money in the bank and there it sits while some other poor community out here is just starving to death and that’s the way it goes. You had to be careful when you were handling those bills for northern Minnesota that there weren’t too many people found out what the hell it was going to do or they’d want the same goddamn thing for Fairmont or Blue Earth or some other place because it was public money that was being spent, and now we’ve got it.

I was at the National Tax Convention. I’ve attended National Tax Conventions for more than twenty years, I guess, National Tax Association. Well, I think it was four years ago. I told them

on the floor then that this federal sharing was going to get itself in a mess, and I was against it. They had no business doing it. I see in one of the papers this morning it’s getting kind of close to the situation, but what’s happened really in the federal sharing is just what happened with the Teachers’ College at Bemidji and the Teachers’ College at Mankato. Well, you’re going to get this. All right, you can have this and that and so forth, because the chairman of the committee at that time was from Mankato, and he couldn’t go back home with a record that showed that Bemidji got this and his college down in Mankato didn’t get nothing. Walter Judd used to talk about it. Some people need it; some don’t, but take care of the ones that need it.

He said it’s the same thing in the Federal Government. When they did this federal sharing thing, they had to parcel it out so everybody was going to get a couple of peanuts, you know. You couldn’t live a half a day on the peanuts they got, but they’re going to get it anyway. They had to be careful in getting all those aids for northern Minnesota, because there are more votes in the legislature from the southern part than the northern part. They got it, and it was Harry Bridgeman and Rockne that really saved the day for northern Minnesota. I’ve forgotten who the chairman on the House side was. It wasn’t Claude Allen, he came after that. I never knew, I’ve forgotten who that chairman was over there. Anyway, you were talking about Rockne, and that’s one of the great things that he did do.

JM: Yeah. Now Rockne, when Governor Olson wanted about five million dollars from Rockne in the Finance Committee. He wanted them to approve—

DW: For what?

JM: For welfare. Rockne was an opponent, and he kept killing the bill and killing it. Ultimately it went through. Would you have been opposed to welfare bills that Governor Olson wanted?

DW: Do you remember what kind of a welfare bill it was? If it was a giveaway, I would be opposed to it. If it was an aid to dependent children—property administered—or aid to the blind or one of those categories, no, I wouldn’t have been opposed to it, not at all.

The funny thing that some of the historians never seem to get their finger on is they think the Social Security Act of the United States, 1935, effective in 1936, was the first thing, well, I already put my finger on two categories: old aid assistance, and aid to dependent children. The first state that ever enacted the aid to dependent children, which wasn’t called that at all in those days, was Colorado, and that was in 1912, I believe.

Second state was either Illinois or Indiana. I think Indiana. I don’t know. The third state was Minnesota in 1913, and it was Mother’s Aid, that was the program, Mother’s Aid. It was administered by the judges of the Probate Court, which wasn’t illegal if the judges wanted to do it voluntarily. They did it, anyway, but it was not a judicial function. It was figured that, well, here’s a man that dies and he’s left a widow and some kids and there isn’t any money, and who is better equipped than our administration of affairs to know about that than the judges of the Probate Court? It was given over to the judges of the Probate Court and they were given a clerk or somebody to help them do it, and that was in 1913.

Ever since that time, there has been aid to dependent children in Minnesota. Well, how the hell many people know about that? The government was Republican with a Republican governor, a Republican Senate, Republican House of Representatives, and they set up the program. Now on our side of the picture Republicans have supported these things all down the line. Then we had another one that was aid for the aged is really what it was. It was administered countywide, not statewide. It was an optional with the counties, under the theory that the state would reimburse the county for the money spent. It was used here in Anoka County.

Now, I’d be the first one to concede, as you look back on it now, that the Mother’s Aid law only took into part of the category, but it did take in the families of men that were incarcerated in prison and it reached out quite a ways. It didn’t go as far as it goes now, for Christ’s sake, that you could get Mother’s Aid and be living with two or three illegitimate husbands at the same time and all that sort of thing, which of course there isn’t very much of that going on. That’s overblown a hell of a lot, too.

We had all those things in Minnesota. I don’t think we had any special program for blind people, but in Minneapolis, in Hennepin County, there were volunteer organizations. There was a big organization sponsored by the churches, and they did a hell of a good job in taking care of people who were hungry and so forth and so on.

JM: Can I ask you about the trucker strike in 1934?

DW: Yeah, you can. I remember it very well. I remember exactly where their headquarters were.

JM: Did you support Governor Olson’s handling of that?

DW: I think he handled it very well.

JM: Do you?

DW: He called out the militia, you remember.

JM: To support the strikers. Some people thought he should have broken the strike.

DW: Well, he called out the militia and his friend said it was to support the strikers. There was disorder, and local enforcement officers were unable to cope with it, and the governor called out the militia. I figured he was supporting the public, too. He was just trying to stop the riots.

JM: Did it stop them?

DW: Labor says he’s helping them. Yes.

JM: So whatever the reason—

DW: Well, there were a couple of murders; at least one.

JM: Yeah, there were four or five, I think, before it was over with.

DW: Yeah. When it got that bad is when he stepped in. Who was mayor? The mayor must have asked for it, though, I guess. Maybe he made him ask for it. I don’t know.

JM: I don’t remember either.

DW: I don’t think he had to have the mayor ask for it, though.

JM: No, I don’t think so. If you were to think of Governor Olson in a sentence what’s the first thing that comes to your mind that characterizes Governor Olson to you in your memory? How do you think of him?

DW: Well, I would say that he was an able and a conscientious governor, who unfortunately—

JM: This is July 27, 1974, and we are visiting with Mr. Don Wright in his home.

We’d like to get into your senatorial years, by far the greatest, most significant part of your involvement in the state legislature. You had, I think, made some comments about Governor Benson, in speaking of Olson. Were there any significant happenings in those two years that you wanted to comment on? I know you talked a little bit about Benson and how the Farmer-Labor Party started falling apart at the seams. What was the Republican reaction during those Benson years?

DW: Well, I never was an active leader in the strict definition of the Republican Party. I spent most of my time, in fact all of my time, with legislative candidates and legislative problems. When Mr. Olson died and Mr. Benson became governor, the party started to slip, and it slipped down among its own party members who were members of the legislature. There were several members of the legislature that were the leaders in the Farmer-Labor Party that were having so much trouble trying to get along with Mr. Benson that they simply deserted their party, walked out on it entirely, so that at the end of Mr. Benson’s administration the legislature came back into the hands of the conservatives again.

We must always remember that Benson’s legislature was a violent partisan organization during the years we’re talking about. Several members, including stable members of the Farmer-Labor Party just walked out of the party right there in the middle of the legislative session. Mr. Benson and his leaders were a ways to the left of the party. They wouldn’t sit still for him, so they just walked out of the party. That was a part of the downfall of the party.

The other part of it was that after Mr. Olson died the party people just put everything up for grabs, and that’s what happened. There was a lot of talk, and a lot of scandals and so forth related to public funds and jobs and political patronage, generally that sort of thing. When Mr. [Harold E.] Stassen came in, there was a very [unclear] to work in.

JM: Well, that was one of the issues that he made for his bid for governor, wasn’t it? Mr. Stassen was for civil service reform?

DW: That was one, yes.

JM: Reorganization of the whole state government was another, wasn’t it?

DW: Yeah.

JM: Were these issues popular ones in the Senate and the House then?

DW: Oh, yes. There was a lot of talk and the legislature considered a general civil service law between the parties, and had the backing of I believe the Republican Party, and [unclear] the voters to a certain degree. The governor was [unclear] labor relations. When things don’t happen you make them happen.

[unclear] was chairman of the Civil Administration Committee in the Senate in Mr. Stassen’s administration, and that [unclear] civil service bills and labor bills. The organization was [unclear], of that civil service, and the reorganization of the state government, and [unclear] to a large extent the Labor Relations Act. There was another committee on labor but it required another branch of government, so it came under the jurisdiction of the legislature.

We worked all those things out, and I believe if we were going to look back, I was under Mr. Stassen’s administration, there were a whole lot of what we then thought were forward strides in the affairs of the government of Minnesota that had taken place so many years in the past, and more than had been taken in any one administration since.

JM: So you see those as very active years legislatively?

DW: Yes, they certainly were, and they were very important years legislatively. There were some mistakes made, but then there’s always going to be some mistakes made, and I don’t mean anything real wrong when I say mistakes. I mean it was overreaching for the civil service law. We made it too tight. We made it too tough. It’s still too tough. It’s too difficult to discharge an incompetent employee.

JM: So do you think you erred in favor of too much protection for individuals?

DW: That’s right. That would be a natural mistake to make, and we made it. I made it, I wrote the bill, really. We had people included in the drafting, but I mean, furnishing the ideas and so forth, so I went a little too far in that respect. Minnesota Labor Relations law was one of the first in the nation; I think the first in the nation. All of its terms, practically, were adopted by the Federal Congress in the law called the [unclear] Law, so that was a big step forward.

Civil Administration, we just had to do something to protect the public treasury even further, roads and so forth from unscrupulous people. We did, and we made that too tough, too. It required bids on practically all purchases that were involved. You do things in a hurry, and you do the best you can with it.

I remember distinctly that we [unclear] in the Highway Department, and that was the first, because some of their contracts had got into trouble, tied up so that they couldn’t employ farmers; absolutely compliant with the law, they had to take bids for farmers to use their teams of horses or tractors to cut leaves along the highway, or people to mow hay along the highway right-of way. Well, I think that softened the attorney general’s rule. They’ve been changing it around ever since and now they’re going too far the other way again.

This last session of the legislature, or the session before that, or maybe even the last session that I wasn’t there, they changed the law to allow the state to purchase without taking bids up to a certain number of dollars. When you’re dealing with public money, you cannot be too careful, and I’m sure that some of these things are overreaching a bit.

In terms of the rest of our other situation—something had to be done. For example, in the schools the law had always said that a member of the school board could deal with the school board as a supplier of property or selling them materials and so forth. So [unclear] the school board, and if there is only one coal dealer in town and he’s a member of the school board, and a good member of the school board, but they can’t buy coal from him because he’s a member of the school board. Things like that that you have to get straightened out. There’s always danger in letting the bar down, but you have to do it with practical circumstances.

Those things were all done, and Mr. Stassen’s administration I thought was a very successful administration. The opportunity was there, and he was willing to help make it work. When I say helped make it work, I mean that. He helped you make it work, and was not one of these people who felt that because he’s been elected governor he had become the high-and-mighty monarch of all creation just because he was elected governor. I guess what I’m trying to say is that he didn’t try to dictate to the legislature what they should do and what they should not do. The working arrangement between the legislature and Governor Stassen was very, very pleasant, because he never gave orders to the legislature. Under our theory of government that’s the way it ought to be.

JM: You would consider him a good administrator, then?

DW: Yes, he was a great executive and administrator. He understood that the legislature was the lawmaking body and that he was to make suggestions and not orders.

JM: How would you rate him with all the governors you worked with?

DW: Well, I think I want to rate him as top. That could be maybe because I happened to have more to do with him legislative wise while he was governor. Now, after he was governor, then I became chairman of the Tax Committee of the Senate. Now I’m in an entirely different role. It’s impossible for me to cooperate as chairman of the Tax Committee and endorse some of these governors' spending programs that they advocated, because some of them were honest in their avocations and some of them weren’t. Some of them were advocating this for political reason or that.

It was all in the struggle to get enough money from our tax sources to keep the state on a cash basis, and so you had to just fight with some of these people to cut the size of their spending ideas down so as to keep them within what we thought the taxpayers of Minnesota could afford to pay.

JM: Before we get into your tax stance we had a question about the civil service legislation. What were some of the big sources of opposition? What were the big sources of opposition to civil service legislation?

DW: At the moment I don’t remember a definite, organized opposition to civil service, unless it was the extreme leftist people who believed that there should be absolute power in the government, or run the whole show. They didn’t believe in civil service, because civil service would disrupt loyalty to the party.

JM: And it was taking away patronage.

DW: Yeah, take away patronage. It would weaken the party. They weren’t too vociferous about it, but they were the opposition to various parts of the civil service setup, like [unclear] and so forth.

JM: What about the labor legislation?

DW: Labor legislation?

JM: Was the Citizens’ Alliance still an effective voice against the organized labor during Governor Stassen’s tenure? That was a group of Minneapolis businessmen that had really fought labor legislation during Olson’s tenure.

DW: Well, if you could think of some specific issue to illustrate it with I’d like to, but my mind doesn’t have one right at the moment. The organization that you’re talking about, the Citizens’ Alliance, was an active organization, and it’s still here, but it’s had a couple of different names since then. It’s an organization of the employers of people, and to say that they were fighting labor, I don’t believe I want to put it that way. They weren’t antagonistic to labor, but they were concerned about the costs and the expense of the benefits that were to be derived, for example, from workman’s compensation. These things all have to fit together, and so in some of those particulars they were opposed to certain propositions that were advocated by the labor unions.

JM: Binding arbitration would be another clash?

DW: Binding arbitration, I don’t think we ever had that as an issue. I don’t remember that one. They had to protect their own businesses so that they weren’t carried away with excessive costs, and how are they paying all these other things because they’re all tied up together. Today we have what was the Minnesota Employers’ Association. What is it now? They changed the name again now. I’ve forgotten the name of them, but it’s the same idea. It went along pretty well. We’ve done pretty well, fair to both sides, and then we cut into unemployment compensation.

That was another one. The first question was who’s going to pay the bill? [laughs] Shall the employer pay an entire [unclear] on employers and the working people each contribute to it? Shall just the labor, working people, make their own contributions amongst themselves? Then Minnesota decided that the employer would pay the entire bill. Other states have decided it would be a fifty-fifty. Some states decided the employees would pay the whole bill and run it themselves. [unclear] unemployment insurance company they’ve operated. California is one of them, big state, so that question was up through Stassen’s administration.

JM: How did it happen that in Minnesota the arrangement was agreed upon that the employer would pay all of the unemployment compensation?

DW: Well, the employer wanted to. Neither labor nor the employers liked this fifty-fifty deal. They didn’t like that.

JM: Why?

DW: Well, because of the management, I suppose. If the employees paid it, they can run it. That’s your thing to do. If the employer pays it, then he can have his voice in the running of it.

JM: Did labor fight that?

DW: No, labor didn’t fight that. Labor in Minnesota didn’t want their people to pay any part of it.

JM: They saw that as a fringe benefit?

DW: Yeah, they thought it was. They found out, though. But that’s how that came about. Then the League of Women Voters had their notions about how to keep it pure, and they were opposed to veterans’ preference. We got over all those hurdles pretty good, except again, we went a little too far with veterans’ preference, and now we’ve backed away from it a little bit, you know.

JM: Now, sometimes you note opposition from people whose positions might be displaced by your organization. Did you have that kind of opposition when civil administration came up under Governor Stassen? Was there consolidation to the extent that some people might be displaced from positions, or did that bill sail through pretty cleanly?

DW: No, we didn’t [unclear] from that. We really didn’t. This reorganization was not in the nature of a consolidation of departments. This was directed more to safeguarding the interests of the state and the purchasing [unclear] and the forms, et cetera.

JM: Now, consolidation came later, didn’t it?

DW: I don’t think there’s ever really been one. [laughs] There have been several proposals, but I don’t think there’s ever really been one.

JM: Do you think it’s needed?

DW: Oh, yeah, it’s needed, but I don’t think we’ve ever had one.

JM: Do you think it won’t happen because of entrenched positions and people, or what?

DW: Well, while I’ve been in the legislature, and that’s quite a long time, I’ve never seen a bill for the consolidation of the departments of state government and so forth that didn’t add more people to the payroll than it took off, and the ones it added were all the big high-salary top jobs, and they didn’t take anything off at the bottom, just a build up at the top.

As I said before, people are people, and they’re not all alike, and you just can’t make a cast and say, “Now that’s what you’re going to do, you’re going to do it this way,” but they’re not going to do it that way, they’re going to do it their way. So it really hasn’t really been accomplished. I believe there’s been some token this or putting this together with that or something, but I mean get right down to the meat of the thing. I think it could be done. There wouldn’t be now, since civil services is so long entrenched, I don’t think there would be very much difficulty of that, with the kinds of jobs that you’re talking about.

I think it could be done, but you’d have to get rid of the idea that you’re going to hire a lot of super-duper high-selling people to run something when it’s running fairly well the way it is and could be run an awful lot cheaper. It would take some years. You’d have to set up the law, an acceptable law, that you can’t just fire people off the payroll. Do it like you do many things— we’re not going to hire anymore. This can be done. You ought to go and spend a little time around that capitol office building someday in the week and see what some people think constitutes a day’s work.

Now, the employees are really not to blame for that, I think, for all this stuff. It’s just a lot of work. They got a job and they don’t care, they work or they don’t work. But generally speaking, the employees know they’d be much happier if they were working all the time. The department heads and so forth haven’t had too much experience, you know, and they don’t know a damn what a day’s work is either.

I’d like to see some businessmen go in there and set up some standards and so forth. When I say businessmen, I don’t mean that because they’re businessmen, but I mean people who understand how to keep employees happy and get their work turned out. I know they’d be much happier if they were turning out more work. When you have a department like the Education Department, used to drive me crazy, and every time the legislature would give them something extra to do, they’d have to have a supervisor and an assistant supervisor and four stenographers and two private secretaries and an office. You know?

And that’s a fact. That’s exactly what happened. So, that never occurred to somebody that maybe this department head could take on that with one more clerk, why, he could get this done. No, it’s got to be a big thing all the time. This has got to stop. In our country, at the federal level, the state level, and at the city level, this business of continually increasing the cost of [unclear] has got to stop. It’s got to. It’s eating up the substance of our people. It’s got to stop.

JM: Now, Governor Stassen resigned in 1943 to enter the Navy, and Governor [Edward] Thye replaced him. What’s your impression of Thye’s administration? These were war years, weren’t they?

DW: These were war years, yeah. Governor Thye was an extremely careful and strictly honest governor, personally honest and politically honest and so forth. He became a United States senator, and he continued to be politically honest. He was defeated, wasn’t he, by somebody who was a mayor?

JM: In the Senate?

DW: [unclear] United States Senate.

JM: Yeah. [Hubert H.] Humphrey won in 1948.

DW: Well, Thye was—

JM: Then it must have been [Eugene J.] McCarthy. Is that right?

DW: Yeah. But he was not a flashy man at all.

JM: So he was quite a contrast to Stassen?

DW: Yes, he was, but he was an honest, hardworking plodder and no harm came to Minnesota while he was governor. There weren’t any real accomplishments, but as you say, we were involved in war at that time. We had other things to do and other things to look at and support.

JM: How was Stassen’s resignation greeted? Was that a surprise to you people in the legislature that the governor resigned?

DW: Well, he took a leave of absence and served in the Navy for a while. No, I don’t think it was a surprise after that. He did resign, didn’t he? That’s right. Yeah. Then Thye took over, and then Mr. Thye was the candidate.

JM: Then he was succeeded by Luther Youngdahl.

DW: Yeah.

JM: Who seemed to have quite a program of social services that he proposed.

DW: Yeah.

JM: So was Minnesota ready for that, then, after World War II? He became governor running ’46.

DW: I think while he was governor, I was chairman of the Committee on Education, or Committee on Public Welfare. I’d have to look at the book, but I think I was. He was concerned about the state hospitals. That was one of his great concerns. He was a noisy one, he demanded the public attention, and he was the sparkplug of accomplishing some changes in the hospital situation.

JM: Were they needed?

DW: Some of them were, yes. There will never be a time when there aren’t some things needed in the public institutions like hospitals. Some of them, again, went too far, but it was an improvement. What they tried to do then was to abolish the idea of having patients in restraints, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that just about that time, a little before he started the conversation about it, well, we began to get these quieting drugs, what do you call them?

JM: Antidepressants?

DW: Antidepressants or depressants.

Tore them down a little bit, and they got into general practice and finally into the hospitals, and you never could run these hospitals without restraints if it wasn’t for the use of these drugs. Today, I’m talking about.

So, I remember that Senator Charlie [unclear], he was on the Finance Committee and Buildings and Institutions Subcommittee, chairman of [unclear]. I remember Charlie being there [unclear] children’s hospital. He was telling me about it. The superintendent was showing them around, and there was a feeble-minded child who had just had a bowel movement, and the toilet hadn’t been flushed yet and the child was playing with the stool on the bowel movement, in the toilet, and Charlie came along and the superintendent turned to the head nurse, he said, “Well, how long has this been going on?” “Why,” she says, “ever since Governor Youngdahl took the restraints away from us.”

You see, there are some things, you know, that you can’t cope with and all. After all, shall I say the restraint rule went too far one way? Now we’re using an awful lot of these quieting drugs, and, in the hospitals bill thousands and thousands of dollars to it, and it’s a better place. It’s a better place. Now what that’s doing to the patients, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s much changed, but it had enabled them, I think, to get along without too much visible restraints and so forth.

JM: Would you characterize those years with Youngdahl as fairly quiet years in Minnesota politically? This is when the DFL now had been merged.

DW: I think it was, yeah. I think we had tax troubles in those years. Let’s see. When did he get to be governor?

JM: ‘46 he was elected.

DW: Yeah, ’46.

JM: Was there a continual push for a sales tax during all of those years, the forties and the fifties, finally when it was passed in the late sixties?

DW: No. No, it was quite a few years that we never talked to effect, we thought it.

JM: The income tax was producing sufficient—

DW: Yeah. Quite a few years there that sales tax was in there. I can remember that the demands for money were terrible.

JM: Would this be the fifties now?

DW: Yeah. Then we had a tax study interim committee. We had two of them, or three. Three, I guess. I’ve forgotten when I got to be chairman of the tax committee. Anyway, we had an interim committee then and a good many of us had come to the conclusion then that regardless of what businessmen said, many of us came to the conclusion that we had to have some other source of tax revenue. We just had to have it.

So, we sat down with the interim committee, and we held hearings all around the state of Minnesota. Oh, God, I don’t know how many days I spent on them, many, many, many. Winter and summer for two years, almost every county seat. I don’t mean we had meetings in every county seat, but we combined two or three counties and, you know, tried to get the leaders on both sides of the question there, township and so forth and go over and go over and go over this proposition until we really rubbed out the opposition to it as far as the public was concerned, the voters and so forth, especially out in the counties. Well, then you had your organizations, and then you had those who were playing politics with the question either running for office in favor or running for office against it or something else.

It finally got up to the point where Mr. [Karl Harold Phillip] LeVander was governor, but you know the story there, and he had made a political promise that he wouldn’t sign the bill, and he kept his word. He didn’t sign it and it had to be passed over his veto.

JM: So you see the sales tax ultimately coming as the culmination of a great deal of lobbying, really, by even the legislature educating the public.

DW: Yes.

JM: Now one of the things about the Youngdahl years was his resignation in 1951. He was appointed by Truman as a judge, federal district judge in Washington, and there was a lot of speculation, apparently, as to why Youngdahl accepted that. Do you have any reactions or any memories of that resignation, any inside information as to why he accepted that?

DW: Well, his name is Youngdahl, and he was a district judge in Hennepin County, and before that he was a municipal judge in Hennepin County. He and my brother Fred were judges at the same time.

JM: Some have said that he might have been maneuvered into heading a campaign for Stassen that he might not have wanted to do. Do you know of any evidence of that maneuvering behind the scenes?

DW: I never heard of his name in connection with that. That wouldn’t happen. Well, what would you do? You’re a governor, you’ve been a municipal judge and a district court judge and now you’re governor, and they come along with some kind of a deal whereby you can get to be appointed a federal district court judge. You came up the hard way. The Youngdahl family, his father was a minister, the boys all worked, like my brother Fred and I, and we were all those kind of people who worked their way along. Youngdahl practiced law, and I think he was a night law school graduate. I could be wrong; he maybe [unclear]. I don’t think so, though. But anyway, somebody comes along and they set up a deal whereby you can be a federal judge the rest of your life. That’s a lifetime job. Now, what are you going to do? Youngdahls, the whole family of Youngdahls, it was all of us, but Youngdahls first. I don’t blame him for that. I don’t criticize him. Youngdahls first, had a chance to get the job and he took it. So he resigned. Who was the lieutenant governor, Ancher Nelson, wasn’t he? It wasn’t him, no.

JM: Elmer Anderson.

DW: Elmer Anderson, that’s right. What am I thinking about? Sure, Elmer, yeah. So he took the job. Well, a lot of people criticized him about it, but I never did, because what the hell, he was a good judge, a capable judge, there’s no question about that. Nobody ever said he wasn’t a capable jurist—

JM: You said you never heard his name mentioned in relation to a Stassen campaign, and I think you said that that would have never happen. Was there friction, or?

DW: He wouldn’t do it.

JM: He wouldn’t have ever—

DW: I told you, Youngdahls are for Youngdahls, see. And then the Youngdahl family, Luther Youngdahl for Luther Youngdahl, Oscar Youngdahl for Oscar Youngdahl. It’s a different way of living, you know. He was quite a reformer, and that is to say he took the reform platform and we passed the anti-slot machine bill under Youngdahl. I didn’t vote for it.

JM: You didn’t support it?

DW: No.

JM: Why not?

DW: Oh, I kind of got a [unclear] against it. There are a few slot machines around here, but you don’t see them. They’re all under cover someplace. I knew that’s the way it would be, and that’s the way it is.

JM: You favored regulation of them in the open rather than forcing them underground?

DW: Oh, no, I never was in favor of slot machines anyway. They were always illegal. They were never legal in Minnesota. He put terrific penalties on them, like a big one was the property on which they were found. Not just the machine, but if there was a slot machine in the back of your grocery store, the whole goddamn place could be closed up. We still have an abatement law for prostitution. Wherever prostitution is carried forth, the whole building can be closed up, boarded up, locked up. You can’t use it for a year, unless you can get it open under a bond or something. There was a provision there for that.

I thought the penalty was kind of ridiculous for slot machines. I guess that’s the reason I didn’t vote for it. I don’t think it was the gambling idea that bothered him, but slot machines are vicious things. They rob you and rob and rob you, and you don’t have any chance. It isn’t a gamble at all, it’s a pre-fixed deal. I played poker many hundreds of nights a week with Youngdahl and my brother Fred and Judge Levi Hall, who died a couple weeks ago, and all the rest of them. We used to have a bridge club, and no, Luther wasn’t a very good poker player, either, as I remember. [laughs]

Luther was a good man. Luther was a good man. Minnesota needed Luther. They needed him. He was all right. He was a good governor.

JM: What do you think best characterizes C. Elmer Anderson’s years? He ran in ’52 and won, after serving out the remainder of Youngdahl’s term.

DW: Yeah, it’s an enigma with me. There was something wrong with him, and I don’t know what it was. There certainly was nothing wrong with his head. I mean, he always intended to do exactly the right thing, and he was scrupulously honest, and a competent businessman, but he didn’t have what it took to be a public official. Is that the right way to say it? I don’t know what it takes, but he didn’t have it, whatever it was.

[unclear] We had the primary, we were going to have a primary election, of course, and there was somebody else running for it that nobody wanted. The party bosses didn’t want it. I mean, we didn’t want the guy to be some wiseacre, and as I said, a member of the legislature is kind of out of the party politics, just on the fringes. Anyway, somebody got this idea that they’d get another candidate to run for the nomination for lieutenant governor, and that would make it doubly sure that this guy from St. Paul would get the nomination.

So somebody said, You go up to Brainerd and you get him to run—the candidate. He’s been in the Republican State Convention for years and years, file for lieutenant governor. Well, that’s the story.

JM: And then he was elected?

DW: And then he was elected. He got the nomination, and that’s how he got to be lieutenant governor. Then, as presiding officer over the Senate, he did a pretty good job. He was a good student. He studied parliamentary law for about three weeks before the Senate convened that year, and he knew his book pretty good. He worked at it. He worked at the damn thing. He worked hard as governor, you know. He was not out playing golf. He was working all the time. But it didn’t pay off. So that’s the story about C. Elmer.

JM: I think that’s part of this too, about that three-way deal.

DW: I think that’s true. God, the name was under my tongue just now. He’s actually a shy person. His wife was kind of different. She was just a very nice person. Everybody, members of the legislature all liked C. Elmer. They were all trying to do everything they could to help C. Elmer, you know.

But I remember one member of the legislature was a very good friend of C. Elmer’s and said, “Well, goddamn it, he’s got to do something. Let’s pass a bill he can veto. My God, he’s got to do something. He’s got to be assertive about something.” I said, “My God, we’ve got too goddamn many governors around here that have asserted themselves and they’ve asserted us right into bankruptcy, for Christ’s sake.”

[unclear] I think the banks were kind of lukewarm to him after that. As they did with me, I had to oppose them on one bill and [unclear]. You’d think I was dog lover. But that was C. Elmer.

JM: Well, he was then defeated in ’54, I think, by Orville Freeman.

DW: Yeah, that’s true.

JM: Now, the Freeman years then were a DFL governor and a conservative legislature. Were there some real dogfights in those years between the governor and the legislature, or were there pretty good relations?

DW: No, they were dogfights. Well, again you see, I’m not in the position to say anything because I didn’t have a key to the governor’s office. I was in the other party, and when things got too tough, why then they’d call a conference and being a member of the Rules Committee, I’d sit in on the conference, but I never had any close relations with him.

JM: Now, during those years, there were an awful lot of commissions and studies and so forth initiated. Do you think at those years as there being a lot more of those commissions and special studies than had ever been initiated prior to Freeman?

DW: [unclear] very much. Oh, if you were on a committee, what you wanted was facts. Now, that did work, but beyond that, and of course you’ve got to be careful where you get the so-called facts from, but generally speaking, the interim committees [unclear].

JM: Now, there was a rather far-reaching judicial revision carried out under Freeman, isn’t this correct, one of the first large revisions of the judicial system in the state since the establishment of the state and the writing of the original constitution. Were you involved in any of that judicial revision?

DW: Let’s see, what did we do then?

JM: Constitutional amendment, 1956, provided for a reorganization of the state’s judicial system and moving it to judicial districts.

DW: [unclear] Yeah. Let’s see. Yes, I think so.

JM: Did you think that they—

DW: I want to see that law again, though, before I [unclear]. I think that was right, though.

JM: But I think the provision was made for the elimination of them, and whether or not they were eliminated I’m not sure.

DW: That’s right.

JM: Do you think they ever served any function [unclear]?

DW: You had to have somebody who was close to the job to do it. [unclear] else, and you couldn’t give that somebody else real, wide, judicial [unclear]. You had to limit them down to something where he wasn’t going to scalp somebody, you know? Small courts, you know, and they served a great function.

JM: [unclear] trouble with labor and strikes and so forth, didn’t he?

DW: I don’t remember that. [unclear] then the recount. Well, you don’t know who to believe anyway. I know several of the recounted that had been [unclear]. You know, there are a lot of people [unclear].

[unclear] whether it’s to a bank on a note or a political promise or something else, it should be kept. I’ll say that for Harold Stassen. Goddamn it, he kept his word. I know one fellow who claimed he didn’t, but with me he kept his word. Every goddamn time we had an agreement about the language [unclear]. But I had been there quite a few years, and I had been with quite a few governors [unclear].

[unclear] You and I can sit here and talk all around an issue of what he said [unclear] he said that. Maybe neither one of us said that. But I knew that.

[unclear] Could be. I don’t remember it.

JM: Yeah, there’s never been a liberal Senate [unclear].

DW: Who the hell was Speaker?

JM: I don’t recall.

DW: You don’t?

JM: No.

DW: Who was the Speaker of the House?

JM: Zwach.

DW: No, it wasn’t Zwach [unclear]. Yeah, I think you’re right. It was a guy from out here, Benton, Minnesota.

JM: [unclear] Were you in favor of that?

DW: Yeah, and Governor Anderson was supposed to have told [unclear] that’s why they all [unclear].

JM: Oh, is that right?

DW: [unclear] Yeah. It’s not Elmer’s Glue. No, that’s not it. It’s [unclear].

The thing that really broke my heart is this goddamn zoo that they appropriated the money for. I can’t understand why the state should be in that business, but a lot of people think it’s okay, so I must be wrong, but [unclear].

[unclear] that zoo once a year. [unclear] That’s going to cost a hell of a big gob of money, too. And what will they see that they couldn’t see in [unclear]

JM: Well, Rolvaag then became governor.

DW: Yeah.

JM: Were those stormy years?

DW: Oh, I don’t think they were so stormy, no. I don’t think so.

JM: How did you see [Karl F.] Rolvaag? Did you get along?

DW: Oh, Rolvaag and I always got along very good. Most of Rolvaag’s work was done by his lieutenants. Personally we always got along very well, yeah. We didn’t have very much controversy.

JM: What about his successor, LeVander?

DW: Well, [unclear] that’s why I got along all right with him.

JM: Was he opposed to the [unclear] tax? That’s right, he did [unclear] the votes over the veto?

DW: I’ll say there was.