Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party merged with the state Democratic Party in April 1944. Thus was the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party born.
Working from inside the Democratic Party, Hubert Humphrey helped engineer the merger. The Farmer-Labor Party was riddled with Communists. Humphrey knew it, but he had no trouble working with them. At the time he was a Popular Front kind of guy with no enemies to the left.
Packing the 1946 party caucuses, Communists promptly took over the DFL in Hennepin County (including all of Minneapolis) and in the state. Then Minneapolis Mayor Humphrey could not even get elected a delegate to the state convention. Communists picked up no fewer than 120 of the 160 Hennepin County delegates. In Minneapolis’s Second Ward, both Humphrey and his ally Arthur Naftalin (future Minneapolis mayor and father of Paul Butterfield Blues Band keyboardist Mark Naftalin) went down to defeat.
Humphrey was nevertheless named a delegate at large to the state party convention, where he was to serve as keynote speaker. As Humphrey rose to speak, however, he was shouted down as a “fascist” and “warmonger.” In his meticulous 1984 biography of Humphrey, Carl Solberg records: “A beefy sergeant at arms shouted at him, ‘Sit down, you son of a bitch, or I’ll knock you down.’ He was not allowed to finish his speech.” Solberg comments: “It was an outright coup.”
Solberg adds: “The totally organized left wing took command of the DFL convention….They passed resolutions excoriating Winston Churchill for his ‘iron curtain’ speech…” Talk about history rhyming.
The party’s rising star, Humphrey had been elected mayor of Minneapolis in 1945. He organized a successful counterattack on the Communists to throw them out of the party. By 1948, the task was more or less complete and Humphrey was on his way to national prominence. Mister, we could use a man like Hubert Humphrey again.
Orville Freeman, by the way, was one of Humphrey’s right-hand men in the counterattack. Freeman went on to be elected Minnesota’s first DFL governor and to serve as Secretary of Agriculture in the Kennedy administration. Freeman’s son Mike is the Hennepin County Attorney who is the object of scorn among the radicals who rule the roost in Minneapolis today.
Now Minneapolis appears to be ground zero of the revolution fomented by the radical left and its shock troops among the Antifa/Black Lives Matter gang. They are idiot Marxists who substitute the categories of race for the categories of class in the service of the revolution.
Their local supporters are already embedded in our political institutions: Fifth District Rep. Ilhan Omar sits in Congress and comes to town occasionally to rouse the rabble, Keith Ellison burrows from the inside as Minnesota Attorney General, and Ellison’s son Jeremiah sits on the Minneapolis city council as an avowed supporter of Antifa (“I hereby declare, officially, my support for ANTIFA”).
If you have any doubt what Antifa is all about, please check out Kyle Shideler’s American Mind backgrounder, “The real history of Antifa.” The Communists may be gone, but their successors have arrived. In line with the goal of the shadowy Black Visions Collective and the Antifa crowd, Jeremiah Ellison and his colleagues on the Minneapolis city council have pledged to abolish the police. Ilhan Omar urges them on. Former Nation of Islam hustler Keith Ellison sits on a perch as Minnesota’s chief law enforcement officer, the position from which he has taken control of the Floyd case.
Not entirely on board with the program, Mayor Frey has been subject to the treatment formerly accorded Mayor Humphrey by the 1946 DFL convention sergeant at arms. Shut up, they explained.
They have served up some highly illuminating revolutionary theater. It is sound and fury signifying something. The city council pledge to abolish the police, however, will meet the city charter’s requirement that the city maintain and fund a police force (“of at least 0.0017 employees per resident”). Any move to abolish the police would have to be submitted to Minneapolis voters in the form of a proposed charter amendment.
By contrast with the Democrats who confronted the Communists in the post-1946 battle, however, every Democrat in town is afraid of our gang of radicals. There is no pushback. The Star Tribune should be the voice of civic responsibility at this moment of crisis, yet the editors are giving eunuchs a bad name. Governor Walz serves as a front man for the gang (below). Forgive me for repeating myself — I can only conclude that we could use a man like Hubert Humphrey again.
Walz closed by hinting at concerns outstate:
"I’m thinking about folks sitting out in Marshall or in western Minnesota, what are they hearing when they hear that? What is the vision they’re looking at? We need to help…explain what that’s going to look like."
— Theo Keith (@TheoKeith) June 8, 2020
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