Civics: “the gap widens between the original DFL and its current version”
Surely an important founding father of the DFL would think so. And who might that founding father be but Hubert Humphrey. Then the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, Humphrey played a key role in uniting the Democratic and Farmer-Labor parties and thereby creating the only DFL anywhere in the
country. In a very real sense, he also thought that he was working to create an enlarged, or at
least somewhat larger, tent.
But his tent was going to have some serious limits. Gone was the old Popular Front call of “no enemies to the left.” Gone, therefore, was the idea that liberals, socialists, communists, and their fellow travelers ought to gather together under the same political tent. Or should that be “hang together” under such an oversized, unwieldy tent?
Humphrey, to be sure, was a liberal. But he was something more than that; he was a liberal anti-communist. And the new party that he sought to create was to be a party committed to both liberalism and anti-communism. Today that term is virtually extinct. Not so for Hubert Humphrey. As far as he was concerned, the merging of the two parties was a time for purging as well.
As a result, unhappy Minnesota progressives, meaning some liberals and most all communists and socialists decided to join a renewed Popular Front enterprise, namely the Progressive party of Iowa’s Henry Wallace, the former vice-president of Franklin Roosevelt. That earlier incarnation of a big tent went down to a crushing defeat in the general election of 1948, but Hubert Humphrey did not. He became the first Democrat, let alone the first DFLer, to win statewide election to the U. S. senate from Minnesota. Another liberal anti-communist, namely President Harry Truman, was also elected to a full four-year term, defeating not just the Republicans, but Wallace’s Progressive party and Strom Thurmond of the splinter Dixiecrats.
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Think of FDR’s deployment of the federal government against his political enemies, his attempt to pack the Supreme Court, and his decisions to run for a third and fourth term.
