I recently came across this article by Elmer Benson, leader of the old Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota, appointed by Farmer Labor Governor Floyd Olson to the U.S. Senate for a brief period and then one term two year Governor of Minnesota from 1936-1938.
As Governor Benson fought for property tax relief for homeowners, state income and corporation taxes, sharply increased state aid to education, compulsory workman's compensation, and other pro labor policies, with the aid of CPUSA activists, whom he welcomed as allies, so much so that he, along with Congressman John Bernard, was accused of being a "secret Communist," a "charge" that cold war revivalists later brought back.
Benson was defeated for re-election by Harold Stassen in 1938, a year of general political reaction but continued to serve as a Farmer Labor party candidate and leader of its left wing.
He became an opponent of Hubert Humphrey, the Minneapolis Democratic Mayor who, after the Farmer-Labor party was merged with the Democats during WWII(a disaster ulitimately for the left) became the leader of the party's rightwing. Benson served as a leader of the Progressive Party in Minnesota in 1948(where I first came across him in my studies forty five years ago) and became, to use George Orwell's term, a political unperson in the purges which followed. Benson did in my opinion much more to improve the lives of the people of Minnesota than either Humphrey of his young protegee Eugene McCarthy, although in the cold war world of the 1950s and 1960s they became leaders of the "center-left" in the Democratic party
I have put the link to the article from Minnesota History below and I urge our readers to read it.
Shortly before his death in 1985 at the age of 89, Elmer Benson wrote to the New York Review of Books, whose reviewers usually reflected the world view of the Committees of Cultural Freedom globally, that is salon anti-Communism. Benson was responding to Hal Draper's review of Harvey Klehr's Heyday of American Communism, a work that fitted in perfectly with the Reagan cold war revival and was a sharp backlash against an emerging school of labor and left historical scholarship which rejected the demonization of the CPUSA. To make it for complicated and in some respects comical, Hal Draper was the Trotskyist brother of Theodore Draper, a former CPUSA member who had left that party before WWII and then became a sort of roving professional anti-Communist journalist and writer of thinly researched works on the CPUSA in a tradition that Klehr was continuing, albeit with extensive footnotes.
I have cut and pasted Benson's response below, not primarily as a historical footnote but because of their valuable insights to where we are today
Norman Markowitz
In response to:
Pie in the Sky from the May 10, 1984 issue
To the Editors:
My attention has been called to a review of Harvey Klehr’s The Heyday of American Communism by Hal Draper [NYR, May 10]. I wish to object to certain statements in the review.
I was the Governor of Minnesota during 1937 and 1938, the beginning period of the Popular Front outlook of the Communist Party. I’m sure that communists did participate in the Farmer-Labor Party at this time and also in the farm and union movements. However, the statement in Draper’s review that the C.P. “took over” Floyd B. Olson, who preceded me as Governor, is sheer exaggeration. The reviewer’s further allegation that I “continued in Olson’s path, giving communist organizers money for organizing…” is a further elaboration of the same exaggeration. I don’t know if the basis for the innuendo that the Farmer-Labor Party became almost an extension of the Communist Party lies in the book itself or in the mind of the reviewer; but, in any event, the innuendo should not be allowed to stand without challenge.
Readers may wish to recall that the Farmer-Labor Party was founded in the early 1920s and that it developed into a powerful mass movement, taking control of the State of Minnesota with the election of Governor Olson in 1930. It was a party with radical roots, an amalgam of unionists, Farmer Nonpartisan Leaguers and socialists, from whom a wide range of political leadership emerged. It is ridiculous to suggest that the No. 1 political party of the state could be “taken over” by communists, overnight so to speak, after a handful of communists changed the party line in 1935 and 1936.
Also, readers might like to know that in 1934 the Farmer-Labor Party adopted a platform which declared in part: “We, therefore, declare that capitalism has failed and immediate steps must be taken to abolish capitalism in a peaceful and lawful manner and that a new, sane and just society must be established…. Only a complete reorganization of our social structure into a cooperative commonwealth will bring economic security….” I think it is time to again look critically at our social system which has become military capitalism and seems to need ever increasing “shots in the arm” of war spending even to maintain stagflation. Hating the communists and the Russians comes in very handy on our side of the ocean for keeping the arms race going; and no doubt, hate and fear among Russians works to the same end. To my knowledge, every arms race in history has ended in war; and if this happens again with nuclear weapons, any survivors may live in caves and rummage through our trash dumps to sustain themselves. In the United States, our problem lies not with a small band of communists but rather with the real wielders of power, the Republicans and Democrats who have fostered the military-industrial complex into a cancer in our midst. As was the case in 1934, our system is again in a state of crisis, a crisis which is inflicting plenty of poverty and unemployment but which also threatens the very existence of the human race.
