OLSON OF MINNESOTA

...You might say I'm radical as hell...

...A thorough study of Floyd Olson, and of what he represented in the politics of the thirties, has been overdue...

...I'm what I want to be, a radical...

...At the time of his death at the age of 44, he had an exciting career behind him and a brilliant one ahead—three terms as governor of Minnesota, an almost certain choice as Senator, and rising influence in national third party and liberal circles...

...This explains why, among reformers, Floyd Olson was a success, and why he could contain in one party the mercurial elements of mutually opposed groups...

...As Mayer points out, the roots of Minnesota's Farmer Labor party lay in the regional past, in the Grange, Farmer's Alliance, Populist, and Non Partisan League movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries...

...Before and during World War I, labor strength grew rapidly in the Midwest...

...Born of immigrant parents and raised in the city slums, Olson fought his way up as lumberjack, miner, and migrant worker to a position of minor importance in state politics...

...The next year, Olson went with the New Deal when the Federation seemed about to split it, but Roosevelt was never quite far enough to the left to suit him, and he disliked the New Deal farm policies...

...His handling of the great truck strike of that year, in which he used troops on the side of labor, provoked greater controversy...

...The crucial point of Olson's career was the campaign of 1934, when the Minnesota Farmer Labor party produced its famous platform calling for the abolition of capitalism and the substitution of a "cooperative commonwealth" in which all natural resources, machinery of production, transportation, and communication would be owned by the government...

...His opponents were the same as those of the earlier Midwestern radicals—the "interests"—and he fought them with the same weapons and the same spirit as his predecessors...

...wobbly...

...This explains the difficulty in classifying him as a political type: Olson simply ranged the field, using whatever tools lay at hand with the ability he possessed...

...Floyd Olson, a young county attorney, appeared in the party in 1924...

...II The major portion of Mayer's study deals with Olson's career from 1924 to 1936, for it was during those years that he welded the Farmer Labor party into an organization that dominated state politics and became the "mother party" for the various unsuccessful national farmer-labor parties of the period...

...He once defined himself as one who would "use any agency he finds at hand— whether he believes in the entire program—to translate into action such part of his own program as is possible...

...This was immediately tagged as "a declaration of war on the United States," and Olson as a "red menace," although he pointed out that it was not half so radical as the Declaration of Independence and painstakingly denied all communistic connections...

...George H. Mayer, a mem-"ber of the faculty at Purdue, has supplied this in interesting and readable form...

...He was a consummate politician, as skillful in his ma-neuverings as any old-line boss, and at the same time he was a self-pro-fessed, idealistic reformer...

...Although Olson won the election of 1934, the unstable farmer-labor alliance he headed was beginning to break up, and his attitude toward the American Commonwealth Political Federation, which was attempting to form a national third party, was not yet clear...

...III The key to Floyd Olson's political personality, as Mayer uncovers it, is that he was a reformer, but that he was an opportunist and not a doctrinaire reformer...

...Yet, Mayer points out that Floyd Olson's radicalism was that of Ignatius Donnelly and John A. Johnson, and not that of Huey Long or Father Coughlin—a homegrown Midwestern product, rooted in decades of farm labor unrest...

...In 1918, more as a matter of convenience than anything else, the League and the Minnesota Federation of Labor cooperated in the state elections, and the Farmer Labor party was born...

...After the disintegration of the NPL, beginning in 1920, a new group of leaders gradually took over until by 1924 it became a full fledged third party with a strong city and farm following...

...His book, an excellent synthesis of history and biography, is objective, sound, and a notable contribution not only to our grasp of the workings of third-party politics but to our understanding of the stream of Midwestern political thought...

...Reviewed by Russel B. Nye AS Farmer Labor governor of Minnesota from 1930 to 1936, Floyd Olson made significant political history in a turbulent era...

...At the same time, the Non Partisan League, under A. C. Town-ley, swept the farmers into politics in the Dakotas and Minnesota...

...An ex- I.W.W...

...He could, on the one hand, look like an old-fashioned radical of the "Sockless Jerry" Simpson stamp, and, on the other, preach the "production for use" economy of the sophisticated Eastern liberals with equal ease...

...He constantly balanced expediency with conviction, and mixed his reform with realism...

...He had already sided with labor against the businessmen's powerful Citizen's Alliance, but he was not well known to the farmer element of the state...

...He never read Lenin or Marx, and if there was any trace of foreign ideology in his politics it was that of the Scandinavian cooperative...

...I'm not a liberal," he once said...

...It was during this time, too, that Olson came into political maturity, displaying those traits of mind and action that made him something of an enigma in politics...

...He was, undoubtedly, an extraordinary politician and one of the few outstanding leaders developed in recent American third-party politics...

...Olson belongs in the later phases of the Midwestern political tradition, and this study of him is required for those who would understand it...

...He had a monumental adaptability, a multiplicity of purpose, that often bewildered his supporters as much as it did his opponents, and neither could classify him neatly as one thing or another...

...What his course might have been after 1936 remains anybody's guess, though Mayer is probably right in believing that he had his sights set on some sort of New Deal-Farmer Labor fusion in 1940...

...Nevertheless, he became the party candidate for governor that year, and took over the party reins from that time on...

...As the Midwest moved from a simple frontier economy to a complex agricultural-industrial one, both farm and labor groups emerged as potent political forces...

...Olson, like Thorstein Veblen, was a hardheaded, realistic product of the Scandinavian Northwest, a shrewd man with a sharp mind and tongue, and a smart politician...