Revolutionary Theater in Minneapolis
10th June 2020
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), 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.