How a young Minneapolis mayor defeated the communists, saved his party, and changed America.
Before Hubert Humphrey became a senator, a vice president, and a presidential nominee — before he authored the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or created the Peace Corps — he had to fight a war inside his own party. It was a war against radicals who wanted to turn Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party into a vehicle for communist ideology. Humphrey won. And in winning, he built the DFL that Minnesotans knew for the next seven decades.
Today, a new generation of radicals is attempting the same takeover — this time under the banner of the Democratic Socialists of America. The tactics are familiar. The stakes are the same. And the question Humphrey asked in 1948 is the question Minnesota faces again now.
"Will the D-F-L party of Minnesota be a clean, honest, decent, progressive party? Or will it be a Communist-front organization?"
In 1944, Humphrey helped engineer one of the most consequential mergers in American political history: the union of Minnesota's small, ineffective Democratic Party with the much larger and more radical Farmer-Labor Party. The new Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party — the DFL — was meant to unite progressives under one banner strong enough to challenge Republican dominance.
But the merger came with a problem. The Farmer-Labor Party carried deep ties to the Communist Party USA, especially through former Governor Elmer Benson, who had led the party's dominant left-wing faction. During World War II, when the U.S. was allied with the Soviet Union, these ties were easy to overlook. When the Cold War began, they became impossible to ignore.
By 1946, the communist faction had gained control of the DFL's organizational machinery. They dominated the executive committee, controlled caucus procedures, and used their organizational discipline to outnumber the party's mainstream liberals at conventions.
At the 1946 DFL convention in St. Paul, Humphrey — then the sitting mayor of Minneapolis — attempted to address his own party. What happened next would define his resolve.
Humphrey was jeered and spat upon by the communist faction. His wife, Muriel, was physically blocked from entering the hall until his police driver muscled her in.
As Humphrey rose to speak, there were cries of "fascist!" and "warmonger!" from the delegates. A sergeant at arms told him: "Sit down, you son of a bitch, or I'll knock you down."
Humphrey was unable to finish his speech.
The DFL's left-wing slate then suffered a crushing defeat in the 1946 general elections, validating Humphrey's warnings that communist influence was making the party unelectable. Rather than accept the lesson, the radicals dug in deeper.
In 1947, Humphrey co-founded the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) — a national organization built on a simple but powerful idea: you can be a liberal without being a communist.
The ADA united anti-communist liberals on both domestic and foreign policy. It gave Humphrey a national platform and an organizational backbone for the fight ahead. His young aide, Arthur Naftalin — later elected mayor of Minneapolis himself — wrote that Humphrey charged publicly that "Communist party-lines were at work within the DFL and that they were making it impossible to build up the party into a decent, progressive movement."
"We're not going to let the political philosophy of the DFL be dictated from the Kremlin. You can be a liberal without being a Communist, and you can be a progressive without being a communist sympathizer, and we're a liberal progressive party out here. We're not going to let this left-wing Communist ideology be the prevailing force because the people of this state won't accept it, and what's more, it's wrong."
In early 1948, Humphrey made his move. He was preparing to run for the U.S. Senate, and he knew he couldn't win a general election with a party controlled by communists. More importantly, he believed the communist takeover was simply wrong.
Humphrey and his young ally Orville Freeman — later governor of Minnesota and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture — organized a parallel formation of anti-communist liberals. Most had never attended a DFL meeting before. Freeman recruited them, trained them, and prepared them for the April 30 caucuses.
In Hennepin County, the DFL chair and Humphrey ally Lester Covey rearranged caucus locations to favor the anti-communist wing. The radicals, outraged, held their own rival caucuses. But Humphrey's faction won the night.
As Minnesota historian Rhoda Gilman noted, Humphrey's faction used tactics "borrowed directly from the leftists of the party" — and swept the DFL all the way to the state convention. Humphrey then used the party's steering committee to disqualify supporters of Henry Wallace's pro-Soviet Progressive Party from DFL participation, severing the communist faction's last foothold.
The communists were out. The DFL belonged to the liberals.
With the DFL secured, Humphrey turned to the national stage. At the 1948 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, the 37-year-old mayor of Minneapolis delivered the speech that changed American politics.
Party leaders had warned him not to push a strong civil rights plank. President Truman's advisors told him his career would be over. Southern Democrats threatened to walk out. Humphrey gave the speech anyway.
"To those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights."
The convention adopted Humphrey's civil rights plank. Southern segregationists walked out and formed the Dixiecrat Party. And Humphrey was elected to the U.S. Senate that November — the first Democrat to win a Senate seat from Minnesota since before the Civil War.
With the communists expelled and the DFL secured as a liberal democratic party, Humphrey spent the next three decades building one of the most consequential legislative records in American history:
Humphrey's convention speech forced the national party to take a stand, laying the groundwork for every civil rights advance that followed.
Humphrey introduced the first legislative proposal to create the Peace Corps, which Kennedy signed into law.
As Senate floor manager, Humphrey shepherded the most important civil rights legislation in a century through a 60-day filibuster to final passage.
Humphrey was the driving force behind the Food Stamp Act, creating the program that feeds millions of Americans to this day.
Served as Lyndon Johnson's vice president, helping advance the Great Society — Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act.
None of it would have been possible if Humphrey had let the communists keep the DFL. A party controlled by radicals would never have elected him to the Senate. The civil rights plank would never have been proposed. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 might never have passed.
Humphrey understood something essential: you cannot build progressive change from a party that the public doesn't trust.
In the 1940s, communists packed DFL caucuses with organized cadres, gained control of party machinery, and attempted to turn the party into a vehicle for an ideology most Minnesotans rejected.
In the 2020s, the Democratic Socialists of America have employed similar organizational tactics. They organize caucuses and conventions with disciplined attendance. They pursue DFL endorsements through organizational coordination. They run on the DFL ballot line while adhering to a national platform that calls for abolishing capitalism, defunding police to zero, and restructuring American alliances.
The 2025 Minneapolis DFL convention — where Omar Fateh won a mayoral endorsement later rescinded for procedural issues — echoes this earlier period.
In 1966, reflecting on his fight with the DFL's communists, Humphrey told reporters: "I fought those bastards then and I'm going to fight them now."
See exactly what the DSA platform calls for — and how it compares to the DFL that Humphrey built.
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