Minnesota’s not-so-nice legacy in political campaigns

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Congratulations to Gov. Tim Walz, whose Midwestern roots and straight talk should provide a strong contrast to Donald Trump’s angry diatribes and astroturf populism.

The conventional wisdom is that Walz’s background provides “a familiar figure for voters who might not be attracted to a Black and South Asian woman from California,” as the New York Times put it. But the political history of Walz’s adopted home state is more rough-and-tumble than his image suggests.

Consider the work of a Minneapolis PR man named Walter Quigley — my great-grandfather. Quigley coined the term “political dynamiting” to describe his style of attack politics, which he claimed to have used in more than 150 campaigns around the country between about 1930 and 1960. In Minnesota, he worked for and against candidates regardless of party affiliation, including Harold Stassen, Floyd Olson and Hubert Humphrey, who he claimed called him “Old Poison Pen.”

His smear campaigns took the form of a fake newspaper, often created in Minneapolis and sent to every eligible voter in the week before an election. The newspapers accused their targets of being soft on Communism, anti-Catholic, anti-German or antisemitic, as the case required. He was careful to use candidates’ own words against them, often wildly out of context.

“Many persons vote on their dislikes and prejudices,” Quigley observed in 1957. “They would rather vote against somebody on a dislike than to ballot for somebody on a fundamental issue.”

In Quigley’s account, the Minnesota icon Floyd Olson sought out Quigley to undermine a rival in 1932. The Farmer-Labor governor approached him after Republicans drafted Earle Brown, then head of the Minnesota Highway Patrol, to run against him. (Yes, this is the same Brown whose association with the Ku Klux Klan led Brooklyn Center to strip his name off several landmarks recently.)

Quigley had little trouble using details about Brown’s personal wealth to paint him as part of an elite class of millionaire tax-dodgers — an unpopular position during the Great Depression.

Rather than deploy this attack in Olson’s name, however, Quigley filed a straw candidate, former Republican Rep. Franklin Ellsworth, to run against Brown in the Republican primary. Quigley ran Ellsworth’s campaign from the Rogers Hotel at 4th Street and Nicollet Avenue S. in downtown Minneapolis, distributing a newspaper statewide that included Brown’s bank statements, details of the (allegedly minimal) taxes that Brown’s supporters paid and a caricature of Brown’s prized horses.

Brown won his primary against Ellsworth, but his campaign never recovered, and he lost to Olson, 51% to 32%.

In the general election, Olson benefited from his endorsement of Franklin D. Roosevelt for president, while Quigley made sure that Brown was hindered by his support for Herbert Hoover: Quigley advised planting surrogates at Brown’s campaign events to ask whether Brown supported Hoover, and to storm out when Brown said “yes.”

“People like to vote mad — to hell with fundamentals,” Quigley later observed.

Quigley also helped torpedo Hubert Humphrey’s presidential run in 1960 by promoting the view that Humphrey dodged military service in World War II. (Quigley apparently developed an admiring grudge against Humphrey after Humphrey defeated one of Quigley’s patrons, Republican U.S. Sen. Joseph Ball, in 1948.)

Quigley gave documents to back up his claim to Robert F. Kennedy Sr. The Kennedy camp gave these to a surrogate — Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. — who used them in the West Virginia primary, where Humphrey’s loss helped turn the campaign in Kennedy’s favor.

In fact, Humphrey had tried to join the military during the war, but health issues disqualified him. But such last-minute accusations are hard to rebut, and it’s slim consolation if the truth emerges after the votes are cast.

In some ways, Walz branding Republicans as “weird” is part of this tradition. Quigley’s fake newspapers also aimed to paint opponents as outside of the norm, but in ways more akin to Trump.

In the 1930 gubernatorial race, Quigley used a cartoon to crudely paint one candidate, Theodore Christianson, as opposed to parochial and private schools, and thus anathema to Catholic, German and Jewish voters.

Quigley also cherry-picked quotations from years’ worth of Christianson’s columns in the small-town newspaper he owned, using his words without context to make Christianson appear anti-German, anti-Scandinavian, anti-progressive or just heartless.

In Minnesota’s 1938 state legislative elections, Quigley claimed to have drafted 41 attack newspapers, one against each Farmer-Labor candidate. In these papers, Quigley did not hesitate to identify his targets as “Jews” or “Jewish radicals,” employing antisemitic tropes such as Jews controlling the “power behind the political throne.” Thirty-four of the 41 state legislators lost, according to Quigley.

These unsubtle suggestions that candidates don’t belong are more like Trump’s race-baiting comments on Kamala Harris, the accusation that Harris is nothing but a “DEI hire,” and the notion that her husband, Doug Emhoff, is a “horrible Jew.”

On the other hand, “weird” connects because it feels like a reasonable response to candidates who put Hannibal Lecter in campaign speeches or promote a book that praises violent dictators.

Campaign smears and character attacks are as old as the United States. Quigley’s contribution to the art form was his deep research and his dramatic presentation.

In a letter explaining his work, Quigley wrote that he liked “to campaign against a man who has written a book or has several hundred votes in Congress or a legislature … . One can take a couple of dozen of these votes or paragraphs from speeches or a book and crucify him.”

Recently, Walz told New York Times columnist Ezra Klein that the “weird” campaign is designed to expose the GOP ticket’s extreme positions so that the Democrats can talk about kitchen-table issues like paid family leave and housing costs.

Unfortunately, one thing that these past campaigns share with the present is that they get attention. They seem to work, which means we are in for a long fall.

In a 1957 survey of Quigley’s work, University of Utah political scientist Frank Jonas wrote that his impact was to “create doubt and fear in the mind of the voter, and thereby finally to frighten him out of his easy chair and to the polls on election day.” Sound familiar?

Adam Graham-Silverman, a former political journalist who grew up in Minneapolis, is working on a book about Quigley’s life and times. He lives in Seattle.