Ernest Lundeen

Early life and education

Ernest Lundeen was born on August 4, 1878, on his father's homestead in Brooklyn Township near Beresford, Lincoln County, Dakota Territory. His father, C. H. Lundeen, was an early pioneer who was credited with the naming of Brooklyn Township and the establishment of the school and other local institutions.

Most of Ernest Lundeen's siblings died during a diphtheria epidemic during the 1880s. In 1896, Lundeen and his family moved from their Brooklyn homestead to Harcourt, Iowa, and then to Minnesota. Lundeen served in the United States Army in the 12th Minnesota Volunteer Regiment during the Spanish–American War.

In 1901, Lundeen graduated from Carleton College and studied law at the University of Minnesota Law School. In May 1906, he was admitted to the Minnesota bar.

Early political career (1911{{Endash}}36)

Lundeen served in the Minnesota House of Representatives from 1911 to 1915. He represented the 42nd district, which served Hennepin County.

United States House of Representatives (1917{{Endash}}19)

Lundeen first ran for United States Congress in 1914 but was unsuccessful. Then, in 1916, he was elected to the 65th U.S. Congress, representing Minnesota's 5th congressional district based in Minneapolis. On April 6, 1917, he was one of 50 congressmen to vote against the American declaration of war against Germany. He continued to oppose the war while it was being fought. Owing to the unpopularity of his isolationist, anti-war stance, he lost renomination in the 1918 Republican primary to the eventual election winner, Walter Newton. Once, while Lundeen was making a speech in 1918 about foreign policy, an angry crowd in Ortonville, Minnesota carried him off the speaker's platform and forced him into the refrigerated rail car of a departing train.

Unsuccessful bids for office

In the 1920s, Lundeen was repeatedly unsuccessful in his runs for political office:

• Lundeen ran for the same seat again in 1920 but failed to win the Republican nomination. He ran in the general election as an independent candidate but finished third with 10.0% of the total vote.
• In 1922, Lundeen challenged incumbent United States Senator Frank B. Kellogg for the Republican nomination for Senate. He received 123,765 votes in the Republican primary (33.54% of the total).
• In 1923, Lundeen ran in the special election for United States Senate but finished seventh out of nine candidates in the Republican primary, winning only 5,851 votes (3.40% of the total).
• In 1924, Lundeen ran unsuccessfully for Chief Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court.
• By 1926, Lundeen had switched his affiliation to the Minnesota Farmer–Labor Party and ran in that year's election for Minnesota's 10th congressional district. As the Farmer–Labor nominee in this more rural and exurban district, he finished a distant second to incumbent Republican Godfrey G. Goodwin with 34.5% of the total vote.
• In 1930, Lundeen was the Farmer–Labor nominee for United States Senate, challenging incumbent Republican Thomas D. Schall. He finished third behind Schall and Democratic nominee Einar Hoidale with 22.89% of the vote.

United States House of Representatives (1933{{Endash}}37)

Lundeen was elected to the U.S. House again in 1932 and served in the 73rd and 74th Congresses.

In 1934, during the 73rd Congress, Lundeen sponsored the Workers' Unemployment Insurance Bill. The bill embodied a far-reaching unemployment insurance and social insurance program formulated by the Communist Party in 1930 and openly and vigorously advocated by the Party for the next several years. Despite the bill's Communist origins, the Party mustered considerable support for it, including from union locals, international unions, and state labor federations. The bill attracted support from liberals dissatisfied with the less generous and much less radical Wagner-Lewis Bill (which became the Social Security Act). With Lundeen's help, a subcommittee of the Labor Committee heard testimony from 80 witnesses on the benefits of the bill and the suffering of the unemployed. Many were Communists, including Party chairman Earl Browder. The bill was narrowly voted out of the Labor Committee, but it was killed by House leadership, which wanted no competition for Wagner-Lewis.

U.S. Senator (1937{{Endash}}40)

1936 election

Main article: 1936 United States Senate election in Minnesota

In 1936, the Farmer–Labor Party nominated Floyd B. Olson, the popular incumbent Governor of Minnesota, for the open United States Senate seat vacated by Schall's death. However, Olson died of stomach cancer at the age of 44 on August 22. The state central committee of the Farmer–Labor Party selected Lundeen to run in his place, and he won a landslide election over Republican former Governor Theodore Christianson.

Term in office

Senator Lundeen served in the 75th U.S. Congress starting on January 3, 1937, and then in the 76th Congress until his death. Initially, he displayed sympathies with the Communist Party. For example, in late 1936, Senator-elect Lundeen addressed a meeting of the "Friends of the Soviet Union" at Madison Square Garden as Tovarishchi ("Comrades"). But he remained strongly isolationist and was later denounced by Earl Browder as a reactionary.

It was Lundeen's "passionate embrace of isolationism" that began to align him more with Americans who backed Nazi Germany. Some of these speeches were markedly pro-German and pro-isolationist. Viereck would have Lundeen's staff print thousands, and in certain cases, millions of copies of the speeches, which would then be distributed to the public.

Lundeen was the chair and founder of the Make Europe Pay War Debts Committee (later dubbed the Islands for War Debts Committee), which urged the seizure of British territories in the West Indies as a means of settling Britain's debts to the United States from WWI. It was likely an isolationist public relations tactic, reminding Americans that the U.S. should not lend more assistance to a country that was already in debt to them.

On June 14, 1939, Lundeen joined a civilian and press delegation aboard for its sea trials off Fire Island. The ship reached a maximum speed of 40 knots, came to a complete stop in 58 seconds, and then travelled in reverse at 20 knots. He said the experience was "astounding" and it showed that American ship designers "need bow to none."

While in office, Lundeen required his aides to pay him a portion of their paychecks, threatening to fire them if they did not comply.

He vehemently opposed the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940.

Death and investigation

On the afternoon of August 31, 1940, Lundeen was a passenger on Flight 19 of Pennsylvania Central Airlines, flying from Washington, D.C. to Detroit. The plane crashed near Lovettsville, Virginia, and all 25 persons on board were killed. Lundeen was buried at Fort Snelling National Cemetery.

Also on board Flight 19 were "a Special Agent of the FBI, a second FBI employee, and a prosecutor from the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice." Director J. Edgar Hoover denied that the FBI agents on the plane had Lundeen under surveillance.

The Civil Aeronautics Board launched a week-long investigation regarding the cause of the crash, but found no definitive answers. A coroner's inquest in the Virginia county where the crash occurred concluded it was probably weather-related. There was a violent thunderstorm in progress, and the crash may have resulted from a lightning strike on the plane, possibly combined with pilot error while flying into wind shear.

Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen appointed Joseph H. Ball to fill Lundeen's Senate seat. Although Ball continued his predecessor's anti-New Deal stance, he took a different foreign policy position by voting for FDR's Lend-Lease program as "a barrier between us and whatever designs Hitler and his allies may have on this continent."

In 2022, Rachel Maddow released a podcast series titled Ultra, which explored Lundeen's complicity in Nazi Germany's intelligence and propaganda operations in the U.S. during the 12 to 18 months immediately preceding America's entry into World War II. At the time of his death, the FBI was investigating Lundeen's ties to George Sylvester Viereck, who was working in the U.S. to spread pro-Hitler and anti-Semitic propaganda.

After the plane crash, Lundeen's wife Norma tried to clear his name by covering up his involvement with the Nazi regime. Within two days after the crash, she travelled to his office in the Capitol to retrieve the "Viereck files". Within a year after the tragedy, several journalists started reporting that Lundeen's speeches had been ghostwritten by Viereck. Norma Lundeen sought to block that narrative by claiming that "no one wrote [her] husband's speeches" and by threatening to sue one of the journalists reporting it. When she was called as a defense witness during Viereck's trial for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, she falsely testified that while she indeed took the Viereck files, the files had now disappeared due to a burglary at their residence. It was later discovered that the files were actually stored in the Lundeen family archives.

References

References

1. Duchschere, Kevin. (17 February 2023). "Did a Nazi sympathizer once represent Minnesota in the U.S. Senate?". [[Minnesota Star Tribune]].
2. "Lundeen, Ernest - Legislator Record". Minnesota Legislative Reference Library.
3. (1968). "Current Biography 1940". H.W. Wilson Co..
4. Maddow, Rachel. (2023). "Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism". Crown.
5. University of Minnesota Libraries, University of Minnesota. "1930 Minnesota U.S. Senate Farmer-Labor Primary".
6. (2013). "When Government Helped: Learning from the Successes and Failures of the New Deal". Oxford University Press.
7. Klehr, Harvey. (1984). "The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade". Basic Books.
8. Frye, Alton. (1967). "Nazi Germany and the American Hemisphere 1933–1941". Yale University Press.
9. Radelat, Ana. (11 January 2023). "How a U.S. Senator from Minnesota became a key player in a Nazi plot". [[MinnPost]].
10. (June 14, 1939). "Latest in Destroyers". The Evening Star.
11. "Accident Details".
12. Eisele, Albert. (3 September 2009). "Death of senator from Minnesota still shrouded in mystery". [[MinnPost]].
13. "Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra | an MSNBC original podcast".
14. Specktor, Mordecai. (November 13, 2022). "Editorial: Minnesota's pro-Hitler senator". [[The American Jewish World]].
15. (October 24, 2022). "Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra - Episode 4: A Bad Angle".
16. (October 31, 2022). "Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra - Episode 5: Shut It Down".