Magnus Johnson

• Magnus Johnson
• Born: September 19, 1871
• Died: September 13, 1936

Agrarian reformer and U.S. senator, was born near Karlstad, Varmland, Sweden, the son of Johannes Janson and Elizabeth (Pierson) Janson. After the death of his father, a prosperous farmer and ship captain, the sixteen-year-old boy was apprenticed to a glass-blower. When his mother died, he emigrated at the age of twenty to Wisconsin, where he worked as a lumberjack. In 1894 he moved to Minnesota and took up farming. On September 14, 1895, he married Matilda Boreen, who died shortly afterward.

Magnus Johnson became a naturalized citizen in 1899, and he expressed great pride in the fact that his second wife, Harriet Dormán, whom he married February 7, 1900, was of American Revolutionary stock. They had six children: Lilian, Victor E., Agnes, Frances A., Magnus, and Florence.

Johnson arrived in the United States at a time of widespread agrarian protest against the growing power of banks, railroads, and other corporate interests. In one-crop areas the price manipulations of the commodities merchants—a combination of processors, warehouse owners, and speculators—were the chief targets of the farmers’ wrath, and the usual counterattack, a cooperative marketing arrangement, found especial favor among Scandinavian-Americans.

While continuing as an active farmer Johnson also undertook a long career in the cooperative movement. From 1911 to 1914 he was president of the Minnesota Union of the American Society of Equity, which organized spring wheat farmers, and from 1911 to 1926 he served as vice president of the Equity Cooperative Exchange. This organization of farmers in Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Montana, was both a grain and livestock marketing company and the first cooperative to function successfully in a terminal market—that of Minneapolis.

The expansion from economic organization to radical political action that had occurred in the South and the southern Plains states during the populist era came to the upper Mississippi valley in the progressive period. In 1915 the Farmers Nonpartisan League was founded in North Dakota to work for state ownership of terminal elevators, flour mills, stockyards, cold storage houses, and packing plants; state inspection of the grading and dockage of grain; exemption of farm improvements from taxation; state hail insurance; and nonprofit rural credit banks.

The Nonpartisan League spread rapidly to neighboring states, including Minnesota, where it became known as the Farmer Labor party, and where for several years “Magnavox” Johnson, with his strong Swedish accent and his foghorn voice, which he attributed to years of glassblowing, had been advocating similar measures and building up a reputation as an authentic voice of the dirt farmers. Johnson’s program, however, tended to emphasize local rather than state control of public utilities, police, and liquor traffic. He favored woman suffrage; the initiative, referendum, and recall; low taxes on productive industries; and high taxes on income derived from the exploitation of natural resources. Johnson was elected as a Farmer Labor candidate to the Minnesota House of Representatives for the 1915 and 1917 legislatures and served as state senator in the 1919 and 1921 sessions.

In 1922 Magnus Johnson ran a strong but losing race for governor, but in 1923 he won, against both Republican and Democratic opposition, the special election for the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by the death of Knute Nelson. He then decided to run for the regular six-year term in 1924, a year in which progressive hopes were running high; but although he ran well ahead of presidential candidate Robert M. La Follette, he lost narrowly to the Republican Thomas Schall. In 1926 he lost another gubernatorial campaign, and in the same year he gave up his position with the Equity Cooperative Exchange when it was absorbed by the Farmers’ Union.

Johnson continued full-time farming near Kimball, Minnesota, and when the Depression of the 1930s revived Farmer Labor strength, resulting in the election of Floyd Olson as governor, he hoped to be named as state commissioner of agriculture. Olson rejected him in favor of a candidate less identified with politics; but in 1932 he returned to public life on being elected to Congress, where he consistently supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal measures. Because of redistricting in 1934, he was obliged to run against a popular Republican, Representative Harold Knutson, and he was defeated.

In the mid-1930s Johnson became an outspoken member of the Farmer Labor faction that feared that the party’s dominant position was turning the organization into a typical political machine. By 1935 it became clear that Governor Olson planned to run for the Senate in 1936 and that banking commissioner Elmer Benson, whom Olson had just appointed to a Senate vacancy, had thereby gained the inside track as Olson’s successor.

Johnson regarded Benson as a front for spoilsmen, and he was infuriated by Olson’s attempt to name his own successor. Even though the party leaders had indicated their belief that the he was too old to run for governor, Johnson entered his name as a candidate with a statement to the press: “The rank and file of the Farmer Labor Party will brook no dictatorship in the control of its policies whether from inside or without the party.” But then he discredited himself with the rank and file by participating in a protest meeting against Benson’s candidacy organized by Arthur Townley, founder of the Nonpartisan League, who had acquired an unsavory reputation.

The bad luck that had dogged Johnson’s political career became even worse in his last try for office. An automobile accident followed by pneumonia forced him to spend five weeks in the hospital at the beginning of the campaign, and six weeks before the election he died at his home in Litchfield, Minnesota.

Biographical sources include W. W. Folwell, A History of Minnesota, vol. 3 (1926); G. Mayer, The Political Career of Floyd B. Olson (1951); and The Dictionary of American Biography (1958).