Paul Wellstone

Politician

• Born: July 21, 1944
• Birthplace: Washington, D.C.
• Died: October 25, 2002
• Place of death: near Eveleth, Minnesota

Wellstone served as the U.S. senator from Minnesota from 1991 until his untimely death in 2002. He was known as an articulate proponent of liberalism and a staunch advocate for the underdog.

Early Life

Paul Wellstone (WEHL-stohn) grew up in Arlington, Virginia, the son of Leon Wellstone, a writer for the United States Information Agency, and Minnie W. Wellstone, a school cafeteria worker. His father, once known as Leon Wexelstein before Anglicizing his name in the face of anti-Semitism, fled persecution in Russia, and his mother was born on the lower East Side of were chosen. At sixteen, Paul Wellstone met Sheila Ison, the daughter of Appalachian Southern Baptists. They married when both were nineteen on August 24, 1963. Wellstone became a father at twenty. Meanwhile, he took classes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and competed on the wrestling team. He witnessed the Civil Rights movement exploding all around him, but he had no time for political activism. Wellstone then earned a doctorate in political science from the University of North Carolina.

Wellstone began his first academic job at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, in September, 1969. Filled with the conviction that individuals could change the world, he determined to use his skills as a political scientist to empower people and to step forward to pursue justice. As Wellstone later acknowledged in his autobiography, he was an idealist, and he remained one until his death. He supervised studies of housing, health care, and nutrition needs. He made no recommendations, but college administrators and local political officials were not pleased that poor people used Wellstone’s work to address their needs. In 1972, Wellstone founded the Organization for a Better Rice County, which worked to build the political power of the poor. Carleton College was not accustomed to this type of community activism. Wellstone received notice of his dismissal in January, 1974. However, he had just received the best student evaluations of all third-year teachers, and the students protested his dismissal. The college retreated, and Wellstone went from being fired to being the youngest, at twenty-eight, tenured professor in the history of the college.

Life’s Work

Wellstone spent the next years teaching, writing, speaking, and community organizing. He traveled Minnesota widely and was involved in most of the farm, labor, antipoverty, environmental, and peace struggles. In 1982, he entered politics by running for state auditor, but he lost. In 1988, he served as Minnesota cochair of Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign before acting as state cochair of Michael Dukakis’s Democratic campaign in the national presidential election. He then decided to run for the U.S. Senate to fight for the people and the causes in which he believed.

In 1990, Wellstone won a seat in the U.S. Senate. Outspent by a margin of seven to one and dismissed as a hopeless cause by pundits, he achieved the victory with a grassroots campaign but only after enduring anti-Semitism. At the time, the poor economic situation of farmers in Minnesota prompted many of them to turn to racism and to anti-Semitism out of desperation. Wellstone’s close friends, fearing for his safety, pleaded with him to stop speaking at farm gatherings. He refused, because he believed that he had the ability to move and to inspire people in a positive way.

Wellstone did not fear to take unpopular stances. In his first month in the Senate, he voted against the Persian Gulf War. He thought little of breaking the Senate tradition of congeniality and personally attacking his colleagues, such as the deeply conservative Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Over the years, Wellstone moderated his personality but not his politics. He fought for unions, advocated for family farmers, and opposed the interests of banks, agribusiness, and large corporations. He pushed for national health insurance and opposed laws that made it more difficult for people to declare bankruptcy. In one of the last votes of his life, Wellstone opposed using force against Iraq.

In February, 2002, Wellstone announced that he had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and that he did not intend to allow the ailment to affect his ability to serve the people. He died with his wife and daughter in a plane crash while campaigning for reelection. He was survived by two sons.

Significance

Wellstone was a leading representative of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. During his two terms in the U.S. Senate, he unabashedly backed liberal legislation designed to help the poor and the working class. Often, Wellstone was the only senator voting against a measure. He was also one of the few senators who made the effort to meet and to remember the names of elevator operators, waiters, police officers, and other low-level workers in the Capitol. Wellstone’s blend of liberalism, stubbornness, and folksiness made him an icon for Democrats.

Bibliography

Lofy, Bill. Paul Wellstone: The Life of a Passionate Progressive. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. This is a solid biography of the late senator.

McGrath, Dennis J., and Dane Smith. Professor Wellstone Goes to Washington: The Inside Story of a Grassroots U.S. Senate Campaign. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. The authors provide an account of how Wellstone beat the odds to win a U.S. Senate seat.

Wellstone, Paul. The Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming the Compassionate Agenda. New York: Random House, 2001. This is Wellstone’s autobiography, in which he explains why he remained an unabashed liberal until his dying day.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. How the Rural Poor Got Power: Narrative of a Grass-Roots Organizer. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978. Wellstone describes a rural organizing effort on the part of the poor in southern Minnesota in the 1970’s. He focuses on the Organization for a Better Rice County, with which he was intensely involved from 1972 to 1974.