Floyd Bjerstjerne Olson

• Floyd Bjerstjerne Olson
• Born: November 13, 1891
• Died: August 22, 1936

Governor of Minnesota and Farmer-Labor party leader, the only child of Paul A. Olson and Ida Maria (Nelson) Olson, was born and raised in a lower-class neighborhood on the North Side of Minneapolis. His father, a railroad checker of Norwegian peasant stock, and his mother, who came from Sweden, had a strife-filled marriage, which may have contributed to Floyd Olson’s rebellious impulses. As an adolescent he sought refuge in the Jewish homes in his neighborhood, participating in the cultural life of the area and developing a sympathy for the struggling poor. Perhaps this experience also contributed to his later ability to converse easily with people from many social and cultural groups.

After high school, Olson spent a restless year at the University of Minnesota, where he sought to organize opposition to compulsory military training. Leaving for the Far West, he served as a scowman on the Fraser River, joined a gold rush in Alaska, and worked on the docks in Seattle, where he joined the radical International Workers of the World (IWW). He appreciated the defiance of authority that the IWW represented. Back in Minneapolis he worked as a law clerk by day and studied law at night at the Northwestern Law College, graduating in 1915. Briefly he worked in a law firm as a defense attorney. In his first case he successfully reduced the charges of first-degree assault against his client. He married Ada Krejci of Minnesota in 1917; they had one daughter, Patricia.

Despite his rebellious proclivities—he once said, “You bet your life I’m a radical, you might say I’m radical as hell”—Olson exhibited caution when he entered politics, joining the moderate Democratic party rather than the radical Non-Partisan League and unsuccessfully seeking the party’s nomination for Congress in 1918 and 1920. He began to exhibit those mature personal traits that made him appealing as a politician. He liked people and they liked him. The writer Sherwood Anderson described him as “a big laughing man who gives you the impression of being alive and aware.” He was tall, lean, and broad-shouldered, with large hands and strong features. He liked to play pranks, sing to audiences, and tell stories in dialect. His energy made him a powerful orator. He could magnetize small groups or large, including conservative businessmen with whom he gambled in Minneapolis. His personal appeal gave him political opportunities and the latitude he would often need to sidestep political pressure from friends and adversaries.

Olson was sufficiently friendly with Minneapolis Republicans for them to make him assistant attorney of Hennepin County in 1919 and county attorney in 1920, a position to which he was elected for full terms in 1922 and 1926. In 1924 he made an unsuccessful bid for the governorship of Minnesota on the ticket of the Farmer-Labor party, whose organization he had recently joined. This party was an outgrowth of the Non-Partisan League, which had inherited the long tradition of agrarian discontent dating to the nineteenth century and the Populist party, and which had now allied itself with the newer urban dissident groups, especially labor. The Farmer-Labor party endorsed government ownership of railroads and power utilities, but Olson, despite his membership in the progressive Committee of 48 and his acceptance of Communist support, downplayed this platform in an attempt to appear a moderate.

In 1930, after the beginning of the Great Depression, Olson ran again for the governorship. Again he moderated the more extreme reforms proposed by the Farmer-Labor party, such as government ownership of utilities, the forty-hour workweek, and unemployment insurance. After his election—by the widest margin yet achieved in the state—a hostile legislature made his term more conservative than even his campaign strategy had suggested. He vetoed bills important to business interests but also some sought by workers. Rising unemployment and his vacillation on important issues cost him support and threatened his reelection.

But by 1932 the depression had deepened, popular sentiment had become more receptive to firm progressive programs, and Olson began to talk about the need for a third national party, stressing now the militant planks that he had earlier put aside. Avoiding truculent language and cautiously defending the controversial Holiday Association, which organized farm strikes, he won reelection. He also had formed an alliance with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom he had met prior to the presidential campaign of 1932. Olson found his views on conservation and land utilization especially appealing, and for Roosevelt’s benefit he helped mobilize Minnesota Democrats.

After both were elected, Olson found himself in agreement with most of Roosevelt’s policies, but urged him to go further, suggesting that if the depression deepened “the Government ought to take and operate the key industries of the country.” He argued for production-for-use factories that would undercut private firms and enlarge the public sector.

In Minnesota Olson sounded even more militant, threatening to declare martial law to enforce relief measures against the opposition of the powerful and wealthy. “Tell ‘em that Olson is taking recruits for the Minnesota National Guard,” he said in 1933, “and he isn’t taking anybody who doesn’t carry a Red Card.” Like Roosevelt, Olson made weekly radio broadcasts to appeal for support for his program of economic action, speaking against the more conservative state legislators. He succeeded with conservation laws, measures to delay farm mortgage foreclosures, and unemployment relief, and pressured Washington for agricultural price relief.

Olson played a somewhat ambiguous role in the violent truck strike in Minneapolis in the spring and summer of 1934—a role that nevertheless won him praise from labor. His initial settlement, which forced employers to recognize the radical truckers’ union, was hailed by the Minneapolis Labor Review as the greatest victory labor had ever gained in the city, but many truckers grumbled. Olson later declared martial law, raided the offices of the promanagement Citizens’ Alliance, and persuaded Roosevelt to use the Reconstruction Finance Corporation as a means of pressuring business to end the conflict. Olson’s rhetoric was often vacillating but the unions in Minneapolis formally thanked him.

After his reelection in 1934, Olson continued his endorsement of liberal and radical programs and talked more of a new third party. Despite this stance, he maintained his alliance with Roosevelt’s New Deal, which allowed reciprocal support of Democratic and Farmer-Labor candidates. Olson supported the president for reelection in 1936. He campaigned for a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1936, but was felled by cancer of the pancreas. He died in Rochester, Minnesota, at the age of forty-four and was buried in Lake-wood Cemetery, Minneapolis. By the time of his death Olson had developed a following all across an America in which the popularity of progressive politics was still on the rise. The radical magazine Common Sense found him to be skilled at the practical art of politics and principled in his leftist beliefs.

Olson’s official papers are in the Minnesota State Archives. Some of his personal papers are in the Minnesota Historical Society. Biographies include G. H. Mayer, The Political Career of Floyd B. Olson (1951). For important background analysis and specific comment on Olson, see A. M. Schles-inger Jr., The Politics of Upheaval (1960). See also Olson’s, My Political Creed (1975), compiled by D. C. McCurry; J. Janney, The American Magazine, September 1935; T. Christianson, Minnesota: A History of the State and Its People, vol. 2 (1935); and the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 2 (1958).