Hubert Humphrey was the most eloquent champion of American liberalism in the postwar generation, a politician of extraordinary energy and conviction who spent three decades in public life fighting for civil rights, social welfare, and the idea that government could be an instrument of human progress. Born on May 27, 1911 in a room above his father's drugstore in Wallace, South Dakota, he was the son of Hubert Horatio Humphrey Sr., a licensed pharmacist and small-town merchant who also served as mayor and a member of the South Dakota state legislature, and Ragnild Kristine Sannes, a Norwegian immigrant. His paternal ancestors had migrated from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony around 1648. The family's roots were deep in the American plains, and the values of that community — neighborliness, hard work, democratic participation — shaped Humphrey for life.
He grew up mainly in Doland, South Dakota, a small town of roughly six hundred people on the Dakota prairie. When the late 1920s brought severe economic downturn, both banks in Doland closed and his father struggled to keep the family store solvent. After Hubert graduated from the local high school, his father moved the family to Huron, a larger town with a population of eleven thousand, seeking better prospects. Financial pressure forced Humphrey to withdraw from the University of Minnesota after only one year. He earned a pharmacist's license from the Capitol College of Pharmacy in Denver, Colorado, completing a two-year program in just six months, and worked in the family pharmacy while continuing to develop his intellectual ambitions.
He eventually returned to formal education, attending the University of Minnesota and going on to earn a master's degree in political science. In 1943, he became a professor of political science at Macalester College and ran, unsuccessfully, for mayor of Minneapolis. He had also, by this time, become deeply engaged in the political reorganization of the Minnesota left. In 1944, he was one of the key figures in founding the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, a merger that created the dominant progressive force in the state's politics. The following year, 1945, he was elected mayor of Minneapolis, a position he held until 1948. In 1947, he was a co-founder of Americans for Democratic Action, the influential left-wing but explicitly anti-communist organization that defined the ideological center of Cold War liberalism.
The moment that brought Humphrey to national attention came at the 1948 Democratic National Convention. As a delegate, he successfully advocated for the inclusion of a strong civil rights plank in the party platform, a direct challenge to Southern segregationists and a defining moment in the Democratic Party's long transformation on racial issues. The speech he delivered that day, calling on the party to step out of the shadow of states' rights and into the bright sunshine of human rights, became one of the most celebrated in American political history. That November, he was elected to the United States Senate from Minnesota, beginning a career in that chamber that would last, with one interruption, until his death.
In the Senate, Humphrey established himself as the most effective progressive legislator of his era. He was the lead author of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark legislation that outlawed racial discrimination in public accommodations and employment, a achievement that represented the culmination of his life's central cause. He had also introduced the first initiative to create the Peace Corps and chaired the Select Committee on Disarmament. He served as Senate Majority Whip for the last four years of his Senate tenure. He sought the Democratic presidential nomination unsuccessfully in 1952 and again in 1960.
In 1964, Lyndon Johnson chose Humphrey as his running mate, and the ticket won a landslide victory. The vice presidency, however, proved a costly office. Loyal to the Johnson administration's increasingly unpopular prosecution of the Vietnam War, Humphrey found himself defending a policy that alienated the liberal constituency that was his natural base. When Johnson announced in March 1968 that he would not seek reelection, Humphrey entered the presidential race but avoided the primaries, focusing instead on winning delegates from non-primary states. His strategy succeeded in capturing the Democratic nomination, and he chose Senator Edmund Muskie as his running mate. The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was a scene of profound disorder, with anti-war protests met by police violence in the streets outside. Humphrey emerged as the nominee of a deeply fractured party.
In the general election he nearly matched Richard Nixon in the popular vote but lost the electoral college by a substantial margin. The defeat ended his vice presidency and temporarily his national political ambitions. He returned to the Senate in 1971, representing Minnesota once again. He ran in the 1972 Democratic primaries but lost to George McGovern and declined to join the ticket as vice presidential candidate. From 1977 to 1978, he served as deputy president pro tempore of the United States Senate. He died on January 13, 1978, at the age of sixty-six. His legacy is the liberal tradition of mid-century American politics — its faith in government, its commitment to civil rights, its conviction that the proper measure of a free society is how it treats its most vulnerable members.
