| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Making Minnesota Liberal: Civil Rights and the Transformation of the Democratic Party. By Jennifer A. Delton. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. xxvi, 226 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8166-3922-1.)

Recently, I heard a film studies scholar argue that all eight of the Oscars awarded to African American actors were for roles in which they helped a white actor resolve his or her problems. I was reminded of this formulation throughout my reading of Making Minnesota Liberal. Jennifer A. Delton does an excellent job of demonstrating how Hubert Humphrey and his allies used civil rights to achieve their political agenda: to transcend the anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism that had long been powerful forces in Minnesota politics; to merge the Democratic and Farmer-Labor parties; to gain control of the new Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party, overcoming the opposition of well-positioned Communists and die-hard Farmer-Laborites, on the one hand, and traditional Democratic party officials, on the other; to unify the party, particularly its working-class and agrarian bases, by raising the shibboleth of southern demagoguery and states' rights as replacements for the eastern banks and monopolists long reviled by Farmer-Laborites; to connect their new party to the national Democratic party in ways that not only reinforced their local control but also lifted Humphrey's prominence nationally; to promote a new kind of political ideology that claimed to be nonideological, prioritized interest groups over social movements, and positioned the state above social and economic conflicts that it could harmonize and balance.

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