Ernest Lundeen | |
|---|---|
 Lundeen in 1929 | |
| United States Senator fromMinnesota | |
| In office January 3, 1937 – August 31, 1940 | |
| Preceded by | Guy V. Howard |
| Succeeded by | Joseph H. Ball |
| Member of the U.S. House of Representatives fromMinnesota | |
| In office March 4, 1933 – January 3, 1937 | |
| Preceded by | General ticket adopted |
| Succeeded by | Henry Teigan |
| Constituency | General Ticket Seat Eight(1933-1935) 3rd district(1935-1937) |
| In office March 4, 1917 – March 3, 1919 | |
| Preceded by | George Ross Smith |
| Succeeded by | Walter Newton |
| Constituency | 5th district |
| Member of theMinnesota House of Representatives from the 42nd district | |
| In office January 3, 1911 – January 4, 1915 | |
| Preceded by | William Campbell and John Godspeed |
| Succeeded by | John B. Sanborn Jr. and George Sudheimer |
| Personal details | |
| Born | (1878-08-04)August 4, 1878 Beresford,Dakota Territory, U.S. |
| Died | August 31, 1940(1940-08-31) (aged 62) Lovettsville, Virginia, U.S. |
| Cause of death | Plane crash |
| Political party | Republican(before 1925) Farmer-Labor(after 1925) |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 |
| Alma mater | Carleton College University of Minnesota Law School |
| Occupation | Lawyer |
| Military service | |
| Allegiance |  United States |
| Branch/service |  United States Army |
| Years of service | 1898 |
| Rank | Private |
| Unit | Company B, 12th Minnesota Volunteer Regiment |
| Battles/wars | Spanish–American War |
Ernest Lundeen (August 4, 1878 – August 31, 1940) was an American lawyer and politician who representedMinnesota in theUnited States House of Representatives from 1917 to 1919 and 1933 to 1937, and in theUnited States Senate from 1937 until his death in 1940. He was a member of theRepublican Party before joining theMinnesota Farmer–Labor Party. He opposed American involvement in bothWorld War I andWorld War II. At the end of his life, he became controversial for his close ties withGeorge Sylvester Viereck, a Nazi agent in the U.S.[1]
A veteran of theSpanish–American War, Lundeen got his start in politics when he served in theMinnesota House of Representatives between 1911 and 1914. He was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1916 as the representative fromMinnesota's 5th congressional district. However, when seeking reelection in 1918, he was defeated in the Republican primary due to his unpopular opposition to American entry into World War I.
On August 31, 1940, Senator Lundeen and 24 other passengers died in a plane crash nearLovettsville, Virginia. At the time, he was the subject of a probe by theFederal Bureau of Investigation for his alleged links toNazi Germany. Investigations into the cause of the crash turned up nothing conclusive.
Ernest Lundeen was born on August 4, 1878, on his father's homestead inBrooklyn Township nearBeresford,Lincoln County,Dakota Territory. His father, C. H. Lundeen, was an early pioneer who was credited with the naming of Brooklyn Township and the establishment of the school and other local institutions.[citation needed]
Most of Ernest Lundeen's siblings died during adiphtheria epidemic during the 1880s. In 1896, Lundeen and his family moved from their Brooklyn homestead toHarcourt, Iowa, and then to Minnesota. Lundeen served in theUnited States Army in the 12th Minnesota Volunteer Regiment during theSpanish–American War.[2]
In 1901, Lundeen graduated fromCarleton College and studied law at theUniversity of Minnesota Law School. In May 1906, he was admitted to the Minnesotabar.[2]
Lundeen served in theMinnesota House of Representatives from 1911 to 1915. He represented the 42nd district, which servedHennepin County.[2]
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Lundeen first ran for United States Congress in 1914 but was unsuccessful. Then, in 1916, he was elected to the 65th U.S. Congress, representingMinnesota's 5th congressional district based inMinneapolis. On April 6, 1917, he was one of 50 congressmen to vote against the Americandeclaration of war against Germany.[3] He continued to oppose the war while it was being fought.[4] Owing to the unpopularity of hisisolationist, anti-war stance, he lost renomination in the 1918 Republican primary to the eventual election winner,Walter Newton. Once, while Lundeen was making a speech in 1918 about foreign policy, an angry crowd inOrtonville, Minnesota carried him off the speaker's platform and forced him into the refrigerated rail car of a departing train.[5]
In the 1920s, Lundeen was repeatedly unsuccessful in his runs for political office:[6]
Lundeen was elected to the U.S. House again in 1932 and served in the73rd and74th Congresses.
In 1934, during the 73rd Congress, Lundeen sponsored the Workers' Unemployment Insurance Bill. The bill embodied a far-reaching unemployment insurance and social insurance program formulated by theCommunist Party in 1930 and openly and vigorously advocated by the Party for the next several years.[7] Despite the bill's Communist origins, the Party mustered considerable support for it, including from union locals, international unions, and state labor federations.[8] The bill attracted support from liberals dissatisfied with the less generous and much less radical Wagner-Lewis Bill (which became theSocial Security Act). With Lundeen's help, a subcommittee of the Labor Committee heard testimony from 80 witnesses on the benefits of the bill and the suffering of the unemployed. Many were Communists, including Party chairmanEarl Browder. The bill was narrowly voted out of the Labor Committee, but it was killed by House leadership, which wanted no competition for Wagner-Lewis.[9]
In 1936, the Farmer–Labor Party nominatedFloyd B. Olson, the popular incumbent Governor of Minnesota, for the open United States Senate seat vacated by Schall's death. However, Olson died of stomach cancer at the age of 44 on August 22. The state central committee of the Farmer–Labor Party selected Lundeen to run in his place, and he won a landslide election over Republican former GovernorTheodore Christianson.
Senator Lundeen served in the75th U.S. Congress starting on January 3, 1937, and then in the76th Congress until his death. Initially, he displayed sympathies with the Communist Party. For example, in late 1936, Senator-elect Lundeen addressed a meeting of the "Friends of the Soviet Union" atMadison Square Garden asTovarishchi ("Comrades"). But he remained strongly isolationist and was later denounced by Earl Browder as areactionary.[10]
It was Lundeen's "passionate embrace of isolationism" that began to align him more with Americans who backedNazi Germany.[5] He had frequent contact withGeorge Sylvester Viereck, a leading Nazi agent in the U.S. During his first term in the House of Representatives, Lundeen had contributed toViereck's American Weekly.[11] After giving Sen. Lundeen millions of dollars in bribes, Viereck often used the Senator's office and "sometimes dictated speeches for Lundeen, openly using the Senator's telephones to obtain material fromHans Thomsen at the [German] embassy."[12] Some of these speeches were markedly pro-German and pro-isolationist. Viereck would have Lundeen's staff print thousands, and in certain cases, millions of copies of the speeches, which would then be distributed to the public.[5][13]
Lundeen was thechair and founder of the Make Europe Pay War Debts Committee (later dubbed the Islands for War Debts Committee), which urged the seizure ofBritish territories in theWest Indies as a means of settling Britain's debts to the United States fromWWI.[14] It was likely an isolationistpublic relations tactic, reminding Americans that the U.S. should not lend more assistance to a country that was already in debt to them.[11]
On June 14, 1939, Lundeen joined a civilian and press delegation aboardUSS Hammann for itssea trials offFire Island. The ship reached a maximum speed of 40 knots, came to a complete stop in 58 seconds, and then travelled in reverse at 20 knots.[15] He said the experience was "astounding" and it showed that American ship designers "need bow to none."
While in office, Lundeen required his aides to pay him a portion of their paychecks, threatening to fire them if they did not comply.[16]
He vehemently opposed theSelective Training and Service Act of 1940.[17]
On the afternoon of August 31, 1940, Lundeen was a passenger onFlight 19 ofPennsylvania Central Airlines, flying fromWashington, D.C. toDetroit. The plane crashed nearLovettsville, Virginia, and all 25 persons on board were killed.[18] Lundeen was buried atFort Snelling National Cemetery.[2]
Also on board Flight 19 were "a Special Agent of theFBI, a second FBI employee, and a prosecutor from the Criminal Division of theU.S. Department of Justice."[19] DirectorJ. Edgar Hoover denied that the FBI agents on the plane had Lundeen under surveillance.[20]
TheCivil Aeronautics Board launched a week-long investigation regarding the cause of the crash, but found no definitive answers.[21] A coroner's inquest in the Virginia county where the crash occurred concluded it was probably weather-related. There was a violent thunderstorm in progress, and the crash may have resulted from a lightning strike on the plane, possibly combined with pilot error while flying intowind shear.[18][20]
Minnesota GovernorHarold Stassen appointedJoseph H. Ball to fill Lundeen's Senate seat. Although Ball continued his predecessor's anti-New Deal stance, he took a different foreign policy position by voting forFDR'sLend-Lease program as "a barrier between us and whatever designs Hitler and his allies may have on this continent."[20]
In 2022,Rachel Maddow released a podcast series titledUltra, which explored Lundeen's complicity in Nazi Germany's intelligence and propaganda operations in the U.S. during the 12 to 18 months immediately preceding America's entry into World War II. At the time of his death, the FBI was investigating Lundeen's ties to George Sylvester Viereck, who was working in the U.S. to spread pro-Hitler and anti-Semitic propaganda.[19][22]
After the plane crash, Lundeen's wife Norma tried to clear his name by covering up his involvement with the Nazi regime. Within two days after the crash, she travelled to his office in the Capitol to retrieve the "Viereck files". Within a year after the tragedy, several journalists started reporting that Lundeen's speeches had beenghostwritten by Viereck.[23] Norma Lundeen sought to block that narrative by claiming that "no one wrote [her] husband's speeches" and by threatening to sue one of the journalists reporting it. When she was called as a defense witness during Viereck's trial for violating theForeign Agents Registration Act, she falsely testified that while she indeed took the Viereck files, the files had now disappeared due to a burglary at their residence.[24] It was later discovered that the files were actually stored in the Lundeen family archives.[24]
| Party political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Farmer–Labor nominee forGovernor of Minnesota 1928 | Succeeded by |
| Farmer–Labor nominee forU.S. Senator fromMinnesota (Class 2) 1930 | ||
| Preceded by Floyd B. Olson | Farmer–Labor nominee forU.S. Senator fromMinnesota (Class 2) 1936 | Succeeded by Al Hansen |
| U.S. House of Representatives | ||
| Preceded by | U.S. Representative fromMinnesota's 5th congressional district 1917–1919 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by General ticket Adopted | U.S. Representative fromMinnesota General ticket Eighth Seat 1933–1935 | Succeeded by General ticket Abolished |
| Preceded by General ticket Abolished | U.S. Representative fromMinnesota's 3rd congressional district 1935–1937 | Succeeded by |
| U.S. Senate | ||
| Preceded by | U.S. senator (Class 2) from Minnesota 1937–1940 Served alongside:Henrik Shipstead | Succeeded by |
| Class 1 |  | |
|---|---|---|
| Class 2 | ||
| Nullifier | |
|---|---|
| Know Nothing | |
| Free Soil | |
| Union | |
| Liberal Republican | |
| Readjuster | |
| Populist | |
| Silver or Silver Republican | |
| Nonpartisan League | |
| Farmer–Labor | |
| Other | |
| Independents | |
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| People | |
| Other | |
