On January 20, 1981, Minnesota Republican Senator David Durenberger sat with his colleagues outside the U.S. Capitol to watch Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as America’s fortieth president. Durenberger considered himself a progressive Republican, which he defined as a combination of fiscal prudence and social conscience. He was a pioneer in legislative efforts to combat climate change and also a champion of charter schools; his other priorities included equal rights for women and minorities, high-quality public education, affordable health care, accountable government, and what he called “a fair, business-friendly tax code to pay for it all.” At the time of Reagan’s inauguration, Durenberger counted himself as one of seventeen progressive Republican senators. By the time he retired in 1995, there were only four. Soon, these also left office. Durenberger was one of the last of his kind.
In 2018, Senator Durenberger co-authored his memoir, When Republicans Were Progressive, with Lori Sturdevant, an editorial writer and columnist for the Star Tribune of Minneapolis. In this podcast interview, Sturdevant talks about how she wrote the book with Durenberger and how it serves as his memoir and a history of Minnesota’s bygone progressive Republican tradition. It’s a tradition that reaches back to Harold Stassen, who became a national figure as Minnesota governor during the 1930s by creating an effective and compassionate Republican response to the Great Depression, and it carried through to later moderate and progressive Republicans in Minnesota into the 1990s. Sturdevant discusses the factors that made Minnesota’s political culture conducive to fairness, compromise, and civility – and how that culture has been shaken in recent years by the nationalizing forces of political polarization and changes in the media and developments within the Republican Party.
Senator Durenberger died in early 2023 at the age of eighty-eight, making When Republicans Were Progressive in some sense his last political testament. Lori Sturdevant explores the factors that underlay Durenberger’s faith in progressive Republicanism and why this seemingly obsolete political philosophy might matter again.
Transcript
Lori Sturdevant: In Minnesota, we have this thing called winter here. There was a sense, way into the twentieth century, that we’re kind of on our own here, and we’re able to do our own thing without too much interference from national forces, and we can make our own society — and people did.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to The Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. I’m delighted to be joined today by Lori Sturdevant. She is an editorial writer and columnist for the Star-Tribune of Minneapolis, which is the largest newspaper in Minnesota. Her particular beat is state politics and government. And she is the author, co-author, or editor of numerous books, most of which are about Minnesota and its politics. Welcome, Lori!
Lori Sturdevant: Good to be with you, Geoff. Thank you.
Geoff Kabaservice: Thank you for coming on. I particularly wanted to have you on the podcast because you are a co-author with former Senator David Durenberger of his 2018 memoir, When Republicans Were Progressive. Senator Durenberger died in January of 2023 at age 88, so this is in a sense his last testament. Let me start by asking you something about yourself. Where do you come from? How did you come to Minnesota, and how did you come to the study of Minnesota politics?
Lori Sturdevant: I’m originally from South Dakota near Sioux Falls. My parents were small-business people. I went to college in Iowa at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, where I’m proud to say I’ve been on the board of trustees for many years. I came to the University of Minnesota to be a graduate student in journalism but in the hope of landing a job at the Minneapolis Tribune, which was the newspaper of my childhood; my parents subscribed to it in eastern South Dakota. And I was very lucky to land such a job at age 22, and I just stayed put.
Then after a while, I noticed that all the top editors had at one time or another covered the Minnesota legislature. So I raised my hand to do that too in 1978 and ’79, and I got stuck there. The rest of my career had something to do with state politics and government. I think, as a South Dakotan, coming from a state where state government is really quite weak — was then and is still — to see a state where state government is vigorous and actively engaged in trying to solve people’s problems, and unafraid to use progressive taxation to do that, that impressed me.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, terrific. Senator Durenberger had described politics in the 1960s and ‘70s as having been very much of a boys’ club. I wonder what it was like for you, as a young woman, to be covering this all-male activity in a profession that at that time was still largely male-dominated as well?
Lori Sturdevant: I arrived just as all of that was changing. The 1971 Minnesota legislature, 201 members, had exactly one woman. 1973 had six. 1975 had something like about a dozen. We were making changes rapidly, and the same thing was happening in the Capitol basement, where the Capitol press corps functions. By the time I got there, there were three or four other women; actually, one of them just passed away last week. So I was part of a growing wave, but I wasn’t the first, and I was appreciative of that support. Those of us, both in elective office and in the basement, really became good friends with each other as we struggled with what was, yes, a male-dominated institution.
Geoff Kabaservice: You had been the author, co-author, or ghostwriter of ten books before you teamed up with Senator Durenberger for this memoir. Can you tell me something about your authorial career in addition to your journalistic career?
Lori Sturdevant: I was lucky enough to be asked in 1998 to help a very dear former governor who was becoming quite elderly and had lost his eyesight — a Republican named Elmer L. Andersen — invited to help ghostwrite his memoir, his autobiography. And he was a gem to work with, who became a very close friend. And he encouraged me to do more of that work, and I was pleased to do it. So indeed, one after another, I’ve been able to do book projects. Only a couple of the books have been in my name as the principal author. Many of them are by some politician with Lori, and that usually means a ghostwriting arrangement is in play.
Geoff Kabaservice: Who were some of those other politicians or political figures that you worked with?
Lori Sturdevant: There’s a local civil rights leader whose name your audience won’t recognize, probably, named Harry Davis, who was very important in the Twin Cities in the civil rights movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s. I did two books with him. Arvonne Fraser is a name that some of your listeners may remember. Arvonne was an early feminist leader in both Minnesota and nationally, and her husband Don Fraser was a member of Congress and then was Minneapolis’ mayor for fourteen years. The name Pillsbury is a household name, and I did a book called The Pillsburys of Minnesota. That was one by Lori with a politician, so a different arrangement. The politician was George Pillsbury, who was a longtime state senator and activist in the Republican Party, only to switch and vote for Democrats at the end of his life. Oh, I could go on. There’s a long list. But the name that will be most prominent for your listeners would be the Durenberger name, which was the book that we did that was released in the fall of 2018.
Geoff Kabaservice: How did you come to collaborate with Senator Durenberger in writing his memoir?
Lori Sturdevant: Well, I had covered him from the beginning, really, of my political career. My first campaign coverage was in 1978. I wasn’t assigned to him, I was assigned to Al Quie, who became our governor, who just died recently. But I got to know Durenberger in that campaign, as he was leading the ballot in Minnesota. It was a year that we look back on now and call “the Minnesota Massacre.” That’s the name the Republicans gave that year, and it stuck. Watergate inflated DFL majorities in the legislature, and a lot of Democratic strength, but then [Hubert] Humphrey died and Wendell Anderson committed the political faux pas of appointing himself to the U.S. Senate, which was a no-no in Minnesotans’ minds. The Republicans really cleaned house in 1978. That was when Durenberger won, leading the ballot in Minnesota after an unusual start. He started out running for governor and wound up running for Hubert Humphrey’s seat in the U.S. Senate after a bruising DFL primary left the DFL party quite sorely divided that year.
Geoff Kabaservice: So how did you and Senator Durenberger go about putting together the memoir? It does seem that you used archival research, and it also seems that he had a very good memory for a lot of politics — aided by you, I’m sure.
Lori Sturdevant: Well, it was really a collaboration. I like to write memoirs with a message. That’s how we always described this, and that’s what this is: the message being the story of the Republican Party that really produced Dave Durenberger and that he tried to represent, to bring to Washington, and how he saw it fade at the end of his life. A party that was proudly progressive in the Theodore Roosevelt meaning of that term, the notion that the political operations… Government has an obligation to serve the needs of average people, not just the needs of the ruling class, but to really be the ally of average folks — and also to be a protector of the environment, which was big for both Theodore Roosevelt and Dave Durenberger. Those were the ideas that nurtured young Dave Durenberger, through the intermediating figures that I describe in this book, with Harold Stassen being a prominent one. Dave then tries to take those ideas to Washington beginning in 1979 when he goes to the U.S. Senate.
Geoff Kabaservice: Let me give an overview of Durenberger’s career, for those who might not be familiar with him. David Durenberger, as you say, was an exemplary specimen of what used to be called a progressive Republican. That was a species that once thrived particularly in places like Minnesota but is now largely extinct. He was first elected to the Senate, as you said, in 1978, in a special election to complete the unexpired term of legendary Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey, who had died earlier that year. Durenberger was then reelected in 1982, and again in 1988, leaving office at the start of 1995. He was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and grew up in Collegeville, where his father was a coach at St. John’s University. He graduated from that university in 1955, and then the University of Minnesota Law School in 1959.
Dave Durenberger first ran for the Senate on a message that, as he put it, “Government should be both compassionate and effective, and to do so it must operate as close to the people as possible and function as a purchaser rather than a provider of services.” His priorities in the Senate included high-quality public education, affordable healthcare, environmental protection, particularly combating acid rain — that was a big issue in Minnesota — accountable government, and what he called “a fair, business-friendly tax code to pay for it all.” He was a pioneer in efforts to combat climate change, and also led the way in removing barriers for women and minorities in federal law. He was also the Republican committee author of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
He recalled in this memoir that “It pleased me to be seen as the go-to Republican Senator by advocates for equal rights and social justice.” Now, he was a fiscal conservative. He was also among the early advocates of charter schools; Minnesota was the first state in the nation to authorize them. But I think most people hearing his self-description, and his record and priorities, would think it strange that he was a Republican, or that a Republican would call himself progressive. He was, in fact, among the last of his kind. Indeed, he served in the Senate long enough to witness the events that led to the progressives being in effect driven out of the Republican Party.
He recalled that, at the time of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as president in 1981, there were seventeen progressive Republican senators watching that event. But by 1996, all but four of them had either departed or were retiring. Of those four, two — Jim Jeffords of Vermont and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania — would eventually switch parties while a third, Indiana’s Richard Lugar, would lose to a more conservative Republican primary challenger.
But what’s remarkable about this book, When Republicans Were Progressive, as you just mentioned, Lori, is that it’s not just a memoir but really a history and an evocation of the whole progressive Republican tradition — focused on Minnesota but encompassing the national tradition as well. It begins, really, not with any of Durenberger’s personal story, but with Harold Stassen’s election as governor of Minnesota in 1938. Stassen was 31 years old at the time, so he became known as “the Boy Governor.” Later generations would remember him mainly for his repeated, unsuccessful, and increasingly embarrassing attempts to run for president of the United States. He did so while wearing a toupee that the Washington Post’s late Marjorie Williams described as “stubbornly, proudly wrong, topping his great head like a sullen possum that had been dipped in bronze.” Did you ever meet Stassen?
Lori Sturdevant: Oh yes, I did, but only in the course of his later years when he was doing those repeated presidential campaigns. But as I came to know Minnesota’s political history, I came to really admire Harold Stassen, who represented a reformer in Republican ranks in the 1930s and was, by all accounts, a very charismatic figure, able to end the reign of our Farmer-Labor Party. We used to have three political parties in Minnesota. The Farmer-Labor Party was, in the 1930s — most of the 1930s — the dominant party during the Depression years. The Democrats were then our smaller third party in Minnesota. But then Harold Stassen comes along and actually embraces much of the New Deal but tries to perfect it by getting what he perceived as cronyism out of government ranks, professionalizing government, making the rhetoric that you quoted from Durenberger about his notions about government, making government effective, making it work well. That was Harold Stassen. And you can draw a direct line from Harold Stassen to Dave Durenberger’s thinking about government.
Geoff Kabaservice: One of the great virtues of this book is that it does recover Harold Stassen for us as the political innovator who really excited a whole generation of Republicans in the 1930s. In the telling of your book, “Stassen made an immediate impression on national politics with a fresh, appealing Republican response to the distress of the Great Depression. He rejected both the laissez-faire ideology of a previous generation of Republicans and the left-leaning cronyism of the Farmer-Labor Party,” which as you say was a third party in those years. It actually eventually merged with the Democratic Party in 1944, so Minnesota’s Democratic Party is technically the DFL, the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party.
Lori Sturdevant: More than technically. The names stick, more than technically.
Geoff Kabaservice: The name has stuck. You go on to say that “Stassen sold a generation of followers on the virtues of an efficient, professionally-run government, friendly to organized labor and responsive to the needs of the downtrodden. Though Stassen left state politics when he joined the Navy in 1943, he cast such a long shadow that this book might have been entitled ‘Stassen’s line.’”
Lori Sturdevant: I used to give a talk to Rotary Clubs and the like about ‘Harold Stassen’s line’ because, through personal relationships and political philosophy, you can draw a pretty direct line from Harold Stassen through several Republican governors: one of our most liberal Republican governors was Luther Youngdahl in the late 1940s; the governor that I was close to, Elmer Andersen, also one of the most liberal governors the state ever had; right through the 1990s with Dave Durenberger in the U.S. Senate and Arne Carlson in the governorship. And there it ends.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes it does. That’s when Arne Carlson left office in 1998; that is the end of Stassen’s line. But Stassen personally recruited a lot of those progressive Republicans that you mentioned.
Lori Sturdevant: Oh, yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: Elmer Andersen was governor from 1961 to 1963, and Durenberger later served as his in-house legal counsel. Another was Harold LeVander, who was governor from 1967 to 1971, for whom Durenberger would serve as chief of staff. You knew these men quite well. How similar or different were they personally?
Lori Sturdevant: Everyone has their own distinctive traits. The more you get to know them, the more you see those things. But in terms of commitment to public service as public service, rather than self-aggrandizement, I would say they had that very much in common. Even the biggest egos of the bunch were in public life for the right reasons, for reasons of genuine service. That was a strong ethic in Minnesota, and I think it’s bred from… Some political scientists have called the state’s politics, historically anyway, moralistic. There’s a moralistic strain in this progressive Republican Party coming out of Norwegian Lutheran and German Catholic strains that come together. The Irish Catholics in St. Paul tended to be Democrats, but the German Catholics, where Dave Durenberger grew up, were more likely to be Republican. And they got along well with the Scandinavians, who had a very strong sense of public service as a duty.
Geoff Kabaservice: I don’t see this phrase in your book. But I’m curious… As someone who’s been in Minnesota for a long time covering it, is the phrase “Minnesota nice” something that people actually say in Minnesota? Or is it just people outside Minnesota who say that?
Lori Sturdevant: People in Minnesota certainly are aware of the phrase, and we understand it to have sort of a dark side. There’s a strain of hypocrisy about accusations of “Minnesota nice.” But there was this sense that I’m describing that I think comes out of some strong religious traditions: that public service is a duty. It’s what citizenship requires. I sometimes described it as the marriage that happened here in the nineteenth century between the Congregational Yankees, the Yankees who came here with a strong sense of town-meeting citizen governance, rejecting the monarchy and authoritarianism; we are a New England state in many ways. But that New England population was, soon after the Civil War, reinforced by an influx of Scandinavians and Germans — and particularly the Scandinavians, more so than the Germans, were very interested in democracy. The oldest democracies in the world are in Scandinavia. So there was a desire to have citizen-run, citizen-led governance here.
Then we have the happy thing that Minnesota, at least for most of its history, was seen as a remote place. We have this thing called winter here, and it keeps us a bit isolated from time to time. There was a sense, way into the twentieth century, that we’re kind of on our own here, and we’re able to do our own thing without too much interference from national forces, and we can make our own society — and people did.
Geoff Kabaservice: You’re getting at a very important theme of the book, I think, which are the factors that allowed progressive Republicanism to thrive in Minnesota, at least from the 1930s through the late ‘90s. The forward to your book was written by Norman Ornstein, who’s a longtime political analyst, formerly of the American Enterprise Institute, who grew up in St. Louis Park, which is a first-ring suburb immediately west of Minneapolis. It piqued my interest that St. Louis Park was also where Al Franken, the former comedian and U.S. senator, grew up, as well as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen (collectively known as the Coen Brothers)… a lot of very distinguished people.
Lori Sturdevant: That’s right, and they all knew each other. And there was something going on there, there really was.
Geoff Kabaservice: As long as I’m on that subject, Tom Friedman, who grew up there, wrote that in 1971, the year he graduated from high school in St. Louis Park, Minnesota’s Governor Wendell Anderson appeared on the cover of Time magazine holding up a fish he had just caught, under the headline “The Good Life in Minnesota.”
Lori Sturdevant: That was 1973.
Geoff Kabaservice: ’73? Okay.
Lori Sturdevant: He’s got the time about right. I actually have that here on my desk. I can pull it out here for you.
Geoff Kabaservice: Oh, terrific. Time called Minnesota “the state that works,” and Friedman’s childhood senators…
Lori Sturdevant: Here it is: Wendell and the fish. Here you have it.
Geoff Kabaservice: Oh, fantastic. Friedman’s childhood senators were Democrats like Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and Eugene McCarthy. But the congressmen he remembered were moderate Republicans like Clark MacGregor and Bill Frenzel. Norman Ornstein’s grandfather was close to Humphrey, but he admired Minnesota moderate Republicans and policymakers like Elmer Andersen, Arne Carlson, Harold LeVander, Jim Ramstad, and David Durenberger. A lot of these names won’t be familiar to listeners — outside of Minnesota, at any rate. But Ornstein believed that politicians from both parties lived by what he called “Minnesota political values of fairness, the need for and value of compromise, decency, and civility… My peers and I took pride in our Minnesota culture, one that transcended any partisan divide. … Minnesota Republicans, by and large, were pragmatists who married their moderate conservatism with decency and a drive to solve problems by working across that divide.” Friedman added that growing up in Minnesota gave him and his contemporaries “a deep conviction that politics can really work, and that there is a viable political center in American life.” You’ve named some of the factors that contributed to that political culture. Want to list some others that come to mind?
Lori Sturdevant: Well, I think Time’s description is pretty accurate. The real question for the modern era is: have we been able to sustain that? There’s real doubt about that. Our politics here in Minnesota have been nationalized. Changes in the media landscape are certainly part of that. Changes in the way we fund campaigns, certainly part of that. I think the period after World War II, when people came home in that generation — “the Greatest Generation,” we sometimes call it now — from World War II, they brought a sense of idealism and optimism. They had just seen this country do something really big together and succeed at it, and I think felt good about the opportunity to address other problems as well. That carried over to the young people that began to populate both the Republican and the Democratic-DFL Party after the war.
I like to think of the parties then as center-left and center-right, but not so far apart — and a lot of personal relationships. Again, the state’s population in those years was probably only about 4 million. That’s a size of population that allows for lots of personal relationships at the governing level, and that was certainly the case then as well. We’re up to about almost 6 million now, so we’re not that much bigger, but there have been a lot of changes.
Geoff Kabaservice: Durenberger and you pointed out that a lot of those idealistic returning veterans who were Republicans came back to Minneapolis and formed the Citizens League, which actually was originally called the Good Government Group, or something to that effect. That seemed to him very important, as well as a very important expression of the era.
Lori Sturdevant: Yes. Well, it was an idea factory and generated Minnesota-based, home-brewed, homegrown ideas about how we could do government differently here. A lot of the Durenberger ideas about using government as a purchaser of services rather than as a performer of services, a lot of that came from the Citizens League. That was also part of the stew of the time. You recall that at that time Richard Nixon was talking about federal revenue sharing. Some of Durenberger’s ideas attached to that as well. I know Harold LeVander, for whom Durenberger worked, very much thought that revenue sharing was the right way to go: use the powerful fundraising engine of the federal income tax to raise revenues that then can be spent under local direction. That had a lot of appeal to these Republicans.
Geoff Kabaservice: That is a theme to which we will return. But you’d mentioned that one of the legacies of having been settled by New Englanders and Scandinavians was the tradition of participatory democracy, small-town meetings. And this translated into the maybe outsized importance of state government in Minnesota.
Lori Sturdevant: I’ll mention one other thing about our state government that made us a bit different in those years. Beginning in 1913, Minnesota had a nonpartisan legislature. That changes in the early ‘70s. But during that period, some of the worst of partisanship stayed away from state government. Now, during a lot of that time, it’s also the case that we were not redistricting on a regular basis, like many states, so the legislature became more rural than it should have been and hide-bound in many ways. But the fact that the legislature stayed nonpartisan until the 1970s I think made a difference in the political atmosphere in this state. It’s a recurring question: should we try that again? Because there’s a certain nostalgia for that time, as a result of the fact that legislative candidates did not have party designation after their names on the ballot.
Geoff Kabaservice: Just to be clear, did people run as members of particular parties but then did not identify as such when they were seated in the legislature?
Lori Sturdevant: In the legislature, they would caucus as either liberals or conservatives, and they were free to run with the backing of a political party or not. The ballot would not indicate one way or the other. Now, by the end of this period, most legislators did have the endorsement of one party or the other. The parties were becoming more active. But there were some key legislative leaders during that period who prided themselves on staying away from the political parties and never ran with any kind of a connection to either political party. There’s a fellow whose name was Rosenmeier, who was revered as one of the leaders of the legislature in this period, who always stayed far away from the political parties.
Geoff Kabaservice: Interesting. It’s another peculiarity of Minnesota that it has the largest state senate in the country, and the second-largest legislature overall.
Lori Sturdevant: I think that’s right, and that’s part of our New England roots. There have been proposals over the years to change that and they fail, because there is seen to be a virtue in the ability to campaign with shoe leather, to be out door-knocking. The tradition of Minnesota politics is, as a candidate for the legislature, you walk your district, you knock on doors, you speak personally to your constituents. I’m writing a book right now about a man named Martin Sabo, who was a member of Congress for 28 years. But before that he was a very influential leader in the Minnesota legislature, and he door-knocked 12,000 doors every fall.
Geoff Kabaservice: Impressive. You had mentioned Al Quie who, alas, died in August of this year, just one month shy of his 100th birthday. He was another of these moderate Republicans who served, first as a member of the Minnesota State Senate, and then for ten terms as a member of the U.S. House, and finally one term as Minnesota governor. It particularly stuck with me that his grandfather Halvor had immigrated from Norway to the United States in 1845 at age eleven. Then, while working as a hired hand on a farm in Wisconsin, he had a real epiphany when he read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This led him to help found the Republican Party in 1860 and then join the Union Army to fight against slavery.
You’d mentioned this earlier, but there’s an observation in your book from Minnesota native Daniel Elazar, who’s a political scientist at Temple University. In his telling, “moralism in politics emphasizes the commonwealth and the public interest. It says government is legitimate as long as it is a positive force in the lives of its citizens. It values rather than scorns politicians as agents of the public good — but also demands exemplary conduct from elected officials.” This seems to be the influence of both the religious and, in a broader sense, the moralistic tradition in Minnesota that you’ve been describing.
Lori Sturdevant: Well, that’s exactly right. The Halvor Quie story is interesting. We didn’t have a big rush of Scandinavian immigration until after the Civil War, but there was a trickle, and Al Quie’s grandfather and my great-grandfather were among those people. They were very anti-slavery, very much so. In the case of Halvor Quie, he almost lost his leg at Antietam, and almost lost his life too. But he lived long enough to see his baby grandson Al before he died, and was a big influence on that family. His founding of the farm near Nerstrand, Minnesota, established the family. I think the farm still is in family hands today.
Geoff Kabaservice:
It also struck me, when I was talking to Al Quie, that he would’ve had this grandfather, who had seen him, who was born in the 1830s. So between just that one family, you can really go a long way back into the country’s history in just a few generations.
Lori Sturdevant:
Oh, that’s right. Yeah, there’s a lot of those stories. I could do a lot of Minnesota leaps like that, how really young a state we still are.
Geoff Kabaservice:
So there are a lot of Americans, particularly Democrats but some Republicans too, who look longingly at the political cultures of the Scandinavian countries. As you said earlier off camera, your husband is Dutch, so you’ve spent a lot of time in Scandinavia through that connection as well. To some extent, Minnesota shares some of the characteristics of those cultures. It’s cold and it’s full of Scandinavians, obviously.
Lori Sturdevant: There you go.
Geoff Kabaservice: Probably, again, the need to survive that lousy weather reinforced some of the communal aspects of Minnesota politics. But it’s also like the Scandinavians not just in its long traditional democracy but in being relatively small, as you said — even now it’s fewer than 6 million citizens. And it’s historically been largely ethnically homogenous. In 1960, just 1.2% of its citizens were people of color. To what extent did those characteristics contribute to the state’s political culture, do you think?
Lori Sturdevant: Actually, that’s something I think about a fair amount. When Wendell Anderson held the fish up, we were much more of an all-white state; the non-white population was very small in Minnesota. And that’s no longer true. We have a smaller non-white population than many states, but it’s probably up to about 25% right now, would be my guess. If we were to do a census right today, that’s probably where the number would be. That’s a big change in a short amount of time. You have to ask whether some of the difficulties we’ve had in functioning together can be attributed to that. I’m curious, and I would love to talk to some sociologists and other experts, academics about what that change has meant for us. But yes, there is that parallel.
It’s interesting… A few years ago, a delegation from Stockholm came to Minnesota to study how well we had assimilated — that was maybe their word, not ours — our Somali refugee population, which is about 60,000 people now in Minnesota. The sense is that the Somali refugee population in Sweden had not been as successfully integrated into society there. They thought they had something to learn from us — which makes us feel good, of course. But there is some struggle around how do you become a multiracial society with the kind of history and outlook on life that the Scandinavians and the Yankees brought to us? We’re still working on all of that.
Geoff Kabaservice: A syndicated columnist writing in the 1970s attributed Minnesota’s continuing habits of independence to “a vigorous and varied industrial base, much of it locally owned and controlled.” By that time, many of the state’s best-known industrial firms were publicly traded, not family-owned. But family members connected to these companies still resided in Minnesota and were deeply engaged, in many cases, in civic affairs. They included the Daytons of Dayton Hudson, which is now Target; the Pillsburys of the Pillsbury Corporation, which I think is now part of General Mills; the Bells and Crosbys of General Mills; the McMillans of Cargill; the Knights of 3M; and the Heffelfingers of Peavey. Tom Friedman, again, recalled that when he was growing up, “those leading Minnesota corporations were pioneers in corporate social responsibility, and they believed that it was part of their mission to help build cultural and civic institutions — like the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, for example.”
Lori Sturdevant: I wrote a lot about that in the book The Pillsburys of Minnesota, which came out in 2011. That very much was the Yankee orthodoxy that that family, and the families like it, it brought from New England, that they were here not just to get rich but to build a strong civic society. That was their duty, and they set about doing that. It’s not a coincidence that the governor preceding the current one was named Dayton. The influence of those leading families in our social institutions and as cultural markers continues.
However, the nationalization of our state that I described earlier has been felt in this regard. We used to have something like twenty Fortune 500 companies headquartered here, and I think we’re down to about fifteen. And they are much more national companies than they are local ones, it seems like, in so many ways.
I’m not sure that the philanthropy that Ken Dayton and others made a strong show of here… We had something called the 5% Club, which meant that corporations were donating 5% of their profits to charity. I don’t know that that exists anymore, at least not in the same way that it did. Again, there’s been some erosion in all of that. But the obligation though, of our business community, to help build this state — it’s sort of a pioneering stance. It’s what I alluded to when I said a moment ago that we’re still a young state. That attitude is still with us, I’d like to submit. We still have a sense here that we are building something. We are all engaged in a project of creating some kind of society, and we each have a role to play.
Geoff Kabaservice: The subject of regional elites is very interesting to me. In fact, there was a recent essay in the New York Times by Thomas Edsall called “A Hidden Reason Cities Fall Apart” which really spoke to this. Edsall pointed out that many of the nation’s decaying, dysfunctional cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, and Cleveland have suffered from well-known forces like white flight, the decline of manufacturing, and also to some extent the nationalization that did away with local bank branches, for example. But he also observed that another less obvious factor has been what he calls “the erosion of the local establishment and the loss of civic and corporate elites. Until the late 1970s, virtually every city in the United States had its own network of bankers, corporative executives, developers, and political kingmakers who dominated their private associations, golf courses, and exclusive downtown clubs. For all of their multiple faults,” he continues, “they had one thing in common: a shared economic interest in the health of their communities.” He quotes an expert who observes that “Big ‘anchor’ corporations played a key role in civic life in metro areas, not just in terms of corporate donations to nonprofits, but also in bringing to bear leadership to revitalize cities. This used to happen all the time in Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, and the Twin Cities.”
Lori Sturdevant: And I would submit that there’s still some of that here. We have not lost all of that. But I think other places, Edsall’s analysis is correct, that has been a major change in a lot of American places. The sense that each region is its own economic entity, and is on its own and in competition with other regional entities: that sense is still here in Minnesota. Not maybe as pronounced as it was thirty, forty years ago, but it’s still here. I’m not sure how strong that sense exists in other parts of the country.
Geoff Kabaservice: In terms of that urge to participate in civic affairs, it’s interesting the prominent role that you give in your book to civic organizations like the Jaycees and the League of Women Voters. “These are nonpartisan organizations,” you write, “but they were builders of civic leadership capacity, offering their members experiences that instilled in them a spirit of community service. And they schooled their members in creating and maintaining the working relationships that participatory democracy requires.”
Lori Sturdevant: Certainly true of those two that you mentioned. Both the Jaycees and the League of Women Voters were active in recruiting candidates for all kinds of offices, and very effective.
Geoff Kabaservice: Something else that strikes me as different from the current political scene is how organized the Minnesota Republican Party was. You had this whole network extending from the Teen-Age Republicans League, the Young Republicans League, the College Republicans, the Minnesota Federation of Republican Women, the Minnesota affiliate of the National Council of Republican Workshops, which was largely women-dominated — it doesn’t really exist anymore — as well as loosely allied business and professional Republican men’s clubs. There were organizations like the Elephant Club for top donors, which ran a speaker series…
Lori Sturdevant: Still does.
Geoff Kabaservice: Sill does, okay — and the Neighbor to Neighbor program of grassroots fundraising. The Minnesota Republican Party, even at the time that David Durenberger was getting started in his political career, had a staff of thirty-five people, which is very large but, as you said, “reflected the state party’s decision to emphasize grassroots organizing and person-to-person contact over mass-market messaging.” I think that was an important aspect of the party’s success, really.
Lori Sturdevant: And all of that has diminished, though the Elephant Club still meets, and I think has Ari Fleischer coming in to speak in a day or two here. And there’s still some of that on the DFL side as well. But all of that has eroded in palpable ways. When I was first covering all this, somebody told me that Minnesota was the breakfast meeting capital of the country, where people were always being summoned to some sort of a meeting at 7:30 in the morning, like it or not, and off you’d go for your daily dose of civic affairs before your workday began. There used to be a lot of that kind of thing. The Citizens League breakfasts were big deals, and used to really pack them in. They don’t have breakfast meetings anymore, that I’m aware of anyway. But yes, there was a lot of that. It may be that, during the long winter months, we needed something to do in these parts.
I think it mattered though that we were — and still are in terms of our political organizing — a precinct caucus state. You need people to show up on a cold winter’s night to participate in a precinct caucus. The parties knew that their enterprise really depended on getting those people to turn out. So just the fact that getting people to turn out for a caucus meeting is a different kind of connection than getting them just to show up at the polls — or mail in a ballot as we increasingly have mail-in elections — I think that made a difference in our overall participation in all kinds of politically associated grassroots activities.
Geoff Kabaservice: You actually write in your book that the Minnesota Republican Party “was a grassroots party, built from the bottom up. The precinct caucus was the biennial ‘town hall meeting’ to which all were welcomed, and many were put to work. Party leaders encouraged community-level task forces around the issues of the day. Their members were prepared to participate in party platform discussions and encouraged to be delegates at the next-level Republican conventions – counties or legislative districts… followed by congressional districts and the state convention.”
Lori Sturdevant: Many thousands of people would be involved in one level or another of that every year. It builds a big apparatus of people who have some sense of personal ownership of our political apparatus.
Geoff Kabaservice: That really made Minnesota, particularly in the 1960s, different from a lot of Republican parties around the country, because one of the great disadvantages the Republican Party had in that era was that it didn’t have grassroots strengths. That was the Democratic Party’s strength nationally with its grassroots reach, particularly aided by the strong labor unions of those years. Republicans mostly relied on a small cohort of big-money donors. Do you suppose that all of that organization helped keep the Republican Party in Minnesota moderate?
Lori Sturdevant: It probably prolonged the life of the progressive wing of that party. Yes, I think so. The fact that, for example, in 1982 in the governor’s race the more moderate candidate won the primary was a bit of a check on what had been the drift at the Republican caucus convention system towards something, someone more conservative. It’s interesting because, as it turns out, the fellow that was endorsed as the more conservative turned out to be, in his later years, much more liberal than any of those people at that convention, but they didn’t know that at the time. So when given a chance in a primary setting in 1982, the moderate Republican won. But in 1990, in a primary setting, the conservative candidate won, only to drop out when a sex scandal arose just days before the election. We’ve had some interesting ones here, Geoff.
Geoff Kabaservice: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Lori Sturdevant: That’s how Arne Carlson, the last of the progressive Republican governors in this telling, that’s how Arne gets to be governor. He actually came in second in his primary in 1990, but the guy who won the primary dropped out.
Geoff Kabaservice: You wrote of the late 1960s that the period is now remembered as “a creative and constructive period in Minnesota state government — a testament to the quality of governance provided by a Republican governor and a Republican-controlled legislature.”
Lori Sturdevant: 1969 was the last Republican trifecta that Minnesota has seen, now going on fifty-plus years.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, maybe there’s some cause and effect here, too. Because nowadays, at a time when the Republican Party has largely turned against governance, that sounds like alternative-reality political science fiction.
Lori Sturdevant: Oh, yeah. These were very different Republicans. It should be noted that, at the end of his life, Durenberger was no longer a Republican. He very openly backed Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016 and was very openly rooting for Joe Biden in 2020.
Geoff Kabaservice: The question does arise: Were these progressive Republicans just Democrats all along, and did they finally come to reconcile their identity with their political label? But one of the factors I think that did mark Durenberger as maybe on the center-right side of the spectrum was his strong belief in federalism. There’s a passage where you write about Harold LeVander, who shared this belief in federalism. You said: “He was, at heart, a believer that the nation is best served when state governments are allowed to be as effective as possible. LeVander appreciated the role the federal government can play in the nation’s economic development, including the Rural Electrification Program, and its citizens’ income security. But he was wary of federal overreach.” One of the other things that Durenberger appreciated about state governments was that most of them had to balance their budgets every two years. In that sense, they were more fiscally accountable than the national government.
Lori Sturdevant: This sentiment I think Durenberger clung to his entire adult life. He would’ve said the same thing at the end of his life when he was a Democrat as he did earlier. The fellow whose biography I’m writing now, Martin Sabo, a Democrat his whole life, would’ve said the same thing. When you have had, as we have had in Minnesota by and large, effective state government, it makes one think: “Well, why not give the state more authority, not less?” But I think we also would have, in the case of Durenberger, an awareness that a problem like climate change, which he cared about deeply, is not a problem that states alone can solve. We can’t have a patchwork of state differences here. This has to be actually an international solution, but certainly in this country it has to be addressed by the federal government.
So he was discerning about what kind of problems are right for the states to take on. Education would be one. He liked a certain amount of state control over healthcare. Healthcare was his really favorite issue toward the end of his life. He would say the federal government has to do its part, but he would have a lot of confidence in state governments — even during a time when, for many years, up until this past session, Minnesota state government was very prone to gridlock. We had twenty-plus years of divided state government, politically divided, and the gridlock has been a problem in Minnesota — until this year when we had a DFL trifecta and suddenly let her rip in terms of progressive legislation.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, divided government is a problem when the two sides are too far apart and there aren’t enough people in the center making deals. But you and Durenberger also pointed out a factor that allowed that kind of deal-making in those days, which is that both parties had a stake in both rural and urban regions. Republicans, at least in the 1960s, controlled the Minneapolis City Council. Republicans have not been competitive in urban environments for a long time. But the DFLers also had a really tight grip on the Iron Range, which is mostly the rural mining districts in the northeast of the state. And likewise, Democrats have very little presence in rural areas now.
Lori Sturdevant: We’ve had a big geographic political realignment. And it’s not one that I think is in Minnesota’s favor, because I’m a believer that we do best when we aggregate our resources across rural and urban lines and try to solve problems together. Climate change, I think, is a case in point. We need the agriculture sector, we need the Northern Lakes tourism sector, we need everybody at the table if we’re going to be addressing climate change in an effective way that doesn’t cause a lot of economic dislocation. To have such a strong partisan division between urban and rural Minnesotans is not in anybody’s best interest, I don’t think.
So as I write columns still occasionally for the Star Tribune now — I’m in retirement — I do often lift up this theme that our rural-urban divide, which has been exacerbated by the way we do political campaigns in the state, it’s not helping us. This state has had to always aggregate its resources to get a synergy going that allows us to function at a level that’s a little stronger, a little more dramatic, a little more effective, I would argue, than a lot of other states. If we lose that capacity, we’ve lost a lot.
Geoff Kabaservice: There’s an emphasis in the book on “one Minnesota,” the idea that the state’s rural and urban interests are intertwined and dependent upon each other. This actually led even to things like the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra renaming itself the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra.
Lori Sturdevant: It’s no coincidence that our ball teams are all called Minnesota Twins, Minnesota Vikings, not Minneapolis or St. Paul.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s interesting.
Lori Sturdevant: Our current governor, I should say, Tim Walz, has now won two terms with his campaign theme being One Minnesota.
Geoff Kabaservice: Actually, I also found it rather touching that in your book you alluded to a saying of Paul Wellstone — who of course was a very progressive DFL senator — which is that “We all do better when we all do better.”
A lot of the book is about what happened in the Senate when Senator Durenberger went there. But again, continuing on this theme of progressive Republicanism, the National Journal used to keep this graph of the number of senators from both parties who overlapped with each other, and the distance between the most conservative Democrat and the most liberal Republican. When Durenberger first arrived at the Senate, that was 29 out of 100 senators, so that was actually a pretty fair faction of the Senate. By his final two years of the Senate, there were only three people, including the senator, who fell in that category. After that, there were simply none. Both parties are now polarized and, at this point, more widely apart than any time since the era before the Civil War.
Lori Sturdevant: Well, that’s right. That change figured in his decision not to run again in 1994. Now, he had been sanctioned by the Senate for essentially padding his expense account. I believe that was in 1991. A lot of people thought that the reason he didn’t run again was that he was embarrassed by this sanctioning. While that did sting him, and he still had trouble at the end of his life talking about it with any coherence, nevertheless he was very clear on, in our conversations, his sense that he was losing effectiveness because there were so few senators like him trying to bridge gaps.
He was telling me stories a lot about Mitch McConnell being in his face telling him, “Don’t you dare work with the Democrats” on healthcare, or voting rights, or whatever was the issue of that day, because McConnell would make his life miserable if he did. He felt constantly under siege from both the left and the right in Washington. He didn’t have the cooperation he hoped to have with Hillary Clinton on healthcare in 1993 and ’94, but he certainly had resistance from Bob Dole and others on the Republican side. They didn’t want to give Clinton any kind of victory, even if it would’ve been good for the American public. That really offended Dave Durenberger. He was so concerned that he had lost his effectiveness that for him the right decision was not to run again.
Geoff Kabaservice: He did, to some extent, blame both sides for this decline in comity. He actually greatly objected to the Democrats having refused to confirm Robert Bork as Supreme Court justice. He thought the Senate’s role of “advice and consent” was fairly limited, and their ability to overturn this recommendation for ideological partisan reasons was quite limited.
Lori Sturdevant: That was seen as original sin with regard to Court appointments, and you can draw a line from that one all the way through to where we are today on the very partisan reaction to Supreme Court appointments now.
Geoff Kabaservice: But one of the objections he lodged against Newt Gingrich, for example, was that Gingrich discouraged Republicans from moving to Washington and becoming part of its bipartisan culture, if you want to put it that way.
Lori Sturdevant: In Dave’s telling, Newt Gingrich is the villain of what happened to the Republican Party. If there were one villain, that’s who he would lift up as the person who had the most deleterious influence on our ability to govern ourselves together. He was very critical of Newt’s approach to politics, and I think faults Newt for the attitudes that he ran into in 1993 and ’94 on healthcare, that “We just can’t give Bill Clinton any kind of a victory here. Our goal is to knock Bill Clinton out of office.”
Geoff Kabaservice: In terms of the bygone culture of comity, he has an anecdote about a Saturday session of the Senate where Ted Kennedy was working to pass a bill that Republicans opposed. That same afternoon, Senator Durenberger and Senator Dick Lugar both had sons who were graduating from Langley High School. And to accommodate Durenberger and Lugar, Kennedy’s opponents, Kennedy moved to delay the votes on the issues they opposed until they had returned from the graduation ceremony. You don’t see much of that happening nowadays.
Lori Sturdevant: Another time before that same committee, Kennedy announces the birth of one of Durenberger’s grandkids. So there was that kind of a relationship. They were human beings to each other.
Geoff Kabaservice: Despite Durenberger being a progressive, he actually was quite supportive of Ronald Reagan as president.
Lori Sturdevant: Yes. It actually surprised me because… I didn’t cover Reagan. I was covering Minnesota politics then. In Minnesota, those early Reagan years were tough years. Al Quie was governor, and he had a budget that just would not stay balanced because we kept slipping deeper and deeper into a recession that we perceived, at least in the Capitol basement, that President Reagan was not doing enough to staunch the bleeding on that recession. Durenberger was in Washington then; he was not whispering in my ear in the Capitol basement in those years. But he saw in Reagan someone much more amenable to compromise than I ever saw, and saw someone that was really much more in keeping with a progressive tradition than I expected him to see. Again, in Durenberger’s telling, the real turn doesn’t come with Reagan but with Gingrich.
Geoff Kabaservice: Durenberger noted that Donald Trump revived the Reagan slogan “Make America Great Again.” But he felt that Reagan really genuinely believed in America’s greatness, and optimism was one of the key things that he brought to government. He believed that Reagan believed the government should be limited but could get things done, provided sufficient leadership and focus. He writes: “Reagan governed as a pragmatic and, by today’s lights, moderate conservative who was willing to work with a Democratic-controlled House and a more bipartisan Senate to make progress on issues that really we don’t seem able to make progress on anymore…”
Lori Sturdevant: Well, that’s right.
Geoff Kabaservice: Including immigration, foreign relations…
Lori Sturdevant: Think about it. Social Security and immigration reform, which happened in Reagan’s years and really haven’t happened in a real way since.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yep, which is very true. While Durenberger was a supporter of Reagan, he believed that Reagan changed the conditions of the Minnesota Republican Party in a way that made it more conservative. This was partly that Reagan gave a welcome signal to evangelical Christians…
Lori Sturdevant: That’s right.
Geoff Kabaservice: …to move into Republican circles.
Lori Sturdevant: It’s the abortion issue and the fact that, in the Republican Party, winner-take-all still prevailed at caucuses and conventions — so you needed 50% plus 1 to control the choices. In the Democratic Party, thanks to the McGovern-Fraser changes in party operation that were enacted in the early 1970s — the Fraser there being Don Fraser of Minneapolis, the husband of my book-writing partner, Arvonne — we went to a proportional representation, and minorities could sort of get their due but not really to control the party. Well, shift just a few people out of the DFL ranks and into the Republican ranks on the strength of the abortion issue, and you’ve got suddenly the Republican Party being a pro-life party in Minnesota. It was not that when I first started covering politics. Both parties were divided on that question. By the late 1980s, ten years after I started covering politics, that was no longer true. We had one pro-choice party and one pro-life party, and we still do.
Geoff Kabaservice:Yeah. It’s a real change, obviously, in the political landscape. Durenberger also noticed that Reagan brought into the Republican Party proto-Tea Partiers. They weren’t evangelical Christians, they were more libertarian, more motivated by ideology than religion. But the same inclination of both of these groups was to combat the Stassen line and that tradition of moderate governance.
Lori Sturdevant: Yes, there was a little gang of legislators who gave Al Quie fits as he was trying to cut deals with the Democrats and keep our budget balanced. There would be occasions where this little group would be marched one at a time down to the governor’s office to try to get them in line, and they were difficult to deal with. I am smiling because one of them went on to be a pretty liberal Democrat later in life, and just died last year. But that libertarian streak begins to appear more as, like you say, a Tea Party, anti-government strain. That strain, though it’s been present in Minnesota’s modern latter-day Republican Party, has never really been dominant, I don’t think. Even now, there’s more of a pro-government, let’s-make-government streak in Minnesota’s state Republican Party than there would be nationally.
Geoff Kabaservice: But one of the things that you and Durenberger pointed out is that the Republican Party was never pro-tax, they were not in favor of raising taxes in every situation — but they weren’t against it necessarily. I used to know Bill Frenzel quite well because, after he retired as a member of Congress from Minnesota, he came to Washington, D.C. to work for the Brookings Institution. You have a quote from him from 2012 where Bill said “Republicans used to be interested in not running continual rivers of red ink. If that meant raising taxes a little bit, we always raised taxes a little bit. Nowadays, taxes are like leprosy, and they can’t be used for anything, and so Republicans have denied themselves any bargaining power.” In that sense, Bill certainly would’ve said the Republican Party nowadays is less conservative than it was when it was progressive.
Lori Sturdevant: I remember in the early ‘80s covering conversations among Republicans whether they should be for raising the gas tax 2 cents a gallon or 4 cents a gallon, as opposed to cut the gas tax — that would be the position today. There is quite a change about all that. The no-new-taxes pledge that I believe was originated with Grover Norquist and his folks in the late ‘90s, that became very popular here. We had a governor named Tim Pawlenty who rode into office with that pledge and gave us a lot of trouble trying to keep the budget balanced during his two terms in office.
Geoff Kabaservice: I don’t want to end on an overly depressing note. Maybe you can tell me, as we’re discussing this lost Eden of the progressive Republican Party, what aspects of politics and society Senator Durenberger was still optimistic about toward the end of his life.
Lori Sturdevant: I think he very much appreciated what Obamacare had done for healthcare, and he felt that we were still on some progression toward something even better, something that would really allow the benefits of health insurance to be available to everybody — but to do so in a way that offered a fair amount of choice and a fair amount of local control. But I think he thought that we had made good progress there. He was very worried about climate change, and yet he would have felt good about the things that had been done to show that, when human beings get their act together, they can actually make a difference. He was very much involved, for example, in getting rid of fluorocarbons that were causing a hole in the ozone layer and combating acid rain, and there was some considerable success in those realms.
I think that encouraged him that we could and will do better with regard to climate change. There was a potential, he thought, for some bipartisanship on that issue. I hope that’s true. In Minnesota, by the way, there is a small but notable cohort of Republican legislators who care about climate change, and have been willing to make some moves in that direction. He would’ve been also heartened by the progress this country has made on race relations; dismayed terribly by what happened in this city with regard to George Floyd and the policing problems that continue, but progress he would point to on race relations would have made him feel like, again, we’ve come some distance, and we have the potential to go further. I think that’s what he would say.
Geoff Kabaservice: He was interested in the example of Dave Kleis, who was the mayor of St. Cloud, Minnesota…
Lori Sturdevant: Yes. Mayor Kleis.
Geoff Kabaservice: He was a former Republican legislator, but he would hold monthly dinners with strangers that he would cook himself to try to build interracial understanding in the city, particularly with new immigrants.
Lori Sturdevant: If I were to lift up a place in Minnesota that has experienced dramatic demographic change in the last thirty years, St. Cloud would be high on my list. St Cloud was a very white German-Catholic place, the kind of place that was close to where Dave Durenberger grew up, and it has got a rather large now population that is non-white. I’m thinking maybe as many as a third of the city’s… In just one generation, that has happened. Dave Kleis has been such a positive force, as have other civic institutions there, for keeping racial harmony. There was a nasty episode maybe five or six years ago of a Somali immigrant having a mental health episode and stabbing a bunch of people at a shopping center. The fact that that community, with its former Republican senator and mayor, and its newly appointed African-American police chief, came together in a nice way to keep the lid on racial hostilities in that town, and I was pleased with that.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think Senator Durenberger also retained a faith in at least the potential of civics education, civic participation, grassroots organizing.
Lori Sturdevant: Well, he was a believer in democracy. That’s something that he would have scolded his former Republican colleagues, to the extent that he would’ve perceived that they were backing away from democracy. When he would talk about bringing Minnesota values to Washington, that’s fundamentally what he was talking about: Minnesota’s strong civic participation. We’ve led the nation in voter turnout for ten of the last twelve (or is it eleven of the past thirteen?) presidential elections. We have a strong tradition here, a strong ethic of civic participation at the voting level, and that then spills over into other civic activities as well. He thinks that’s a healthy way for society to exist, and he would’ve thought that we need to continue to push for that.
Geoff Kabaservice: I was also struck by his recollection, on the first page of his preface in this book, that in 2010 he met with Russell Fridley, who was a Minnesota historian and leader of the Minnesota Historical Society, and they had breakfast at the Downtowner restaurant in St. Paul. Russell Fridley asked Durenberger to write a history of Minnesota Republicans; he said that, after all, Durenberger was one of the last of the breed that had started with Harold Stassen, he was someone who had known all of them personally. At that point, Durenberger was very discouraged with the way Republican Party politics were going, and he said, “Why bother?” Russell Fridley replied, “Well, when things get bad enough, history has a way of repeating itself. Therefore, there will be a need to know what the progressive Republican tradition is, to bring the state and maybe national politics up from its low point.” I think that, in a weird way, is a hopeful message.
Lori Sturdevant: Well, it is. I always like to encourage people who are thinking about doing a memoir, and wonder if they should… Sometimes people will say, “Is my life worthy of a book?” I always say, “That’s not the right question. The question is: is this a gift that you are willing to give to the next generation?” Leaving a record of what we have done, where we have been in the twentieth century, is very important to the twenty-first century and beyond as we try to understand ourselves, understand the predicaments we are in, understand what possible solutions we might try. History’s a great source of inspiration for a lot of people, and I’m certainly one of them. So I’ve encouraged folks: “Do the book. If I have time, I’ll help you.” I have those relationships with several people right now, because I want to see them leave a record of this special time that we have lived through.
Geoff Kabaservice: Lori Sturdevant, I completely agree with you. And I am deeply grateful to you for all that you have done to help others leave that personal record behind, particularly Senator David Durenberger with his book When Republicans Were Progressive. Thank you again for joining me here today.
Lori Sturdevant: Thank you, Geoff.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating, or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingenieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, DC.