Ernest Lundeen (August 4, 1878 – August 31, 1940) was an American lawyer and politician who represented Minnesota in the United States House of Representatives from 1917 to 1919 and 1933 to 1937 and the United States Senate from 1937 until his death in 1940. He was a member of the Republican Party before joining the Minnesota Farmer–Labor Party, and he opposed American involvement in World War I and World War II. He was also affiliated with the Nazi Party of Germany.
Ernest Lundeen was born on August 4, 1878 on his father's homestead in Brooklyn Township near Beresford, 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 a diphtheria epidemic during the 1880s. In 1896, Lundeen and his family moved from their Brooklyn homestead to Harcourt, Iowa, and then to Minnesota. Lundeen served in the United States Army in the 12th Minnesota Volunteer Regiment during the Spanish–American War.[citation needed]
Lundeen first ran for Congress in 1914 but was unsuccessful.
In 1916, Lundeen was elected to represent Minnesota's 5th congressional district, based in Minneapolis, in the 65th United States Congress. He was one of 50 representatives to vote against the declaration of war against Germany on April 6, 1917.[2] He continued to oppose the war while it was being fought.[3] Owing to his opposition, he lost renomination for the Republican primary in 1918 to the eventual winner, Walter Newton. Once, while he was making a speech about foreign policy, a crowd in Ortonville, Minnesota carried him off a speech platform and forced him into a car of a departing train.[3]
Unsuccessful bids for office
In the 1920s, Lundeen was repeatedly unsuccessful in his runs for political office:[4]
Lundeen ran for the same seat again in 1920 but failed to win the Republican nomination. He ran in the general election as an independent candidate but finished third with 10.0% of the total vote.
In 1922, Lundeen challenged incumbent United States Senator Frank B. Kellogg for the Republican nomination for Senate. He received 123,765 votes in the Republican primary (33.54% of the total).
In 1923, Lundeen ran in the special election for United States Senate but finished seventh out of nine candidates in the Republican primary, winning only 5,851 votes (3.40% of the total).
In 1930, Lundeen was the Farmer–Labor nominee for United States Senate, challenging incumbent Republican Thomas D. Schall. He finished third behind Schall and Democratic nominee Einar Hoidale with 22.89% of the vote.
United States House of Representatives (1933–37)
Lundeen was elected to the U.S. House again in 1932 and served in the 73rd and 74th 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 the Communist Party in 1930 and openly and vigorously advocated by the party for the next several years. Despite the bill's Communist origins, the party mustered considerable support for it, including from union locals, international unions, and state labor federations. The bill attracted support from liberals dissatisfied with the less generous and much less radical Wagner-Lewis Bill (which became the Social 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 chairman Earl 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.[5]
In 1936, the Farmer–Labor Party nominated Floyd 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 Governor Theodore Christianson.
Term in office
He served from January 3, 1937, in the 75th and 76th Congresses until his death. Initially, his Communist sympathies remained strong: in 1936, then Senator-elect Lundeen addressed a meeting of the "Friends of the Soviet Union" at Madison Square Garden as Tovarishchi ("Comrades"). But he remained isolationist and was later denounced by the group as a reactionary.[6]
Lundeen's isolationist views led him to be sympathetic to Nazi Germany. He had close ties to George Sylvester Viereck, a leading Nazi agent in the U.S. Viereck, after giving the Senator millions of dollars in bribes, often used Lundeen's office, and "sometimes dictated speeches for Lundeen, openly using the Senator's telephones to obtain material from Hans Thomsen at the [German] embassy." Some of these speeches were pro-German and pro-isolationist. Viereck would then have Lundeen's staff print thousands, and in some cases, even millions of copies of the speeches, which would then be distributed to the public.[7][8] During his first term in the House of Representatives, he contributed to Viereck's American Weekly.[3]
He was the chair and founder of the Islands for War Debts Committee, which urged the seizure of British territories in the West Indies in order to pay off British debts to the United States from WWI.[3] It was likely an isolationist public relations tactic, reminding Americans that the United States should not lend more assistance to a country who was already in debt to them.[3]
On June 14, 1939, Lundeen joined a civilian and press delegation aboard USS Hammann for its sea trials off Fire 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.[9] Lundeen said the experience was "astounding" and that the test showed that American ship designers "need bow to none."
While in office, he required his aides to pay him a portion of their paychecks, threatening to fire them if they did not comply.[3]
In 2022, Rachel Maddow released a podcast series titled Ultra, 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, a top Nazi spy working in the US to spread pro-Hitler and anti-Semitic propaganda.[11][12]
After the plane crash, Lundeen's wife Norma Lundeen 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 the year after the tragedy, the story that Lundeen's speeches had been written by Viereck had been reported by several journalists.[13] Norma Lundeen tried to prevent that narrative by claiming that "no one wrote [her] husband's speeches" and threatening to sue one of the journalists who was reporting on it. Viereck's defense called her as a witness during his trial. She then falsely testified that she indeed took the Viereck files, but the files were gone due to a burglary that had taken place at their residence.[14] It was later discovered that the files were actually stored in the Lundeen family archives.[14]
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