Henrik Shipstead

Political career

Shipstead started as a Republican but in 1922 was elected to the US Senate under the banner of the new Farmer-Labor Party. While he generally shared the party's left-wing agenda, he rejected the extreme anti-capitalism of some members. Although he was the only Farmer-Laborite in the Senate, he won appointment to the powerful Foreign Relations Committee.

Shipstead opposed U.S. entry into the League of Nations and the World Court. He called for the cancellation of German reparations, which he regarded as vindictive. Unlike non-interventionists in the Old Right, he objected to the U.S. occupation of Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. He blamed these interventions on the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine of 1905, which had turned the United States into an arrogant "policeman of the western continent."

Shipstead, despite his opponents, did not consider himself an "isolationist." While he favored a policy of political non-intervention overseas, he opposed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 which he charged was "one of the greatest and most vicious isolationist policies this government has ever enacted." He argued that high tariffs "raise prices to consumers" and make "monopolies richer and people poorer." Affable and dignified, his adversaries generally liked him on a personal level. He concluded, "It doesn't necessarily follow that a radical has to be a damned fool."

Along with Congressman Robert Luce of Massachusetts, he introduced the bill that enlarged the purview of the United States Commission of Fine Arts to include new buildings on private land facing federal property. The Commission, established in 1910, reviews new buildings, memorials, monuments, and public art constructed on federal property in Washington, D.C.. The bill, the Shipstead-Luce Act, is still in effect.

Shipstead defected from the Farmer-Labor party in the late 1930s charging that Communist elements were taking control. He won reelection to the Senate in 1940 as a Republican. Meanwhile, few fought more tenaciously against Franklin D. Roosevelt's efforts to enter the war in Europe. Although Shipstead voted for the declaration of war after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he still maintained his independence from Roosevelt. In October 1942, for example, he was one of the very few to vote against Selective Service, just as he had in 1940.

In April 1943 a confidential analysis by British scholar Isaiah Berlin of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the British Foreign Office stated that Shipstead was:

a rabid Isolationist of Norwegian descent, elected largely by the Scandinavian vote. A very narrow, bigoted, crotchety man, intensely antagonistic to Minnesota's Governor [Harold] Stassen. A member of the Farm Bloc and consistently votes against the Administration.

Shipstead's vote against US entry into the United Nations was entirely predictable to anyone who had followed his career. It was the capstone of decades of opposition to foreign entanglements. Unlike many modern conservative critics of the UN, however, he did not fear only that it would foster a world superstate. He also feared also that it would be used by the major powers to dominate smaller countries. He was alone in the Senate to oppose the UN except for William Langer. That vote was political suicide, and he probably knew it.

A new breed of "internationalists", led by Governor Edward John Thye and former Governor Stassen, had assumed leadership of the state GOP. In 1946, he lost in the Republican primary to Thye.

Shipstead retired to rural western Minnesota, where he died in 1960.