Paul Wellstone
Paul David Wellstone was an American academic, author, and politician. He represented Minnesota in the United States Senate from 1991 until he was killed in a plane crash near Eveleth, Minnesota, in 2002, several days before that year's election for the seat. A member of the Democratic Party, Wellstone was a leader of the populist and progressive wings of the party.
Born in Washington, D.C., Wellstone grew up in Northern Virginia. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, earning a Bachelor's of Arts and a doctorate in political science. In 1969, Wellstone was hired as a professor at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He taught there until his election to the Senate in 1990. In addition, he also worked as a local activist and community organizer in rural Rice County. In 1982, he made his first bid for political office in the Minnesota State Auditor race, losing to Republican incumbent Arne Carlson.
Wellstone challenged two-term Republican incumbent Rudy Boschwitz in the 1990 United States Senate election. Wellstone was widely seen as an underdog and was significantly outspent by Boschwitz. Using his progressive populism and grassroots campaigning tactics, such as his iconic green school bus, Wellstone won in an upset victory that gained him national attention. He was the only challenger in the country that year to defeat an incumbent senator. In his 1996 reelection campaign, he defeated Boschwitz in a rematch. He won the elections with 50.4% and 50.3% of the vote, respectively.
While in the U.S. Senate, Wellstone was a supporter of environmental protection, labor groups, and health care reform. He notably authored the "Wellstone Amendment" for the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. However, his efforts toward campaign finance reform were overturned in 2010 by the U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
Wellstone was a candidate for reelection to the Senate in 2002 and faced former Saint Paul mayor Norm Coleman in a competitive race. A few weeks before the election, Wellstone died in a plane crash near Eveleth, Minnesota. His wife, Sheila, and daughter, Marcia, also died on board. After his death, Wellstone was replaced as the DFL nominee by former Vice President Walter Mondale, who lost to Coleman.
Wellstone's sons, David and Mark, were not on the flight. In their parents' honor, they founded and until 2018 co-chaired Wellstone Action, a nonprofit organization that trains progressive organizers.
Background and education
Wellstone was born in Washington, D.C., the second son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants Leon and Minnie Wellstone. They met and married in the United States. Their first son, Stephen, was born in 1936. Leon changed the family surname from Wexelstein after encountering severe antisemitism while living and working in Boston during the 1930s. The parents no longer practiced formal Judaism but raised Paul to understand the search for justice as the heart of their faith. Raised in Arlington, Virginia, Wellstone attended public schools. A gifted student, he had difficulty as a teenager in years after his brother suffered a breakdown and had to be hospitalized for a period. Wellstone found new focus and success when he became involved in wrestling. He attended Wakefield High School and Yorktown High School, graduating in 1962.Wellstone attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a wrestling scholarship. In college he was an undefeated Atlantic Coast Conference wrestling champion. He graduated a year early with a Bachelor of Arts in political science in 1965, and was elected Phi Beta Kappa. In May 1969, Wellstone earned a PhD in political science from UNC. His doctoral dissertation on the roots of black militancy was titled Black Militants in the Ghetto: Why They Believe in Violence.
Marriage and family
In 1963, after his freshman year, Wellstone married Sheila Ison. They had dated since high school but went to different colleges. She left the University of Kentucky and worked at UNC to support them while he pursued an accelerated schedule.They had three children together: David, Mark, and Marcia.
Early career and activism
In August 1969, Wellstone accepted a tenure-track position at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He taught political science until his election to the United States Senate in 1990.During the 1970s and 1980s, Wellstone began community organizing with the working poor and other politically disenfranchised communities. He founded the Organization for a Better Rice County, a group consisting mainly of single parents on welfare. The organization advocated for public housing, affordable health care, improved public education, free school lunches, and a publicly funded daycare center. In 1978, Wellstone published his first book, How the Rural Poor Got Power: Narrative of a Grassroots Organizer, chronicling his work with the organization.
Wellstone was arrested twice during this period for civil disobedience. The Federal Bureau of Investigation began a case file on him after his May 1970 arrest for protesting the Vietnam War at the Federal Office Building in Minneapolis. In 1984 Wellstone was arrested again, for trespassing during a foreclosure protest at a bank.
Wellstone extended his activism to the Minnesota labor movement. In the summer of 1985, he walked the picket line with striking P-9ers during a labor dispute at the Hormel Meat Packing plant in Austin, Minnesota. The Minnesota National Guard was called in during the strike to ensure that Hormel could hire permanent replacement workers.
Carleton College's trustees briefly fired Wellstone in the mid-1970s for his activism and lack of academic publications. He received widespread support from students, and some held a sit-in. Wellstone formally challenged the trustees' failure to follow process of review. He gained an assessment by outside professors, who highly praised his teaching, organizing, and work. The trustees then rehired him and gave him tenure a year ahead of the standard schedule. Wellstone remains the youngest tenured faculty member in Carleton's history.
Early political career
Wellstone first sought public office in 1982. He received the Democratic nomination for Minnesota State Auditor after an impassioned speech at the state convention. In the general election he received 45% of the vote, losing to Republican incumbent, and future Minnesota governor, Arne Carlson. Wellstone remained active in Democratic politics in the mid-1980s. He served as an elected committeeman for the Democratic National Committee in 1984, and in 1986 began a second campaign for State Auditor before dropping out to tend his mother's failing health. In 1988, Wellstone chaired Jesse Jackson's campaign for the presidency in Minnesota. After the primary, he co-chaired Michael Dukakis's campaign in the state.U.S. Senate campaigns (1990–2002)
In 1990, Wellstone ran for the U.S. Senate against incumbent Rudy Boschwitz, beginning the race as a serious underdog. He narrowly won the election despite being outspent 7 to 1. Wellstone played off his underdog image with quirky, humorous ads created by political consultant Bill Hillsman, including "Fast Paul" and "Looking for Rudy", a pastiche of the 1989 Michael Moore documentary Roger & Me. Boschwitz was hurt by a letter his supporters wrote, on campaign stationery, to members of the Minnesota Jewish community days before the election, accusing Wellstone of being a "bad Jew" for marrying a Gentile and not raising his children in the Jewish faith. Wellstone's reply, widely broadcast on Minnesota television, was "He has a problem with Christians, then." Boschwitz was the only incumbent U.S. senator not to be reelected that year.Wellstone defeated Boschwitz again in 1996. During that campaign, Boschwitz ran ads accusing Wellstone of being "embarrassingly liberal" and calling him "Senator Welfare". He accused Wellstone of supporting flag burning, a move some believe backfired. Before that accusation, the race was close, but Wellstone beat Boschwitz by nine points despite again being significantly outspent. Reform Party candidate Dean Barkley received 7% of the vote.
Wellstone's upset victory in 1990 and reelection in 1996 were also credited to a grassroots campaign that inspired college students, poor people, and minorities to get involved in politics, many for the first time. In 1990, the number of young people involved in the campaign was so notable that shortly after the election, Walter Mondale told Wellstone that "the kids won it for you". Wellstone had spent much of his Senate career working with the Hmong community in Minnesota, which had not previously been much involved in American politics, and with the veterans community—serving on the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, where he successfully campaigned for atomic veterans to receive compensation from the federal government, and for increased spending on health care for veterans.
In 2002, Wellstone campaigned for reelection to a third term despite an earlier campaign pledge to serve only two. His Republican opponent was Norm Coleman, a two-term mayor of St. Paul and former Democrat. Earlier that year, Wellstone announced he had a mild form of multiple sclerosis, causing the limp he had believed was an old wrestling injury.
Wellstone was in a line of center-left senators from the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. The first three, Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, and Walter Mondale, were all prominent in the national Democratic Party. Shortly after Wellstone joined the Senate, South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings said to him, "You remind me of Hubert Humphrey. You talk too much."
Presidential aspirations
Shortly after his reelection to the Senate in 1996, Wellstone began contemplating a run for his party's nomination for President of the United States in 2000. In May 1997, he embarked on a cross-country speaking and listening tour dubbed "The Children's Tour." It took him through rural areas of Mississippi and Appalachia and the inner cities of Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Baltimore. He intended to retrace the steps Robert F. Kennedy took during a similar tour in 1966.Wellstone planned to highlight that conditions had improved slightly for African Americans since the height of the civil rights movement, but not much for poor whites, despite their receiving food stamps, gaining more government jobs, and the massive federal investment in their regions, especially Appalachia.
In 1998, Wellstone formed an exploratory committee and a leadership PAC, the Progressive Politics Network, that paid for his travels to Iowa and New Hampshire, two early primary states in the nomination process. He spoke before organized labor and local Democrats, using the slogan "I represent the democratic wing of the Democratic Party." Vermont governor Howard Dean later incorporated that phrase into his stump speech in the 2004 US presidential election.
On January 9, 1999, Wellstone called a press conference at the Minnesota State Capitol at which he said he lacked the stamina necessary for a national campaign, citing chronic back problems he ascribed to an old wrestling injury. His pain was later diagnosed as multiple sclerosis. He thereafter endorsed former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, the only Democratic candidate to challenge Vice President Al Gore.