POLITICS: The Minnesota Explosion

The Eisenhower organization in Minnesota was a scale model of what a political machine should not be. Head of Minnesotans for Eisenhower was white-haired Bradshaw Mintener, 49-year-old vice president and general counsel of Pillsbury Mills. Amateur Mintener and most of his workers were ready & willing, but inexperienced. “Headquarters” was an ill-furnished, dingy, rent-free storeroom in downtown Minneapolis. For a while there were three telephones, but two were disconnected to save on the bill.

“Drive for Five.” When Mintener wanted to enter Ike in the Minnesota primary, the headmen of the Eisenhower-for-President movement in Washington said no. That was Friend Harold Stassen’s territory, they said, and should not be violated. But the Minnesotans entered a slate of delegates for Ike, anyway. Some legal technicalities weren’t complied with, and the State Supreme Court threw the slate off the ballot. When that happened, 13,000 undistributed “I Like Ike” buttons were shipped on for use in South Dakota.

After Ike’s victory in New Hampshire, one of the Minnesota eager beavers had an idea. Maybe they could get some write-in votes for Ike, thought young (32) Forst Lowery, Minneapolis Safety Council manager. He asked for a state ruling on whether write-ins would be counted. Just four days before the primary the answer came from the statehouse: yes.

The Mintener machine wheezed into action. Zealous crusaders began a “drive for five” telephone-call campaign: everyone called five friends, urged a write-in for Ike and asked each friend to call five more. On primary eve, Mintener figured his organization had spent just $600 on the write-in campaign. Said he: “If we get as many as 10,000 or 15,000 write-ins for Ike, I’ll be thrilled.”

“On Their Heads.” Primary day—the first presidential primary in Minnesota since 1916—brought rain, snow and mud. A light vote was expected. But not long after the polls opened, election workers knew something strange was happening. Voters were sloshing through the weather in unexpected numbers. In St. Paul, Duluth, Austin and St. Louis Park (a Minneapolis suburb), where voting machines are used, an astonishing number of voters were going through a tedious process. They had to push aside a metal cover on a vertical write-in slot 1½ in. long, reach up (the slot was 5 ft. 9 in. from the floor) to write a name vertically, from the bottom of the slot to the top. “Damn near had to stand on their heads, I guess,” said Ramsey County (St. Paul) Auditor Eugene A. Monick. At many polling places where machines were not used, the supply of ballots ran out. Some voters stood in line for hours, finally wrote their choice on scratch paper initialed by the election judges.

When clerks began to tabulate the vote, they discovered what the voters had written: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Eisonhauer, Eausonhower, Isenhower, Eneshower, Izenour, Ikenhoner, Ike. As the returns came in, politicians across the U.S. listened in amazement. This week the unofficial count gave Ike 106,946 write-in votes to 128,605 for Favorite Son Stassen, whose name was printed on the ballot* and listed on the voting machines. While Stassen got more votes than any other candidate, the total write-in vote was greater than his. This blow in his home state, after he ran a poor third in New Hampshire, made it clear that Harold Stassen is doggedly running nowhere.

“Humble Thank You.” The New York Times’s Arthur Krock, a man not given to careless superlatives, called the Minnesota vote “qualitatively the most spontaneous outburst in history of political preference in this country.”† Mrs. Alma Thompson, who led 79 other elderly women from a Minneapolis home for the aged to the polls to write in for Ike, explained what happened: “We were just waiting for the chance to vote for General Eisenhower, because he’s a born leader, and leadership is what the country needs.”

In France, General Eisenhower was “astonished.” Said he: “I count it an additional compliment that some refused to be dismayed by the long Eisenhower name and simply wrote in Ike.” Then he sent a cable to Friend Mintener: “To you, personally, and to the more than 100,000 Minnesotans who paid me the great compliment of writing my name on the ballot, I send a very humble ‘thank you.’ ”

Many politicians and pundits thought this would be a signal for the Ikemen in Washington to set up write-in campaigns against Stassen in Nebraska April 1 (where a Taft write-in movement is under way), against Taft and Stassen in Illinois April 8, and in West Virginia on May 13. But Eisenhower headquarters seemed way behind their candidate’s popular strength. This week Eisenhower supporters in Nebraska started a write-in campaign, but complained that they had not received authorization or money from national headquarters.

* There were other considerable write-in votes, but all were dwarfed by Ike’s total. Bob Taft had 24,019. On the Democratic side, Favorite Son Hubert Humphrey, a Truman stand-in whose name was printed on the ballot, polled 99,199 votes, while Estes Kefauver’s name was written in 19,868 times and Harry Truman’s 3,644.

† In 1932, Acting Mayor Joseph V. McKee of New York polled 232,501 write-in votes after a vigorous press campaign against Tammany Hall. But Tammanyite John P. O’Brien was elected with 1,056,115 votes. In 1944, Tom Dewey received 146,706 write-ins in the Pennsylvania presidential primary, after a long, well-organized campaign in a primary with no names printed on the ballot.