How the Range was lost

When the DFL’s left and right went to war

On July 7, 1977, state DFL Rep. Phyllis Kahn from Minneapolis addressed a meeting at the Capitol’s State Office Building in St. Paul, speaking in support of the bill that became the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act of 1978. “It is an undeniable conflict and above all it is a one-way conflict,” she argued. “It is the cross-country skier, who expects tranquility and solitude both destroyed by the snowmobiler; as in the manner the canoeist’s calm is broken by the presence of motorboats.” The following day, another meeting took place at Ely High School. “My people have compromised,” Cook County state DFL Sen. Doug Johnson argued in opposition to the bill. “The preservationists are the most selfish people I have ever encountered.”

The fight over the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) drove a wedge between two elements of what Democrat, union bigwig, and leading liberal Joe Rauh called “the liberal-labor-Negro coalition that had elected every liberal president and made possible every liberal advance since the 1930s.” On one side were Twin Cities liberals, like Kahn, who embraced the newly popular cause of environmentalism. On the other were the unionized miners and loggers of northern Minnesota, represented by Johnson, who saw the bill as unwarranted interference in their lives.

Civil Rights and Vietnam were the great stressors of this coalition in the 1960s and 1970s, resulting in its collapse. But, historian Camden Burd argues, “The environmental movement provided a point of fracture for the Democratic coalition.” Of the contemporaneous secessionist movement in Michigan’s Northern Peninsula, Burd writes: “Arguing that environmental legislation hindered economic possibilities and threatened notions of political autonomy, politicians and residents throughout the region disputed much of the new environmental legislation of the 1960s and 1970s, driving a wedge through traditional Democratic strongholds throughout the Great Lakes region.” In Minnesota, the split came in 1978.

The politician: Don Fraser

Two days after Hubert Humphrey’s death in January 1978, Don Fraser announced his candidacy for the vacant Senate seat.

Elected to the Minn. State Senate in 1954, Fraser broke with Humphrey in 1960 to back John F. Kennedy’s presidential bid and in 1962 became the first Democrat to represent Minnesota’s redrawn 5th Congressional District since 1905. He quickly rose to prominence in both the party and Congress. “During his eight terms,” one observer wrote, “Fraser established himself as one of the leaders of liberal Democrats nationally and within the talent-rich dominant liberal wing of the Minnesota DFL.” He chaired the Democratic Study Group, a caucus of liberal Congressional Democrats, and the McGovern-Fraser Commission, established after the chaotic 1968 Convention to broaden representation. In Congress, Fraser championed numerous causes, including environmental protection. This brought him to the Iron Range.

The Boundary Waters covers approximately 1.3 million acres in the northern third of the Superior National Forest in northeastern Minnesota. It was popular with city dwellers, like Fraser’s constituents, as a vacation spot. Humphrey had pushed for its inclusion in the Wilderness Protection Act of 1964, but he recognized the electoral importance of the DFL vote in that region: In 1964, St. Louis County gave the Johnson-Humphrey ticket 76 percent of its vote and John Blatnik’s grip on the 8th District was such that he ran unopposed in 1966. “Though ruggedly independent in most matters,” David Lebedoff wrote in 1969, “in politics [8th District voters] make up the closest thing the state has to an old-time dependable machine.” As a compromise, the bill permitted “multiple uses.” Unlike other wilderness areas, snowmobile, motorboat travel, and logging were permitted on a limited basis. In 1975, Blatnik’s successor, DFLer Jim Oberstar, introduced a bill to address conflicts resulting from “multiple uses.” This bill proposed two zones: one with full wilderness protection and one where logging and motorized travel could continue.

Fraser, who had canoed the area on his honeymoon, countered Oberstar’s proposal with his own, saying, “My bill principally restores the BWCA to…true wilderness status. In addition, we add about 35,000 acres at particular points around the periphery of the BWCA.” Fraser’s bill banned logging, mineral prospecting, and mining; all but banned snowmobile use; limited motorboat use; and officially changed the name of the region to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. It provided stipends for resort owners and outfitters who stood to lose customers.

Iron Rangers saw Fraser’s bill as a metropolitan liberal interfering in their lives. In June 1976, the Duluth News Tribune lambasted “the typical idealistic impracticality of a liberal Democrat.” Steelworkers from the Range picketed Fraser’s Minneapolis office in October 1977. A letter from Cloquet accused Fraser of prioritizing:

…so-called conservationists, who (sic) only goal is to secure a playground for the rich and able bodied and to hell with the rest of us! Why don’t you people clean up Minneapolis and St. Paul…Why are you making northern Minnesota the target for destruction — to appease the privileged people?

“Dump Fraser” bumper stickers appeared across the Range. “People are simply not going to elect into office someone that is going to cut their throat,” an Ely resident explained.

The businessman: Bob Short

Fraser was likely to face a fight for the senate nomination. Cultural divides, rather than economic ones, were increasingly defining American politics and the upheaval was roiling the DFL as much as the GOP.

At the DFL’s 1974 convention, a proposed plank backing the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade failed to get the required 60 percent support. The following year, Oberstar — who owed his primary victory over endorsed candidate Tony Perpich to his pro-life stance and who authored the Hyde Amendment — and his DFL colleague, the 6th District’s Rick Nolan, proposed a pro-life amendment to the Constitution.

Fraser was a prime target for conservative Democrats. Marion Menning, a DFL state senator from southwestern Minnesota, described in the Minneapolis Tribune as one of the state’s “most vocal opponents of abortion and gay rights,” flirted with running. Johnson, “from the pro-life, anti-gun control Iron Range region of the state,” did run. Anti-abortion “forces [had] gained considerable political strength within the state,” the Minneapolis Tribune’s Steven Dornfeld wrote, “and they do not want to see Fraser advance to the Senate.” But it was Humphrey’s old friend Bob Short who took up their banner.

A “flamboyant Minneapolis entrepreneur,” Short was an unlikely standard bearer for the DFL’s labor faction. Starting with a loan he used to buy into a small trucking company, he made a fortune in the trucking and hotel industries. He was unapologetic about his wealth: “I didn’t steal it. I didn’t marry it, and I didn’t inherit it,” he explained, “I earned it myself with hard work.” He had owned — and moved — two professional sports franchises, including the Minneapolis Lakers in 1961, to this day the most successful men’s sports franchise in Minnesota history. “In politics, in civic affairs, in the business community [Short] has been a maverick,” the Minneapolis Star’s Robert Wheratt wrote, “an outsider who decides what he wants to do, does it, and to hell with you if you don’t particularly like it.”

Short was no political novice. In 1956, he managed Estes Kefauver’s presidential primary campaign in Minnesota when most DFL leaders supported the liberal Adlai Stevenson. In 1966, Lt. Gov. “Sandy” Keith and what the Harvard Crimson described as “his band of young Turks and old liberal idealists” challenged incumbent Gov. Karl Rolvaag for that year’s gubernatorial nomination, simply because the dour Rolvaag didn’t fit the then-fashionable Kennedy archetype. After nominating Keith at a fractious 1966 DFL convention, Fraser himself was touted as a compromise candidate. Rolvaag offered Short as a compromise instead, knowing he was anathema to the liberals. After twenty ballots, the DFL endorsed Keith, but, with Short’s financial backing, Rolvaag fought. The Rolvaag-Short ticket won the primary, but, running on populism, lost in November. “If Short makes one more speech,” a reporter quipped, “this state’ll vote for the free coinage of silver.” The Harvard Crimson described Short as “a new-style politician…with money and ambition, but little else.” This wasn’t fair: He had a deep and long-standing antipathy towards the DFL’s liberals. He announced his candidacy in April.

The battle

Short skipped the June 3 endorsing convention, recognizing the extent of Fraser’s support from the establishment. Nevertheless, “Fraser’s endorsement did not come easily,” the Minneapolis Star’s Betty Wilson wrote:

About 1,000 residents of northeastern Minnesota arrived by bus to picket, sit in the gallery, carry signs and noisemakers, and disrupt the convention whenever Fraser’s name came up. Their candidate was favorite son Senator Doug Johnson of Cook, who had announced his Senate candidacy the previous week in an attempt to block Fraser’s endorsement… When Fraser went to the platform to make his formal acceptance speech, there was an uproar, and John French, convention chair, was unable to restore order. The protestors ceased their demonstrations and noisemaking only when Jim Oberstar…went to the podium and urged that the Minneapolis congressman be allowed to speak. Oberstar…was leaning toward Robert Short, who had bypassed the endorsement system and filed as a candidate in the DFL primary.

Short’s strategy, Wilson wrote, was to “stitch together what’s been called a ‘coalition of disaffection’ — single-issue groups hostile to Fraser because of his stands on abortion, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, gun control, and other emotional issues.” Short worked with the National Rifle Association and the Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life. Even with Democrats holding the White House and both houses of Congress, Short ran as an insurgent: “I’ve had enough,” emblazoned his campaign buttons. He ran to the right of everyone, Republicans included. He proposed a Constitutional amendment to ban abortion and complained that “The nuts in Washington are taxing the hell out of us.” He proposed to “cut federal spending by $100 billion, using $50 billion for a tax cut and the other $50 billion to balance the federal budget.”

But Short’s main pitch to primary voters was his promise to keep the federal government from interfering with the right of sportsmen and fishermen to use motorboats and loggers to log in the BWCA. “Increased federal control of your personal lives, Fraser,” ran one Short ad, “Decreased control, Short,” although, as the Duluth Herald asked “Hey, don’t you realize it was your old friend Hubert Humphrey who did so much to create a large, more liberal federal government?”

The Sept. 12 primary was a nail-biter. At 3 a.m., with 83 percent of the vote counted and Fraser leading 50 to 45 percent, the St. Paul Pioneer Press went to print with the headline “Fraser beats Short.” But, as votes came in from northern Minnesota, the lead shrank to a single point by 5:45 a.m. By 8 a.m., it was clear that Short had beaten Fraser — 257,289 to 253,818. The Iron Range votes proved decisive. Short scored 69 percent in St. Louis County, 80 percent in Lake County, and 88 percent in Cook County: the three BWCA counties. The Ely Echo ran a front-page editorial cartoon showing the “Little Guys of N.E. Minnesota” shooting down the Fraser jet with a slingshot.

The split between the DFL’s liberal and labor wings was complete. “I was told years later,” Short’s Republican opponent Dave Durenberger wrote, “that as DFLers in Minneapolis’s tonier precincts — Fraser’s stronghold — absorbed the blow of his defeat with their morning coffee, they turned to each other and said, ‘Let’s take a look at Durenberger.’” A group of liberal DFLers named “Minnesotans for Honesty in Politics” launched a “Stop Short” movement. “The party’s executive committee, dominated by liberals and academics, refused to back [Short],” TIME magazine reported:

The D.F.L.’s feminist caucus actually campaigned against him because of his antiabortion and anti-Equal Rights Amendment views. Other liberals paid for newspaper ads denouncing Short’s opposition to national health insurance and environmental-protection laws. When Jimmy Carter went to Minnesota and urged a Democratic rally to support Short, the President was loudly booed. Predicted a gloomy [Governor Rudy] Perpich just before the election: “Short is going to take all of us down with him.”

Indeed, the Independent-Republicans won both Senate seats, the governor’s mansion, and a tie in the state House in what became known as the “Minnesota Massacre.”

Short went down especially hard. The seat Humphrey won with 68 percent of the vote in 1976, Short lost with just 35 percent. “I never supported Short,” DFL state Sen. Allan Spear said, “and, for the only time in my adult life, I voted for a Republican…Many liberals in the party did the same and Short’s candidacy was doomed.” “I bested Short by nearly 3-1 in Hennepin County,” Durenberger noted, “and 2-to-1 in Ramsey County, the core metro counties that typically are DFL strongholds.” As the northland’s Democrats had rejected Fraser, those in the Twin Cities now rejected Short.

But the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act had been signed into law 18 days earlier. A week before, Fraser gave the final speech of his Congressional career in support of the bill. “There is no question that the BWCA was a ‘deciding factor’ in my defeat,” he reflected.

Forty years later

If Charles Stenvig’s elections as Minneapolis mayor from 1969 onward showed the willingness of urban blue-collar voters to split with the liberals, Short’s victory over Fraser showed the willingness of rural blue-collar voters to do likewise. Personal loyalty tied them to Oberstar, and as late as 2008, he scored 68 percent of the vote. But in the seismic midterms of 2010, the 8th District elected a Republican for the first time since 1944. Four decades after Rangers voted for someone Fraser described as “a Republican in Democratic clothing,” they voted for a Republican in Republican clothing and the GOP has held Blatnick’s old seat ever since, with their vote rising in every cycle from 51 percent in 2018 to 58 percent in 2024. “Things happen slowly, then all at once,” the saying goes.

Environmental issues “divide Democrats, but they also represent social-class issues,” a July 1979 editorial in National Review argued. “They divide haves and have-nots. The affluent want clean air, tourist-free forests, uncrowded and oil-free beaches, happy caribou and snail-darters. The non-affluent want jobs, raises, economic expansion, and enough gas to get the family to a public beach.” They still do.

This article originally appeared in Thinking Minnesota, Spring 2025