Stassen Again by Steve Werle (review)

Steve Werle’s biography of Harold Stassen provides a much-needed window into a world where the Republican Party had a significant and assertive moderate wing. For many decades, Stassen was at the center of this middle way. Born in 1907 and raised on a small farm in what is today the inner ring suburb of West St. Paul, Stassen lived through most of the twentieth century and played a role in shaping many of its important characteristics. Werle focuses primarily on Stassen’s quest to create an international architecture of peace during and after World War II, but we also learn how he worked to move the Republican Party toward more moderate positions on labor and welfare.

Without really explaining Stassen’s decision to join the Republican Party, Werle informs us that from an early age he adopted a reformist attitude and challenged long-established conservative positions within the party. Raised during the Progressive era and coming of age politically during the Great Depression and the rise of fascism and militarism, Stassen understood that simpleminded conservatism had no political future and that threats to freedom and democracy from the right were as dangerous and real as those from the left. He also understood that an unregulated marketplace was as much a threat to prosperity as a centrally planned economy.

Having served as the Dakota County district attorney, he was elected governor of Minnesota in 1938. Stassen proposed a wide-ranging reform agenda, including the state’s first civil service law, the establishment of the state office of social security and public welfare, and a massive reorganization of the state administrative and finance offices. Significantly, Stassen embarked on passing the Minnesota Labor Peace Act of 1939. Borrowing ideas from legal experts and scholars at the University of Minnesota— who in turn borrowed ideas from other countries, particularly Denmark and Norway— the act called for the creation of an office of a state labor conciliator who could force closed-door negotiations for ten days before a strike or lockout could be called. If a compelling public interest was at stake, an additional cooling off period could be called where a fact finding commission would review the dispute between labor and management. Such a proposal accepted as normal the potential conflicts between bosses and workers and sought to use the power of government to encourage negotiations when the two parties saw no alternative to a strike or a lockout.

Reelected three times, Stassen resigned the governorship in 1943 to join the war effort in the Naval Reserve. From that point forward, Werle argues, Stassen focused on global security issues. As a commander in the Navy, Stassen worked closely with Admiral William Halsey and was involved in liberating prisoners of war in the Pacific. Stassen was then appointed one of seven Americans to head the US delegation that created the United Nations. Werle sets out in some detail the interesting story of how Stassen played a key role in overcoming the profound challenges of drafting language dealing with the legacy of colonialism. Here, common ground needed to be found between former colonial powers reluctant to give up their old ways and new nations demanding freedom. Stassen was a fierce internationalist who sincerely sought a world order based on universally accepted rules and negotiation, rather than bombs and threats of violence.

In the end, the strength of this biography is the way Werle demonstrates Stassen’s commitment to what he calls “the middle way.” Within the Republican Party there was a conservative wing and a progressive wing, and they struggled for power through all of Stassen’s political life. Harold Stassen never wavered in his commitment to this middle way. One is reminded in reading this book that both major parties had within them deeply conservative and progressive elements well into the last decades of the twentieth century.

Werle is clearly an admirer of Stassen, and the book could have been more evenhanded in its analysis of foreign policy generally and the Cold War...