Paul Wellstone: The Life of a Passionate Progressive

3. Acquiring a Political Vocation

3 Acquiring a Political Vocation One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion. Wellstone received tenure in 1974 and spent the following sixteen years as the most unorthodox member of Carleton College’s faculty. In addition to meeting his teaching responsibilities, he led raucous and often illegal protests that at times violated even Saul Alinsky ’s work-within-the-system radical principles. He made no secret of his resentment of many Carleton administrators and protested the school’s hiring practices and its ties to corporate interests. He stubbornly refused to submit articles to academic journals and instead published case studies of grassroots organizing in which he admiringly described the use of “guerrilla warfare” tactics in protests. Although the subject of his courses was American politics, he said he believed that running for of‹ce was “a waste of time.” 39 Paradoxically, it was during this period of his life that Wellstone became a political activist. He joined the local chapter of the DFL Party and quickly became a prominent and outspoken party leader. In 1982, he was nominated to be the party’s candidate for state auditor. In subsequent years, he gained prominence as a talented and ambitious political activist with a capacity for compromise. And by the end of the decade, he would be a candidate for Senate. Despite the contradictions in Wellstone’s accounts, all of this unfolded in a series of steps that in retrospect seemed logical. As a young graduate student, he viewed electoral politics as a tool in winning power struggles. Once he arrived at Carleton, he witnessed the dramatic impact he could have by engaging direct grassroots organizing. He grew disenchanted with the more indirect avenue of electoral politics. But over time, Wellstone came to believe that the reason why running for of‹ce is often an ineffective way to contest for power is that the Left had failed to apply the lessons of direct action to political campaigns. It was during his immersion in protest politics—the time of his life when he was least likely to embrace electoral politics—that Wellstone developed the techniques and leadership skills that would eventually help him become a U.S. senator. Learning to Lead Nowhere was the emergence of Wellstone’s leadership capacity more evident than in his ‹ve-year involvement in the late 1970s with a farmer-led revolt against two utility companies in rural Minnesota. Not long after receiving tenure at Carleton, he heard about a group of farmers in the west-central part of the state who were protesting a plan to install a high-voltage power line across 430 miles of farmPAUL WELLSTONE 40 land. The farmers, most of whom owned small, family-run farms, argued that the power companies had chosen to build the potentially unsafe line on their land because the owners of large, irrigated farms convinced the companies that the land on the smaller farms was less productive. In fact, the owners of the irrigated farms simply did not want the line to run through their land. The small farmers were incensed. The power line would cut through the middle of their farms, making it more dif‹cult to plant and harvest their crops and potentially putting them in danger—the high-voltage lines used technology that had not been widely utilized before, and their safety was questioned. But above all, the farmers objected to the idea of a large power company, backed by powerful agribusiness interests and state government of‹cials, appropriating their land. “[It] seemed like they were going to take our land, that was it, and we had nothing to say about it,” said one of the farmers who helped lead the protests.1 When surveyors began appearing on the farmers’ land in 1976, a full-scale rebellion erupted. It started with farmers chasing surveying and construction crews from their land and gradually escalated to acts of civil disobedience and violence . Angry farmers used manure spreaders to block the path of the construction workers and rammed the surveying vehicles and equipment with tractors. Eventually, the governor brought in over two hundred state troopers, almost half the size of the entire force, to quell the uprising. They were met by farmers who sprayed them with ammonia and threatened them with baseball bats. The protests riveted the state and attracted national...