Hubert H. Humphrey

At 66 years old, Hubert H. Humphrey has this physical status:

Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr. (May 27, 1911-January 13, 1978) was an American politician who served as the 38th vice president of the United States from 1965 to 1969.

He served in the United States Senate twice from 1949 to 1964, 1971, 1978, and 1978.

In the 1968 presidential election, he was the Democratic Party's nominee, losing to Republican nominee Richard Nixon. Humphrey was born in Wallace, South Dakota, and attended the University of Minnesota.

He was assisting with the pharmacy run by his father at one point.

He obtained a master's degree from Louisiana State University and spent time with the Minnesota war service program and the War Manpower Commission.

He became a professor of political science at Macalester College in 1943 and ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Minneapolis.

In 1944, he helped found the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL).

He won the city of Minneapolis in 1945, serving until 1948 and co-founding the liberal anti-communist group Americans for Democratic Action in 1947.

In 1948, he was elected to the Senate and successfully advocated for the inclusion of a bill to end racial discrimination in the 1948 Democratic National Convention's party platform.

He served as the Senate Majority Whip from 1961 to 1964.

He was the lead author of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, initiated the establishment of the Peace Corps, sponsored the provision in the McCarran Act that barred concentration camps for "subversives," and chaired the Select Committee on Disarmament.

In 1952 and 1960, he unsuccessfully applied for his party's presidential nomination.

After Lyndon B. Johnson's ascension to the presidency, he selected Humphrey as his running mate, and the Democratic ticket was elected in the 1964 landslide. Johnson declared in March 1968 that he did not seek reelection, and Humphrey declared his campaign for the presidency.

Loyal to the Johnson administration's Vietnam War policies, he faced resistance from many within his own party and pulled the primaries to focusing on gaining the delegates of non-primary states at the Democratic Convention.

Senator Edmund Muskie was voted as his running mate by his delegate campaign, and he secured the nomination.

He nearly equaled Nixon's figure in the popular vote in the general election but lost by a large margin.

After the defeat, he returned to the Senate until his death in 1978.

Early life and education

In Wallace, South Dakota, Humphrey was born in a room over his father's drugstore. He was the son of Ragnild Sannes (1883–1973), a Norwegian immigrant, and Hubert Horatio Humphrey Sr. (1882–1949). Humphrey spent the majority of his youth in Doland, South Dakota, on the Dakota prairie; the town's population was estimated at 600. His father, a registered pharmacist and retailer, served as mayor and a member of the town council. The father served briefly in the South Dakota state legislature and was a delegate to the 1944 and 1948 Democratic National Conventions in South Dakota. A major economic recession in the late 1920s struck Doland; all banks in the town closed; Humphrey's father struggled to keep his store open.

Hubert Sr. opened a new drug store in Huron, South Dakota, where he hoped to grow his fortunes after his son graduated from Doland's high school. Humphrey had to leave the University of Minnesota after just one year due to the family's financial difficulties. He obtained a pharmacist's license from the Capitol College of Pharmacy in Denver, Colorado, (completing a two-year licensure program in just six months), and helped his father run his shop from 1931 to 1937. Both father and son were creative in finding ways to market customers: "The Humphreys had become manufacturers" of patent drugs for both hogs and humans." A wooden pig was hung outside the drugstore to alert the public of this unusual service. Farmers understood it, and Humphrey's was the farmer's drugstore that became well-known." "while Hubert Jr. minded the store and stirred the concoctions in the basement, Hubert Sr. went on the road selling 'Humphrey's BTV' (Body Tone Veterinary), a nutritional supplement and dewormer for hogs, and 'Humphrey's Chest Oil," a biographer, and 'Humphrey's Sniffles' for two-legged sufferers. "We made 'Humphrey's Sniffles,' Humphrey wrote later, as a replacement for Vick's Nose Drops. Ours were better, according to me. The Vick's used mineral oil, which is not absorbent, and we used a vegetable-oil base, which was not. So that even if the sniffles didn't get better, I made it less." The various "Humphrey cures" functioned well enough and made up a significant piece of the family's finances; the farmers who bought the medications were excellent customers." Over time, Humphrey's Drug Store became a profitable business, and the family's business resurgent. When living in Huron, Humphrey, he attended Huron's largest Methodist church and became the Scoutmaster of the Boy Scout Troop 6. He "started basketball games in the church basement, but Hubert found a way in the worst of the summer's dust-storm grit, grasshoppers, and depression to lead an overnight [outing]"

Humphrey didn't enjoy being a pharmacist, and his aim was not to obtain a doctorate in political science and become a college professor. Although doctors could find nothing wrong with him, his illness was manifested in "stomach pains and fainting spells." He told his father that he wanted to return to the University of Minnesota in August 1937. Hubert Sr. tried to convince his son not to leave by giving him a complete partnership in the store, but Hubert Jr. refused and told his father, "how sick I was, nearly ill from the work, the smoke storms, the disconnect between my desire to do something and being someone," he said. "You should do something about it," says Hubert Jr. Humphrey returned to the University of Minnesota in 1937 and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1939. He was a member of Phi Delta Chi, a pharmacy fraternity. In 1940, he earned a master's degree from Louisiana State University, serving as an assistant professor of political science. Russell B. - One of his classmates was Russell B. taylor. A lifetime U.S. Senator from Louisiana.

He served as an instructor and doctoral student at the University of Minnesota from 1940 to 1941 (joining the American Federation of Teachers) and was a mentor for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Humphrey was a member of the University's debate team; one of his coworkers was the future Minnesota Governor and US Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, who served on the Senate's Debating Team. On a Minneapolis radio station, Humphrey and future University of Minnesota president Malcolm Moos debated Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic nominee, and Wendell Willkie, the Republican nominee. Humphrey endorsed Roosevelt. Humphrey soon became involved in Minneapolis politics, but as a result, he never completed his PhD.

Source

Marriage and early career

Humphrey began dating Muriel Buck, a bookkeeper and graduate of local Huron College, in 1934. They were married from 1936 to Humphrey's death nearly 42 years ago. They had four children, including Nancy Faye, Hubert Horatio III, Robert Andrew, and Douglas Sannes. Money was a problem. "For the bulk of his life, he was short of money to live on," one biographer wrote, and his ardent struggle to raise enough campaign funds to get to the White House seemed to be a long road." Humphrey used to get his salary to raise his salary, but he did not get paid outside of speaking engagements. He lived in a middle-class suburban housing development in Chevy Chase, Maryland, for the majority of his time as both a senator and vice president. The Humphreys built a lakefront home in Waverly, Minnesota, about 40 miles west of Minneapolis, in 1958. They used their savings and his speaking fees to build a lakefront home.

Humphrey attempted to join the armed forces three times during World War II, but it was unsuccessful. His first two attempts were to join the Navy, first as a commission officer and then as an enlisted man. Both times he was refused color blindness. In December 1944, he attempted to enlist in the Army but failed the physical exam because of a double hernia, color blindness, and calcification of the lungs. Despite his attempts to join the military, one biographer would point out that Humphrey was dogged by accusations that he was a draft evader" during the conflict.

Humphrey worked in various wartime government departments and taught as a college instructor. He was the state manager of new production development and reemployment in 1942 and the head of the Minnesota war service service program. He was the assistant director of the War Manpower Commission in 1943. Humphrey, a professor of political science at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he supervised the university's recently founded international debate group, which concentrated on World War II and the establishment of the United Nations. Humphrey began working as a news commentator for a Minneapolis radio station until 1945.

Humphrey ran for Mayor of Minneapolis in 1943, in his first run for elective office. He lost, but his poorly funded campaign garnered over 47% of the vote. Humphrey was one of Minnesota's key participants in the fusion of the Democratic and Laborer groups of Minnesota into the Minnesota Democratic-Labor Party in 1944 (DFL). He also served on President Roosevelt's reelection bid in 1944. Humphrey became a committed anticommunist during the successful struggle to oust the Communists from the DFL when Minnesota Communists attempted to retake power of the new party in 1945.

He ran for mayor of Minneapolis after the war; this time, he secured the election with 61% of the vote. As mayor, he ensured the appointment of Edwin Ryan, a former associate and former neighbor, as the head of the police department, because he needed a "police chief" whose reputation and loyalty would be above reproach. Though they had differing opinions about labor unions, Ryan and Humphrey banded together to crack down on crime in Minneapolis. "I want this town cleaned up and I mean I want it cleaned up right now, not a year or a month from now," Humphrey told Ryan, "I want this town to be cleaned up and I mean right now." "I'll take care of the politics." Humphrey served as mayor from 1945 to 1948, winning reelection in 1947 by the largest margin in the city's history to this date. Humphrey rose to national prominence as one of the founders of the liberal anticommunist Americans for Democracy (ADA), and he served as chairman from 1949 to 1950. He also reformed the Minneapolis police force. The city had been dubbed the country's "anti-Semitism capital," and its small African-American population had been discriminated against. Humphrey's mayor has been praised for his attempts to combat all sorts of bigotry. He founded the Council on Human Relations and created a municipal version of the Fair Employment Practice Committee, making Minneapolis one of the few cities in the United States to prohibit racial discrimination in the work force. Humphrey and his publicists were proud that the Council on Human Relations brought together individuals of various faiths and ideologies. "I was mayor once, in Minneapolis, and I was the mayor afterwards, so being the President is the highest job there is."

Source