What Minnesota Made of Itself

There is a story Minnesota tells about itself, and like most stories states tell about themselves, it is partly true and partly aspiration. The story goes that Minnesota is a place of civic seriousness, of high voter turnout, of well-funded public universities and strong public schools, of cooperative economic institutions and a political culture shaped more by pragmatic problem-solving than by ideological ferocity. There is enough truth in this to make the myth useful and enough myth in it to make the truth complicated.

The civic culture that Minnesota developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was built on the specific immigrant communities that settled here. Scandinavian Lutheranism, German Catholic and Lutheran traditions, and the particular circumstances of agricultural settlement in a harsh climate all tended toward community institutions rather than individual ones. A family that lost its barn to fire in a Minnesota winter had to rely on neighbors. A farmer who needed to move grain to market cheaply had to cooperate with other farmers against the railroads. The Grange, the cooperative elevator, the mutual insurance association, these were not political theories. They were practical responses to specific problems.

The University of Minnesota was chartered in eighteen fifty-one, seven years before statehood, on the premise that a public university was foundational to a functioning democracy. The land-grant system that followed the Morrill Act of eighteen sixty-two gave the university its agricultural research mission, the development of better wheat varieties, better livestock management, better soil science, that was for decades as important to the state's economy as anything done in its cities.

Minnesota has sent to the United States Senate, over the last hundred years, a list of names that reads like a primer on twentieth-century progressive thought: Hubert Humphrey, who delivered the civil rights speech that split the Democratic Party in nineteen forty-eight. Eugene McCarthy, whose antiwar presidential campaign in nineteen sixty-eight changed the Democratic primary system. Walter Mondale, who ran for president in nineteen eighty-four and lost all fifty states except his own and the District of Columbia.

This is not a state that has always gotten things right. The Dakota War, the expulsion that followed, the sundown towns that dotted the agricultural south, the history is not uniformly admirable. But the aspiration encoded in the civic institutions has been consistent and it has sometimes been realized. That is its own kind of inheritance.