What's the Matter with Minnesota?

In the 1970s, Minnesota and Wisconsin competed to be the most well-ordered state. Now, they compete to generate the most SteveSailer.Net content.

From The Good Life in Gov. Wendell Anderson's Minnesota (August 1973) to The Not So Good Life in Gov. Tim Walz's Minnesota (May 2020)

Here are excerpts from the August 13, 1973 Time magazine cover story on Minnesota as “a state that works:”

If the American good life has anywhere survived in some intelligent equilibrium, it may be in Minnesota. It is a state where a residual American secret still seems to operate. Some of the nation's more agreeable qualities are evident there: courtesy and fairness, honesty, a capacity for innovation, hard work, intellectual adventure and responsibility.

Politics is almost unnaturally clean -- no patronage, virtually no corruption. The citizens are well educated: the high school dropout rate, 7.6 percent, is the nation's lowest. Minnesotans are remarkably civil: their crime rate is the third lowest in the nation (after Iowa and Maine). By a combination of political and cultural tradition, geography and sheer luck, Minnesota nurtures an extraordinarily successful society.

Drawbacks

... Some argue that Minnesota works a bit too well and too blandly, that its comparatively open and serene population is a decade or two behind the rest of the U.S. The place lacks the fire, urgency and self-accusation of states with massive urban centers and problems.

You gotta admit, fire and self-accusation have not been lacking in Gov. Walz’s Minnesota.

Racial issues

Minnesota's people are overwhelmingly white (98 percent), most of them solidly rooted in the middle class. Blacks rioted in Minneapolis in 1966 and 1967, but with only 1 percent of the state's population, they have not yet forced Minnesotans into any serious racial confrontation. Or at least, not apocalyptic confronation.

… Says Gleason Glover, executive director of the Minneapolis Urban League: "For a black, Minneapolis is one of the truly outstanding cities in the U.S. to live in. The problems here -- housing, education, discrimination, unemployment -- are manageable ... There just isn't the real, deep-seated hatred here that blacks often encounter in other cities." Two black state legislators were elected last fall from predominantly white middle-class suburban districts. …

Civic duty

Part of Minnesota's secret lies in people's extraordinary civic interest. … Even more important than corporate giving is personal fund raising. Fund drives currently underway or about to begin in the Twin Cities amount to a staggering $300 million, of which $136 million has already been raised. …

Political culture

Some of Minnesota's success can be traced to its ethnic traditions. ... In many respects, the Scandinavians, long the largest single group in the state, have shaped Minnesota's character. They, together with its large Anglo-Saxon and German strain, account for a deep grain of sobriety and hard work, a near-worship for education and a high civic tradition in Minnesota life. ...

Arthur Naftalin, a brilliant mayor of Minneapolis during the '60s, points out that no single group -- ethnic, religious or business -- has ever been able to take control of the state. There were no Tammany machines to greet the immigrants. "With our great variety," says Naftalin, "we have always had to form coalitions." ...

(In the late '30s, Gov. Harold) Stassen pushed through a comprehensive civil service law that abolished patronage. "By taking politics out of the back room and engaging thousands in political activity, from women to college students, Stassen made the governmental process in Minnesota a superior instrument of the people's will," observes author Neal R. Peirce in The Great Plains States of America. ...

… Chuck Ruhr, 36, owner of a Minneapolis ad agency, lives a long commute -- by Minneapolis standards -- from his office. … Says Ruhr: "There is a little of the bad things up here -- drugs, pollution. Being way up here, people have had a chance to see the crest of the wave coming and react to it. There's an attitude, too, that we've got a nice little thing going and let's keep it that way."

It would be fun to ask Gov. Walz just how much he deplores Mr. Ruhr’s racist statement.

By the way, in 2016 I wrote “What’s the Matter with Wisconsin?”