Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr. (May 27, 1911 – January 13, 1978) was the 38th Vice President of the United States, serving under President Lyndon Johnson. Humphrey twice served as a United States Senator from Minnesota, Before that, he also served as mayor of Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1945–1949. Humphrey was the nominee of the Democratic Party in the 1968 presidential election but narrowly lost to the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon. Born in Wallace, South Dakota, Humphrey attended the University of Minnesota. At one point he helped run his father's pharmacy. He earned a master's degree from Louisiana State University and worked for the Works Progress Administration, the Minnesota war service program, and the War Manpower Commission. In 1943, he became a professor of political science at Macalester College and ran a failed campaign for mayor of Minneapolis. He helped found the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL) in 1944; the next year he was elected mayor of Minneapolis, serving until 1948 and co-founding the liberal anti-communist group Americans for Democratic Action in 1947. In 1948, he was elected to the U.S. Senate and successfully advocated for the inclusion of a proposal to end racial segregation in the 1948 Democratic National Convention's party platform. Humphrey served three terms in the Senate from 1949 to 1964, and was the Senate Majority Whip for the last four years of his tenure. During this time, he was the lead author of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, introduced the first initiative to create the Peace Corps, sponsored the clause of the McCarran Act that threatened concentration camps for "subversives", proposed making Communist Party membership a felony, and chaired the Select Committee on Disarmament. He unsuccessfully sought his party's presidential nomination in 1952 and 1960. After Lyndon B. Johnson acceded to the presidency, he chose Humphrey as his running mate, and the Democratic ticket won a landslide victory in the 1964 election. In March 1968, Johnson made his surprise announcement that he would not seek reelection, and Humphrey launched his campaign for the presidency. Loyal to the Johnson administration's policies on the Vietnam War, he received opposition from many within his own party and avoided the primaries to focus on winning the delegates of non-primary states at the Democratic Convention. His delegate strategy succeeded in clinching the nomination, and he chose Senator Edmund Muskie as his running mate. In the general election, he nearly matched Nixon's tally in the popular vote but lost the electoral vote by a wide margin. After the defeat, he returned to the Senate and served from 1971 until his death in 1978. Hubert Humphrey in "The Fillmore Shoggoth"[]
The fact that Hubert Humphrey, Robert Kennedy, and Eugene McCarthy were in a three-way battle for the "soul" of the Democratic Party in the Spring of 1968 was seen as a "portent". Another such portent was an iceberg that had broken from the Antarctic Ross Ice Shelf in 1966 and floated north to the coast of San Francisco in May 1968. Hubert Humphrey in The Hot War[]
Senator Hubert Humphrey (1911-1952) of Minnesota was one of several Democrats who joined the race for the party's presidential nomination after Harry Truman decided not to run again in October 1951, as a consequence of the disastrous course of World War III. Humphrey was seen as being the farthest to the political left.[1] Unfortunately, Humphrey and several of his rivals were killed in May 1952 when the Soviet Union successfully dropped an atomic bomb on Washington, DC.[2] Hubert Humphrey in The Man With the Iron Heart[]
![]() Hubert Humphrey in Worldwar[]
Hubert Humphrey was Governor of Minnesota when he became the Democratic Party's nominee for President of the United States in 1964. His running mate was Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.[4] The Democratic ticket was easily defeated by the incumbent Republican ticket of President Earl Warren and Vice President Harold Stassen (a fellow Minnesotan). The Warren ticket took 39 states, with the remainder going to Humphrey.[5] Hubert Humphrey in Southern Victory[]
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Hubert Humphrey
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