Who Owns the House?

The excitement this fall in Minnesota is that two families are trying to live in the same house.

Senator Henrik Shipstead is a tall and mellow fellow, has spent 19 years in the Senate by mastering the ancient political trick of keeping both ears on the ground at once. In 1940 his overdeveloped ears gave him a warning and forthwith Henrik Shipstead moved out of the old Farmer-Labor Party, and became a Republican.

The new G.O.P. in Minnesota gave out no wild cheers over this sudden recruit. Young silo-shaped Governor Harold E. Stassen, architect of Minnesota's new G.O.P., had not planned any rooms in the Republican house for guest stars. He had just enough for his own. Stassen had already sent to the Senate one of them, Joe Ball, a rangy newspaperman with a stomachful of courage.

This summer the Governor noticed that the visitors were taking over all the best rooms and trying to remodel the upstairs. In fact Senator Shipstead, no amateur architect himself, was planning to tear down the whole house and put up a new one, in which he had the master bedroom and Messrs. Stassen, Ball and friends had no rooms at all.

Governor Stassen moved fast. With one eye on the flag and the other on 1944, he announced that he would run again this autumn for the Governorship; that, if elected, he would resign in April to join the Navy. He then chose his friend, Ed Thye, to be the candidate for the key spot, the lieutenant-governorship.

Shipstead had his own candidate: for the seat of Joe Ball, he backed Walter K. Mickelson, publisher of the New Ulm (pop. 8,743) Journal, who began campaigning by promising to vote as Senator Shipstead did on all matters in the Senate.

Courageous Joe Ball, who campaigned aggressively against neutral thinking many months before Pearl Harbor, and Governor Stassen, who has revived the G.O.P. in one of the few States where it has made a major comeback, looked as if he could handle Shipstead's stooges.

The big unknown was the vote of the old Farmer-Labor Party. Up for the Senate nomination was a woman who personified the party's problem: charming Norma Ward Lundeen, the 46-year-old widow of British-hating, German-loving Senator Ernest Lundeen, who was killed in a 1940 airplane crash. Mrs. Lundeen, firm of jaw and of conviction, is campaigning to vindicate her husband's bitter-end isolationism, "to travel under his banner." People who had already looked under Lundeen's banner had found there many smelly characters like George Sylvester Viereck, old Lundeen friend now serving two-to-six years in jail for his work as an agent of the Nazis. Viereck ghostwrote many a Lundeen speech.

Two other Minnesota candidates of national interest:

> Slender, underweight (132 Ib.), blue-eyed Henry L. Olson, 25, onetime farm boy, was invalided home last summer--weighing 112 pounds. He had been with the A.V.G. in Burma and China nearly a year, was twice shot down. He is Democratic candidate for Congress from the Ninth District--a vast area of wheatfields, Indian reservations, woods, lakes, muskeg.

> Republican, bespectacled, dark-haired, Nebraska-born Dr. Walter H. Judd is running for the Congressional nomination in the Fifth District (Minneapolis). He went to China first in 1924, did medical-missionary work four years, superintended a hospital, and returned to the U.S. in 1932 to study in the famed Mayo Clinic. From another stint in China he came back to preach that the U.S. must beware the Japs.

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