Ernest Lundeen was born on August 4, 1878, at Beresford, South Dakota, United States, the oldest of eight children of Charles Henry and Christine (Peterson) Lundeen. He had three older half-sisters by his father's first marriage. Lundeen's parents had emigrated from Sweden shortly after the Civil War and settled in the upper Middle W. The elder Lundeen was a Methodist minister.
Ernest attended schools successively at Beresford and at Harcourt and Dayton, Iowa. Thereafter he entered Carleton College at Northfield, Minnesota, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1901. For the next three years he studied in the law department of the University of Minnesota, and in 1906 he was admitted to the bar.
Lundeen served with Company B of the 12th Minnesota Volunteers during the Spanish-American War. He made his debut in politics as a progressive Republican. He was elected to the Minnesota house of representatives in 1910 and again in 1912, where he echoed the attacks of Senator Robert M. La Follette, Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, and other militant progressives against big business.
Lundeen's reputation as a foe of special privilege enabled him to win both the Republican nomination and the election to Congress from the 5th district in 1916. The personality traits and ideological convictions that were to characterize his later career made Lundeen a controversial figure in the wartime Congress. His antiwar stand made him a target of the professional patriots, and he lost his congressional seat to Walter H. Newton in 1918. He ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1928 and United States Senator in 1930 as representative of the Farmer-Labor party.
Two years later he was elected Congressman-at-large, and he won a second term in 1934 from the 3rd district, in North Minneapolis. A third campaign for Congress ended suddenly, on August 29, 1936, when the Farmer-Labor state central committee chose Lundeen as the party senatorial candidate to replace Governor Floyd B. Olson, who had died a week earlier. The Democrats also threw their support to Lundeen in November, and he defeated the Republican nominee, Theodore Christianson, by a vote of 663, 363 to 402, 404. He served from January 3, 1937 in the 75th and 76th congresses, until his death. He was on his way to address an all-state picnic of Minnesota Townsend Clubs when his career ended abruptly in an airplane crash near Lovettsville, Virginia, in August 1940.
At the start of his political career Lundeen was a member of the Republican Party. About 1920s he joined the Farmer-Labor party. He was a powerful spokesman for the immigrant Swedish and Norwegian workmen who constituted the bulk of the population in South Minneapolis. In Congress he promptly voted against America's entry into World War I and against conscription. He also opposed the Espionage Act and repeatedly demanded legislation that would take the profit out of war.
On domestic questions Lundeen was usually to the left of the New Deal. In the 73rd and 74th Congresses (1933 - 1936) he championed moratoriums on farm debts, nationalization of banking, soldier bonuses, and enlargement of the Supreme Court to eleven members. He also proposed a broad program of unemployment insurance, to be financed by higher income and inheritance taxes. When he transferred to the Senate Lundeen became increasingly concerned with foreign affairs. He was a staunch isolationist, opposing larger naval appropriations, closer ties with the foes of Hitler, and the conscription law of 1940. He also repeatedly urged that the United States take over the Western Hemispheric possessions of European states which refused to pay their war debts. Lundeen was sympathetic to the third-party presidential campaign of Congressman William Lemke in 1936.
Lundeen was a heavy-set, humorless man who spoke persuasively, commanding admiration rather than affection. He lacked the conviviality of the typical politician and was regarded by friend and foe alike as a lone wolf. To such extremes, indeed, did he carry his personal and political independence that he was always, then and later, at loggerheads with the leaders of his own party.
On February 5, 1919, Lundeen married Norma Matheson Ward of San Francisco, who bore him two children, Ernest Ward and Joan Jessie.
