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Gilbert Nelson Haugen was born on April 21, 1859, in Orfordville, Wisconsin, United States. He was the youngest of the six sons of Nels Haugen and Carrie (Nelson) Haugen, who had emigrated from Norway, in 1844. Gilbert's early years were spent on the farms of his father and an uncle. When he was fourteen the family moved to Iowa.
Haugen’s education began at the district school near his boyhood home, continued at the Decorah Institute in Iowa during the winters, of 1874 and 1875, and culminated with graduation from Janesville Commercial College in Wisconsin, in 1877. He learned to process economic data quickly. When not in school, he bought horses in Iowa and sold them in the new settlements of Minnesota and Dakota Territory.
Gilbert's father died when he was a year old. An additional dollar per month came with each successive birthday. After “confirmation” in the Lutheran faith in 1873, Gilbert worked summers for relatives in northeast Iowa. In 1877 Gilbert bought a farm near Kensett in Worth County, Iowa. Able and energetic, he acquired a hardware store and used it as a base for engaging in all manner of business with farmers, including horse breeding and implement sales. Neighbors elected him justice of the peace at age 21.
Elected treasurer of Worth County in 1887, he moved to Northwood, the county seat. He rehabilitated the Northwood Banking Company and bought farms. In 1890 he became chairman of the Worth County Republican Central Committee. Business success and influence with party leaders soon made him the most influential man in the county. A setback came in 1892 when Elise died after the birth of their second child. Thereafter, Gilbert was married to politics. He never remarried.
In 1893 Haugen was elected to the lower house of the Iowa General Assembly and gained a reputation for legislation regulating savings and loan institutions. His competence did not escape notice by the Leif Erickson Republican League and kindred organizations that backed Norwegian Americans for public office. The Republican Party then dominated Iowa politics, but intraparty battles sometimes raged. Haugen failed to win his party’s nomination in 1897 for the seat he had held for two terms in the Iowa House of Representatives, so he decided to run for Congress from Iowa’s Fourth Congressional District. A legendary struggle ensued, requiring 366 ballots at the district convention before he secured the nomination.
Many Norwegians lived in the district, which ran two counties deep and five wide below the Minnesota border from the Mississippi River to the center of the state. The victory came by a wide margin in the 1898 general election. Haugen secured a place for himself in Iowa’s political history by winning 17 consecutive Fourth District elections. Initially, he had no political organization, but he built one for the 1902 campaign and kept it intact with the same leaders for three decades. Until his defeat in the Roosevelt landslide, only two of the general elections-1910 and 1912-were close.
Service to constituents and political acumen, not charisma or eloquence, explain Haugen’s political longevity. Periodically, he would stir up the oleomargarine controversy, then position himself as the dairyman’s friend. Nationally, Haugen is remembered for the McNary-Haugen bills, the first of which came before Congress in 1924 to alleviate the post-World War I agricultural depression. They attempted to raise domestic prices of specified commodities, including grain, pork, and eventually cotton, by creating a government agency to buy up surpluses that would be sold on the world market for whatever they would bring. Producers would pay an “equalization fee,” which would result in their receiving a price between the domestic and world market price.
As chair of the House Agriculture Committee, Haugen argued that this was not radical, but equivalent to the tariff protecting manufacturers. Master of statistics, advocate for agriculture, and fatherly figure, Haugen for a time enjoyed such popularity that the Democrats did not run a candidate against him, in 1926. But Republican President Calvin Coolidge vetoed McNary-Haugen legislation in 1927 and again in 1928. His secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover, favored cooperative marketing as a solution to the “farm problem.”
Defeated in the very election that brought in New Deal farm policies similar to those he had been advocating for a decade, Haugen died at Northwood on July 16, 1933. His estate, including 20 farms and stock in several banks, was the largest probated in Worth County up to that time.
Gilbert Nelson Haugen is remembered as a prominent businessman and politician. For nearly five years, he was the longest-serving member of the House.
Gilbert was concerned with the leading measures for the protection and relief of the farmer. Among the score of acts which he introduced were those for regulation of commerce in livestock, protection against butter substitutes, and encouragement to farmers' cooperatives.
The best-known bill to bear Haugen's name was that which arranged to dispose of the agricultural surplus by a process of dumping it upon foreign markets, with the losses to be borne by an equalization fee upon the producers. This proposal, worked out by a group of farm leaders in cooperation with the Department of Agriculture, was sponsored jointly by Representative Haugen and Senator Charles L. McNary of Oregon.
Quotations: “At the age of nine years I received my first month’s wages of $9,” Gilbert once told an audience.
A local newspaper characterized Haugen as “multifarious.”
On October 25, 1885, Gilbert Haugen married Bertha Evenson. They had two children, Lauritz Haugen and Norma Haugen.
