Karl E. Mundt was born on June 3, 1900, in Humboldt, South Dakota, to Ferdinand John Mundt and Rose Elizabeth Schneider, Dakota pioneers. His father, a real estate, insurance, and investment agent, moved the family from Humboldt to Pierre and then to Madison, South Dakota.
Mundt attended public schools in Humboldt, Pierre and Madison. In 1923, he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.
Mundt's first professional job was teaching speech and social science at the high school in Bryant, South Dakota, from 1923 to 1924.
The next year, he became Bryant's superintendent of schools. His interest in rhetoric led him to cofound the National Forensic League in 1925 and edit its journal, The Rostrum, for the next fifteen years. In 1927, Mundt earned an Master of Arts degree in economics from Columbia University in New York City.
In 1928, Mundt accepted a position as chairman of the speech department and professor of social science at General William Beadle State Teachers College in Madison, South Dakota. He remained at the college until 1936, meanwhile working part-time in his father's business, Mundt Loan and Investment Company, based in Madison.
In 1932, Mundt became chairman of the Young Republican League of Lake County. An ardent conservationist, he served on his state's Game and Fish Commission from 1931 until 1937.
In 1936, Mundt ran for Congress for the first time. However, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's reelection that year assisted incumbent Democratic Representative Fred H. Hildebrandt to defeat Mundt in a close vote. The unsuccessful candidate quit his teaching post and devoted himself fully to giving speeches to the public.
In 1938, Mundt ran again and won by a comfortable margin. Mundt's political ambitions benefited from his isolationist views, which were popular in the conservative, predominantly German-American South Dakota corn belt. As United States involvement in World War II approached, this staunch backer of the America First Committee opposed both Selective Service and Lend-Lease. Mundt also put his environmental advocacy into action by sponsoring legislation for higher water-quality standards. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor forced the South Dakotan to drop his isolationist views, and thereafter he was always interested in international issues. On the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mundt supported Congressman J. William Fulbright's resolution for postwar international cooperation in 1943. That November, he backed the agreement of forty-four countries to form the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. He also endorsed the postwar creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. While working for international cooperation, Mundt also sought to limit the influence of suspected subversives at home.
In 1943, he joined the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Mundt also traveled with the House Foreign Affairs Committee on exhaustive tours in 1945 and 1947 of over twenty European countries, the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia among them. He returned as an active foe of Communism in Eastern Europe, and one of his first initiatives was Public Law 402, the legislation that created the Voice of America in 1948. Meanwhile, he attacked "Godless Communism and Red Fascism" and proposed that all Communists register with the U. S. government.
He and a new colleague in HUAC, California Republican Richard M. Nixon, introduced the Mundt-Nixon Anti-Communist Bill during 1948. This legislation would prohibit any attempt "to establish in the United States a totalitarian dictatorship"; require all members of Communist party organizations, including unions, to register with the Department of Justice; deport suspected aliens; and revoke the citizenship of any immigrant who had joined a subversive group within five years of naturalization. The bill passed in the House, 319 to 57. Mundt's interest in Communist influence in government also led him to team with Nixon in HUAC's investigation of former State Department employee Alger Hiss in 1948, which eventually led to Hiss's perjury conviction.
Later that year, South Dakota's governor appointed Mundt to succeed Senator Vera C. Bushfield, who had resigned at the governor's request so that Mundt could be appointed to complete her term. Mundt intended to run for that seat and in this way he was able to preserve South Dakota's seniority in the Senate when he won the seat outright that November.
Mundt reintroduced his Anti-Communist Bill in the Senate in 1949, revising it to exempt labor unions from the registration requirement. Although his bill died in the Senate Judiciary Committee, many of its points were incorporated into the omnibus Internal Security Act of 1950 (known as the McCarran Act). President Truman vetoed this legislation, but Congress easily overrode him.
Mundt rose to prominence in the Senate after he was assigned to the Government Operations Committee and its Permanent Investigations Subcommittee in January 1953. Both panels were chaired by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, whose efforts to uncover alleged Communists in government had Senator Mundt's support.
By early 1954, McCarthy's allegations of lapses in army security resulted in a countercharge from the army, which accused McCarthy of meddling in army business to benefit G. David Schine, an aide of the Wisconsin senator. Hearings were held, and McCarthy was forced to step down in March 1954 in order to testify in front of his own subcommittee. Karl Mundt then became its acting chair. In his new position, Mundt first attempted to bar the news media from the hearing room. Frustrated in this effort, he sat silently through the nationally broadcast spectacle which destroyed McCarthy's already unraveling reputation. After the hearings, Mundt refused to join in the growing clamor against his Wisconsin colleague: he remained one of McCarthy's most loyal supporters and was one of twenty-two to vote against the censure of the senator that December. As fervent anti-Communism abated, the South Dakotan remained active in other investigations.
In 1958, as a member of the Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, Mundt investigated allegations of corruption by United Auto Workers (UAW) officials in a violent strike at the Kohler Company of Wisconsin. His Democratic colleagues on the panel and the committee's counsel, Robert F. Kennedy, who had political connections to the UAW, accused Mundt and his Republican allies of partisan ambitions in the probe. When the investigation turned up little, Mundt attempted to launch a separate inquiry into the union's political influence.
Elected to his third term after defeating South Dakota Congressman George McGovern in 1960, Mundt continued to vote with conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats almost 90 percent of the time. Still, he was not always predictable. While he joined conservatives in opposition to such measures as labor legislation and social programs, he maintained his support for environmental protection.
He also backed civil rights legislation in 1964, farm subsidies, initiatives for international cooperation, and regulation of nuclear weapons. His most prominent work remained in the Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, which conducted two major inquiries during the Kennedy administration. The first, in 1962, investigated Texas investor and cotton dealer Billie Sol Estes, accused of fraudulent dealings with the Agriculture Department. Mundt embarrassed the Democrats by charging that the Kennedy administration and its secretary of agriculture, Orville Freeman, had shown favoritism by allowing the Texas financier to continue on a cotton allotment board even while he was being investigated. Over Senator Mundt's loud objections, the subcommittee found that Estes had retained his seat on the board due to administrative error, not bribery. The Investigations Subcommittee convened the next year after learning that General Dynamics had won the contract for the TFX fighter /bomber program, even though the Boeing Corporation had made a lower bid. Mundt noted that two top Pentagon administrators had financial connections with General Dynamics. His investigation was stymied, however, when the Justice Department cleared the two officials of a conflict of interest.
Mundt's anti-Communism remained with him even as President Lyndon Johnson attempted to improve relations with the Soviet Union by meeting Premier Alexei Kosygin in 1967. That year, Mundt was at the forefront of an effort by Senate conservatives to kill a new consular treaty between the United States and the USSR. The agreement would have authorized two new consulates in both countries. Mundt, who feared the consulates would harbor Communist spies in the United States, wanted to suspend the agreement until the Soviet Union halted aid to North Vietnam. But overriding interest in better relations with Moscow thwarted his effort.
Mundt backed the Vietnam war, but he protested vehemently in January 1968 when the American intelligence vessel Pueblo and its 83-member crew were seized by North Korea and held for over a year. He declared the mission a "shocking, reckless and needless adventure. " He also told Secretary of State Dean Rusk that the government had "bungled very badly" at the risk of the peace and prestige of the country by sending a ship so close to North Korea without adequate protection. Mundt's blistering attack, which came just as the Tet offensive was causing Americans to question the Johnson administration's interpretation of the Vietnam War, showed that even anti-Communist stalwarts were becoming disenchanted with American involvement in Indochina.
Mundt's last political initiative, in 1969, was to offer a substitute to a Senate nonbinding resolution that forbade the dispatch of American troops abroad without the approval of Congress. The senators wanted the resolution amended to allow exceptions if American citizens, property, or territory were endangered. However, his political opponents thought his substitution excessively watered down their resolution. While Mundt was increasingly frustrated in foreign affairs by Senate liberals, he won plaudits from environmentalists. The World Wildlife Fund honored him in 1969 for his efforts to preserve endangered species, including the whooping crane and the bobwhite.
Later that year, the sixty-nine-year-old Mundt suffered a crippling stroke. Prevented from carrying out his Senatorial duties, he occasionally voted by proxy. His fellow senators demanded he resign from his committee posts, but he refused.
Finally, in 1972, Senate leaders removed Mundt from his high-ranking seats on the Government Operations, Foreign Relations, and Appropriations Committees, in a precedent-shattering step against the traditional seniority system. Mundt, who did not run for reelection in 1972, died in the nation's capital on August 16, 1974.
Karl Earl Mundt was a well-known educator and a Republican member of the United States Congress, representing South Dakota in the United States House of Representatives (1939 - 1948) and in the United States Senate (1948 - 1973). Karl Mundt's personal papers are archived at Dakota State University in Madison, where the campus library was named in his honor. The Karl E. Mundt National Wildlife Refuge in South Dakota was named in his honor when it was established in 1974. The Karl E. Mundt Foundation was established in Mundt's honor in 1963.
In 1936, Karl Mundt was the Republican candidate for the House of Representatives in South Dakota's 1st congressional district, losing in a Democratic year to Fred H. Hildebrandt. He won the seat in the 1938 election, a year more favorable to Republicans, and was re-elected four times. In 1948, he was elected to the Senate seat previously held by Harlan J. Bushfield. He resigned his House seat on December 30, 1948, having been appointed to the Senate to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of Senator Vera C. Bushfield, who had succeeded her husband after his death in September 1948. Mundt was reelected to the Senate in 1954, 1960, and 1966.
In 1924, Karl E. Mundt married Mary Elizabeth Moses, the daughter of a lumberman.
