Background
Harold Knutson was born on October 20, 1880 in Skien, Norway. He was the son of Christian and Jeanette Holm Knutson. When he was six years old his parents immigrated to Chicago and from there to a dairy farm near Clear Lake, Minnesota.
congressman newspaper publisher
Harold Knutson was born on October 20, 1880 in Skien, Norway. He was the son of Christian and Jeanette Holm Knutson. When he was six years old his parents immigrated to Chicago and from there to a dairy farm near Clear Lake, Minnesota.
Knutson attended primary and agricultural school.
Knutson worked as a printer's devil in various Minnesota towns, then rose quickly through the ranks of the newspaper business. In 1910 he became president of the Minnesota Editorial Association, and for most of his life he published the Wadena Pioneer Journal.
In 1916 Knutson was elected to Congress as representative of the Sixth Minnesota District, a wheat-producing area with a large German-American constituency. He succeeded Charles A. Lindbergh, father of the aviator, continuing the isolationism of both his predecessor and his district.
In 1945 Knutson asked the Internal Revenue Bureau to investigate a controversial tax exemption granted to the president's son Elliott.
During the late 1930's, Knutson continually warned against intervention in Europe. Doubting the accounts of German atrocities that were already circulating in 1937, Knutson asserted that he would "refuse to convict a great country ex parte. "
During World War II and the Cold War, Knutson continued his battle against an interventionist foreign policy. In 1944 he accused the administration of hiding its own responsibility for the Pearl Harbor attack.
When the Republicans gained control of Congress in 1946, Knutson became chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee. On the opening day of the Eightieth Congress, he called for a drastic tax reduction. Although Knutson's bill survived a presidential veto, he himself soon admitted that the public believed the measure "gave a horse to the rich man and a rabbit to the poor man. " Many voters in his district apparently adopted the same view, and he was defeated in the congressional election of 1948.
In April 1917 Knutson was one of fifty congressmen opposing a declaration of war against Germany. Apparently his anti-interventionism did not lessen the esteem in which he was held within the Republican party, since he was named majority whip in 1919 and retained the position for six years. Although he supported American entry into the League of Nations, Knutson first gained public recognition as an outspoken advocate of immigrant restriction. Even before he became chairman of the Immigration and Naturalization Committee in 1924, he warned that foreign laborers would add not only to domestic unemployment but also to the spread of radicalism. As he commented in 1920: "We cannot allow the Governments of Europe to dump their Bolsheviki and Communists on us. " Given his isolationism and domestic conservatism, it was hardly surprising that Knutson strongly opposed the New Deal. He attempted by a filibuster to delay the Banking Act of 1935, which made permanent the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. He claimed that the Agricultural Adjustment Act would "sovietize American agriculture" and found social security a dangerous scheme that would "further and definitely increase unemployment. " At times Knutson appeared to be on a one-man crusade against "that man" in the White House. When Franklin D. Roosevelt suggested in 1939 that Congress build a presidential library at Hyde Park, Knutson insisted that all documents remain in Washington. Only then, he said, could future generations "see how not to run a government. "
Although Knutson foolishly allowed his congressional frank to be used to advance German-financed propaganda, his isolationism--like that of so many other conservative Midwesterners--remained rooted in suspicion of federal controls, hostility to Great Britain, a belief in hemispheric self-sufficiency, and fear of domestic radicalism. As in his attack on the New Deal, he stressed the Communist issue, going so far as to say that "the only difference between a Nazi and a Communist is that a Nazi cannot get a job in the New Deal. "
Knutson opposed the loan to Britain, negotiated in 1945, and accused England--which had just gone under Labour party rule--of engaging in "Communist experimentation. " When Truman announced his famous doctrine in March 1947, Knutson charged the President with scrapping the peace machinery and resorting to the "old order" of murder, pillage, and destruction. He was equally vocal about the Marshall Plan and declared, "If communism could be halted with money, there would not be any communism in Hollywood. "
Although far from a sophisticated legislator, Knutson fully realized that international involvements could only weaken the rural America that he had served for so long.
A bachelor all his life, the short, bald Knutson had few passions other than politics. He represented accurately, if not always articulately, the anxieties of much of his region.
Although considered to be "as Western as a prairie fire, " he never lost his knowledge of the Norwegian language.