Henrik Shipstead

Henrik Shipstead (January 8, 1881 - June 26, 1960) was an American politician who served as a United States senator from March 4, 1923 to January 3, 1947, representing Minnesota. Shipstead was initially a member of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party from 1923 to 1941, but in 1941 he switched to the Republican Party and continued to serve in the Senate until 1947. He was primarily known for his ardent opposition to U.S. interventionism abroad.

Shipstead was born on a farm in Kandiyohi County, Minnesota in 1881 to Norwegian immigrant parents. He graduated from Northwestern University, Chicago in 1903. Then he set up a dental practice and was elected president of the village council of Glenwood in Pope County, Minnesota

Shipstead started as Republican but in 1922 was elected to the U.S. Senate on the ticket of the new Farmer-Labor Party. While he generally shared the party’s liberal platform, he rejected some members' extreme hatred toward capitalism. He was the only Farmer-Laborite in the Senate, and served in the Foreign Relations Committee.

Shipstead opposed U.S. entry into the League of Nations and the World Court. He called for the cancellation of German reparations which he regarded as vindictive. Unlike some foreign policy non-interventionists in the Old Right, he objected to the U.S. occupation of Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. He blamed these interventions on the Theodore Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine of 1905 which had turned the United States into an arrogant “policeman of the western continent."

Although Shipstead disagreed with U.S. intervention overseas, he did not view himself an "isolationist." He opposed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 which he chided it as "one of the greatest and most vicious isolationist policies this government has ever enacted." He argued that high tariffs “raise prices to consumers” and make “monopolies richer and people poorer.” Affable and dignified, his adversaries generally liked him on a personal level. He concluded that “It doesn’t necessarily follow that a radical has to be a damned fool.”

Shipstead defected from the Farmer-Labor party in the late 1930s, citing Communist influence in the party. He won reelection to the Senate in 1940 as a Republican. All the while, he was one of the only few that fought against Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts to enter the war in Europe. Although Shipstead voted for the declaration of war after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was not about to give Roosevelt a blank check. In October 1942, he took the lonely stand of voting against Selective Service, just as he had in 1940.

In 1945, he was the only two senators to vote against the ratification of U.S. entry into the United Nations. It was the culmination of decades of his opposition to foreign entanglements. Unlike many modern conservative critics of the UN, however, he not only feared that it would foster a world superstate but also that it would be used by the major powers to dominate smaller countries. His dissenting vote was virtually a political suicide and he probably knew it.

A new breed of “internationalists,” led by Governor Edward John Thye and former Governor Harold Stassen, had assumed leadership of the state GOP. In 1946, he lost in the Republican primary to Thye.

Shipstead retired to rural western Minnesota, where he died in 1960.

Further reading

• David T. Beito, "Henrik Shipstead Against the UN," History News Network, July 28, 2005.

• Barbara Stuhler, "The Political Enigma of Henrik Shipstead," Ten Men of Minnesota and American Foreign Policy 1898-1968. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1973. pp. 76-98.