Protesters march through the streets of downtown Minneapolis, Minn., on Sunday.ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images
It’s hard to not to draw comparisons: two different eras, two different Americas, two different states, separated by 1,381 kilometres and 69 years but sharing the mobilization of federal forces by Republican presidents and the defiant resistance of Democratic governors.
In 1957, Dwight D. Eisenhower dispatched the 101st Airborne Division to Arkansas to enforce the desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School against the protests of governor Orval Faubus. This year, Donald Trump sent Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel to Minnesota to round up and deport undocumented migrants against the objections of Governor Tim Walz.
The first episode happened at the dawn of the mid-20th-century civil-rights movement, as the federal government – through the intervention of Mr. Eisenhower and later by Democratic presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson – sought to enforce racial justice. The mayhem in Minneapolis, where federal officers have killed two U.S. citizens, is unfolding as Donald Trump seeks to enforce immigration law.
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As his administration provides accounts of the violence that are at odds with video evidence, the President has criticized “Leftwing Agitators” he said are determined to resist ICE agents and “to unlawfully obstruct their operations to arrest the Worst of the Worst People.”
Today, the long-ago military mobilization in the American South is celebrated in history and folklore as a heroic effort to right the historical wrong of racial segregation. Meanwhile, the military-style ICE agents in masks and unmarked cars are deplored by three out of five Americans, who, in a New York Times/Siena University poll, said ICE enforcement techniques had “gone too far.”
“Americans don’t like what they’re seeing right now,” Oklahoma’s devoutly conservative Governor Kevin Stitt told CNN’s State of the Union program.
And while the civil-rights protests and federal interventions cast a revelatory light on the political and social culture of the South – an image of intolerance in what the polemicist H.L. Mencken called “a vast plain of mediocrity, stupidity, lethargy, almost of dead silence” – the protests against the Trump roundups shine a light on the Minnesota mystique.
Garrison Keillor, the onetime bard of Minnesota Public Radio’s Prairie Home Companion, described his state as a place where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.” Another account of the state’s character speaks of early settlements where the children were taught “their three R’s and polite manners.”
“Minnesota has a great tradition of co-operation, civility and reasonably liberal politics,” retired Minnesota Supreme Court justice and former U.S. lawyer David Lillehaug said in an interview. “ICE’s occupation conflicts with every one of them. We’re now witnessing a state where an informed citizenry steeped in civic involvement is greeting ICE as if they have brought something stinky to Minnesota. It’s driving ICE agents nuts.”
When he convened a meeting of Minnesota lawyers to fight the ICE mobilization, 200 immediately rallied to the call.
Federal agents push back protesters outside a hotel in Minneapolis on Sunday.OCTAVIO JONES/AFP/Getty Images
Though its reputation was stained by the 2020 police killing of George Floyd, the state is still regarded as a progressive Scandinavian-tinted enclave in the Upper Midwest, marked by a civility known as “Minnesota nice.” Three major presidential candidates in a 16-year period – two of whom, Hubert H. Humphrey (1968) and Walter F. Mondale (1984), won Democratic nominations – personified a chivalry and comity even then uncommon in American politics.
Along with Eugene McCarthy (an unsuccessful 1968 presidential candidate who was educated by monks), Mr. Humphrey (reared in a strict Lutheran household) and Mr. Mondale (a preacher’s son), were shaped by a political party whose official name, the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, speaks of its progressive orientation.
The personification of Minnesota’s legacy is Wendell Anderson, a genteel hockey player who played in the 1956 Winter Olympics and served as Democratic governor from 1971 to 1976. He is sealed in the state’s lore for his appearance (along with a northern pike), on the cover of the Aug. 13, 1973, edition of Time magazine that carried the headline “The Good Life in Minnesota.” The lengthy story inside was titled “Minnesota: A State That Works.”
Near the top of the piece are three sentences that explain the state’s identity in a summer when the Watergate hearings were rocking Americans’ views of their country.
“If the American good life has anywhere survived in some intelligent equilibrium, it may be in Minnesota,” the article states. “It is a state where a residual American secret still seems to operate. Some of the nation’s more agreeable qualities are evident there: courtesy and fairness, honesty, a capacity for innovation, hard work, intellectual adventure and responsibility.”
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That evaluation may be a two-generations-old mythology, but shards of its legacy persist. It can be found in the cultural corners of Minneapolis, such as the Walker Art Center and the Minnesota Orchestra, and on its 11,842 lakes (including the ones dipping over into Manitoba and Ontario). It is present in the state capital of St. Paul, where I once witnessed a high-school hockey game that went into so many overtimes that officials made the teams (and 6,000 spectators) return the next morning for two minutes and 21 seconds of sudden-death play.
And it is evident in the state’s cultural diversity, elements of which have attracted the eye of ICE agents seeking, among many others, people of Somali, Latino and Hmong extraction who followed the path to the plains of the Gopher State blazed by the Indigenous Ojibwa and Dakota people and then by Germans, Norwegians and Swedes.
Minnesota has produced outward-looking fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis, but much of its literature shines the spotlight inward, reflecting the migrants who wandered through and, in many cases, settled there. This includes works by Norwegian Vidar Sundstol, author of the Minnesota Trilogy series, and Louise Erdrich, the Pulitzer-winning novelist of Love Medicine and The Night Watchman, who is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Though reared in nearby North Dakota, she has for decades written sagas of Native American life in Minnesota.
The ICE agents in the state are part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, headed by Kristi Noem. She was reared in Watertown, S.D., a mere 60 kilometres from the Minnesota line. This month more than 120 Democrats signed on to orders for her impeachment.