By Carolyn Yeager
WHEN MINNESOTA SENATOR ERNEST LUNDEEN WAS KILLED IN A PLANE CRASH over Virginia on August 31, 1940, the Republican governor was able, according to the rules, to appoint a fellow Republican to fill the senator's seat. Though Lundeen had begun his political career as a Republican, he had run for office as a Farmer-Labor "Democrat" since 1933.
Governor Harold Stassen (left) had been the keynote speaker at the 1940 Republican National Convention in June that nominated Wendell Willkie as it's presidential candidate. Stassen threw his support to Willkie and even became his official floor manager. The circumstances of the 1940 Republican convention were unusual, from beginning to end.
Willkie was a New York lawyer, corporate executive, Democrat activist and 'interventionist' who only switched to the Republican party in late 1939! He had not run in any primaries but positioned himself as an acceptable choice for a deadlocked convention. Front runners for the nomination, Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, Michigan Sen Arthur Vandenberg, and New York District Attorney Tom Dewey, were all non-interventionist, as was Senator Lundeen of Stassen's state of Minnesota. The east-coast Republicans tended to be the internationalists who wanted to take sides in the European conflicts, and that's who Stassen seemed to be representing.