How Minnesota Saved Civilization
150 years—and 31 ways that we changed modern life
Written by Tim Brady, Elizabeth Dehn, Joel Hoekstra, David Mahoney, Andrew Putz, and Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl
Photo by Robin Eley (Illustrations)
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(16) WE TOOK TYRANTS TO TASK
Back in the days when the Iron Range was alive with miners, merchants, and mensches, four synagogues provided services for Jewish congregants in the region. The oldest, and longest-lived of these temples, would also turn out to be one of the boldest religious communities in the state’s history. Built in Virginia in 1909, B’Nai Abraham Synagogue maintained a thriving congregation for many years. In 1942, outraged by the despotism they saw in Europe and Japan, temple members took the novel action of subpoenaing Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Emperor Hirohito “for the crimes of murder, mayhem, rape, arson, libel, slander, and malicious destruction of property.” While there was obviously a measure of farce in the indictment, those charges were deadly serious and true. The publicity garnered by the gesture not only underscored the horrors of fascism, it also let the world know that, even up in little Virginia, the actions of these tyrants were being weighed and measured.
(17) WE MODERNIZED BREAKFAST
What’s the difference between burnt toast and perfect toast? Springs and a variable-speed timer, the very things that Stillwater mechanic Charles Strite applied in 1919 to a newfangled invention: the electric toaster. Problem was, the electric wires sometimes blackened the bread. Strite took the matter in hand, founded a company, and in 1921 something called the Toastmaster was born: It was a pop-up electric toaster similar to the kind you know and love today. And so America was ushered into a new world of perfect toast at home.No longer was perfect toast reserved for those wealthy enough to employ servants! Thanks to Charles Strite, homemade toast points became possible; and, thus, America suddenly found itself able to play bridge; and, thus, suburban ennui was born.
Thanks to Charles Strite, Pop Tarts were devised (in 1963); and, thus, the munchies were born. Few can doubt that, without the foundational elements of suburban ennui and the munchies, there would be no road trips, Dharma Bums, San Francisco poetry scene, late 1960s hippie-driven cultural revolution, Watergate, Jimmy Carter, Reagan conservatism, Yuppies, surf punk, real punk, YouTube, or, in fact, anything of any cultural import whatsoever. In short, America without the Minnesotan invention of a pop-up toaster would be little more than a late 19th-century Canada, just a nice place where people stood around hoping breakfast turned out.
(18) WE CREATED REGIONAL THEATER
Let’s say it’s 1962: Unless you’re in New York City, you don’t know any professional actors. In fact, you’re not sure what a full-time actor would do in the Twin Cities, because there’s not any of that kind of nonsense going on around here, thank you very much. Why not? Well, because in those dark days before Tyrone Guthrie opened his theater in Minneapolis, professional theaters simply didn’t exist outside of Manhattan. All you had were traveling productions and community shows starring your neighbors (now that’s tragedy!).But all that changed in the mid-1960s. Witness the article that appeared in the New York Times in 1959, revealing the ambitions of Guthrie and his associates, who hoped to build a “regional theater” somewhere in middle America: “Stage Unit Slated Outside of City” reads the headline. Holy Hamlet! “Concerned over the centralization of the legitimate theatre in New York and the general lack of opportunities for burgeoning professional actors,” the article announced, “three prominent show people have taken steps to remedy these conditions.” That remedy would change everything. Guthrie’s original company of Broadway transplants in Minneapolis—Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy among them—would prove that theaters could thrive in the hinterlands, and that actors were worthy of showering with grants, not just rotten tomatoes.
(19) WE KEPT THE COMICS FUNNY
Children playing baseball. A boy hugging a blanket. A dog dancing on his hind legs. It all sounds so warm and fuzzy. And Peanuts did have its cuddly side. But just below the veneer of cuteness resided a world seething with anxiety, loneliness, and frustrated desire. Where did such a bleak worldview originate? In the mind of St. Paul’s own Charles M. Schulz, ironically known to family and friends as Sparky. For half a century, Schulz gave voice to his deep-seated insecurities through a pack of big-headed kids and, in so doing, elevated the lowly newspaper comic strip from fleeting diversion to profound existential commentary. Although various Peanuts characters served as spokespersons for facets of Schulz’s melancholy psyche, it was the lovable loser Charlie Brown who seemed closest to his heart. Without Charlie’s example, later cartoon schlemiels like Garry Trudeau’s Michael Doonesbury and Berkeley Breathed’s Opus may never have seen the light of day. “Most of us are much more acquainted with losing than we are with winning,” Schulz once wrote. “Winning is great, but it isn’t funny.”
(20)WE PROVED THAT EVEN PRESIDENTS HAD TO OBEY THE LAW
Of the Minnesotan “twins” who served on the U.S. Supreme Court in the ’70s and ’80s, history has been far kinder to Harry Blackmun than it has to Warren E. Burger. Blackmun was curious, compassionate, and funny, and his opinions—on everything from abortion to civil rights—left an indelible mark on American culture. Burger was pompous and aloof, obsessed with administrative minutiae. And yet, it was Burger who was most responsible for one of the great moments in our democracy: an opinion establishing that, in America at least, no one is above the law.
The case started in 1973, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, when President Richard M. Nixon—citing “executive privilege”—refused to comply with a subpoena ordering him to turn over secret recordings of his White House conversations to a special prosecutor. The fight over the tapes went to the heart of a basic Constitutional issue: Does the separation of powers established in the Constitution give the president absolute power to withhold information from other branches of government? Writing on behalf of a unanimous court, Burger basically answered No frickin’ way, and he ordered the president—the man who had appointed him—to surrender the tapes. It was a ruling that not only codified one of the country’s most important ideals, it also prompted Nixon’s resignation.
(21) WE WON THE COLD WAR
You live in a state that loses its collective mind over hockey, so you probably already know the facts: In February 1980—amid the Cold War, inflation, the Iranian hostage crisis, economic uncertainty—the U.S. Olympic hockey team (a bunch of kids, really; their average age was 22) took on the team from the Soviet Union, the most talented squad in the world, and beat them 4–3. The game, the winning goal, and even the play-by-play call (“Do you believe in miracles?”) would become legendary. Twenty years later, Sports Illustrated would call it the biggest sports moment of the century. But what is often buried in the story—especially because a couple of Boston guys got much of the glory, and because the team’s best player was from Wisconsin—is how thoroughly Minnesotan the U.S. team was. Twelve of the 20 players were from here, as was head coach Herb Brooks. But it went beyond numbers. Tough, hard-working, quietly confident, smart, unimpressed with its opponents (Brooks constantly told his players that Soviet star Boris Mikhailov looked like Stan Laurel), the team’s identity was the product of their coach’s sadistic genius and a particular brand of hockey culture, a culture that is as much a product of the Gopher State as Hamm’s and hotdish. Let everybody else call it a miracle. You can call it Minnesotan.
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Reader Comments:
Governor Stassen was central to the founding of the United Nations, established one of the first and argueably most successful civil service systems in the county, and in 1941 created what we now call the Iron Range Recovery and Rehabilitation Board, the first public-private partnership created to foster economic and environmental sustainability. He was a giant political leader, not a rogue.