March of the Governors, Governor #15: Samuel Van Sant
Release Date: 05/31/2022
March of the Governors #40 Mark Dayton
Ramsey County History podcast
Mark Dayton, Minnesota’s fortieth governor, was the oldest to assume that office for the first time at sixty-three. He stepped into the role with vast political experience. In the 1970s, he served as legislative aide and Minnesota Economic Development commissioner and later worked four years as state auditor and six as a US senator. He won elections easily and had also been trounced. Dayton was born into wealth—an heir to the Dayton’s department store fortune—and enjoyed a private school education at Breck School and Yale. His family impressed upon him that with wealth came the...
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March of the Governors #39 Tim Pawlenty
Ramsey County History podcast
Tim Pawlenty grew up in a family of South St. Paul Democrats but embraced Republicanism as a teenager. He was a hard worker and excellent student in public schools and at the University of Minnesota and the University of Minnesota Law School. He was hired by a prestigious Minneapolis law firm before getting into politics. At age thirty-two, Pawlenty was a member of the state legislature, where he quickly rose to positions of authority. He served as House majority leader when Jesse Ventura was governor. He then succeeded Ventura as Minnesota governor in a close three-way race in 2002. In office...
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March of the Governors #38 Jesse Ventura
Ramsey County History podcast
To call our thirty-eighth governor, Jesse Ventura, unique is to engage in understatement. He was Minnesota’s first third-party governor since Elmer Benson in 1936. Though he ran on the Reform Party ticket, that party elected no one else, so he had no allies in the legislature. His plurality, 37% of the vote, was the lowest of any Minnesota governor. No other governor had been a national celebrity before election, and none before him used the governorship to enrich himself while in office. Despite everything, his term (1999-2003) was a reasonably successful one, marked by substantial tax...
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March of the Governors, Governor #37: Arne Carlson
Ramsey County History podcast
Arne Carlson, Minnesota’s thirty-seventh governor, was a Swede and a progressive Republican, like several before him, but unlike them, too. He grew up poor in New York City and had no connection to the dominant Harold Stassen political lineage. Carlson came to Minnesota for graduate school—then won election after election: Minneapolis City Council, he legislature, and three terms as state auditor. He lost the 1990 GOP primary for governor but won the nomination anyway when John Grunseth flamed out. He ran the shortest election campaign in Minnesota history—five days—to...
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March of the Governors, Governor #36: Rudy Perpich Part II
Ramsey County History podcast
Following his gubernatorial defeat in 1978, Rudy Perpich (1928-1995) spent a few years in Vienna, Austria, working as a trade representative for Control Data Corporation, but it wasn’t long before he began planning another run for the state’s highest role. Voters remembered him fondly and ushered him back into office in 1982, making him the first (and only) governor of Minnesota to serve noncontinuous terms. Perpich returned to the governor’s seat with a new outlook on bringing economic health to Minnesota, working with and not against big business. No longer the slightly rumpled and...
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Ramsey County History - Little Women, Little Houses, Lots of Work, (and a Little Play)
Ramsey County History podcast
Growing up in Frogtown In 1941, young Wendy Ham’s Gumpa Guy Metzger built a dollhouse—a replica of the family home at 435 Charles Avenue in St. Paul. In 2023, Wendy Ham Rossi donated the “two-story,” six-room dollhouse complete with “indoor plumbing” to Ramsey County Historical Society, a gift for which we are grateful. She also penned a companion memoir about growing up on Charles and, later, at 554 Arundel Street surrounded by the love of her grandparents, parents, and little sister, Joyce. And she graciously recorded a reading, which you can hear online. The retired St. Paul...
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March of the Governors, Governor #35: Albert Harold Quie
Ramsey County History podcast
Albert H. Quie (1923-2023) left a safe seat in Congress after twenty years to run for governor in 1978. In that, his timing was good. He rode around the “Minnesota Massacre” and into office as the state’s thirty-fifth governor along with fellow Republicans Dave Durenberger and Rudy Boschwitz, who were elected to the US Senate. But in another respect, his timing could not have been worse. A successful first year of tax cuts was followed by an unwelcome recession that slashed state revenues and triggered a three-year budget crisis requiring six special legislative sessions and making most...
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March of the Governors, Governor #34: Rudy Perpich
Ramsey County History podcast
March of the Governors, Governor #34 Rudy Perpich Series Podcast #37 Rudy Perpich (1928-1995) served as Minnesota's thirty-fourth governor in the years 1977 and 1978. He got there by succession when Wendell Anderson resigned. Perpich then appointed Anderson to the US Senate—the first event leading to the Minnesota Massacre of 1978. Perpich was the first Iron Ranger, the first dentist, and first Roman Catholic to serve as governor and, maybe, the last to have grown up in poverty. His term was marked by the national energy crisis, controversies over electric power lines, and...
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March of the Governors, Governor #33: Wendell Anderson
Ramsey County History podcast
March of the Governors, Governor #33 Wendell Anderson (Series Podcast #35) Before an ignominious electoral end, Wendell “Wendy” Anderson was one of Minnesota’s most significant and popular governors. Born and raised on St. Paul’s East Side, he had been an Olympic hockey player and a twelve-year legislative veteran when elected governor in 1970 at the age of thirty-seven. In his first term, Anderson successfully encouraged legislative passage of landmark open government, environmental, labor and other forward-looking laws. Most importantly, he campaigned and got passed a sweeping...
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March of the Governors, Governor #32: Harold Levander
Ramsey County History podcast
March of the Governors, Governor #32 Harold Levander (Series Podcast #35) Harold Levander (1910-1982) ran for political office once in his long life, in 1966. He defeated incumbent governor Karl Rolvaag, served four years, and never ran for office again. He had been a star athlete in college, in football and track, and a national champion orator. He practiced law in Harold Stassen's firm, where he represented rural electric power cooperatives and the South St. Paul stockyards. As a Republican governor, he helped enact a remarkably progressive agenda that included creation of...
info_outlineMarch of the Governors, Podcast #16
Samuel Van Sant
Samuel Van Sant was Minnesota’s fifteenth governor—the first to serve in the twentieth century and the first to occupy the current capitol. After three years of combat duty in the Union cavalry (1861-1864), Van Sant joined the family steamboat business in LeClaire, Iowa. In 1883, he moved to Winona and soon went into politics. A Republican, he was elected to the legislature in 1892 and rose to speaker of the house just two years later. A gifted public speaker, he was elected governor in 1900 and reelected in 1902. In keeping with the spirit of the age, he championed such progressive measures as reform of the state's tax system, advocating for wilderness protection, and extending the use of the primaries to nominate candidates. In the decades following his retirement from political office, Van Sant became a national leader in Civil War veterans’ affairs and was a popular speaker at Republican gatherings throughout Minnesota. He died in 1936 at the age of ninety-two.