Hubert Humphrey

May 27, 1911 – January 13, 1978

American Democratic politician who was mayor of Minneapolis, a U.S. senator from Minnesota and the 38th vice president of the United States (1965-1969). He was the Democratic nominee in the 1968 presidential election, which he narrowly lost to Richard Nixon.

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Biography

Hubert Humphrey was born in 1911 in Wallace, South Dakota, and grew up in Doland, where his father ran a drugstore. Lack of money forced him to leave the University of Minnesota after a year; he qualified as a pharmacist in Denver and worked in the family store in Huron during the 1930s before returning to Minnesota, where he graduated in political science in 1939, followed by a master's degree from Louisiana State University in 1940. He taught political science at Macalester College in 1943-44.

Humphrey helped merge Minnesota's Democrats and Farmer-Laborites into the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in 1944 and was elected mayor of Minneapolis in 1945, where he fought discrimination and co-founded Americans for Democratic Action. His speech for a strong civil rights plank at the 1948 Democratic National Convention made him nationally known, and that year he was elected to the U.S. Senate. As a senator he proposed the Peace Corps, chaired the Select Committee on Disarmament, served as majority whip from 1961 and led the floor effort that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Elected vice president as Lyndon Johnson's running mate in 1964, Humphrey defended the administration's Vietnam policy. When Johnson withdrew in 1968, Humphrey won the Democratic nomination at a bitterly divided Chicago convention and lost narrowly to Richard Nixon in the popular vote. He returned to the Senate in 1971, lost the 1972 nomination contest to George McGovern, became the first deputy president pro tempore in 1977 and died in office in January 1978.