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"This trip has impressed one thing on my mind ... I need to do more reading, more writing and more thinking if I ever want to fulfill my dream of being someone in this world. Maybe I seem foolish to have such vain hopes and plans, but, Bucky, I can see how some day, if you and I just apply ourselves and make up our minds to work for bigger things, how we can some day live here in Washington, and probably be in Government politics or service. I set my aim at Congress. Don't laugh at me. Maybe it does sound rather egotistical and beyond reason, .but, Muriel, I do know others have succeeded."
Cicero's Wind. A year and a half after they were married, Hubert set out to fulfill the dream. Back at the University of Minnesota, Muriel got a job as a typist, Hubert got a part-time drugstore job, worked as a janitor to help pay their rent.
The Minnesota campus was full of New Deal-talk. Humphrey plunged enthusiastically into the midst of it. He gulped down the New Deal ideology, lock, stock & pork-barrel. He became a big wheel in the political science department, a voluble, incessant talker—long on persuasiveness, a little short on logic. A professor once told him: "If God had given you as much brains as he has given you wind, you would be sure to be another Cicero."
After graduation, Humphrey went to Louisiana State University as a graduate student and instructor, wrote a master's thesis on "The Philosophy of the New Deal." (Henry Wallace, reading it years later, commented: "Humphrey, you get an A on this.")
The Mashed Potatoes Circuit. Without ever taking his eye from his real goal—politics—Humphrey returned to Minnesota and a series of odd jobs: as an instructor at the university, as adult education director for the WPA, and as assistant regional director of the War Manpower Commission. But he also began to get around. In his WPA job, he printed and mailed out thousands of diplomas, each carefully signed by Hubert H. Humphrey Jr. He joined everything in sight. The word spread that Hubert Humphrey was a rousing speaker—and always available.
He became the darling of the Townsendites (though he nimbly avoided endorsing the Townsend Plan). He got on the chicken a la king and mashed potatoes circuit: Kiwanis, Rotary, the Elks. Then, at 31, when the time looked right, Humphrey plunged into politics, aiming high. He ran for mayor of Minneapolis, came in second in a field of ten. In the runoff he lost out by only 5,000 votes.
That summer Humphrey got to thinking: the trouble with liberal politics in Minnesota was that Democrats and Farmer-Laborites fought each other instead of the Republicans. He took a day coach to Washington, sold Democratic national headquarters on his plan for fusing the two parties, returned home and presided at the wedding.
That gave ambitious Hubert Humphrey a base to work from. He took a job teaching politics at St. Paul's Presbyterian Macalester College, got a part-time job as a radio commentator (WTCN) and waited. In 1945, he was elected mayor of Minneapolis by the largest plurality in the city's history.