A tall, tousled beanpole of a man packed his tiny wife and three small children into the family Ford and set out northward through the streets of Washington. The Hon. Joseph Hurst Ball, 35, was heading home to Minnesota.
Young Senator Ball expected a cool reception from the home folks. For this earnest, rumpled newspaperman whom Republican Governor Harold Stassen chose last year to take the place of the late Senator Ernest Lundeen is an ardent crusader for President Roosevelt's foreign policy. And for over 25 years Minnesota has been a sand pile of isolationism.
It was as a Congressman from Minnesota that the elder Charles Augustus Lindbergh fought against U.S. entry into the war in 1917. It was in Minneapolis two months ago that Congressman Lindbergh's pilot son got one of his biggest ovations, as he urged the U.S. to keep hands off 1941's war. Minnesota's delegation in Congress, almost to a man, belongs to the little band of fearful men who voted against the Lend-Lease Bill.
Sentiment against war is not so strong in Minnesota today as it was in 1917. Joe Ball's life was in no danger, but his political career was—for Joe Ball means to run for his seat in the Senate next year. Last week he staked everything he had on his faith that by next year Minnesota's citizens will believe in the danger of a German victory as he does now.
Crusader Ball had just one week to tell his constituents what he thought about the war, before heading back to Washington. He started his campaign on July 3 at Cannon Falls, in the rich, rolling farmland of southeastern Minnesota. The crowd at the fair grounds, mostly slow-spoken, slow-thinking Scandinavian farmers, was stolid and quiet, but attentive. It was the same story next afternoon at Elbow Lake, when Joe Ball went on right after the hog-calling contest.
In Minneapolis, the night of the Fourth, Joe Ball shot the works. In Powderhorn Park he spoke to a crowd of 50,000 men, women & children who had come to see and hear the fireworks.
Said Joe Ball: "Liberty is an ideal which spreads and spreads and spreads, if it is not destroyed at the source. Hitler knows that he ... must . . . destroy liberty here in America and make this great nation part of his new Nazi world order. It is clear now to all of us that the onward march of Nazi barbarism must be stopped, or like the relentless tides of the ocean it will engulf the whole world. . . .
"As long as we stand united . . . our workmen and our industries . . . will outproduce all the slave labor in the world, and this great nation need never appease the dictators. . . . Let us emulate the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and 'with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence . . . mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.' "
For those words, even Minnesota gave Joe Ball a good hand.