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Minnesota Boy. The background of this crusader deserved some attention. Joe's father was a man who had studied for the ministry, gave it up after he read Robert Ingersoll, married a Kentuckian, studied law but never practiced, taught school, sold textbooks, became a Bull Mooser and a Woodrow Wilson internationalist. Joe, the sixth of seven children, was born in Crookston, Minn., in 1905. Joe played football at high school, worked as a farmhand and went to Antioch College. He topped off his education at the University of Minnesota and got a job on the Minneapolis Journal as a $15-a-week reporter.
Like most underpaid reporters, Joe was a revolutionist. Colleagues remember the time when they upended the assistant managing editor and spanked him. They especially remember Joe rushing up with one ham-hand raised, a revolutionist's look in his eye, to strike a blow against authority. He met and married bustling Betty Robbins, who was a $15-a-week librarian in the Journal morgue. They quit the paper and Joe went freelancing.
Joe's revolt from Minnesota convention then took the form of a thin mustache and drooping sideburns. He wrote adventure, mystery and confession stories for the pulps. But laws of nature and economy caught up with him. He went broke, and Betty became pregnant. Back he went to journalism, this time on the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch.
For a while Joe was an ardent proselytizer for the Newspaper Guild, until he decided that Communists had infiltrated the union. Also, as he began to gain a reputation as a long-winded but conscientious political writer, he began to feel uppity about being lumped with clerks, office boys and stenographers in one union. He quit. The individualist Ball emerged in full flower.
Minnesota Senator. It was about this time that he met a county attorney named Harold Stassen. Ball liked Stassen's views. They were two intellectual explorers in Midwest Minnesota and Joe helped elect Harold governor. So in 1940, when Minnesota's U.S. Senator Ernest Lundeen was killed in an airplane crash, the nation's youngest governor (Stassen was then 33) filled the vacancy with Joe Ball, who at 34 became the nation's youngest Senator.
Betty served as his secretary (at $6,000 a year), efficiently labeling folders, answering letters from constituents, expounding Joe's views, and, on the side, running her family of three children. Minnesotans liked his earnestness and in 1942 returned him to the Senate for another six years. Joe became a vociferous internationalist. In March 1943 he collaborated on the famed B2H2 resolution (with Ohio's Harold Burton, New Mexico's Carl Hatch and Alabama's Lister Hill) —the most specific statement of U.S. internationalism which had come out of Congress up to that time.
In 1944 Ball shocked Republicans by bolting Dewey for Roosevelt because the latter's foreign policy was more in accord with his own. But on domestic issues, he was far from being a New Dealer. He shared Bob Taft's concern over breakneck, "dogood" legislation which he thought might destroy certain American principles, like liberty.
Liberty became Joe Ball's watchword. He applied it like a touchstone to labor.