Will former U.S. congresswoman Coya Knutson's name come home to Oklee MN post office?

An item in Ingrid Harbo's Forum News Service article, Rep. Fischbach proposes renaming post offices in Vergas and Oklee, Minnesota:

According to a news release from Fischbach’s office, the proposed bills would rename the post offices in Vergas and Oklee to honor local heroes. The Vergas Post Office would be named after Jon Glawe, a veteran and mail carrier who lived in Vergas, while the Oklee Post Office would be named after Coya Knutson, the first woman elected to Congress from Minnesota. . . .

Knutson was born in North Dakota, and attended Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. She moved to New York to become a professional opera singer, but settled down on a farm near Oklee with her husband Andy. She was elected to Congress in 1955, and served until 1959. She also served as liaison officer for the Department of Defense under John F. Kennedy. . . .

There's more to the story about Knutson. In 2014--years after her death in 1996--Liz Halloran reported for National Public Radio in The Congresswoman Whose Husband Called Her Home:

Fifty-six years ago this weekend, newspapers across the nation told a sad tale of a family seemingly imploding.

At the center of the story was Coya Knutson, the opera-singing daughter of a Norwegian farmer, and the first woman from Minnesota elected to Congress.

Voted in on her own merits, not appointed to keep a late husband's seat warm for a successor, the trailblazing mother could only watch as vengeful party rivals, a manufactured scandal, and a feckless, alcoholic husband combined to sabotage her career.

It all came to a head on the eve of Mother's Day 1958.

Never heard of the charismatic Knutson, who briefly studied opera at the Juilliard School in New York before returning home to become a schoolteacher and political activist?

Not many have, even in her home state.

But during the late 1950s, when Knutson was running for her third U.S. House term representing Minnesota's rural 9^th District, she briefly but spectacularly made the front pages across the nation.

Not for her work on Capitol Hill establishing the first federal student loan program and first grants for cystic fibrosis research. Or for being the first congresswoman ever appointed to the House Agriculture Committee – at the insistence of House Speaker Sam Rayburn over vehement gender-based objections of its chairman.

It was because of an infamous letter, signed by husband Andy back in tiny Oklee, Minn., but widely believed to have been written by grudge-driven operatives in the congresswoman's own party, the progressive Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party.

The letter — urging her to abandon the nation's capital and return to hearth and home — was first published in a regional newspaper under the headline, "Coya Come Home."

It spread like a virus, inspiring overheated stories nationwide. Like one in a Pennsylvania newspaper that described the "honey-blonde" congresswoman looking haggard as she "came out of hiding" to insist she wasn't angry at her husband.

"It's the dirtiest trick I've ever seen in politics," says Gretchen Beito, a Minnesota author who chronicled Knutson's historic path in the book, Coya Come Home.

Knutson's son Terry, now 74, had campaigned with his mother as a teenager but was already in college when the rumpus erupted. He said DFL operatives had also engageda spurious whisper campaign back in his mother's very religious district that she was having an affair with a young man who was her top aide.

"They wanted to get even with her, to get her out of Congress," Knutson says.

What prompted this enmity? These reprisals? Historians largely agree that the Knutson was vulnerable only in part because of her gender at a time when the prevailing sentiment was that a woman's place was in the home.

"Women themselves resented her," says Beito, the author. "She was doing what women weren't supposed to do."

The populist Knutson's greatest political sin was that she had the temerity to buck party bosses at least twice, and with great success.

First, when, as a state legislator, she used her estimable campaigning skills – which included fluency in Norwegian and a charming ability to sing and play the accordion — to challenge and defeat the DFL's choice on her way to her first term in Washington.

Knutson stepped on toes once again, more significantly, when she chaired in 1956 the state presidential campaign of Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver, who was seeking the Democratic nomination. DFL officials, including Sen. Hubert Humphrey, who harbored vice presidential ambitions, had endorsed Illinois Sen. Adlai Stevenson.

Kefauver crushed Stevenson in the Minnesota presidential primary that year, a shocking embarrassment to party bosses, and an end to Humphrey's drive to be on a national ticket. Knutson won re-election that year, but was forced to again beat back a party-backed primary challenge two years later when she set out to win her third term.

Even so, her detractors were persistent, and played their trump card before the fall election.

"They decided to go to Andy," Terry Knutson says, "and pay him cash to sign the letter."

That letter urged the congresswoman to abandon her re-election campaign and "go home a make a home for your husband and son." It went on: "As your husband I compel you to do this...I'm sick and tired of having you run around with other men all the time and not your husband. I love you honey."

Says Terry Knutson: "After that, it was pretty much over," even though his adoptive parents hadn't been living together for years, he says, because of Andy's drinking and abusive behavior.

Coya Knutson lost to a Republican challenger – "A Big Man for A Man-Sized Job" was his slogan — in the fall of 1958. She obtained a divorce few years later, but steadfastly refused to speak ill of her husband. He died of alcoholism in 1969, but not before he admitted he did not write the famous letter.

"She had a philosophy that 'vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,'" said Beito. "That was her mantra."

A handful of party old-timers like George Farr, 90, who served as DFL state chairman in the 1960s, still assert that it was the unfounded rumor of the affair that undid Knutson, not any organized effort to oust her. . . .

We thought of Knutson recently when "American Greatness," a conservative online venue published a poorly-sourced smear against Republican South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. Noem tweeted in part: “These rumors are total garbage and a disgusting lie,” Noem said in a tweet. “These old, tired attacks on conservative women are based on a falsehood that we can’t achieve anything without a man’s help. . . ."

It's not just conservative women who are attacked with such rumors, though the tactic is old and tired. For the best look at the fate of the Noem rumors, we recommend Forum News Service South Dakota Bureau Chief Jeremy Fugleburg's How the Noem-Lewandowski rumors became news.

We also recommend the United States House of Representatives History, Art & Archives biography of Knutson, much of which is focused around the policies she championed. Our favorite:

 . . .One of her more inventive proposed measures would have permitted farmers to place fallow land into a national “conservation acreage reserve” and still be paid rent on the unproductive acreage from federal funds. Knutson argued that this would help replenish the soil, protect it from overuse, and, ultimately, boost future yields. . . .

We look forward to seeing Coya's name on the Oklee Post Office.

Photo: Coya Knutson playing an accordion. Via the Star Tribune "Curious Minnesota" article, Why was the career of Minnesota's first congresswoman cut short? The accordion is in the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society.

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Comments

[KGC]

The absolute weirdest such smear/hit piece on a female politician has to be the 2009-2013 attacks on Laura Brod.

Turning what was a consensual affair and ill-judged photo at most into some mass of innuendo, gossip, and slow drips that left even her staunchest political opponents defending her.