John Emerson describes the 1936 Congressional election in Minnesota’s district.  It was an election the likes of which we’ll not see again, or at least not until I locate the secret corporate lab where today’s candidates are cloned and programmed.  For all of LBJ’s faults - read Billy Lee Brammer’s “The Gay Place” for a fictional summary of Caro’s tomes - he at least had the humanity to call an opponent a pigfucker just for the chance of seeing him deny it.

I can just see Shoemaker calling draft-dodging, chickenshit coward Dick Cheney a draft-dodging, chickenshit coward for rattling his limp saber from within the safe confines of his personal medical complex under the Appalachians.  Ah, who am I kidding.  Draft-dodging, chickenshit coward Cheney would have one of his mercenaries off Shoemaker, dodging the wetwork himself just like Mr. Forever War dodged the Vietnam War because of that bad case of chickenshittus cowarditis.

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The ninth and last Congressional slot was claimed by Francis Shoemaker, a leftist muckraker and scandalmonger who looked like a tough-guy detective in a noir movie. In the 1929 Congressional election he had done well in defeat,  even though he had been indicted and briefly jailed on charges of libeling a local banker as a “Robber of Widows and Orphans” (which the banker probably was). In 1930, after the election, Shoemaker was finally convicted of libel and given a suspended sentence, but because of his defiant attitude in his newspaper account of the trial the suspension was revoked, and he spent a year in Leavenworth.

For the rest of his career he bragged about his time in prison, while continuing to slander opponents and to physically assault critics and various others. (He was arrested for assault twice during his single Congressional term; neither attack was politically motivated). He was an undistinguished Congressman, and after one term he left Congress and challenged Minnesota’s mealy-mouthed Farmer-Labor  Senator Shipstead. He threw a scare into Shipstead at the FLP convention, but was soundly defeated in the primary.

In 1936 Shoemaker was back in action  despite various legal problems, some of them rising from his support of the Trotskyist Teamsters Local 574 in the bloody 1934 trucker’s strike. (He succeeded in pissing off  the Trotskyists as much as he did their opponents). He decided to challenge Republican Congressman Pittinger in the Eighth District. Whether or not Shoemaker had been an effective Congressman, and despite the fact that he was opposed by the Farmer Labor Party leadership, he was a fearsome, no-holds-barred campaigner and Pittinger dreaded  the thought of having to run against him. Through an intermediary Pittinger donated money to Shoemaker’s primary opponent, John Bernard, who defeated Shoemaker but also defeated Pittinger and became the district’s Congressman .

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