Saturday, April 24, 2021

Walter Mondale as rural: reflections on the occasion of his death

I found myself engaged by reflections on former U.S. Vice President Walter Mondale's death over the past few days.  It's been a walk down memory lane for me; I was in middle school and just starting to follow politics seriously when the Carter-Mondale ticket won in 1976.  Some of the tributes to Mondale have mentioned that he was a product of rural America, including this piece by U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who Mondale mentored:  

He was a small-town boy, the son of a minister who rose to the second-highest office in the land, with a strong moral core that defined his every action.

And here's a quote from the New York Times obituary of Mondale:

Walter Frederick Mondale was born on Jan. 5, 1928, in the hamlet of Ceylon, in southern Minnesota, in a lake region less than five miles from the Iowa border.
* * * 
Mr. Mondale’s father lost a series of farms in the 1920s and moved from town to town, subsisting on meager earnings while Mr. Mondale’s mother gave music lessons and led the choir in each of Theodore’s parishes. His parents believed in helping the less fortunate and never making a show of it.

Once asked whether he would be a good president, Mr. Mondale said: “I have trouble answering that. If my father had ever heard me tell him that I would make a good president, I would have been taken directly to the woodshed. In my family, the two things you were sure to get spanked for were lying or bragging about yourself.” 

These references to Fritz' Mondale's rural roots tend not to indicate explicitly how that rurality shaped the man.  It's something I'd like to hear fleshed out, though I suspect I know what these writers are getting at, and I suspect what they are getting at is based on a big dose of nostalgia about the nature of rural community. 

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