Minnesota: To the Woodshed

The late O. E. Rolvaag's 1924 classic Giants in the Earth portrayed the trials of a yeoman Norwegian family that strove doggedly to conquer the Great Plains, only to be consumed in the struggle. The author's son, Minnesota Governor Karl Fritjof Rolvaag, 52, has come to experience the same sort of futility. Though he has been a dedicated, longtime party worker, Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party last week dumped him in a bruising convention fight for the party's gubernatorial endorsement. Picked instead was ambitious, boyish-looking Lieutenant Governor A. M. ("Sandy") Keith, 37.

Kennedy Coiffure. The bloodletting was intended as a transfusion to rejuvenate the political coalition that young Hubert Humphrey put together in 1944. In a sense, the D.F.L. has been damaged by its very success. One by one, its brightest luminaries—Humphrey, Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, Senators Eugene McCarthy and Walter Mondale—have gone off to Washington, leaving the party's fortunes in less gifted hands. Rolvaag, for example, was the earnest but lackluster lieutenant governor in 1962 when he won the D.F.L. nomination for Governor simply because there was nobody else to challenge Republican Incumbent Elmer L. Andersen. To everybody's surprise, Rolvaag won by 91 votes after a recount that took three months.

Balding, dumpy and an ineffectual public speaker, Rolvaag has introduced progressive programs but has earned a reputation as bumbling and indecisive. When polls showed last year that he could not win in 1966, D.F.L. leaders asked the Governor to step down as a candidate for reelection. On his refusal, party chieftains decided to turn to Keith, a lawyer and ex-athlete who grooms his hair Kennedy-style.

Switch or Lose. At the convention, Rolvaag delegates wore buttons proclaiming "I'd rather fight than switch" —to which Keith partisans' buttons replied: "I'd rather switch than lose." Though Keith led from the outset, he fell short of the required two-thirds majority until the 20th ballot. Humphrey, scrupulously neutral during the convention, came out of seclusion to embrace Keith, noted: "You can't live forever on the older generation."

But Rolvaag was embittered. "I got taken to the woodshed by my lieutenant governor," he said. And despite Humphrey's urgings of unity, the Governor would not rule out challenging Keith in the party primary in September. Any further D.F.L. feuding, of course, could only benefit Minnesota's Republicans, who at week's end had a marathon convention contest of their own before rallying around Political Novice Harold LeVander, 55, a South St. Paul attorney, as their gubernatorial candidate.