July 21: Paul Wellstone

Paul Wellstone, one of the more progressive U.S. senators in American history, was born on this date in 1944. Wellstone was a professor of political science at Carleton College in Minnesota before being elected in 1990, with the backing of a coalition of union members, farmers and others he had worked with as a community organizer in the 1970s. In the course of two terms, Wellstone served on the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, gaining improved health care benefits for veterans; he worked passionately to win equitable health insurance coverage for mental illnesses; he opposed the first Gulf War in 1991 and courageously voted against the congressional authorization of the war in Iraq in 2002, in the midst of a tight election campaign (making him one of only eleven senators who voted against both wars). Shortly after, Wellstone died with his wife Sheila and one daughter, as well as five other people, in a somewhat mysterious plane crash that led some to believe he’d been murdered for political reasons (pilot error was the likely cause).

“The American polity is infected with a serious imbalance of power between elites and masses, a power which is the principal threat to our democracy.” —Paul Wellstone