
Muriel Humphrey played an indirect part in her husband’s early political career, keeping a certain distance between her role as mother and Hubert’s public life, but also assisting him as an informal advisor. After their landslide victory, Humphrey served as Vice President from 1965 to 1969. Johnson chose Humphrey as his running mate on the presidential ticket. In 1948 he was elected to the first of three consecutive terms as one of Minnesota’s U.S. Humphrey became a powerful force in the state’s DFL. Two years later, he launched a long and storied political career by winning election as mayor of Minneapolis. He also served as the state chief of the Minnesota war service program and as assistant director of the War Manpower Commission in 1943.

Hubert Humphrey went on to teach political science at the University of Minnesota and at Macalester College during World War II. 2 They raised a daughter and three sons: Nancy, Hubert III, Bob, and Douglas.

1 On September 3, 1936, Muriel Buck married Hubert Humphrey and, within a year, Muriel began helping to fund her husband’s college education at the University of Minnesota and his graduate studies at Louisiana State University. It was at that time that she met a young man tending counter at his father’s pharmacy, Hubert Horatio Humphrey. From 1931 to 1932, she attended classes at Huron College. Muriel Buck was raised in a Presbyterian home and was educated in public schools.

Her father supported the family as a produce middleman, buying and selling such staples as cream, eggs, and poultry. Muriel Fay Buck was born on February 20, 1912, in Huron, South Dakota, to Andrew and Jessie May Buck. As only the second Minnesota woman ever to serve in Congress, Muriel Humphrey pursued her own interests during her brief tenure, supporting an extension of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) ratification deadline and advocating several programs to benefit people with developmental disabilities. When Senator Humphrey passed away in 1978, his political partner and adviser, Muriel, emerged to fill his seat and carry out his programs.

The archetypical political wife, Muriel Humphrey supported her husband, Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr., during a career that took him from being a clerk at his father’s pharmacy in North Dakota to a political powerbroker in the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party and national prominence in the Senate and, finally, as Vice President.
