“[T]he value of a Senator is not so easily determined as the value of a car or a hog, or even that of a public utility bond or a ballplayer. There are no standard tests to apply to a Senator, no Dunn & Bradstreet rating, no scouting reports,” John F. Kennedy remarked as a U.S. senator. “His talents may vary with his time, his contribution may be limited by his politics. To judge his true greatness, particularly in comparison with his fellow Senators long after they are all dead, is nearly an impossible task.” This—to judge George Stanley McGovern’s merit as a senator and contribution to American politics—is Thomas K. Knock’s task in his biography of the South Dakota legislator.

In The Rise of a Prairie Statesman, the first of two planned volumes, Arthur Knock narrates McGovern’s background growing up in Mitchell, South Dakota, a town in 1940 with a population of about 10,000, located in the state’s southeastern quadrant. McGovern, the son of a Methodist minister, was the second child of four, an avid reader, a skilled debater, and a popular teenager and young adult. He was raised in a strict religious household, and close to his mother and older and younger sisters both. He left college during the World War II to join the Army Air Corps and, as a B-24 pilot, demonstrated skill, poise under pressure, courage, and exceptional leadership. It was on furlough that George returned home to marry his girlfriend, Eleanor Stegeberg, and she gave birth to their first child in early 1945, while McGovern was still stationed in Italy.

After the war, McGovern finished his degree at Dakota Wesleyan and went on to study Walter Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel, attend Garrett Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, and embark on a Ph.D. in history at Northwestern, where he studied under Ray Allen Billington, Arthur Link, and Lefton Stavranos. McGovern’s dissertation was on the Colorado Coal Strike of 1913–14, the deadliest labor confrontation in American history, which culminated in the Ludlow massacre of the miners by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s, private army. McGovern enjoyed the archival research and managed to secure access to President Woodrow Wilson’s yet-unreleased papers bearing on the difficult working conditions, fierce politics, and horrible violence surrounding the Colorado Coal Strike. He concluded that if the miners lost the bloody strike, labor ultimately won the war, since the conflict raised the consciousness of workers, led managers to accept company unions, exposed politicians nationwide to the importance of labor—management relations, and paved the way for the right to collective bargaining in the 1930s.

McGovern’s religious upbringing and identification with the Social Gospel, his concern for family farmers and workaday Americans, and his military experience—he hated warfare and, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resolved that atomic weapons should never be used again—informed his liberal politics. He was committed to preserving the family farm and was a strong supporter of Henry A. Wallace, the secretary of agriculture, vice president to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and secretary of commerce under Truman, and personally close to Hubert Humphrey. He appreciated Charles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of the American Civilization (1927), Theodore White’s Thunder out of China (1980), Howard K. Smith’s The State of Europe (1950), and other books that called into question the typically conservative conventional wisdom of the United States. McGovern, in contrast, believed in the capacity of the United States to be a force for good in the world, in the promise of American agriculture for mitigating global hunger, and in the U.S. capability to lead other states to a more peaceful, more prosperous, and ultimately better international system. Unsurprisingly, McGovern opposed the strident anticommunism of the House Un-American Affairs Committee, the politics of fellow South Dakotan Karl Mundt—although they later buried the hatchet once McGovern was elected U.S. senator in 1962—and much of American politics and press coverage in the 1950s and 1960s.

Knock’s very readable and impressively researched book is particularly thorough on McGovern’s electoral campaigns leading up to his reelection to the Senate in 1968. It persuasively conveys McGovern’s empathy with and support for family farmers and the common man, and convincingly explains the multiple and intersecting roots of his liberal and democratic ideals. The Rise of a Prairie Statesman will be a valuable resource for those wanting to learn more about anticommunism and early Cold War politics, mid-twentieth-century international food assistance, the 1968 presidential campaign, the anti—Vietnam War movement, and, of course, McGovern himself.

The book does raise a few issues. We learn almost nothing of those who helped McGovern, apart from his political and academic mentors and his wife. Who were those on his campaign teams and Senate staff who helped him in elections and on the Hill? Whom did he hire or retain? On whom did he most depend? And what were their qualifications and ties? Neither, for all of its attention to farm politics, does the book lay out the principal issues in agricultural economics and farm production in early mid-twentieth-century America and review the options that national policymakers had; the reader is not given an overall picture of this important policy subsystem in which McGovern was a keen participant. Nor do we know about McGovern’s personal habits. When did he have time to think and mull things over? What was his daily schedule, and did he get regular exercise? Did he keep in touch with his siblings (they vanish from McGovern’s life after childhood)? Also, with rare exceptions, we learn nothing of McGovern’s flaws, vulnerabilities, or personal errors.

Because this book is only the first half of Knock’s biography, it is premature to pronounce the author as meeting John F. Kennedy’s challenge about senatorial greatness. Throughout 1968, the idealistic, hardworking, and charismatic McGovern was politically ascendant. So the task before Knock is to explain how this decent, guileless, and honorable man—a war hero, a religious man, and a husband and father—could have been soundly rejected by the American electorate in the 1972 presidential election and then marginalized within the Democratic Party and in national politics.

The biography begins by telling of McGovern’s receipt of a Presidential Medal of Freedom, with President Bill Clinton praising him for his multiple contributions to the United States as a diplomat, senator, and World War II pilot, and, especially, for his “stalwart voice for peace” and commitment to feed the hungry (p. x). But the award of a Medal of Freedom by no means clinches the author’s case: Since 1964, 27 U.S. senators have received the Medal of Freedom. Robert Dole, Barry Goldwater, Herbert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, Edward Kennedy, and Michael Mansfield share the honor alongside Lloyd Bentsen, Edward Brooke, Gaylord Nelson, Strom Thurmond, and others (http://www.senate.gov/reference/SenatorsPresidentialMedalFreedom.htm).

Even so, Knock’s highly informed, comprehensive, and sympathetic portrait of George McGovern up through his 1968 reelection to the Senate suggests that the second volume will amply prove his credentials as a statesman, explain his greatness, and make it apparent why he merits a two-volume biography.