Coya Knutson was on the fast track.
In 1958, the Minnesota congresswoman was one of only 17 women to hold a seat in the House and the first ever elected from her state. In little more than a decade, she had gone from a quiet life tending chickens on her small farm in Oklee to becoming the first woman on the powerful House Committee of Agriculture.
Knutson, 45, had proposed a flurry of progressive legislation on health and farm issues; her education aid plan would become a precursor to the federal student loan program. Washington pols said Knutson, who was in her second term, had a future in the congressional leadership. Some thought a Senate seat or a cabinet job was possible.
“Blond-haired, dynamic Mrs. Knutson is the most talked about Congresswoman on Capitol Hill,” wrote one reporter. She was “heading for the moon,” said former vice president Walter Mondale, a fellow Minnesotan, who was then a Senate aide.
But when Knutson died last fall at 84, her passing was hardly noted in Washington. There were no memorial services, no commemorative speeches; no talk about whether she deserved a place alongside the most accomplished political women of this century. Indeed, for almost 40 years, Knutson had lived quietly away from the center of power, a political has-been who once enjoyed a brief period of position and fame.
Her life might have taken a different course, but at the height of her popularity, Knutson’s career was destroyed by one of the most brazen acts of sabotage in modern political history. That a politician in a tough election would face furious attacks from her opponents would not have been surprising.
But the plot to undermine Coya Knutson was different, for it came from inside her own home. Her husband, jealous of her success, secretly joined in an intricate conspiracy with members of her own political party to drive her from office.
“She was a woman of great promise,” says Ray Smock, a former historian of the House. “Her early demise was a tragedy of American politics.”
“The guys were out to get her,” explains Arvonne Fraser, who was a member of Knutson’s Democratic Farmer-Labor (DFL) party. “And they got her.”
Knutson’s story, like many of that era, begins with immigrant parents drawn to America by the promise of opportunity. Her mother and father came from Norway and met in the Midwest’s sprawling farm country.
Born in 1912, Coya Gjesdal grew up on a wheat and diary farm in the desolate, open lands of North Dakota. She worked hard to help her family, milking the cows each day before dawn and driving a tractor by age 11.
Coya’s high school classmates voted her most likely to succeed, and she strengthened that notion when she was accepted at the Juilliard School of Music in New York to study voice. While living in the city, she appeared on the era’s top radio show, Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour, but was gonged after just four bars of “O Sole Mio.” Her voice was not of operatic quality, she was told.
Still, Coya returned home as something of a local celebrity. She found a job teaching and, at age 23, rekindled a romance with Andy Knutson, a seventh-grade dropout who had worked on her father’s farm. She was flattered by the attention. “Coya was heavy, she wore glasses, and my father was the first man who ever paid attention to her,” explains he adopted son, Terry.
Before long, the young couple was talking about getting married. But her father did not think Andy Knutson was a good enough match for his favorite daughter. “What clinched the marriage was that her parents opposed it,” Terry remembers his mother telling him. “Coya was a stubborn woman.” In March 1940, Andy and Coya were wed, and they moved to a farm across from Andy’s parents in Oklee (population 490).
But it soon became clear that Coya had made a fateful mistake. Andy was an alcoholic and a gambler, and he didn’t much care for married life. He was also physically abusive. Years later, Congresswoman Knutson would sometimes wear dark glasses to hide her bruises. After only eight months of marriage, Andy told his wife that he would never keep a steady job.
For the rest of their marriage she would be the breadwinner in the family paying Andy’s bar bills, living expenses, and gambling debts. In those bleak early days, Coya resigned herself to a life of sadness and abuse.
One morning, after finishing her daily round of farm chores, Knutson walked back into her house to hear Eleanor Roosevelt’s voice crackling from the radio. The first lady was urging women to participate in the political process. “It was as if the sun burned into me that day,” Knutson recalled years later. “All of a sudden, I had an awareness of something I can’t explain. I felt there had to be more to life than what I was experiencing.”
But the change was gradual. Because Andy found farming monotonous, the Knutsons decided to try another venture and brought a small hotel on Oklee’s Main Street. Coya named the place Andy’s Hotel, hoping that the business might encourage her husband to take pride in himself and sober up.
But the new place turned out to be more work for her. She ran the hotel, waited on tables, taught school, and, on weekends sang at every wedding and funeral in the area. “I didn’t know it then, but I was building a political base,” Terry remembers her saying.
Knutson was lonely and desperate to be a mother. After two miscarriages, she decided to adopt a child. “I thought that maybe, just maybe, if Andy and I had a child, it would give him a purpose in life,” she said. She took the train to the Lutheran Welfare Home in St. Paul and found seven-year-old Terry, “the most adorable, slender little guy in the home.” Terry, who had given up hope of being adopted, would become Coya’s friend and closest confidant.
But when Coya and Terry arrived home on the boy’s first night with his new family, they discovered that Andy had wreaked havoc on the room Coya had prepared for Terry. He had torn down the new curtains and ripped apart the stuffed animals. The room reeked of beer and vomit. Andy was passed out on the bed. When he woke up, he growled at Coya, “Take that damn kid back where you got him.” She ignored him.
In the months and years that followed, Coya would often be called to nearby taverns to pick up her husband. During Andy’s drunken rages, Coya and Terry sometimes sought refuge at a neighbor’s house.
“It is all right for others to speak of a woman being noble and brave in the face of her husband’s disgraceful drunken condition,” she said later. “But when it comes home, it is a hard thing to take, and I neither felt noble nor brave. It was difficult to hold my head up in our small town. Because of him, I was a lonely person, which forced me to seek expression in other fields and become more interested in other people’s problems.”
During World War II, Knutson served as a local government agricultural adviser, helping farmers increase crop production. She became involved in numerous community activities, which led to her decision, in 1950, to run for the state legislature. Elected to two terms, she proved to be ahead of her time by proposing legislation that would allow working mothers to deduct child care costs and would create nonsmoking rooms in hospitals. Meanwhile, at home, she moved into a separate bedroom. Her marriage to Andy existed in name only.
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