Mark Andrews, North Dakota Farmer-Politician, Dies at 94 (original) (raw)
Obituaries|Mark Andrews, North Dakota Farmer-Politician, Dies at 94
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His support for agriculture helped him win nine elections to the House and one to the Senate, despite a moderate-to-liberal voting record as a Republican.
Mark Andrews in 1986. He called 1980 the high point of his political life. “It was the year I was elected to the Senate,” he said, “and in North Dakota I outpolled the head of the Republican ticket, Ronald Reagan.”Credit...Ross Collins
Oct. 7, 2020
Mark Andrews, a North Dakota Republican farmer whose strident support for farmers helped him win nine elections to the House of Representatives and one to the Senate, but who could not stave off defeat for a second Senate term in 1986, died on Saturday in Fargo, N.D. He was 94.
The Hanson Runsvold Funeral Home in Fargo confirmed the death on its website.
As his 23-year congressional career drew to a close, The New York Times said Mr. Andrews had kept “three items at the top of his priority list: farmers, farmers and farmers.”
Tall (6 foot 4), plain-spoken and rawboned, Mr. Andrews raised wheat, sugar beets and corn for 13 years before venturing into public life. He was the third generation in his family to work a 1,280-acre Red River Valley spread that had been started by his grandfather, Albion Andrews, in the Dakota Territory of 1881, eight years before North Dakota became a state.
His father, also named Mark Andrews, was born on the farm in 1886 and became an opera-singing farmer-politician who gave concerts in Fargo and in New York and sang for the voters in his successful 1928 campaign for Cass County sheriff. He served one four-year term, went back to farming and died after being injured in a car accident.
“They called him the singing sheriff,” Mr. Andrews recalled in an interview for this obituary in 2018. “People used to say to me, ‘Well, you’re the son of the singing sheriff,’ and ask me to sing. But I couldn’t carry a tune in a bushel basket.”
With an easygoing warmth that appealed to rural voters, he began his political career in 1963 by winning a special election after the state’s lone member of the House of Representatives died in office. In 17 years in the House, Mr. Andrews was a fiscal conservative, favoring spending cuts and balanced budgets, and a faithful backer of agricultural subsidies and farm price supports. His re-election became routine.
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