Daniel E. Richter was a lawyer, journalist and political activist in Minnesota, North Dakota and Wisconsin from the 1890s to the mid-1930s. He was admitted to the Minnesota bar in 1890, practiced law briefly in North Dakota, edited a newspaper in Wisconsin while practicing law, went back to North Dakota to take charge of a paper, then returned to Minneapolis, where he lawyered and worked as a special correspondent for the Minneapolis Times and in 1910-1912 as a columnist for the Tribune.
During World War I, he recruited an infantry company that guarded flour mills Minneapolis from sabotage and was later dispatched with a battalion of the Minnesota Home Guard to combat the Cloquet-Moose Lake fire of 1918---the worst man-made disaster in the state's history (not counting the Dakota War).
Politics, it seems, invigorated him in a way the law could not. He practically abandoned his law practice in 1919-1920 to combat the influence of the Non-Partisan League. He travelled throughout Minnesota and North Dakota delivering speeches attacking the League, thereby earning the sobriquet "Fighting Dan." In the 1920s and early 1930s, he was active in the Constitutional Defense Alliance, the Constitutional Rights Association of America, and a committee of the Hennepin County Republican Party working to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment.
He died on November 17, 1935, at age sixty-five. On February 8th of the following year, a memorial to him was read in district court on behalf of the Hennepin County Bar Association.
View Article
