Mark Andrews, North Dakota farmer-politician, dies at 94

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 Saturday in Fargo, North Dakota. He was 94.

The Hanson Runsvold Funeral Home in Fargo confirmed the death on its website .

s his 23-year congressional career drew to a close, The New York Times said Andrews had kept “three items at the top of his priority list: farmers, farmers and farmers.”

Tall (6-foot- 4), plain-spoken and rawboned, 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,” 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 ea sygoing 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, Andrews was a fiscal conservative, favoring spending cuts and balanced budgets, and a faithful backer of agricultural subsidies and farm price supports. His reelection became routine.

But there was another side to Andrews, and it said much about his constituents’ tolerance. He had a moderate to liberal voting record on social issues, supporting food stamps and assistance to the poor and opposing bans on abortion and prayers in public schools. He once endorsed Nelson Rockefeller, New York’s liberal Republican governor, for president.

In a gentler era when politics was less of a blood sport, he liked Ike and LBJ — Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, and Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat. And he befriended liberal Democrats like Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Rep. Bob Bergland of Minnesota, who later became President Jimmy Carter’s secretary of agriculture.

“Sure, he was a Democrat, and I was a Republican,” Andrews told Inforum. com, The Fargo Forum news website, in 2017, referring to Bergland. “He would come to North Dakota and talk about his good friend Mark Andrews, and I’d go to Minnesota and talk about my good friend Bob Bergland, because we really were good friends despite our political differences.”

The voters did not mind. In 1980, when North Dakota’s long- serving Republican senator, Milton Young, retired, Andrews jumped into the race and won the seat with 70% of the votes, part of a swing to Republican control of the Senate for the first time in decades. He began making national headlines.

In 1981, as debate swirled over the Reagan administration’s proposed sale of AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) planes to Saudi Arabia, Andrews joined liberal Democrats in opposing the sale as a peril to Israel. But after meeting with a persuasive President Ronald Reagan, he and four other senators switched sides, providing the margin to approve the arms sale, the biggest in the nation’s history.

Andrews took on the Defense Department in 1983 by sponsoring what became a law — backed by a bipartisan coalition in Congress — that required makers of military weapons to guarantee their hardware. He criticized “incestuous relationships” between military officers who bought weapons and defense contractors who often hired the officers in retirement.

And in 1985, as a crisis loomed over the farm economy, he took on the Reagan White House, writing a bill to stabilize farm incomes by subsidizing commodity prices at steady levels over several years.

Reagan opposed the measure as a budget buster, arguing that subsidies encouraged surplus production and depressed markets. But he signed the measure anyway, hoping that rising commodity exports might eventually wean farmers from costly price supports. Mark Andrews II was born in Fargo on May 19, 1926, to Mark and Lillian (Hoyler) Andrews, a former kindergarten teacher from Michigan. He graduated from Fargo Central High School in 1943. After a year at North Dakota Agricultural College (now North Dakota State University), he attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point for two years, leaving on a disability discharge, his family said, then returned to North Dakota Agricultural and graduated in 1949.

In 1949, he married Mary Willming, whom he had known since eighth grade. She died in July. He is survived by a son, Mark III; two daughters, Sarah Herman and Karen Andrews; a sister, Barbara Bertel; as well as grandchildren and greatgrandchildren.