Karl Mundt was born in 1900 in Humboldt, South Dakota, earned an economics degree from Carleton College in 1923, and taught speech, psychology, sociology and government at Bryant High School while coaching debate, soon becoming superintendent. He married Mary in 1924, both earned master’s degrees at Columbia, and by 1928 they taught at what is now Dakota State University. He was national president of the National Forensic League from 1932 to 1971. After losing a 1936 House race, he won in 1938, backed U.S. membership in UNESCO, and coauthored the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which made the Voice of America permanent while barring its material from domestic distribution.

From 1943 to 1948 he served on the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Alger Hiss and Hollywood investigations. Appointed to the Senate in late 1948 after Vera C. Bushfield resigned, he narrowly beat George McGovern in 1960, sat on Appropriations and Foreign Relations, and chaired the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings. He voted for the civil rights acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1968, the Voting Rights Act, the 24th Amendment and Thurgood Marshall’s confirmation. After a severe stroke on November 23, 1969, he never returned to the floor, yet his wife Mary ran his office and refused calls for him to resign for more than three years.

• On HUAC he pushed for an investigation of the Ku Klux Klan, an effort that failed.
• He used his Appropriations seat to bring the EROS satellite data center to Sioux Falls.
• In 1972 the Senate Republican Conference stripped him of his committee assignments.
• He stayed in office until his term expired in early 1973, was succeeded by James Abourezk, and died in 1974.
• Richard Nixon dedicated the Karl E. Mundt Library at Dakota State in 1969, and John Goodman plays a character named for him in Barton Fink.