Ray P. Chase spoke to The Exchange Club, a businessmen’s organization, a few months before the Minnesota election for governor. Chase was a Republican party operative. His lecture attacked the Farmer-Labor candidate by misrepresenting his travel to New York City. He also spun out a distorted view of life at the University of Minnesota, calling it a laboratory for communism. As a staunch political reactionary, he labeled most of his opponents as communists, no group more than students on campus. His efforts to label all left-wing student activists, whatever their political views, communists led him to seek out constant information from the Dean of Student Affairs to be used in his attacks on the University of Minnesota.