Nonpartisan League

For the adjective used to describe various United States organizations and elections, see nonpartisan.

The Nonpartisan League (NPL) was a political organization founded in 1915 in the United States by former Socialist Party organizer A. C. Townley. The Nonpartisan League advocated state control of mills, grain elevators, banks and other farm-related industries in order to reduce the power of corporate political interests from Minneapolis, Minnesota. It originated in North Dakota, but eventually spread throughout the American Midwest and Pacific Northwest during the Progressive Era and was briefly organized as a national party. It also spread northward into Canada, running in provincial elections and providing some of the basis for the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan and the Progressive Party of Canada. The NPL goat served as the League's mascot. It was known as "The Goat that Can't be Got."^[1]

History

Its origins date from 1915, a time when small farmers in North Dakota felt exploited by out-of-state milling companies, the railroads, and the eastern capital markets. Rumors spread at an American Society of Equity meeting in Bismarck that a state legislator named Treadwell Twichell had told a group of farmers to "go home and slop the hogs." Twichell later said that his statement was misinterpreted. In fact, Twichell had been instrumental in previous legislative reforms to rescue the state from turn of the century boss rule by Alexander MacKenzie and the Northern Pacific Railroad. Ironically or not, the phrase was to become a rallying cry among large numbers of disaffected constituents.

Attending the meeting was Townley, a failed flax farmer from Beach, North Dakota. Townley and a friend, Fred Wood, drew up a radical political platform on Wood's kitchen table that addressed many of the farmers' concerns. Soon, Townley was traveling the state in a borrowed Model T Ford signing up NPL members for a payment of $6 in dues. Farmers were receptive to Townley's ideas and joined in droves.

The League, supported by a groundswell of "six-dollar suckers"^{[citation needed]}, ran its slate as Republican candidates in the 1916 elections. It won control of the state legislature and elected a farmer, Lynn Frazier, as governor with 79% of the vote. After the 1918 elections, in which the NPL won control of both houses of the legislature, a significant portion of the League's platform was enacted. State-run agricultural enterprises such as the North Dakota Mill and Elevator, the Bank of North Dakota, and a state-owned railroad were mandated. A graduated state income tax distinguishing between earned and unearned income, a state hail insurance fund, and a workmen's compensation fund that assessed employers were established. In addition, the device of popular recall of elected officials was enacted.

The NPL's initial success was short-lived. A drop in commodity prices at the close of WWI together with an untimely drought caused an agricultural depression. As a result, the new state-owned industries ran into financial trouble, and the private banking industry, smarting from the loss of its influence in Bismarck, rebuffed the NPL when it tried to raise money through state-issued bonds, calling the state bank and elevator "theoretical experiments" that might easily fail. Moreover, the NPL's lack of governing experience led to perceived infighting and corruption. Newspapers and business groups portrayed the NPL as inept and disastrous for the state's future. The socialist origins of the NPL and its widely-publicized isolationist leanings during WWI also compromised its popular appeal. In 1921, after an investigation of the state bank showed it to be insolvent, Frazier became the first U.S. state governor to be recalled. He was also the only one, until California's Gray Davis was recalled in 2003.

The decade of the 1920s was relatively prosperous for farmers, and the NPL's popularity receded. But the populist undercurrent that fueled its meteoric growth resurged with the coming of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl conditions of the 1930s. The NPL's William "Wild Bill" Langer was elected to the governorship in 1932 and 1936 (the two terms separated by his declaration of North Dakota's secession from the United States in 1934, and a jail term), and served in the U.S. Senate from 1940 until his death in 1959.

Many remnants of the NPL's short reign continue today, including North Dakota Mill and Elevator and the Bank of North Dakota. Perhaps the most radical of the populist reforms, prohibition of corporate farming, or indeed even of corporate ownership of farmland, was enacted in 1932 by statewide initiative and remains a cornerstone of the state's economic landscape.

Legacy

Although it began as a faction within the Republican Party in 1915, the NPL merged with the Democratic Party of North Dakota in 1956. The Executive Committee of the NPL still formally exists within the party structure of the North Dakota Democratic-NPL headed by former State Senator S. F. "Buckshot" Hoffner (D-NPL, Esmond), Chairman and former Lt. Governor Lloyd B. Omdahl, Secretary.

A fairly accurate portrayal of the founding of the NPL was dramatized in the 1979 film, Northern Lights, starring Joe Spano, which won the 1980 "Camera d'Or award (best first film; literally: "Golden Camera") award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Bibliography

• Ellsworth, Scott. Origins of the Nonpartisan League. (PhD Dissertation, Duke University, 1982).
• Gaston, Herbert E. The Nonpartisan League. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920).
• Glassheim, Eagle. To Fuel a Fire: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in the North Dakota Nonpartisan League 1915-1921. (History Honors Thesis, Dartmouth College, 1992).
• Goldberg, Ray. The Nonpartisan League in North Dakota: A Case Study of Political Action in America. (Undergraduate Honor's Thesis, Department of Government, Harvard University. Published by Midwest Printing and Lithographing Company, Fargo, 1948).
• Huntington, Samuel P. The Election Tactics of the Nonpartisan League. ("The Mississippi Valley Historical Review" 36, no. 4 (1950): 613-32).
• Langer, William. The Nonpartisan League: Its Birth, Activities and Leaders. (Mandan: Morton County Farmers Press, 1920).
• Morlan, Robert L. Political Prairie Fire: The Nonpartisan League 1915-1922. (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1955, 1985).
• Moum, Kathleen Diane. Harvest of Discontent: The Social Origins of the Nonpartisan League, 1880-1922. (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 1986).
• Nielsen, Kim E. 'We All Leaguers by Our House': Women, Suffrage, and Red-Baiting in the National Nonpartisan League. (Journal of Women's History 6, no. 1 (1994): 31-50).
• Reid, Bill G. John Miller Baer: Nonpartisan League Cartoonist and Congressman. ("North Dakota History" 44, no. 1 (1977): 4-13).
• Remele, Larry. Power to the People: The Nonpartisan League. (In "The North Dakota Political Tradition", edited by Thomas W. Howard, 66-92. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1981).
• Remele, Larry R. The Lost Years of A.C. Townley (after the Nonpartisan League). ("ND Humanities Council Occasional Paper", no. 1, pages 1–27 :1988).
• Russell, Charles Edward. The Story of the Nonpartisan League: A Chapter in American Evolution. (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1920).
• Schoeder, Lavern.Women in the Nonpartisan League in Adams and Hettinger Counties. (In "Women on the Move", edited by Pearl Andre, 47-50: Book produced for the International Women's Year for North Dakota Democratic-NPL Women, 1975).
• Starr, Karen. Fighting for a Future: Farm Women of the Nonpartisan League. (Minnesota History. Minnesota Historical Society . Summer 1983: pages 255-62).
• Thomason, Oliver Milton. The Beginning and the End of the Nonpartisan League, (Coleman: Saint Paul, MN: Ramaley Printing Co., 1920).
• Wasson, Stanley Philip. The Nonpartisan League in Minnesota: 1916-1924. (PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1955).

See also

• Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party
• Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party
• Conference for Progressive Political Action
• nonpartisan, adj.
• North Dakota Democratic-NPL Party
• Politics of North Dakota
• Progressive Party of Canada
• United Farmers
• Alberta Nonpartisan League
• A. C. Townley
• Political party strength in North Dakota

References

1. ^ Vogel, Robert (2004). Unequal Contest: Bill Langer and His Political Enemies. Crain Grosinger Publishing. p. 2. ISBN 0-9720054-3-9. 

Other sources

• Morlan, Robert L. (1955) Political Prairie Fire: The Nonpartisan League, 1915-1922, (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis)
• Lipset, Seymour M. (1971) Agrarian Socialism, (University of California Press, Berkeley)

External links

• North Dakota Democratic-NPL Party Website
• North Dakota State University Institute for Regional Studies Nonpartisan League Collection
• Article on the NPL from the Progressive Populist
• Northern Lights - docudrama of the forming of the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota
• American Socialist Voter a non-partisan voter-ship of happening trends in 21st American socialism.