A. C. Townley

Arthur Charles Townley (December 30, 1880 – November 7, 1959) was a farmer and political organizer best known for creating the Nonpartisan League, which adopted as its platform most of the immediate demands put forward by the American Socialist Party. The League was a grass-roots organization of North Dakota farmers that unexpectedly swept to victory in the state elections of 1916.

Townley was born near Browns Valley, MN, the son of Fitch R. Townley and Esther J. Cross, and graduated from high school in Alexandria, MN. He moved to western North Dakota to farm with his brother Covert, and participated in a failed large-scale wheat farming venture in Colorado before returning to North Dakota in 1907. In Colorado he met his eventual wife Margaret Rose Teenan, whom he married in 1911.

By 1912, Townley owned considerable area near Beach, North Dakota, and was being called the "Flax King of the Northwest". In August 1913, a freak snowstorm together with the fluctuations of a speculative grain market ruined him financially, causing an abrupt change in vocation. After joining the Socialist party and running unsuccessfully for the state legislature in 1914, he abandoned the Socialists and criss-crossed the state in a borrowed Model-T Ford, signing up members in a new political party called the Nonpartisan League. His message resonated with the grievances of small farmers against the exploitative big interests: the Minneapolis grain merchants, the railroads, and the eastern banks.

In 1916 the Nonpartisan League candidate, Lynn Frazier, won the North Dakota gubernatorial election, and in 1919 the state legislature enacted the entire NPL program, consisting of state-owned banks, mills, grain elevators and hail insurance agencies. However, the political winds soon turned. Newspapers and business groups portrayedthe NPL as socialist, and the NPL's lack of political experience led to infighting and corruption. Frazier became the first U.S. state governor to be recalled - the only one until California's Gray Davis in 2003.

Townley's popularity declined along with the NPL. Near the end of WWI, Townley was arrested in Jackson County, Minnesota for "conspiracy to discourage enlistments", based on League pamphlets that questioned the motivations of the American war effort. He was convicted by a jury hand-picked by a virulent anti-League judge and served 90 days for the offense in 1921, after appeals were exhausted. One of the only other inhabitants of the Jackson County jail was a boy who was serving 30 days due to his inability to pay the fine for stealing an old automobile tire. Townley paid his $25 fine and gave him train fare home.

Finding himself increasingly irrelevant to NPL affairs, he drifted from one failed project to another. He founded the short-lived National Producer's Alliance in 1923, and later promoted the drilling of gas wells in Robinson, ND. Through the depression he lived hand-to-mouth as a traveling salesman.In 1934, he ran unsuccessfully for Governor of Minnesota. In the late 1940s, shortly after his wife and foster daughter died, he lived near New Effington, SD with a faith-healing group. During the McCarthy era of the 1950s he lectured for donations, somewhat ironically, on the evils of communism. His public accusations that the North Dakota Farmers Union was dominated by Communists led to libel suits against him.

Townley ran for the U.S. Senate from North Dakota as an independent in 1956 and 1958. In 1958, he lost to Republican incumbent William Langer, whose first state office was Attorney General on Townley's original NPL slate in 1916, and who served two terms as Governor of North Dakota in the 1930s before leaving the NPL. Townley was an insurance salesman, trying to raise money to pay his legal bills, when he was killed in a car-truck accident near Makoti, ND on Nov. 7, 1959. Langer died the next day in Washington, DC.

References

1. Morlan, Robert L. (1955) "Political Prairie Fire: The NonpartisanLeague, 1915-1922", University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

See also

* Conference for Progressive Political Action
* North Dakota United States Senate election, 1958
* Farmers' movement