I can't think of a place in America
that is more deceptive than North Dakota, 70,000 square miles of not
what you thought. It's most fertile land is the valley of the Red
River of the North (above), except its not a valley. It's the bottom of a
lake that's no longer there - usually. The river meanders back and
forth across a prostrate terrain on its way to not the Pacific or the
Atlantic, but the Arctic Ocean. Flowing north, every fall it freezes
first at its mouth causing “the valley” below to flood. Every
spring, when the rains come to Minnesota, the lake reappears again,
but briefly, because in North Dakota the dominant long term weather
pattern is reoccurring drought. And in the second decade of the 20th
century, with a population of little over half a million, most of
whom were farmers and bred to be conservative and fiercely independent
and Republican, this state created openly socialistic industrial and economic
institutions. Perhaps this was because North Dakota's raison d'ĂȘtre
from its inception in 1889, was the business plan of two vertically
integrated out-of-state corporations.
Both the Northern Pacific railroad,
created to benefit its shareholders, and the Great Northern Railroad,
built by the megalomania of its owner, James J. Hill, sold land to
European farmers, who bought their inexpensive new American farms
sight unseen. The boat and train tickets, and the land itself were
loss leaders for the corporations. Their profits came once the
farmers were isolated on the Great Plains. They bought their food and
supplies from corporate stores, financed their plantings through
corporate banks, stored their harvests in corporate silos until it
was transported on corporate railroads to be sold to corporate mills
in Minnesota. In “bonanza” years the profits ended up in the
corporate banks. And in the inevitable non-bonanza years, the farms
were reposed by the banks, starting the cycle all over again. It
was a very profitable business plan, as long as the customers did not
get wise that North Dakota was a colony of the Minneapolis-St. Paul,
Minnesota capitalist- industrial complex.
Up to 1916 the great dividing force
within North Dakota politics was race. In the 1870's the Red River
Valley had been settled by snowy white Norwegians and Icelanders -
mostly stern Lutherans. The west and center of the state was settled
in the 1880's by creamy white Germans who had been living in Russia
since the 16th century. They called themselves the
“volksdeutsch” and they were rigid Catholics all. But in 1916,
the North Dakota normal was turned on its head by a political
arsonist named Arthur Charles Townley, who split the rigid, stern
conservative North Dakota Republican Party into kindling.
When he was a farmer along the Montana
border, Townley (above) was known as the “Flax King”. But an August
snowstorm in 1913 cost him his farm and left him $80,000 in debt. He
went into politics – Republican of course - there being only one
real party in North Dakota - and he pushed for aid for farmers. He
was confronted by his fellow Republican Treadwell Twitchell who told
him to stop messing in state politics and “go home and slop the
hogs”. Instead Arthur cranked up his model T Ford and went on a
tour of the state, speaking to hundreds of small groups about the
need for North Dakota's 78,000 farmers to organize in self defense.
Three thousand paid $6 each to join his Non-Partisan League, because
he spoke their language. “If you put a banker, a lawyer, and an
industrialist in a barrel and roll it down a hill,” he said,
“you’ll always have a son-of-a-bitch on top.” In 1916 the
Non-Partisan League had 40,000 members and elected Lynn Joseph
Frazier as governor. And in 1918 they swallowed the Republican party
whole and won every executive office in state government, control of
the house and near control of the state Senate.
Governor Frazier (above, center) now became the head of
the new Industrial Commission, a three man board running state owned
businesses. Commissioner of Agriculture John Hagan (above, left) was entrusted to
construct and run the state's Mill and Elevator Association in Grand
Forks. It would buy wheat and barley from farmers at fair prices and
sell the final products at a profit for the state. Attorney General
William Lemke (above, right) oversaw operations of the BND, the Bank of North
Dakota. All state and local tax revenues would be deposited in the
bank, and used to offer low interest loans to farmers. When the
farmers profited the bank would profit. And you know, it seemed like
a good idea at the time. The day it opened the bank had two hundred
applications for a total of $8 million in loans.
Then the First World War ended on
November 11, 1918. In a flash every industrialized nation slashed
their budgets and stopped buying American wheat. Farm prices
collapsed. The 650, 000 citizens of North Dakota were hurting, and in
order to cover its loan requests, the BND was forced to offer $10
million in bonds for sale. The Minneapolis-St. Paul bankers, who had
just lost their best customers to the BND, turned up their noses.
They were determined the bank should fail. Faced with impending
disaster, the Industrial Commission decided on a bookkeeping slight of
hand. They ordered various state agencies and city governments,
which were already required to have their money deposited in the
bank, to loan the BND $10 million. The cash was never actually
withdrawn, so nobody was actually out the money. But cash was
available to make loans to the strapped farmers. And the bank of North Dakota had been saved.
It was a bridge too far for the old
school Republicans. On April Fools day, 1919, three major players in
state politics, Attorney General “Wild Bill” Langer, state
Auditor Carl Kositizksy and Secretary of State Thomas Hall all
resigned their membership in the NPL in protest. Publicly they blamed
Townley's influence. Langer even called the father of the
Non-Partisan League a liar. Resistance to the League solidified
around The Independent Voters Association - except the IVA was
anything but independent. Most of its money came the Minnesota
capitalist-industrial complex. So much money poured in that in
November of 1919 the first issue of a 40 page monthly magazine
appeared, “The Red Flame”, pounding home the message that the
NPL were communists, intent on subverting capitalism in North
Dakota. Newspapers took sides, and it became clear that the further
west within the state, the stronger the NPL became, and feeding off
the anti-German sentiment left over from the war, the further east
you went the stronger the IVA became.
The IVA tried suing to invalidate the
legislation which had created the Industrial Commission, claiming it
violated the 14th amendment. A North Dakota judge tossed
the suit, and the State Supreme Court upheld that decision, saying it
was an issue of taxation and thus a matter for the the elected
officials, not judges. The IVA then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court
which heard the case in in April of 1920. And in June the court admitted that
things in North Dakota were getting pretty odd, but again, they
refused to stick their noses into a taxation issue.
The primary campaign in 1920 was nasty,
and vicious. There were charges that the IVA was bribing politicians,
and the IVA managed to put a measure on the ballot to weaken the bank by
allowing city or county governments to withdraw their money. Month
after month, “The Red Flame” spewed out accusations against
Frazier and the Non-Partisan League, charging incompetence and fraud
in running the BND. In the October Republican primaries Frazier beat
“Wild Bill” Langer for Governor, but the NPL lost control of the
House to the IVA, and the bank lost capital when the ballot measure
passed. Come November, the wounded Frazier defeated the Democratic
candidate for Governor by a mere 5,000 votes.
Governor Frazier responded in December,
during a special session of the legislature, when he introduced the
“anti-liars” bill, making it a felony for a state employee to
publish false statements about the bank. IVA politician Theodore “Two
Bit” Nelson went hyperbolic to the Bismark North Star Dakotan,
“This is the end of democracy. Nothing is sacred,” he pronounced
What it was, was civil war within the Republican Party. Politics in
North Dakota ground to a halt. Fist fights erupted periodically in
the legislature between NPL and IVA Republicans. But the IVA had
managed to turn one of the NPL's political reforms against it,
collecting 73,000 signatures and forcing an October recall election
on the three freshly re-elected members of the Industrial Commission;
Frazier, Lemke and Hagen. At the same time a half dozen ballot
measures were offered, any one of which would neuter or destroy the
bank.
The vote was held on Friday, October
28th, and all three NPL members of the Industrial
Commission were ousted. Frazier became the first Governor every
recalled, by a margin of just 1%, barely 4,000 votes. But the Bank
of North Dakota survived, as every ballot measure meant to destroy it
was defeated. Wrote the Dakotan, “It seems that the people want
the bank and the mill but think that the IVA can do a better job of
running them.” In 1921, the IVA tried again to dismantle
“Socialism” in North Dakota, and again every ballot measure
intended to overturn the bank and the state run flour mill, went down
to defeat. They never tried again. Both institutions are still very
much alive and healthy today, if reduced in size and goals. But they
remain a recognition that when corporations seek to exploit and
dominate the people, the people have no choice but to incorporate
themselves.
The year after being recalled as
governor, the people of North Dakota elected Lynn Frazier to the
United States Senate, where he served for 17 years. Arthur Charles
Townley the man who splinted the Republican party, served a 90 day
prison sentence in 1922 for discouraging enlistments in World War
One. He resigned from the NPL, but he never stopped fighting for
things he believed in. Without him, his Non-Partisan League remained
a thorn in the side of the Republican Party until 1956. Since then
they have annoyed the Democratic Party of the North Dakota, which
remains a minority party in a state still filled with farmers and still dominated economically from Minnesota.
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