The Public "I": NORTH DAKOTA

Showing posts with label NORTH DAKOTA. Show all posts

Friday, November 22, 2019

A LITTLE SOCIALISM Republicans Working Together

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, until the ice melts at the mouth. But even then, only briefly, because in North Dakota the dominant long term weather pattern is reoccurring drought. And in the second decade of the 20^th 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'être 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 16^th 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 11 November, 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 the kind of economics big corporations employed all the time.

But 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 14^th 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 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 of North Dakota.

The vote was held on Friday, 28 October, 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 in total. 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.

- 30 -

Thursday, May 09, 2019

A LITTLE SOCIALISM

I can't think of a place in the 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 drought. And in the second decade of the 20^th 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'être 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 Plain of North Dakota. 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.

Then the First World War ended on 11 November, 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 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 from 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 14^th amendment to the U.S. constitution. 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 Bank of North Dakota. In the October Republican primaries Frazier beat “Wild Bill” Langer for Governor, but the NPL lost control of the North Dakota 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 newspaper, “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, 28 October, 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 newspaper, “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.

- 30 -

Sunday, October 16, 2016

A LITTLE SOCIALISM

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 drought. And in the second decade of the 20^th 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'être 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 of North Dakota. 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.

Then the First World War ended on 11 November, 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 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.

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 Bank of North Dakota. In the October Republican primaries Frazier beat “Wild Bill” Langer for Governor, but the NPL lost control of the North Dakota 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 newspaper, “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, 28 October, 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 newspaper, “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.

- 30 -

Tuesday, October 04, 2016

CORRUPTION

I sympathize with the stupid, stupid thing Governor William Langer (above) did on the night of Tuesday 17 July, 1934. He was frustrated. He had been outmaneuvered, railroaded and thoroughly screwed over by his political opponents. Even his friends. The North Dakota Supreme Court had just validated his exile and he was facing two years in prison and disbarment. He'd spent the day commiserating with ten friends in the governor's mansion. The dedicated temperance man might even have been a little drunk. If he did that would help explain why, late that night, “Wild Bill” locked the font door of the executive mansion and signed a declaration that he was succeeding from the Federal union, and taking 680,000 people and 71,000 square miles with him. North Dakota was now a brand new country, where the national tree was the telephone pole, and the national motto was “I'm not paying for that.”

“Wild Bill” lived up to his nickname during his 1932 gubernatorial campaign, telling voters, “Shoot the banker, if he comes for your farm. Treat him like a chicken thief.” It was a popular message. That year 76,000 North Dakota farms had been sold at bank auctions, but the repossessions were not helping the small banks: of the 900 banks operating in North Dakota in 1920, by 1933, barely a third were still open, and that number continued to drop. Nationally, $140 billion – $2.5 trillion in today's money - in uninsured customer deposits had simply vanished. Almost every farmer in the cash starved North Dakota was “upside down” on their loans The unemployment rate in the state would rise from 9.4% in 1930 to 27.3% in 1933. Wild Bill goaded his supporters, “There can be no return to prosperity in North Dakota that does not begin with the farmer.” But Governor Langer was just trying to catch up to a radicalized public.

In February a crowd of a thousand stopped a farm seizure and sale, and in March a group pulled guns on a sheriff, burning the foreclosure papers on another farm. In response Governor Langer called up the National Guard – and ordered them to stop all such sales. Then, in October, with the price of wheat hitting an all time low, Langer closed the state's borders to all wheat exports. The embargo was short lived, ending before the railroads and banks got a court order over turning it. While the price of wheat rose only a few cents, he had convinced farmers the government was on their side. The governor did not have the legal authority to do such things, and in traditional Republican circles Langer was denounced as a dictator. Amazingly, neither extra-legal action had anything to do with his 1934 indictment.

Winning the 1932 election had almost bankrupted the Republican Non Partisan League of North Dakota. Governor Langer even had to loan his party $21,000 out of his own pocket. And if the party was to survive a rematch with the traditional Republican establishment in 1934, they were going to have to raise cash. That summer Langer began republishing the old NPL weekly newspaper “The Leader”. And he pressured state employees to buy a year's subscription, equal to 5% of their salary. It was a common practice in many states at the time to require workers to donate to the party in power, but at least in North Dakota, for every additional subscriptions a state worker sold, an equal dollar amount would be returned. It made every state worker a salesman for the NPL.

The Governor's plan might have worked except for fellow NPL Republican and U.S. Senator, Gerald P. Nye (above), aka “Gerald the Giant-Killer”. He earned his nickname by uncovering the Tea Pot Dome scandal in the Harding administration. He and Langer were both afflicted with the puritanical egotism that had repeatedly splintered the NPL and prevented it from dominating North Dakota politics. Nye began urging the federal Justice Department to investigate his old political "frenemy", William Langer.

After reviewing Senator Nye's allegations, newly appointed federal prosecutor, Democrat Powless William (P.W.) Lanier (above) thought he'd found “an offense...that is indictable.” Roosevelt's New Deal was funding 2,300 miles of road improvements and 60 new bridges across North Dakota. And that made the members of the state highway department technically federal employees, covered by federal corruption laws. A federal Grand Jury was convened in Bismark to hear the evidence on 8 March, 1934. They refused to return an indictment. So P.W. convened a second jury on 10 April, but this time, carefully selected its members. Of the 23 jurors, twenty were city residents, in a state that was still heavily rural, and 22 had previously made public statements opposed to the NPL. P.W. kept the hand picked juries' indictment a secret until 16 May, the same day Governor Langer announced his campaign for re-election. But the case was really decided when it was assigned to the court of federal Judge Andrew Miller.

Judge Miller (above) was another Harding appointee, but before that, as a private attorney, he had defended the railroads when the South Dakota Attorney General had sued them for $2 million in back taxes. The A.G. who won that judgment and humiliated Andrew Miller had been William Langer. And even though Federal Prosecutor Lanier agreed to postpone the trial until after the Republican primary - with so few Democrats in North Dakota, winning the primary was paramount to winning the general election - Judge Miller refused to delay the trial. In an arraignment that took only fourteen minutes, Miller went a step further, ruling the defense could not mention Langer's loan to the NPL, making it seem “The Leader” subscriptions were pure graft. And then he required the sitting Governor, accused of a non-violent crime, to post bail.

The trial, which opened on Tuesday, 22 May, 1934, charged Governor Langer (above) with two related offenses: conspiracy to extort funds from federal employees, and blocking the orderly operation of an act of congress. As the case was handed over to the jury, Governor Langer could sense what was coming, and on Thursday, 12 July, he tried an end run. Arguing that only the legislature had the power to remove a sitting governor, “Wild Bill” called for a special session to investigate his actions.

Tensions began to mount while Bismark filled with Langer supporters (above) and opponents. Then, after sixty hours of deliberation, at 12:26 in the morning of Sunday, 17 July, the jury convicted William Langer on both counts.

Judge Miller could not help gloating, admitting he was delighted and pleased by the verdict. “You have earned the confidence and respect of the whole state,” he told his jury, adding for some reason, “Your verdict...(is) the result of honest conviction without fear or favor.” Then, bright and early Monday morning, Lieutenant Governor Ole Olson (above), asked the state Supreme Court to answer a simple question – since the state constitution said convicted felons lost all rights of citizenship, was the newly convicted William Langer still Governor? The court had to answer “No”. But they also refused to rule on William's ability to stand for re-election until after his sentencing.

And as his first official act, “Governor” Ole Olson rescinded the call for a special session of the legislature. The next day, Tuesday, 18 July, “Wild Bill” Langer, easily won the Republican primary for Governor.

About 10:30 that night, with ten friends as witnesses, “Wild Bill” (above left) declared himself and his state a new nation, conceived in bitterness and dedicated to the proposition that William Langer was getting screwed. Luckily somebody convinced “Wild Bill” not to tell many people about his bold move, or he might have been removed for mental incompetence. On Sunday, 22 July, Governor Langer assured the 94 out of 159 members of the legislature who showed up for the special session anyway, “I want this legislative assembly to investigate how the federal government and officials have persecuted me with the advice and aid of Senator Gerald P. Nye...I am still your governor. If I have been guilty of any corrupt conduct...I want this legislative assembly to impeach and remove me from office.” Dutifully, his supporters voted to begin impeachment proceedings against not only Ole Olson, but the entire State Supreme Court too.

That night there was a quiet meeting between a calmer William Langer and the entire state supreme court. They managed to reason with “Wild Bill”, who moved the sofa away from the front door of the executive mansion, and resigned. The constitutional crises in North Dakota had been averted. The union of states was saved, again. Of course, William Langer still refused to leave the mansion (above) until what would have been the end of his term.

That fall Senator Nye and the “Governor” Olsen threw their support behind Democrat Thomas Moodie (above) for Governor...

allowing him to beat Lydia Langer (above, right), “Wild Bill”'s wife. Then, in February of 1935, the State Supreme Court ruled that Moodie had not met the five year residency requirement for state office holders.

That made Lieutenant Governor Walter Welford (above, seated) the fourth Governor of North Dakota in four months.

It wasn't until 7 May, 1935 that the Federal Appeals Court overturned “Wild Bill”'s conviction and ordered a new trial. Judge Miller refused to recuse himself, and at the new trial managed to at least get a hung jury, 10 to 2 for conviction. Langer immediately appealed again, and the Appeals Court again ordered a new trial, this time ordering Judge Miller to step aside. Prosecutor Lanier responded by charging Langer with committing perjury in his appeal filing. First a new trial jury, under an impartial judge, found William Langer (above, left) “not guilty” of corruption. Then the judge in the perjury trial found the supposed falsehoods were merely personal opinion, and ordered a directed verdict of not guilty. The following year, in 1936, William Langer ran again for Governor, and won again. Senator Nye growled, “Langer has more lives than a cat.”

While these intense political battles were raging, the state of North Dakota was burning up and blowing away. The dry year of 1933 (just 13 inches of rain) was followed by the drought year of 1934 (9.4 inches). That September a plague of locusts descended on the state . There were 4 inches of grasshoppers on the streets of Killdeer. After the Dust Bowl Years, North Dakota lost so many citizens, the population would not return to 1930 levels until the year 2010. But the politicians are just as corrupt, partisan and irrational. Did anybody expect them to change?