A VERY, VERY BAD IDEA

 

I suppose there is no any way of knowing exactly when the idea was born, but at some point in early 1881 it occurred to New York City actress Miss Jennie Rhett that she needed to stand out from the chorus. My guess is that she read a newspaper story about two young women who had recently fallen off an excursion barge into the East River. 

And from that chance news story, and from her own ambition, the actress hatched a very bad idea. Miss Rhett searched amongst the piers of the lower east side of Manhattan until she found the young swimmer who had saved the two women. He was handsome, smart and just as ambitious as she was, and Irish too. And that was when I suspect that this very bad idea took its very first steps to reality.

Some time later Miss Rhett was discovered off Coney Island Beach near the new Iron Pier (above), floundering in the sea. Just in the nick of time a tough young Irishman pulled her to safety. Later, in front of a small crowd and a reporter, Miss Rhett presented the young man with a “gold locket” in gratitude for his bravery.  

The reporter did not think to ask what a young Irishman from the Bowery was doing swimming at Coney Island.  In any case, it was a small news story. And sadly it does not seemed to have propelled Miss Jennie Rhett to the stardom she sought. After this publicity stunt she disappears from our story.  

But the young Irishman, who was already billing himself as the "King of the Newsboys!" had learned an important lesson, and we will hear from him again.

New York City in the 1880’s was the kind of place where any idea seemed possible, even fame and fortune for those surviving on their wits in the Bowery or "Hell’s Kitchen".  Even a very bad idea. The twin towers of the Brooklyn Bridge, begun in 1870 and nearing completion, were the highest structures in New York City.  But as tall as they were, they still seemed somehow human in size.

Standing at the foot of the Brooklyn tower it is still possible to feel the audacity of a world, still powered largely by horses and humans, which had dared to make the 5,989 foot long unsupported throw across the open expanse of the East River.  So it was not surprisingly that the next step in the evolution in this very, very bad idea should leap into some lunatic’s mind even before the great bridge had been completed.

One night in 1882 a young man was detained by bridge employees on the unfinished center span of the Brooklyn Bridge.  He was in the process of undressing. Eager not to be seen as a common pervert, the young man identified himself as “Professor” Robert Emmet Odlum, from Washington, D.C.; a self described well known and well named swimming instructor and author of pamphlets on diving.

"Professor" Odlum told the police he had made a $200 bet that he could safely dive from the unfinished bridge.  After explaining to Mr. Odlum that he could not hope to survive the 175 foot drop, the “Professor’s” mother was notified and he was put on a train back to Washington. 

The New York City police made a note to never admit Mr. Udlum (above) onto the bridge again, even after it opened in May of 1883. It was at this point in the evolution of the very, very bad idea that chance intervened, in the form of a love-sick 22 year old bar maid in far off Bristol, England.

On  8 May, 1885,  Miss Sara Ann Henley received a note from her boyfriend breaking off their engagement.  In a fit of pique Miss Henley walked half way across the Clifton Suspension Bridge (above), high above the Avon River Gorge, and threw herself off.  

As she plummeted the 245 feet toward oblivion her crinoline petticoats caught the air like a parachute and slowed her descent. 

She was even more fortunate when she splashed down into shallow waters along the shore, where her landing was softened by thick forgiving mud. She was badly injured, but she lived. Her extraordinary survival made all of the English papers, and was picked up and republished extensively in America.

A week after Miss Henley’s great fall the New York police got word that ‘Professor’ Odlum had been inspired to give the Brooklyn bridge another “go”. They alerted the toll collectors, and on Sunday afternoon, 19 May, 1885 (ten days after Miss Henley’s plunge) a toll collector reported a suspicious cab lingering on the bridge. Police officers found it parked against the railing, half way across the span. But it was a decoy.

While they were searching that cab, hidden within one of a pair of "vans" further back on the bridge, "Professor" Odlum appeared out from beneath the covered flatbed wearing a swimsuit emblazoned with his name. He clambered over the railing and before the cops could reach him, threw himself into space.

Imagine the "Professor's" surprise when he discovered that the cops had been right. He entered the water feet first (as was the accepted diving position at the time) and shattered every bone in his frame from heel to skull. He was pulled from the river unconscious and died a half hour later. His friends shipped his body home, but ten days later Robert’s sister came to town,  demanding the coroner explain what had become of her brother’s liver and heart. She never got a satisfactory answer, but my guess is they had both been reduced to jelly by the impact. A little math shows that “Professor” Odlum hit the water going sixty-three and a half miles an hour. At that speed water is almost as fluid as cold concrete.  But it was Robert Odlum’s tragic foolishness that was the catalyst for the return of the Irish hero to our story of the very bad idea.

He was 23 years old by this time, making his living as a newsboy and a bookie amongst the denizens of the Bowery.  Like a certain actress he had worked with, Steve Brodie now needed to escape the chorus; except in his case the chorus was a cacophony of poverty. The story that he later told police was that a friend, James Brennan, had dared him on a $100 that he would not jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.  But I doubt that Mr. Brennan had ever seen $100 at once in his life.

Steve Brodie claimed to have made the leap on Friday afternoon,  23 July, 1886. Mr. Brennan claimed to have witnessed the jump. There was even a sworn affidavit from a barge captain who had pulled the daredevil from the river. 

Sceptics said Brennan had thrown a dummy off the bridge while Brodie had swum out from shore, but it didn't matter if the story was true or not. Overnight, daredevil or spinner of tall tales, everyone in New York City knew the name of Steve Brodie, the man who jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge.

Brodie parleyed his 15 minutes of fame into his own bar, with a little theatre in the rear where he re-enacted his alleged dramatic plunge into the East River several times a week for the tourists. In 1891 promoters built a Broadway melodrama (“Mad Money”) around his dive,  and a musical in 1894, (“On the Bowery”).

And on the wall next to a painting of his fabulous plunge, was displayed the following homely, “Cursing and swearing don’t make you any tougher in the eyes of people that hears you. Steve Brodie".  Of course, Steve's success at selling the idea, did not make it any better of an idea.

In 1895 Mrs. Clara McArthur, married to a disabled railroad worker and mother of a young daughter, jumped off the bridge at 3:30 in the morning. She was seeking a share of Steve Brodies’ pot of gold for her destitute family. The desperate Clara was wrapped in an American flag. She had water-wings strapped under her arms and a punching bag tied to her back to keep her afloat after landing. Her socks were filled with sand to keep her feet below her head (again, the accepted, best attitude to enter the water).

But Clara landed on her side, spreading the impact over the length of her entire body. That is what saved her life. The shock ripped the water wings under her arms to shreds. She struggled to the surface, but the punching bag kept flipping her over onto her face, and the heavy socks kept pulling her down. After struggling for several long seconds, Clara finally passed out, face down in the water. Two men in a rowboat waiting under the bridge finally managed to pull her to safety. She never made a dime from the effort, even though she had several reliable witnesses that she had actually made the jump. The Victorian public simply didn't want to know the details of a woman forced to risk her life to provide for her family. Clara McArthur is one of only ten people (two of them women) known to have actually jumped off the bridge since the 1881, and who survived the impact with the East River.

Steve Brodie is not counted as one of those ten. He was always an agreeable fellow. If he had money, his friends and family shared in it. He gave generously to charity his entire life. But it is extremely doubtful that he actually made the jump. He tried to extend his fame by claiming to have leaped off a railroad bridge in upstate New York, and later claiming to have gone over Niagara Falls wrapped in inner tubes and metal bumpers. The Niagara stunt, real or not, almost killed him.

He settled in Buffalo, New York, and operated a bar there for a few years before his asthma forced him to move to San Antonio, Texas, where he died in 1901 of complications of diabetes. Steve Brodie was all of 38 years old. He is buried in Calvary Cemetery, in Woodside, Queens, New York. Thankfully the very, very bad idea of jumping from the bridge for fame and fortune died with him.

The longest living survivor of all these daredevils was the accidental one. Sara Ann Henley (above), the woman who tried to commit suicide in 1885 by jumping 240 feet off the Clifton Suspension bridge, finally earned her angel’s wings in 1948. She was 84 years old, married, but with no children, perhaps because of injuries sustained in her fall into the Avon River Gorge. 

Every year since that bridges' opening in 1864, two to four lost souls (90% of them men) uses the bridge to commit suicide, until 1974 when barriers were installed. Such silly feats, for fame or to seek escape are never good ideas. But jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge went further. It was a very, very bad idea.

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REPETITION

 

I've heard a rumor that history repeats itself. So, why don't you see if you find anything familiar in what happened after the sad ship James Franklin tied up in her home port of Bridgeport, Connecticut on Thursday, 12  July, 1873.  

The single masted schooner was a half century old already, 51 feet long and 18 feet wide, and built it seems to put the lie to the romance of the age of sail. She was a working ship, a hard lifetime of utilitarian cargo recorded in her thirty tons of chipped paint, rusted cleats, and patched gunwales. Her master (they dare not call him a captain) was the meager 23 year old Frank E. Bassett, a short young man whose alcohol tanned life was stretched taut over the forty miles between the docks of New York's treacherous East River, through the Hellsgate, up Long Island Sound to the mouth of the Pequonnock River, and back again - and again and again. The Franklin and her master and her crew were of value only so long as they were less expensive than a steam ship, and the owners invested in them accordingly.

Once the cargo had been unloaded and the crew paid their meager $40 for the month's work, Bassett invited crewman “Stuttering Jack” Rufus,  “a well-meaning fellow”,  to share a drink with him and his regular passenger, his common law wife, Lorena Alexander - a hard faced woman in her forties. And as the three comrades walked to Lorena's rooms on William and East Washington Avenues, in Bridgeport's East Side neighborhood, Jack was probably expecting little more than enough whiskey to dull his misery.  He got that, certainly. But after clambering through the broken fence surrounding the abandoned Brewster carriage factory, he also received something far more mercenary.

Two months later Frank Bassett was arrested for the theft of a wallet containing $65 dollars in cash ($1,400 today). Desperate to make bail, Frank sold all the furniture from the Brewster factory apartment.  A week later, when Lorena returned from a trip and found her home stripped, she was infuriated. And being a woman driven by her passions, she was determined to get even. She told the police she knew something about Frank Bassett which would “put him where he belonged.” She said Frank had killed a poor simpleton named Stuttering Jack, for the cash to be made selling his corpse.

Lorena said that on the night of the 12^th, she was in the bedroom “attending to some sewing” when Frank ordered her to come out. Stuttering Jack was passed out on the sofa and Frank ordered her to fetch a bottle of chloroform from the mantle. She says she cried out, “Oh Frank, what are you going to do with that? What are you about?” He replied, "Shut up, you act cowardly and child-like.” After Stuttering Jack was murdered Lorena said she tried to run, but the domineering Frank Bassett ordered her to stay and help cover up the crime.

To validate her story Lorena lead them to the roads north of Shelton, Connecticut, to a ravine near the new Ousatonic Water Company canal. In its shadowed recesses they found a barrel containing Stuttering Jack's body. They then traveled 8 miles to New Haven and spoke to Dr. Leonard Sanford, Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the Yale College of Medicine. He confirmed that on Friday the 13^th Lorena had offered him a body for sale.  Dr. Sanford explained he required a valid death certificate, and Lorena responded by pleading, cursing and even wailing, begging for at least $5 to cover the cost of renting a horse and wagon -  until finally the doctor had her escorted off the premises.  But he did not call the police. And then, finally, the police confronted Frank Bassett with Lorena's story. And Frank told his own, slightly different version of events.

Frank said that on the night of 12 July, 1878, he was in a room alone reading the newspaper when Lorena entered and announced "she had got him fixed. And I says, "What?"  She says, "I have chloroformed him." She called me out of the room, and I told her she had done wrong. She said, "Never mind, Frank. We can get $25 for the body." Then she got the barrel, and I helped put him in." Frank admitted, "In the morning I hired a team and we both went to New Haven to see Dr. Sanford. After we got there  the Doctor would not receive the body and we started for home." And, Frank added, "On the way we dumped the barrel in the woods where it was found." And to validate his version of events, Frank would lead the police to the chicken coup behind the Brewster factory, beneath which  he had buried the dead man's coat and shoes.

The newspapers were electrified. The New York World insisted “nothing like it ever happened here before or elsewhere...” The Hartford Courant headlined, “A Horrible Murder Discovered”, and the Boston Globe called it “A Shocking Example of Human Depravity”. The coroners' jury investigation garnered so much press coverage that Bridgeport brought in State's Attorney James Harvey Olmstead. His family name was engraved on the “Founders Monument” in Hartford, and he was a powerful member of the Democratic party. In fact his cousin, George F. Olmstead, was one of the owners of the ship James Franklin. James Harvey Olmstead proved his worth when he decided to charge both Bassett and Alexander with murder, but to try them separately. It meant, “he said, their  she said/he said ” defenses would work for the prosecution

As usual, as the trial approached the story got more complicated. It was revealed that the victim's name was not actually “Stuttering Jack”, or even John Rufus, although he answered to either. Legally he was Jack Weinbecker, and well known as a “simpleton”, who “belonged to a low, miserable, drunken class”, and he had a police record as a thief.  But then, so did Frank Bassett.. Frank's mother explained to one reporter (as she would testify under oath) that little Frank – he weighed only 125 pounds – was also an alcoholic and “slow”.  Frank had also been been arrested several times, once for assault on Lorena.  But it was upon Lorena that the press focused most of their vitriol..

Lorena had been raised in Manhattan's Bowery, a lower east side neighborhood filled with brothels, opium dens, gay and lesbian bars, “German beer gardens, pawn shops and flophouse”. Still, she claimed she was a pious Christian, until “Men... turned her away from the Lord.” As usual the press was fascinated with her attire, describing her black silk dress accented with a flower pattern and a crown like hat of black velvet, editorializing “The woman’s personal appearance suggests natural shrewdness.” According to the New York Times, “ In 1872 she was living in East Houston-street...as Lena E. Coyne, and was employed at Harry Hill's (as a barmaid)...Among her effects is the outfit of a fortune-teller and astrologer.” Lorena admitted having been married three times, but the press uncovered at least three other co-habitations. She had a daughter who was only a few months younger than her co-defendant Frank Bassett, and during Frank's trial, one reporter noted, she was more engrossed in her two year old daughter playing on her lap, than in the testimony .

Frank's defense was described by the New York Times as, “he was so completely under the influence of Mrs. Alexander that she controlled him about as she pleased.” The jailer, the aptly named Wakeman W. Wells, told the jury, “I was particular to ask him who chloroformed the man, and he said that Mrs. Alexander did ". Then the paper added, "The father of the prisoner, George Bassett, a man with straight hair, copper-colored complexion, and the features of an Indian, testified that his son...had never been very bright since an attack of scarlet fever when he was 4 years old” This defense was only a partially successful. Frank Bassett was convicted of murder in the second degree, and sentenced to life. At her trial in October, Lorena claimed Frank had conceived the entire plot, and had robbed Jack's body of $5.75. The jury did not believe her, and she received an identical sentence to his.

Both prisoners were sent to separate wings of Wethersfield Prison, just south of Hartford. On entering the prison their heads were shaved before they were confined to individual 3 ½ by seven foot cells, which were unheated, and had no water or toilets. The inmates were required to work six days a week, marching in lockstep to and from the work yard.  But no prisoner was allowed to speak at any time, except if being questioned by a guard. Suicides were common, usually by hanging, but there are records during this time of numerous prisoners cutting their own throats, and at least one man who lay on his bed, emptied his kerosene lamp on himself, and set himself on fire. Lorena endured this hellhole for six years, before being transferred to the State Insane Asylum at Middletown, where she died early November of 1884. No cause of death was given, nor is it explained what happened to her body. But it was also common for the bodies of prisoners to be provided to the Yale School of Medicine for dissection. Surely Lorena's demise was more horrible than Stuttering Jack's.

Frank did not die in prison, physically. According to the Hartford Courant, “At first Bassett was employed in the prison shop. When his mind began to slip from him, he was given employment as a runner and as a sweeper.” But, according to the story published on the fiftieth anniversary of the murder, “Friendless and feeble, the old prisoner spent the day in idleness, an inmate of the insane ward of the institution....playing in far-off lands and imagining strange journeyings which he describes to whoever will listen.”

The Courant also recorded Frank's death in 1937, as follows:  "The longest prison confinement in the state's history ended Friday when Frank Bassett, 82, died at Norwich State Hospital.... He is believed not to have any relatives. Years ago a woman in Chicago made arrangements with an undertaker...to care for his body.”

And if you can't find a similar story in today's headlines, about the way the abandoned poor struggle to survive living up to the morals of the wealthy, I don't think you are paying attention.

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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.

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 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.

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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