Nonpartisan League - History

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 around the start of the 20th 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", 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. It also elected John Miller Baer to the United States House of Representatives 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.