Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics by Michael J. Lansing (review)

The Nonpartisan League’s rejection of political parties frightened existing officeholders and appealed to agrarian voters across national boundaries. Born in western North Dakota, the League spread to thirteen states and two Canadian provinces. Created in 1915, the npl survived the push for conformity during World War I, and, by 1920, was positioned to transform North American politics.

Michael J. Lansing, an associate professor of history and department chair at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, offers an insightful new assessment of the npl and its relevance in Insurgent Democracy. Lansing deftly narrates the League’s history with information drawn from npl newspapers, extensive archival research, and a broad selection of secondary sources. Insurgent Democracy provides an up-to-date interpretation—with a heavy emphasis on gender—and replaces Robert L. Morlan’s Political Prairie Fire: The Nonpartisan League, 1915–1922 (1955) as the starting point for understanding the npl.

The League, Lansing writes, empowered rural women to influence politics, shaped farmer-labor political coalitions, and launched the careers of several influential US senators. He challenges interpretations that view the npl as merely a radical reiteration of earlier forms of agrarian protest—such as the People’s Party—and as a movement mostly confined to North Dakota and Minnesota. He details the differences between the Populists and the League including the npl’s commitment to working within existing parties rather than creating a third party. The League rapidly swept west and south from the northern Plains and claimed 208,800 paid members in December 1919. In the Midwest, the npl found adherents in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas.

The return of relative prosperity at the start of the twentieth century only temporarily quieted agrarian discontent following the Populist revolt. Although farmers on the northern Plains received higher prices for wheat, they still confronted the region’s harsh environment, tight credit, greedy bankers, high railroad rates, and capricious buyers. They mortgaged land to sustain or expand operations, and, as indebtedness grew, felt increasingly threatened by the grain traders and buyers that set the prices for their crops. The North Dakota farmers keenly recognized that their economic adversaries also controlled the state government. Farmers resisted by creating their own wheat holding company, the Equity Cooperative Exchange, to compete in the Minneapolis grain market. North Dakota’s small businessmen and bankers initially backed the farmers’ efforts to get fair prices for crops, but a push to create a state-owned terminal grain elevator in Minnesota or Wisconsin floundered in 1914 and prompted agrarian political action.

Lansing emphasizes Albert E. Bowen Jr.’s creation of the League. Bowen, a former teacher and the 1912 Socialist Party candidate for North Dakota governor, sought to form a new organization that advocated the same goals without the stigma associated with socialism. He used early 1915 speeches to farmers at Minot and Bismarck to argue for nonpartisan action. He then resigned from the Socialist Party and created the npl. Arthur C. Townley, the indebted farmer and socialist organizer often referred to as the npl’s founder, soon agreed to bring his organizing talent to the League in exchange for credit for its invention.

The npl, as presented by Lansing, was more than an organization that aimed to reform politics; it sought to transform the wheat market with the opening of state-owned competitors. Although its founders and organizers included former socialists, Lansing contends the npl emerged outside of the American socialist tradition. He notes the hostility between the North Dakota leadership of the npl and the state’s Socialist Party. Even those npl leaders that moved directly from the party to the League refused to be bound to socialist ideology. npl farmers expressed both a commitment to capitalism and an anger over the concentration of capital.

Lansing locates the origins of the npl’s goals in the mindset of middle-class farmers shaped by local economic circumstances. He finds that ethnicity and religion mattered...