Stand Up!: The Story of Minnesota’s Protest Tradition

7. War Makes New Allies

62 for most farmers in minnesota, the two decades be­ fore World War I were a time of relative well-being. The landscape of bleak prairie homesteads had been transformed with solid farmhouses and barns, silos, occasional windmills, and growing woodlots. It was also the heyday of the small town, whose main-street storekeepers and local banks depended on the prosperity of farmers around them. In a world without automobiles or highways, those towns were the focus of rural economic activity, especially if they had service from the network of rail lines that then blanketed the state. The wheat belt had moved west to the Red River Valley and the Dakota plains. There, single-crop farming—with its risks and its dependence on cash crops and distant commodity markets—was the norm, and there, farmers remained angry. They had some reasons. The grading and pricing of grain was still tightly controlled, as it had been since the 1870s, by a powerful combination of railroads, millers, and grain merchants . The center of the “ring” was the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce, later called the Grain Exchange. 7. WAR MAKES NEW ALLIES War Makes New Allies 63 A new challenge to this arrangement appeared in 1902 with the forming of the American Society of Equity. Instead of political protest it took the road of economic pressure, to be exerted through producers’ cooperatives and commodity holding movements. Of most interest to Northwest wheat growers was the Equity Cooperative Exchange, which aimed at becoming a terminal grain-marketing organization fed by a chain of local cooperative elevators. It was a forerunner of the Farmers Union Grain Terminal Association (GTA), but the struggle was an uphill one. By 1915, realizing that it was outmatched by the Minneapolis monopoly, Equity was advocating stateowned terminal elevators to restore competition. With campaigns organized largely by Socialist Party activists, North Dakota voters twice amended their state constitution to allow for this, but the legislature refused to take action. Recognizing that the name “Socialist” was not popular with farmers and that small parties faced enormous barriers, the supporters of the Equity proposal decided to use direct primaries and to take over the dominant Republican Party. Under the inoffensive name “Nonpartisan League” (NPL), they started to organize. At that point a charismatic leader appeared. Arthur C. Townley had risked and lost everything on a mammoth crop of flax in a year when speculators forced the price down on the commodity market. Feeling bitter and cheated, he became the chief organizer for the NPL. He recruited a team of angry young farmers like himself and a small fleet of the inexpensive cars that Ford was beginning to turn out on the first assembly line. They made the black Model T and the NPL symbols of grassroots organizing as they bumped over wagon roads and into hundreds of farmyards from one end of the state to the other. It lit what has been called a “political prairie fire.” 64 STAND UP! By the end of 1916, the League had about forty thousand members, and its endorsed candidates, who swept the primaries in June, had won most of the North Dakota state offices, including governor. It also had a solid majority in both houses of the legislature. Not everyone was happy. One prominent North Dakota businessman was quoted by the St. Paul Dispatch as saying, “The Nonpartisan League is a band of socialists , led by an anarchist, bent on the destruction of the country. It will set the state back twenty years, plunge it into an overwhelming debt, and make it the laughing stock of the nation. If it stays in power past the next election most of the businessmen will leave the state and let the damned anarchists run it to suit themselves.” Most Minnesota farmers had little sympathy for the NPL, but wheat growers in the northwestern part of the state shared the anger of those in North Dakota. The summer of 1916 saw organizers in their Fords heading eastward across the Red River and into Minnesota, where membership and support blossomed. There was also much interest among socialist-leaning workers in the state’s cities, mines, and logging camps. The socialist tide was rising in Minnesota following the election of 1912. While the country had chosen Democrat Woodrow Wilson for president, and Minnesota voted overwhelmingly for Theodore Roosevelt, Socialist candidate Eugene Debs received 8 percent of the state’s vote...