The North Dakota Idea
THE farmers of North Dakota have embarked upon an experiment in public ownership and control more radical than any yet attempted by any American state. Organized as members of the National Non-Partisan League, and controlling the legislative machinery of the state, they have amended their constitution and passed a long programme of bills.
This legislation permits the state to engage in any kind of business. It provides for state-owned terminal elevators and flour-mills; a state bank, to finance these and other enterprises; an industrial commission, to organize and direct such businesses, consisting of the Governor, the Attorney-General, and the Commissioner of Agriculture and Labor.
The state is to build homes and buy farms, within certain price-limits, for groups of citizens who put up twenty per cent of the cost and engage to pay the remainder, at a low rate of interest, within a period of twenty years. There is provision for state hail-insurance, for reducing discriminatory freight-rates, for various revenue measures intended to put the burden of taxation on those best able — in the opinion of the farmers — to bear it. In other words, the citizens of a purely agricultural community, — about eighty-five per cent of the population of North Dakota is ‘rural,’ — using political weapons found effective elsewhere, have set about remoulding their neighborhood according to what they fancy is their heart’s desire.
There are two opinions of this phenomenon .
(1) The farmers themselves feel that they are fighting a battle for the people; and in the enthusiasm which accompanies any such movement in its beginnings, they look on themselves as skirmishers in a sort of holy war.
(2) Their opponents, who include not only those whose immediate interests may be affected, but also a considerable portion, probably the majority, of the substantial non-farming citizens, both within and without the state, honestly opposed to what they regard as a ‘menace,’ attack the Leaguers furiously as ‘Socialists,’ ‘Anarchists,’ and ‘Bolsheviki.’
In North Dakota itself, in St. Paul and Minneapolis and the neighborhood, the fight has reached a bitterness which entirely obscures the essential issues in a cloud of abuse and recrimination. If the Leaguers authorize the governor to investigate the feasibility of establishing a state publishing-plant, to supply school-books, the opposition promptly roars that the ‘Red Fingers of Socialism are Closing on the Entire School System of North Dakota.’ The Leaguers, on the other hand, refer to their critics as ‘relics of the Stone Age,’ slaves of ‘Big Biz,’ the ‘Kept Press,’ in their calmer moments; or, more whole-heartedly, as ‘liars,’ ‘assassins,’ ‘journalistic harlots,’ and ‘black-hearted skunks.’
Having dodged through this bombardment, and been to North Dakota and back again; having read some thousands of words of propaganda on both sides; having seen the North Dakota Legislature at work, and observed and talked with Non-Partisan leaders, and the rank and file, I propose to set down here a statement of some of the more essential facts; and, with the indulgence of those to whom it is an old story, to tell how the North Dakota Idea originated, what it has done, and where it seems to be going.
I
North Dakota is a big open place, with tiny specks of houses, like period marks on a blank sheet of paper, punctuating its endless plains. It is as large as New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut put together, and has only some 700,000 people — more than Buffalo, New York, but less than Brooklyn.
The largest town, Fargo, — which is very citified for its size, like the great majority of such Western towns, — has only about 20,000. Fargo is almost on the eastern state-line. Five hours westward, across the prairie, is the capital, Bismarck, from any corner in which you can see the open country at the end of the street.
Nearly all these people are farmers, — not ‘gentlemen farmers,’ but regular frontier farmers (there is still plenty of unploughed land in North Dakota), — fighting drought, hail, cold, loneliness, and all the diseases crops are heir to, and, more often than not, a mortgage held by some more gentleman-like person farther east. You or I get a Western loan, and are charmed with our six per cent. The agent who finds us the loan takes his commission, the local Dakota agent takes his, and the man who needs the money most, takes the real risk, and stakes everything on his season’s crop, pays, perhaps, ten, or even twelve, per cent. One of the bills passed by the North Dakota Legislature makes an interest rate higher than nine per cent usurious.
It is a great, wheat-country — so flat sometimes, that you could plough a straight furrow a mile long, and turn water into it at one end, and the water would run right down the furrow to the other end, without spreading. In a good year North Dakota rolls up a hundred million bushels of wheat and another hundred million bushels of other grain — several hundred million dollars’ worth of the realest sort of wealth, out of this so-called ‘debtor state.’ There is, perhaps, no state in the Union which produces, per man, so much real wealth.
The wheat goes out of the state at wholesale prices, and everything the farmer needs comes in at retail prices — even the flour made out of his own wheat. And although his farm may be only a few hundred miles away from the mill, the local price for flour is often higher than the price somebody in Norfolk, Virginia, more than a thousand miles away, is paying for the same flour. The reason for this, of course, is that the big millers, making vastly more flour than they can sell in any one neighborhood, get as good a price as they can close by; and they meet distant competition and sell the rest, at a lower profit, perhaps, but still a profit, in neighborhoods farther away. In the same way American steel rails have been sold cheaper in Europe than at home.
Inequalities of this sort are not peculiar to North Dakota, but they stand out more clearly in the empty prairie air. The New York City equivalent of the Dakota farmer, jammed in his subway train with thousands like himself, is so enmeshed in a complex economic machine that it is not easy for him to tell who really pays his weekly salary, and to whom, really, the money goes which he gives the clerk in the grocery or department store. He growls a little, and goes right on hanging to his strap. Anyhow, he says, ‘What’s the use? ’ Or he goes to a show. Or a sort of neighborhood feeling, made up of countless indefinable human elements, gathers round him rather pleasantly, like a sort of warm mist, and he says, ‘After all, little old New York is good enough for me.’
It is different in North Dakota. There are no storied urns in sight. The prairie is bare of all those warm accumulated humanities which make city folks forget. Life is almost as simple and understandable as it was for Robinson Crusoe.
The bank that the city man goes to is a great stone pile which seems embedded in the general scheme of things. He pays his money to or gets it from a clerk as little and unimportant as himself, and goes his way. When the Dakota farmer drives in from the prairie to the station or the water-tank, and a little group of weatherbeaten shacks which make the town, he finds, perhaps, a general store, and, across from it, a little building labeled ‘Bank.’ And whatever contrasts there may be, favorable or otherwise, between the wheatgrower in the sheep-lined overcoat, who drives in through the twenty-belowzero weather, and the man in a white collar who sits in the warm bank, will be clearly felt. His relations with the banker and the store-keeper and the elevator-man and the freight-agent will be as concrete and simple almost as if he were an Indian bringing in a lot of beaver-skins, to trade for the white man’s jack-knives and fire-water.
II
Now, recalling these things about the farmer himself, imagine yourself a farmer-legislator in Bismarck, on one of those crystal-clear, dry, cold North Dakota days, when the smoke rises straight from the little white frame houses, and you can see in any direction any number of miles.
The Capitol, an ugly, square brick structure at the top of the slope on the edge of town, is the last thing between the city and a prairie which is almost as it was when buffalo roamed over it. The little town below, with its oneand two-story houses, seems, in the immensity around it, less like a city, in the smoky Eastern sense of the word, than like a sort of moss or lichen, wistfully spreading over the prairie grass. Turning away from it, you look out across rolling billows of country as over a sort of ocean — you might be on the Arctic or the Russian steppes.
I went up there by the water-tank, after a long afternoon in the legislature, just as a red sun was going down behind the low, gaunt hills that mark the course of the Missouri. That sun had swung across the sky, as unobstructed as the sun at sea. In the still, dry, crystal-clear air one could see any number of miles. A light snow had dusted the short prairie grass, until it looked as if covered with alkali, and had given to this empty world a curious air of austerity and almost of desolation. Far in the distance one saw a lonely silo or windmill; and once an automobile drew a dot across the white, miles away, with the look of some curious bit of stagemanagement.
The long deep-sea prairie swells, not a stone to break the soft grass carpet, seemed made for the unshod feet of Indian ponies. One felt like jumping on a pony and streaking over them, westward, to catch the sun. It was beautiful to anyone who had grown up in prairie country, with that austere, yet lifting beauty of the desert, and the ocean, and cities, and all that goes with them seemed far away, trifling, and tame.
One could well imagine that, if one lived in one of those far-off specks of houses, and had, or thought one had, any grievance against that remote city world, and one’s neighbor five miles away felt the same, and the next neighbor, five miles farther on, the same, this grievance would stand out like a searchlight, undimmed by the big city’s distractions and boredom and collective skepticism. And plainly, if all of you, having practically the same interests, got together to right it, you might go breezing on, unchecked by the city man’s necessity, or compromise with somebody across the street whose interests were quite different.
This is what happened in North Dakota. The farmers had long felt that they had a grievance. That is the heart of the North Dakota Idea.
A good many things went to make up this sense of grievance. Some were what might be called psychological — the distrust often felt by isolated, unorganized, hard-working men for the far-off organized forces largely controlling their income and expenditure. Interest rates in pioneer neighborhoods may be no higher than the business sense of the lender demands; yet this does not prevent the ultimate borrower from feeling somehow ‘done’ when he pays his ten per cent. There were legislators who seemed to have less interest in the people they were supposed to represent than in interests farther off. People seem to agree that a certain amount of ‘rough stuff’ was ‘put over’ in North Dakota, as in other new states. Setting aside these things, and the complaints about unjust freightrates and extortionate middlemen, which are similar everywhere, the special North Dakota grievance gathered about wheat.
The farmers did not feel that out of the hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth they produced each year, they got what was coming to them. There were many items in their complaint, including freightand interest-rates and the price of the flour that came back to them: some things comparatively casual, like grain grades; some comparatively inevitable, like the loss to the soil of the thousands of tons of mineral matter sifted out each year and sold as feed or otherwise by out-of-the-state millers. Among the more concrete dissatisfactions are those which have to do with grain grades.
The price which a farmer receives for any particular lot of wheat is determined by two factors — grading, that is to say, whether it is A No. 1 wheat, or belongs in class 2, 3, 4, or 5; and dockage, the amount subtracted for the estimated amount of dirt, chaff, seeds not wheat, and other foreign matter.
If a load of No. 1 wheat has 14 per cent moisture in it, it still sells as No. 1 wheat. If it has 14.5 per cent, it becomes, under the Federal grain-grading system, No. 2 wheat; if 15 per cent, No. 3; and so on. There are various other tests for grade, not — so Dr. Ladd, the wheat expert at the North Dakota Agricultural School would tell you — based on the food-value of the grain (the values people have learned since the war), so much as on the predilection of the American public for a certain kind of white bread. A few years ago, for instance, the North Dakota wheatcrop was shriveled, and a large part of it was sold as very low grade ‘feedwheat.’ Dr. Ladd experimented on some of this same wheat in his own mill and bakery, and found, he says, that the real difference in flour-value between this so-called feed-wheat and first-class No. 1 wheat was only about 11 cents a bushel, while the difference in the price the farmers actually received was over a dollar.
The farmers get nothing for the dockage. That is simply subtracted in a lump, and the millers or elevator-men afterward sift it out and sell it. Dr. Ladd has estimated that the farmers lose over $2,000,000 in dockage and screenage alone on a 100,000,000 bushel wheat-crop.
Now, the North Dakota wheat is sold mostly through the Twin Cities and Duluth. The great Minneapolis flourmills suck it up by hundreds of millions of bushels, and strew it forth again, in the form of flour, over the wide world. They control the Northwestern wheatmarket just as the Chicago packers control the market for cattle.
The farmers were not satisfied with the Minnesota grain grading—they are not satisfied even with the new Federal grain grades, and maintain that they are too complicated to be applied in the average country elevator. They did not like losing the dockage, which, they thought, might be saved if they had big elevators of their own. But they had, according to their own story, still further cause for complaint. Taking the figures used by Dr. Ladd and others, they found that between September, 1910, and August, 1912, the terminal elevators received 15,571,575 bushels of No. 1 Northern wheat; and while they had no wheat of this grade on hand, and only about 100,000 bushels at the end of the period, they nevertheless shipped out of the elevators, 19,978,727 bushels of No. 1 wheat. In other words, here were 4,500,000 bushels of No. 1 wheat for which the farmers say they had been paid the price of lower grades. There was a similar loss, they say, of 2,000,000 bushels on No. 2 wheat.
Of course, some of this wheat may have come in damp, been dried in the elevator, and thus raised to a higher grade; or the small amount of foreign matter which reduced its grade may have been sifted out, and the bulk thus raised in grade. That is one of the arguments for big elevators owned by the farmers themselves. What may happen is illustrated by a little episode related by Mr. John Hagin, the North Dakota Commissioner of Labor and Agriculture. Last autumn Mr. Hagin went back to his farm from Bismarck, to help market his wheat. He drove the first wagon-load to the elevator himself, and saw it weighed and graded. It was the best No. 1 wheat. On the way back, he met the second wagon, changed seats, and drove this one to the elevator. It was wheat from the same field, and, so far as he knew, of exactly the same value; but the elevator-man found a few grains of rye in it, and graded it down as No. 2. The field had been sown to rye a couple of years before, and a little self-sown rye-seed had got in near one of the old stacks.
‘Now I knew the elevator-man,’ said Mr. Hagin, ‘and I knew the elevator, and that the first load had gone into No. 7 bin. And I said, “Joe, where are you going to put this second lot?”
“‘Oh, in No. 7,” he said.
‘ “But,” I told him, “you’ll only get No. 2 grade then, on the whole lot.”
‘“Oh, no!” he said; “there’ll be enough No. 1 in before it goes out, so it won’t show. It’ll all go out as No. I.”
When this happens between friends who call each other by their first names, it is not hard to conceive that an even less satisfactory disposition of consignments might be made, when big terminal elevators are handling wheat for farmers hundreds of miles away. The farmers tried to improve matters by building coöperative elevators, — some of the Canadian farmers who have had similar difficulties are said to have done this very successfully, — but they finally decided that the only satisfactory solution was for the state itself to build terminal elevators, in which they could do their own grading, mixing, and docking.
After several years of agitation the people voted for state-owned elevators, by a large majority. They did this twice. Both times the legislature, controlled, as the Leaguers now put it, by the ‘old gang,’ turned them down; and the second time, when they sent a delegation to protest, they were told by one of the opposition, to ‘go home and slop the hogs.'
The phrase was not a happy one. It was one of those things which get remembered. It became a sort of war-cry in North Dakota; and though it was spoken several years ago, I saw it in print and heard it repeated over and over again while I was in Bismarck this winter.
III
It was at this psychological moment, after a lot of smouldering discontent, and after the legislators had thrown them down, that A. C. Townley, of Beach, North Dakota, appeared on the scene.
Townley — of whose personality I shall speak more in detail later — is a young man of imagination and great natural ability. With no initial capital except his own energy and a borrowed Ford, he started a movement which, in four years, has built up a fighting organization controlling the political machinery of one state, and reaching out into several others, and the members of which swear by their leader as if he combined all the admirable qualities of Napoleon Bonaparte and Abraham Lincoln.
The bitter criticisms of Mr. Townley as a leader of farmers, on the ground that he failed in his two wild plunges into farming, seem rather beside the mark. Each man to his job. There are men who make things for the pleasure of making them, and men whose pleasure it is to direct the making of things, and both are needed in a complex world. At the same time, in measuring the depth of Mr. Townley’s convictions, and the soundness of his agitation, it is no more than just to recall that he is no North Dakota Cincinnatus, reluctantly called from the plough, — the Non-Partisan Governor, Lynn Frazier, is more in that line, — but a dynamic person, more in his element leading an army of farmers than being a farmer himself. In 1911, Townley tried wheat-farming on a large scale, near Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, and failed, it is said, with a loss of some $70,000. He next tried flax, near Beach, North Dakota, with the notion, so his opponents say, of winning the title of ‘Flax King.’ Frost caught the crop, and the judgments against Townley and his brother are said to have been in the neighborhood of $400,000. In bankruptcy proceedings last year at Bismarck, there were liabilities of $79,000, and assets of $479.
Townley’s ingenuity in turning even such episodes to his advantage was shown one evening during my stay in Bismarck, when he spoke at a meeting called primarily to discuss the new State Bank. It was the first time, I believe, that he had spoken in Bismarck, and there was a good deal of curiosity to hear him. Looking down at the crowd, nearly every one of whom had probably at some time in his life had a mortgage hanging over him, he drawled out an ironical, ‘Yes, I’m famous as the only man who ever went broke in North Dakota . . . and had recourse to the same laws which rich men made to protect themselves.’ The soundness of this comment on bankruptcy laws might be open to argument, but the crowd applauded.
Well, Townley started out with his Ford and his idea. A substantial farmer, F. B. Wood, of Deering, North Dakota, who had been active for years in the Farmers’ Equity Society, joined Townley and became the League’s first vice-president. The idea caught on; new recruits themselves became organizers, each taking along with him, into a strange neighborhood, some farmer known in the locality to back him up.
The original volunteers soon grew into an organization which could hire canvassers on a commission basis. A state paper was started in the fall of 1915, and in 1916 a full state ticket was nominated. At the election that fall all the state officials but one were elected, as were a majority of the House members, and eighteen out of the twentyfive men sent that year to the Senate. In 1918, the League won a majority in both houses, and elected its candidates for Governor, Attorney-General, Commissioner of Labor and Agriculture, — the present Industrial Commission, — and the Supreme Court.
The story of this fight, — the adventures of motor-car canvassers, the big picnics, the building up of a chain of newspapers, the mob attacks on League organizers last summer, on charges of disloyalty, especially in Minnesota,— all this is too long to go into here. The essential point, the difference between this and most other farmer organizations, was that it started out toward the definite goal of a fighting political machine, with money, newspapers, and brains behind it.
Money was one essential. It was needed to work with, and it was needed to help make the farmers — notorious individualists — ‘stick.’ Men who had paid real money would want to follow it up. The dues, first set at $2.50, were raised to $16 for fixed two-year periods. That is to say, whether you join in the first or in the last month of the twentyfour, you pay your $16 just the same. If the figures for League memberships are accurate, here, right away, is more than $3,000,000 to work with.
Another essential was a machine which the enemy could not smash or creep into unawares; and up to the present, the Non-Partisan League has been air-tight. At the top, as President and Chairman of the National Executive Committee, is Townley himself. The three members of the Executive Committee hold office in such a way that the term of only one expires every two years, and the other two nominate his successor. Townley’s term expired this year; and although millions of fiery words have been written against him, and he has been called everything, from autocrat to traitor, he was returned as president by a vote of more than a hundred to one.
The executive officers of each group, beginning with the precinct, elect one of their number to the group next above it; so that the men on top must be elected several times over ‘ by those who know them, who must work with them, and whose economic interests are the same as their own,’ making it impossible, as a League publicist explains, ‘ for any enemy to run the gauntlet, and get into a position where he can betray the organization into the hands of its enemies.’
The same advocate, after pointing out the difference between a ‘democratic army’ and an army ‘fighting for democracy,’ asks if the Non-Partisan League is now a democratic organization, in the sense that it is governed by its own members in the same manner in which it proposes that the state and nation shall be governed by their citizens, after the League programme has been adopted.
‘The answer is, that it is not. The battle is on now; there must be a commander . . . the great monopolies now fighting the Non-Partisan League are not and do not pretend to be democratic, and in order to attain democracy, these great political machines, which now act as the servants of the great private monopolies, must be beaten and destroyed in a political battle. This can be done only by another machine, with all the money required and more solidarity, more compactness, more men, more votes, more courage, and a better generalship. The Non-Partisan League is trying to build and be that kind of a lighting machine.’
Publicity was another essential; so they started, in St. Paul, the National Non-Partisan Leader, an illustrated weekly, going practically to every member of the League. In North Dakota there are now two daily papers, and little weeklies in every county in the state.
So much for the League’s general outline. Its coöperative stores and various other activities can scarcely, for the moment, be considered here.
IV
No outsider could drop into Bismarck for even a day or two, without being impressed by the very different elements included in the League. On the one hand are the farmers themselves, thinking a good deal of concrete grievances and concrete remedies affecting the day-to-day lives of themselves and neighbors, and very little of phrases and theories. On the other hand are the non-farming theorists, attracted to the movement from without, and doing more or less to direct it.
I talked with a number of the farmers, and found, their point of view much the same. They all had the same story of unjust grain grades, freightand interest-rates, and what they described as the financial tyranny of the Twin Cities. They admitted that they might make mistakes, that they did not like all the people attracted to the organization, but believed that they were going to do good. Their notions of legislative and judicial responsibility were sometimes rather naive. Some seemed to take it as rather a matter of course that the Supreme Court judges elected by them would decide questions as they wished them decided; and the attempt two years ago to amend the state Constitution by passing amendments in the form of bills — the famous ‘House Bill 44 ’ — did not disturb them. It only saved time, they said; the people would have endorsed the legislation later if it had passed; a point of view perhaps not unnatural in states brought up under the initiative and referendum. Any references to the opposition’s talk about ‘Bolshevism’ they impatiently brushed aside.
‘Call it anything you want to,’ they would say: ‘never mind the names. This is what the people want!'
This idea was fixed, and no suggestion that they were being misled by dangerous agitators could shake it out of them. They began to get bored as soon as talk turned that way, and soon brushed it aside, with ‘That’s all cammyflage.’ Several added the rather startling suggestion, that they believed it better to bring about a revolution peacefully with the ballot than in some other way.
The League floor-leader in the House, Representative Dell Patterson, a substantial-looking middle-aged farmer, whose tall, spectacled wife looked down on him from the gallery every afternoon, while she crocheted busily, was one of those who made this observation. He spoke feelingly of their splendid wheatland and the great crops they rolled up every year, and it troubled him that there should be ‘$310,000,000 in first farm-mortgages ’ in North Dakota, and the amount growing, he said, by a million every year. They had no fears of Townley: he was ‘one of the country’s great men.’
I saw a good deal of young Mr. Maddock, assistant floor-leader — a characteristic prairie Webster, with a lofty pompadour of curly brown hair, and a statesman-like solemnity, which broke every now and then into an engaging boyishness. He took his work with great seriousness, and one evening, when we happened to sit. at the same table at dinner, ordered only milk toast and tea. I asked if he were under the weather. No, he said, but when he was off the farm and not working out of doors he found it better not to eat much. ‘I find it reduces my efficiency,’ he explained; and then added, ‘as they say,’ with his bashful smile.
He went on to talk about the farmerlegislators. ‘I used to have misgivings about us farmers too,’ he said, ‘and feel afraid that we lacked experience; but after two years in the House, I believe we’re just as broad-minded as any other class of people — as lawyers, for instance. Of course, we’ll make mistakes, and it is discouraging to find here and there men who would sacrifice the cause for their own selfish ends. But I don’t believe you will find anywhere in the country a legislature more sincere and serious than this one is, in trying to do the best thing for the people.’
No protest of this sort could be made at any time, without attracting a certain number of local ne’er-do-wells, and it could not be made at this particular time without drawing into it clever non-resident theorists, who hitch themselves to the movement with the hope of working out their theories vicariously, at any rate. Nearly every day someone dropped off the overland train to take a look at the legislature, and, as Professor Max Eastman expressed it, ‘to get a breath of free air.’ In other words, although the core of the North Dakota Idea is simple enough, its periphery is a good deal more complicated.
I am not considering, in this doubtful fringe, questions of loyalty, about which perhaps enough was said and done in the Northwest last summer; but the present issue of public versus private ownership, and the social and political ideas of the theoretical people who have been drawn toward the movement, and what may be their ultimate ends and aims.
One of the exotic figures, for instance, with which the stranger in Bismarck was immediately struck, was that of the League’s principal spellbinder, Mr. Walter Thomas Mills. Mr. Mills is a speaker and writer instead of a farmer, the author of The Struggle for Existence and Democracy or Despotism. He is a pleasant little gentleman, with white side-whiskers and jolly blue eyes, and suggests a sort of domesticated Ibsen. He was born in New England, educated at Oberlin, and was for many years interested in temperance agitation. A socialistic administration in Milwaukee once sent him on a five-year trip around the world, to investigate municipal and other questions. He knows all about Denmark and the farmers’ coöperative work there, the British Labor Party, and what has been done along socialistic lines in Australia and New Zealand. Ingratiating to talk with, very popular with the farmers’ wives in the Non-Partisan Woman’s Auxiliary, he becomes a veritable little giant on the platform, and one of the most effective agitators in the country. He is employed by the League at a good salary as a writer and speaker.
In a pamphlet written as an answer to the criticisms against Townley and the League, and setting forth its purposes, he says, —
To vote once in four years, to elect someone to office, who will afterwards appoint a postmaster . . . and then to work for four years with no voice in fixing the prices received when labor and the products of labor are sold, and with no voice in fixing prices when the means of life are brought out of the market, may be universal [suffrage] as to the number of people who vote, but it is not universal as related to the matters of most vital concern to all the people.
In discussing the question of ‘regulation,’ as opposed to public ownership, he says, —
There is a general pretension that the functions of the government shall be restricted to the work of protection only. . . . It is agreed that the government shall protect ‘shopkeepers’ from ‘shoplifters,’ who pilfer goods; but what is the government to do when ‘shopkeepers’ become, themselves, ‘shoplifters,’ and by unfair prices rob the public, in an afternoon, of greater values than all the nimble-fingered thieves together could smuggle from the market in a half-century?
The older the world gets, and the better it is organized, the easier and more certain it ought to be for every useful person to be able early in life to become the owner of his own home or his own farm, or a proportionate share in the industry in which he is collectively employed with others.
The battle for democracy means more than admitting all the people into a share of the control of the government. It means also admitting the government into direct ownership organization and management of collective interests, in the means and processes by which we live, so far, and only so far, as these must either he ’public enterprises or public monopolies.
The Non-Partisan League is now the most democratic and most vital factor in the political life of this country. With its natural development, or as the result of the inevitable alliance, it offers to every useful citizen the opportunity for a greater social service than any other organization now in existence, or likely to come into existence during the life of this generation.
‘Fall In! Attention, Squad! Eyes to the Front! Forward, March!’
Mr. Mills evidently is not thinking merely of North Dakota and improved methods of grading wheat. Here is another side-light. On February 9, Governor Frazier went down to Chicago to speak at a meeting of the new Labor Party there. The Chicago Union Labor men have frankly gone into politics, have nominated a full city ticket, and established a well-edited paper, The New Majority.
The Governor told how James J. Hill once advised the North Dakota farmers to keep out of politics because ‘politics were rotten.’ The Governor said that, if they were, the farmers and city workingmen were to blame. He told what they had done in North Dakota, and urged farmers and city workers to get together and ‘through the intelligent use of political power make our nation a better place in which to live.’
Governor Frazier is not in the least like Mr. Mills. He is a regular farmer, and the movies, showing him driving a reaper and washing up in a tin basin outside his kitchen door, prove it. He is good-natured and heavy, speaks and thinks rather slowly, and a sarcastic critic has likened him to a homesick ox, dreaming in the Capitol’s marble halls of his native pasture. Yet here he was, hobnobbing with Union labor men far away from North Dakota; and some of the more enthusiastic of the latter were assuring him that if the new North Dakota bank needed help, there was a lot of Chicago workingmens’ savings which would be deposited there.
And here is another example. Early in the session, Townley pleaded one evening with his followers, and begged them not to waste time on foolish little bills.
Kill the six big league bills, and you could stay here sixty days and pass sixty bills a day, and you would be remembered only as the biggest bunch of fools who ever got under one roof in the history of the world. But if you forget all the other bills and pass those six, this North Dakota legislature will be known for five hundred years as the greatest gathering of men since the Revolutionary War.
I want you to come out of yourselves, to remember that to put over this people’s industrial programme is the biggest thing you will ever have an opportunity to do. . . . Believe me, if you will do that, I will agree, with the aid of organizers and speakers who will come here and help, to carry that message, in the next six or eight years, to a majority of the people in the United States, and the day will come when this programme will be the programme of the United States. Then our work will be done.
The Townley machine worked perfectly until the League programme had been passed and the Legislature had adjourned. Some murmurs of protest within the organization were heard a few wrecks later — not against the general industrial programme, but rather against two or three of the minor bills, especially one providing that the State printing should be given to but one paper instead of three in each county. This protest, loudly heralded by the opposition as an ‘insurrection,’ was attacked with equal vigor as ‘ treason ’ by Townley and the League press. The Governor, although not compelled to order a referendum unless there are 30,000 petitioners for it, stated that he would order one if there were 15,000 signers, reasonably well distributed. In that case, the disputed questions would be decided by a popular vote. And there the matter stands.