Region's politicians have wide influence
By John Sundvor
The Forum - 10/03/1999

For the last 100 years - really for most of its history - North Dakota has been mixing a dash of socialism in its cauldron of conservatism to produce a mix of leadership that has been both explosive and innovative.

For the last 100 years - really for most of its history - North Dakota has been mixing a dash of socialism in its cauldron of conservatism to produce a mix of leadership that has been both explosive and innovative.

North Dakota was in only its 11th year of statehood when the 20th Century opened. It was a state full of promises and suspicions.

Political leaders predicted a bright future for the new state. It was to be a state with great cities and prosperous farms. Promoters, they said, would make the state the "jewel" in the crown of democracy.

But the early settlers already had a generous dose of suspicion about government, big business and outsiders. Farmers had learned quickly to dislike out-of-state grain companies, banks, and railroad companies. They objected to the power out-of-state companies wielded in North Dakota political circles and maintained they were being exploited.

In those days Alexander McKenzie, a Northern Pacific Railroad representative, dominated politics, even though he never held public office. His critics referred to him as "Alexander the Great."

In 1890, farmers, organized as The Independents, merged with the Democrats to fight the McKenzie Republicans. By 1892, the two groups took over state government, promising significant reform.

Hobbled by political inexperience, their success was limited. In 1894, the Republican Party resumed control of state government and returned the state to its old ways.

Led by Republican conservatives, the state encouraged investment by establishing liberal banking, regulatory and tax policies. They argued that North Dakota would not attract investors unless steps were taken to enhance profits and diminish risk.

The policies spawned the economic revolution that swept across North Dakota early in the first years of the 20th Century.

"I think that we're a conservative state, and we live out our conservative culture, except in times of great stress," said Lloyd Omdahl, a former lieutenant governor who is now a political scientist in Grand Forks.

In 1905, progressive Republicans joined with Democrats under the banner of reform to elect John Burke governor. But change was already in the wind

A new movement, the American Society of Equity, formed in 1907. And many of the new immigrants who arrived after 1905 quickly joined the Socialist Party.

The two groups attacked the preferential treatment the state gave to out-of-state corporations and demanded fair taxes and better government service.

By 1915, A.C. Townley, a flax farmer from western North Dakota and an organizer for the Socialist Party, had merged the movements into the Nonpartisan League.

Charles E. Joyce recalled years later that the first time he heard Townley speak to a crowd in Bismarck people wanted to lynch him for his socialist views. The next year, Joyce said Townley was signing up those same farmers in droves.

The NPL took control of the Republican Party in 1916. Two years later it took control of state government and began its reforms.

It quickly expanded rural education services, decreed a nine-hour workday for women, and improved the regulation of public services and corporations. The party established a state-run insurance program to provide for injured workers and a hail insurance program for farmers. It opened the state-owned Bank of North Dakota in 1919 and the State Mill and Elevator in 1922.

For a time, North Dakota found itself with three major political parties: NPL Republicans, the Independent Voters Association - the so-called "real" Republicans - and Democrats.

World War I brought the isolationist-minded NPL into public disfavor. The Independent Voters exploited the movement's opposition to the war and its socialist leanings. When grain prices dropped at the end of the war and a drought hit western North Dakota, the NPL suffered at the polls.

By 1920, the Independent Voters had taken control of one house of the Legislature. A year later, the party forced an election that recalled Gov. Lynn Frazier and members of the Industrial Commission. North Dakota became the first state in the nation to depose a seated governor.

Townley quickly fell into obscurity. When he died in a car-truck accident near Minot in 1959, he was traveling from town to town selling insurance.

Only a handful of people gathered for his funeral in Bertha, Minn. Members of his family said they were too busy to attend. Also missing were the very people that he and the NPL had brought to prominence.

Omdahl maintains that the economic revolution spawned by the NPL was an anomaly. NPL could happen again, he said, only if there was "a condition of great economic stress in which neither of the two major parties would respond."

With farm commodity prices at or near historic lows, the end of the 21st Century may hold the same promise of economic revolt as the century's early years.

Omdahl said Quentin Burdick's election to Congress in 1960 was an agricultural revolution. Farmers hated Ezra Taft Benson, Republican secretary of agriculture and his market-oriented farm policy, he said.

"We had Republicans who abandoned their party to vote for Burdick because of economic stress," he said. "Right now, we have economic stress here, but do we have the focus point? At that time it was 'Beat Benson with Burdick.' You don't have a lightening rod like Benson on the scene, but I think the economic stress is here."

Omdahl said the question is whether that economic stress can be converted to a political activity.

In 1932, economic stress - better known as the Great Depression - was the salvation of the NPL. It brought William Langer, a political maverick from Casselton, back to prominence.

Langer, a gifted orator, had been elected attorney general in 1916 on the NPL ticket. He fell into disfavor when the NPL lost its luster.

In 1932, Langer was elected governor. That same year farmers blockaded marketing points in northwestern North Dakota in an attempt to raise commodity prices.

Langer responded to the economic crisis by declaring a moratorium on mortgage foreclosure sales and blocking the export of farm commodities.

The North Dakota Supreme Court forced him from office in 1934, after he was convicted of violating the state's campaign law.

In spite of the controversy that swirled around him, Langer was popular. Farmers were known to ask guests who spoke ill of Langer to leave their homes.

He returned to the governorship in 1936 and went on to become a U.S. senator. But conflict seemed to be his companion.

A Senate committee called for his ouster on charges of political corruption. The full Senate rejected the recommendation.

The Nonpartisan League left the Republicans for the Democrats in 1956. That union has produced a bevy of political players, some of whom had influence well beyond North Dakota.

Former Gov. William Guy was credited with steering the Democratic presidential nomination to John Kennedy in 1960.

At the party's national convention, the North Dakota delegation was deadlocked, evenly split between Adlai Stevenson, Lyndon B. Johnson and Kennedy. Operating under a winner-take-all rule, it was unable to unite behind a candidate.

Kennedy, meanwhile, had been assured by Wyoming delegates that they would vote for him if their few votes would give him the nomination.

Guy sent a telegram to the North Dakota delegation, telling them he would be delighted to run for re-election with Kennedy at the top of the ticket. The message was enough to sway Kenneth Larsen of Agate and North Dakota's votes went to Kennedy.

It pushed Kennedy to the brink of victory, and Wyoming pushed him over.

Robert Kennedy told Guy that many of his brother's commitments were for the first ballot only. If he had not won on the first ballot, Kennedy said, his brother probably would not have been nominated for president.

"I can only cite this case and the vote of delegate Larsen of Agate when people say to me that one vote doesn't count," Guy said later.

Bill Lemke was elected to Congress in 1932 as an NPLer. After the assassination of Sen. Huey Long of Louisiana in 1936, he was chosen by the Union Party to run for President.

And John Baer, a cartoonist from Fargo, coined the phrase "New Deal" while serving in Congress as an NPLer.

Baer published cartoons showing farmers and working men appealing to wealthy bankers and industrialists for "a new deal." The cartoon was picked up by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and used as the slogan for his package of "New Deal" reforms.

"I caricatured my way into Congress and then cartooned my way out," Baer said later.

Omdahl said voters in North Dakota have always tended to be nonpartisan. He said the passage of time has only made them more so.

"It is a national trend," he said, noting that political parties are falling apart.

He worries that the lack of structure in the social system is an invitation to rich political renegades with vested interests.

"Instead of polo ponies they are going to have candidates and be candidates," he said. "The more billionaires we get, the more dangerous the situation becomes. I'm convinced that for $1 billion you can buy the presidency if you run a smart campaign."