Bill Caraher |

It’s been a long and hectic end of the year here in North Dakotaland and I celebrated it by reading a piece published in The Nation in 1922. It was part of a series called “These United States” which invited an author for each state to discuss its character, economic, history, and social situation. For North Dakota, the editors of The Nation invited Robert George Paterson who was at one point the city editor of the Fargo Forum, but otherwise rather obscure. His essay though is well worth a read and offers an intriguing context for the early days of NDQ (and the history of the state that many of us at NDQ call home).

(N.B. As I was writing this, I discovered that my buddy and collaborator Aaron Barth out in Bismarck posted on this very series not four months ago.)

These United States—XXXV
North Dakota: A Twentieth-Century Valley Forge
Robert George Paterson

The drama of North Dakota has been one of the great American epics. Scene of a gigantic struggle for independence, fought almost as fiercely and tenaciously as the Colonists’ revolt in 1776, its far-stretching prairies have been a continuous battlefield since the bloody days of Custer. There is a sparkle in the piercing northern air “out in those vast spaces where men are men” that prompts the clash of dominating spirits. Regarded by the sedate East as America’s enfant terrible, its numerous reforms have made its name a synonym for radicalism, for amazing governmental ventures that have startled the conservative world, shivering its spine with the latest spectacle of the Nonpartisan League, whose daring shadow has broadened across the whole Western horizon. There has been real romance in the story of its forceful dramatis personae, stalwart builders who visualized empires, political chieftains who slapped each other’s faces, earnest home-makers converting the great plains into a chrome-yellow sea of ripening grain, strong men bold enough to strike out for ideals and break the invisible chains of unseen rulers exacting tribute from afar.

Aside from the war, North Dakota’s revolt has been one of the century’s outstanding political events in America. It has had as many interpretations as it has had observers. Many passively noted it as one of those freakish experiments in which in the name of progress certain Western States occasionally have indulged themselves, a temporary obsession to be viewed with no more concern than a city changing to the commission form of government. To some it has seemed the heroic effort of the second generation of a pioneer people to conquer political chiefs, economic overlordship, and the forces industrial civilization has erected, as their fathers subdued Indian chiefs and the forces of nature. Others saw it as a conflagration fired by the incendiary bombs of demagogues whose personal destruction offered the only hope for its extinction. Still others have fancied it everything from the first American foothold of the foreboding International to a revolt of the tenantry.

Ample evidence may exist for these contentions. It certainly was not a revolution without its Jacobins, its carpet-bagging exploiters suddenly swooping down upon it to direct its generals from behind the scenes, its feverish mob howling for the political decapitation of all survivors of the old regime. Nor was it without its Dantons sincerely seeking the economic deliverance of the State’s agricultural classes from a system that ground them into vassalage while they produced the world’s daily bread.

Yet none of these estimates is wholly correct. North Dakota has been greatly misunderstood, for it is not a State of Marxian idealists. Prior to the Nonpartisan League’s appearance it had but a straggling Socialist element scarcely able to muster two thousand votes on election day. Unlike its neighbors of South Dakota and Iowa to the south, it never had any land tenantry worth mentioning. It has not been bothered by labor disturbances, as it has no laboring class except its floating farm helpers who come and go with the spring and autumn. While in 1913 there was a brief I.W.W. flurry at Minot the rioters were not North Dakotans but the typical Western rovers who frequent the trans-Mississippi region during the harvest season together with a boisterous handful of Butte’s mining element who had strayed eastward out of Montana.

Of all the States North Dakota is one of the freest from poverty. Nearly all of its half million people are landowners. A country of magnificent distances, its mighty expanse adapted itself to the acquisition of enormous tracts. The “bonanza farm,” covering thousands of acres, sprang into vogue. Inconsequential indeed was the farmer possessing less than a section—640 acres of land. The forty- or eighty-acre farm of the Eastern or Middle States is inconceivable to the average North Dakotan. The majority of the 30 per cent of its people that are not Scandinavian are keen-faced Yankees who migrated from Iowa, Illinois, and western New York to get rich quick in the early land boom, but on seeing the country’s possibilities decided to stay. The years have dealt generously with them, and though North Dakota boasts only a few millionaires nearly every one is well to do. Virtually every farmer has his car, some three and four. A few years ago the tremendous business of the Ford plant at Fargo ranked it near the top of that company’s branches throughout the country.

North Dakota’s revolt came as the direct result of its complete subjection to outside domination. Hunger, poverty, class distinctions, religious oppression, political graft and chicanery all prompt rebellion. But nothing is more certain to provoke it than the attempt of one people to govern another.

Nominally a sovereign State, in reality North Dakota has experienced few of the thrills of sovereignty. From the hour of statehood it has been merely the “flickertail” of the Minnesota gopher. Albeit Bismarck is the capital where the Governor resides and the legislature convenes, the actual seat of the State government always has been in St. Paul and Minneapolis, homes of the overlords who played with its destinies. At the outset James J. Hill became its acknowledged patron saint and colonized it with Norwegians as Minnesota already had been settled by their Swedish cousins. Throughout his years his excellent paternal care well entitled him to the fond sobriquet of “Father of North Dakota”. From St. Paul he watched over its interests—so closely interwoven with his own—with the same anxious eye a keen guardian displays for a wealthy ward. From a carefully guarded chamber in the West Hotel in Minneapolis its political wires were manipulated with rare dexterity by that most astute of all the Northwest’s political chiefs, the frequently mentioned but infrequently seen “Alec” McKenzie of Klondike fame—fame suggested, if not exactly extolled, by Rex Beach in “The Spoilers”.

Perchance because of the proprietary concern exhibited in the State by these two gentlemen, the financiers, merchants, and millers of Minnesota’s chief centers assumed that North Dakota was their private preserve. And few moves in North Dakota became possible without their sanction, as its legislators, bankers, and grain growers soon came to understand. Whenever a North Dakota politician aspired to public office in North Dakota it first was necessary to run down to Minneapolis and see McKenzie. Whenever a new general business policy was promulgated for the State its announcement usually followed the return of some prominent North Dakotan from the Twin Cities. When Fargo wanted a new chief of police it sent to Duluth, and as a new Commercial Club secretary it selected one discarded by St. Paul.

When Fargo was chosen as the site for the French Government’s gift to the Norwegians of the United States of a statue of Rollo the Norseman who invaded France ten centuries ago the Hill interests managed, despite Fargo’s spacious parks, to have it placed on the tiny greensward of their Great Northern railroad station where it has an uninspiring background in a yellow brick wall. When Minnesota’s big-business interests learned that the North Dakota farmer no longer was producing enough to meet the advancing cost of their operations they launched a “Better Farming Association” in North Dakota to scrutinize his efforts and to make him produce more, sending up an energetic young man from Minnesota to run it. And upon discovery that, instead of ever becoming self-supporting, the “association” always would be a drain on their purses, they calmly tried to unload it on North Dakota’s State Agricultural College and replace the college president with the energetic young man.

Never has North Dakota been free from the supervision of its eastern neighbor. Its first submitted constitution, indignantly rejected as “a piece of unwarranted outside intermeddling,” was drafted by James Bradley Thayer of the Harvard law faculty on request of the Northern Pacific Railroad’s president, Henry Villard. There is no doubt that Mr. Villard was actuated by the best of motives in his desire to assist the new State’s admission into the Union. But that he was not a North Dakotan militated against the acceptance of his good offices.

Even the turbulent upheaval which finally overthrew the yoke of alien domination failed to restore to North Dakota’s soil the seat of its government. The shrewd Loftus, the Robespierre of its revolution, and the autocratic Townley, grabbing the tempest with Napoleonic opportunism, both directed their annihilating campaigns from St. Paul.

Sporadic outbursts from the beginning revealed North Dakota’s unconscious groping for self-determination. Queer things, impulsive and incoherent, were done in this battle for independence, but all revealed the underlying aim. At its second election it chose a Populist governor. The experiment did not last. The next uprising in 1906 had more enduring effect and made North Dakota a vital contributor to the subsequent Republican schism. For six years a Democratic governor and an “Insurgent” Republican legislature fought the McKenzie “Stalwarts” for control. In that time they enacted into law nearly every suggestion that promised hope of deliverance from outside political and financial influence. The statutes bristled in their defiance of the railroads and all outside business operating within the State. They affected nearly every commodity used, inasmuch as North Dakota is wholly agricultural and manufactures practically nothing for its own consumption. The rigidity of the State’s pure-food laws for a number of years barred entrance to the products of several concerns of national prominence.

These caprices disturbed distant campaign managers, not because of North Dakota’s power in national conventions, but on account of the misleading impression its unexpected treatment of their chosen candidates might give the electorate at large. It inaugurated several disquieting political novelties. It was the first State to hold a Presidential primary, and in it forsook the magnetic leadership of its once widely boasted foster son, Roosevelt, for the progressivism of La Follette. Later, in the effort to rid itself of Nonpartisan rule, it established another disconcerting precedent as the first State to recall its governor—the inoffensive Nonpartisan figurehead, Frazier—whom it subsequently elected to the Senate in place of the veteran conservative, McCumber.

Its great organized protest followed in natural sequence to this list of reforms. It was but another, more emphatic, more defiant step toward independence. The protest subsided gradually, partially due to the overwhelming outside financial pressure marshaled to kill it; but chiefly because the Nonpartisan League as conducted proved it was not wholly an agrarian nor a cooperative movement. As distasteful in its dictatorial methods as any previous experiment, it failed in its five years of virtual State power to fulfil its chief promises to the North Dakota farmers for whose express benefit it was supposed to exist.

Farming on a huge scale, the ills of the North Dakotan lie in marketing. His crop is wheat and small grains. He is dependent on the railroads to move it and on the grain commission men of the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce to sell it. Between the two he early found himself a helpless victim of strange price fluctuations and freight tariffs that more frequently favored the big elevator, milling, and railroad interests than himself. The chief Twin City millers and elevator magnates controlled the Chamber of Commerce, and the trading privileges of its floor were largely restricted to their representatives. As they were in position to buy grain virtually at their own grading, the North Dakota farmer felt himself at their mercy.

Amelioration of this condition was sought through a railroad commission empowered to adjust shipping disputes, through elevator commissions created to sit in Duluth and Minneapolis and seek fairer grading. Finally came a proposal for the construction of North Dakota State-owned and State-managed terminal elevators at Duluth and the Twin Cities. This caught the popular fancy and gradually edged its way into the political platforms. But owing to that happy lapse of memory with which politicians seem blessed after election the cherished projects always found a waiting grave in legislative committees.

Meanwhile a Farmers’ Equity Society sprang into being to market the crop independently, and opened a Cooperative Selling Exchange in St. Paul. Immediately it became the target of the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce. Both were located in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, but as North Dakota furnished the crop it became the battleground of the conflict. The North Dakotans welcomed it, for they always relish a fight and are ever ready to take sides. Loftus, president of the Equity Exchange, a spectacular figure with a keen knowledge of crowd psychology, staged his skirmishes in Fargo every January when it was filled with farmers attending its annual grain growers’ convention. His bizarre appeals and escapades stirred the State. He rented auditoriums, threw men out bodily, and applied for the removal of that police chief who dared refuse him protection.

Townley sat in his audiences, an obscure but studious observer. When Loftus had keyed the farmers to open revolt and marched them on to Bismarck, while the legislature sat, to demand the long-promised State-owned elevator, Townley cleverly stepped in and wrested away the leadership for himself. He steered the Equity’s membership into an organization of his own. Until that moment this new king, suddenly rising over this Egypt which knew not Joseph, had never been heard of even throughout his own county, the “slope country,” on the western edge of the State. Dynamic, resorting to all the bombastic tricks of Loftus, he swept North Dakota like a Billy Sunday whirlwind. Staking his fortunes on this spirit of revolt at its height he toured the State in an automobile and secured the signed pledges of the farmers to support the child of his brain—the Nonpartisan League—which was to make him North Dakota’s dictator for the next half decade.

Ostensibly the Nonpartisan League began as an association of North Dakota farmers formed to run their own State. But it gathered its leaders from the earth’s four corners. While Townley was its czar he was not so unwise as to conduct it without advisers. One came from far-away Australia and New Zealand, another from Colorado and Washington, some from New York, several from Minnesota, but few from North Dakota. Some of these special importations had been prominent I.W.W. attorneys, and nearly every one of them had a record in several States as a candidate for some exalted office on the Socialist ticket.

Under League rule North Dakota launched energetically into numerous enterprises and sought to become its own financier. It opened a State bank. It started a home-building scheme. It attempted coal-mine seizures. It enacted legislation to seize necessary industries either in peace or war. It created an appointed State sheriff to whom all elected county sheriffs were made answerable. It subverted its public educational system to propagandize the League in all the public educational institutions. It attempted its own immigration commission to determine who should enter the State from Canada.

That one tribunal expected to be the exemplar of law and order, its Supreme Court, indulged itself in a travesty of all order which might have gone well in opera-bouffe but was hardly expected in a serious government. Three newly elected League justices appeared at the capital and demanded their seats a month before their predecessors’ terms expired. One of the court’s League justices, evidently of journalistic bent, found a unique pastime in penning for the press a weekly letter which commented freely on his associates and discussed important cases up on appeal before they were decided.

The League taught North Dakota some new tricks about how to perpetuate a State administration’s power. It legally supplied the voter with advisers to help him prepare his ballot correctly. It then granted him the ingenious supplemental privilege of re-marking it at the polls upon discovery that he might have checked the wrong candidates.

It would be difficult to imagine a tranquil hour in North Dakota. Born in strife, it has been seething ever since. Long before the battle of the bottle made the American flag its champion and attacked the freedom of the seas, North Dakota wrestled single-handed with the demon rum. With its twin to the south it was the first State to write prohibition into its constitution when framed.

North Dakotans love their State with an admirable devotion. Their language describing it is rich with superlatives. They call Fargo the “biggest little city in the world” and don’t relish having it belittled. They like to think of the Red River valley as the “world’s bread basket” and to compare it to the Nile. Fargo assumes importance because it is the State’s cultural, financial, and political clearing-house, but in more densely settled sections it wouldn’t pass for a town of secondary consequence. Quite usual, Eastern in tone, similar to towns of 30,000 in Ohio or any Middle Atlantic State, it has a couple of bishops, plenty of churches, good public schools, an enterprising daily press, some handsome homes and streets, and an “exclusive set”. There is considerable civic spirit in the State and nearly every hamlet has its “white way”.

Yet with all its boasted State pride, notwithstanding its readiness to spend money on futile impeachment trials, on all sorts of elections and primaries, on new governmental experiments, North Dakota never has found the energy or wherewithal to build a decent State capitol. The nondescript hulk it calls a capitol unblushingly is shown to Bismarck visitors as one of the sights. And it is one. Although its location is superb on an ideal spot overlooking the town and the bald hills beyond the Missouri, it is a ramshackle, pieced-together arrangement, constructed in three sections, each of a different kind and color of brick—the front dark red, the middle wing vivid yellow, and the rear white. On all sides handsome new State capitols have been erected but North Dakota makes no effort to replace this architectural monstrosity. On its sloping grounds are the log cabin Roosevelt occupied during his three years at Medora, and a bronze statue the North Dakota women have reared to the Indian “bird woman” who guided Lewis and Clark across the Rockies.

Educationally North Dakota is quite abreast of other States. Its percentage of illiteracy is surprisingly small. Except for a meritorious but unknown epic drama of its famous Indian massacre by Aaron McGuffy Beede, an old Episcopal missionary among the Sioux, so far it hasn’t figured much in literature and produced no distinctive literary geniuses of national renown—unless the monthly preambles of Sam Clark in his Jim Jam Jems could possibly rank him as a littérateur.

To live North Dakota’s life is thrilling. It has a bleak, white winter when the mercury occasionally plays around forty degrees below and the railroad rails snap in the crispness. But there is a mighty call in its summer with its nine o’clock sunset and lingering twilight. And it has an irresistible autumn when the prairie chicken and wild-duck hunting is unequaled. From the picturesque undulations that pocket Minnesota’s myriad sparkling lakes the country flattens out into the broad surface of North Dakota’s smooth, fertile prairie which stretches away in a vast sweep to where the Bad Lands’ jagged cliffs trace their lonely outline against the leafless Western sky. North Dakota possesses some strange germ that enters the blood and makes whoever leaves it always want to go back.

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Bill Caraher is the editor of NDQ and has become unreasonably obsessed about its history and the early 20th century North Dakota literary scene.