THE NONPARTISAN LEAGUE
In December, 1918, Oliver S. Morris, editor of the National Magazine of the Nonpartisan League, gave to an investigator of the Americanization Study an analysis of approximate membership of the League. (See [Table LIV].)
TABLE LIV
Membership of the Nonpartisan League by States in December, 1918
| Minnesota | 50,000 | |
| North Dakota | 45,000 | |
| South Dakota | 25,000 | |
| Montana | 25,000 | |
| Idaho | 20,000 | |
| ———– | ||
| 165,000 | ||
| Washington | } | 40,000 |
| Wisconsin | } | |
| Nebraska | } | |
| Iowa | } | |
| Kansas | } | |
| Oklahoma | } | |
| Texas | } | |
| Colorado | } | |
| ———– | ||
| 205,000 | ||
The membership has shifted this way and that ever since, and the experience of the Nonpartisan League government in North Dakota is a matter of history; but the fact that stands out is that this large membership did not either accomplish or attempt anything which the radical Socialist would accept as revolutionary. The Nonpartisan League movement is a true agrarian movement, on the whole a movement of property owners to benefit themselves as such, to insure their own hold upon the land they have acquired and the processes of storage, exchange, and marketing upon which their prosperity depends. John M. Gillette, professor of sociology in the University of North Dakota, distinguishes clearly between its underlying spirit and purpose and those of the revolutionary Socialists:[175]
The Nonpartisan League ... aims at economic and social reforms through political action; the Bolshevists aim at social reforms through economic action. The League does not seek to disfranchise other classes than farmers; Bolshevism disfranchises all other classes than the proletariat.... The League is essentially an organization of farmers, the preponderant majority of the electorate in such states as North Dakota owning the bulk of the wealth of the commonwealth, for the improvement of economic and general welfare conditions by recourse to political action.... It is destroying no fundamental institution, but is reshaping and redirecting certain ones to make them more amenable to the public will.
Without any attempt to assess either the righteousness or the wisdom of the League methods or program, intelligent understanding of its relation to the spirit and purpose of political Socialism, and of the reaction to each on the part of various racial groups among the foreign born, requires that the distinction be carefully kept in mind. The foreign born who participate in the Nonpartisan League are not only citizens of the United States—voters—but they are preponderantly of the races whose mental operations tend to be conservative toward really revolutionary propaganda, and of the property-owning and property-ambitious class, as contrasted with the propertyless, job-holding, wage-earning class generally implied in the term “proletariat.”
This distinction underlies the reason why the strength of the League lies in the rural communities rather than in the cities. The League certainly showed strength in the cities, and the Socialistic character of many of its proposals undoubtedly attracted considerable support from city radicals who were unsatisfied with the range of the platform; nevertheless, the Nonpartisan League represents an agrarian rather than a revolutionary movement. There is a world of difference between a Socialist program calling for the establishment of a wholly co-operative commonwealth, the common ownership of all the machinery of production, distribution, and communication, and the League program demanding:
1. Exemption of farm improvements from taxation.
2. Tonnage tax on ore production.
3. Rural credit banks operated at cost.
4. State terminal elevators, warehouses, flour mills, stockyards, packing houses, creameries, and cold-storage plants.
5. State hail insurance.
6. A more equitable system of state inspection and grading of grain.
7. Equal taxation of property of railroads, mines, telegraph, telephone, electric light and power companies, and all public utility corporations, as compared with that of other property owners.
Adding to these the “national demands”—“that the government refuse to return to private hands ownership or operation of those public utilities owned, operated, or controlled by the government during the war,” and “that the conscription of wealth begun by the government through income and excess-profit taxes shall be continued and increased, that surplus wealth may be compelled to pay the money cost of the war”—the program still falls far short of being revolutionary. On the whole the underlying spirit and purpose are more or less precisely those of the earlier agrarian Free Soil, Greenback, Populist, Single Tax, and Free Silver movements.
The Progressive movement of 1912, given extra “steam” by the magnetic personality of Mr. Roosevelt and the hero worship of his followers, was a far more powerful influence in drawing common support from farms and cities. And its support, like that of the Nonpartisan League, was essentially American, as distinguished from foreign-born Socialistic support. It is interesting to speculate upon the attitude of the people generally toward the Progressive movement, if one could imagine it coming into being during the war. To what extent would its platform and the utterances of its leaders have been regarded as “seditious”?