| 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.