Nonpartisan Leader

William F. Lemke (1878-1950) was considered by many to be the brains of the Nonpartisan League. He was called “the political bishop” by some. He had known Bill Langer before the League was founded. He was practicing law in Fargo when he was recruited for leadership in the NPL in the summer of 1915. League leaders Townley, Fred Wood, and others visited Lemke in Fargo, where he was recovering from typhus, to hire him full time for the League. Lemke is credited with helping to identify Lynn Frazier as a worthy candidate for North Dakota governor.

Lemke was a tireless worker. He frequently put in 18-hour days, particularly during the earliest years of the League’s insurgency. The historian Edward Blackorby has written, “Lemke’s willingness to work, his dynamic energy, his fiery caucus presentations, and his central position in the League headquarters made him a dominating figure.”

Lemke had a fiery temperament. He did not accept criticism or opposition without expressing his views in a sometimes-violent manner. His outspokenness and instinct for the political ruthlessness opened him to the charge that he was a rural demagogue.

Lemke made two serious mistakes that damaged his reputation and called into question the principles of the Nonpartisan League. Using money from the League’s Home Builders Association, Lemke built a house for himself and his family in Fargo that exceeded the HBA’s cap on public loans for private dwellings in North Dakota. That blunder became a symbol of League corruption and ineptitude.

He also let himself be elected chairman of the Republican Party in North Dakota in 1916, and Attorney General, a member of the critically-important Industrial Commission, in 1920. This violated Townley’s rule that League leaders would not stand for public office, to assure the farmer-citizens of North Dakota that their purposes were altruistic, not personal aggrandizement. In October 1921, together with the Governor Lynn J. Frazier and Commission of Agriculture John Hagan, Attorney General Lemke was recalled by the voters of North Dakota.

Lynn J. Frazier (1874-1947) was a farmer at Hoople, North Dakota, in Pembina County. Educated at the University of North Dakota, Frazier had never intended to take over the family farm, but the early deaths of his father and brother forced his hand. He had planned to be a doctor. He had taken on a few civic responsibilities in Hoople, including the school board.

When he was “called from the plow” as North Dakota’s Cincinnatus in 1916, he was regarded by the League’s leadership, particularly William L. Lemke, as the ideal candidate for Governor. He was an uncomplicated man who spoke humbly and in short utterances. Bald, stout and plainly dressed, there was nothing flashy or even “professional” about him.

Frazier was a perfect candidate. He neither smoked nor drank. He had no ambition to seek office. The office sought the man. He was so grateful for his education at University of North Dakota that he named his twin daughters Unie and Versie. He used no off-color language. When the call came to him that he had been nominated for the governorship, he apologized that he could not come immediately because he was wearing his overalls.

The League wanted to present itself as the pure expression of discontent among North Dakota’s 80,000 farmers. It did not want to be seen as a politically sophisticated protest movement. Frazier, therefore, was the ideal embodiment of the League’s “innocence.” When he was selected, a flabbergasted North Dakota newspaper wrote, “Who the Hell is Frazier, and Where in Hell is Hoople?”

Frazier’s fundamental decency and personal conservativeness – he was a teetotaler and a prohibitionist who regarded dancing as sinful – made farmers skeptical of the charge that the League consisted of “a bunch of radicals,” Bolshevists, and free lovers. Frazier was the least “Bolshevist” farmer in America.

One observer wrote, “Frazier is a ruddy-cheeked, broad-shouldered, quiet, plain-spoken man, a purely American product who came up from the sod house and the pioneer’s hardships and you can tell by looking at him that he is as clean as a hound’s tooth.”

Frazier brought credibility to the Nonpartisan League because he was so clearly not a professional politician. His blunt, plain-spoken, and humble manner impressed everyone but profession politicians, which was precisely the point of his nomination!

The Bowman Citizen concluded: “After listening to Mr. Frazier speak one cannot help but feel that, in choosing him to head the ticket, the farmers of this state must have been inspired, for it would have been impossible to have found another man, farmer or otherwise, with a combination of qualities that would have better fitted him for the leadership of a great agricultural state.”

As governor, he was quoted in the May 16, 1920 issue of New York Times Magazine, “In my estimation, that which we have started in North Dakota is the one hope of putting the government of the various states of the nation into the hands of the people … This change can be brought about in a true American manner by the use of the Non-Partisan ballot.”

A.C. Townley was a gifted rabble rouser, a talented political strategist, and, in the opinion of many, a demagogue. He was also a genius. After plunging into a bonanza flax farm north of Beach, North Dakota, and losing everything, Townley became a field organizer for the small North Dakota Socialist Party.

The Socialists admired Townley’s talents but concluded that he was more interested in selling memberships than in Socialist ideology. He was at loose ends in February 1915 when the he visited Bismarck at the end of a contentious North Dakota legislative session, for a meeting of the Equity Society. It was then that he realized that his organizational skills, his innovative use of technology, and his capacity as a fiery stump speaker might change the face of North Dakota.

It was the failed flax farmer, agrarian rabble rouser and prairie demagogue Arthur C. Townley who conceived the Nonpartisan League, developed its unique style and sales strategy, who stirred the farmer-citizens of North Dakota to assert their collective power between 1915 and 1922. Some of the earliest thinking about a new nonpartisan pressure group came from a man named A.E. Bowen; some of the League’s program was adapted from proposals put forward by the small North Dakota Socialist Party.

Townley was a blunt, often sarcastic leader. Ideology mattered to him much less than success. He knew that the League would only succeed if it produced tens of thousands of memberships throughout North Dakota (and beyond) and only if farmers committed their hard-earned money to the cause. “Cut out all this fine stuff and get down in the manure pile with the farmer and get the money,” he advised.

Townley and the NPL promised “a New Day in North Dakota.” For a time (1916-1921) it appeared that perhaps a farmers’ utopia was possible on the northern plains. Several contemporaries and more recent historians have argued that if it had not been for World War I, the NPL would have become a viable national farmer-labor party that might have changed the course of American history. The skeptics sneered at the idea of a “New Day,” in North Dakota or elsewhere.

Of Townley, by Ray McKaig:

“I first met A.C. Townley when I was Master of the North Dakota State Grange. As he indignantly told me how the food pirates had beaten down the price of grain just when he was ready to sell I became indignant too. He became bellicose as he told how they shoved the price up after cornering the market. I became bellicose too. Then came the appeal to ‘stick together.’ Would I stick? I was so ‘het up’ by this time that I was looking around for a stick to hit a grainpit rattler. His promotive personality inspires confidence, and irresistibly makes one a crusader against economic wrongs.”

“He is rather slow in action and exceedingly deliberate in the use of words. As he commences to talk he appears to be about five foot ten; when he finishes he seems to be about ten foot five. Rather thin in appearance, he is yet strong in physical make-up. His eyes are set deep, but they match his sarcastic drawl. His hair is dark, and his nose is rather prominent. He speaks slowly and enunciates clearly; his gestures go out after you, reaching out to tear down your refusals to agree with his ideals. His voice is expressive, strong, and resonant. As irony, sarcasm or sympathy is hurled at his crowd, his voice betrays his mood before his words articulate the thought. He is one of the great native orators of America.”