Chapter VI 



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THE NONPARTISAN LEAGUE 

 BEGINNINGS 1 



THE NONPARTISAN LEAGUE was organized in North Dakota in 1915, 

 and was thus a contemporary of the Equity. It differed sharply from 

 the older society in a number of ways: it originated in the region where it 

 was to score its greatest successes; it placed chief emphasis on political as 

 opposed to economic action; and it was deeply influenced by the Socialist 

 movement and by organized labor. Like the Equity, however, it was or- 

 ganized in an era of rising farm prices, and it appealed most to the dis- 

 contented spring wheat growers who lived in the northern part of the 

 western Middle West. Eventually the League helped decimate the ranks 

 of the Equity, but when the League, in turn, went into a decline, the 

 Farmers' Union, an order more like the Equity than like the League, 

 moved in to fill the vacuum. Throughout these years the example of the 

 Canadian wheat farmers, who had successfully carried their fight against 

 the organized grain trade to a sympathetic government, greatly influenced 

 the action of the American farmers across the border. 2 Mindful, also, of 

 the success with which organized labor waged war against unemploy- 



1. This chapter is reprinted in the main from Theodore Saloutos, "The Rise of 

 the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota, 1915-1917," Agricultural History, XX 

 (January, 1946), pp. 43-61. 



2. Harald S. Patton, Grain Growers' Cooperation in Western Canada (Cam- 

 bridge, Mass., 1928), pp. 114-17; Louis A. Wood, A History of Farmers' Movements 

 in Canada (Toronto, 1924), pp. 199-201. 



