154 AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



rains soon followed, however, and as a result those who had been associ- 

 ated with him prospered. 



After spending a year wandering to the Pacific Coast, Townley returned 

 to North Dakota to try raising flax in the Golden Valley, where returns 

 from farming were very high. 19 During two fairly successful seasons, he 

 expanded his holdings beyond what might be termed sound economic 

 practice, and soon came to be known as the "flax king." Land agents 

 pointed him out as a successful farmer, but this reputation was short-lived : 

 his third farming year, 1912, proved disastrous. The payments on the ad- 

 ditional land and machinery that he had purchased could not be made, 

 for the season was dry, the harvest small, and the prices low. Townley 

 himself attributed his failure to the speculators and the "grain gamblers," 

 and disclaimed any responsibility on his part for his mishaps. This point 

 of view soon found its way into the "campaign of education" of the Non- 

 partisan League. Inefficient farm management and weather hazards as 

 causes for small crops, low prices, and small incomes had no place in 

 Townley 's thinking. The farmer was not at all responsible for the condi- 

 tions under which he farmed. 



Townley's failure at farming drove him headlong into the Socialist 

 camp. North Dakota was a state fertile for the spreading of discontent and 

 the sowing of Socialist propaganda. Commercial wheat farming had 

 brought the farmer into direct relation with the organized grain trade, 

 financial institutions, the railroads, and the town merchants. 20 Agricultural 

 discontent was accentuated by the semiarid conditions prevailing in a 

 large part of the state, for the farmers were not familiar with the existing 

 climatic hazards, or else they were indifferent to them and to the need of a 

 diversified agriculture to insure some income regardless of weather con- 

 ditions. 21 The Socialists capitalized on these conditions; they held meet- 



19. Gaston, The Nonpartisan League, pp. 49-50. 



20. James E. Le Rossignol, What is Socialism? (New York, 1921), pp. 239-40; 

 Meyer Jacobstein, "The Aldrich Banking Plan," University of North Dakota, 

 Quarterly Journal, III (January, 1913), pp. 154-56. 



21. Wheat farmers repeatedly were warned against the disastrous consequences 

 of single-crop farming. In 1889, for instance, Dakota farmers were advised: "There 

 is money in gardening, in poultry and eggs, in butter and cheese, and a score of other 

 things which seem trifling to a man who harvests 3,000 or 4,000 bushels of dollar 

 wheat, but supposing there is a hot wind, a lack of rain or a frost? The man who 



