NONPARTISAN LEAGUE! BEGINNINGS 155 



ings, sold literature, and canvassed the farming areas for membership. 22 

 The Socialist party of North Dakota was a fairly well organized unit 

 from 1908 to 1914, despite the predominance of agricultural population 

 in the state, and the party's influence was greater than its membership 

 figures would indicate. As early as 1908 it had adopted a platform em- 

 bodying the chief features of the Nonpartisan League, calling for state- 

 owned elevators and mills, credit banks, and a system of state-owned and 

 operated hail insurance. At Minot, a center of radical activities, the So- 

 cialists published the Iconoclast, which repeatedly urged the farmers 

 to organize for political action. 23 It saw the American Society of Equity 

 movement as a step in the direction of socialism but hardly sufficient to 

 achieve the goal the Socialists desired. "We recognize the Equity as well 

 as every other radical organization or movement, no matter what its 

 name or label as a social force, and therefore a part of the great process of 

 social evolution which will result in the eventual socialization of the na- 



puts all his eggs in one basket is liable to go smash." Frank H. Hagerty, The State 

 of North Dakota, The Statistical, Historical and Political Abstract (Aberdeen, 

 S. Dak., 1889), p. 61. 



The dairy commissioner's report for 1910 indicated that the failure to practice 

 diversified farming in the state was not because of ignorance or indifference, but be- 

 cause of conditions that were difficult to overcome. The commissioner said, "When 

 we consider the early settlement of this state at a time when it was possible to secure 

 large tracts of land either by purchase at a nominal price, or through governmental 

 regulations, and realize that the great majority of farmers have large farms, that 

 diversified farming means building fences, barns, arranging for pastures and foods 

 for live stock, that it calls for better and a higher grade of help, that it means more 

 labor must be added to the farm, that there will be no months of leisure, and that 

 the size of the farm practically prohibits their handling it in the most approved 

 methods advocated by scientific agricultural experts, we realize more fully what it 

 means for the grain farmer to take up diversified farming. It is not wholly prejudice, 

 but a condition, that confronts them. . . ." Biennial Report of the Dairy Commis- 

 sioner to the Commissioner of Agriculture and Labor, 1910, p. 8. 



22. Arthur Le Sueur, "The Nonpartisan League" (unpublished manuscript in 

 the Minnesota Historical Society), p. 2; Iconoclast (Minot, N. Dak.), July 17, 1914. 

 Beecher Moore was a pioneer Socialist in North Dakota. 



23. Ibid. See Frederick E. Haynes, Social Politics in the United States (Boston, 

 1921), pp. 204-8, for the distribution of political strength of the Socialists in the 

 nation. Minot was the headquarters for the North Dakota Socialists. State of North 

 Dakota Legislative Manual, 1913, pp. xxiii, 265-67. See also Le Sueur, "The Non- 

 partisan League," pp. 1-2. 



