EXPANSION AND DECLINE 217 



tions through one set of executives. It is my opinion that this work of enrolling 

 members is a business function, requiring specialized training, and is inevitably 

 bound to be neglected and fail, if required of men who are at the same time 

 engaged in the business of looking after the political activities of the league. 85 



The withdrawal from power of such leaders as Townley meant that 

 the organization which had appeared with dramatic swiftness in 1915 

 was about extinct. Townley himself was perhaps the most important of 

 the few individuals who in the early days had applied to political organ- 

 ization the methods of high-pressure salesmanship. The key to the rapid 

 growth of the League, perhaps, was not its proposed remedies for financial 

 and political problems, but rather the large-scale application of the tech- 

 niques of oil-stock salesmen. As a result, the political organization formed 

 was financed from the bottom up by the rank and file rather than from 

 the top down. 



Repeated charges of mismanagement were hurled against Townley, 

 but at no time were they substantiated. There were, however, strong 

 evidences of looseness in financial bookkeeping and also an absence of 

 real responsibility on the part of the bulk of the membership. Perhaps 

 one of the strongest indictments was the readiness of the League's leader- 

 ship to embark on new ventures without the necessary experience and 

 personnel. Especially trying were the effects of the depression, beginning 

 in 1921, when the League found it impossible to continue organizing on 

 the commercial basis which had proved so successful in earlier years. 

 An annual income of some seven million dollars dwindled; large sums 

 of postdated checks could not be collected; its newspapers were sold one 

 by one; and the League as an organization had to cease functioning. 



The charge that an organization had to be built upon an economic base 

 was perhaps correct; otherwise movements like that of the League and 

 the Populists would fade out completely, as the latter did in the nineties. 

 Mass movements are of temporary duration unless founded upon an 

 economic organization that functions every day of the year; they must 

 have strong local units ; they cannot be maintained if they are to perform 

 vital functions only once every two years. 



Despite these shortcomings in organization, all the things the League 

 campaigned for were not in vain. "As in all movements," wrote one au- 



85. Ibid. 



