55 AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



Critics of the Bureau were heard to say that the hue and cry that the 

 organization raised over parity was due not to an implicit faith in it, but 

 rather to its potentialities as a bargaining device. It could be used as a 

 club to force tariff increases on some farm commodities, obtain govern- 

 ment subsidies for others, abolish some of the corporate and labor con- 

 trols, and perhaps some day bring the major nonfarm groups back within 

 hailing distance of the free competitive system under which the farmers 

 claimed that they wanted to operate. If nothing else, the Bureau could 

 justify its right to exist. 3 



Besides the Equity, the Farmers' Union, the Nonpartisan League, and 

 the American Farm Bureau Federation, there were lesser bodies: the 

 short-lived National Producers' Alliance, the Missouri Farmers' Associa- 

 tion (a body of considerable substance), and numerous independent com- 

 modity groups like the Land O'Lakes Creameries, the Central Coopera- 

 tive Livestock Association, the business agencies of the Farmers' Equity 

 Union, the state farmers' grain dealers' associations and numerous other 

 agencies. What they advocated and accomplished was hardly different 

 from that sought by the other bodies. 



Among the political spokesmen for the region were Arthur Capper of 

 Kansas, Henrik Shipstead of Minnesota, Lynn Frazier of North Dakota, 

 the La Follettes of Wisconsin, George Norris of Nebraska, Peter Norbeck 

 of South Dakota, and others. The senior La Follette helped hand down 

 the torch of Grangerism and Populism to the succeeding generations, and 

 kept it alive after much of its effectiveness had expired. Norris, who also 

 was a carry-over from the insurgency period of the years before World 

 War I, managed to hold office until after the New Deal had ended and 

 played a big role in much of the farm legislation that was passed. Capper, 

 Shipstead, and Frazier, on the other hand, were products of the agricul- 

 tural unrest of the postwar era. Capper was the most orthodox spokesman 

 of the lot. But both Shipstead and Frazier, however, were representatives 

 of political and economic unorthodoxy when elected to office. Frazier 

 remained faithful to this minority point of view, but Shipstead, with the 

 passing of years, moved more into the orbit of conformity. 



3. Theodore Saloutos, "The American Farm Bureau Federation and Farm Policy: 

 X 933 to J 945" Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, XXVIII (March, 1948), pp. 

 3I3-33- 



