302 FARMERS' ORGANIZATIONS 



a platform. The background of the movement is both economic 

 and political. 



Economic Background. The movement began in North 

 Dakota in 1915, as a culmination of ten or fifteen years of agitation 

 on the wheat marketing question. By the year 1915 North Dakota 

 ranked second only to Kansas as a wheat producing State. But 

 unlike Kansas, the Dakota wheat was not milled within the State ; 

 it was shipped chiefly to two Minnesota points to Duluth for 

 export, or to Minneapolis for milling. Hence the weighing, 

 inspecting, grading, and docking, were all done by interests 

 entirely outside the control of the North Dakota farmer or the 

 North Dakota government. And to the North Dakota farmer, 

 price fixing on his wheat seemed to be done autocratically and 

 arbitrarily by the Minneapolis and Duluth Grain Exchanges. In 

 such cases, the farmer always feels a sense of voiceless helplessness, 

 a sense of indignation and resentment, and a sense of rebellion. 

 It is now a matter of economic history that the weighing, inspec- 

 tion and grading of grain by the State of Minnesota had for many 

 years been done in a fair and efficient manner; that the old arbi- 

 trary margin of 8 or 10 cents a bushel on the farmer's grain, fixed 

 and taken by the big line elevator companies, had given place, 

 thanks to the hundreds of farmers' elevators, to a narrow competi- 

 tive margin; and that the price of wheat was fixed on a world-wide 

 market outside of and beyond all the Grain Exchanges of the 

 United States. But the North Dakota settlers, pioneering, de- 

 pending on one crop, had come to feel that they were the victims 

 of injustice in wheat marketing. All their discontent was focussed 

 on this one point. Leaders, selfish and otherwise, had created the 

 belief that the simple remedy for the injustice was in a terminal 

 elevator or number of terminal elevators, owned and operated by 

 the State. The voters amended the State Constitution a four- 

 years process to enable the Legislature to provide the terminal 

 elevator. The Legislature refused to pass a terminal elevator law. 

 This was the crowning " injustice," the farmers felt, for their 

 years of hope and effort, and the whole farming population of the 

 State was plunged into a state of anger. It counted for naught 

 that the business members of the legislature, after an impartial 

 survey and discovery of several terminal elevators for sale at half 

 price, had decided that the venture was too risky for experimenta- 

 tion with public funds. At this juncture a group of organizers 

 of the Socialist party left that party and began a most vigorous 

 organization of a farmers' Socialist party under the name of the 



