THE STORY OF THE NONPARTISAN LEAGUE 



The League had now forty thousand members. 

 It was no longer a movement to be ignored or 

 sneered at. Forty thousand farmers voting 

 together within the dominant party could 

 control the state, and every politician knew 

 that fact only too well. For you must under- 

 stand that the state ticket acclaimed by this 

 convention related with the one exception of 

 the state treasurer to the Republican primaries 

 in June, and the nominations amounted to 

 nothing but this, that these candidates were 

 recommended to the Republicans of the state 

 as the best to be voted for at those primaries. 

 This point is important because the whole of 

 the League's tactics swung upon it. The 

 League was never a political party. It was 

 and still is no more than an organization to 

 secure the nomination of candidates whose con- 

 victions are, or are believed to be, in harmony 

 with the program of the League. In other 

 words, the farmers had adopted Townley's 

 idea that the mastery of the primaries was the 

 mastery of the state and were acting definitely 

 and deliberately upon that principle. 



It was now applied to the selection of can- 

 didates for the legislature. Each county (or 

 legislative district) had its convention, and 

 these conventions, chosen by precinct cau- 

 cuses, had the task of making the selections 

 for representative and senator. I should ex- 

 plain here that the term of a state senator in 



