THE STORY OF THE NONPARTISAN LEAGUE 



should marry" and providing pretended penal- 

 ties for women that should refuse offers of 

 marriage from such suitors. No attention 

 was paid to this apparent outburst of bovine 

 humor, and the incident was quickly for- 

 gotten. In the campaign it was dragged up, 

 twisted, incredible as this may seem, into a 

 bill to nationalize women, and the whole 

 country was informed through the press 

 agencies that the League had sanctioned and 

 introduced a measure to make women state 

 property. The man that designed this 

 measure appeared in the campaign as a 

 strenuous opponent of the League, a fact 

 that spread some doubt as to the merely 

 humorous purport of his effort. Anyway, 

 the newspapers, orators, and others fighting 

 the League always omitted to say anything 

 about a humorous intent. According to them 

 the League had plunged to the depths of 

 moral degradation, for here was proof that it 

 was imitating what they had been led to 

 believe was a practice of the Bolshevists. 



The other incident was just as extravagant 

 and still more hurtful to the League's cam- 

 paign. From the beginning its opponents had 

 said that it stood for the state ownership of 

 all farm lands, and had tried unsuccessfully 

 to read this purpose into its declarations about 

 taxation and the like. Some one now pre- 

 pared and printed a fictitious dispossess notice 



286 



