The Bismarck tribune. [volume] (Bismarck, N.D.) 1916-current, 1917-01-20
North Dakota's Farmer Revoh
From Literary Digest

I This was in 1910. But combination
of circumstances, including crop fail
ure, caused q complete collapse of his
| ambitious venture, and he and his
wife packed up few belongings and
abandoned the farm with its stock and
machinery to the creditors.
Work Singled Handed.
After this Townley farmed in a
much smaller way in different parts
of the state, even at times, 1t is said,
working as a farmland. But in all
this time he never ceased to preach
the doctrine OF political and industrial
independence to his neighbOrs. He
attended farmers conventions and
addressed them on occasion, but for
the most part he confined his prOpa-
ganda to personal conversations, UNI
I'll he had come to be known through
out the state as the foremost eXpon-
ent of those politico-social ideas
which the nonpartisan leagues pro-
gram embodies. The farmers said OF
him that he was the first North Da-
kOta farmer to lose enough to care
Townley attended the Farmers Con-
vention in Bismarck in the early
spring of 1915, which insisted that the
legislature take advantage of the con-
stitutional amendment passed the year
before and establish a state-OWned
terminal elevator within the state. The
legislature not only refused to do
this, but repealed the small tax pro-
vided two years before to raise mon
ey for the. erection OF an elevator.
The farmers were furious, we are told,
and ont OF their fury was born the
nonpartisan league. BY right OF per-
sonality Townley became its head but
he declined to run for state office, as
did every other officer and organizer
of the league. lest the sincerity of
his efforts be challenged and we are
told that he worked as "only lean,
wiry, stoop- shouldered American, with
a hook nose and clOse-set eyes can
work" When the opposition had wax
ed up sufficient to put up a fight,
Townley was the main point of attack
on his record as the "dethroned flax
king" The league program was large
ly ignored. but Townley could stand
it, and now he is the boss OF the
state
{. 20 "Ioen scope.
Propa ganda of the league is to be
carried on in four more states-loWa,
Nebraska Michigan and Wisconsin,
and press dispatches inform us this is
the reason the leagues headquarters
have been removed from Fargo, N.
D., to St. Paul. They quote President
Townley as saying that North Dakota,
South Dakota, Minnesota and Mon
tana are already being organized,
while the same work will later be ex-
tended to the Pacific Coast states, the
Southwest and the extreme South, and
we read that the plans Of the league
as stated by him
"call for strict state supervision OF
marketing conditions and public own
ership of important industries which
relate to the marketing OF the farm
er's products, such as grain elevators,
by which it is proposed to establish
fair system of grades and market
ing, packing houses, cold-storage
plants and flour mills.
ultimately we shall have Federal
ownership Of grain elevators and 9TH
er important and necessary adjuncts
to marketing, which are now controll-
ed by monopoly to the great injury
Of every citizen Of the United States,
consumers OF farm products as we'll as
farmers"
Dispatches inform us also that the
league expects to become eventually
the dominant political factor through
out the Middle West and Far West.
The New York World observes that
mot one of these class parties ever
enacted a class idea," although they
are full of weird notions" They all
die and the old parties, accepting
what is reasonable in their demands,
live on. In proof, this journal re-
calls that the first farmers party was
the Changers of the seventies; they
were followed by the Farmers ALI
ance of the eighties, and they in turn
by the Peoples party in the nineties.
The league "voices long-standing
protest against market conditions con-
trolled by powerful combinations in
the larger cities and The World goes
on to say that if North Dakota under
its government by and for farmers
can proftably perform all the propos-
ed services for itself, it is expected
that the old parties will disappear,
but We are reminded that
Similar hopes were entertained in
the cases of the Grange, the Alliance,
and Popu1ism, but, that was not the
way things worked. The Grange was