James Thomas Milton Anderson (July 23, 1878 – December 29, 1946) was the fifth premier of Saskatchewan and the first Conservative to hold the office.

In the 1929 election, the Conservatives were able to exploit patronage scandals surrounding the Liberal government of Saskatchewan Premier James Garfield Gardiner to achieve a major breakthrough by winning 24 seats.

Anderson was accused of working closely with the Ku Klux Klan, which was a major force in the province in the late 1920s and the early 1930s with an estimated 25,000 members.

[citation needed] With few Blacks in the province, and First Nations largely confined to Indian reserves under the informal pass system, the focus of the Klan was against immigration, Catholics, and francophones;[1] as well as opposition to the Gardiner Liberals, who were seen as supporting all three of those groups.

The Anderson government also had to face the onset of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, which destroyed the province's agrarian economy.

Those efforts were insufficient, and in the 1934 elections, the Conservatives lost every seat in the legislature and remained a minor party for 40 years.

[2] Anderson led the Conservatives to a much improved result in the 1929 election, being only eight seats short of a majority in a hung parliament.

Gardiner chose to face the Assembly in hopes of obtaining sufficient support from some of the opposition members to maintain his government.

Anderson was Premier for almost five years and led the Conservatives into the 1934 election, at the depths of the Great Depression and Dirty Thirties.