Nonpartisan League

On behalf of small farmers and merchants, the Nonpartisan League advocated state control of mills, grain elevators, banks, and other farm-related industries in order to reduce the power of corporate and political interests from Minneapolis and Chicago.

[2] Progressive Era Repression and persecution Anti-war and civil rights movements Contemporary By the 1910s, the growth of left-wing sympathies was on the rise in North Dakota.

[3] In 1914, Arthur C. Townley, a flax farmer from Beach, North Dakota, and organizer for the Socialist Party of America, attended a meeting of the American Society of Equity.

[3] The League began to grow in 1915, at a time when small farmers in North Dakota felt exploited by out-of-state companies.

[4] Rumors spread at a Society of Equity meeting in Bismarck that a state representative named Treadwell Twichell had told a group of farmers to "go home and slop the hogs."

He had been instrumental in previous legislative reforms to rescue the state from boss rule by McKenzie and the Northern Pacific Railroad around the start of the 20th century.

Proposing that the state of North Dakota create its own bank, warehouses, and factories,[4] the League, supported by a populist groundswell, ran its slate as Republican Party candidates in the 1916 elections.

After the 1918 elections, in which the NPL won full control of both houses of the state legislature, the League enacted a significant portion of its platform.

[4] However, the NPL's initial success was short-lived, as a drop in commodity prices at the close of the war, together with a drought, caused an agricultural depression.

However, the populist undercurrent that fueled its meteoric growth revived with the coming of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl conditions of the 1930s.

The Democratic-Nonpartisan League Party introduced a unified slate of candidates for statewide offices and adopted a liberal platform that included the repeal of the Taft–Hartley Act, creation of a minimum wage of $1.25 an hour, and a graduated land tax on property worth $20,000 or more.