Non-Partisan League

The Non-Partisan League (NPL) was an independent political movement active in the United States and Canada from 1915 to the mid-1950s. Originally created in North Dakota by former members of the Socialist Party, it stood for the socialists' stated policies but tried to advance them not through the class-based socialist movement but by a broad coalition of labor, farmer, and bourgeois activists. After World War I, the NPL enjoyed major electoral and legislative successes in several midwestern and western states, and its example inspired the creation of the Progressive Party of Canada, the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, and a number of short-lived coalition labor parties.

The NPL's origins are traced to the North Dakotan socialist organizer, Arthur C. Townley, who had initiated a scheme for recruiting farmers to the Socialist Party. His Organization Department gave interested farmers the opportunity to become nonpartisan, that is, not officially affiliated adjuncts of the party. The tactic proved phenomenally successful, but it was disliked by the socialist leaders, since it did not fit in with their highly doctrinaire beliefs about the working class's advance. After the party leadership discontinued the recruitment, Townley created the Non-Partisan League to continue the work.

The NPL's program was largely derived from the Socialist Party platform, but its focus was on issues of concern to the farmers of North Dakota. It included plans for the state ownership and inspection of utilities, grain elevators, flour mills, and packing houses; the creation of rural credit banks; state hail insurance schemes; and state support to trade unions and cooperative [Page 1043]societies. All this, and the NPL's populist style, was designed to appeal to the farmers' special needs and to their grievances against grain dealers, banks, and railroad magnates, but Townley's ultimate goal remained a fully socialist transformation of North Dakota government. He opted for highly innovative electoral tactics to bring about this ultimate goal.

Rather than operating as a traditional third party, the NPL made use of the relatively new practice of holding party primaries. It ran its candidates in the primaries of whatever happened to be the dominant party in a given state. In North Dakota this was the Republican Party, and the NPL decided to attempt a takeover of that party. So successful was it that barely a year into its existence, the NPL managed to have its representatives Lynn J. Frazier and William Langer chosen as the Republican candidates, respectively, for governor and state attorney general. In the elections of 1916, not only were these men elected, but the NPL won major victories in the state assembly as well, and it ended up in control of the state government. Further victories in subsequent elections gave the North Dakota NPL a two-thirds majority in the state assembly and assured that it could translate much of its program into law. It created a state-owned bank, instituted progressive income taxation, and started workmen's compensation and low-interest, state-guaranteed loan schemes. Later, Governor Frazier tried to expand on these early achievements by working toward full-scale government ownership in North Dakota.

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