Populist Socialism Reconsidered
by Mark Evans
The late Max Scherr, Editor of The Berkeley Barb, holding court in the Mediterraneum
coffee house in the '60s, used to maintain that there were roughly eight
different kinds of socialism in the American political experience. With
the possible exception of the Black Panther Party, which received the brunt
of the CoIntelPro operation attacks during the late sixties and early seventies,
it is fair to say that the form of socialism in America that historically
received the most deadly treatment and suffered the most persecution, even
to the suppression of their literature, was the movement known as the Non-Partisan
League (1915 to 1922) that developed into the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota.
This is ironic, because the League was not an armed movement at all.
The Non-Partisan League, like Jazz, was a purely American accident. As Jazz
was a melding of Cajun (Acadian, Scotch-Irish, and French) fiddle music
with Afro-American field hollers and African thumb-harp music in the melting
pot of Louisiana at the mouth of the Mississippi River, so the League was
a produce of the miscegenation in the upper MIssissippi Valley of an indigenous,
American, Jeffersonian radicalism descended from the American revolution,
with the first wave of Fabian-Socialist ideas that hit these shores from
England, Scandinavia and the Continent, and penetrated into the Midwest,
beginning in the 1880s.
The League, first organized in 1915 in North Dakota by several socialist
organizers who had left the Socialist Party because it did not adequately
address the needs of the farmers, organized quietly and almost unnoticed
for several months. Formulating a Five-Point Platform, the League as a "non
party" party, vowed to support any candidate of any party who would
support their platform and to work against any candidate who would deny
or oppose their platform. The platform, which called for state-owned grain
elevators, a state bank, and state-owned hail and fire insurance companies
(for the spring wheat) was clearly the reflection of the agrarian concerns
of the farmers of North Dakota.
It was also the most radical and revolutionary state platform that has ever
been formulated and effectively written, enacted into law in all of American
history. From inauspicious beginnings "with an idea and a Ford,"
in the sub-zero tundra of North Dakota in the winter of 1915, the Non-Partisan
League grew and organized and quickly became a force. A marvelous book Political
Prairie Fire by Robert Morlan, published by the Minnesota Historical Society,
is must reading for all organizers who would learn the secrets of the amazing
growth of this movement.
In the populist socialism of the Non-Partisan League and the Farmer-Labor
Party, traditional monetary concerns about who controls credit and who issues
the money, central to any understanding of Jeffersonian and Lincoln-Greenback
radicalism of the nineteenth century, merged, with the near-Marxist, class-conscious,
and anti-plutocratic language of early socialism. This was before "socialism"
had become a dirty word. To the Farmer-Laborites, the first step towards
achieving the "Cooperative Commonwealth," the earthly paradise,
was to nationalize credit and the Federal Reserve Bank.
During the First World War, League candidates took, along with Debs, a principled
stand against American involvement in the war and braved rotten eggs and
tomatoes, and sometimes bullets and tarring and feathering, as well as imprisonment.
The political careers of Robert La Follette, Sr. and the elder Lindbergh
(father of the aviator), early supporters of the League, suffered severely
because of their courageous and articulate opposition to the War. The books
of the elder LIndbergh, who was the chief economic theoretician of the League
and of the Farmer-Labor Party, were suppressed by Attorney-General Palmer
in 1918. By the election of 1918, the League had captured the control of
the Republican Party in North Dakota, elected the Legislature, and elected
their candidate as governor in North Dakota. In a single session of the
State Legislature, they enacted all five planks of the platform of "State
Socialism," including the foundation of the state-owned Bank of North
Dakota, which continues to this day. The New York Times, the organ of the
ruling class, seriously alarmed, wrote in genuine trepidation (the plutes
were already cutting a deal with Lenin) of "Bolshevism on the iiPrairie."
Today the times have changed. Many of the issues have changed, though some
remain. Agribusiness, international finance, and the grain cartels have
virtually eliminated the family farm and have succeeded in lumpenizing the
farmers who were the basic interest group who organized the League and were
fully half of the Farmer-Labor Party, which became by 1932 the largest radical-left
third party yet to appear in the twentieth century, fully 15% of the entire
electorate, at the height of the movement. Crucial lessons may yet be gleaned
both from the organizational acuity and the subsequent pitfalls of this
movement.
A five-point platform today, as the basis for non-violent, revolutionary
political change on a national and global level, could address the times
and pressing needs of not only wheat farmers in the Dakotas, but of all
the common people in North America and indeed all the people of the world.
A "non-party" party, organized along the lines of the Non-Partisan
League, could wield a considerable positive influence in national and global
affairs. The following five-point program could be a possible agenda for
a resurrected Non-Partisan League of the present:
1. The federal government should issue sufficient non-interest bearing,
U.S. notes to purchase back the capital stock of the Federal Reserve Bank
from its current private owners.
2. The government of the people and by the people should henceforth, in
agreement with Article 1, Section 8, Clause 5, of the U.S. Constitution,
control its own credit by issuing non-interest-bearing greenback dollars
to pay off all outstanding government securities, bonds and notes as they
come due, but not in excess of $100,000 to any person, corporation, or trust
holding such securities. Also, there should be no further issuance of government
bonds or securities.
3. The American people, cleaving to the principles of the Constitution of
1787 and realizing the bankruptcy of imperialism and of national chauvinism,
shall henceforth avoid all foreign wars and entanglements. We refuse to
be the grunts and the soldiers for the debt collection schemes of the international
commercial banks, the International Monetary Fund, and the multinational
grain, industrial, mineral and oil cartels. We move for immediate legislation
to cancel all international debt owed to First World banks and call for
a symbolic Year of Jubilee of the release of all nations from the bondage
of debt to the World Bank/International Monetary Fund, and to the Bank for
International Settlements and to their "capital pool," the international
commercial banks.
4. Realizing that the Cold War is over and that we have few, if any, "enemies,"
who have not, as the Soviets, Red China, and Saddam Hussein, been propped
up at one time or another by our own corrupt State Department, we move to
take decisive steps to dismantle the military budget and to press towards
immediate peace-time conversion of the industrial sector towards the pressing
needs of our own decaying infrastructure and millions of homeless citizens.
5. Having nationalized credit, the government of the people must subsequently
address the issues of land reform, of nationalizing the millions of acres
given to the timber barons in 1908, negotiating with the International Indian
Treaty Council to make restitution for lands stolen from Native Americans,
and reopening the South and North-West to homesteading, rebuilding the decaying
infrastructure and inner cities of our nation, rebuilding our education
and health-education institutions, thus creating millions of well paying
jobs and creating housing for millions of homeless people who have fallen
through the cracks under the excesses of the current system.
A thousand citizen-candidates and ten thousand workers from coast to coast
can organize and win the Congress and the Senate to put over a program like
this. Will you put your own shoulder to the wheel?
Mark Evans
-- North Coast HOME -- Archives
-- Electrons to the Editor