(light upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to Prairie Pulse.

Coming up a little bit later in the show we'll hear a musical performance from Dan Israel, but first, today's guest is Terry Shoptaugh, talking about his new book, Sons of the Wild Jackass.

Terry, thanks for joining us today.

- Happy to be here.

- As we get started, before we get to the book, tell the folks a little bit about yourself and your background.

- Well, like I said, earlier I said I was born and raised in Missouri.

Did some graduate work in American history up in New England, at which point I decided that having spent all of those hot summers as a child in Missouri, I'd rather come up here and put more clothes on during the winter than sweat down in Missouri, no matter what the weather was, and that just happened to work out, 'cause my wife was from Minnesota, so we came looking for a job and found it at Moorhead State University.

- Well, Terry, as I look at your book here, of course it says the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota, Sons of the Wild Jackass.

What is the NPL and how did it get started?

- Well, the Nonpartisan League, they considered many names, but they ended up with this because they wanted to say they are not following a Democratic party line or a Republican party line, and they said they were all farmers.

They wanted every member who joined the Nonpartisan League, and this is back around 1914, '15, and '16, when they were putting the operation together, they decided that they would put up the name of a farmer who people trusted.

Sometimes they were part of the legislature, sometimes they were just you know, farmers working on a small or a moderate farm, and because of their reputation for being trusted, they would say this person will go out and get changes made in the state legislature, and in the legislation, that give the farmers a better value for their grain.

Getting less than a dollar a bushel for probably the best wheat being grown in North America was something that would, you know, really draw people into the movement, and that was their idea.

They started out with a very straightforward platform they first put together, leading up to the 1916 election.

They said they wanted the state to pay for, through taxation, a state owned grain elevator that could tell them exactly how good their grain was, 'cause they said we're getting our grain graded by people at the elevators operated by the railroads, and we're getting our loans from banks that don't even consider what the quality of our work is.

And they said and then we send the grain into the mills, like General Mills or one of those places.

They're just gonna mix it all together and give us all a standard price, even though we know some of us are growing better grain than the others.

Never get between farmers when they're discussing who's a better farmer.

That's one thing you learn very quickly when you get into this research.

And so that's what they were doing.

They said this grain elevator we would get would at least get us an honest answer of the quality of our grain.

Then we want a state bank so we can develop parts of North Dakota to help agriculture, using the state bank as a way of finding investment money because traditional banks were either small local banks owned in many cases by members of the legislature, quite frankly, or they were part of branches that were run out of Chicago or out of New York.

And they said no, we need a bank that'll help farmers directly, so let's get a state bank, and then they wanted some change in hail insurance, some of those kinds of things, and they said if we get enough farmers committed to our movement, we can make those changes in the legislature ourself, and make these laws.

- Well, you said, coming from Missouri, was learning about the NPL kind of a revelation to you?

- In a sense.

I knew a lot of farming kids when I was in college.

Growing up in St. Louis, you know, I was in the first suburb ever created in north St. Louis, and by the time I was 10 years old, all that north side, all the farms were gone.

But there were plenty of kids that their grandparents were farmers, their parents had been farmers, and they talked about these things.

They talked about how they worked.

There was a song that I put in the book that the farmers would get together, and it was called The Farmer is the Man, and they had all these verses, and the verses with how they got cheated by the tax man and how they got cheated by the bank loaning them money, and how they got cheated when the guy at the elevator said well, yours is just standard grade wheat, and so we'll just give you the regular price and not the higher price.

And I know at the end, at one point, they said you know, you get so sick of it, you could die, and the last verse was the banker is the man who gets it all, that kind of thing, and they'd sing these things at protest marches.

And for three years in a row-- No, three years, I'm sorry, three terms of the legislature, so you're talking about five different years, because you know, those terms in those days crossed across two years, and they got promises from the legislature, we're gonna build you this grain elevator, and every time towards the end of the session they'd say oh, sorry, we've spent as much money as we can with the tax base.

We just can't get it done, maybe next time.

And it was on the basis of that they finally got really angry and here's this man comes along, and his name's Arthur C. Townley.

Now he had tried to make a big killing in growing flax, and he was out there in the western part of North Dakota.

He was originally born in Minnesota, but he'd gotten some land in North Dakota, he and his brother, and they were growing flax.

And he had this idea if he borrowed a lot of money, and he borrowed a lot of it from a harvesting company because they were trying to market their new harvester, so they lent him the money and so his harvesting of using that harvester for flax would advertise their equipment.

Well, he ended up owing about $30,000 for all these loans he had taken on the basis of this, and as for his flax farm, well, an early frost took care of his flax crop, and suddenly he was out of money.

Well, he tried to run for the legislature, met a fellow that was a former schoolteacher that was going around trying to organize some people in kind of a little rural socialist movement, got sort of interested in that.

He admitted later he had very little book learning.

He'd paid no attention to schooling.

I think he left school after 5th or 6th grade, but he had a gift for gab.

He had a wonderful gift for gab, and he could be a very dynamic speaker.

And he said let's put together a movement whereby we as farmers help each other, and he went around the state, he had a friend who could get him access to a lot of Model T cars, Fords, and he said let's drive around in these Fords and let's organize, and he told all of the people that were gonna make the pitch for him, he said look, the key to salesmanship's simple.

If they're religious, talk God.

He said if they're sports-minded, talk about sports in the state.

He says just keep talking and keep talking 'til you get their name on the membership card, and he had that gift for that.

Many times he'd sit in a gathering and he'd say listen, let me tell you something.

He said we've always had one idea here.

He said if you take a lawyer and you take a politician, and you take a banker, and you shove them all into a big barrel, and then you kick the barrel down the hill, he said, go down, and I'll betcha the one on top's gonna be an SOB.

And of course, he spelled that all out and they'd howl and they'd laugh, and he'd just go around.

He was a dynamic-- Some people think that maybe Elmer Gantry's character that's created by Sinclair Lewis might have been inspired a little bit, 'cause Lewis was familiar with this area when he was writing in Minnesota.

So that's a possibility, because he just had a real gift.

- What kind of research went into this book?

- Mostly what I used was there was four nice collections that I could use at either NDSU or UND.

One was the papers of William Lemke.

Now Lemke was a lawyer, trained, bright as can be, but he loved to buy land and he loved to buy it on margin.

He'd put $5000 down on something that might be $100,000 worth of land, and he was doing it in Mexico as well as in the west of the United States.

And he would never quite make that big killing.

He just loved to do that, speculate in land.

He tried to put together a colony down in Mexico.

Now that didn't help because Mexico had one of its periodic civil wars, and everybody lost everything in that land investment as a result of that, and he was piled up with debts, so he left behind his papers because he, as a lawyer, became an advisor to the Nonpartisan League once it was up and running, and he knew Arthur Townley pretty well, and so he would help him with legal issues.

So that was one collection I could use.

Then there was Bill Langer.

Now Bill Langer had gotten out of college, gone off to New York to get a second law degree, because he wanted to be a graduate of one of the top law schools in the country, and so to people he said I'm gonna be the most well-known and most popular man in North Dakota, and that was his plan.

Well, of course, he became a very notorious man, and for a time he was the most popular man in North Dakota, and then, you know, he'd end up fighting with somebody and you know the story of Bill Langer.

But he became the Attorney General under the NPL as a result of that.

Lynn Frazier was a very bright man.

He graduated from the University of North Dakota.

He was studying medicine when he gave it up, 'cause his father died suddenly and he had about six or seven siblings back home, so he went home to farm.

But he was considered one of the most trustworthy people.

If he told you he'd do something, he always did it.

He was the one they ran for governor in their first major election in 1916.

He was also, of course, the first governor to be removed by a recall procedure in 1922, and we've only had one other governor recalled that way out in California, which made Arnold Schwarzenegger the governor of California for a few years.

So that was kind of notori-- But everybody trusted Lynn Frazier, and he was the great poster for the honesty of the movement.

And then finally there was a fellow named Harry Laskowitz.

This is a guy that kinda tied it all together.

Harry Laskowitz grew up in the Ukraine.

He was still relatively a kid when his family moved to the United States.

He got into the social movement in New York City, took some classes in social justice and things like that, studied to become a social worker.

But instead he went to law school, got a law degree, and he said where can I practice law?

And they said they're looking like crazy out in the plains for lawyers, 'cause they're building new towns and new sections everywhere.

So that's what he did is he went out here, and became a lawyer, and he linked up to all of them 'cause at one time or another he did law work for all of them.

Also joined the Nonpartisan League, and he kind of patched the whole piece together because every time they ran into a legal problem they would often turn to him.

With those newspapers, some correspondence, and a little bit of oral history and some magazines, you could get a pretty good full story out of this.

- It sounds like it, but did you uncover anything that you hadn't known or interesting?

- Oh, yeah.

Going back to Bill Langer, I think, you know, this was something, and it was uncovered because it was the kind of thing-- I was an archivist, of course, at Moorhead State, and the one thing you want to do when you get a box of records from an archivist is make sure you go through every single one of them and look at them, because you don't know what's gonna be in that box.

Somebody didn't do that, and a collection, I think it's at NDSU but I'm not sure, it's in the Langer Papers, I think, and there.

It might be UND, one or the other.

But anyway, it doesn't matter.

There was a file and it was simply marked socialism, and there was like 10 more files in that box marked socialism, and when you pulled this one file out and you started looking at it, you realize that they are the reports from a private detective agency out of Chicago.

And I thought what the heck is this?

Well, these are Langer's records when he was Attorney General.

He used some of his budget to hire a detective firm to find out how many socialists there might be in the Nonpartisan League once that charge was leveled.

Since reading about Langer, he usually was looking for some kind of leverage somewhere, I'm guessing he was going to use that if he found some things, to try to either take over the movement, because he expressed interest in taking over the movement, which by the way, there was always a Nonpartisan League throughout the '40s and '50s, that pretty much was a lobbying organization for Langer's political campaigns, really.

And in those detective things, they showed these guys going around pretending to be farm workers, hiring themselves out to farmers and going into towns and asking questions, and finding out how many socialists.

They actually didn't find any socialists.

I mean, they all wrote back reports we're not finding anybody-- They said they've talked to a socialist or they've heard him speak, but they've never joined and they don't know of any group or anything like that, and then one of the detectives ended up writing a report, he said, you know, one of the things I've noticed is that the farmers aren't paying those workers very much, so they're the ones that are really being exploited.

Soon after that, I think he just packed all that stuff and threw it in a box and forgot about it.

But yes, for about four weeks people were going around acting as detectives for him.

That was a surprise.

- Terry, I understand you've got a passage marked here.

Can we ask you to read that passage for us?

- Sure, sure, I mean, this is about-- And this is what I wanted to do with the book was talk about the ordinary farmers, and through the letters and newspaper things and statements they made about how they felt their lives were going.

Well, this one involves a man in 1915, 1916, named John Wallen, and he had a small farm outside Minot.

And while he was farming, he sent a letter he wrote to his local newspaper there in Minot, and he wanted to talk about what was going on with the prices of what he was expending to run his farm, and how little he got in return from it.

As he noted from his experience, one first had to deal with the deceptive sales pitches of equipment agents.

They lie to you.

What a surprise.

Then he had to figure out how to finance a tractor.

It was dangerous, he wrote, for a man to mortgage his farm to the last farthing.

I think it's fascinating they throw in the word farthing in the middle of this.

To spend your last farthing to buy traction engines.

These new machines would help him expand his planting and speed up the harvest, but the higher interest on his total debt to get the machine would offset the, what he called total benefit that a farmer might get from the transaction.

So you're sitting down saying, you can see a farmer do this today, should we get a new tractor this year?

What's that going to do with what we can possibly get in return for our crop?

And Wallen advised against financing a tractor as a result until the state was willing to give more help with lower taxes.

Well, I can't think of a human being today that couldn't relate to the story of well, maybe we could do a little bit more with our lives if we could have some lower taxes.

I mean, you know, and this is across the span of a hundred years when this man wrote this.

And it was this kind of thing, these kinds of things in these passages that I found.

As I said, later on they were doing all sorts of things in the way of they created a series of stores that they called NPL stores, and they were going to sell you your farm needs in these stores for a lower price.

That was one way they could raise money.

They were charging the farmers only $6 a year to be a member of the NPL.

Townley was looking for greater money.

He was hoping to be elected possibly governor of Minnesota in his home state.

He started living in Minnesota after the first few years.

He wanted to be the boy who came home and had made good.

He got into an investment, and this was where he really got into trouble.

He decided that down in Florida they were starting to use land to grow sisal.

Now that's what you make some pretty good quality twine with and so he started investing in land down in Florida.

Unfortunately he was using membership dues money for doing that out of a bank that was here in Fargo, the Scandinavian American Bank, and then he took out a loan from the Scandinavian Bank on the basis of his being the president and having all these dues on hand in the treasury.

And he didn't understand much about what it takes to grow sisal, so that thing all went bust and he had to declare bankruptcy, which is where the real scandal came out in 1919, 1920, that caused many of the farmers to kinda turn away.

The other reason some of them kinda turned away by the end of the decade from the NPL is that-- And it might just be that this was all coincidental, 'cause there's several passages that I could quote from from the book that-- You have to remember, though, they started this right at the beginning of World War I. Woodrow Wilson immediately mandated some kind of minimal floor to the cost of selling your grain, because they needed to grow grain, not just because they're in war, but because they knew they were going to have to feed so much of Europe during and after the war.

Wilson mandated that the price of grain go up, and it would remain up during the course of the entire war.

And in fact, they kept it going for two years after the war.

After the war was over, the price of grain dropped below a dollar a bushel again.

But it may be that the greatest benefit came from the war and not the NPL, although the NPL did get that state bank that they still use today, and how many things have they created in the state using that state bank?

They did get that grain elevator, and that grain milling operation that the state relies on even today.

They did get changes in the insurances.

They did learn to treat the farmers with more respect because who else votes in North Dakota, but farmers?

Little other things that happened to it, they put a woman on their board the last few years.

There was a Mrs. Fisher, and I can't remember her first name at the moment, but she joined the board because the women were already organizing the rallies, organizing the picnics, going out and getting new members, talking to people.

They even talked to schoolteachers and things about supporting the Nonpartisan League, so that actually forwarded the women's movement in the state of North Dakota, so there was a lot of fallout from this, and much of it worked to the benefit of the state.

- Yeah, Terry, we're about to run out of time here, but what's been the reaction to the book so far?

- Well, as I said, you know, it's been kind of odd because it came out right before Christmas, and so we've done some things through Zoom and through the internet, but I've gotten some pretty good feedback from other historians.

I think there's been a couple of good reviews.

I don't really know how many copies we've sold, but that's okay.

I write these things-- You don't write these things to make money.

You find a good story that's worth preserving and you write it for that reason.

- Well, I understand you've written some other books.

Do you have anything next, real quick here?

- Well, yeah, I wrote that book on Herman Stern, of course, and you know, and then another one on the 164th Infantry.

Right now I'm tying on something maybe about the 1997 flood.

There have been books on it, but not a real human interest book that really talks about the actual stress of being in the middle of that flood.

I'm kinda toying with that.

- Well, if people are interested in, of course, the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota, Sons of the Wild Jackass, where can they go, where can they find the book?

- Oh, there's some over there at Zandbroz.

I know there's some out at-- I've forgotten what their names are out there in Fargo, the bookstore out there.

You can also contact NDSU, 'cause they're the publisher, and if you contact their publications office, which is easy to find in their directory, they'll get you a box of books and bring it over to you if you want that many.

So they'll be delighted to do that.

- All right, well, Terry, thanks for joining us today.

- Well, thank you, I enjoyed doing it.

- Stay tuned for more.

(soft music) Dan Israel is a Minnesota singer-songwriter who has been creating folk rock for over two decades.

The music he performs is a mix of sweet melodies and infectious hooks.

Here he is performing Ain't Gonna Let the World.

(guitar strumming) ♪ I ain't gonna let the world get me down ♪ ♪ Stepped outside after the pouring rain ♪ ♪ Trees in the clouds and the sky ♪ ♪ On the ground said no to the sorrow ♪ ♪ No to the pain ♪ ♪ Saying no to the sorrow ♪ ♪ No to the pain ♪ ♪ I walked in the night ♪ ♪ To the sidewalk without a sound ♪ ♪ Lit by the streetlight ♪ ♪ Feeling the strength ♪ ♪ Most of the time I can get by, get around ♪ ♪ Then come tomorrow, I'll do it again ♪ ♪ This life ♪ ♪ Ain't disjointed ♪ ♪ Of course ♪ ♪ I'm disappointed ♪ ♪ For now ♪ ♪ I can take it ♪ ♪ Today ♪ ♪ I can make it ♪ ♪ I ain't gonna let the world make me cry ♪ ♪ Only got myself, can't help the rest ♪ ♪ Stood in the field with the birds ♪ ♪ Way up in the sky ♪ ♪ Done all that I could ♪ ♪ Gave it my best ♪ ♪ Done all that I could ♪ ♪ Gave it my best ♪ ♪ It was found ♪ ♪ And I lost it ♪ ♪ It's the sound ♪ ♪ Of someone exhausted ♪ ♪ Good will ♪ ♪ That you burn through ♪ ♪ Sometimes you don't know ♪ ♪ Who to turn to ♪ (guitar strumming) ♪ I ain't gonna let the world get me down ♪ ♪ Stepped outside after the pouring rain ♪ ♪ Trees in the clouds and the sky ♪ ♪ On the ground said no to the sorrow ♪ ♪ No to the pain ♪ ♪ Saying no to the sorrow ♪ ♪ No to the pain ♪ (guitar strumming) - Well, that's all we have for Prairie Pulse this week, and as always, thanks for watching.

(soft upbeat music)