The Nonpartisan Leader Newspaper, March 4, 1918, Page 12

I | 1 It [ i \uear as I can learn. : ‘'NORTH DAKOTA'S LIGNITE ~Townley’s Speech at Blackfoot, Idaho -North Dakota’s Start Toward Political and Industrial Democracy— OLLOWING is the principal portion of the address of A. C. Townley, president of the National Nonpartisan league, delivered to an audience of nearly 2,000 farmers at Blackfoot, Idaho, January 16. Standing room was at a premium in the big haill in which the meeting was held. : Mr. Townley talked for a time about political and industrial democracy, explaining. that while 1F THEY LIL ABOUT YOU THEYLL LIE ABOUT Mt Have you ever néticed that the same papers that are fighting the farmers are the ones that are fight- ing President Wilson and the government (print- ing Roosevelt’s attacks, etc.)? This farmer has noticed it and is calling Uncle Sam’s attention to the fact. the people elect the president of the United States, they don’t elect the president of the Standard Oil or of the milling and packing trusts. Then he said: We have gotten quite .a little ways in the state of North Dakota toward the work of breaking the industrial autocracy. For 26 or ‘30 years we were . ~asleep politically. We voted for whoever they told us to vote for and it didn’t make any difference whether we voted for a Democrat or a Republican, we found ourselves in about the same place after election. 3 : ™ We were a good deal like the Irishman’s pig. The Irishman had a pig that learned how to get through a hollow log from his pen into the corn field, and- for a long time the Irishman could not undeistand it. He would go out and get the pig and pit him * back in the pen, and then the pig would get out into the corn field again. He kept that up for weeks, - until he had the farmer pretty much worried, ands finally the farmer found the log, and he turned both ends of the log inside the pig pen, and for - days the pig would scoot, through the log, but would always find himself in the pen. (Applause and laughter). Now, it took that pig about a week - to learn that tliere was no use. (Laughter). It took the farmers in North Dakota 25 years to find it out. (Applause). But we finally learned the lesson, and 1 guess that you have been having some. experience at the -same time that we were getting ours, as COAL; HOW IT IS- HANDLED 1 want to tell you something about the work of this organization in North Dakota. I want to tell you how we come to start it and why, some of the difficulties we oyercome, and how we overcome them, some of the enemies we met and what they looked like, so you will know them ‘yourselves when you see them down here. But I must tell you some- thing about the state of North Dakota.. In’' North -Dakota we don’t raise sugar beets; we don't raise .apples to amount to anything; very little fruit; we don’t mine any,.coal; we don't even mine the coal that we have got there. You know, we are a funny kind of people in Nerth Dakota. There are seven hundred billion tons of lignite coal in the state of North Dakota, but for the last 25 years we have . been hauling our coal from Pennsylvania, and I 2 g 3 3 e SR SR I e e AR s A e L\ e £ PV P 6 A8 S on s A T3 5 R L T S e e e The Need for Organization presume if the railroads hadn't been taken over by the government, and had it their own way for the next 25 years, we would have kept on hauling our coal from Pennsylvania until the Pennsylvania coal run out, and then we would ship that in North Da- kota back to Pennsylvania. (Applause.) You know that railroads are strong for the long haul, and it is a good haul from Pennsylvania to North Dakota, but we are going to make a change. In North Dakota'we don’t even mine our coal. We raise one principal crop, and that is wheat. We raise about 100,000,000 bushels every normal year in North Dakota. Sometimes we raise as much as 150,000,000 bushels of wheat. We raise more wheat in North Dakota than any other state in the United States. It is a wheat producing state. SOME RAISE WHEAT AND 'SOME JUST HANDLE IT “" 1 said in North Dakota we RAISE wheat. That is all we have to do with it. After we raise it, we turn it over to the grain trust—I don’t know who the' fellow is out here; it isn’'t Mullen, is it—we turn our grain over to the grain trust to handle for us, and we haven’'t been getting along very well ] ", in North Dakota, that is, financially. The farmers are $300,000,000 in debt. You can’t hardly believe that. We were not that much in debt when we filed on the land. The Indians were never that much in debt, but we are more progressive than the Indians were. (Laughter.) We are doing great things in North Dakota. Three ‘hundred million dollars in debt, and going farther in every year, in spite of the fact that the average family raises enough wheat one.year to feed the family 50 years. This sounds almost like vaudeville, don’t it? There is a grest difference between “rais- ing” anything that you farmers produce and “hand- ling” it. You never heard a farmer “handling” any- thing, have you? -~ ', . B TThere is a great ‘difference between RAISING potatoes and HANDLING potatoes. I am going to make this perfectly plain to you. Now you put the potatoes in-the’ cellaz:;:-;,gn the fall; ‘take them out in the spring and cut them up into seed; take them out into. the field; plow; drag and disc, and get the potato. bed ready for the potatoes; you plow a fur- row; you drop the potatoes in there, and cover them up; you drag, and’ cultivate; you pull and hoe ' the weeds; pick, kick and poison:the potato bug, and in the fall you plow them up, pick them up, put ° them in a basket, carry them and put them in a pile—that is the.way we do it-in North Dakota; maybe you have a different way out here. You do ‘that in the fall, if you get any potatoes; you haul “them and put them in' the cellar, or warchouse, and; £ later shovel them- 'o}_it and put.them*on the box ear,-. . and" then. somebody -else ;' begins -to -“handle” the “ ‘potatoes. Up to.that time all you have been doing is “raising” the ‘pota oes. They make more HAND: " LING one bushel than you-make RAISING ten. S WHAT THE FARMERS LEARNED FROM DOCTOR WORST Remember, the next time you break a calf to drink out of a pail, and you catch his head between vour legs and jam his head down in the bucket, and _ wrestle with him for 25 or 30 minutes, remember, you are not “handling” the calf—you are just “rais- ing” him.- (Laughter.) After vou have worked for three years “raising” thim, someone else will'begin to “handle” him. (Applause)~ = - i ~ What was true of our potatoes, AND IS TRUE OF YOUR. POTATOES, was true éspgglalls"-bf the " wheat we raised in North Dakotd..We:went in debt to raise this 100,000,000 bushels of wheat in North Dakota, We have up there, Dr. Worst, who was for 25 vears the head of our farm school. Three years ago he told us that he had discovered something about the business of producing wheat and Dr. Worst stood on the platform in the auditorium in the city of Fargo and proved to the farmers of the state of North Dakota that if we would learn how to con- duct our own business, if we would, instead of turn- ing our wheat over to the elevators—the grain trust’ —to ‘handle it for-us; if we would grind the wheat into flour, bran and shorts, and keep the screen- _ings at home and feed the by-produqts to. cattle, - and market the cattle, and market our wheat as flour, instead of marketing the whole thing as wheat, he proved to us that we would get $55,000,000 a - ¢ PAGETWELVE » vear more out of our wheat crop. He proved it to us in black and white; and no newspaper man, poli- tician, nor enemy of the farmers’' organization up there has undertaken to prove that he was not right. Now, that $55,000,000 per year would be about $1,200 for every son-of-a-gun of a farmer in North Dakota. —fApplause.) y HOW THE NONPARTISAN LEAGUE WAS STARTED I want to tell you that that $1,200 looks awfully good to us, because $1,200 is more than we got up there for working ten years, on the average. Now the discovery that we could get that much out of the wheat crop, if we would get up on our hind legs and manage our business, is what started the Nonpartisan league. When we learned that we went to the legislature, and we asked the legislature, the state government, to build a terminal elevator and flour mill in the state of North Dakota, so that we could market our wheat as flour, instead of as wheat, s0 we could handle our own wheat. Well, the people at two successive elections had voted by overwhelm- ing majorities authorizing the legislature to build these terminal elevators, but the legislature always forgot all about it. One thing, however, that the legislature did do: It authorized the board of control in the state of North Dakota to investigate the practicability of building a state owned elevator and flour mill, and the board of control went down to Minneapolis and St. Paul, and interviewed the fellows that were making ¢he $55,000,000 and then said that it would not be a good plan to build any, (Applause.) They actually reported, 'giving the opinions of the men who had been getting the $55,000,000; proving to us. that it was bad business to establish a terminal elevator. They had run the state of North Dakota so long that they had come to the conclusion that they would always run it, and when, 300 farmers gathered at Bismarck, urging the legislature to save this money for the state, the leaders of the opposition told the farmers to go and slop their - pigs, and then the jig was up. al ' 0e SLOPPED THE PIGS AND ' SLAPPED THE HOGS, TOO "We went home, not to spend all the time in slop- ping the pigs, however, We got ready to “slap the hog” and not slop the pig. (Laughter.) So we set. out to build this organization. I happened to be the + craziest man in the bunch of farmers that wanted the organization. I came to them with the story and plan for organizing all the farmers in the state of North Dakota in one year to win the government of the “state. What do you think of that?.I don't see how I did it. Neither myself or anybody else ‘could believe it. We heard them say that the farm- ers would not stiqk; that they would not stand to- i1s Baer’s pen-a-traitor? Ask Big Biz and the Kaiser. It is pen-a-traiting them. Whether . they see the point or not they. certainly feel it, and that ex- plains the fight that they try to make against the farmers’ congressman, g e