The Nonpartisan Leader Newspaper, March 4, 1918, Page 13

-9 1 gether.. we kept-at them. We put organizers in .the field, and said to the farmers: “Here, now. You are a Democrat. You have been voting as a Democrat all your life. Your neighbor has been voting all his life as Republican, and an- other neighbor as a Socialist, and another voting as a Bull Mooser, but the trouble with us is that it don’t make any difference which party is in power, we are 'in the same boat. We don’t get anywhere.” We proved to the farmers that it didn’t make any difference whether you were a Democrat or a Re- publican when you took your wheat to town, the elevator man didn’t ask you whether you were a Democrat or a Republican, -but he says: “Wheat went down ten cents a bushel this morning.” (Ap- plause.) 5 When you go in to buy some bacon, the butcher don’t ‘ask you whether you are a Democrat or a Republican. He says: “Thirty-seven cents a pound,” and you pay it. So we ‘said the thing -for us to do .- is to go out and pick some good men who will go to the legislature, men whose friends live in the state of North Dakota; men who are not so well ‘acquainted with the manipulators outside of the state. What we want to do is elect men for office who don’t know anybody outside the state of North Dakota; farmers, and men. who understand the problems of [farming, 1 § NEED MONEY TO FIGHT . FORCES OF BIG BUSINESS So the farmers he said: “I guess you are right.” We said: “See here, now, it costs money to build up a political orgq.nization, and we want you to scratch your name down here and pay $16 as a membership fee, $8 a year for the two years, to carry it along and pay the expense.” That was when they bucked. They said: “Sixteen dol- lars!” ] You know, the farmers of North Da- kota haven’t been in the habit of con- tributing to the campaign fund, I mean, that they haven’t been in the habit of contributing to the campaign fund in a way sc that they would notice it. They contributed all right. They paid more than $16 EVERY YEAR but they didn’t notice it. YOU CAN DO ANY- THING TO A FELLOW, IF HE DON'T NOTICE IT. When we come to get- ting the $16, picking it right out of - their pockets, to pay the expense of the organization, you bet your bottom dollar they noticed THAT in good shape. U - s They said: “Sixteen dollars; 40,000 farmers; that is an awful lot of money.” ; “Yes,” we said, “that is an awful lot oi-money. It looks like a lot of money to you, but it is because you are not used to handling very much.” (Laugh- ter and applause.) We said to them: “It is only a very small part—it would be around a half. million dollars—it is a very small part of $65,000,000 we are losing,” but a lot of them couldn’t un- der stand. They couldn’t understand that we were losing $55,000,000. Lots of them come right in; whole town- ships, as fast as we come to them. = I am talking about the man that was hard to get. These men couldn’t understand that we were losing $55,000,000. They said: “It is more money than we got for our 'wheat; $1,200 is more than we got.” MUSTARD. SEED AND WILD OATS CLEAR PROFIT We said: “Perhaps so, but look here, when you take a load of wheat up to the elevator, they dock you.” Yes, yes, the farmers could junderstand that. They have the habit in North® Dakaia of docking the farmers’ wheat. If we should take 50 bushels ‘of wheat in the house, scatter it out on the floor . and get all the kids busy, and hand pick it, and then scour it and dry it, and put it back in the sacks and take it to the elevator, they would dock us a pound to the bushel anyway. Yes, they say they would. Ve ey : 5 They say-they have got to do it. It is a principle they don’t want to relinquish for a moment. (Laugh- ter.) They always dock us, and if we take in some cracked wheat, they dock us for the cracked wheat; if we have any flax in the wheat, they dock us for the flax;, and if we take in flax with wheat in it, ‘they dock us for the wheat. It is a 'principle with them, and even though mustard is worth more than $17 a bushel, they don’t pay us a penny for it. --Mustard is worth over five times as much as wheat and they don’t pay us a penny. It only costs a few - .cents to take that stuff out of the wheat; the wild oats and peas and stuff of that kind, and the wheat is just as good for milling purpose as if it didn’t have anything in it. After they take out the things more valuable than wheat, they pick out the pigeon seed and little stuff that they can't classify, grind it up into stock food and put some liniment of some kind in it, and send it back to us at a good big price. (Laugh- ter.) They go farther than that. There is some land in the north that is pretty foul. We raise a lot of wild oats up there, and we have been giving " them away. We have discovered what they do with them. We farmers know that in the spring we have to feed our horses pretty good strong feed to keep them going. We don’t feed them corn stalks, etc., if we have hard work for the horses, but we have to feed them something to keep the iron in their bones and steel in their muscles, so that they can stand the work. Now, the North Dakota farmer is a good deal like the horse. In order to be able to give up that $56,000,000 a year, $1,200 apiece, and still stay in "The Farmer:—NOW EAT IT, DURN YE” gRo- &R SLU™NK Z= o v & - n(.(.uspt"|°‘~, ‘—Drawn expressly for the Leader by W. C. Morris ' business, he has to be in pretty good trim. He can’t eat light stuff, and the Minneapolis Chamber .of Commerce—the grain trust—have learned that they have to provide a concentrated food for the farmers. Now here is how they do it. They take the oats, grind them up .into breakfast food and ship them - back to us and sell them to us at a high price. (Ap- plause.) It was-the wild oats in the blood of the North Dakota farmers which enabled us to build the Nonpartisan league in one summer. (Applause.) We never undertake anything up there that we can’t finish in one summer, because we don’t know whether we will be there next summer or not. WHAT FORTY THOUSAND FARMERS IN NORTH DAKOTA DID ‘ Now this dockage alone amounts to about $7,000,- 000 a year. Think of that! Seven million dollars in dockage, and seeds, and mustard, which we gave to the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce, -accord- ing to the best expert advice we can get, and the farmer- that couldr’t see his way clear to give the $16 to save the $55,000,000, could see his way clear to give the $16 to stop this $7,000,000' dockage, be- .cause ‘we -explained if we could save $7,000,000 in one year, it would pay ‘our membership for 20 years ormore. : . . ) T ' PAGE THIRTEEN Then he came in. We got pretty near all of them. We got 40,000 farmers in the state of North Dakota 3 to join the Nonpartisan league in a suminer, for the ] purpose of electing men to office .who would be | friendly to the farmers of the state, and.not so friendly - with the Minneapolis Chamber of Com- merce. PR As a result of this organization campaign, and educational campaign, the farmers in North Dakota and their friends at the first election elected prac- tically everybody from governor to dog-catcher. | Only lost one man on the state ticket. Out of 110 represeuntatives. the farmers elected 83, and out of 25 senators they elected 18, but there were 24 sen- ators that held over; that is, we didnt have a chance to vote on those senators; they .were elected for four years the election before. As a result the hold- over senators who had been elected two years ‘before by the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce, the grain combine, still had a majority in the sen- ate, so we were not able to perform the program of the organization in a very large measure. We, did, however, get through 25 or 30 laws, any one of which was worth to the farmer the price he paid to belong to the organization. We got the state grain grading law, and now if a fellow sells his grain and don’t get a square deal, he calls up on the telephone— calls up the inspector of grains to come down—and he comes down and straightens it up. You only have to do that a few times and then they all “get straight.* I think THAT one law has saved the farmers of the state this year probably $3,000,000 or $4,000,000 in the grading of their grain. * TIME FOR THE FARMERS TO GET ORGANIZED Let me talk a little bit about your- selves as farmers. You noticed that the most important part of anybody’s business is what he gets for what he . sells. The most important part of the banker's business in this town is how | much he gets for his money, the rate of interest, and how much it costs to foreclose on a farmer. The most im- . bortant part of the railroad busihess - is the railroad freight and passenger rates. The most important part of the barber’s business is how much he gets for cutting hair. A barber would be a funny sort of a fellow that didn’t pay ~ any attention to the price of the hair cut, wouldn't he? A barber who didn’t care.anything about the price of ,the hair cut and . just wanted plenty of hair to cut, would bg‘a funny creature. Now, the most important part of the farmer's business, likewise, is how much he gets, not for cutting.hair, but . for raising wheat, etc., and how much : he pays for the things that he has to Sbuy. . p Now, the bankers are very well .organized, and fix the rate of in- terest. The railroads are very ' well organized and fix the railroad pas- senger and freight rtes. The water ‘pPower corporations are organized and fix the rates. John D. Rockefpller ° is pretty well organized. He fixes ° . the price of - gasoline. Even the | boot-black has dttended to the most important part of his business: The I. W. W.’s work hard to build an .organization to attend to the most important part of their business, because the most important part of his business is not what you get for 20 bush- els of wheat, but how much he gets for shocking the wheat. Since everybody else, all other groups of producers and workers; since all other groups of individuals—lawyers, bankers, doctors, boot- blacks, I. W. W.’s and all the rest—have attended ' to the most important part of their business, I am ! " sure that the farmer has not neglected that matter, | I am sure that because everybody else has attended ! to the most important part of their business that ' you must have attended to it. - ; . i ARE THE FARMERS REALLY. INDEPENDENT? I have been.told all'my life that.you are ind pendent American farmers. I know that you a _ independent farmers, because all those fellows' th: handle the.wheat and potatoes say you are, The . tell it from morning until night, that you are inde- pendent American farmers. You- know that they never lie. I'heard a farmer the other day say. that . his interpretation of an “independent” American farmer was that he was “in” about as far as he 7