Insurgent Democracy

The Nonpartisan League (npl) was one of the most significant and certainly distinctive movements in America's long history of agrarian radicalism. Launched in North Dakota in 1915, it effectively took over the dominant Republican party and then the state government, established state-owned banks, terminal elevators, and flour mills, and soon spread rapidly across the American West and the prairie provinces of Canada. Mobilizing small farmers against the power of the caricatured “big business,” it generated controversy and, by the early 1920s, suppression by conservatives in state and federal governments, local and national businesses, both major parties, and in organized agriculture. Despite its importance, however, and despite the considerable popular and scholarly attention it has received, the last monograph to study the Nonpartisan League war Robert L. Morlan's Political Prairie Fire, published in 1955. Morlan's book has justly achieved the status of a classic, but it reflects the interests of the 1950s and Morlan's focus as a political scientist

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