Arthur Charles Townley

• Arthur Charles Townley
• Born: December 30, 1880
• Died: November 7, 1959

American political reformer, promoter, and orator, was born at Browns Valley, Minnesota, the first of four sons and two daughters of Fitch R. Townley, a farmer born in New York State, and Ester J. (Cross) Townley, a native of Pennsylvania.

Townley attended and then taught in rural schools before studying at high schools at Wadena and Alexandria, Minnesota. While in school, he read extensively and discussed reform movements with local Populist intellectuals. He worked as an itinerant harvest laborer and in 1900 as a census enumerator.

Intense, active, and possessed of a quick and sarcastic wit, Townley followed a changing vision of American society. He initially sought economic independence; from 1904 to 1907 he homesteaded in western North Dakota near Beach, a boom town within sight of Montana. While there he formed a machinery cooperative among his neighbors. About 1908 he became an itinerant laborer and traveled in the West. He settled at Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, and speculated unsuccessfully in large-scale farming. He then returned to Beach, persuaded dealers to advance machinery and supplies, leased 7,000 acres from the Northern Pacific Railway in the remote Squaw Gap region, and tried for significant profits by planting flax. The venture failed.

Convinced that market manipulations on Minneapolis and Chicago grain exchanges had destroyed his enterprise, he turned to politics. He joined the Socialist party in 1913 and quickly became North Dakota organizer. Difficulties with party leaders led him to resign in January 1915. Immediately thereafter, he was a founder of the National Nonpartisan League (NPL), his most successful endeavor, and served as president until 1922. Townley then formed the National Producers’ Alliance (1922-25), a commodities pooling organization, and promoted wildcat oil speculations financed largely by personal notes.

In 1929 Townley organized the American Temperance League to push repeal of prohibition and to put himself once again in the public eye. Supporting himself as a salesman, he remained active politically throughout the 1930s. In 1930 and 1932, he sought nomination to Congress from North Dakota and Minnesota, respectively. He was reelected president of the National Nonpartisan League in 1933, his victory a by-product of his movement to establish cooperative industries using rural labor and commodities in North Dakota; but his 1934 primary election challenge to Governor Floyd B. Olson in Minnesota proved unsuccessful. In 1936-37, he enrolled North Dakota farmers for benefits provided by the Frazier-Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act.

Townley thereafter became North Dakota’s political gadfly. In 1944, for example, he sought NPL nomination to the U.S. Senate. In search of a way to revitalize his political fortunes, he adopted a virulent anticommunism in the late 1940s, using both his abilities as a public speaker and phonograph records to further his appeals. This activity combined with renewed oil speculations, as well as faith healing, to produce a notoriety that lasted until his death. In 1956 he ran independently for Congress in North Dakota; his rhetoric included charges that the North Dakota Farmers Union was dominated by Communists. Undaunted by libel judgments, Townley ran in North Dakota for the Senate in 1958, again red-baiting his opponents. Before additional lawsuits were settled, he died, at seventy-eight, in an automobile accident near Makoti, North Dakota. His estate was valued at less than $2,000.

Townley married Margaret Rose (O’Keefe) Keenan at Cheyenne Wells on January 27, 1912; she was a widow, born in Elkton, South Dakota. He adopted her three-year-old daughter, MaryBonita Keenan. Margaret Townley died October 25, 1943, at Cheyenne Wells, and the daughter committed suicide six months later in Minneapolis. Though Townley asserted that his peripatetic life-style had family support, little is known about his domestic arrangements.

The organization for which Townley is most remembered, the National Nonpartisan League, both melded and reflected its cofounders’ background and experiences. While state organizer for the North Dakota Socialist party in 1914, Townley devised a method of organizing rural areas on a farm-to-farm basis by use of an automobile. His organization department proved very successful, but he was dismissed for refusing to obey leadership directives. Townley then joined with Albert E. Bowen Jr., who was promoting a nonpartisan organization of farmers, and in early 1915 enrolled the first members. Townley’s early, decisive leadership and organizational skills made the movement a success.

One year later the Nonpartisan League had 26,000 members in North Dakota, its growth a result of organizing by the cooperative American Society of Equity and a commonsense program that appealed to the state’s farmers. Under Townley’s guidance, the NPL called for state ownership of terminal elevators, flour mills, packinghouses, and cold-storage plants; state inspection of grain grading; exemption of farm improvements from taxation; state hail insurance; and state rural credit banks operated at cost. Townley shrewdly supplemented these popular ideas with calls for woman suffrage and school consolidation in order to gain favor with nonfarm reformers.

The NPL won control of the state Republican party in the 1916 primary and victory in the general elections; its candidates included Lynn J. Frazier for governor and William Langer for attorney general. Holdover senators, however, prevented enactment of the league’s program in the 1917 legislative session. By that time the league was expanding into other agricultural states and had moved its headquarters to St. Paul, Minnesota.

During World War I, the NPL remained a progressive force in regional politics and reached for national influence. Townley, by this time a charismatic orator of fabled ability, articulated the organization’s calls for conscription of wealth, nationalization of basic industries, and extension of civil liberties. At the same time, he and the league endured opposition from super-patriots for alleged “pro-German” sympathies. In 1918 the NPL won complete control of North Dakota’s state government and made significant gains in Minnesota, South Dakota, Idaho, Colorado, and Montana.

Victory in North Dakota brought enactment of the NPL program during the 1919 legislative session. Townley proclaimed a “New Day in North Dakota,” and after severe difficulties in obtaining capital, the state-owned industries were initiated. By 1920, however, both Townley and the NPL met increasing difficulties, largely fueled by defections from the league’s inner circle, questionable financial practices, the failure of some league-backed private enterprises, unremitting opposition propaganda, and economic depression. Townley resigned from the NPL presidency in 1922 after a ninety-day jail sentence in Minnesota stemming from a wartime conviction for “seditious utterances”; the politically motivated sentence did not tarnish Townley’s image with many NPL members, but it diminished his organizational control.

The Nonpartisan League represented Townley’s greatest success, and its legacies in many ways must be considered his. He gained little from the league; he took a moderate salary and refused nomination to national office. He did obtain glory, prominence, and power, but those intangibles disappeared after 1922. Even so, North Dakota’s state-owned bank and its mill and elevator association, its history of insurgent politics, and its reputation as “consistently the most radical state in the Union” owe much to Townley. His Nonpartisan League opened the political process to democratic alternatives and charted a course for later reform movements to emulate.

There is no biography of Townley. Vital dates noted above are taken from birth, death, and census documents. The standard work on the Nonpartisan League is R. L. Morlan, Political Prairie Fire: The National Nonpartisan League, 1915-1922 (1955). Many other works have been published, including L. Remele, Power to the People: The Nonpartisan League The North Dakota Political Tradition (1981).