George Sperry Loftus

• George Sperry Loftus
• Born: August 16, 1873
• Died: July 16, 1916

Commerce reformer, agrarian leader, Equity Cooperative Exchange spokesman, was born in De Soto, Wisconsin to James Loftus and Anne Hillard (Heal) Loftus. Both parents had immigrated to the United States: his father, a stonemason, was of Irish birth and descent; his mother was English. In 1882 the family moved to Minneapolis.

The next two decades of George Loftus’s life resemble the plot of a Horatio Alger novel. He sold newspapers on the street until he was about thirteen, when he became a messenger for the Minneapolis and St. Louis Railroad. Over the next ten years, Loftus—who undoubtedly quit school at an early age—rose in the ranks of the company, becoming chief clerk in 1896 at twenty-three. He was also active in the local Railway Clerks’ Association, serving as its secretary in 1895, That same year, he married Catherine E. Sherin, also of Irish descent; they had four children: Grace, Catherine, Helen, and Robert M. La Follette Loftus. In 1909, after the death of his wife, he married Josephine Peyton.

In 1897 Loftus moved to from Minneapolis to adjacent St. Paul, where he took a position with the St. Paul and Duluth Railroad as an assistant to its general freight agent. Three years later, after a decade and a half of experience, Loftus left the railroad business. With Thomas H. Kerwin, a former clerk with the Great Northern Railway, he organized the concern of Loftus & Kerwin, commission merchants in hay, grain, and flour. In 1901 Charles F. Hubbard, former governor of Minnesota, became a partner in the operation, which soon changed its name to the Loftus-Hubbard Elevator Company.

Given the course of his life thus far, the self-made Loftus seemed on the verge of attaining wealth: he had acquired a well-known partner in a business in which substantial profits were far from uncommon. But what he did not know was that that the large corporations that dominated the grain trade were secretly given special treatment by the railroads, and smaller companies like Loftus-Hubbard were at a great disadvantage.

Loftus soon learned of these discriminatory practices and reacted by going to court and to both the Minnesota and federal regulatory commissions. Between 1903 and 1910 he launched a number of suits and filed complaints against the railroads. To the amazement of many, he was often successful, obtaining penalties against some of the largest shippers and railroads—including the mighty Great Northern—in the grain trade.

Although he had acted initially out of self-interest, these pursuits soon earned Loftus the sobriquet “Commerce Reformer.” Aided by a famed Minnesota reform lawyer, James Manahan, Loftus engaged in activities against the railroads and large commission houses that soon went beyond areas that were of sole concern to Loftus-Hubbard. In 1905 he organized other small commission merchants into the Shippers’ and Receivers’ Association, which pressured candidates for state office to support legislation designed to assist small shippers and to minimize the influence that large corporations had in the Minnesota state government. Two years later, acting alone, Loftus initiated one of his most renowned pieces of reform litigation: after a sleepless night in the upper berth of a sleeping car, he brought suit against the Pullman Company for price discrimination, claiming that charges for upper berths should be lower than those for the more desirable lower berths. He won the case, altering sleeping car rates nationwide.

Loftus’s campaigns against the railroads were by no means novel, but it was ironic that he should be the source of such criticism. Having grown up inside railroad offices, he was singularly well equipped to combat company lawyers and officials. Moreover, he was a respected citizen and a member of the Episcopal church. He was even highly regarded by the commercial community of St. Paul, long jealous of the stranglehold that Minneapolis companies had on the grain trade. Nominated for the presidency of the St. Paul Commercial Club, he was defeated only when a meeting of railroad officials in Chicago was adjourned early to allow its St. Paul members to return to Minnesota and vote against him. His crusades were not without a price. Loftus-Hubbard was blacklisted by manufacturers and was eventually forced out of business.

With the dissolution of Loftus-Hubbard, Loftus became in 1912 the sales manager of the Equity Cooperative Exchange, embarking upon what was to be his most famous reform effort: the fight for a cooperative grain-marketing system. The selection of Loftus by the Exchange—an outgrowth of the Society of Equity, a farmers’ organization—was fortunate. Loftus was an eloquent lecturer and an able salesman, and he soon became a leading spokesman for the farmers’ movement, enlisting many new members into the Exchange.

Yet even with the addition of Loftus, the Exchange could not withstand the attacks upon it waged by the large commission houses and their allies in government, and by late 1914, the business of the Exchange had been effectively halted. By that time, the farmers’ movement had been redirected toward the establishment of a state-owned grain elevator in North Dakota, an Equity stronghold, and Loftus had become a leader in that fight as well. Early the next year, however, the farmers of North Dakota were beaten again by a state legislature whose sympathies lay with the large corporate interests.

The farmers’ anger over this treachery—voiced passionately by Loftus in his celebrated “roll call” of the North Dakota legislature—was soon translated into the organization of the Nonpartisan League. Although the politically progressive Loftus had done much to bring the farmers of the northern plains to a point at which they would embrace an organization such as the League, how strongly he himself supported it is unclear. In August 1915, when the the League was only a few months old, Loftus was stricken by what was later diagnosed as abdominal cancer. During the next few months he traveled to Florida to recuperate, and then to New York City for radiation treatment. He kept in touch with the week-to-week operations of the farmers’ movement, but was never again able to serve it in a full-time capacity. One month before his forty-third birthday, he died in St. Paul.

Although Loftus was hailed as one of the greatest reformers of his day, he has never been adequately recognized by historians, perhaps because many of his victories were later overturned by the courts or otherwise defeated. Loftus was nevertheless a central figure in the development not only of the Nonpartisan League and of commerce reform, but of the progressive political tradition of the north central states. There can be no doubt that his death at an early age robbed these movements of one of their most important leaders.

The most useful sources on Loftus are a biography, U. L. Burdick, The Life of George Loftus: Militant Farm Leader of the Northwest (1940), and J. Manahan, Trials of a Lawyer (1933), the autobiography of his attorney and long-time reform partner. An obituary appeared in The St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 17, 1916.