William Frederick Lemke

• William Lemke
• Born: August 13, 1878
• Died: May 30, 1950

Agrarian politician and organizational strategist, was born at Albany, Minnesota, the second son and fourth of ten children of Frederick Lemke, a farmer and native of Germany, and Julia (Klier) Lemke, a Wisconsin-born daughter of German immigrants. The Lemkes moved to Grand Forks, Dakota Territory, in 1881, and two years later settled in Towner County, near Cando; frugality and shrewd management allowed the family to accumulate more than 2,700 acres of land by 1900.

Lemke attended rural schools, Cando High School, and the University of North Dakota, graduating in 1902. An able student, he also captained the university football team and organized the first fraternity on campus. He matriculated at Georgetown University and received his a law degree from Yale in 1905. The adult William Lemke was less than medium height and physically robust; acquaintances remarked the striking contrast between his rough-hewn appearance and his polite, educated personal demeanor.

After first establishing law offices at Cando in 1905, Lemke moved to Fargo in 1907. His interests, however, extended to Mexican lands; Lemke formed the Land Finance Company in 1906, purchased large acreages in the state of Sinaloa, and persuaded family and friends to invest, among them William L. Langer and Lynn J. Frazier. Political instability in Mexico devalued the lands, and maintaining the company while repaying its debts helped drain Lemke’s wealth for the rest of his life.

Lemke’s law practice led him into politics. In 1914 he became counsel for the Equity Cooperative Exchange, a move that led in 1916 to his retention by Arthur C. Townley as legal adviser for the insurgent Nonpartisan League (NPL), which attempted to achieve agrarian reforms by working with the Republican and Democratic parties. Lemke rapidly came to be considered the organization’s “kingmaker.” When the NPL took control of the North Dakota Republican party, Lemke was selected national committeeman. He was elected attorney general in 1920, but was recalled in 1921; the election, the nation’s first to remove state officials, stemmed from a particularly vitriolic political atmosphere in which red-baiting and character assassinations were commonplace tactics.

Despite the setback, Lemke remained a political force. He ran unsuccessfully for governor on the NPL slate in 1922 and for the U.S. Senate in 1926 on the Farmer-Labor ticket. In 1932 he won election with NPL support to the U.S. Congress; he served from 1933 to 1941 and again from 1943 until his death. Interspersed were a 1936 candidacy for the presidency on the Union party ticket and a 1940 senatorial race.

A stable domestic life balanced Lemke’s tumultuous public career. He married Isabelle (McGilvray) Mein tyre of Fargo on April 16, 1910. Two sons and one daughter were born of this union.

Lemke gained a reputation for honesty and principled progressivism during his life. A monetary theorist, he believed banking to be a duty of government; the state-owned Bank of North Dakota, created in 1919, to which Lemke devoted much effort, served as his model for a proposed Bank of the United States. His belief in direct democracy resulted in periodic bills to establish national initiative and referendum processes.

Though Lemke’s congressional achievements included creation of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, his most significant work was the Frazier-Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act. This measure, enabling bankrupt farmers to refinance their debts and thereby retain their lands, survived opposition from the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, and modification to conform with adverse decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court, to become law in 1936. The struggle engendered his 1936 presidential campaign as the candidate of anti-Roosevelt groups. Lemke, moreover, also disliked FDR’s pro-British foreign policy.

Lemke suffered a coronary attack and died at seventy-one in Fargo.

Lemke’s political acumen contributed much to successful political insurgency in North Dakota. He is remembered as a rough-and-tumble orator who constantly defended the small farmer and business entrepreneur.

For material on Lemke the best source is E. C. Blackorby, Prairie Rebel: The Public Life of William Lemke (1963), an excellent biography. Many articles deal with his career, particularly in connection with the Nonpartisan League and the abortive candidacy for the presidency in 1936. His papers are held by the Orin G. Libby Manuscript Collection at the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks. See also the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 4 (1974). An obituary appears in the Fargo Forum, May 31, 1950.