Chapter 16
NOTHING is more remarkable in the United States than the difference between the Dakotas. These are the two least-known states in the country, and many people think of them casually as a kind of “bloc,” which they most certainly are not. North Dakota is probably the most radical state in the union, and South Dakota is one of the most conservative. North Dakota has two transcontinental railroads; South Dakota has none. North Dakota lives on wheat and is, to an extent, a “colony” of Minnesota; South Dakota lives on wheat too, but on livestock, mining, and above all pheasants in addition. Both states produce political characters of remarkable eccentricity, but the North Dakotans are eccentric in a different way. There are more idiosyncrasies per square inch in North Dakota than in any state I know.
What is more, the two Dakotas, though coterminous for 330 miles, have practically no contact with one another. South thinks that North is inhabited exclusively by raging Bolsheviks; North thinks that South is a preserve for all people to the right of Hoover. South looks down across the river to Iowa and southward to Nebraska; it never looks upward to North at all, if it can help it. I met one South Dakota editor who has been an important personality in the whole area for twenty years; never once has he crossed the line and set foot in North Dakota. It was impossible, so far as my own experience went, to find North Dakota newspapers in Sioux Falls or South Dakota papers in Bismarck, though in both you could easily buy the Chicago Tribune and the Omaha World Herald.
Finally, extraordinary as it is to tell, travel between the two states is difficult in the extreme. When I was there no bus or air lines connected them at all. Try to get from Pierre, say, the capital of South, to Bismarck, the capital of North, by rail. In a manner of speaking railways do exist, but you will not thank me for the suggestion.
Glimpse of North Dakota
Quite possibly this cross-grained, inflammatory state is the most complex in the entire nation. Contrasts are sharp in almost every field: for instance the state capitol is a handsome skyscraper built by Holabird and Root; the governor’s mansion near by is a small white frame house that would be modest even for a farmer of very modest means.1 Its public men are among the most refractory in America, and much of its political history can only be characterized by some such word as wacky.
I spent several bewildered days in Bismarck and elsewhere in North Dakota; my cicerone on several occasions was Gaylord Conrad, the editor of the Capital, and I met people of every camp. No state except possibly Oklahoma has a history so bursting with furor. I learned that it once had, in a period of a few months, no fewer than four governors; of these one served only fifteen days before he was expelled by an outraged citizenry. The recall has only been used four times in American history for the removal of an important public official; three of the four occasions were in North Dakota. Senator William Langer, whose ornery career is inextricably enmeshed with the life of the state, stood criminal trial three times on a technical charge relating to the collection of funds, and was once sentenced to eighteen months in a federal prison, before the judgment was reversed and he was finally cleared. The three trials produced every possible kind of flaming charge and countercharge. Langer even lost his citizenship for a time—though he had just been nominated governor!
But out of a background of confused scandal, the most savage kind of internecine feuding, and berserk demagoguery, has come strikingly advanced government. The people fought for good works, and they got them. North Dakota is the reform state par excellence. Along with Minnesota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin, it is traditionally the chief repository of progressivism in the United States.
It maintains the only state-owned bank in the nation, which has resources of 71 million dollars and is the biggest bank between the Twin Cities and the West Coast; it controls all public funds and is the state’s fiscal agent. Similarly North Dakota maintains the only state-owned flour mill in America, and the only state-owned grain elevator. This, at Grand Forks, was established to relieve farmers from the pressure of absentee elevator interests in Minnesota. All public officials in North Dakota, down to the pettiest, must be bonded by the state, and all public buildings, including the county courts and schoolhouses, carry compulsory state insurance. North Dakota insures its farmers against the risks of fire, hail, and tornado; it has an admirable workman’s compensation law, and a highly developed system of co-operatives. It is in fact, to sum up, almost as thoroughly socialized as Sweden.
Behind all this is of course agriculture and its concomitant in hard times—agrarian radicalism. For mile after mile through the state I passed the prodigious bread factories, i.e., wheat farms.
North Dakota is divided into two distinct spheres, dry (western) and wet (eastern), by the 98th meridian. Another demarcation line is made by our old acquaintance the Missouri River. The eastern area is the greatest producer of hard durum wheat in the world; this is the indispensable binding ingredient for products all the way from cake flour to macaroni. Wheat in North Dakota is usually moved to the machine (a fixed thresher) rather than vice versa; combines aren’t used much. The state has 57,000 farms, and the total agricultural income has exceeded 500 million dollars every year since 1943. It worked out in 1945 to the dazzling average of $7,600 per farm.
But wait. These past years have been exceptional. North Dakota has not forgotten others in the 1930’s. It may be an exaggeration, but one farmer told me, “It didn’t rain for seven solid years.” The risks of weather make for a bizarrely vulnerable economy; I heard of one man who, in 1939, declared his assets to the state bank as $320; in 1944, four crop years later, he was worth $47,920. In the 1930’s farmers sold Liberty Bonds at 60¢ or even 50¢ on the dollar. In one group of counties big insurance companies still hold at least 30 per cent of the entire area, as a result of foreclosures. I have before me a pamphlet, Buy Now for Security, published by the University and School Land Department. I know nothing like what this contains except the Florida newspaper advertisements after the real estate boom and collapse in Miami—thousands of holdings are listed for sale at minuscule prices, holdings that were once the property of small landowners closed out.
A statue exists in North Dakota to an anonymous Indian2 who watched an early pioneer turn up pasture land for wheat, and who grunted in simple comment, “Wrong side up!” Later we shall meet the Dust Bowl in the southwestern states. The Dakotas had their own grisly experience of a dust bowl. Land that should never have been plowed in the first place flew off and became new top soil in Indiana and Ohio. I have described what toll the Missouri River takes of soil. Wind erosion has cost the nation just as much. In the whole Great Plains area, it is calculated, there were once 400 million acres of tillable land. The tremendous droughts of the 30’s destroyed forever about 10 per cent of this. Some 200 million acres were badly damaged, and 40 million simply blew away.
Non-Partisan League, Politics, and Langer
The political history of North Dakota is mostly the history of the Non-Partisan League. This peculiar institution was founded in 1915 by A. C. Townley, who lives these days in Minnesota; for a time its influence spread to a dozen states. Townley was a salty and effective organizer. Somebody told him once, “You ought to read history.” His reply was, “History? I don’t care to read it. I make it.” Once a rebellious farmer rose in a league meeting and interrupted him: “A.C., I paid up sixteen dollars to join this thing, and what did it ever give me?” Townley replied, “It gave you the courage to get up and ask that question.”
Townley was a farmer at Beach, and an old-line Socialist. Most league planks derive from the platform of the Socialist party of North Dakota, as worked out at a famous convention at Minot in February, 1914. Townley set out to arouse the countryside. To become a member of the Non-Partisan League a man had only to be a farmer and pay sixteen dollars. Basically the movement was one of protest. A North Dakota senator once scoffed at some complaining farmers, “Don’t talk about things you don’t know about. Go home and slop your hogs.” It was this kind of attitude that Townley fought against. At first his men were called the “sixteen-dollar suckers.”
But not for long. The movement found roots and life in the soil and spread. By 1918 it controlled both houses of the legislature, and it is the source of most of the North Dakota reforms. In many ways it was a precursor of the New Deal, which came along a quarter of a century later. The ever normal granary is an extension of Townley’s idea for a state elevator; the Federal Crop Insurance Law embodies the league’s ideas on hail insurance; the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration applied on the national level what had already been worked out locally in North Dakota.
But the Non-Partisan League always operated within the Republican party, and as a splinter instrument of that party. The details are confusing. I heard a dozen versions of what happened from 1920, say, to date. The leaguers chose to work with the Republicans because Democrats were as rare in North Dakota as ocelots.3 Then came fissures and dissension. Townley himself seldom ran for office; the league’s political boss and spearhead was usually Bill Langer, though he once spent eight “wilderness” years outside its fold. Formidable shoguns like Nye and Lemke were also leaguers at the beginning. In time a faction known as the Independent Voters Association (IVA) broke off from Langer, and he and Nye became adamantine enemies. Later this IVA, which embodied the conservative end of the movement, became resurrected as the Republican Organizing Committee (ROC) and elected an anti-Langer governor. The league and the regular Republican organization both hold conventions, and usually the primary is a race between a “regular” conservative and a league radical. To make it more fun, the loser as a rule tries to work out a subsequent deal with the Democrats, so that he can help defeat the primary winner in the general election. Langer, in fact, was once actually elected governor as an independent after being beaten in the primaries. The local Democrats are, by and large, suspicious of the league because it is more liberal than they are. But though the league supported Roosevelt in 1932, it did not do so thereafter. Hold your head.
Today the Non-Partisan League is at a very low ebb, and it has not elected a governor since 1937. Several things aside from inner splintering damaged it: (1) It was pre-eminently “a hard-times outfit,” and worked best in periods of depression; (2) The New Deal outdid it in its own field; (3) Its old-timers seemed incapable of keeping pace with a fast-changing world; (4) Its isolationism, always ferocious, steadily became more sterile.
Bill Langer is an extremely complicated personality. One source of his power is his strong record as a people’s man. He was the first American governor to declare a moratorium on foreclosures for debt; he called out the National Guard to prevent forced sales of farm property by local sheriffs; once, during a labor dispute, he used state troopers to protect workers who had been getting wages as low as 28¢ an hour. Like that of so many grass-root radicals, his Washington record is inordinately mixed. He voted for the confirmations of both Henry Wallace and Aubrey Williams; he has always voted for FEPC and against the poll tax; he supported veterans’ housing and opposed the Case bill. Of course, an isolationist pure and undefiled, he fought the British loan, and he was one of two senators who voted against the San Francisco Charter.4 Once he called the UN a “production of pure bunk.” But after voting against the Charter, he announced that, since it was the law, he would support it—a position exactly opposite to that taken by Wheeler, incidentally.
Here is what Langer said about himself once. It appears in the neat little handbook that North Dakota publishes at all elections, explaining the issues and allowing each candidate a page to state his own position.
I am a firm believer in the … Townsend Plan. I stand for money reform and a Bank of the United States … For years I was the attorney for the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen. I have rarely been retained by the corporations …
When I was elected Attorney General I was endorsed by the Scandinavian Total Abstinence League, the Farmers Educational Union, the Progressive Republican Party, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and the Non-Partisan League.
I promise to uphold the dignity of a North Dakota United States Senator, and will not endorse any brand of cigarette, snuff, perfume, or whisky; and I also promise not to become a candidate for President of the United States within two weeks after I assume the duties of office.
If elected, I will devote my time to the duties of office, and will not rob the taxpayers of the time that is due them by giving one hundred speeches a year … at two hundred and fifty dollars a speech.5
Not everybody in North Dakota likes Langer—by any means. One favorite local story (pre-1945) was, “Heard the wonderful news? Roosevelt died, and Bill Langer got killed going to the funeral.”
Langer, despite cataclysmic failings, is a much more substantial man than Gerald P. Nye. Nye was an outright America Firster; Langer, perhaps strangely, never was. Nye, who was born in Wisconsin, was defeated for re-election in 1944, after twenty years in the Senate; in 1946 he ran to regain his seat, and was badly beaten—Nye, Shipstead, Wheeler, and LaFollette were, as we know, all casualties at about the same time. Nye’s comment on Pearl Harbor, delivered immediately after news of the attack, was that it was “just what Britain had planned for us,” and that “Britain has been getting this ready since 1938.”6
Farmers Union and the Co-ops
North Dakota is the premier Farmers Union state, and its headquarters at Jamestown, under the able Glenn Talbot, are a pivot in the organization almost as important as Denver or St. Paul. Of the 57,000 farmers in North Dakota, more than 30,000 are members, which must be something of a record for saturation in any movement. The Farmers Union is by far the biggest single force in the state, and its North Dakota unit is probably the strongest farmers’ organization in the whole country on a state level, though several others, like the Illinois Farmers Association, may be wealthier. It plays no direct role in politics, though it supports some issues like the MVA; it never takes a line as between candidates for office.
To many this seems a pity. Should the Farmers Union come out forthrightly against a man like Lemke, it could beat him, because it could, if politically organized, beat anybody. The confusion exists that, whereas it favors MVA, the governor of the state is against it, though he is a Farmers Union member. The attitude of the union seems to be that the local citizenry is not yet ready to tie political and economic issues together; people take their political allegiances very seriously, and are accustomed to think that the union functions on an altogether different plane. The organization is in a way fearful of risking its own great force by tossing it into the unpredictable political whirlpool that North Dakota is.
The fields it does cultivate are: (a) those that similar farm organizations attend to everywhere, like rural education, electrification, technological improvement; (b) insurance; (c) the co-operatives. It maintains its own flourishing life insurance and other insurance companies, and its co-operatives are a whole big story in themselves. “The co-ops rule North Dakota,” I heard it said. The Farmers Union has co-operatives in everything from hospitals and creameries to credit unions and funeral homes.
Here we touch on a subject hitherto unmentioned. But this book cannot be expected to deal with co-operatives in general on any scale. That there are an infinity of different kinds of co-operatives in the United States, ranging from a huge business like the Central Cooperative Wholesale Association in Wisconsin to the small consumer cooperatives in California, is known to everybody. The Farmers Union co-ops in North Dakota arise, by and large, from the immediate wants and needs of the local citizen; they are short on theory, and long on practical results. Take the gasoline co-ops. The union maintains about 120 of these in North Dakota, and they are a thriving institution. A man pays $25.00 to join; of this, $5.00 is checked off as Farmers Union dues, and is applied to an education fund. Or a purchaser may buy his gas and oil, also hardware and farm supplies, from a co-operative although not a member; when his “patronage dividend” reaches $25, this will serve as his membership fee, and he gets one share of stock, one vote, in whatever the local co-op happens to be, for instance the Farmers Union Oil Company of Bismarck. The “patronage dividend” is what the co-operative as a whole turns back to its membership in lieu of profit. Normally each member gets 9 per cent of his total purchases for the year back in dividends; if he spends $100 on gasoline his refund is $9.00.
Naturally this has become big business. The union owns its own oil wells and refineries in Kansas and elsewhere, and its own distributing system, the Farmers Union Central Exchange in South St. Paul, Minnesota. In North Dakota the co-ops have about half of all retail gas business. One result is that prices have been forced down. When I was in North Dakota gas cost 21¢ as against 25¢ in adjacent states, and what the big commercial oil companies thought about it can’t be printed.
Bigger and more important, however, are the grain co-ops. Fifteen per cent of all grain marketed in the Twin Cities is handled by the Farmers Union on a nonprofit basis, and North Dakota has a total of 316 local co-ops dealing with grain—more than any state except Illinois, more by a good deal than Kansas or Iowa though their population is considerably greater.7 The nucleus of the system is the Farmers Union Grain Terminal Association in St. Paul, headed by M. W. Thatcher. This celebrated institution markets grain for members, stores it for them (in six million bushels of storage space), operates a durum mill for semolina flour, and maintains 150 local elevators all over the Northwest. Members receive dividends exactly as do those who belong to the gasoline co-ops, if the elevators make a profit. The idea behind all this was concentration. It was to exert pressure on the terminal market. “Follow the wheat all the way to the terminal, instead of selling it at the gate,” was an early motto. Also the system has served to modify abuses and discriminations. A member is free of middleman and commission charges, and he escapes the “dockage” racket. Dockage is the extraneous matter that gets into wheat like mustard seed, oats, and so on. Standard tests now determine what “dockage” shall be assessed against the farmer by the miller, in contrast to the former system in which it could run to almost any amount.
A Line on Other Factors
About 40 per cent of North Dakotans are Scandinavian in origin (predominantly Norwegian); about 30 per cent are German or “Volga German.” Bismarck was actually named Bismarck in order to attract German immigrants; tickets could be bought Bremen-to-Bismarck direct.8 During World War I, some Germans sought to evade the draft, and many refused to buy war bonds; by the time of World War II this situation was much ameliorated. A good deal of anti-Semitism exists in North Dakota.9 The Volga Germans (who are basically of Russian descent) “will” trade with Jews, I heard; the non-Volga Germans won’t, if they can help it.
Other North Dakota forces and influences might be listed as follows: (1) The railroads. The Great Northern, largely because of the memory of Jim Hill and because it is famously a “railway man’s railroad,” is highly regarded throughout the state. (2) The chain banks. During the 1920’s, as in Montana, hundreds of small banks failed; most were eventually bought up by two large banks centered in the Twin Cities, the Northwest Bancorporation and the First Bank Stock, Inc. These have very considerable local power. (3) The Greater North Dakota Association, which is a kind of over-all chamber of commerce for the state. (4) The absentee millers. (5) The Lutheran Church. (6) Women. As I got on the train in Bismarck, a lady handed me some resolutions just passed by the ninety-seventh anniversary meeting of the Seneca Falls Convention. One demanded a woman’s equal rights amendment to the constitution; another asked for government subsidies for housewives. (7) The various groups working for MVA, which was by all odds the greatest issue in North Dakota when I was there. As always, the stratifications caused by MVA are very sharp, and I heard liberals say, “We’re done for, if MVA goes out.” So far as conservatives are concerned, to advocate it is to become a leper.
Finally, journalism. North Dakota was, as of the time I visited it, the only state in the union with no Blue Network (American Broadcasting Company) outlet, and so the citizenry never had opportunity to hear Raymond Swing, John W. Vandercook, Winchell, Pearson, Dorothy Thompson, Elmer Davis, or LaGuardia. One local paper of interest is the Leader, the organ of the Non-Partisan League, not so much by reason of its opinions, which are what anybody would guess, but because it employs a paragraphist of great talent. Western journalism has always been notable for a dry, pithy, understated type of paragraphing. Here are two examples from the Leader:
EAST IS WEST
E. V. Eastman and C. F. Westman, neighbors, got together and built a wall dividing their property. Eastman lives on the west of the wall and Westman lives on the east.
HORSE JUMPS ON AUTO
Frightened by a bus, Dave Sanders’ workhorse made a lunge. He landed on top of an automobile in one bound and, had it not been for the fact that he had a clumsy old wagon behind him, he would have set a hurdle record.
South Dakota: Everything But Pheasants
“South Dakota,” writes Hayden Carruth,10 “is the heart of the prairie region of North America. Take a pair of compasses and on your map set the legs to cover six hundred miles. Plant one in the middle of South Dakota, and swing the other around, and in your great circle, twelve hundred miles in diameter, you will have the prairie…. South Dakota in the exact middle of this great plain of the world should be its very heart and soul, and is.”
In fact the state has set up a monument near Pierre (pronounced Peer), the hamlet that is the capital, to mark its geographic middle and “the approximate center of North America.” From this point “more than a thousand miles from any ocean,” the prairie “spreads endlessly in every direction.” But actually there is much in South Dakota that is not prairie exclusively. What chiefly differentiates it from North is a certain diversity and variety. It has timber stands, a packing industry, mountains, and mineral deposits, all of which its northern sister lacks.
Also South Dakota contains the Bad Lands. This largely uninhabited district in the west of the state, beyond the Missouri River and on the dry side of the 98th meridian, was once described by General Custer as “a part of hell with the fires burnt out.” On the authority of Life (which, in a pictorial essay on South Dakota, once printed some of the best photographs of American terrain ever taken), exactly eleven human beings live in this wilderness, who have to haul even their drinking water “from sixty miles away”; the area is populated only by “rabbits, rattlesnakes, birds of prey, and the wailing wind and coyotes.”
Behind the Bad Lands lie the Black Hills, so called not because of black rock but by reason of their dense black-green covering of pine and fir. Here are both natural and artificial wonders—rackety towns like Deadwood, which was the home of Wild Bill Hickok, and Lead (pronounced Leed), the site of the Homestake Mining Company. On Mount Rushmore is “the most impressive monument ever executed by man,” in the words of a local pamphlet—the four heroic statues hewn on the mountain by Gutzon Borglum, depicting Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt in 480-foot blocks.11 South Dakota is proud of its Black Hills, and though it is an extremely isolationist state it tried hard to make them the site of the UN world capital.
Also in western South Dakota is gumbo. This is a type of soil very hard when the weather is dry, and at other times the opposite. In gumbo, during drought, “you can see a nickel two miles away,” I heard it said, but when it rains, the grass grows so fast that “you have to part it to see a cow.” You can’t stand on really wet gumbo, because it is too slippery, or get it off your hands, because it’s so sticky. Anybody born in the gumbo country will be long legged: he gets so much exercise pulling his legs out. One friend told me, “Drive over a gumbo hill, and you’ll take the road right with you.”
The Homestake mine is the largest gold producer in the Northern Hemisphere. It was once owned by William Randolph Hearst; control is now largely dispersed. Homestake is probably the dominant enterprise in the state, not merely from the point of view of economics but politically. Until 1937 it paid no tax whatever on the ore it produced (such was its power in the South Dakota legislature); then a small tax, 8¢ a ton, was affixed, but with the first 50,000 tons exempt, in theory to encourage smaller mines. Lately this tax was reduced to 4¢. Homestake has a terrific lobby, but it operates very smoothly. Its labor is not organized. If any union organizer should appear in Deadwood or Lead, so I heard it put, “he would simply be thrown in jail.” I have mentioned in Chapter 11 the policy and tactics toward labor of Anaconda in Montana. Compared to Homestake, Anaconda is the CIO. One auxiliary point, not without interest, is that the legislative district of Francis Case, the South Dakota representative who wrote the Case bill, includes the Homestake properties. The mine has always been a substantial money maker, except during the war when gold mining was shut down. Its dividends spread all over the country. Gold is a heavy metal, but very volatile.
Glance at another field—no play on words intended. I have seldom seen anything lovelier than the shocks of grain in South Dakota. Flying into Sioux Falls, I looked down and saw the fields dotted symmetrically, in patterns that might have been designed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with what seemed to be golden marbles—the oats, barley, wheat, cut by the binder, stacked, and waiting to be picked up. On an immensely magnified scale, they looked like the fruit and beans in a Mexican market such as that at Toluca, with every object artfully spaced, every color and shape balanced with delicate harmony and precision.
South Dakota is full of “foreigners”; it has 140,000 folk of German extraction (out of a total population of roughly 650,000), and 90,000 Scandinavians. Also, like North Dakota, it has a considerable Indian population, mostly Sioux; Indians hold one-tenth of all land in the state. A general still alive fought the last campaign against the Sioux in the Dakotas—the date may seem incredible—as recently as 1890. His name is John J. Pershing.
South Dakota is today almost as Republican as, say, Alabama is Democratic. Nevertheless, there were Democratic governors in 1926, 1932, and 1934, and FDR carried it twice. In 1940, when Willkie ran, it gave him the largest proportionate majority of any state; the percentage even exceeded that of Vermont and Maine. Also South Dakota is extremely conservative; when it does elect Democrats, they are very conservative Democrats, you may be sure. Once it had a brief liberal interlude, during the hegemony of Peter Norbeck, who died in 1935. Norbeck, a progressive Republican, took over some of the policies of the Non-Partisan League. South Dakota, like North, had hail insurance for a time; it had a rural credit law and a bank deposit guaranty law. Then came a conservative back swing, and what liberalism Norbeck gave the community was lost; even the measures covering hail insurance and rural credit were repealed. Today, the successor to Norbeck’s Senate seat is Harlan J. Bushfield, who is quite possibly the most reactionary man in Washington.12
For all its conservatism, South Dakota is not machine run. Lobbyists are obliged to register, and a favorite political maneuver is to embarrass your opponent by alleging that he does belong to a machine. As strong an influence as anything in the state is its leading newspaper, the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader. The cattlemen are of course important, and so are the various agrarian groups.
South Dakota: Pheasants
But easily South Dakota’s greatest distinction is in the realm of—pheasants! It is a curious story. There are some 50 million in the state,13 and Sioux Falls is the “pheasant capital of the world.” One friend told me, “We have more pheasants than Republicans—and you can’t even count the Republicans!” The open season varies from year to year; an average is two months, beginning from October 15, with a bag limit of five birds a day. South Dakota is a paradise for the maladroit marksman; the pheasants are so thick that nobody can possibly miss. Residents pay $1.00 for a shooting license; outsiders pay $20. The hunters come from all over, and in a normal year some 40,000 outstate licenses are issued—so it may be seen that pheasants bring the community a very handsome revenue.
This revenue is controlled strictly. It goes not to the state as such, but to the Game, Fish, and Parks Commission, which uses it for wild life shelters, lake improvement, and the development of more pheasants. One can easily imagine what opportunities for graft the “pheasant fund” would provide in a really corrupt state, like Illinois in older days or Pennsylvania. Of course the Game, Fish, and Parks Commission, handling its funds with absolute probity, deals with other birds and animals besides merely pheasants. The state has set aside more than 400,000 acres for “the protection and propagation of migratory waterfowl, game birds, song birds, and game animals.”14 There is even a law to protect frogs. South Dakota produces, protects, and then duly shoots chukar partridge, Hungarian partridge, prairie chicken, grouse of several types, sage hen, quail, wild turkey, and all manner of geese and ducks. One of the handsomest brochures ever put out by an American state is Wild Ducks, issued in collaboration with the American Wildlife Institute, and containing fascinating material about the four great “flyways” ducks like to use.
But to return to pheasants. In World War II came a severe shortage of shotgun shells; this crippled the local industry. But in a normal year, about 15,000 birds are killed every hour during the season; guns shoot at the rate of 75,000 shots per hour. Since the first open season in 1919, something over 20 million pheasants have been legally slaughtered; this is the equivalent—I am relying on the pamphlet cited above—of some 3,000 carloads of beef. This whole development has arisen in forty years or so from an investment of about $20,000, and mostly as a result of the acumen of three men, Peter Norbeck, a Doctor Zitlitz, and a man named Rothschild. Previously there had been a prodigious undiscriminating slaughter of wild life. Sensible people wanted to stop this, and, if possible, replenish the stocks of game. The pheasant that helped do the job was, originally, an alien from China; its name is still the Chinese Ring-Necked Pheasant. As early as 1880 an American consul general in Shanghai shipped a few of these birds to Oregon, as a gift to friends, and by 1892 there were enough in the neighborhood to provide an annual kill of 50,000. Pheasants, in a word, are great multipliers. In 1898, Dr. Zitlitz brought into South Dakota two males and four females. They were carefully bred, and then ten birds in all were released into the wilderness. Similar experiments took place elsewhere. A handful at a time, the pheasants were turned loose. This went on until 1914–15 when the state itself purchased and released 7,000 birds. We know the rest. Today, you can shoot pheasants in South Dakota while driving an automobile.
I hope I have not given the impression that South Dakota, with its extreme political conservatism, is a staid state. Sioux Falls is one of the least staid cities I have ever seen. At the airport gates I looked warily at a sign, ANY PERSON ATTEMPTING TO ENTER OR DEPART AT ANY OTHER POINT SUBJECT TO BEING SHOT, and commercial airline passengers actually were unable to leave the field except under military convoy. F. C. Christopherson, editor of the Argus-Leader, invited me to a party the day I arrived. This, it happened, turned out to be V-J Day. I had seen V-E Day in New Orleans, a notably tumultuous town. But nothing that I saw in New Orleans or, for that matter, that I have ever seen anywhere else, rivaled what went on in Sioux Falls that night. For someone to tear out a public drinking fountain by the roots and hurl it playfully down the streets was only a quiet episode.
Addendum on a Great State, Nebraska
Former Governor Dwight Griswold let me ride by highway patrol from Omaha to Lincoln15 and we spent most of a day together. I admired “O” Street which is part of US 34 and which runs sixty-nine miles without a turn, and so is called the longest and straightest street in the world. I admired the state capitol also. Like that in Bismarck (also Baton Rouge) it is a skyscraper, and, rising out of the wide green-tawny flatness of the plains, it is strikingly dramatic. A story goes with it too. It cost eleven million dollars and took eleven years to build, since it was paid for, year by year, by a special property tax calculated to yield exactly a million dollars annually. The doughty Nebraskans don’t believe in debt, and they built, penny by penny, as they got the money. The portals of the building bear the legend, THE SALVATION OF THE STATE IS WATCHFULNESS IN THE CITIZEN, and atop the dome is a large statue of the “Sower.”16 This too shows what Nebraska thinks about.
Griswold left office in January, 1947. He had previously been beaten in a run for the Senate by Hugh Butler, an extreme diehard. What defeated Griswold was the British loan—mostly. Butler, a fierce isolationist who not only voted against the loan but against selective service, Lend Lease, and Bretton Woods, made isolation the chief issue. Griswold, a liberal Republican of the Stassen school, took a strong internationalist line, and lost three to one.
Of course Griswold, who was one of the best governors in the nation, will return to politics some day. Let me write about him briefly as an example of a modern Great Plains-corn-belt chief executive. He was a “sand hill” boy; his parents were homesteaders who settled in western Nebraska before the railroads came. That, in high school, he won a $100 prize for an essay “How to Lay the Foundations of Good Government,” shows how character patterns may be forecast in childhood. Except while governor, he has lived in a small town called Gordon since 1901, and is chairman of the board of the local bank and publisher of the Gordon Journal, with a tiny but important circulation. Griswold’s tough independence reminded me to an extent of Sumner Sewall, who was then governor of Maine, though he isn’t so rambunctious or iconoclastic. He was one of the few governors (Kerr of Oklahoma is another) who did some hard spadework on the questionnaire I sent him. Always, before seeing governors, I submitted a small list of questions. I would ask what their state contributed to the union and so on. Griswold sent these questions all over Nebraska, and collected an interesting anthology of answers. He is a stubborn man (like Osborn of Arizona); he had to run for the governorship three times before he made it. Then he was re-elected twice. Once he received 74.8 per cent of the total vote cast, and once 76 per cent, an all-time record for Nebraska. He was one of the few Republican governors to “go along” with FDR on foreign policy, and his secretary was a registered Democrat. The international question was not the exclusive cause of his defeat. He had had three terms as governor and people thought that this was enough public office for the time being. Nebraska is a fickle state.
What runs Nebraska is—the weather! I do not mean this as a wisecrack. The state differs markedly from its neighbors South Dakota and Kansas in that it has no mineral wealth, and there are few foaming, power-producing rivers in the interior.17 All Nebraska has to live on is its eight-to twelve-foot-thick rug of soil.
On this it lives quite well—provided the weather smiles. It is the thirty-second state in population, and yet the sixth in production of foodstuffs; what supports it is, in other words, export of corn, wild hay, wheat, alfalfa, feeder cattle, feeder hogs, butter, eggs. It is, after Wisconsin and New York, the third dairying state. More than a billion dollars are invested in the 121,000 Nebraska farms, which are tended as carefully as lawns in Connecticut. These farms average 191 acres in size incidentally—more than twice that of farms in the country as a whole—and they are mechanized 61 per cent more than the national average.
Driving back to Omaha I looked at some farms and decided that my synonym for the word “rich” hereafter would be corn growing in southeastern Nebraska. But not all of it is so lush and fertile. The state is half West, half Middle West. The western half is dry ranch and sand hills country, with thousands upon thousands of acres that have never seen a plow.
No wonder weather is such a preoccupation. It can almost literally be a matter of life or death. I saw the clouds burst open one day; out of sunshine came water that was three inches deep in half an hour. The first copy of the Omaha World Herald I picked up had three weather stories on its front page, and the local radio broadcasts weather news all the time. Incidentally an Omaha hotel is the only one I have ever known with radios in the elevators. Out in the country, the fact that there are comparatively few trees, no big stands of timber, and no mountains for a windbreak, makes the impact of weather more dramatic; nothing screens you from what may be elemental violence. The summers are as brutally hot as the winters are brutally cold. The drought of the middle 30’s hit here just as it did in the Dakotas; nobody has forgotten the “black blizzard” dust storms. Of course, as in all agrarian states, weather equals politics, and bad weather equals radicalism. James E. Lawrence of the Lincoln Star went east in 1936 to do a series of articles on Alf Landon’s chances. When he left, the corn was green. When he returned it was black. He knew then that Landon’s chances were gone with the corn, “fried out.”
The name Nebraska means Flat Water; the Otoe Indians called it this, for the Platte and its famous characteristic of flowing “bottom side up.”18 Originally the state was a “Louisiana orphan,” being in that part of the Louisiana Purchase which Congress first set aside as Indian country. The first homestead in the United States (1863) was in Nebraska, at a town named Beatrice, pronounced today Be-at-rice.
There were two main streams of settlement. First, Civil War veterans who sought homesteads. Nebraska, unlike Kansas, had no slave problem. There is scarcely a county seat today without the imprint of the Grand Army of the Republic. Second, German, Scandinavian, and to a somewhat smaller degree Czechoslovak settlers. These had an enormous yearning for land, their own land; they cared little for cities, and pushed straight out into the flat wilderness. Some early villages were so small that, for a time, each had only one church; Catholics and Protestants worshiped in the same room, with half the pews facing an altar at one end, half a pulpit at the other.
This was all sturdy stock. It believed in health, hard work and education. Anybody who has read the early novels of Willa Cather knows what the circumstances of life were. Today, Nebraska has more folk of German extraction than any state except Wisconsin, and about 11 per cent of the total population is of Czechoslovak origin. Most of the Scandinavians are Swedes, though both Norwegian and Danish communities exist. Some counties are almost solidly Czech, and Czechoslovak is spoken almost as commonly as English; one county is half Czech, half Swede. The Germans are largely Lutheran, and their political affiliation varies. Woodrow Wilson, I heard it said, made Republicans out of them; then prohibition made them Democrats; during World War II they were divided. There was no discernible disloyalty among the Nebraska Germans, though plenty were strongly isolationist, in 1941–45; the Bund was not a problem. In World War I many Germans had thought well of the Kaiser, but Hitler alienated Lutherans, Catholics, Jews and all. During World War I when the German newspapers were a real power in the state, a law had to be passed proscribing foreign language schools and papers. This wasn’t necessary in World War II. In a sense, the old German Turnverein and similar societies, which had played a substantial role in Nebraska for well over a generation, never regained their former influence after 1919. A striking point—the American melting pot does melt—is that even after Lidice, Germans and Czechs in the same Nebraska town got on perfectly well together.
Nebraska is, like most western states, exceptionally hospitable and friendly. The atmosphere is quite different from that in some parts of Iowa where, if a stranger passes, the suspicious citizenry assemble to discuss him. A hotel in one western Nebraska town has a big sign on the door, HUNT AND FISH AS YOU DAMN PLEASE. WHEN THE BELL RINGS COME IN TO DINNER.
Any innocent traveler from the East who thinks that Nebraska is a stick-in-the-mud state politically will get some surprises. Somehow the illusion exists that it is overwhelmingly Republican and conservative, which is absurd. Simply recollect that this is the state not only of George W. Norris but of William Jennings Bryan.19 It had a series of Populist governors, Roosevelt carried it twice, its leading newspaper is Democratic (though strongly anti-New Deal) and Democratic and Republican governors have tended to alternate. Except for Butler and the loudmouthed Wherry (the other senator) it has scarcely ever elected an outright reactionary to public office. It dislikes Republicans with a Wall Street flavor, and it is the only state ever to have elected a federal senator (Norris) as a nonpartisan. On the other hand it has recently shown a strong antilabor tinge, and in 1946 it was one of three states to adopt a constitutional amendment outlawing the closed shop.20
In the old days what ran Nebraska was the railways. This was inevitable, in the pattern the reader knows well: the railways got the land, then populated it, then exploited it. For many years, the Union Pacific and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy divided the state between them; the UP was always supposed to elect one senator, the Burlington the other. One thing that broke down railway dominance was the direct primary; the parallel here to California is very close. Another lively factor was the growth of the automobile, which made free railway passes less valuable and desirable. A chief minor weapon of the railways everywhere in the nation was, for many years, the free travel with which they bribed legislators and practically anybody else. South Dakota once went to the length of making all members of its legislature swear by the constitution not to accept railway passes.
The chief uniqueness of Nebraska today is that it is the only state with a unicameral legislature.21 Largely George Norris was responsible for this. Senate and assembly were abolished in 1934, and a one-house system with forty-three members came into operation. Norris developed the idea when, in Washington, he saw bills dear to him killed in committee or hopelessly weakened by compromises; he thought that the “special interests” would have less room in which to operate in a single chamber. I found people in Nebraska somewhat divided on this subject. Most agree that the unicameral idea, as it has worked out, makes for a higher class of legislator (since fewer are to be elected) and greater efficiency and economy generally; some thought however that the system, by giving the lobbyist a single target to aim at, and by eliminating the possibility that special interest legislation which manages to pass one chamber will get stopped by the other, has not been so effective as Norris would have hoped.
The Cornhusker State has plenty of other political distinctions. The legislature (like that of Minnesota) is elected on a nonpartisan basis; a man does not stand as a Republican or a Democrat, and there is no division in the chamber itself on party lines. Another important reformist item is that debate on all bills must be public; this is I believe something unique in the nation; Nebraska has no “executive sessions” (where so much bad legislation is worked out in other states) or private committee meetings. Once again, we see western ideals of democracy demanding expression in concrete form. The people insist on running things. All judges and educational officers in Nebraska (as in California) are also elected, like the legislators, on a strict nonparty basis. Another singular factor is that the constitution limits the bonded debt to $100,000; Nebraska cannot undertake expensive public works without specific authorization from the people. Sometimes the passion for pure democracy and complete popular control of the procedures of government leads to picturesque exaggerations; for instance the Omaha ballot in November, 1946, was thirteen feet long and contained 26,000 words. One proposal on this ballot was that the state should contribute $40 per year to the support of every child in the public schools.
Recent big issues have been (a) prohibition, and (b) public power. A referendum to make the state dry was beaten three to one in 1944; Nebraska has many do-gooders, but it is not dominated by them as, for instance, Kansas is. As to public power, a subject of cardinal importance, the simplest thing to say is that Nebraska has it. Behind this “simple” sentence are years of struggle, violent affrays with the utility companies, convoluted maneuvers by Electric Bond and Share, an irresistibly expanding sentiment for rural electrification, pressure by the Securities Exchange Commission, establishment of people’s power districts like the PUD’s in the Northwest, and finally the transfer to public ownership of the Nebraska Power Company, one of the great old-time behemoths. The result is that Nebraska (not Washington or Oregon which might claim the distinction or Tennessee which does claim it) is the first public power state in the nation.
Finally a word on Omaha (population 223,844). This is one of the most masculine cities in America. It is a great place for aggressive hijinks on Saturday night; it has more night clubs, so-called, than any city between Chicago and San Francisco except, perhaps, Kansas City, Missouri. Omaha is one of the most active cattle markets and meatpacking centers in the world; it is the jumping-off place of the Union Pacific; nine other major railways serve it (of which seven were insolvent in 193722). It is full of dust, guts, noise, and pith; what it lacks mostly is effective civic leadership. Omaha, like Kansas City, is one of the biggest cities in the country where local journalism is a monopoly; the only newspaper (it exists however in morning and evening editions) is the World Herald. Its leading citizens are, aside from the distinguished editors of this paper, a real estate and department store man named George Brandeis, and of course William Martin Jeffers of the Union Pacific, who started work as a janitor and who is reputedly so tough that he breaks half dollars with his teeth.
1 The governor’s salary is $333 a month.
2 Life, August 13, 1946.
3 But—a Democratic governor did hold office from 1939 to 1945.
4 The other: Henrik Shipstead of Minnesota.
5 This last was a slap at Nye, his fellow senator, who had been making money on the lecture platform. A whole chapter might be written on the intricate frenzies ©f the Langer-Nye civil war.
6 New York Times, December 8, 1941.
7 Cooperative Grain Marketing in the United States, a pamphlet issued by the Farm Credit Administration of the Department of Agriculture, p. 3.
8 Bryce (II, p. 837) records that in the 8o’s Bismarck was destined “to be the metropolitan hearth of the world’s civilization.”
9 But one of the leading citizens of the state, William Stern, a Fargo banker and the former Republican National Committeeman, is Jewish.
10 In These United States, I, p. 269.
11 The only thing remotely resembling this in America is the unfinished sculpture on Stone Mountain outside Atlanta, Georgia, which is also by Borglum.
12 The Great Plains states do still produce radicals, of course, but mostly they rnove out. I do not know if Maxwell Anderson, the playwright, or Professor Alvin H. Hansen of Harvard would classify themselves as “radicals,” but they have their roots in North and South Dakota respectively. Nebraska has a big export of radicals, and Earl Browder, the deposed head of the American Communist party, is a Kansan. But beware of such generalizations. John D. M. Hamilton, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, is a Kansan too.
13 North Dakota has plenty of pheasants too, but they are neither so concentrated nor so exploited as those in South. Even so, its pheasant “harvest” was over a million birds last year, brought down by some 30,000 hunters. North Dakota considers itself, in fact, just as important a “gallinaceous” state as its neighbor.
14 According to an attractive pamphlet compiled by the State Writers’ Project.
15 Several other governors did me similar courtesies, notably Blue of Iowa and Dempsey of New Mexico.
16 The Vermont state capitol has a similar figure on the dome.
17 It differs from Iowa, another neighbor, chiefly in that aside from producing grain it is predominantly a livestock state. A further differentiation from Kansas is that its chief crop is overwhelmingly corn, as against wheat; for Kansas the situation is exactly the reverse.
18 Cf. “Nebraska, the Cornhusker State,” by Leo A. Borah, in the National Geographic, May, 1945.
19 The first lines of Bryan’s celebrated “cross of gold” speech are known to everybody; not so many may know those that follow: “The great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”
20 The others: South Dakota and Arizona.
21 But both Pennsylvania and Georgia were unicameral before 1789.
22 Cf. F‘ve Cities, by George R. Leighton, p. 229, which contains a masterful sketch of Omaha.