1 Hard Times, Organization, and Politics: The Great Depression on the Transnational Plains Jason McCollom Missouri State University-West Plains 55 th Annual Western History Association Conference Portland, Oregon October 21-24, 2015 During the winter of 1937-38, with farmers still suffering from both drought and depression, the Liberal Government of Saskatchewan implemented a plan to pasture farmers’ stock. As spring 1938 dawned, dozens of deceased and emaciated horses were reported at Weyburn after spending the winter under the care of the Government. Across the province additional horses returned from Government pasture half-starved or dead. The Liberals claimed not enough hay existed to feed the stock under their plan. George H. Williams, leader of the agrarian socialist Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), found it unacceptable that horses starved or died under the Government’s care while plenty of feed lay unused. Williams and the CCF offered to help the horses returning from the Government pasture plan. 1 Across the international boundary in North Dakota, farmers were working with, not against, their government. Bert M. Salisbury, the secretary of the Benson County Farmers Union, had a frenzied year. He worked with New Dealers to address farm foreclosures and rural rehabilitation. In just a few months in late 1936 Salisbury secured federal loans for dozens of farmers facing foreclosure and eviction. 2 These two incidents illustrate the differing experiences of agrarian organizations in North Dakota and Saskatchewan in particular, and in the U.S. and Canada in general, during the Depression. Roosevelt actively courted the Farmers Union. The North Dakota chapter became intimately connected to various New Deal programs, and received a lion’s share of federal
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1
Hard Times, Organization, and Politics: The Great Depression on
the Transnational Plains
Jason McCollom
Missouri State University-West Plains
55th Annual Western History Association Conference
Portland, Oregon
October 21-24, 2015
During the winter of 1937-38, with farmers still suffering from both drought and
depression, the Liberal Government of Saskatchewan implemented a plan to pasture farmers’
stock. As spring 1938 dawned, dozens of deceased and emaciated horses were reported at
Weyburn after spending the winter under the care of the Government. Across the province
additional horses returned from Government pasture half-starved or dead. The Liberals claimed
not enough hay existed to feed the stock under their plan. George H. Williams, leader of the
agrarian socialist Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), found it unacceptable that
horses starved or died under the Government’s care while plenty of feed lay unused. Williams
and the CCF offered to help the horses returning from the Government pasture plan.1
Across the international boundary in North Dakota, farmers were working with, not
against, their government. Bert M. Salisbury, the secretary of the Benson County Farmers Union,
had a frenzied year. He worked with New Dealers to address farm foreclosures and rural
rehabilitation. In just a few months in late 1936 Salisbury secured federal loans for dozens of
farmers facing foreclosure and eviction.2
These two incidents illustrate the differing experiences of agrarian organizations in North
Dakota and Saskatchewan in particular, and in the U.S. and Canada in general, during the
Depression. Roosevelt actively courted the Farmers Union. The North Dakota chapter became
intimately connected to various New Deal programs, and received a lion’s share of federal
2
largesse. The CCF, lacking such support at the federal and provincial levels, pursued radical
political insurgency and became the alternative to traditional party rule in Saskatchewan. And
after almost thirty years of sustained cross-border interaction between farmers and farm
organizations in North Dakota and Saskatchewan, the Depression forced agrarians to turn inward
to deal with the ravages of the Dirty Thirties.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the northern plains of North America was
characterized by a wheat monoculture economy and similar settlement patterns and
demographics. This provided the context for the free flow of agrarian ideas and organizations
across the forty-ninth parallel. The existence of an international boundary separating two distinct
political cultures, however, often led to divergent developments and outcomes related to the
forms of organization, strategies, and trajectories of farmers’ economic and political movements.
From the turn of the century until the Great Depression, the U.S. and Canadian agrarian
organizations and their development in the northern plains roughly paralleled each other and
frequently intertwined across the international line. Cooperatives, agrarian political parties, and
large-scale marketing organizations advanced in tandem in North Dakota and Saskatchewan
through the end of 1920s. The agricultural catastrophe of the 1930s sent political shockwaves
across the northern plains and reoriented farmers’ organizations and political movements.
After 1929, the reverberations of the disintegrating commercial and industrial sectors in
the U.S. and Canada quickly reached farmers in the northern plains. Demand for farm
commodities dropped precipitously and export markets disappeared. Rural banks were shuttered
and mortgage foreclosures scarred the countryside. Drought and crop failure in both North
Dakota and Saskatchewan during the first years of the Depression magnified the economic
maladies.3
3
The Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, which had for half a decade provided the province’s
farmers with a good life, collapsed under the weight of the economic calamity. As Seymour
Lipset reminds us, “no other province of Canada and probably few other places on earth changed
within a few years from such heights of wealth and prosperity to such depths of depression and
poverty.” In North Dakota, too, the wheat pool’s demise left the farmers for the first time without
a major agrarian organization to help shoulder the brunt of hard times.4
The Farmers Union filled the organizational vacuum after the end of North Dakota’s
wheat pool. The North Dakota Farmers Union created large-scale marketing cooperatives to sell
members’ wheat, livestock, poultry, and even wool. Purchasing co-ops and a NDFU oil company
saved farmers money. With these resources, the NDFU was able to spearhead relief efforts for
those suffering from drought and crop failure and foreclosure. By the early 1930s, the NDFU
became the largest state body of the National Farmers Union, with around 15,000 members. It
was led by Charley Talbott and Marion W. Thatcher, both veterans of leftist agrarian politics and
large-scale cooperatives in the spring wheat belt.5
After the end of the Wheat Pool, the prime agrarian economic organization in
Saskatchewan became the United Farmers of Canada (Saskatchewan Section) (UFC). Created in
1926, the UFC had worked with the Wheat Pool and promoted agrarian cooperation. After the
collapse of the pools in the early 1930s, the UFC found itself overwhelmed with the amount of
relief needed across the province. Its leaders and members did what they could to provide seed,
feed, and sustenance to the farmers suffering from crop failure, drought, and foreclosure.
In the first years of the Depression, both the NDFU and the UFC received little assistance
from their respective federal and subnational governments, so they looked to more radical
solutions. Most leftists’ discussions of social change in the dark years of the early 1930s focused
4
on the Soviet experiment, because it was the only place where socialism was in operation. As it
seemed that democratic capitalism crumbled before their eyes, North American leftists saw in the
USSR a sense of orderliness and direction, exemplified in Five-Year Plans. For many on the
political left in the U.S. and Canada, their worldview was invested in the development of Russian
socialism.6
George H. Williams of the UFC and Marion W. Thatcher of the NDFU both toured
Russia in 1931. By this time, the Soviet state was pressing cooperatives with grain procurement
and beginning to liquidate the kulaks and dismantle private land ownership. The massive
famines, arrests, violence, and killings, however, were not yet widespread. Williams met Soviet
delegates at the 1931 World Wheat Conference in London, and, impressed with his knowledge of
wheat agriculture, they invited him to tour the country. Williams visited several collective farms
in the Volga region southeast of Moscow and met with several Soviet officials. It seems that he
visited one area of intense state compulsory grain procurement, in the Volga region, but not other
affected areas including Ukraine and the northern Caucasus. Thatcher spent most of his time in
Russia in the region around Moscow.7
After their visit, both Williams and Thatcher rejected the idea that collectivization and
communism were the answer to the farmers’ problems. Communism seemed like a preferable
system in theory, Thatcher contended, but in reality it did not improve lives in Russia and it
would not improve lives in the United States. Thatcher explained how, during his entire trip in
Russia, he subsisted on bread and tea, because there was no meat or fruit anywhere, though he
did encounter some rotten strawberries for sale by a peasant woman. The Soviets bled and
impoverished their people through forced production and discarded all elements of freedom,
security, and comfort for a government of martial law, he concluded.8
5
American farmers soon did not have to look abroad for state schemes to address their
problems. As David Danbom reminds us, when the farmers “were given reason to hope for
something better their radicalism evaporated like the dew on a sunny Midwestern morning.”
Under the New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Act, wheat farmers and other major agricultural
commodity producers were urged to eliminate surpluses in order to raise prices, and were paid
subsidies by the federal government to do so. For wheat, the curtailment of the crop began for
the 1934-35 season.9
In most other states, the Farm Bureau spearheaded the AAA. But due to Farmers Union
dominance in the North Dakota, Farmers Union leaders took control from the Farm Bureau of
the administration of the AAA. In all, over ninety percent of North Dakota farmers signed up
with the AAA to restrict acreage for the 1934-35 crop season. In addition, the Federal
Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) funneled money to North Dakota for basic necessities.
For the next two years North Dakota had the highest percentage of population on relief compared
to the rest of the country. The farmers of North Dakota proclaimed FDR is working “like no man
in all history has worked” for agriculture.10
As the federal government and its agricultural programs came to dominate more and
more of the state, the Farmers Union organized a Washington lobby group, the Northwest
Legislative Committee. In doing so, the Farmers Union came to reap the benefits of subsequent
New Deal programs and became Roosevelt’s champion in the northern plains wheat belt. The
rehabilitation programs of the Resettlement Administration (RA) and later the Farm Security
Administration (FSA) were additional vehicles by which the Farmers Union became wedded
irrevocably to the New Deal.11
6
The RA and FSA also channeled money into Farmers Union cooperatives. Thousands of
federal loans to individuals allowed farmers to purchase stock in a variety of Farmers Union
cooperatives. M.W. Thatcher’s chairmanship of the National Farmers Union Legislative
Committee gave the Farmers Union unprecedented access to FDR and other New Dealers. It also
meant that millions of dollars in federal aid found its way into North Dakota and into the
cooperatives affiliated with the NDFU. The RA/FSA came to be known as “the Farmers Union
agencies” and the Farmers Union controlled important appointments in the FSA during the life of
the program.12
FDR carried usually Republican North Dakota in 1936. Without the New Deal, the
Farmers Union in North Dakota would have shriveled and most likely disappeared. The state
itself would not have survived without federal subsidies during the 1930s. North Dakota’s most
important business during the 1930s was the federal government.13
The New Deal also tempered the more radical agrarian elements in North Dakota. During
the early 1930s communists were active in the northwest portion of the state, and NDFU leaders
publicly supported Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas in 1932. As the Farmers
Union in North Dakota became more wedded to New Deal programs, its stance became more
moderate. By 1936 the NDFU publicly called for the prevention of any socialists or communists
in the organization.14
In the summer of 1934 President Roosevelt toured North Dakota drought regions.
Farmers Union members lined roads to show support and filled outdoor events with their county
Farmers Union banners flying high.15
When Canadian Prime Minister R.B. Bennett toured the ravaged West in August 1931,
there were no parades or crowds of supporters. The UFC in Saskatchewan criticized heavily the
7
administration’s lack of relief policy. In 1932 the UFC voted to enter politics directly via a
alliance with the leftist laborites, called the Farmer-Labour Party. Major James Coldwell of
Regina led the Farmer-Labour Party.16
Coldwell led the party in 1932 to join Canadian socialist groups in Calgary, where they
sought to organize a collective response to the Great Depression. Their answer was the
Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, an avowed socialist national political party. The CCF
political platform espoused public ownership of finance, credit, utilities, and natural resources,
and the establishment and spread of cooperatives. Above all, the new party advocated economic
planning as an alternative to free market capitalism. Though it took until 1934 for the Farmer-
Labor Party to change its name to the Saskatchewan CCF, it was already the de facto CCF body
in the province.17
This situation set the stage for the Saskatchewan Farmer-Labour Party to participate in its
first provincial election in 1934, on a platform calling for the use-hold land system, public
ownership of major industries, and other public programs. The Liberals intimated that the use-
hold land system was merely a cover for the nationalization of private property and the
beginnings of collectivization. Despite these attacks, the Farmer-Labour Party won five seats and
became the official opposition in the legislature as the Conservative Party disappeared after the
1934 elections. The Liberals, however, won all remaining seats and commanded a strong
majority.18
The return of Liberal Government in Saskatchewan did not change the situation of
suffering. They campaigned on a more responsive approach to debt adjustment, but this did not
lessen the multiplication of farmers’ debts or negate the threat of foreclosure. The UFC and CCF
in Saskatchewan, working together, aimed to remedy what they argued were manifest
8
deficiencies in the Liberal approach to relief, debt, and unemployment, and used this as a major
campaign issue leading up to the 1938 provincial elections.
The CCF Central Office and the UFC Central Relief Committee, both headquartered in
Regina, received thousands of cases of foreclosure per year. By mediating between government
officials, creditors, and debtors both organizations managed to allow some farmers to remain on
their lands or obtain alternate terms of settlement. The two organizations were able to juxtapose
these actions with claims that the Government’s debt adjustment tribunals were “little more than
collection agencies for creditors.” Through such mediation, and by publicizing the suffering of
individuals through local meetings, newspapers, and other literature, the UFC and CCF pressed
the provincial government to provide feed and fodder and expand their relief measures. Thus the
UFC and CCF were able to create an effective coalition—one that utilized joint campaigning
during the next provincial election in 1938.19
The Saskatchewan CCF recognized the planks associated with socialism hurt their
political fortunes. To neutralize attacks the party officially removed references to socialism from
the platform, and ended talk of the land use-hold program as well. At the 1936 provincial
convention the CCF instead promoted a vision of the privately owned family farm. The CCF also
officially adopted a policy of non-collaboration with the Communist Party in political matters.20
Meanwhile, farmers saw no prospect of a government at the federal level willing to
institute a true Canadian New Deal. In preparation for the 1935 federal elections, Prime Minister
Bennett announced his own New Deal-style reforms, but by election day it was clear the call for
such reform was mostly political posturing. In October 1935 the Liberals under Mackenzie King
formed a moderate administration and did not embark upon any major social welfare or
agricultural programs.21
9
Back in Saskatchewan during the 1938 provincial election, the Liberals maintained a
majority of seats but the CCF also fared well, beating out another insurgent challenger, Social
Credit. By the end of the decade, the CCF in Saskatchewan became the leading opposition party
to the ruling Liberals. The Saskatchewan party proved itself a durable alternative to traditional
party rule.22
In conclusion, the New Deal gave the Farmers Union a stake in the federal government.
North Dakota received the second largest amount of funding per capita from the AAA, FSA, and
Farm Credit Administration. North Dakota also ranked high on per capita basis in FERA relief.
This money helped avert catastrophe and made farmers grateful for federal assistance.23
In Canada, the federal government never planned or organized its own long-term
approach to the problems of relief and unemployment. The two Prime Ministers of the decade
followed relatively conservative and guarded courses of action.24
The presence of the CCF on the provincial and national political stages pushed the
Liberals towards the center. The farmers and laborers occupied the left position in Canada, while
the absence of a party left of the Democrats enabled FDR to build a broad progressive coalition.
In essence, “The young men who became New Dealers in the United States became CCFers in
Canada.”25
The New Deal boosted morale and halted some of the worst conditions but did not alter
the fundamental agricultural problems of the northern plains. The need to preserve land values,
pay debts and mortgages, or keep agricultural commodity prices at or around parity, were never
structurally addressed by the Roosevelt administration. Conversely, structural change is exactly
what the CCF championed. Land policy, socialized health care, and debt reform all suggested a
new form of cooperative and socialist society. The many decades of provincial government
10
activism left prairie farmers with an expectation for the government of Saskatchewan to do
something. In North Dakota, less had been expected from the states and more from the federal
government, such as the McNary-Haugen bills or Hoover’s Farm Board. The New Deal
tempered farmer radicalism, but Ottawa’s weak response had the opposite effect and pushed
farmers to create more radical alternatives like the CCF. Both the Farmers Union and the CCF
used the language of socialism—of the cooperative commonwealth—but gave it divergent
organizational forms.26
The CCF was able to work outside the established institutional processes while still
seeking to directly influence the course of government through the conviction that democratic
elections and legislatures were the accepted means of reform. Party leaders could boast after
1934 of becoming the official opposition in the legislature, a parliamentary perch from which to
proselytize and legislate. On the ground, the CCF constantly challenged the Liberal Government
to provide relief to suffering farmers. In other words, the CCF used institutional opposition to
their policies to their advantage. In contrast, the Farmers Union dominated North Dakota through
the 1930s and faced very little hostility to its programs. The state government of William Langer
worked with the organization, as did the Roosevelt administration. Within North Dakota,
opposition to the Farmers Union in North Dakota was almost absent.27
During and after World War II, however, the NDFU would face significant challenges
from a conservative state government and the beginning of the Red Scare. So did the CCF in
Saskatchewan, though it did so with majority control of the provincial government after 1944.
All the while, the farmers of North Dakota and Saskatchewan renewed binational contacts on the
basis of economic cooperation and mutual respect.
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1 Was Starvation Necessary? File II, CCF Pamphlet Collection, University of Saskatchewan,
Special Collections.
2 Salisbury to the Bank of North Dakota, 28 Aug., 21 Aug., 1936; Salisbury to Judge Grimson,
21 Aug. 1936, and reply, 29 Aug. 1936; Salisbury to Ebach, 23 Nov. 1936; Salisbury to Duffy,
and Salisbury to Mabel and Ethel Maloney, both 27 Nov. 1936; all in Bert M. Salisbury
Collection of Papers, North Dakota State University.
3 C.F. Wilson, A Century of Canadian Grain: Government Policy to 1951 (Saskatoon: Western
Producer Prairie Books, 1978), 237-8; John Herd Thompson with Allen Seager, Canada, 1922-
1939: Decades of Discord (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985), 194; David B. Danbom,
Born in the Country: A History of Rural America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1995), 190, 198-202; Lawrence Fairbairn, From Prairie Roots: The Remarkable Story of
the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1984), 109-10.
4 Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1987), 383-84. Quote from S.M. Lipset, “The Rural Community and Political Leadership in
Saskatchewan,” The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 13 (Aug., 1947): 413.
5 On the rise of the NDFU and its cooperative ventures, see Harold V. Knight, Grass Roots: The
Story of the North Dakota Farmers Union (Jamestown, ND: Inter-County Cooperative
Publishing Association, 1947); Charles and Joyce Conrad, 50 Years: North Dakota Farmers
Union (1976); Nancy Edmonds Hanson, Changing Landscapes: North Dakota Farmers Union
(Jamestown, ND: North Dakota Farmers Union, 2001); Theodore Saloutos and John D. Hicks,
Twentieth-Century Populism: Agricultural Discontent in the Middle West, 1900-1939 (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1951); William P. Tucker, “Populism Up-to-Date: The Story of
the Farmers’ Union,” Agricultural History 21 (Oct., 1947): 198-207; and Ross B. Talbot, “The
Politics of Farm Organizations in North Dakota” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1953).
6 Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the
Depression Years (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 61-68. For an example
of this from the UFC in Canada, see The Western Producer, 11 Oct. 1934, p. 9, and 25 Oct.
1934, p.9.
7 G.H. Williams, The Land of the Soviets (Saskatoon: Modern Press, Ltd., 1931), 1-14; Friedrich
Steininger, “George H. Williams: Agrarian Socialist” (M.A. Thesis: University of Regina, 1976),
78-80; Nicolas Toulaykov (vice president of the Lenin Academy of Science and Agriculture,