“Hard Times, Agrarian Organization, and Politics: The Great Depression on the Transnational Plains.”

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

Moscow) to Williams, 21 Apr. 1931, File E.70, Violet McNaughton Papers, Saskatchewan

Archives Board (Saskatoon); North Dakota Union Farmer, 6 July 1936, p. 2; Farmers Union

Herald, 22 June 1931, p.1; Proceedings of UFC 1932 Convention, 57-58, Folder 1.6, Annual

Convention Reports, UFC-SS Ltd. Collection, Saskatchewan Archives Board (Regina).

8 Williams, The Land of the Soviets, 28-85; Steininger, “George H. Williams,” 80-94; How Other

Countries Are Helping Their Farmers (Regina: Saskatchewan Cooperative Wheat Producers,

1936), 25-26, Folder: Saskatchewan Co-operative Wheat Pool, Ltd., Box 51, North Dakota-

12

Montana Wheat Growers Records, University of North Dakota Special Collections; Farmers

Union Herald, 13 July 1931, p.1, 3, 3 June 1931, p.1, 19 Oct. 1931, p.2. For an analysis and

comparison of the CCF, American Populism, and prerevolutionary Russia, see J.F. Conway,

“Populism in the United States, Russia, and Canada: Explaining the Roots of Canada’s Third

Parties,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 11 (Mar., 1978): 99-124.

9 Danbom, Born in the Country, 173-5, 205; Saloutos and Hicks, Twentieth-Century Populism,

473.

10 Memo to County Officers and Councilmen, 2 May 1933, North Dakota Farmers Holiday

Association Collection of Papers, North Dakota State University Archives; Farmers Union

Herald, July 1933, p. 1; Theodore Saloutos, The American Farmer and the New Deal (Ames:

The Iowa State University Press, 1982), 75-76; Christiana McFadyen Campbell, The Farm

Bureau: A Study of the Making of National Farm Policy, 1933-40 (Urbana: University of Illinois

Press, 1962), 123; Jerome D. Tweton and Daniel F. Rylance, The Years of Despair: North

Dakota in the Depression (Grand Forks: The Oxcart Press, 1973), 9-12; Conrad and Conrad, 50

Years, 41; Saloutos and Hicks, Twentieth-Century Populism, 472, 491-92.

11 Farmers Union Herald, Apr. 1935, p. 1, 6.

12 “The Credit Association Has Funds to Loan on a Sound Basis,” Folder 7, Box 11, Ole Olson

Papers, North Dakota State University Archives; North Dakota Union Farmer, 19 July 1937, p.

1, 3 Aug. 1937, p.1, 20 Sept. 1937, p. 1, 4, 3 May 1938, p.1, 4; Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and

Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill: The University

of North Carolina Press, 1968), 205; Ross B. Talbot “The North Dakota Farmers Union and

North Dakota Politics,” The Western Political Quarterly 10 (Dec., 1957): 877; Campbell, The

Farm Bureau, 169-70; Tweton and Rylance, The Years of Despair, 14-15; Saloutos, The

American Farmer and the New Deal, 162.

13 The Farmers Union Herald, Feb. 1938, p. 2, Mar. 1938, p. 5; Talbot, “The Politics of Farm

Organization in North Dakota,” 54; Tweton and Rylance, The Years of Despair, 16; Conrad and

Conrad, 50 Years, p. 60, 70. Thatcher and president Talbott even backed FDR’s court-packing

scheme.

14 North Dakota Union Farmer, 5 Oct. 1936, p. 2; Jean Choate, Disputed Ground: Farm Groups

That Opposed the New Deal Agricultural Program (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), 52;

William C. Pratt, “Rethinking the Farm Revolt of the 1930s,” Great Plains Quarterly 8

(Summer, 1988): 132-33; Lowell K. Dyson, Red Harvest: The Communist Party and American

Farmers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 137-38.

15 North Dakota Union Farmer, 2 July 1934, p. 1, 16 July 1934, p. 1.

16 Memorandum to Mr. Bennett, File 3.21, Pamphlet Collection, SAB (Regina); M.J. Coldwell,

Left Turn, Canada (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1945), vii-ix; William C. Pratt,

“Politics in Alberta and Saskatchewan in the 1930s,” Journal of the West 41 (Fall, 2002): 52; Bill

13

Waiser, Saskatchewan: A New History (Calgary: Fifth House, 2005), 311-13; Thompson and

Seager, Canada, 1922-1939, 214-15.

17 The Western Producer, 12 July 1934, p.6; Dean E. McHenry, The Third Force in Canada: The

Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, 1932-1948 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1950),

24-27; David Laycock, Populism and Democratic Thought in the Canadian Prairies, 1910 to

1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 167-77; Friesen, The Canadian Prairies,

378-80.

18 Saskatchewan C.C.F. Research Bureau 1 (Aug., 1933): 1-20, and Saskatchewan C.C.F.

Research Bureau 1 (Oct., 1933): 3; George Hoffman, “The Saskatchewan Farmer-Labor Party

1932-1934: How Radical Was It at Its Origin?” Saskatchewan History 28 (Spring, 1974), 52-64;

David E. Smith, Prairie Liberalism: The Liberal Party in Saskatchewan, 1905-71 (Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 1975), 214-16; Waiser, Saskatchewan: A New History, 311-12;

Pratt, “Politics in Alberta and Saskatchewan in the 1930s,” 53-54.

19 Williams to CCF Campaign Managers and Candidates, 10 Apr. 1935, and Williams to CCF

Campaign Managers and Candidates, 2 Apr. 1935, both in File VIII.31, Folder 1, Records of the

Saskatchewan Grain Growers Association, Farmers’ Union of Canada, and United Farmers of

Canada (Saskatchewan Section), SAB (Saskatoon).

Proceedings of 1930 UFC Convention, 49-50, Folder 1.4; Proceedings of the 1931 UFC

Convention, 41-42, 57, Folder 1.5; Proceedings of 1932 UFC Convention, 39, Folder 1.6;

Proceedings of the 1934 UFC Convention, 33-34, Folder 1.8; Proceedings of the 1935 UFC

Convention, 28, Folder 1.9; Proceedings of 1936 UFC Convention, 29-30, Folder 1.10, all in

Annual Convention Reports, United Farmers of Canada (Saskatchewan Section) Ltd. Collection,

SAB (Regina).

The Western Producer, 17 Nov. 1932, p.5; 10 May 1934, p. 1; 27 Sept. 1934, p. 1; 11 Oct. 1934;

25 April 1935, p.5; 2 May 1935, p.5; 23 May 1935, p.5; 29 Aug. 1935, p.8.

Saskatchewan C.C.F. Research Bureau 1, no. 3 (Sept., 1933): 2; Smith, Prairie Liberalism, 206-

21; Waiser, Saskatchewan: A New History, 311-12.

20 CCF Central Office to Campaign Managers and Candidates, 11 June 1935, File VIII.31, Folder

1, Records of the SGGA, FUC, UFC-SS, SAB (Saskatoon); Peter Sinclair, “The Saskatchewan

CCF and the Communist Party in the 1930s,” Saskatchewan History 26 (1973): 1-10; Smith,

Prairie Liberalism, 232-3; S.M. Lipset, Agrarian Socialism: The Cooperative Commonwealth

Federation in Saskatchewan: A Study in Political Sociology (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1968 ed.), 136; McHenry, The Third Force in Canada, 119; Walter D. Young, Anatomy of

a Party: The National C.C.F., 1932-61 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 255-66.

21 Thompson and Seager, Canada, 1922-1939, 261-99.

14

22 For an example of a Saskatchewan CCF attack on Social Credit, see George Williams

statement from the CCF Central Office, 20 Aug. 1935, Folder 1, File VIII.31, Records of the

SGGA, FUC, UFC-SS, SAB (Saskatoon); Smith, Prairie Liberalism, 238-42; Lipset, Agrarian

Socialism, 145-46; Young, Anatomy of a Party, 180-81; Pratt, “Politics in Alberta and

Saskatchewan in the 1930s,” 55.

23 Untitled interview with Benson Co. resident, Bert M. Salisbury Collection, NDSU; Nellie

Erickson, Fifty Years: Ward County Farmers Union (Minot, ND, 1977), 5; William C. Pratt,

“Rethinking the Farm Revolt of the 1930s,” 131-39, and Pratt, “Rural Radicalism on the

Northern Plains, 1912-1950,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 42 (Winter, 1992), 51;

Leonard J. Arrington and Don C. Reading, “New Deal Economic Programs in the Northern Tier

States, 1933-1939,” in ed. William Lang, Centennial West: Essays on the Northern Tier States

(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 228-41.

24 Howard R. Lamar, “Comparing Depressions: The Great Plains and Canadian Prairie

Experiences, 1929-1941,” in eds. Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain, The Twentieth

Century West: Historical Interpretations (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989),

194-95.

25 Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the

United States (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000), 79-81; Norman Penner, The Canadian

Left: A Critical Analysis (Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall of Canada, 1977), 203-204.

26 Lamar, “Comparing Depressions,” 180-97; John Herd Thompson and Stephen J. Randall,

Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies, 4th ed. (Athens: The University of GA Press,

2008), 133.

Mildred A. Schwartz makes the point that the development of “socialist” agrarian movements in

the northern plains borderlands suggest “it is time to come to terms with the fact that it is usually

socialism’s substitutes, and not socialism itself, that are pathways for the emergence of

politically significant movements in Canada and the United States.” Schwartz, “Political Protest

in the Western Borderlands: Can Farmers Be Socialists?” in ed. Robert Lecker, Borderlands:

Essays in Canadian-American Relations (Toronto: ECW Press, 1991), 47.

27 Mildred Schwartz, Party Movements in the United States and Canada: Strategies of

Persistence (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006), 7-8; Knight, Grass Roots,

47-48.