Local Agricultural Labor in Relation to the Upper Midwest

H-Local Local agricultural labor in relation to the Upper Midwest

Discussion published by Terry Shoptaugh on Tuesday, August 16, 2016

I’ve recently read Michael Lansing’s Insurgent Democracy, a narrative of the Non-Partisan League, the farmer-dominated crusade in North Dakota and other upper Midwest states, established in 1915. This is an excellent book and should encourage more historians to research the contributions of rural movements in reforming American state and local government.

Since reading the book, while doing research of my own concerning this era of North Dakota history, I discovered some surprising documents that throw light on the League and labor conditions in the upper Midwest in the latter ‘teens era. These documents make up a series of reports written by agents of a private detective agency, reporting on the question of “socialist influence” among farm field workers in North Dakota. These reports, some three dozen in all, can be found in the papers of William Langer (1886-1959), at the State Historical Society of North Dakota.

Langer, popularly known as “Wild Bill” Langer to his constituents, was a colorful and controversial character. He dominated much of the state’s political scene over the first half of the twentieth century. At various times in his career he served as Attorney General and governor of North Dakota; then as U.S. Senator for that state over a period of eighteen years. It was during his tenure as Attorney General, in 1919, that Langer commissioned these reports. He hired the Thiel Detective Agency, a major firm at the time, which supplied house detectives for hotel chains and trained investigators to infiltrate labor unions. Thiel’s Minneapolis branch furnished Langer with agents to pose as field laborers in Fargo, other towns, and farms in various parts of the state.

The reports by these agents are usually one or two pages in length, mostly typed up from notes by a Thiel coordinator in Fargo; sometimes handwritten reports were submitted. There are about three dozen reports in all, mostly dated in July and August of 1919. Most of the men who wrote these reports used some kind of pseudonym while working among field workers, and they reported on any conversations they had, or overheard, concerning socialism, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), threats or plans of strikes or implications of violence by workers. In point of fact, most of what they ending up reporting consisted mostly of workers’ routine gripes about their wages and living conditions. There is one set of reports concerning a worker who had been shot and wounded by a local policeman while handing out pro-labor literature in the town of Casseltown (co-incidentally, this was Langer’s home town). The agent reporting this incident went into some detail about the incident and identified a prominent attorney in Fargo who had complained to police on the injured man’s behalf; the agent believed the attorney, born in Russia in the 1880s, was likely a radical (he was in fact a member of the Nonpartisan League and apparently never knew the existence of the Thiel investigations).

Exactly why Langer employed the Thiel agency for these reports is a matter of speculation. He had begun assembling a collection of literature on socialism in 1919; the Thiel reports are contained in these files of pamphlets and articles. A small number of letters he preserved show that he paid the Thiel Agency for these investigations with cash he collected from friendly county attorneys, not from funds through the Attorney General’s office. The most the detectives, over the two months of effort, turned up was a vague threat of a general strike by field workers and miners, and a man in Fargo

Citation: Terry Shoptaugh. Local agricultural labor in relation to the Upper Midwest. H-Local. 08-16-2016. https://networks.h-net.org/node/16645/discussions/132336/local-agricultural-labor-relation-upper-midwest Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Local who told an undercover agent he was an “IWW recruiter” and had a “large trunk” filled with socialist pamphlets and some “2000 [membership] cards” for enrolling new members.

Nothing in the files explains precisely why Langer hired Thiel for these reports, but political calculations could have been the main motive. He had disagreed with League actions concerning education and banking regulations throughout 1919, and he broke with the NPL in 1920 in order to challenge incumbent Lynn Frazier for the governorship. During that campaign which he lost, Langer said repeatedly that he thought the NPL had become “infiltrated” by socialists and “agents of Russia” bent on seizing control of the League. He never mentioned the detective reports and they remained hidden in his papers until I ran across them.

I was able to make use of some of these reports in an article I have drafted concerning the Casselton shooting incident and Langer’s 1920 gubernatorial campaign; that draft is now making the rounds for possible publication.

I believe the reports can be used by other scholars in several ways, not least for the insights they provide on local police forces. Police records from the early 1900s are rarely preserved and these shed some light on how local officers treated laborers and strangers. The reports also provide some insight into the working conditions of field labor, their wages, housing, and travel about the state during harvests. Another avenue might be to link these papers in Langer’s files to the papers of the Agricultural Workers Organization, an affiliate of the IWW. There are AWO Papers in the collections of the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University.

If other scholars have found similar materials in other archives, please post a comment. Thank you.

Terry Shoptaugh (Minn State University, Moorhead; ret.)