University of Arkansas, Fayetteville ScholarWorks@UARK Theses and Dissertations 5-2015 Political Harvests: Transnational Farmers' Movements in North Dakota and Saskatchewan, 1905-1950 Jason McCollom University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd Part of the American Politics Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation McCollom, Jason, "Political Harvests: Transnational Farmers' Movements in North Dakota and Saskatchewan, 1905-1950" (2015). Theses and Dissertations. 20. http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/20 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UARK. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UARK. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Political Harvests: Transnational Farmers’ Movements in North Dakota and Saskatchewan, 1905-1950 Political Harvests: Transnational Farmers’ Movements in North Dakota and Saskatchewan, 1905-1950 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History by Jason McCollom Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi Bachelor of Arts in History, 2003 Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi Master of Arts in History, 2006 May 2015 University of Arkansas This dissertation is approved for recommendation to the Graduate Council. ______________________________ Dr. Robert C. McMath Dissertation Director ______________________________ _________________________________ Dr. Elliott West Dr. Sterling Evans Committee Member Committee Member Abstract This research uses as a case study farmers’ movements in North Dakota and Saskatchewan, two identical locales in terms of wheat monoculture, demographics, and agrarian ideology, and traces the differing social, economic, and political outcomes between 1905 and 1950. The research, however, moves beyond this and also investigates the transnational integration, connections, and engagements among agrarian groups across the broader North American northern plains and across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to Europe, the Soviet Union, and Australia. Methodologically, this study applies social movement theory, pioneered by sociologists Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilley, which seeks to replace a static view of social movements with a more dynamic one and allows for baseline comparison and elucidation of cross-border interactions. This investigation utilizes personal and organizational papers, along with movement newspapers and other movement publications from archives in the United States and Canada. For the first time, this research delves deeply into the shared histories of the U.S.- Canadian northern plains—and movements’ relationships with similar agrarian histories around the globe—and takes the story from the late nineteenth century through the tumult of the Great Depression, when the divergent paths of farmers’ movements began, and into the early Cold War period, when two distinct political outcomes became apparent. Table of Contents I. Preface.......................................................................................................................................1 II. Chapter One: The Beginnings of Transnational Farmers Movements.....................................7 III. Chapter Two: Grain Exchanges and Grain Elevators: Farmers, Farm Organizations, and Ideas Across the Forty-ninth Parallel, 1905-1915................................................................51 IV. Chapter Three: The Politics of Prairie Socialism, 1915-1918: The Nonpartisan League in North Dakota and Saskatchewan.............................................................................126 V. Chapter Four: The Failure of Agrarian Politics and the Rise of the Wheat Pools, 1919-1929.................................................................................................................................185 VI. Chapter Five: Hard Times, Organization, and Politics: The Great Depression on the Transnational Plains.......................................................................................................249 VII. Chapter Six: Farm Organizations and Social Democrats in War and Cold War, 1939-1950.................................................................................................................................320 VIII. Chapter Seven: Conclusion..............................................................................................380 IX. Bibliography.......................................................................................................................385 Preface: “We are tied together with invisible bonds in a hundred different ways.” In the first half of the twentieth century, the northern plains of North America was characterized by geographic integrity, a wheat monoculture economy, and similar settlement patterns and demographics. This provided the context for the free flow of agrarian ideas, organizations, and policy approaches 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 often 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 that was the 1930s sent political shockwaves across the northern plains and reoriented farmers’ organizations and political movements. By the end of the decade and into the war years and early Cold War period, farm movements in North Dakota and Saskatchewan moved away from previous institutional equivalency, altered their transnational connections, and developed in ways unique to the political cultures of the U.S. and Canada. It has been almost seventy years since a scholarly monograph examined the intertwined histories of farmers and farm associations across the North American northern plains, and that story, though told well, only looked superficially at the history through the World War I period. The binational experiences of borderland farmers in the 1920s, through the Depression, and into the postwar period have never been studied. Though there is literature on the interwar wheat pool 1 movement in the Canadian prairies, there is virtually none on the pools in the U.S., and certainly no one has traced the cross-border connections among North American wheat pools and their relationship with the international large-scale agricultural commodity marketing movement. Though the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) is the perhaps the most written about third party in Canadian history, a transnational context allows for new insights on how that political insurgency interacted with Saskatchewan cooperatives and with social democrats in the United States, and why the rise of the CCF accompanied alterations in long-standing connections between northern plains farmers in the two countries. Finally, this work is the first to apply to farmers’ movements a social science theoretical approach which allows for a clearer understanding of comparative and binational histories. For the first time, this research delves deeply into the shared histories of North Dakota and Saskatchewan, and takes the story from the late nineteenth century through the tumult of the Great Depression, when the divergent paths of farmers’ movements began, and into the early Cold War period, when two distinct political outcomes became apparent.1 1 Paul Sharp’s The Agrarian Revolt in Western Canada: A Survey Showing American Parallels (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1948) still holds up under scrutiny for its readability and novel methodological approach. Mildred A. Schwartz, a sociologist, has for many years been at the forefront of suggesting such transnational connections between U.S. and Canadian farmers’ groups and political organizations in the northern plains, but her work never rises above generalities and theoretical assumption, and relies upon secondary literature. See, for example, Schwartz, “Cross-Border Ties Among Protest Movements: The Great Plains Connection,” Great Plains Quarterly 17 (1997): 119-30. Not only have borderlands scholars mostly focused on the Mexico-U.S. region, but those few who acknowledge the U.S.-Canadian border region often ignore the vast shared histories across the northern plains. See, for instance, William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), ch. 3; Richard White and John M. Findlay, eds., Power and Place in the North American West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999); and Stephen J. Randall, ed., with Herman Konrad and Sheldon Silverman, North America Without Borders? Integrating Canada, the United States, and Mexico (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1992). 2 Chapter Summaries The introductory chapter examines briefly the ways in which scholars have treated the history of the American-Canadian West and the northern plains borderlands, and lays out nineteenth-century patterns