North Dakota Has the Country’s Oldest Public Bank. We Should Look to It as a Model.
With the ongoing financial crisis, it’s a perfect time to look to the Bank of North Dakota. It is the only state-owned bank in the continental US and was formed in 1919 by a left-wing farmer movement to free working people from the grip of private finance.
Counting room of the Bank of North Dakota, c. 1920. (Wikimedia Commons)
Who are banks for?
As crisis stalks the financial system, that question is again a pressing one. And the history of how previous generations answered it points us to an unlikely place: North Dakota, where, in 1919, an upstart farmer movement called the Nonpartisan League (NPL) established the United States’ most successful state-owned bank.
The politics of banking was a widely discussed subject among working people in the early twentieth century. Financial panics throughout the 1800s had taught farmers and laborers to see banks and bankers as enemies of both a stable economy and ordinary people’s prosperity. Despite financiers’ fierce resistance, popular movements successfully pushed for postal savings, credit unions, and farm credit. Political opposition to banking as usual thrived in large cities and remote rural precincts alike.
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