The Nonpartisan League

A rise in left-wing sentiment in North Dakota during the 1910s culminated in 1915 when Arthur C. Townley, a farmer and former organizer for the Socialist Party of America, drew up a platform to address farmers’ interests that he felt were ignored by the two-party system. He founded the Farmers Non-Party League Organization, later known as the Nonpartisan League (NPL). The League’s various goals included improved state services, women’s suffrage, and state ownership of banks, mills, and elevators. With a robust grassroots campaign, the NPL quickly grew in numbers, and by the 1916 primaries, it had effectively seized control of the state’s Republican Party, winning both houses of the state legislature as well as the governor’s office.

Its victory, however, proved short-lived. At the close of World War I, a drought and a drop in grain prices caused an agricultural recession. The League’s opponents accused it of opposing the war effort, and soon internal conflicts emerged within the coalition that formed the party’s core. The NPL lost control of the statehouse, resulting in a vote to recall governor Lynn J. Frazier. It seemed the third-party experiment was to be swept out with the prairie winds.

However, in 1918, the NPL expanded into neighboring Minnesota, where it joined forces with city worker-focused groups to form the Farmer-Labor Party (FLP). The FLP carried on the NPL’s mission while adding labor union protection to its platform, creating a broad, working-class movement statewide. The new party was a hit, partially due to the lack of “viable political opposition to the dominant Republican Party in Minnesota during this period.” Over the next twenty years, it produced three governors, four US senators, and eight US representatives, relegating the Democrats to a third party in the state.

American Third-Party Politics

The FLP became a case study in successful third-party politics in the American system. It was a grassroots, regional party that prioritized the needs of Minnesota voters, allowing it to focus its campaigns and tailor messaging effectively. The FLP’s coalition of urban workers and rural farmers proved key to its lasting success, building a strong regional voting bloc with national influence in presidential elections. With a foothold established, the FLP mobilized voters and endorsed candidates, steadily expanding its reach.

However, after two decades in power, internal conflicts surfaced. The unexpected death of popular governor Floyd B. Olson sparked a divisive primary campaign filled with accusations of corruption, fracturing the party before the 1938 election. The American Farm Bureau Federation, newly empowered by New Deal programs, was actively hostile to the FLP, further hindering its policy goals. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, though he had previously received FLP support, offered little help, refusing to expend political capital on the party’s behalf. The 1938 midterm elections dealt the FLP a severe blow, as Republicans made sweeping gains, resulting in the loss of all state offices, most of the state legislature, and a significant presence in Washington.

 The FLP limped along for several years as a shadow of its former self. The party fielded candidates in 1940 and 1942 but failed to repeat its victories in the state legislature or win any state office. Its national standing continued to erode, with the party losing an additional senate seat in 1940 and electing only one congressman, while its vote totals steadily declined. Despite the fall of the FLP, the Minnesota Democratic Party did not rise to fill the gap, remaining a distant third in the state. One might argue that the FLP could have reestablished itself by weathering the downturn, but instead it turned to the Democrats.

After bitter losses for both parties in 1942, state Democratic chair Elmer Kelm publicly expressed interest in a merger. Early the following year, he drafted a memo to the national committee, suggesting that President Roosevelt’s odds of winning Minnesota’s electoral votes were at risk without a unified left-of-center front. The idea was encouraged by influential Minnesota Democrat Hubert Humphrey.

From Alliance to Absorption

The FLP for was not opposed to the idea. Leaders reasoned that it made little sense for two left-leaning minority parties to continue struggling with one another with little chance of overcoming their Republican opponents in the near term. Merger negotiations began later that year and culminated in an April 1944 between Kelm and FLP leader Elmer Benson, with Humphrey chairing the discussions. When the negotiations were closed, America’s longest-running third party had folded, and the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) was born.

While FDR did carry Minnesota in the 1944 presidential election, the DFL initially saw only minor gains in the state legislature. It wasn’t until the 1950s that the DFL began to experience real success. Fortunes began to improve. Meanwhile, the internal friction within the hastily assembled party began to show.

By the second party convention in 1946, factions had arisen between Humphrey, now the center-left mayor of Minneapolis, and the more radical socialist-leaning wing led by Benson. When Benson’s faction took over after Kelm’s resignation as party chair, Humphrey quickly geared up for war. Over the next three years, Humphrey marshaled his allies into an insurgency within the party that fought tooth and nail to reverse Benson’s consolidation of power. The conflict culminated in 1948 with the expulsion of all remaining radical and communist elements from the DFL, including Benson, who opted to move to former vice president Henry Wallace’s floundering Progressive Party. Humphrey, meanwhile, became the party’s first elected senator in Washington.

As the DFL’s star ascended, the populist elements that had made up the Farmer-Labor Party became a distant memory. In all but name, Minnesota’s left opposition had become the Democratic Party. The FLP’s gamble for short-term gains led to a Democratic takeover, with the party’s larger resources and national structure swallowing the FLP wholesale. In retrospect, the takeover seems inevitable: structural contradictions within the merged party demanded resolution. Whether the FLP leaders failed to foresee this struggle or assumed it was a fight they could win, they ultimately underestimated the ability of the Democratic Party to absorb a rival movement.

In the aftermath of the 2024 campaign, we can see shadows of this process. We can imagine the party apparatchiks working backstage to transform a once-insurgent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into a safe, uncontroversial convention speaker, or reshaping Tim Walz’s progressive gubernatorial achievements into a campaign centered on Liz Cheney and a right-wing turn on immigration. In the end, after being metabolized by the Democratic National Committee machine, all that remains of twentieth-century Midwest populism is the vestigial organ of an “FL,” dwarfed by the adjoining letter “D,” beside the governor’s name.