Arthur C. Townley

Arthur Charles Townley (1880–1959) was an American political organizer best known as the founder the National Non-Partisan League (NPL), a radical farmers' organization which had considerable political success in the states of North Dakota and Minnesota during the second half of the 1910s.

Arthur Charles Townley was born December 30, 1880, near Browns Valley, Minnesota, the son of Fitch R. Townley and Esther J. Cross, and graduated from high school in Alexandria, Minnesota. He moved to western North Dakota to farm with his brother Covert, and participated in a failed large-scale wheat farming venture in Colorado before returning to North Dakota in 1907. In Colorado he met his eventual wife Margaret Rose Teenan, whom he married in 1911.

By 1912, Townley owned considerable area near Beach, North Dakota, and was being called the "Flax King of the Northwest". In August 1913, a freak snowstorm together with the fluctuations of a speculative grain market ruined him financially, causing an abrupt change in vocation.

After joining the Socialist Party of North Dakota and running unsuccessfully for the state legislature in 1914, he abandoned the Socialists and criss-crossed the state in a borrowed Model-T Ford, signing up members in a new political party called the Nonpartisan League. His message resonated with the grievances of small farmers against the exploitative big interests: the Minneapolis grain merchants, the railroads, and the eastern banks.

In 1916 the Nonpartisan League candidate, Lynn Frazier, won the North Dakota gubernatorial election, and in 1919 the state legislature enacted the entire NPL program, consisting of state-owned banks, mills, grain elevators and hail insurance agencies. However, the political winds soon turned. Newspapers and business groups portrayed the NPL as socialist, and the NPL's lack of political experience led to infighting and corruption. Frazier became the first U.S. state governor to be recalled - the only one until California's Gray Davis in 2003.

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