@realjohnboy,
realjohnboy wrote:
Hi, Nimh. Good to see you again. Do you know why WV's population has been declining?
Not really .. I guess the decline of mining, especially of old-fashioned, labour-intensive, shaft mining (as opposed to today's, I gather, more popular mountain removal mining).
Plus the decline of small farms.
The latter, in any case, is the story of North Dakota's continuous decline since 1930. That was small farmer central - North-European immigrants staking out on frontier land and running hard-scrabble farms. The dust bowl and the crisis put the first big dent in that - and unlike, say, Oklahoma the state never developed the kind of urban centers that would spur the growth of a new kind of economy and population.
Though I still don't know, or understand, why this was so much more true for North-Dakota than for, say, South-Dakota. Somebody else know?
The nature of North-Dakota's hard-scrabble, small farm culture with its Norwegian and German immigrants did spur a rather unique political orientation, for several decades, with its own separate movement. I posted [url]this link[/url] on Reddit a couple of months ago, and posted this comment:
Quote:I hadn't heard of [the Non-Partisan League] until a month or two ago either, when I came across a mention of it somewhere and started reading up. Fascinating story, with more twists and turns than this short article lets on to.
From what I picked up browsing and reading at the time, the NPL started off as a socialist movement by another name, as this article mentions too (the tragic story of NPL founder Arthur Townley, namechecked in the article, is in itself worthy of a novel). The difference is that it mainstreamed socialist-like ideas and rhetorics into run-of-the-mill, by European standards - but rare by US standards - social-democratic type politics, while retaining a distinct rebellious character. They got into power suddenly and overwhelmingly, right after WW1, but soon collapsed under their own inexperience and bitter opposition - that part is mentioned in the article too, the recall elections.
But the NPL survived, and with it a for US political conventions unusual openness to planned and state-owned economic elements [i.e. North Dakota's unique state-owned bank, flour mill and grain elevator]. The article mentions that it became a movement for Sen. Langer, who in turn is a fascinating and ambivalent figure with a long career spanning from the twenties to the fifties. Langer kept up leftist-sounding populist rhetorics on economic policy and an openness for statist policy, but temperamentally and culturally tacked sharply to the right over time. His populist eviscerations of the economic and political elites manifested itself also as a deep distrust of the coastal elites in New York, Washington DC and Hollywood.
At some point, from what I remember reading, the NPL/Langer axis in the Dakotas ended up bordering on the political realm of Father Coughlin, the crypto-fascist priest who became, for a while in the thirties, wildly popular by combining a populist defense of the poor against the rich with virulent anti-semitism. Moving on from there, I suppose it doesn't come wholly as a surprise that by the end of WW2, when Cold War paranoia erupted, Langer became a strident supporter of Joe McCarthy's witchhunt for crypto-communist eggheads in DC and Hollywood.
At first blush, the transformation, over thirty-odd years, of a politician and his political umfeld from semi-socialist to red-baiting seems a wild stretch. But reading about it reminded me of what I'd once read about Joe McCarthy's own, nearby state of Wisconsin.
Wisconsin was the heartland of support for the decidedly left-wing progressives of the 1920s, the homestate of local political fixture "Fightin' Bob LaFollette". Hell, Milwaukee had a Socialist mayor until the fourties or fifties, I believe. LaFollette's presidential candidacy in 1924, supported by a coalition of socialists, farmer movements and former supporters of Teddy Roosevelt, had attracted widespread support across much of the West and Upper Midwest.
From there to the immense popularity of Joe McCarthy in Bob's state 25 years later seemed like an even bigger paradox than what I was now reading about Langer. But I did once read about McCarthy being boisterously praised by some of the same voters who had long supported LaFollette - because they were both seen as populist fighters for the common man who were not afraid to stick it to the treacherous, moneyed, powerful elites on the coasts.
That whole story, coming several decades before Nixon's race-tinged strategies that are more commonly associated with the GOP's conquest of formerly Democratic heartlands, is really kind of an intriguing foreshadowing of how the right won over some of the poorest, heartland states of the US. What's the Matter with Kansas and all that. Did you know that when famed/notorious Socialist leader Eugene Debs made his most successful run for the US presidency, back in 1912, the single state he easily did best in was ... no, not New York ... Oklahoma?
Anyway, this is all from the top of my head, so apologies for any misrepresentations that may have slipped in. But fascinating stuff, definitely - especially as the NPL may have been something specific to the Dakotas, but the more widely spread Farm-Labor tradition in the Upper Midwest and Western states bordering Canada raises some of the same history.
