Arthur Charles Townley (30 December 1880-7 November 1959) was the founder of the Nonpartisan League, a democratic socialist political party in North Dakota and Minnesota.
Biography[]
Arthur Charles Townley was born in Browns Valley, Minnesota in 1880, and he became a flax farmer in Beach, North Dakota, where he became nicknamed the "Flax King of the Northwest." A 1913 snowstorm ruined him financially, and he joined the Socialist Party of America and ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature in 1914. After his failed electoral bid, Townley left the Socialist Party and founded the populist Nonpartisan League, which attacked the Minneapolis grain merchants, railroads, and eastern banks. The NPL went on to establish state-owned banks, mills, grain elevators, and hail insurance agencies, but newspapers and business groups portrayed the NPL as socialist and corrupt, resulting in the recalling of Governor Lynn Frazier. Townley's popularity declined along with the NPL, and he was arrested in Jackson County, Minnesota for discouraging enlistments during World War I. He served 90 days in jail, and he soon found himself irrelevant to NPL affairs. He promoted the drilling of an oil well in Robinson, North Dakota in 1926 and worked as a traveling salesman through the Great Depression, and he failed in his 1934 Farmer-Labor Party bid for the US House of Representatives in Minnesota. During the 1950s, he lectured on the evils of communism and accused the North Dakota Farmers Union of being dominated by communists. He failed in his US Senate bids in 1956 and 1958, and he retired to New Effington, South Dakota before dying in a car-truck accident near Minot, North Dakota in 1959.