Lynn Joseph Frazier

• Lynn Joseph Frazier
• Born: December 21, 1874
• Died: January 11, 1947

Nonpartisan League leader, North Dakota governor, agrarian Spokesman United States senator, was born, near Minnesota, to Thomas and Lois (Nile) Frazier, small farmers who had come west from Rangeley, Maine. Six years later, the family moved again, taking a homestead near Hoople, North Dakota, where Lynn Frazier was to operate a farm for most of his life.

Frazier attended the country schools around his home and was graduated from nearby Grafton High School in 1892. His educational plans were interrupted, however, by the death of his father that year, which obliged Frazier to aid his brothers in the operation of the family farm. During the next two winters, he taught in the country schools near Hoople and saved enough money to enter the Mayville State Normal School, whose two-year course he completed in one year, graduating in 1895. After a few seasons of full-time farming, he entered the University of North Dakota.

Frazier’s years at the university had a considerable impact upon his life. Having watched, and most likely been a part of, the Populist struggles of the 1890s, Frazier was now able to place these issues within the framework suggested by some of the more progressive faculty. He struck up friends with classmates whose political careers were to intersect his for many years, including his fraternity brother and football teammate William Lemke. Frazier was graduated with honors in 1902.

He hoped for a legal career, but the death of a brother necessitated another return to the family farm. In 193 he married Lottie J. Stafford, the daughter of a neighboring farmer. Five children resulted from this union, including twin daughters named Unie Mae and Versie Fae in honor of Frazier’s alma mater. Over the next decade, the Fraziers established themselves as among the more progressive and successful potato farmers in the region. Frazier also became a figure in local politics, serving on the local school and township boards.

But if the Fraziers attained some degree of prosperity, they were never removed from the tenacious cycle of debt that clutched at the other farmers, nor from the injustices of the corporate grain-marketing system. In response to these abuses, a number of North Dakotans had established local cooperative businesses, while many others joined in the cooperative crusades waged by the Society of Equity. Frazier was involved in both of these struggles, as an officer of the Hoople Farmers Grain Company and as a local Equity leader.

By 1914, there was deep sentiment within the ranks of the Equity in North Dakota that their cooperative aspirations could never be realized short of organized political action. The next year, this sentiment was translated into the creation and organization of the Nonpartisan League (NPL)—in effect, a “third party” operating within the ranks of the state’s Republican party. At its first convention, held in early 1916, the NPL selected its first candidates for state office. Although Frazier certainly had all of the necessary qualifications, no one, perhaps least of all himself, would have considered him a likely candidate for public office. Yet the convention, after hearing of his qualifications from a number of league leaders—including William Lemke— endorsed him as its first gubernatorial candidate.

The state’s press and political elite viewed the selection of the unknown Frazier as a joke; one newspaper sarcastically asked, “Who is Frazier and is Hoople a place or a disease?” But to the majority of the state’s voters, the choice was excellent, and Frazier was elected the first NPL governor of North Dakota, a victory he repeated in 1918 and 1920.

The reforms registered during the Frazier administration were considerable innovations in American politics, including the creation of the nation’s only state bank and the establishment of state-owned industries to counter the inequities in the corporate grain-marketing system. Although it would be fallacious to credit Frazier with the genesis of these reforms, his stable leadership provided the necessary atmosphere in which they could be attained. Moreover, this stability and Frazier’s refusal to bow to the wartime hysteria of 1917-19 kept North Dakota free of the most odious antiradical and anti-German practices, which were common throughout most of the nation. As a result of these accomplishments, Frazier provided the NPL with its foremost public servant, indeed becoming the living embodiment of the league to its thousands of members nationwide.

Unfortunately, not all of the league’s ventures were as insulated from criticism as was Frazier, and in 1921, he and a few other NPL state officials were recalled from office. Frazier’s political career, however, was far from over, and the next year he was elected to the U.S. Senate. His presence boosted the small, but vocal, number of “insurgent” Republicans in the Senate chamber, but their criticism of the policies of the Coolidge administration led to their being read out of party caucuses.

Frazier’s alienation from the more established Republican circles was to continue throughout his years in the Senate, forcing him to search out allies wherever they could be found. Usually, however, this meant that Frazier—virtually the only “dirt farmer” in the Senate—was without any significant political support.

Nonetheless, the voters of North Dakota returned Frazier to office in 1928 and 1934, by which time the economic situation in rural America was in full-blown crisis. Initially, the New Deal offered some promise to the nation’s beleaguered family farmers, but the reforms did not reach down far enough, and foreclosures spread across the land. In response to this situation, Frazier collaborated with his old ally William Lemke—then a member of the House—and drafted a series of bills designed to save the embattled family farm through debt moratoriums and government loans. The most famous was the Frazier-Lemke Act of 1934, which allowed bankrupt farmers to postpone mortgage payments for six years, and then buy back their farms at reasonable rates. The act, however, was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court on the ground that it violated due process. Subsequent efforts by Frazier and Lemke resulted either in compromise or defeat. By 1937, Frazier’s political support in the Congress had collapsed.

In 1935 Lottie Frazier died; two years later he married Catherine Paulson of Concrete, North Dakota.

Frazier ran for a fourth Senate term in 1940, but was defeated by William Langer, and he returned to his farm near Hoople. Six years later, he made a half-hearted attempt at winning the Republican nomination for governor, but by then his health was failing, and the effort ended in defeat. Less than a year later, at the age of seventy-two, Frazier died of a heart ailment.

Lynn Frazier’s career in public office was an uneven mixture of victory and defeat. The forms enacted under his governorship of North Dakota benefited that state’s citizens for generations. Had he been successful in Washington, his reforms might have done much to help preserve the family farm. In the end, it was Frazier’s quiet dignity and adamant honesty that remain as the hallmark of his career in public office.

The only collection of Frazier’s papers that has been deposited in public archives is a small collection at the state Historical Society of North Dakota, Bismarck; these papers relate mainly to his actions during the 1919 coal strike. Frazier has never been the subject of a biography. either in book or essay form. Information about his university years can be located in L. G. Geiger, University of the Plains: A History of the University of Northern Dakota 1883–1958 (1958). The basic facts regarding his governorship of North Dakota are covered in R. L. Morlan, Political Prairie Fire: The Nonpartisan League, 1915-1922 (1955).for his years in the Senate, see R. L. Feinman, Twilight of Progressivism: The Western Republican Senators and the New Deal (1981). See also the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 4 (1974). Obituaries of Frazier—virtually the most complete source on his life—can be found in The Bismarck Tribune and The Minot Daily News, January 13, 1947.