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Lecture 10 was titled Fire on the Ice and the main thesis was politics on the plains. As a class we decided that the plains were mainly "Red" states, or conservative in the current sense of politics but as Dr. Isern the plains have do have socialist tendency running through it. Some of the more socialist institutions on the plains are the Bank of North Dakota, the North Dakota state Mill and Elevator, Nebraska's state power company, but the main bastoon of socialism on the plains is our neighbor to the north, Alberta where Tommy Douglas from the Progressive Party introduced the model that Canada's socialized medicine system is based on. Locally we discussed how North Dakota likes to send Democrats to Washington DC to raise taxes to benefit North Dakota by bringing in federal tax dollars while we send Republicans to Bismarck to keep our state taxes low. After we layed the ground work and idea that North Dakota and the plains in general might not be as "Red" as we think it is we started to discuss some of the political organizations that were active or formed on the plains. We started off by looking at National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry which was one of the first. Started in the 1860s as a cooperative for buying and in the 1870s started a foray into politics. Next we learned of Farmers Alliance which begans as a social ogranization and coop during the 1880s and the following decade also got into politics with the Peoples Party/Populace Party which called for the federal government to take over control of the railroads. Another organization we looked at was the Non-Partisan League beginning in the 1910s when they infiltrated the North Dakota republican party that led them to start the Bank of North Dakota and the State Mill and Elevator, which were socialist type programs being started by so called republicans. We also looked at the Progressive Party of Alberta, the American Agriculture Movement and Farmer's Union. Most of these political organizations faded away after a decade or two and never became very large outside of the plain states.

I found the most interesting part of the lecture to be Gordon Kahl and Posse Commitatus. Growing up during the mid 80s like I did I remember it seemed like everyone in my small town were talking about him. Upham is a small farming community and the farm crisis of the 1980's hit it hard, there were alot of farmers that were sympathetic to Gordon Kahl and it seemed like he was a strange sort of folk hero to alot of the pissed off farmer back then.

Sutton Goodman