The Recall of Lynn Frazier: Democracy as a Two-Edged Weapon

The Nonpartisan League's opponents were not idle. Business interests and conservative farmers organized the Independent Voters Association, and when the state bank and the state mill ran into financial difficulties during the deflationary crisis of nineteen twenty and nineteen twenty-one, the IVA moved quickly. In October of nineteen twenty-one, North Dakota voters recalled Governor Lynn Frazier, Attorney General William Lemke, and Commissioner of Agriculture and Labor John Hagan, the first time in American history that a sitting governor had been removed through the recall mechanism.

It was also a demonstration that the progressive reform tools the League had championed could be turned around. The Bank of North Dakota survived, though it was restructured. The state mill survived as well.

But the League's ambition to build a comprehensive industrial program, state-owned packing houses and more, was largely stopped. What the recall could not undo was the underlying organizational fact: tens of thousands of North Dakota farmers had built a political movement from scratch, used democratic institutions to create state-owned enterprises, and those enterprises had enough legitimacy and enough constituencies to outlast any single election cycle. Lynn Frazier himself was not finished.

In nineteen twenty-two, the year after his recall, he ran for United States Senate and won. He served three terms. The voters who removed him from the governorship trusted him with the Senate.

North Dakota politics has always been complicated.