July 18, 2002

Plains Folk: Prairie Populist

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

He grew up with the country, you might say, except that he never quite grew up, and neither did the country. I'm talking about Usher Burdick, a political patriarch in North Dakota, subject of a fine new biography by Edward Blackorby.

Blackorby is a retired professor from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire who happened to take his first college degree from the same institution as did his biographical subject--Mayville State University, or I should say for historical usage, Mayville Normal. The book, "Prairie Populist: The Life and Times of Usher L. Burdick," is published by the Institute for Regional Studies, North Dakota State University (in collaboration with the State Historical Society of North Dakota).

It is fashionable these days for biographers to try to get inside their subjects, ostensibly to show readers the real person, explaining all his internal motivations and demons. The life-and-times biographer, on the other hand, sets the person in context, relating him to environment and events. Blackorby serves us people of the northern plains well with his life-and-times approach, because it teaches us why we are the way we are.

Usher Burdick was a shooting star from the North Dakota frontier. From his hard-working roots at Graham's Island, the Minnewaukan vicinity, he went on to get a teaching degree, marry advantageously, earn a law degree and play football at the University of Minnesota, and establish himself in the infant railroad town of Munich. A big man, he cast a long shadow in Munich as lawyer, banker, auctioneer, horse trader, temperance crusader, and community builder. He moved to Williston, entered politics and was elected to the legislature. He was barely 30 when elected lieutenant governor in 1910.

Burdick ardently sought high office, but he wasn't very good at it. Charismatic and talented, he kept making the wrong moves, saying ill-advised things and choosing poor allies. His business interests suffered, so he always had money troubles. He was unwise in matters of the heart, so that in later years his love life made him the object not so much of scandal as of humor. After his stint as lieutenant governor he lost other elections, was out of office for many years, but then made a surprising comeback with his election to Congress in 1934.

There he served until 1959, except for a time out of office after he made his run for the Senate, but got double-crossed by his supposed friend, Bill Langer. (Gosh, what are the odds of that?)

The truth is, Burdick's influence in Congress was minimal. As a Congressman he had time to take up bookbinding at home. Making no mark in Washington, Burdick's importance was back in North Dakota, where he profoundly influenced the course of partisan politics and political culture. Burdick was an old-time Progressive Republican who declined to throw in with the Nonpartisan League. Later, though, he led the Farm Holiday Movement, an organization of fighting farmers during the Great Depression.

In 1958 the Republican leadership made, as Blackorby observes, "one of the major blunders in North Dakota political history." They dumped Burdick from the ticket unceremoniously. Thus Usher Burdick and the new shooting star, his son Quentin, became swing men in moving the Nonpartisan League from the Republican side to the Democratic and establishing two-party government (sort of) in North Dakota. Quentin Burdick, of course, went on to a far more distinguished congressional and senatorial career than that of his father.

As for matters of political culture, we are left with a political rhetoric formed by guys like Usher Burdick, who as a lad beat up his schoolteacher. (And this applies to the northern plains in general, not just North Dakota.) Our political candidates continually promise to "fight" for North Dakota, preferring that verb to other, more mature ones such as "build" or even "think." There is a time for fighting, of course, but to every thing a season.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Tom Jirik, (701) 231-9629, tjirik@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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