When the good people of Williams County, North Dakota elected their neighbor, the fighting Communist farmer A.C. Miller, to the State House.

‘North Dakota’s Communist Legislator’ from The Workers Monthly. Vol. 4 No. 6. April, 1925.

Standing out from the throng of small town bankers, ambitious and unscrupulous lawyers, shopkeepers and well-to-do farmers who are the legislature of the sovereign state of North Dakota, is the gray-haired figure of A.C. Miller, the first Communist farmer to be elected to a legislative body in the United States.

This alone would make him a landmark in the history of the labor and revolutionary struggle, but it is the soil from which he came that makes him typical of the Communist movement.

His father was a German revolutionist, born in Essen before the Franco-Prussian war that brought the iron and coal of Lorraine to Germany’s rulers and made of Essen a symbol of economic and military power which in 1914 became the center of the war.

Father Fled From Bismarck’s Persecution.

A student of Marx in his boyhood, A.C. Miller’s father came to the United States in 1849 to escape the Bismarck exception laws that drove the early socialist movement into illegality.

Born on a farm in Missouri, in 1870, Comrade Miller experienced all the hardships of the American peasantry. When twenty-one years of age he went west and for eleven years led the life of a migratory worker. Then he married and settled down to the task of wresting a living for himself and family from the reluctant soil of the wind-swept Dakota prairies.

He joined the Socialist Party when it organized in North Dakota and took an active part in all its campaigns. He has never voted for a Republican or Democratic presidential candidate. In 1923 he joined the Workers (Communist) Party.

In the Non-Partisan League.

In the great agrarian revolt which, having its inception during the war period, crystallized around the Non-Partisan League in the Northwest states and shook them to their foundations in 1919-20-21, the revolt which was already dying out when LaFollette decided to capitalize it for the middle class—Comrade Miller took more than his share of the work, trying always to keep clearly defined the class issues of the struggle.

In North Dakota, the mortgage shark, the International Harvester Trust, the elevator and milling combine with headquarters in the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce, the local commercial clubs and all the leech-like elements that prey on the farmers, have had a fertile field. The machine of the Republican Party rolled over the poor farmers at every election with resistless force.

When poor crop years and low prices came there was nothing for hundreds of farmers to do but pack their few household belongings and leave their land and machinery to the banker vultures. But Comrade Miller stayed and fought.

No Cinch for the Farmer.

The life of a farmer in North Dakota is not easy under any circumstances. In winter the climate is of the arctic kind with piercing winds that drive the snow through the smallest crevice in the isolated farm houses. Fuel must be bought. The Dakota plains are treeless except along the muddy flats of the Missouri and Red rivers where a few cottonwood trees are found. The spring rains flood the roads, soften the gumbo soil to a glue-like paste, and make them impassable. The summers are burning hot, the water has a high alkali content and drouths are frequent.

Comrade Miller stuck. He had seen enough of the United States to know that hot or cold, wet or dry, the farmer is always fighting nature while the banker, merchant and Harvester trust waits to pluck him if he wins.

Comrade Miller decided long ago that he might as well fight his part of the class struggle where he was. He is still fighting.

His sturdy figure in the North Dakota legislature, his tanned and determined face lined with the wrinkles carved by sun and wind, his unmistakable proletarian character— most of all his program—the program of the Workers (Communist) Party of America—puzzle and worry the flower of the North Dakota babbittry gathered in Bismarck. More and more they understand that here is a new kind of farmer-legislator that cannot be fooled by fair words nor browbeaten by curses.

Not a Legislator But an Agitator.

One day they will understand completely. Then they will know that this American-born son of a German rebel was the forerunner of a host of Communist farmer and worker legislators who used the platforms of the capitalist state to expose to their fellows the tyranny and rottenness of capitalism and to welcome the advent of a workers’ and farmers’ government which they helped to build.

The Workers Monthly began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Party publication. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and the Communist Party began publishing The Communist as its theoretical magazine. Editors included Earl Browder and Max Bedacht as the magazine continued the Liberator’s use of graphics and art.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/wm/1925/v4n06-apr-1925.pdf