The Midwest has long been home to third parties. In the 1870s, the Greenback Party arose there to oppose monopoly and the gold standard. In the 1890s, Populists like Nebraska's William Jennings Bryan and Iowa's James B. Weaver (a former Greenback) supported bimetallism, an income tax, and nationalized utilities. The Non-Partisan League held onto power in North Dakota and the Farmer-Laborites in Minnesota. Wisconsin's own Robert LaFollette ran as a Progressive several times.
The American League capitalized on that history, and the remnants of it that still remained. Philip LaFollette, Governor of Wisconsin and son of Robert LaFollette, ran as Long's running mate in Wisconsin, former Governor "Wild Bill" Langer of the NPL ran in the Dakotas, and Governor Floyd Olson of the Farmer-Labor Party ran in Minnesota.
This had some repercussions.
One major effect was that several politicians who ran for Vice President - and then President - were hence either legally or practically prohibited from running for other offices. Philip La Follette, while technically eligible to be elected to the Governorship, decided to focus instead on campaigning for the Vice Presidency.
This was not as counterintuitive as it sounds, even knowing - as both Long and La Follette did - that the American League didn't have a snowball's chance in New Orleans of winning the Presidency. La Follette had ambitions of forming a national Progressive Party, combining the reach of his father's Presidential runs with the depth of the Wisconsin Progressive Party that Philip and his brother Robert Jr. had built. Leaving the Governorship allowed La Follette to have influence in a future third party - the one Long planned to build, according to La Follette - while demonstrating that the Wisconsin Progressives had members other than the La Follette family.
There were a number of candidates in the primary, but by far the top dog was Ralph Immell, the Adjutant General of Wisconsin, in which capacity he commanded the Wisconsin National Guard. Immell was a family friend of the La Follettes who had served as Adjutant General for more than a decade. He had first gained fame for enforcing Governor John Blaine's order for the Wisconsin National Guard not to participate in a series of "defense tests" in 1924. More recently, in 1933, he had worked to end a strike carries out by Wisconsin dairy farmers. In doing so, he worked alongside Milo Reno, then president of the Farm Holiday Association.
Immell won a solid victory in the primaries and went on to the general election. He would be facing both a Democrat and a Republican there. The Democrat was State Senator Edward Carroll, a leader of the conservative faction in the legislature who had won plaudits for defeating a 209-million-dollar public works bill supported by La Follette. Conservative former Chippewa County District Attorney Alexander Wiley, meanwhile, was the Republican.
In the end, it wasn't even close. Immell had the support of a popular Governor and the de facto endorsements of both Huey Long and Franklin Roosevelt. Meanwhile, the two conservatives split the vote between them.
Milo Reno, meanwhile, was both a presumptive candidate for Governor of Iowa and very, very, sick by the time Ralph Immell was inaugurated. He eventually passed away in April of 1937.
His death left a power vacuum in the Iowan branch of the American League. They needed a candidate for the Governorship desperately. Governor Clyde Herring, considered a conservative Democrat, would not be standing for re-election, and the expected candidates of the two main parties were Guy Gillette, a Democratic member of the House who had helped defeat several New Deal bills, and George Wilson, a Republican former state senator who had run previously in 1936.
Meanwhile, Agriculture Secretary and native Iowan Henry Wallace was growing disillusioned with the slow pace of New Deal improvement, a pace made slower by many pro-New Deal members of Congress being outflanked by more left-wing candidates. His proposed farm bills were watered down by conservatives and put down by liberals. He wanted an out.
On a visit to his home state, he found one. The precise details for how the "Draft Wallace" movement arose are lost to the ages. What is known is that in late August of 1937, Wallace met with farm leaders, including Roswell Garst. And by early September, Roswell Garst was President of the Draft Wallace Organization.
Wallace initially declined the nomination of the American League, in an effort not to burn his bridges with the President, who saw the American League as a concord of impractical idealists hell-bent on destroying his administration for ideological reasons and Wallace as a potential running mate in 1940. Instead, Wallace decided to run in the Democratic primary. The defection of many leftists to the American League hurt his chances there, though, and Guy Gillette won in a squeaker of a result.
Wallace pressed on, with the support of his President (whose distaste for the American League did not outweigh his preference for a pro-New Deal governor in the archetypal farm state). During the campaign, he wrote dozens of telegrams to the President, working out a strategy to defeat the American League even as he was surrounded by its leaders. On Election Day, 1938, Henry A. Wallace, a Republican appointed to the Cabinet by a Democrat, was elected Governor of Iowa as a member of the American League.
Wallace planned to leave the American League shortly after his election. Despite everything, he still believed in Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. There's a legend I can't confirm that states that Wallace planned to announce this on December 9, 1938.
The reason this is significant is that on December 8, conservatives in Congress went to President Roosevelt with the Agricultural Normalization Act. The bill repealed several portions of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and cut several programs of the Department of Agriculture. If the bill were not passed, the conservatives who came to the White House alongside the bill said, they would filibuster any and all other major bills the President tried to get through Congress.
Roosevelt was caught between a rock and a hard place. When he chose the rock and signed the bill, Wallace reconsidered his options. So did a lot of Governors, Senators, and Representatives from across the Midwest. Six Democrats from the Farm Belt - from Oklahoma to Iowa - left the party in the Senate alone over the ANA.
In late 1939, a number of senators - the reported list is Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma, George Norris of Nebraska, Henrik Shipstead of Minnesota, Robert LaFollette Jr. of Wisconsin, and Tom Berry of South Dakota - were talking about the upcoming 1940 election. Eventually, the topic came to the question of who would run for the Presidency.
Before too long, the senators had decided that the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota, the Progressive Party of Wisconsin, and the various "American League" organizations that filled the Midwest should nominate a joint candidate for President, and that the senators from those parties should officially form a caucus to increase their power. While those members of Congress were informally referred to as the "Farmers' Bloc", somebody remembered the title of a Thomas Paine pamphlet.
And so fourteen Senators from ten states formed the Agrarian Justice Caucus.
The next year, hundreds of delegates gathered under clear skies at the Iowa State Fairgrounds to elect a Presidential nominee. Contrary to popular belief, while the party started in the Midwest, a number of delegates came from other states - including California, whose delegation included folk-singer Woody Guthrie and author John Steinbeck, both of whom would go on to high office. The California delegation wasn't the only place where rising stars could be found - a certain pharmacist, originally from South Dakota, who had just returned from a year at LSU was a member of the Minnesota delegation. Hubert Humphrey's story, however, is a story for another day.
By the third ballot, the nomination had come down to two candidates - the "gentle knight of progressive ideals", who could lend the party legitimacy, or the young buck who had risen through the ranks in three separate parties, who could give it energy. Henry Wallace withdrew his candidacy before the fourth ballot, and the rest was history.
(If you'd like to see more, check out
Divided We Stand!)
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