The western states have a shorter history of independent political movements, partly because they have a shorter history in American politics. Of the eleven states that either contain some part of the Rocky Mountains or are to the west of that range, the first one to be admitted - California - predates only seven eastern states. Arizona - the most recent state to be admitted - had only been a state for twenty-four years in 1936. In 1936, both of Arizona's Senators had served in Congress since Arizona became a state.
Its politicians did tend to be independent, though. William Borah - the "Lion of Idaho" - answered to the voters of a state with less than half a million residents. Consequently, he was elected five times, and spent those thirty years in office as one of the most independent-minded thinkers in the Senate.
He was up for re-election in 1936. However, in addition to running for Senate, Borah chose to run as Huey Long's running mate in five states. Borah had several reasons for doing so - in addition to being Long's good friend (Long had called Borah "the greatest lawyer since Daniel Webster"), Borah thought that adding his name to Long's run would help Long in his next campaign. But he didn't want to lose the seniority that he had painstakingly accrued over three decades.
Into this situation strode Glen Taylor. Borah and Taylor were not dissimilar in politics - both were progressive, although Taylor was well to Borah's left - but in temperament, they were polar opposites. Borah was conservative, austere, patrician, and deeply rooted in the Senate's traditions. Taylor was a flashy, working-class, populist who would later be called "Idaho's Huey Long". He worked as a painter's assistant, sheet-metal worker, cowboy entertainer, and country singer, but his real love was politics - after reading King Gillette's
The People's Corporation and Stuart Chase's
A New Deal, Taylor became an ardent leftist - some would say socialist - who worked to establish Farmer-Labor Parties in Nevada and Montana.
Taylor's campaign was the first serious challenge to Borah since 1903. He criss-crossed the state on his horse, Nugget, criticizing Borah's conservatism on issues like civil rights and the nature of the Senate. Borah, confident of his re-election, paid little attention.
On the one hand, he was right - Taylor didn't win, nor even really come close. But he did demonstrate the schism, opening even before the party was born, between progressives and conservatives in what would become the Frontier League.
Another demonstration of the schism, this one with significant repercussions, came in California.
Francis Townsend was a World War I medic and real estate agent. His fame, however, came from his advocacy of an old-age pension proposal called the Townsend Plan. The plan would give two hundred dollars every month - $5,000 in today's money [IOTL it would be closer to $3,500] - to retired people over 60 with the proviso that they had to spend it within the month to stimulate the economy. Social Security was considered the ideological child of the idea, but Townsend was not satisfied - he wanted to implement the idea in full, first in California and later in the whole United States.
But Townsend was not the only leftist radical in the race. Culbert Olson was a former journalist and lawyer who had served in two different state legislatures - the Utah Senate in the 1910s, where he advocated government control of utilities, a ban on child labor, and old age pensions. That last one he mentioned quite a bit. After moving to California in the 1920s, he campaigned for Upton Sinclair's gubernatorial campaign in 1934. That year, he himself ran for and won a seat in the California Senate.
Their opponent was the incumbent Governor, Frank Merriam. Merriam, like Olson, had previously served in another state's legislature - namely, Iowa. Unlike Olson, though, Merriam was an ardent conservative, one who had deployed his power as Governor to help crush a strike at the Port of San Francisco - and not only an ardent conservative, but one who had alienated his core constituency by raising taxes.
Under normal circumstances, Merriam's unpopularity would have made the election a total blowout. But Olson and Townsend struggled to differentiate themselves from each other. Olson had the superior resume, as well as the backing of the Democratic Party of California. Townsend, though, had better name recognition and the backing of the Frontier League, an organization of Western state American League organizations dedicated to Western-specific issues such as correlative water rights and Native American policy.
In the end, Marbletop made it through.
However, the late 1930s were not all bad for the leftist tendency of the Frontier League.
At the age of 13, Frank J. Hayes began working in the coal mines of Illinois. He joined the United Mine Workers and began rising through the ranks, achieving the vice presidency of the union at the age of 29. In that office, he helped to organize strikes, including one which took place in Colorado from 1913 to 1914. During the course of that strike, the Colorado National Guard and company guards at the mine attacked a crowd of 1,200 striking miners in Ludlow, killing between nineteen and twenty-six of them.
Around this time, Hayes ran for Governor of Illinois as a Socialist. He ascended to the presidency of the UMW in 1917 when incumbent John P. White was appointed to the National Fuel Commission. However, his tenure as leader was not a success, partly due to his declining health, and two years later he turned most of his duties over to John Lewis. Shortly thereafter, he retired to Colorado.
When Huey Long called on Hayes in 1936, it was a surprise. Hayes had been retired for a decade and a half, spending most of his time writing poetry about the Ludlow Massacre. He had been preparing to run for the Lieutenant Governorship, certainly, but a Vice Presidential run was something very different.
Still, Hayes threw his efforts into the race, particularly once it was a Presidential race. While he narrowly lost in 1936 - a margin of less than a thousand out of more than half a million votes - it was obvious that in an election that wasn't against a President viewed as the greatest friend to labor ever to sit in the Oval Office, he could pull it off.
That opportunity came two years later. Alva B. Adams was the son of a former Governor, a graduate of Philips, Yale, and Columbia Law. He had been appointed to the Senate in 1923, and lost an election that year - but returned to the Senate eight years later. There, he was an opponent of the New Deal, ardently supporting the Agricultural Normalization Act and a number of anti-labor measures.
And he was up for election in 1938. Hayes crossed the state dozens of times, building on his previous runs. He not only had to maintain his almost monolithic support in mining towns - he had to appeal to ranchers in the west, farmers in the East, and workers in the cities.
He was, however, by far the candidate with the best chances. Not only did he win around 36% of the vote in the 1936 election, he was endorsed by the candidate who won another 36%. His victory was hardly assured, but neither was it any kind of David-over-Goliath situation.
Hayes served for one term. By 1944, his health had declined quite severely, and he chose not to seek re-election.
The liberal wing of the Frontier League was a minority faction of a minority party. But that didn't mean it was insignificant - not in the Thirties, and not later.
Thanks to
@Oppo for wikibox assistance.