In the early twentieth century, North Dakota became the unlikely epicenter of one of the most radical political experiments in American history. The Nonpartisan League, founded in 1915, swept to power on a platform of state-owned banks, grain elevators, and flour mills, implementing a form of agrarian socialism that terrified corporate interests and inspired reformers across the country. The story of how wheat farmers in one of the most conservative regions of America built a socialist political machine challenges every assumption about the relationship between geography, ideology, and economic self-interest. The conditions that produced the Nonpartisan League were rooted in systematic exploitation. North Dakota farmers grew wheat that fed the nation, but the profits from their labor were siphoned away by a chain of middlemen, from the railroad com ...