William Lemke

William Frederick Lemke (August 13, 1878 – May 30, 1950) was an American politician who represented North Dakota in the United States House of Representatives as a member of the Republican Party. He was also the Union Party's presidential candidate in the 1936 presidential election.

Life and career

Lemke was born in Albany, Minnesota, and raised in Towner County, North Dakota, the son of Fred Lemke and Julia Anna Kleir, pioneer farmers who had accumulated some of land. Lemke lost an eye in a boyhood accident. As a boy, Lemke worked long hours on the family farm, attending a common school for only three months in the summers. However, the family did reserve enough money to send him to the University of North Dakota, where he was not only a superior student, but also well known for his ability to impersonate the professors. Graduating in 1902, he stayed at the state university for the first year of law school but moved to Georgetown University, then to Yale Law School, where he finished work on his law degree and won the praise of the dean. He returned to his home state in 1905 to set up practice at Fargo. Lemke was a Freemason.

During the 1910s, the Nonpartisan League (NPL) was formed and quickly gained significant traction in North Dakota. Lemke was heavily involved and quickly became one of its top leaders.

Lemke was elected attorney general of North Dakota in 1920, In 1921, a special recall election, initiated by opponents of the NPL (the Independent Voters Association or IVA) successfully removed all three members of the Industrial Commission, all of whom were NPL members: John N. Hagan (Commissioner of Agriculture and Labor), Lynn Frazier (Governor), and Lemke (Attorney General). They were replaced with IVA-supported candidates.

However, Lemke remained popular. In 1922, he received the NPL's nomination for governor, but he was defeated by incumbent Ragnvald Nestos. Later, in 1932, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives, as a member of the Non-Partisan League (NPL). which privately told Congressmen that they would exercise a Presidential veto against the bill. The Act was eventually re-passed as the Farm Mortgage Moratorium Act, which lowered the previous Frasier Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act's five year moratorium on barring banks from repossessing farms for five years to three years, and later held constitutional by the Supreme Court. The Farm Mortgage Moratorium Act would be renewed five times until finally expiring in 1949. He received 892,378 votes, or just under two percent nationwide, and no electoral votes in the 1936 election. Lemke did outpoll Alf Landon in six North Dakota counties and remained the last third-party presidential candidate to outpoll a major-party nominee in any non-Southern county until George Wallace outpolled Hubert Humphrey in Utah's arch-Republican Kane County in 1968 and his successor John G. Schmitz outpolled George McGovern in four Idaho counties in 1972. Simultaneously, he was reelected to the House of Representatives as a Republican. Many believe Lemke's acceptance of the Union Party nomination in 1936 was out of bitterness toward Roosevelt over the farm mortgage issue. Through the Union Party, Lemke befriended other populists such as Fr. Charles Coughlin. Coughlin, a controversial, Fascism-supporting Catholic radio priest who was regarded as the Union Party's main founder, assumed Lemke would receive at least 9 million votes.

Lemke died of a heart attack in Fargo, North Dakota and is buried in Riverside Cemetery. Former Atlanta Braves baseball player Mark Lemke is Lemke's second cousin twice removed.