Background
William Langer was born on a farm near Everest, North Dakota, the son of Frank J. Langer, a prosperous homesteader, and Mary Weber. Langer's father increased his landholdings and became director of the local bank and insurance company.
William Langer was born on a farm near Everest, North Dakota, the son of Frank J. Langer, a prosperous homesteader, and Mary Weber. Langer's father increased his landholdings and became director of the local bank and insurance company.
After attending rural schools, Langer completed work at the University of North Dakota Law School in 1906. Unable to practice law in his native state until he was twenty-one years of age, Langer entered Columbia University in New York City as a freshman. He received his B. A. in 1910, being valedictorian and president of his class.
Langer returned to North Dakota only after a harrowing experience in Mexico, where he was captured and almost killed by revolutionaries while inspecting landholdings in which he had speculated--and lost--some $30, 000 borrowed from his father. Settling in Mandan, he was soon appointed assistant state's attorney for Morton County. He made a statewide reputation suing the Northern Pacific Railroad and other major corporations for back taxes.
After being elected state's attorney for the county in 1914, he won the support of temperance organizations for his prosecution of prominent businessmen and others as violators of state vice and prohibition laws. In 1916, with the endorsement of the newly organized Nonpartisan League, a neo-Populist political faction, he was elected attorney general on the Republican ticket. He enforced prohibition and blue laws throughout North Dakota, at one point taking a town telephone exchange at gunpoint to prevent violators from being warned of an impending raid. But Langer soon quarreled with the Nonpartisan League leadership. He ran against the league's candidate in the Republican gubernatorial primary in 1920 but was defeated.
Langer then returned to an increasingly lucrative private law practice. Langer ran for office only once in the 1920's, a losing effort to regain the office of attorney general in 1928. But he was politically active, working for Senator Robert M. La Follette's third-party presidential ticket in 1924. In 1932 Langer rejoined the Nonpartisan League as attorney and campaign manager. Endorsed by the league in 1933, he secured the Republican nomination for governor. He swept to victory in a campaign against the grain-trade monopoly without once mentioning President Herbert Hoover. In office Langer ignored league leaders, attacked President Franklin D. Roosevelt's agricultural program, and declared an embargo on North Dakota wheat in an effort to push up prices. The state's durum wheat farmers supported the embargo and his moratorium on the foreclosure of farm mortgages.
Langer's political strength was therefore growing when he was indicted by a federal grand jury in May 1934. The charge was soliciting funds from federal employees for personal and political gain; Langer had allegedly coerced government workers to purchase subscriptions to a Nonpartisan League newspaper. He was found guilty and removed from office. He appealed the verdict, and after a second trial ended in a hung jury, he was found not guilty in a third trial. By now the Nonpartisan League was split into pro- and anti-Langer factions. But he had enough support to win the race for governor in 1937. His second term in the statehouse was marked by intensive efforts to win election to the U. S. Senate.
In 1938 he unsuccessfully challenged incumbent Senator Gerald Nye both in the Republican primary and as an independent in the general election. In 1939 he challenged the other Republican senator, Lynn Frazier. With the support of a faction of the Nonpartisan League he won the Republican nomination and in 1940 triumphed in a close election. In an unprecedented action Langer's political enemies in North Dakota petitioned the Senate Committee on Elections and Privileges, charging that he was guilty of vote fraud, corruption, income-tax evasion, soliciting false endorsements, and making an illicit deal with the Northern Pacific Railroad by lowering its assessment in return for the purchase of worthless land stock. An extensive senatorial investigation filled four thousand pages of congressional reports. The committee majority found a pattern of "continuous, contemptous and shameful disregard for public duty. " The minority insisted that the evidence was hearsay and inconclusive. After an extensive Senate debate, the committee was overruled 52 to 30, and Langer retained his seat.
Langer never again faced a serious challenge to his position; he was reelected overwhelmingly in 1946 and carried every county in the state in his 1952 race. In 1958, too ill to return home to campaign, he sent only a television clip to local stations but again carried every county.
Responding to the charge that he was "unpredictable, " he told a reporter in 1954, "I'm the most predictable damn fellow in the Senate; I'm always on the side of the underdog. " Indeed, the rangy, rumpled, hard-working senator enjoyed confronting his enemies. His speeches were filled with derogatory images: "monsters, " "cringing mongrel servants of the plutocrats, " "pirates, " and "bandits" opposed his programs and his candidacy. But if Langer won support at home for his domestic programs, he gained national attention because of his fervent isolationism. In 1941 he opposed lend-lease to Great Britain.
After the war he strenuously attacked the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, and other mutual aid programs as "giveaways" of dollars that were needed for social programs in the United States. He lamented the loss of congressional influence in foreign affairs and assailed presidents Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower for centralizing foreign policy-making in the White House. He was an early supporter of the Bricker amendment, which sought to subject executive agreements to congressional ratification. Langer voted against joining the United Nations, insisting that it was unrealistic, a "tissue paper shield" against the international problems of the future. He claimed that moneyed interests dictated promotions and influenced policy in the State Department. He reserved special animus for Great Britain.
On December 31, 1951, he sent a telegram to the Old North Church in Boston asking that lanterns be lit to warn of the visit of Winston Churchill, who represented, he said, as much of a threat to America as the Redcoats had in Paul Revere's day. For midwestern Populists like Langer who had long feared international bankers, Anglophobia was a natural posture. One of his lectures was entitled "England: Enemy of Liberty. " Langer's isolationism was influenced perhaps by the German-American constituency he represented; he accused Roosevelt and Churchill of betraying both the Atlantic Charter and President Woodrow Wilson's earlier dream of a peace without victory when they insisted on a doctrine of harsh unconditional surrender against Germany. But it was more than ethnic isolationism that informed his approach. He was from an insular, agricultural community that had not fully shared in the affluence that the war and postwar years brought to most of the nation. His American Recovery Program would distribute money to needy Americans and not to Europeans, potential competitors, and undependable allies. He was not an advocate of military spending and consistently called for negotiated disarmament with the Soviet Union. He was not a virulent anti-Communist and not an "Asia First" isolationist. He opposed both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization as paper pacts that might provoke the Soviet Union while offering little protection. His was an older isolationist ideology, rooted in the hostility felt by liberal spokesmen of less privileged groups for international involvements of any kind. He always insisted that he was for the underdog; he cheered Indian efforts to win independence from Britain and supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In foreign policy as in domestic affairs, he was an irrepressible and unforgettable maverick who could not be dismissed easily. He had achieved considerable senatorial seniority (serving as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1953-1954) by the time he died in Washington, D. C.
Langer had married Lydia Cady, the daughter of a prominent New York architect, whom he met while a student at Columbia University, on February 26, 1918. They had four daughters.