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Sheridan County’s red past: Historian researches rise, fall of Communists in remote northeast
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| Contributor | RBH |
| Last Edited | RBH Feb 19, 2012 12:36pm |
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| Category | News |
| Author | Don Spritzer |
| News Date | Sunday, May 23, 2010 06:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Communities, like people, often have chapters in their past that they prefer to bury and forget. So when Verlaine Stoner McDonald was growing up in Sheridan County in Montana's furthest northeast corner, she never learned about a Communist movement that swept through her home region during the 1920s and early 1930s. In school they never taught her that at one time outspoken Reds were elected to virtually every public office in the county. She never heard of a local Communist youth group called the Young Pioneers. Indeed, for a short time, tiny rural Sheridan County was a major focal point for America's fledgling Communist Party.
McDonald is now a college professor in Kentucky. The chance discovery of a faded newspaper with a headline reading, "Vote Communist Tuesday, Nov. 8," spurred her interest and eventually led her to write a detailed history of her home county's radical past.
In seeking the origins of rural unrest in northern Montana, the author discovered several likely causes. During Montana's homestead boom, scores of Scandinavian immigrants populated the area. In their home countries many had participated in active Socialist parties. Once they began farming on the prairie, they found an active Grange and later Populist movement that sympathized with and spurred their discontent over high railroad rates, high interest rates, low wheat prices and exploitation by eastern wealth. |
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