After Populism: The Agrarian Left on the Northern Plains, 1900–1960

Abstract

The Populist Party appeared on the political scene in 1892 championing free silver, direct election of Senators, regulation of railroad shipping fees and creation of a network of federally controlled grain storage facilities, all intended to benefit the nation’s small farmers and rural communities increasingly beleaguered by global markets and distant elites. Four years later the defeat of William Jennings Bryan by William McKinley triggered the collapse of the Populist Party as political force. But the problems confronting the nation’s small farmers did not go away. The wide-ranging solutions rural radicals tried and discarded are the topic of William C. Pratt’s After Populism: The Agrarian Left on the Northern Great Plains, 1900–1960. The book is a compilation of previously published material revised into a chronological narrative marking the culmination of a distinguished forty-year career. The book begins with a survey of the historiography of rural radicalism. Although an abundance of scholarship exists on populism the subject is hard to define. Among the works considered in Pratt’s discussion are two essential texts, John D. Hicks 1931 study, The Populist Revolt and Lawrence Goodwyn’s 1976 work The Democratic Promise.1 Despite its flaws, such as a reliance on the Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier theory, neglect of women’s roles and underutilization of available resources Pratt prefers Hicks because of his broad definition of populism as agrarians who sought a third-party solution to their dilemmas. Socialism is much easier to define as it was a coherently organized political party. The bulk of existing research on the Socialist Party at the local level focuses on Oklahoma, a stronghold of rural radicalism, but far away from Pratt’s preferred field of the Northern Plains. Study of the Nonpartisan League (NPL), however, centers on North Dakota right in Pratt’s backyard. Equally strong scholarship exists for the history of Communist Party organizing on the Northern Plains, unsurprising considering that communist organizers built on the foundation laid by the NPL. The next two chapters are some of the best ones in the book and could serve as required reading in undergraduate classes on the practice of history. In chapter two Pratt takes the reader on his summer trips around the Northern Plains, visiting local libraries and historical societies, conducting interviews in farm kitchens, and taking walks through small town cemeteries. The sheer effort required to collect small pieces of information and fit them together can boggle the mind. The chapter is also a celebration of the work of history chronicling the pleasure of tracking down individual stories and interviewing eyewitnesses. Chapter three recounts Pratt’s visits to the Russian State Archives of Social and Political History (RGASPI), also known as the Comintern Archives, in Moscow. Although the Communist Party had a stronghold in Plentywood, Montana, clandestinely dominating Sheridan County politics during the 1920s, Pratt was surprized to find almost nothing about Plentywood in the early Party files. However, there were reams of correspondence