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Red Corner: The Rise And Fall Of Communism In Northeastern Montana
As towns in northeastern Montana approach their centennials, The Red Corner chronicles the events of the teens and 1920s that left a permanent mark on the region. Sheridan County was the site of an armed robbery of $100,000 from the county treasury, a Young Communist camp, an adolescent’s “Bolshevik funeral,” and surveillance by FBI agents who pursued some radical leaders even into the 1960s. The book profiles several influential Communists including a colorful newspaper editor who was elected state senator and later national chairman of the Farmer Labor Party, as well as his comrade, the county sheriff, who was allegedly involved in graft, prostitution, and bootlegging. In spite of its notoriety, the farmers’ movement became one of the nation’s most successful rural Communist organizations during the 1920s.
By the beginning of the Depression decade, however, Communism in northeastern Montana was crippled. The Red Corner details this strange reversal of fortune by examining newspaper accounts, FBI reports, and internal Communist Party files, offering insights on how movements arise, sustain themselves, and decline.
By the beginning of the Depression decade, however, Communism in northeastern Montana was crippled. The Red Corner details this strange reversal of fortune by examining newspaper accounts, FBI reports, and internal Communist Party files, offering insights on how movements arise, sustain themselves, and decline.
220 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
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July 27, 2018read this book for a forthcoming essay on communist history in butte (nowhere near the area this book focuses on) and glad to see my argument that, if you look to most pockets of america anywhere post-civil war and pre-mccarthyism you will see a popular insurgent leftist movement, holds true. hearing about a municipality in the plains of montana that was almost 100% filled with communists for decades is really helpful in trying to recontextualize left politics in america, and gives an agricultural counter-narrative to the industrial left of the sewer socialists in milwaukee (which all in all held more power, longer than sheridan county, montana). in order to think about a radical left in america prior to the civil rights movement and the 60s, we must remember mark fisher's conceit that "capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history," and that communism is in america's blood or what the communist party presidential candidate in 1932 said: 'communism is 20th century americanism' if the party could've learned from the mistakes that Stoner McDonald points to from montana, this might have been true.
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March 20, 2011My review from the Missoula Independent:
Sheridan County, circa 1920s and '30s: either a Communist or a soon-to-be Communist holds every major political office in the region, including that of county surveyor. Left-wing agitators have their own newspaper, a Youth Communist Training School, along with the awe and approval of New York's Communist International (Comintern) and Moscow bureaucrats. The populace, mostly weather-ravaged Protestant farmers, has become rabid activists in the fight against the moneyed-interests of oppression. For a time it seems that the county's largest town, Plentywood (sarcastically dubbed "Little Moscow" at the time), has morphed into a utopia of revolutionary sentiments. For a split second, in a landscape not widely regarded for its dynamic progressivism, the dreams of the far left and the nightmares of the far right become a reality.
No, this is not some pre-McCarthy drivel of what could happen if reds infiltrated the Great Plains. This is northeastern Montana just prior to the Great Depression as told in The Red Corner, Verlaine Stoner McDonald's explosive history of America's "Communist laboratory." The author, a descendent of farmer movement organizer Clair Stoner, was raised in the area, and with verve and passion for Harry Truman's dictum that "there is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know," gives an entirely new meaning to the term "red harvest".
Prefacing The Red Corner (the title is borrowed from a passage in Ivan Doig's Bucking the Sun) with the social forces that would allow the inexplicable to happen in the United States—droughts, market exploitation and low crop yields being only a few—McDonald turns to those organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) that would inspire agrarian revolt under the auspices of the Farmer-Labor Party. There were a number of reasons why farmers went left and stayed left for nearly a decade, McDonald says: the vast following of the Populist Party at the beginning of the 20th century, the "vagaries of the agricultural economy," the public relations skills of leftist organizers and the inherent socialism of Scandinavian immigrants who settled the area.
At the epicenter of the farmers' movement was the Producer's News, an inflammatory, entertaining newspaper founded in 1918 on the behalf of the Nonpartisan League by Charles E. Taylor, a closeted Commie who would go on to state senatorship and drift ever leftward until 1931, when the Communists gave the paper a national distribution with fateful consequences. Some of the best moments of the book concern the fierce, printed repartee between Taylor and Burley Bowler, sometime FBI informant and editor of North Dakota's Daniels County Leader. Otherwise, McDonald's notes, the red celebrities of Plentywood would also include county sheriff Rodney Salisbury, a man viewed simultaneously as a crusader for humanity and a gangster making friends with known criminals and Prohibition rum-runners. By pointing out the virtues and the flaws of her cast, McDonald never loses contact with the strangeness of her narrative, grasping the nuances of frontier politicking and showing those paradoxes to be indispensable tics of the American political mind.
Especially in her handling of the hubris of Communist policy, the shifting allegiances of election time and her analysis of the origins of Montana Communism, McDonald proves herself a capable investigative journalist as well as a rousing chronicler. The book smells and looks like one of those information-laden local tracts destined to be enjoyed by nine regionalists and a slew of high school teachers, but don't let that deter you. The Red Corner's events are absorbing, a little shocking, and ultimately satisfying, no matter where your politics reside. Biographies of those involved could have been expanded and certain key episodes elucidated further, but these are minor squabbles.
The failure of the Communist Party in Sheridan County in the late '30s—an era that would see the party gaining influence in other parts of the country—was due to many factors, McDonald contends: the alienating tone of the Producer's News as it came to be dominated by hardliner East Coast editors; scandals in the private lives of early organizers; the recent press leaks of Stalin's atrocities; and, perhaps more crucially (and ironically), Roosevelt's New Deal infrastructure and civil service projects, which gave to farmers the rights and stability they had been seeking for so long.
McDonald has taken a bursting corner of forgotten Americana and made it unforgettable. As "one of the most of class-conscious areas in the nation," Sheridan County violated the capitalist ethos, organized itself into a formidable haven of radicals, then quietly reinstated itself "as an ordinary farming community once again." The Red Corner is a definitive account of the rise and fall of prairie socialism; a compulsively balanced tale of scheming, bootleggers, charismatic provocateurs, newspaper wars, Wild West violence, farming and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. One lingering criticism might be that it ends about 100 pages too quickly.
Sheridan County, circa 1920s and '30s: either a Communist or a soon-to-be Communist holds every major political office in the region, including that of county surveyor. Left-wing agitators have their own newspaper, a Youth Communist Training School, along with the awe and approval of New York's Communist International (Comintern) and Moscow bureaucrats. The populace, mostly weather-ravaged Protestant farmers, has become rabid activists in the fight against the moneyed-interests of oppression. For a time it seems that the county's largest town, Plentywood (sarcastically dubbed "Little Moscow" at the time), has morphed into a utopia of revolutionary sentiments. For a split second, in a landscape not widely regarded for its dynamic progressivism, the dreams of the far left and the nightmares of the far right become a reality.
No, this is not some pre-McCarthy drivel of what could happen if reds infiltrated the Great Plains. This is northeastern Montana just prior to the Great Depression as told in The Red Corner, Verlaine Stoner McDonald's explosive history of America's "Communist laboratory." The author, a descendent of farmer movement organizer Clair Stoner, was raised in the area, and with verve and passion for Harry Truman's dictum that "there is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know," gives an entirely new meaning to the term "red harvest".
Prefacing The Red Corner (the title is borrowed from a passage in Ivan Doig's Bucking the Sun) with the social forces that would allow the inexplicable to happen in the United States—droughts, market exploitation and low crop yields being only a few—McDonald turns to those organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) that would inspire agrarian revolt under the auspices of the Farmer-Labor Party. There were a number of reasons why farmers went left and stayed left for nearly a decade, McDonald says: the vast following of the Populist Party at the beginning of the 20th century, the "vagaries of the agricultural economy," the public relations skills of leftist organizers and the inherent socialism of Scandinavian immigrants who settled the area.
At the epicenter of the farmers' movement was the Producer's News, an inflammatory, entertaining newspaper founded in 1918 on the behalf of the Nonpartisan League by Charles E. Taylor, a closeted Commie who would go on to state senatorship and drift ever leftward until 1931, when the Communists gave the paper a national distribution with fateful consequences. Some of the best moments of the book concern the fierce, printed repartee between Taylor and Burley Bowler, sometime FBI informant and editor of North Dakota's Daniels County Leader. Otherwise, McDonald's notes, the red celebrities of Plentywood would also include county sheriff Rodney Salisbury, a man viewed simultaneously as a crusader for humanity and a gangster making friends with known criminals and Prohibition rum-runners. By pointing out the virtues and the flaws of her cast, McDonald never loses contact with the strangeness of her narrative, grasping the nuances of frontier politicking and showing those paradoxes to be indispensable tics of the American political mind.
Especially in her handling of the hubris of Communist policy, the shifting allegiances of election time and her analysis of the origins of Montana Communism, McDonald proves herself a capable investigative journalist as well as a rousing chronicler. The book smells and looks like one of those information-laden local tracts destined to be enjoyed by nine regionalists and a slew of high school teachers, but don't let that deter you. The Red Corner's events are absorbing, a little shocking, and ultimately satisfying, no matter where your politics reside. Biographies of those involved could have been expanded and certain key episodes elucidated further, but these are minor squabbles.
The failure of the Communist Party in Sheridan County in the late '30s—an era that would see the party gaining influence in other parts of the country—was due to many factors, McDonald contends: the alienating tone of the Producer's News as it came to be dominated by hardliner East Coast editors; scandals in the private lives of early organizers; the recent press leaks of Stalin's atrocities; and, perhaps more crucially (and ironically), Roosevelt's New Deal infrastructure and civil service projects, which gave to farmers the rights and stability they had been seeking for so long.
McDonald has taken a bursting corner of forgotten Americana and made it unforgettable. As "one of the most of class-conscious areas in the nation," Sheridan County violated the capitalist ethos, organized itself into a formidable haven of radicals, then quietly reinstated itself "as an ordinary farming community once again." The Red Corner is a definitive account of the rise and fall of prairie socialism; a compulsively balanced tale of scheming, bootleggers, charismatic provocateurs, newspaper wars, Wild West violence, farming and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. One lingering criticism might be that it ends about 100 pages too quickly.
October 2, 2011
How can I not love a book about my hometown, talking about people I know, people I didn't know, places and facts ..... some that I found out on my own and some that were hidden from me. My parents didn't talk about this part of Plentywood's history.... I just know that certain buildings I asked about what they were.... my parents would never answer. It is so strange to grow up in a town that had a whole different history boiling underneath the surface that people really wanted to forget about.
May 3, 2019
A solid general historical overview with significant interpretive weaknesses. He explains the failure of the CPUSA in Sheridan County, and beyond, as one of simple rhetorical technique rather than placing it within the context of the betrayal of Stalinism, the rise of the American imperialist economy which allowed certain reforms to be enacted, and the open hostility of the American ruling elite, political system, and government. As well as the unification of Republicans and Democrats in opposition. He glosses over the fact that the FBI tracked most of these people for the remainder or their lives. To him the the FBI files are just an archive rather than evidence of the marshalling of forces against the growth of communist thought in the US. He's also seemingly clueless about the significance of the split between Trotsky and Stalin. But in general, the book is an informative starting point.
May 13, 2020
An interesting review of a little known episode of American history that reveals the broader political battles of the early 20th century. The events are facinating, with big characters on a local and national stage. However, the writing is a bit dry at times making the book a bit of a slog.
March 22, 2021
Pretty strong narrative that made painfully obscure political figures relatable and memorable.
Well told.
Well told.
March 30, 2020
TLBC No. 14 (Dec. 2019) Honestly, it took being stuck in a couple days of “social distancing/self isolation” to finally finish this one. I am not a fan of the book or it’s writing, even though it is a somewhat interesting local topic.
January 21, 2024
Literally nothing about this remarkable bit of history would have changed if all of the participants were on Twitter. Hilariously relevant for the modern left!
May 2, 2013
This is a really interesting read about the area of Montana in which I grew up. I had no idea about this part of northeastern Montana's history before I read this book.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews