Sheridan County Reds

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Many people are surprised to learn that there was once a strong Communist Party presence in Sheridan County, Montana. This wheat-farming county, in the northeastern corner of the state, which borders North Dakota and Saskatchewan, has after all long been solidly Republican (Jimmy Carter was the last Democrat to win the county, in 1976). Indeed, the embarrassed parents of many people born there in the 1940s and 1950s never told their children that they (the parents) had grown up singing songs in praise of Joseph Stalin in their public schools.

The backbone of Communist Party support in Sheridan County was among the Finnish-American immigrant farmers who were the majority of the county, many of them supporters of the Social Democratic Party of Finland and the Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic and some of them veterans of the Finnish Red Guards who had fled Finland after the Reds lost the Finnish Civil War. The Communist Party also had considerable support among the smaller culturally similar Swedish-American community. Opposition to the Communist Party was centered among the German-American farmers, who leaned Republican although some were pro-Communist; adherents of the Lutheran Church, which supported the Republicans; in the Democratic stronghold of Scobie, the second-largest town; and in the county seat, Plentywood, which had considerable Communist Party support but also many Democratic, Republican, and Socialist Party supporters.

Farm country had long been in revolt against the power of industrial capital and specifically the railroad interest, and farmers had long been associated with The Grange, a cooperative movement dominated by large agricultural interests and tied at the national level to the Democratic Party. More radical farmers were drawn into the Populist Party movement that sought to ally farmers with the rising power of organized labor. When this party collapsed amid a retreat into Jim Crow race-baiting and fell into the orbit of the Democratic Party, some Western farmers associated with the Society of Equity, which advocated that farmers form an independent political force that endorsed candidates it considered farmer-friendly, including candidates associated with the Democratic, Republican, and Socialist Parties.

When Sheridan County was established in 1913, many of its people were Socialist Party supporters. Many had supported socialist movements in their home countries (especially Finland or Sweden) before immigrating, and many others were drawn to the Socialist Party through the Society of Equity. The Nonpartisan League, founded in 1915 in North Dakota, grew out of the Society of Equity and the left wing of the Socialist Party, and demanded that the state nationalize banks and farm-related industry.

As the Nonpartisan League dominated the North Dakota state elections in 1916, it gained many adherents in nearby Sheridan County, which alongside nearby Eastern Montana counties elected a Nonpartisan League candidate to the State Legislature ; and Nonpartisan League organizers in St. Paul, Minnesota sent Charlie Taylor to Plentywood to edit a new party newspaper, the Producers' News. The Bolshevik Revolution and the wave of radical Finnish-American immigration further radicalized Sheridan County, and Taylor covered the Revolution sympathetically and took the side of the Communist Party in the wake of its split with the Socialist Party.

The Nonpartisan League merged with the Union Labor Party, a radical syndicalist party dominated by the Milwaukee brewers' union, to form the Farmer-Labor Party in 1920, and Taylor endorsed the Farmer-Labor ticket in 1920; the Republican candidate (Warren G. Harding), who won in a national landslide, won the county in a landslide in that election, but the Farmer-Labor Party came in a close third after the Democratic Party, and the Communist Party and Socialist Party candidates also did well.

Meanwhile, under the pressure of the counterrevolution in Russia, the Communist Party moved toward the right and an opportunistic alliance with the Farmer-Labor Party, just as Sheridan County continued to move to the left. Through the influence of the Farmer-Labor Party, Taylor came to join the Communist Party in 1921. By this point, the Producers News, the pro-Soviet line of which attracted radical farmers from across the nation, had grown to be the largest Communist Party paper in the United States by circulation, with more readers than the Daily Worker.

 

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In 1922, Rodney Salisbury, the Communist Party candidate endorsed by the Producers News, was elected Sheriff of Sheridan County. As sheriff for two terms (he was re-elected in 1925), he refused to evict farmers who occupied farms the banks were trying to foreclose on or to file their motions for eviction, or to arrest the radical Industrial Workers of the World organizers dispatched from Butte, which had its own radical ferment among the miners there, to support them.

In 1924, the national Communist Party instructed its Western branch, based in Plentywood, not to run its own candidates for state and local office, but to support the candidates of the Farmer-Labor Party instead. Farmer-Labor candidates, supported by Communist Party supporters and opponents alike, including Taylor (a CP member), swept Sheridan County in the 1924 elections, winning every county-wide seat, while the Communist Party candidate for President, William Z. Foster, came in third in the county after the Farmer-Labor candidate, Bob La Follette (who ran as the Progressive candidate nationally), and the Republican candidate, Calvin Coolidge.

As Taylor went to Helena to take his seat in the state legislature, P.J. Wallace, also a Communist Party member, was dispatched by the Farmer-Labor Party to take over the Producers News. Meanwhile, a faction fight broke out in the Communist Party between the right-wing Pepper-Ruthenberg faction, which wanted the party to focus on an alliance with the Farmer-Labor and Progressive Parties aimed at gaining control of those parties, and the left-wing Foster-Cannon faction, which wanted the party to focus on urban industrial union organizing. Although this was not clear at the time, the fight also was part of the international struggle delineated most clearly in Russia between the then-dominant rightist Bukharin-Stalin faction, which wished to retreat from the revolutionary struggle and was based on the peasant masses and the conservative bureaucracy, and the ultraleft Zinoviev faction, based among the party rank and file and the radical workers, which wanted immediate international revolution. Salisbury, Wallace, and most of the politically active Communist Party supporters of Sheridan county sided with Pepper and Ruthenberg, while Taylor sided with Foster and Cannon. Taylor, who narrowly lost his bid for re-election to the state legislature running on the Communist Party ticket in 1926 to a left-populist Democratic candidate, resumed editorship of the Producers News and his criticisms of Salisbury helped lead to Salisbury's narrow defeat by the left-populist Democratic candidate for sheriff in 1928.

After Pepper moved to the USSR and Ruthenberg died, Jay Lovestone became the leader of the Communist Party right wing. His notorious bureaucratic attacks on the left repelled many farmers, and the Foster wing of the party grew in the West. All this led to a renewed interest in the Producers News. Meanwhile, Foster's support for 'dual unionism' (organizing radical Communist Party-dominated unions when the main AFL unions backed the Democratic, Republican, Progressive, Socialist, or Farmer-Labor candidates) and unwillingness to work with the Socialist Party and other workers' groups on nonpartisan labor defense issues, and the increasingly bureaucratic nature of his own faction's fight, led Cannon to break with Foster and lead a movement based in the International Labor Defense of which Cannon was the president and calling for a dissolution of all party factions.

Foster was able to challenge Lovestone for control of the party only by gaining the support of the Soviet bureaucracy. This happened when Stalin broke with Bukharin and made his lurch to the far left, embracing in exaggerated form the very policies recently embraced by Zinoviev and his ally of the time Trotsky. Part of the price for his alliance with Stalin was Foster's agreement to expel Cannon, who had been exposed to the previously suppressed ideas of Trotsky at a Communist International conference. Trotsky had continued the fight commenced in 1921 by Lenin against the Stalin-led bureaucratic wing of the party. As Lenin's health failed, Stalin allied with Bukharin, then the far-left leader of the party basing himself on the party's recent recruits, and Zinoviev, then on the center-right and the ally of the small business owners and top union officials, to marginalize Trotsky and the revolutionaries allied with him. As Bukharin turned to the peasantry and the right and came to dominate the party in alliance with Stalin, Zinoviev belatedly turned to the left and made a bloc with Trotsky; he later returned to Stalin's good graces after denouncing Trotskyist (revolutionary communist) politics, as Stalin turned against Bukharin and executed him on ludicrous charges of plotting with the Trotskyists and fascists. Lovestone as Bukharin's protege fell from power, was expelled, and became leader of the Communist Party (Opposition). Foster, Zinoviev's man, switched in time to supporting Stalin, and expelled Cannon and the Trotskyists, who founded the Communist League of America.

During this fight, a bureaucratic maneuver taken by the Foster faction to gain leverage over the Lovestone group involved moving the Communist Party headquarters to Plentywood, where Foster's ally Taylor controlled the press, and corrupt union goons sympathetic to Lovestone could not readily be organized to attack Communist Party leaders. As Foster's allies took over the Daily Worker, its publication was also moved from Chicago to Plentywood.

Taylor, who had been a loyal Foster supporter, recognized Stalin (and Bukharin) as counterrevolutionary, and while welcoming Foster's victory in the faction fight, declared the Producers News sympathetic to Trotsky and protested the expulsion of the Cannon faction. With Stalin temporarily staking out a position to Trotsky's and even Zinoviev's left, while the farmers as property owners tended to lean toward the right wing of the party, many of the farmers of Sheridan County and across the nation agreed with Taylor and Cannon, while Bukharin to Trotsky's right and his ally Lovestone also had their supporters in farm country; but neither the Communist League of America, which concentrated on industrial union organizing and seeking readmission to the Communist Party, nor the Communist Party (Opposition), which sought primarily to organize a fight for a separate Black nation in the South, devoted its resources to organizing Montana's farmers, and so the Communist Party remained dominant out here.

Taylor, though he was not expelled, was ordered by the Communist Party to relinquish control of the Producers News to Foster's man Erik Burke, who took up the cause of Stalin and the party line under Foster. With the independent-minded farmers now enemies of the Foster regime, the party sought to undermine their power. Publication of the Daily Worker and CP headquarters were moved to New York. While the Communist Party candidate (Foster) got 22% of the Sheridan County vote for president in the 1928 election, third place behind Republican Herbert Hoover and Democrat Al Smith, communists in Sheridan County became demoralized by Trotsky's defeat, the contradictory and counterrevolutionary line of the Stalinized party, and the party's new urban focus, and Communist Party candidates in local and state elections far underperformed compared with elections in 1923-1927; Foster's leftist line prohibited the alliance with the Farmer-Labor Party which drew in farmers who didn't support the Communist Party but were willing to work with it for common political advantage. The party's local strength shifted from the rural farming communities to the town centers where remnants of the party bureaucracy sustained it. Foster came in 2nd to Democratic candidate Franklin Roosevelt in Sheridan County in 1932, but with less than half the votes he'd gotten in 1928. Salisbury as the Communist candidate for governor came in third in the county behind Democrat John Erickson and Republican Frank Hazelbaker, still getting nearly 2000 Sheridan County votes.

After Stalin shifted back to the right following Hitler's takeover and ordered Foster replaced by Earl Browder, the Communist Party again began a policy of alliance with the Farmer-Labor Party. Pro-Soviet Farmer-Labor candidates, endorsed by the Communist Party, were elected mayors of Plentywood and Scobie, and to a majority of seats on the Plentywood school board, for the 1936-1940 terms. However, even as the Depression and the organization of the CIO led to a ballooning of national support for the Communist Party, support for the party in Sheridan County declined in the 1930s. Browder came in 5th in the county in 1936, behind Democrat Roosevelt, Republican Alf Landon, Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas, and Union Party candidate William Lemke, a former Farmer-Labor representative supported by the Montana Farmer-Labor Party as well as by prominent fascist leaders Charles Coughlin and Gerald L.K. Smith and by social security advocate Francis Townsend. Most of the remaining Communist Party members resigned when the party and the Producers News, influenced by the USSR's then-alliance with Nazi Germany, first broke with the Farmer-Labor Party to oppose U.S. entry into WWII, then, following Hitler's invasion of the USSR, reversed course immediately to become leading jingoists, and by 1940 the Communist Party presidential candidate (Browder) only got 22 votes in Sheridan County, fewer than in Butte's Silver Bow County.