Review of Main Street in Crisis: The Great Depression and the Old Middle Class on the Northern Plains By Catherine McN icol Stock

Authors

Thomas D. Isern, North Dakota State University - Main Campus

Date of this Version

1995

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 15:1 (Winter 1995). Copyright © 1995 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Abstract

The analysis in this book rests on the contention that by the time of the Great Depression there existed on the northern Plains a broad commonality of culture and interest that may be termed "the old middle class." The old middle class was a petty-producer class comprising both town and country. It espoused such values as hard work, egalitarianism, and community service, enforcing them through community organizations and public ritual. When a new middle class, the bureaucrats of the New Deal, proposed fundamental reforms in the society and economy of the Plains, they found Dakotans receptive to aid-of course, given the magnitude of the emergency-but stubbornly resistant to reform. It was the common values of the old middle class that laid the groundwork for its defense.