Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1995
Abstract
So began Logan's long career in Sheridan County. The year was 1930, and she had just arrived from North Dakota, a fresh Cum Laude graduate of Jamestown College. The social and cultural walls that divided the community were at once unambiguously defined for her-with a simple list. The good Catholics and Lutherans of Plentywood made sure that the custodians of their children's minds would be well insulated from the riffraff of the town-the liquor distillers, the bootleggers, and, of course, the reds. The social center of the community, the Farmer-Labor Templethe "Red Temple" to local conservatives-was generally off limits to Logan and her fellow teachers. The countless parties, dances, and celebrations held there were not to be part of their social life; that list guaranteed it. Emblazoned with hammers and sickles, the red flags that occasionally adorned the Temple marked for Plentywood's teachers and their middleclass guardians-contemptuously referred to as "mainstreeters" by local left-wing criticsan ideological divide so immense as to be unbridgeable. Local communists were "socially unacceptable," Bernadine Logan concluded, and anyway, "who's going to dance with somebody who calls you a mainstreeter!"
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 15:1 (Fall 1996). Copyright © 1996 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.