"WHO'S GOING TO DANCE WITH SOMEBODY WHO CALLS YOU A MAIN STREETER" COMMUNISM, CULTURE, AND COMMUNITY IN SHERIDAN COUNTY, MONTANA, 1918,1934

Authors

• Gerald Zahavi, University of Albany

Date of this Version

1995

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 15:1 (Fall 1996). Copyright © 1996 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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!"