CHAPTER 3

“100% AGAINST COMMUNISTS”

IN 1948 WHEN THE federal government dispatched a “Freedom Train” full of historic memorabilia on a nationwide tour to “sell America to Americans,” they badly misunderstood the people of the Northern Plains. So many people stood in line in North and South Dakota to see the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address that attendance records were broken again and again. Even San Francisco couldn’t match the number of people who waited in terrible heat and terrifying thunderstorms in Rapid City, Pierre, Jamestown, Bismarck, Minot, Fargo, Grand Forks, and Sioux Falls. Informal estimates at the time suggested that a higher percentage of residents of North Dakota had seen the train than had residents of any other state.1

Even if Dakotans did not have to be sold on America, they may have felt the need to sell themselves to America. Through the 1930s, they had been nearly unanimous in their resistance to a second war in Europe; some had waited until December 7, 1941, to change their minds. And their resistance to American involvement in World War II was not the first but the third chapter in a multigenerational effort to stop military expansionism, imperialism, and war itself. To make matters worse in the age of the second “Red Scare,” they counted among themselves socialists, communists, and other agrarian radicals from the prewar era. Perhaps this very history and the suspicion of the region it had created explained why the train made so many stops there. Along with their stamina, Dakotans visiting the Freedom Train displayed their respect for the military and their fear of a new enemy, the Soviet Union. In Rapid City, residents allowed veterans from the nearby hospital to go to the head of the line even though at least five people had already fainted from the heat. In Sioux Falls, the week of the train’s visit was officially declared “Rededication Week.” The climax was Medal of Honor air force pilot, Joe Foss, leading a squadron of B-29 bombers to “defend” the city from a “Soviet attack.”2

Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s Dakotans found many ways to “rededicate” their communities and redefine themselves. Although a handful held their ground, the vast majority of Dakotans turned against Populist anti-militarism and began to support most aspects of an interventionist foreign policy. Meanwhile they passed restrictions on union activities, reorganized political groups to marginalize agrarian radicals, used anti-communist smears to beat political opponents, instituted loyalty oaths, and purged political radicals from at least one university and two farm organizations. One of the region’s senators, Karl Mundt, even became Joseph McCarthy’s right-hand man. Blending their historic suspicion of a distant federal bureaucracy with fears of totalitarianism, leaders on both the right and the left made it clear that they were, in newly elected Senator “Wild Bill” Langer’s words, “100% against Communists in every way, shape, form, and manner.”³ Historian David Mills argues that Dakotans did not go to “absurd” lengths to ferret out communists. Perhaps not, but they did respond to the imperatives of the era with a marked turn toward political conservatism and antiradicalism, finding opportunities in both the voting booth and everyday life to express their commitment to postwar American ideals.

Of course not all Dakotans changed their Populist-inspired views on the economy or the military all at once; a few never changed them at all. In North Dakota in particular, the socialist-inspired heritage of the Nonpartisan League (NPL) and its enduring state-owned institutions could not be erased so easily. Likewise, every leader did not suddenly become an uncompromising hawk. Politicians from both states and both sides of the aisle expressed concerns about the war in Korea and the long-term impact of certain forms of universal conscription, concerns that would reappear more forcefully during Vietnam.⁴ But gradually, the culture of the Cold War would lay deep roots on the Northern Plains as it empowered local conservative political groups and contributed to the deradicalization of others, eventually revising even how the radical heritage of the region was remembered.⁵ Moreover the culture of the Cold War began to blur the distinctions between and among supporting the military, fighting communism, and embracing conservative cultural and religious ideals, including new forms of evangelical Protestantism. As war, or what Mary Dudziak calls “war but not war,” became a permanent part of American life, this elision of conservative politics and conservative cultural views with patriotism started to become permanent too.6 It was a first step in the creation of a nuclear country.

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When the US declared war against Japan and Germany in 1941, South Dakota congressman Karl Mundt knew exactly what he had to do: quickly disassociate himself from what critics called “isolationism” and groups such as America First. So he “emptied his office of every newspaper clipping, speech, or memorandum that recorded his opposition to the conflict.”⁷ Even though he was over forty years old and a member of Congress, he volunteered to serve in the military. While he was counseled to remain stateside, no member of Congress would support the war more ardently. Likewise, when the war ended and the nation’s foe turned from Nazis and Japanese to Soviets, and voters elevated Mundt to the upper chamber, he earned a national reputation as a relentless anti-communist, unearthing its evils both at home and abroad.

Mundt was hardly alone in his rapid conversion. Fellow South Dakota congressman Francis Case had voted consistently against measures that brought the United States closer to war and even sponsored a bill that would have required a national referendum before any declaration of war.⁸ But after Pearl Harbor, he too offered to enlist. Across the Northern Plains, men and women who had resisted the entry of the United States into a second world war quickly came to believe that the defense of their nation and its ideals was not only necessary but honorable—even heroic. During the war, South Dakotans bought $328 million worth of war bonds and donated more than $2 million to the Red Cross; in 1944, North Dakotans put a higher percentage of their income into Series E savings bonds than the people of any other state. Their sacrifice was personal as well as financial. Families said farewell to 110,000 recruits of whom nearly 4,000 never returned.⁹ They died in battles their families had hoped the world would never witness again.

By 1944 nearly all Dakotans came to see that their commitment to Populist anti-militarism in the late 1930s had been a mistake. But other Americans had long memories. Whenever it served their interests, politicians reminded rural people—Dakotans and others—that they had been part of “America’s greatest mistake.”10 National leaders sometimes used the memory of Dakotans’ support for organizations like the America First Committee as a bludgeon to gain support for other projects. As late as 1950, President Harry Truman visited the region to check on flood damage and reminded local men and women that a “rebirth of isolationism could bring on war.” He added with a touch of sarcasm that the “economic isolationists” of 1950 were no different from the “yes-but-boys” of 1936.¹¹ So endless were the accusations that “isolationism” nearly cost the world its freedom, according to Brooke Blower, that hawkish Cold Warriors could easily grasp the chance to “lead the country [unimpeded] … into … world leadership.”¹²

As if to answer these critics, voters in North Dakota made their rejection of prewar Populist anti-militarism crystal clear when Senator Gerald Nye—the outspoken and unapologetic anti-interventionist with a national profile—came up for reelection in 1944. The state Republican Party still housed a probusiness and a Nonpartisan League faction, so the conservative wing contemptuously nominated Nye, whom they judged to have been “unAmerican and a joy to Hitler.” They thought Nye would easily beat the NPL-endorsed candidate, Usher Burdick, in the Republican primary. But they also forced Nye to accept a platform that included support for a postwar international organization. It did not work out entirely as planned. While he won his primary, on Election Day Nye lost to Democrat governor John Moses by a landslide.¹³ Moses beat Nye even though no other Democrat won statewide office that year and even though he had been hospitalized during much of the campaign. Moses died less than six weeks after taking the oath of office.¹⁴ Even then, Nye did not retain his seat and serve a third term. The new Republican governor, Fred Aandahl, appointed Milton Young to take Moses’ spot instead. Young was, David Danbom writes, “a thoroughly conventional and conservative Midwestern Republican.”¹⁵ Hardly an anti-militarist, he would go on to champion the acquisition of two air force bases and three hundred ICBMs for the state.

Like Young, Dakotans did not simply aim to show the world that they had rejected “isolationism,” they worked to place themselves at the center of a militarized, international future. At the behest of a local businessman, in early March 1945, South Dakota congressman Francis Case wrote President Roosevelt with a suggestion: wouldn’t the Black Hills be a wonderful site for the newly created United Nations?16 “ ‘In the Black Hills there are no military objectives, and the gentlemen who are striving for the peace of the world can live at peace while the atomic bombs are falling.’ ”¹⁷ Within twenty years, the plains themselves would contain “atomic bombs,” but for now the congress members promoting the proposal used the state’s remote geography to their advantage. The editors at Time—and a number of members of the selection committee—found the idea preposterous, and assumed their national audience would, too, saying: “the bleak Black Hills of South Dakota, where men are men and steaks are three inches thick.”¹⁸ A bit of elite sarcasm did not dissuade the people of the Northern Plains, however. In 1947, Master Sergeant James Lessman, an army recruiter in South Dakota, sent an invitation to President Truman to vacation in the Black Hills. He thought Mount Rushmore would be a particularly wonderful place for Truman to administer the oath of enlistment to new recruits, a “ceremony heard around the world.”¹⁹

In those first years after the war, many Dakotans—influenced by their newfound, perhaps frantic embrace of the US’s role in the world—sounded more like hawks than doves when they discussed issues of foreign aid, rearmament, and anti-communism. One 1948 poll, for example, revealed that a large majority of North Dakotans supported the Marshall Plan for the rehabilitation of Europe.²⁰ Likewise, when the Soviets announced the successful detonation of an atom bomb in 1949, the editors at both the Bismarck Tribune and the Fargo Forum reminded their readers that “missile work deserves priority.”²¹ Moreover, they reiterated the “lessons of Munich” to support a massive rearmament campaign, arguing that “appeasement will not stop a tyrant” and that “the men in the Kremlin” had learned their lessons “from Hitler.”²² Local editors and businesspeople boasted that the Midwest might play a big part in the job of rearming, a task that would presumably bring jobs.²³

Support for an interventionist approach to foreign affairs was new for men and women in the Dakotas, but anti-communism and antiradicalism were not, at least not for some. Since 1890 Alliance members, Populists, progressive Republicans, “Leaguers,” socialists, and communists had faced fierce opposition from conservatives and business interests. By the late 1930s Dakotans of many political persuasions, unhappy with the agricultural policies, the distant bureaucracy, and the emerging cultural authority of the New Deal, began to merge the rhetoric of anti-statism and anti–New Dealism with antiradicalism, a trend amplified in the new Cold War context. In 1938, for example, when Dakotans contributed to an essay contest sponsored by the Dakota Farmer on what Americanism meant to them, five of the six winners specifically contrasted American “freedom” and “liberty” with an authoritarian state. One submission by J. H. Boese, for example, defined Americanism as “something that grants every individual and every family the right to put himself on his own feet, independent and self-directing.”24 Mrs. L. A. Philbrook agreed: “Americanism is every honest man striving to solve his own problems … keeping us from Communism, Nazism and fascism and all other isms. Except Americanism.”²⁵ Edgar Syverud wrote, “Americanism admits of no superior, overlord, king, or dictator.”²⁶ The “real Revolution” in the world, the Bismarck Tribune agreed, occurred when governments allowed for individual freedom from the government itself.²⁷

Political leaders who fought to maintain Populist-style organizations and “people first” policies during the Cold War—sometimes called the “old Progressives” although the monikers “old Populists” or “old Leaguers” suit them better in the Dakotas—developed what Charles Barber has called an agrarian ideology of “anti-communism on the left.”²⁸ Like many of their constituents, they linked communism not to its attempts to reduce the power of an economic elite—something they continued to endorse in their own work—but to the dangers of a state with too much concentrated power. After the Second World War, Senator “Wild Bill” Langer maintained that “the doctrine of Socialism had within itself the seeds of dictatorship as much as did the doctrine of Capitalism.”²⁹ Speaking at the Mandan Elks Club in 1950, Langer made the connection explicit. Communists, he said, were “highly educated. They obtained their education in the United States and wormed their way into the highest councils of government. Then trusted by the president and holding the most important government positions, they have been found working toward the destruction of our nation.” Langer proposed the franchise and the people as the antidote to the communism of an educated elite.³⁰ Mrs. Anna Corbin from Livonia, North Dakota, seemed to agree with Langer when she wrote the Bismarck Tribune: “It seems to me that our government is only by a Few, in place of by and for the people.”³¹

Some “old Progressives” were also old anti-militarists and, as such, they did not forget that the central government’s power to send men to war was one of its most anti-democratic. Both Langer and Representative Usher Burdick, for example, were skeptical about the war in Korea. So were more conservative South Dakota senators Francis Case, Karl Mundt, and Representative Harold Louvre, who demanded the immediate withdrawal of American troops. They saw the military as an expression of an overheated, overempowered government. Ordinary Dakotans, many of whom were veterans, worried that the military was inefficient and top-heavy while the individual soldier was underpaid.32 They also did not forget that corporations benefited the most from war, and working-class people paid the price. In 1951, the North Dakota state senate passed a resolution to support the conscription of wealth as well as manpower “when this nation’s security is imperiled.” There was little debate about whether the rich should pay more for war; instead, state senators debated whether it was appropriate actually to call the military a “dictatorship.” Those who endorsed the term reminded naysayers that “the army … can tell you when you can get up, what you can eat, and when, what you can and can’t do … and that a man hauled before a court martial is guilty until he is proved innocent.”³³

These long-simmering fears, expressed by Dakotans on both sides of the aisle, concerning communism and any expression of an overly powerful, anti-democratic state led to outbreaks of what John Miller has called “McCarthyism before McCarthy” in the region.³⁴ In the prewar years farm organizations like the NPL, the Farmers Holiday Association (FHA), and the United Farmers League (UFL) were inspired by socialist principles of cooperative marketing and state ownership of agricultural facilities and drew their best-known organizers from socialist or communist groups.³⁵ During World War I and again amid the Dust Bowl, law enforcement officials and vigilante-style gangs of local people sometimes took violent action to oust known or suspected communists from their communities. In northeastern South Dakota, for example, in early 1934, seventeen activists were arrested for “rioting” at a foreclosure sale. In July 1934 a mob beat five UFL members in Britton. According to historian William Pratt, the “incident was followed by a Legionnaire attack on the [UFL] ‘Farm School on Wheels’ in the same county. Several individuals were beaten … the facility was driven from its site.”³⁶

In South Dakota, the election of 1938 introduced the state to redbaiting, a strategy employed by conservatives to beat left-leaning opponents. To beat FHA leader Emil Loriks, for example, Karl Mundt adopted a clever, if cynical, approach. He endorsed the Loriks’ own brainchild, “the cost of production” alternative to domestic allotment. At the same time, he—or his spokespeople—accused Loriks of being a communist because he had promised to work with the CIO and had been praised for doing so in the Communist Party’s newspaper, the Daily Worker. The Sioux Falls Argus Leader told voters that “we are not saying that Loriks and Fosheim [the Democratic candidate for governor and president of the Farmers Union] in fact are Communists…. Candidates who endorse politics that are communistic in nature should not be surprised when they, in turn, receive the blessings of the Communists.”37 But Mundt supporter Arthur Bennett of Milbank, South Dakota, felt no compulsion to be nuanced in his conclusion about the pair of candidates. He distributed a pamphlet that averred, “South Dakotans Wake Up—Tomorrow may be too late! Communism is knocking at our very doors … disguised as ‘progress.’… [It will] deprive us of everything we hold dear.”³⁸ Similar strategies were employed to defeat Democrat Fred Hildebrand.³⁹ This election returned power in Pierre to South Dakota conservative Republicans where it would stay—with one brief but crucial exception—through the first decades of the twenty-first century.

As part of this rightward turn, South Dakotans also passed the nation’s first “Right to Work” law in 1946, effectively ending the ability of unions in the state to require membership for all workers in a place of employment and severely restricting the ability of union workers to picket or boycott a place of employment. In the 1930s and 1940s, many South Dakotans distrusted large organized labor operations. The closed shop, they believed, was antithetical to capitalism and the doctrine of American individualism and opportunity upon which it depended. Historian Matthew Pehl writes: “In postwar South Dakota, economic freedom became synonymous with opposition to labor power.”⁴⁰ Furthermore, because the New Deal’s Wagner Act had empowered unions nationwide, they engendered the hostility of anti–New Deal Dakotans of all political persuasions, even some left-leaning farmers who had supported workers in the 1920s. One South Dakotan, Rex Batie of Webster, characterized “labor racketeers” as aspiring to become “a little Stalin of USA.”⁴¹ According to one reporter in the Black Hills, home to the powerful Homestake Mining Company, “if any union organizer should appear in Deadwood or Lead … he would simply be thrown in jail.”⁴²

Businesspeople felt particularly vulnerable to work actions taken by the Teamsters, who had developed a reasonably strong presence in eight cities on the Northern Plains and led a major coal strike in Sioux Falls in 1938.⁴³ In 1945, the Custer Chamber of Commerce wrote President Truman demanding that “government intervention” (presumably troops) be sent to end a shipping strike before their crops were ruined. Anti-labor activist William Wilson echoed these sentiments, “It is high time that the people of this country take a firm hand in the handling of these strikes.”44 In 1948, Senator Francis Case introduced a law that would, in his words, if successful “break every union in the country.”⁴⁵

In North Dakota the years before what historians identify as the “McCarthy era” also saw a strong conservative backlash against perceived “creeping socialism,” unionism, government corruption, and “Langerism.” For most of the state’s history, the Republican Party had been split between business-friendly voters from the Red River Valley and the Nonpartisan League–affiliated farmers and ranchers in more western counties. Democrats, while gaining strength in the Roosevelt years, were still more often than not “viewed as curiosities.”⁴⁶ Essentially, this meant that the state had a single party system split into irreconcilable factions. But in 1943, a group of business-friendly Republicans schemed to oust the NPL from their organization once and for all. New leaders like Fred Aandahl and Milton Young believed that conservative Republicans, anti-Langer members of the NPL, and unaffiliated young people might unite behind a conservative banner. In 1944 this strategy produced the Republican Organizing Committee’s (ROC’s) first platform, which accepted the ongoing presence of the NPL-established state-owned businesses and state-funded crop insurance. But every other plank revealed the growing consensus among conservatives around the country that Americanism was defined by economic freedom, support for business, and a small and efficient federal government—a repudiation, in other words, of the public-private partnership that characterized the New Deal.⁴⁷ Even more important—top of the list for the ROC—was support for “the Armed Forces of our nation.”⁴⁸ In 1944, Aandahl won the governorship. The Fargo Forum proclaimed upon Aandahl’s death in 1966: “[Aandahl] is the man who started the conservative branch of the Republican Party in North Dakota on its longest period of control in the State’s history.”⁴⁹ In less than a decade, the NPL would leave the Republican Party entirely, merging with the Democratic Party and creating what has been known as the D-NPL ever since.

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These shared cultural histories and political strategies prepared Dakotans to rededicate themselves to anti-communism during the 1950s, both in Washington and at home. On the national stage, South Dakota senator Karl Mundt joined Joseph McCarthy to assist in his investigations into communist subversion inside the United States. Born in Humboldt, South Dakota, Mundt carried the banner of anti-communism throughout his career, first as a congressman elected in 1938 and then, beginning in 1948, for three terms in the Senate. In 1947, he was the first congressman to call for the registration of communists and members of front organizations.50 In the upper chamber, he contributed directly to the Internal Security Act of 1950, which had originally been named the Mundt-Nixon Act.⁵¹ A champion debater, Mundt was well-known for his fiery and colorful rhetoric. In one attack, he said that “for eighteen years [the country] had been run by New Dealers, Fair Dealers, Misdealers and Hiss dealers who have shuttled back and forth between Freedom and Red Fascism, like a pendulum on a cuckoo clock.”⁵²

Mundt’s most public association with McCarthy came when he chaired the “Army-McCarthy” hearings, called to examine subversive activities in the United States Army. One case involved an army dentist who had not signed the required loyalty oath, but had been recommended for a promotion nonetheless. When McCarthy insisted that he be dishonorably discharged, the army refused. The subsequent hearing was part investigation and part “ordeal, combat, theater, duel, confession, catharsis, the testing of will—all accomplished through a flood of talk.”⁵³ Mundt was barely able to maintain order as McCarthy misused a common parliamentary device called a “point of order” to interrupt witnesses, threaten and harass them, and bring up new topics for discussion. Televised live with no commercial interruption on the fledgling ABC network, the hearings ran for thirty-six days and were seen by more than eighty million viewers.

In the early stages, voters on the Northern Plains largely supported Mundt, McCarthy, and all the associated efforts to ferret out communist subversives. In regard to the Mundt-Nixon Bill, later named the McCarran Act, L. A. Forkner of Elm Springs wrote Senator Case, “No country can hope to live unless they retain the right to curb any subversive activity.”⁵⁴ When Senator Langer spoke out against the bill, and even helped to filibuster it, he received plenty of pushback from voters. He explained that, should the bill pass, any member of the NPL would have to submit to federal investigation, whether they had ever been communists or not. Such a bald attack on dissent and political experimentation reminded Langer of the Sedition Act of 1917 which had led to violent attacks against Leaguers, Germans, and other anti-war protesters. However much he hated communists, Langer felt the act evoked the cultural politics of that terrible antidemocratic era.55

When it came to the televised debacle that was the Army-McCarthy hearings, however, Langer found he had a great deal more company in his opposition to McCarthy and Mundt. Dakotans, like other Americans, began to wonder how the desire to keep America safe from communists had veered so badly off course. Furthermore, Mundt’s inability to keep the hearings on track or on schedule was not lost even on his closest allies back home. On June 11, publisher Fred Christopherson wrote in the Argus Leader that Mundt was trying to please too many people—by implication McCarthy—and that he simply had to take control. “Mundt should let all know who’s boss,” he wrote. “The time has come to swing an iron fist!”⁵⁶

The question of whether McCarthy should be censured by the Senate put Mundt, his regional colleagues, and their constituents in an especially tight spot. Francis Case, known for his equanimity, was chosen to serve on the Senate subcommittee tasked with making a recommendation on censure to the full Senate. Like both McCarthy and Mundt, Case made use of the political capital of anti-communism to target opponents at home. As a result, Case struggled with the Senate’s movement to censure McCarthy. At first he stood steadfast in McCarthy’s defense. But when the six members of the Watkins Committee initially agreed to censure him, Case backpedaled. First he suggested that McCarthy apologize and be exonerated; then he decided not to vote on one of the censure charges. Finally he voted for a different charge, in effect splitting the difference and pleasing no one. By way of explanation, Time magazine noted that the senator from South Dakota “is up for re-election in 1956 in a state where McCarthy has powerful political friends.”⁵⁷ The charge was not unfounded. Throughout the hearings, mail from South Dakota and around the country poured into Case’s offices in support of McCarthy.⁵⁸

Ironically, by the time Case ran again in 1956, it would not be his support for Joe McCarthy that he would be compelled to explain. For several years the farm economy on the Northern Plains had been in crisis; thousands of Dakotans had left their farms and rural communities; many even left the region. Meanwhile President Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, Ezra Benson, a member of the John Birch society and an avid anti-communist, sought to cut all remaining New Deal farm programs. He saw them as forms of socialism and wrote approvingly of a Harper’s Bazaar satire that depicted farmers who accepted them “pampered tyrants … with a minimum of two cars.”59 When Benson had traveled to South Dakota for an appearance at the National Corn-Husking Contest in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, farmers pelted him with eggs.⁶⁰ Even worse for South Dakota’s Republican Party, as the decade came to an end, a newcomer to state politics, George McGovern, was going farmyard to farmyard, determined to rebuild the South Dakota Democratic Party from scratch. A decorated war veteran and preacher’s son who knew how to speak the traditional language of Populism and religious faith, McGovern supported farm programs and even the agencies that administered them. Moreover he believed they might even play a role in maintaining global peace, which remained among his primary goals. Farmers—and others in South Dakota—started to listen.⁶¹

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When Dakotans sought out communists in their own communities, schools, and organizations, they maintained their unique regional view of what made communism so bad—not that it sought to equalize economic opportunity but that it diminished local control and concentrated power in a centralized state. Although they did not go to the extremes seen in some other states, political changes in the 1950s would reverberate long into the region’s future.

Anti-communist agitation began at the University of South Dakota (USD). The FBI could only identify thirty-seven card-carrying members of the Communist Party in South Dakota. Even so veterans’ organizations, including the VFW and American Legion, demanded that public employees, including faculty at the University of South Dakota, sign a loyalty oath. It read in part: “I do not advocate, nor am I a member, nor have I been within a period of a year a member … of any political party or organization that advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States or of this state by force or violence.”⁶² When historian R. Alton Lee joined the USD faculty, his department chair advised him simply to sign it like everyone else.⁶³ Even so, Lee felt the task inherently “degrading.” Moreover, he knew that McCarthyism engendered the “immeasurable” harm of making teachers self-conscious and “cautious” about political statements and content.64 Hardly confined to a single era, the loyalty oath was required of all public employees in the state until 1974.

Even with the oath in place, administrators watched carefully for any known communists or other radicals who spoke or worked at USD, coordinating with the FBI when necessary. President I. D. Weeks, for example, considered cancelling a convocation appearance by Henry Pratt Fairchild, a sociologist who advocated nationalization of land. He need not have worried, however, since the student newspaper, the Volante, quickly identified his “pink complexion.”⁶⁵ Two other professors also came under scrutiny: Bert James Loewenberg, the only Jewish professor on campus, had written a scathing critique of the 1927 prosecution of Sacco and Vanzetti and enthusiastically supported the New Deal and other federal programs, having himself served as the assistant director of the Massachusetts Federal Writers Project. Soon he became known as “that communist history professor.”⁶⁶ Loewenberg later left USD for a job in New York City. Thus the only professor fired for his views worked at the Medical School. When he learned from the FBI of the professor’s affiliation, Mundt called USD president I. D. Weeks immediately, who in turn told Dean Walter Hard to fire the faculty member. Weeks reportedly said that he “did not want a guy like that around.” A covert investigation followed, “to keep an eye on him and his activities” and, when the professor continued to attend communist “cell” meetings in Sioux Falls, his contract was terminated.⁶⁷

Anti-communists also targeted leftist farm organizations across the region, actions that would have far-reaching consequences for the region’s politics over time.⁶⁸ After Karl Mundt and his allies attacked Loriks for, at minimum, coordinating with communists in 1938, Emil Loriks and other FHA leaders began to expel political radicals from their ranks, thinking that it was better to dismember their own organization than to have others do it for them. This compromise effectively brought the storied days of the FHA as an outside and independent political organization, rather than a lobbying group, to an end.⁶⁹ At the end of his life, Emil Loriks could not remember—or would not admit—that at one time he had stood fast against Roosevelt’s New Deal, and particularly against top-down agricultural programs such as the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA).⁷⁰ He erased his own radicalism from his mind, just as many Dakotans would soon erase it from their memories.

Conservatives attacked the National Farmers Union (NFU) even more pointedly. Since its founding in 1902, the NFU had included a “no political party test” in its constitution. For that reason and its persistent advocacy for small farmers and tenants, the organization claimed a Populist image and left-of-center political philosophy. Members held communist and other leftist affiliations; some state organizations endorsed Henry Wallace for president in 1948, who advocated disarmament and cooperation with the Soviets. National leaders loudly protested intervention in Korea, putting them directly at odds not just with anti-communist conservatives but also with anti-communists on the left. Then, in the fall of 1950, the American Legion announced that it had included the NFU on its list of subversive organizations.71 Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire charged, “the time has come to rid the Farmers Union, composed for the most part of fine and loyal Americans, of the evil and subversive forces within the organization.”⁷² In response, William Langer, Karl Mundt, and Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey defended the NFU.⁷³ Senator Milton Young reported that he was a member in good standing.

Among the NFU leaders Bridges assailed was North Dakota’s Glenn Talbott, who historian William Pratt believes “was the real power in the national organization.”⁷⁴ Even as the American Federation of Labor and other leftist organizations purged themselves of radicals, Talbott passionately defended the Farmers Union as the “direct descendant of the Populists.”⁷⁵ In the early years after the war, he supported maintaining third party efforts rather than working as an interest group within the Democratic Party. He spoke out against the Truman administration’s loyalty oath and increased defense spending. If that weren’t enough to attract the wrath of the right, he told NFU members in 1947 that “corporatism was a form of fascism … while communism was not enough of an issue to be worth fighting about.”⁷⁶ Pressure on the NFU mounted even more until Talbott helped find for the union common ground with the Truman Administration policies, including those on the war in Korea. At home he endorsed an anti-communist program called the Crusade for Freedom and began the process of becoming “more conventional”—at least politically.⁷⁷ Most importantly, Talbott endorsed the NPL’s merger with the Democratic Party in advance of the election of 1960, establishing a conventional two-party system in the state for the first time. In South Dakota meanwhile, comparable attacks on the Farmers Union extended beyond the 1950s, creating a phenomenon that Pratt names “McCarthyism after McCarthy.”⁷⁸ In both states, these charges and the consequent concessions reduced the Farmers Union from a radical third party “movement” to a “business-oriented” lobbying group—part of the coalition of labor and business interests that defined mid-twentieth-century liberalism.79

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Most men and women on the Northern Plains did not have the time to devote to hunting down communists in their midst. Even so, they found a variety of other ways—like standing in line for hours to see the Freedom Train—to show their respect for the military, their devotion to “100% Americanism,” and their suspicion of political radicalism. These actions spoke volumes to the politicians they elected. Dakotans had come to live with a new reality, new kind of war, and a new enemy—one with representatives close to home. While they were not living in nuclear missile fields—at least not yet—they were coming to understand what it meant to live “under the shadow of war.” During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, they saw how close the threat of nuclear war, of World War III, actually was.

To support the American way of life some Dakotans pursued activities directly connected to the military. Veterans’ organizations, like the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), soared in membership and community involvement in the late 1940s and 1950s.⁸⁰ When President Eisenhower changed the November 11 national holiday from Armistice Day to Veterans Day, veterans groups organized parades, fairs, and suppers. They also remained active in bringing soldiers’ bodies and remains home from battlefields abroad. But the groups’ strong anti-communism also gave them a distinct, if often implicit, political agenda. Before each high school American Legion baseball game or other activity, for example, youth involved recited the Pledge of Allegiance, said a prayer, and sometimes repeated the Legion’s Code of Sportsmanship. To most people at the time, these rituals were not ideological but simply a part of everyday life in a time and place where “everyone in town shared a sense of patriotism.”⁸¹ When Jim Fuglie was growing up in Hettinger, North Dakota, his father served as the commander of the local American Legion post—but that was just one of many local leadership positions he held. It was only when Jim came home from two tours in Vietnam, went to a local Legion meeting, and spoke out in favor of amnesty for draft dodgers—and was met with a chorus of boos—did he realize he had “chosen the wrong audience” for his left-leaning political views.82

Dakotans could demonstrate their support for the military directly by volunteering for the Ground Observers Corps (GOC), an organization that trained local people to stand watch for enemy planes that entered American airspace. Since the Dakotas were the farthest northern points of the central United States, volunteer observers were trained to look for Soviet planes that had flown over the Arctic. Often this work was isolated and somewhat dangerous, as observers stood on tall forest service towers or their own locally constructed observation posts late at night.⁸³ Even so officials had no dearth of volunteers in the Dakotas; women were particularly well represented. Organizations such as the Daughters of the American Revolution in Dickinson and Flaxton, North Dakota, supported the local GOC through fundraising; other women organized and participated in GOC beauty pageants, ice cream socials, and fairs; in fact women made up 65 percent of actual observers.⁸⁴ Dakotans defied expectations in their enthusiastic support, even in the tiniest of towns, like New Hradec, North Dakota. Its thirty-five residents “accomplished what seemed impossible by establishing an observation post that required a staff of 100 members. Residents recruited volunteers from outlying areas and swelled the ranks of observers to 125.”⁸⁵

Dakotans also supported militarized anti-communism in their everyday lives through religion. As we have seen, religious practice, much of which leaned toward the conservative end of the Christian spectrum, was a part of the prewar culture of the Northern Plains that could unify people across the political spectrum. The famously liberal Senator George McGovern—who eventually found the liberal teachings of the “social gospel” when he was in college—grew up in a pietistic Methodist family and remembered a prewar childhood of endless religious revivals and camp meetings.⁸⁶ But after the war Dakotans—Catholics in particular—began to see their faith practices in a context beyond family and community; they saw them instead as part of the fight against “godless communism” and the threat of atomic war.⁸⁷ Historian Stephen Whitfield observes that Americans believed “not so much in the value of religion” as they believed that “religion was virtually synonymous with American nationalism.”⁸⁸ In the early Cold War years, Dakotans recontextualized long-held religious practices and beliefs into national defense, anti-communism, and geopolitics, a change which would reverberate in regional politics for generations.

For some Dakotans, this recontextualization of faith drew them to investigate new trends in evangelical belief and practice. Historian Darren Dochuk has shown how the “plain folk” of the southern plains, after migrating to defense-industry-rich towns of southern California, combined Populist anti-elitism and anti-statism with anti-communism and white supremacy to launch the postwar evangelical movement.89 Since the “plain folk” of the Northern Plains shared much of this worldview, they too were drawn to the lessons of sinfulness, redemption, and preparation for the coming apocalypse. Furthermore, they saw in evangelism a bold expression of anti-communism in an ever more dangerous world. While it would grow more slowly on the Northern Plains in the early Cold War than it did in California, evangelical Protestants in the 1950s set the stage for a surge in congregation-building in the 1970s and 1980s, when “mainline” Protestant denominations seemed to grow ever more closely allied with liberal culture.⁹⁰

The connection between “plain folk” evangelists of the Sun Belt and the people of the Northern Plains was evident as early as 1950 when the evangelist Jack Shuler visited Sioux Falls. Nearly 40,000 people attended his services, so many that the city had to change the venue to the Civic Center Coliseum.⁹¹ He told the congregants “to prepare their souls for the afterlife, lest atomic war catch them unprepared.”⁹² Likewise, in 1958 nearly 80,000 people gathered in an outdoor amphitheater in Spearfish for a series of performances of the “Black Hills Passion Play,” which told the story of Jesus’ life.⁹³ From Spearfish the Passion Play traveled to over 650 other locations.⁹⁴ Oral Roberts likewise filled Bismarck’s Memorial Auditorium twice a day for four days; 1500 people filled out a card asking Roberts for healing before his first appearance alone.⁹⁵

By the time the world’s most famous Christian evangelist, Billy Graham, visited the Northern Plains, he had preached to Americans in every region and to international audiences on every continent. Moreover he had spread his faith in the inerrant words of the Bible, the possibility of personal salvation, and the imminent chaos of Armageddon through a broad network of conservative radio stations, bookstores, and television programs.⁹⁶ Unlike some evangelists, Graham made his Cold War politics clear: as Kevin Kruse says, placing himself soundly in the “McCarthy wing” of the Republican Party. He told an audience in 1949, “Communism is not only an economic interpretation of life—communism is a religion that is inspired, directed, and motivated by the Devil himself and has declared war against the Almighty God.”97 He shared more than anti-communism with conservatives, though, speaking in favor of deregulation and against unions and the New Deal. In the 1960s and 1970s, Graham would combine this economic conservatism with homophobia, antifeminism, and what Melanie McAllister calls “soft” support for civil rights, all the while acting as counselor to some of the best known Republican politicians of his time.⁹⁸

Graham’s visit to Fargo was an event few people forgot. Over the course of three days in June 1987, 22,000 people heard Johnny Cash perform, a 2500-member choir sing, and Graham preach. According to one volunteer, Wayne Hoglund, “there was electricity in the air, and it was a holy moment. A lot of people … went forward [for the altar call] and all those lives changed in some way.”⁹⁹ Even more remarkable was the way his visit shed light on the conservative consensus that had emerged in the region in the Cold War. A Democratic governor, “Bud” Sinner—the last Democrat to serve in that position—introduced Graham. Leaders from every Christian church in Fargo, including the Catholic parishes, worked together to make the event a success. Cultural conservatism, it seemed, with deep roots on the Northern Plains, had flourished in the Cold War era and by the 1980s had found new and even more dynamic forms of expressions. The appeal and power of evangelism in the region made sense. Like Graham, Dakotans knew the apocalypse might bring them to the face of God at any time.

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The United Nations was never located in South Dakota and President Truman never vacationed in the Black Hills or gave the oath of citizenship there. Even so on July 23, 1962, when twelve million people in seven countries around the world tuned in to see live images broadcast by satellite for the first time in history, they saw the Northern Plains.¹⁰⁰ Operation Telestar, like Radio Free Europe, used mass media to show those living in communist-controlled countries what life in a free country was like. What images could be better than the carved rock faces of four great American presidents paired with a conveniently timed—and dynamite-triggered—buffalo stampede, “a baseball game and the US-Canada border (with no guns or barbed wire),” and a performance by the 350-member Mormon Tabernacle Choir? The magnitude of the moment and the location was not lost on those who saw it live, either. A Latter-Day Saints (LDS) newsletter reported that members of the choir had been nearly overcome by the concurrent sense of national honor and the threat of its destruction: “The choir seemed to call up strange echoes among the cliffs—rich songs of progress, of vast migrations to better lands, of explorers, overtones from the marching pioneers…. But there were overtones of evil too.”101 To ward off these frightening premonitions, the choir sang hymns of battle: the well-known Protestant hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and the Civil War anthem “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

It is hard to imagine another event that could have dramatized more clearly the transformation underway on the Northern Plains in the early Cold War decades. Just as those who had carved Mount Rushmore had erased the history of Native people and the “six Grandfathers,” so the broadcast ignored the radical agrarian heritage of the plains and erased its anti-militarist tradition. Instead, the broadcast associated South Dakota with American exceptionalism and individualism: pioneers and progress, not deprivation and demand. Moreover, it connected South Dakotans to evangelical religious practices that within fifteen years would bring together diverse congregations, including evangelical Protestants, Catholics, and Mormons, into an interdenominational conservative political movement. Finally, through the choice of hymns, the program underscored the region’s support for militarism itself. After the cameras were off and the Telestar satellite moved elsewhere on its orbit, all that remained for the people of the Dakotas was to build those fortresses and arm themselves for battle on the plains themselves.