Look for the Hillary 2016 signs in front yards.
Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party of the United States?”
That was the unnerving question asked repeatedly during a 1950s witch hunt by the House Un-American Activities Committee and U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican and communist hunter. McCarthy’s career was cut short by courageous reporting from CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, who demolished McCarthy by revealing the senator’s unfair bullying tactics.
Right-wing Americans once shivered at the thought of communists plotting to take over the world. Members of the John Birch Society wrung their hands worrying about Reds during the Cold War after World War II.
But in the late 1980s, President Ronald Reagan, assisted by plunging oil prices and a disastrous Soviet Union military expedition in Afghanistan, helped bring down the communist Soviet Union.
Poof! There went communism, and Russia went back to being Russia, if still authoritarian. At the time, I wondered what the John Birchers would do when they didn’t have communists to complain about.
Vernon Pedersen, a former University of Great Falls professor, has an answer.
“Communism is gone, but they’re very concerned about one-world government and black helicopters,” Pedersen said with a chuckle last week.[…]
Pedersen grew up in Great Falls and earned a PhD in history at Georgetown University, taking an interest in studying radical 20th century movements including communism.
“I hate Lewis and friggin’ Clark,” Pedersen explained. “They tortured me with them every day of my childhood.” Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark visited Great Falls in 1805 during their famous expedition, which is recounted regularly in Electric City schools.
These days, Pedersen is writing a book about Montana communists through the 1960s.
“No one has done a book like this before,” Pedersen said. Earlier, he wrote about communists in Maryland; now, he’s taking on the task to write about communists in Montana.
There is plenty of subject matter. If Montana’s communists were tamer than some on the national scene, many were colorful, such as communist officials in Plentywood, including Sheriff Rodney Salisbury; Bill Dunne, who founded Montana’s Communist Party in 1919; and a Missoula communist who went on to spy for the Soviet Union during World War II in Washington, D.C.
Pedersen said communism gained some traction in Montana in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. He said one-term Montana western district Congressman Jerry O’Connell, who served from 1936 to 1938, was either sympathetic to communism or a secret party member; O’Connell later moved to Seattle and worked at a Communist Party office there. Pedersen said a man named William Wright ran a Communist Party section in Great Falls from the late 1920s through the late 1930s, although Wright squabbled with North Dakota communists because he was acting independently.