Communists and American Farmers in the 1920s

Abstract

On 28 April 1921, New York police and Bureau of Investigation agents raided a Greenwich Village studio, arresting several people and seizing a large cache of Communist documents. The raid was reported in the New York Times and later many of the documents were discussed at a 1924 U.S. Senate hearing on diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia. Among the seizedmaterials were two items that related to Communist interests in American farmers. The first of these documents was an “Agrarian Report,” which was prepared to brief the Comintern in Moscow; the second was a letter from the editor of the Nonpartisan League (NPL)’s daily newspaper in Fargo. In a way, these two artifacts reflect the dual character of the American Communist experience. On the one hand, Communists saw themselves part of an international movement directed from Moscow; on the other, they were tied to an older indigenous left as well. In this article, I explore these two themes in regard to Communist efforts in the countryside in the 1920s. In recent years, a treasure trove of documents from this era previously unavailable to scholars have been made available inMoscow.Much of what follows is drawn from those materials, but I also have utilized FBI documents and movement and local newspapers among other sources.