Jo Anne Salisbury Troxel - Waiting for the Revolution: A Montana Memoir

In 1932 an extraordinary funeral took place in Plentywood, in the north-eastern corner of Montana, in the United States. Janis Salisbury, the fourteen year old daughter of Rodney Salisbury, was buried in a "Communist funeral". The room, drapped in red flags, saw a service culminating in the audience singing radical and revolutionary songs. It was a shocking moment for many in Montana, but Plentywood, alongside much of Sheridan County, had many radical and socialist activists and voters. They, angered by poverty, economic turmoil and unemployment repeatedly supported socialist candidates and organisations.

The story of Sheridan County's radicalism has been well told by Verlaine Stoner McDonald in her book The Red Corner: The Rise & Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana. Waiting for the Revolution, is a deeply touching and often inspiring memoir of those times and the aftermath by Janis Salisbury's half-sister by Rodney Salisbury, Jo Anne Salisbury Troxel. She tells the complicated and often stormy account of her parents with the radicalism of the 1920s and 1930s as the backdrop to her life. Jo was born to Rodney and his lover Marie Chapman, who was his partner for thirteen years until Rodney's untimely death in 1938. At the same time though Rodney was married to his wife Emma and, Jo's mother was also married. Despite their clear love for each other Rodney and Emma could not marry, as Emma would not divorce. Rodney was not just a socialist sheriff in his Plentywood days, he had been a Communist candidate for governor, an agricultural workers' union organiser and a revolutionary organiser.

These complicated relationships are emblematic of the wider conservatism of the years. Despite the radicalism of the era, and Rodney and Marie's on socialism, they were trapped by the logic of the system. Jo's memoir tells the story of them and their wider families, placing it in the context of their activism, but in many ways telling a story that is really about the impoverishment and unemployment of the 1930s in the US rural hinterlands. It is not surprise that Marie is an alcoholic, and her and Rodney's children have a different relationship with the adults around them. 

These conditions aside, it is remarkable to read about the radicalism. Rodney and Marie carry their politics through their lives, and it was imbibed by Jo, who maintains a radical set of principles to this day. But her parents, isolated as they must have been in Montana, were principled socialists - siding with Trotsky against Stalin, and working to build the earliest Trotskyist groupings in the US. Readers might like to read the obituary for Rodney that was published in Socialist Appeal on his death in 1938 to a get a sense of the radicalism that existed in 1930s Montana. Sadly it does not mention Marie, though it does talk about Emma a "good wife, companion and teacher, who sympathized with and joined him in his revolutionary outlook".

But most of Jo's account is not about this history - it forms the backdrop to her own story, and that of her family. Shaped by poverty and economicly difficult times, it reminds us that Montana is not just a state of beautiful National Parks, but of class struggle, trade unionism, and the fight for a decent life. Waiting for the Revolution is characteristic of much of American local history, often a little overburdened by complex family trees, these books are nonetheless immeasurably important insights into a history that is fast disappearing. 

Related Reviews

McDonald - The Red Corner: The Rise & Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana
Doig - Bucking the Sun