North Dakota is Everywhere

Thomas McGrath’s North Dakota roots were deep and formative. Born in 1916 into an Irish farming family on a homestead just southwest of Fargo, his Midwestern experience shaped his values and was the source of some of the most memorable scenes in his poetry. Radical consciousness had long flourished on the plains. In the late nineteenth century, the Farmer’s Alliance had launched a national third political party; thereafter, the Wobblies (I.W.W.) gained prominence among farmers and workers alike, and the Non-Partisan League (founded in the year of McGrath’s birth) controlled the legislature and established public ownership of agricultural infrastructure such as granaries. Like many of his generation, McGrath eventually saw his own family’s farm largely ruined by the Great Depression. However, the legacy of agrarian political struggle, the history and culture of Plains Indians, and the experience of shared work informed his vision of the world throughout his life.

“The primary experience out in these states, originally, anyway, was an experience of loneliness, because the people were so far away from everything. They had come out here and left behind whatever was familiar, and you find this again and again in letters that women wrote out here. The other side of that loneliness was a sense of community, which was much more developed than it is now. The community of swapped labor. This was a standard thing on the frontier; everybody got together and helped put up a house or put up a soddy when a new family came along. You helped with this, that or the other, and you swapped labor back and forth all the time and community was never defined. It wasn’t a geographical thing; it was a sort of commune of people who got along well together….This sense of solidarity…is one of the richest experiences that people can have.” – Thomas McGrath