Making a Popular Front: The Farmer-Labor Movement and the Genealogy of the U.S. Popular Front

This paper recasts the history of 1930s radicalism by challenging the conventional interpretation of the Popular Front as a top-down Comintern strategy dictated from Moscow. Rather, radicals in the United States who identified themselves as part of the Popular Front chose as an origin story the turbulent social-movement politics of Farmer-Laborite Minnesota. This paper integrates on-the-ground social history of rank-and-file Farmer-Laborites in Minnesota with cultural history of how radicals across the United States then re-imagined those local agitations as precursor to the American Popular Front.