Editor Capsis:
As a sometime denizen of Chelsea and longtime Sauk Centre area resident, I would like to say that your Catherine Revland’s assessment of Gopher Prairie and Lewis’s reception there is all wrong. Revland would have Lewis’s background that of being unsophisticated, intolerant one-dimensional white people that talk through their noses and say, “You betcha” too much like the characters from a Coen Brothers film.
Cocaine, Wobblies, feminism, and woman’s sufferage were not unheard of here in Lewis’s time. Minnesota’s Iron Range helped birth the IWW and the Teamsters’s first successful strike took place in this state. Thingification was no more prevalent in this area than anywhere else. Lewis addressed these things because they were happening here, and people here, in his back yard, like everywhere else, knew it. Minnesota politicians from the left, center, and the right have offered the nation outstanding political leadership and not only in minority rights, civil rights, social welfare, and inclusion models.
Contemporaries of Lewis have told me that Lewis was not always liked here, but he was respected and appreciated. “He told us we were provincial and we appreciated it,” was how one of my relatives, an English professor, told me. This is all straight from the shoulder (but not through the nose).
Will Kraemer
Belgrade MN, (22 miles south of Gopher Prairie)
Dear readers,
As someone who grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, I am quite familiar with what mid-western small-town life is like. Gopher Prairie is not a location as much as a state of mind, which I believe I made clear in the Sinclair Lewis piece. I am also quite familiar with the radical history of that section of the country because members of my family were part of that history (see my article about the Nonpartisan League in the May 2012 WestView, “It Doesn’t Have to be Bloody You Know: A History Lesson for the 99 Percent”). I don’t recall portraying Lewis as a rube when he arrived on the Village scene in 1910. Nevertheless, the most sophisticated young artist of his day could not have failed to be influenced by landing in the midst of that great convergence of famous political, artistic, and social revolutionaries, in a neighborhood where people helped IWWs organize, not run them out of town. But who am I or anyone to feel obligated to defend Village history? It speaks for itself. Oh, and just so you know, the Cohen Brothers got that movie all wrong.
