Red banners, green fields. When the Socialist Party was on the march in rural Oklahoma.

Following the 2016 presidential election there has been extensive discussion of the rural vote and "urban-rural divide" in the mainstream press. This blog has covered these topics at length, with some articles located here and here. Additionally, the 2008 recession and Bernie Sanders' two presidential campaigns have renewed interest in socialist politics within the United States, emblemized by soaring membership rates in groups like the Democratic Socialists of America. 

Those who became funneled into the world of socialist politics through, for instance, the Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign have likely come to realize the numerous obstacles — structural and political — involved in socialist organizing. Those obstacles have been exacerbated by trends originating in the prior century such as the dramatic decline of the trade union movement post-Volker Shock and the end of mass politics.

With that current backdrop, as well as discussion of the role of activist framing of current issues in rural areas raised by another student in this blog post, I wanted discuss the brief period when the Socialist Party emerged as the preferred political vehicle for Oklahoma's rural poor. 

I would like to begin this story with how the period of Socialist success in rural Oklahoma abruptly ended, drawing from Garin Burbank's 1973 Journal of American Studies Article, "The Disruption and Decline of the Oklahoma Socialist Party" Burbank describes how the Oklahoma political establishment and the state's economic elites used the backdrop of the United States entry into the first world war to wage an assault against the legitimacy of the Socialist Party of Oklahoma ("SPO"). The Oklahoma establishment used the courts, the press, and wartime organs of the state to accomplish the task of undercutting the SPO, casting party members as un-American traitors.

For example mainstream newspapers encouraged mob-violence against SPO members who — unlike the party's eastern branches — were almost entirely Anglo, non-immigrants, yet nonetheless "should be driven from the American continent" and characterized SPO members as "heathenistic apes" who disgraced patriotic Americans. The Oklahoma Council of Defense, an arm of the state government, joined in the effort to label SPO members' opposition to the war as treasonous and faciliated vigilante violence against those sympathetic to the SPO.

Finally, the Green Corn Rebellion of 1917, in which a diverse group of poor tenant farmers rebelled against conscription laws, provided pretext for the wider suppression of the SPO. This was despite the party's stated opposition to armed rebellion and specific critique of the Green Corn Rebellion. As Meagan Day wrote in the above-linked Jacobin article "[f]or refusing to wholly denounce the Green Corn Rebellion...the SPO was mercilessly attacked and undermined by every institution of power in the state. Politicians and newspapers whipped middle-class citizens into a frenzy." This all out assault was the final blow to the party. 

The reason for the extensive campaign of suppression was that for the past decade the SPO's message had resonated with the Oklahoma rural poor. The SPO's core platform deviated from the Marxist orthodoxy of the national Socialist Party, including a "farm program" platform plank that offered relief to tenant farmers and was viewed as "more agrarian-populist than socialist". Rhetorically, the party synthesized a traditionally socialist message with elements of emancipatory Christian teachings. 

In extremely poor, rural areas of Oklahoma, this proposed political program and message paid dividends, with Burbank noting that SPO was particularly strong in the cotton and wheat growing areas of the state. Between 1908 and 1916, SPO candidates routinely garnered double digit vote shares in statewide elections, including more than 20% of the vote in the 1914 gubernatorial election. Further, Burbank points out that the SPO performed disproportionately well in rural precincts while floundering in towns and cities except for those dominated by the coal industry. The SPO was arguably more effective at the local level, for example in 1914 they won more than 175 local and county offices and six seats in the state legislature. 

With the Socialist Party gaining momentum nationally, including the election of two Socialist Party members to Congress in the 1910's (Victor Berger from Milwaukee and Meyer London from New York), it makes sense that the Oklahoma establishment would seize upon wartime chauvinism as pretext to stamp out the SPO and the radical agrarian cause they promoted. Following the end of the wear, with the once nascent SPO in tatters the Oklahoma state legislature joined the chorus of states to enact criminal syndicalism laws which further suppressed leftist organizing in the state.

While researching the SPO, I was struck by how adaptable the party was given the material and historic conditions of the people they organized. Instead of modeling the party's organizing efforts and strategy on that of the Socialist Party in the Northeast and industrial Midwest, the SPO tailored its messages to the needs and realities of an underdeveloped agricultural economy based on tenant farming, combining a socialist industrial program with agrarian reform and adopting Christian emancipatory rhetoric. In that way, the SPO reminds me more of many Latin American Left movements that emerged later in the century than later Left movements in the United States. Obviously, conditions are quite different in rural areas now than they were in rural Oklahoma in the 1910's, but I think the flexible approach undertaken by the SPO might be worth investigating in light of the persistence of  rural poverty and misery in parts of the United States.