For a growing group of young Oklahomans inspired by the Bernie Sanders campaign , this isn’t ancient history. Over the past two years, they have reclaimed the experience of Red Oklahoma and they have revived a socialist movement across the state. This new generation of radicals confronts many of the same dilemmas as their predecessors. Yet one challenge particularly stands out: how to begin building roots in unions and workplaces. Without a base in the labor movement, Oklahoma’s socialists have been unable to help guide the current education strike to victory.

Part of the reason for this discrepancy is that there is more working-class political continuity in West Virginia than in the Sooner State . But there’s an additional reason: Oklahoma’s radical roots are explicitly socialist. It’s a little-known fact that Oklahoma had the strongest Socialist Party in the country a century ago. Angered by their material hardships and inspired by a vision of economic and political democracy, tens of thousands turned to socialism.

By ignoring social class and class struggle, the “red state” myth misread the present — and distorted the past. All regions of this country have rich, and relevant, traditions of labor resistance. Educators in West Virginia reclaimed this history when they surged into struggle, obliging mainstream accounts of the strike to highlight precedent-setting historical struggles like the Mine Wars . But it’s significant that the liberal media has so far studiously ignored Oklahoma’s deep history of militancy.

Mass struggle has a remarkable way of puncturing political myths. Liberals for many years have condescendingly portrayed working people in “red states” like West Virginia and Oklahoma as brainwashed dupes of the Republicans. But the eruption of teachers’ rebellions across so-called Trump country has revealed the superficiality of these accounts.

Socialist Roots

The starting point for the emergence and popularity of Oklahoma socialism was the dire economic situation of working people across the state. Small-holding and tenant farmers were subjected to intense profit-squeezing by large landowners and credit-lenders. Failing to make ends meet, many ended up deeply in debt, obliging them to work land that they didn’t own.

Brutal poverty, the concentration of land ownership in the hands of a small elite, and the exploitative credit-lending power of the banks were an explosive mix. By consistently championing the basic material demands of Oklahomans for land and economic justice, and by treating poor farmers as part of a broadly conceived working class, socialists from 1902 onward began building up a popular base in the Sooner State.

Oklahoma’s Socialist Party (SP) soon became the party’s largest branch, per capita, in the United States. Much of the credit for this growth can be given to the tireless work of German-born socialist Oscar Ameringer. A talented and humorous propagandist known as the “Mark Twain of American Socialism,” Ameringer built up a strong organizational and electoral apparatus inspired by Milwaukee’s moderate socialist machine.

Contesting elections was a central means through which the SP rooted itself among Oklahoman toilers. This electoral focus was particularly important since Oklahoma lacked a large industrial working class with the social power to shut down production through strikes. By 1914, the SP had over eight hundred locals and over 175 elected officials, including six state legislators. That year, the party’s gubernatorial candidate, Fred W. Holt, got 20 percent of the vote, convincing both the poor and the political elite that Oklahoma’s socialists might soon win the levers of governmental power.

Though electoral politics was a central focus, the Socialist Party hardly limited itself to this arena. Holt, for instance, was imprisoned for six months in 1915 for giving arms to striking mine workers in Macalester. A more typical form of socialist activity was the promotion of the party press. More copies of the national journal Appeal to Reason were sold in Oklahoma than elsewhere in the US. Branches in towns across Oklahoma established their own newspapers and distributed a wide variety of educational pamphlets. Of these, the most popular was Ameringer’s 1909 The Life and Deeds of Uncle Sam. A Little History for Big Children, a witty popularized socialist account of US history, sold half a million copies before World War I.

Bad economic conditions underlay much of the party’s growth. But these alone cannot explain the emergence of mass socialist movement in Oklahoma since similar conditions were widespread across the US. As historian Jim Bissett notes in his excellent study Agrarian Socialism in America, the unparalleled strength of the Oklahoma SP arose from “the unique qualities that Oklahoma socialists brought to their party. . . . While retaining the Marxist core of the socialist message, activists in the Sooner State presented that message in a form that was instantly recognizable to virtually all of its potential constituents.”

More than elsewhere in the country, Oklahoma’s socialists found creative ways to blend socialism with preexisting cultural norms and political traditions. One important example of this was the SP’s focus on organizing encampments, a practice pioneered by evangelicals and Populists. Thousands of farmers would travel by covered wagon for a week of singing, socializing, discussing, and socialist education. “It makes one think of an old-fashioned Methodist camp meeting,” reported one local activist in 1903. “Singing and speeches, interest and excitement ran so high that the event lasts until about one o’clock in the night.” In 1915 alone, there were over two hundred encampments, some of which numbered up to ten thousand participants each.

The extraordinary success of Oklahoma’s socialists rested above all on their synthesis of socialism with the best emancipatory traditions of Christianity. In a deeply religious state like Oklahoma, a flexible approach to religion was indispensable for any mass party. The following appeal by an Ellis County socialist for “the Kingdom come on earth” gives a good sense of the movement’s moral indignation and religious tenor: “While men are underpaid, while women are overworked. While children grow up in squalor, while exploitation and social injustice remain, the Kingdom of Heaven can never come on earth and never will.” Another activist declared that Jesus was “one of the first great labor leaders of the world [who] gave up his life for his class.”

A significant minority of preachers were won to Oklahoman socialism. But this did not mean that the state’s socialists accommodated themselves to the institutionalized churches, many of which actively upheld the status quo. In the 1903 words of one party member: “The bible is full of socialism, but the churches have departed from the faith, and we, the Socialists, must educate them with the true light Christ brought.”

Nor did the party’s embrace of radical Christianity lead it to drop its fundamentally Marxist message. Ameringer’s Uncle Sam pamphlet, for example, concluded as follows:

The means to the end is the class struggle, but the goal itself is the abolition of classes and class wars though the establishment of the common ownership of the means of production. The place of the present industrial monarchy will be taken by the industrial democracy of the future, the Socialist Republic.

This fidelity to socialist principles was concretized in various ways. Take the Oklahoma SP leadership’s long and consistent defense of equal rights for black people. Though there was a minority of open racists inside the party, Oklahoman socialists generally fought for racial egalitarianism and class solidarity. The party’s 1912 platform declared that the “safety and advancement of the working class depends upon its solidarity and class consciousness. Those who would engender or foster race hatred or animosity between the white and black sections of the working class are the enemies of both.”

This position — not an easy one to take in a deeply white supremacist society — did not merely remain on paper. As Bissett notes, the “Socialist Party was the most hospitable political institution available for black Oklahomans in the early twentieth century.” Most importantly, the SP led a historic struggle in 1910 against the Democratic Party’s “grandfather clause” ballot initiative to electorally disenfranchise black residents. Ameringer wrote the ballot argument against the measure and the party campaigned hard to stop it, despite the fact that everybody knew that this would cost the SP votes by alienating racist white workers.

Ultimately, the ballot initiative — with the help of a host of Democratic Party electoral machinations — passed 135,000 to 106,000. But the Socialist Party’s principled stand won it the support of key black leaders. Denouncing the nominally antiracist Republicans for failing to seriously fight the “grandfather clause,” a 1910 assembly of black activists pledged its support to the SP:

Whereas, the Socialist Party has invited us to affiliate with them for the reason that the Socialist Party believes in the Social Equality of all races; and Whereas, the Colored Race of Oklahoma believes with the Socialists that all men are born free and equal in every sense of the word; Therefore, Be It Resolved, that we hereby endorse the platforms put out by our Socialist brothers and recommend that all the colored people of Oklahoma vote the Socialist ticket and align themselves with our Socialistic brethren.

While there was vocal internal minority opposed to the SP’s line on racism, the same was not true when it came to independent political action. Complete independence from the twin parties of capital was an uncontroversial axiom. Socialists of the era refused to support any candidates running on either Republican or Democratic ballot lines, no matter how progressive they might be. Oklahoma’s party press declared that, unlike Democrats and Republicans, the SP “does not pretend to represent both the capitalist and the worker. It represents only the worker and says so plainly.”

In Oklahoma, the Democratic Party was enemy number one. The state was governed in semi-authoritarian fashion by a corrupt Democratic machine clearly beholden to big business. “The democrat[ic] party in Oklahoma is a political tool of the banker-ginner-merchant-landlord class,” explained one socialist in 1914. In his influential Uncle Sam, Ameringer highlighted the danger of Democratic co-optation by noting that “even mighty populism was swallowed up by the Democratic Party.”

Further evidence of the SP’s Marxist credentials was its principled opposition to imperialist war. In 1914, the party declared that “if war is declared [by the US government], the socialists of Oklahoma shall refuse to enlist; but if forced to enter military service to murder fellow workers, we shall choose to die fighting the enemies of humanity within our own ranks rather than to perish fighting our fellow workers.” Along these lines, the SP fought in 1916 and early 1917 against the US military intervention in Mexico to fight Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.

It was the SP’s steadfast struggle against capitalist war that eventually led to the party’s demise. In April 1917, Democratic president Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany, reversing his recent campaign promises to keep the US out of the European conflict. In subsequent weeks and months, vigilante and state harassment thinned the ranks of Oklahoman socialism. For their “disloyalty,” socialist newspapers were closed down. The blessings of US democracy have always been unevenly guaranteed for radicals, particularly in times of war.

Government persecution intensified after the August 1917 “Green Corn Rebellion,” a failed armed uprising begun by a biracial group of Oklahoman tenant farmers to oppose World War I and the draft. After Oklahoma’s state leaders falsely accused the Socialist Party of having orchestrated the rebellion, socialists across the state were subjected to intense persecution. Many were arrested, fired from their jobs, flogged, or even tarred and feathered.

The repression worked. By 1918, Oklahoma’s mass socialist movement had been destroyed by the state. Seeking a complete eradication of the socialist legacy, government leaders in 1925 replaced Oklahoma’s red state flag because it was too associated with working-class radicalism.