Socialist Party of Oklahoma

Background

The "Oklahoma lands" — the entire future state of Oklahoma with the exception of the narrow western panhandle — were first set aside as a site to which Native American populations were to be deported from their ancestral homelands in the 1830s. It was there that the so-called "Five Civilized Tribes" — the Cherokee, Seminole, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Muscogee (Creek) peoples — were relocated at that time, clearing the way for European-American colonization of their previous lands. Following the conclusion of the American Civil War the Federal government used the fact of these five Native American peoples' support of the Confederate States of America as a pretext for retaking approximately half of these "Oklahoma lands." This freed new area for additional forced relocations of other Native American peoples.

In the years after the civil war the "Oklahoma lands" were administratively divided, with the Eastern territory remaining in the possession of the Cherokee, Seminole, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Muscogee designated the Indian Territory and the Western area given the official designation Oklahoma Territory. It was originally envisioned that part of this land ceded back to the Federal government after the conclusion of the Civil War would be used for the settlement of freed African-American slaves, but no such systematic relocation campaign was conducted.

At the end of the 1880s, nearly two million acres (810,000 hectares) of unused land remained in the Federal inventory at the center of the present state. With little other free land available on the American frontier, public pressure grew for this land to be made available for settlement. Expectant settlers known as "Boomers" began to organize in neighboring Kansas, agitating the government to open the Unassigned Lands for settlement and promising the mutual support of their members for the establishment of their individual claims. Attempts were made by some of these Boomers to squat claims, which were met by ineffectual government dispersals of illegal settlers and their subsequent re-invasion of illegally claimed lands.

Public pressure and the ongoing pattern of illegal occupation began to move the wheels of government towards a fundamental transformation of its Indian policy. The Dawes Act of 1887 authorized the dismantling of collectively held tribal lands into individual allotments and signaled an intention to open the whole of the Unassigned Lands to parcelization and allocation to private landholders. Whereas commonly held tribal lands were unlikely to be leased out to white settlers, the Dawes Act with its individually owned parcels ranging from 60 to 320 acres created a situation in which individuals could be persuaded to make transactions that tribal governments would not.

The fragmentation of the collectively owned tribal lands was followed in April 1889 by the first and largest of a series of officially sanctioned Oklahoma land runs, in which prospective settlers rushed to stake claims to parcels previously part of the Unassigned Lands. Oklahoma became the new Kansas — a bustling, hardscrabble, agrarian frontier economy emerged, with Oklahoma City the nexus of the Oklahoma Colony.

White settlers flocked to the state in search of nominally priced virgin agricultural land. By August 1889 nearly 6,000 claims were filed on over 900,000 acres of land. The next year would see another 7,000 claims putting a million more acres behind fences. By 1901 virtually all the Oklahoma Territory — the western half of today's Oklahoma, land previously set-aside for displaced Native American populations — was in the hands of European-American homesteaders.

Oklahoma populism

Obtaining land proved to be the simple part of the economic equation for the white newcomers to the Oklahoma Territory. Life proved difficult. The timing of the April 1889 land dash made the growing of a crop in the first year nigh impossible. Settlers, many of whom were of limited financial means to begin with, were forced to draw down the stocks of provisions which they carried with them to their new homesteads. Homes were built and wells dug, but 1890 was a year of severe drought, which made a second consecutive year of no farm income for many settlers.

Thugs squatting on prime land sometimes kept their rightful owners off their own property until matters could be litigated in court, further impeding the development of viable farms. Speculators claimed prime land and access to transportation and water. Some lost their claims and were rendered landless owing to a lack of funds to pay legal fees. Exacerbating these problems, for a full year no territorial government existed to adjudicate the myriad of legal issues which emerged.

On top of the difficulties faced in the launching of a new agricultural economy came the insertion from neighboring states of a resource-draining financial and business apparatus. Few Oklahomans had the financial resources to go into business for themselves on more than a personal subsistence level and a seller's market prevailed.

A costly credit system emerged in which merchants would frequently charge substantially higher prices for wares purchased on credit and then levy heavy interest rates on the unpaid balance — combined costs which could add as much as 50% to the total purchase price. Many were forced to mortgage their furniture and basic possessions at exorbitant interest rates in order to make ends meet. Defaulting families lost their possessions and were reduced into still more dire living conditions. Poverty was endemic. Nearly a decade after the great land grab of 1889, one study estimated the value of the furniture owned by the average Oklahoman family at just $7.50.

The widespread economic misery had the effect of radicalizing a significant segment of the Oklahoma population. This found expression in the 1890 establishment of the People's Party (commonly known as the "Populists") in Oklahoma in the summer of 1890. On June 21, 1890, representatives of the Farmers' Alliance, the Knights of Labor, and the Union Labor Party gathered in Oklahoma City for pre-convention planning. The group set August 13, 1890 as the date for the first territorial convention of the new political organization, which sought to challenge the dominant Democratic and less potent Republican parties in the Oklahoma Territory. The selection of this date proved unfortunate, however, as Governor George W. Steel subsequently announced August 5 — a week ahead of the scheduled organizing convention — as the date for the election of a territorial legislature.

Despite being surprised by the snap election, the Populists still managed to win election to several seats in the first territorial legislature, including a sweep of Payne County's senator and three representatives and winning another seat in Payne County. People's Party supporters tended to be Northern-born, while the Democrats were skewed towards the Southern born. The Republicans tended to split the Northern-born vote with the Populists, dominated by those hailing from New England, while People's Party supporters tended to be of Midwestern origins. Six Republicans, 5 Democrats, 1 Populist, and 1 Republican-leaning Independent were elected to the 1890 Oklahoma Territorial Council (Senate), while the first House of Representatives included 14 Republicans, 8 Democrats, and 4 Populists. Oklahoma was, in short, a three party state from the outset.

The People's Party remained an extremely effective political entity for two more election cycles. In 1892 the Oklahoma People's Party advanced a full slate of its candidates, committed to the third party approach but relegated to third place. In the elections of November 1894, however, the People's Party seemed to break through, outpolling the candidate of the Democratic Party for Congress by drawing 33% of the vote in a losing effort.

The party was ultimately shattered in 1896 amidst a bitter division between "fusionists" who sought to cooperate with the Democratic Party headed by William Jennings Bryan, who seemed to share some of the Populists' programmatic interests and those who wished to "stick to the middle of the road" by nominating a full slate of candidates in the name of the People's Party. The victory of the "fusionists" over "mid-road" adherents, followed by Bryan's defeat at the polls in 1896 proved a near mortal blow to the People's Party, which very nearly dissolved in the aftermath. It would be the Democratic Party which would survive, with many former Populists moving over to the support of that organization.

The ground was cleared for a new political organization to represent the interests of common people against the monied interests which dominated each of the "old parties."

The Indiahoma Farmers' Union

With the effective demise of the People's Party, a new organization game to the fore to advance the issues of the impoverished small-holding and tenant farmers of the Oklahoma and Indian Territories. This was to be the Indiahoma Farmers' Union (IFU), a new entity harkening back to the Farmers' Alliance which was headed by a former Populist named Newt Gresham. The IFU was patterned after a similar organization established in neighboring Texas in 1902. Expansion was made northward into the Oklahoma and Indian Territories the following year. The fledgling organization remained part of the Texas Farmers' Union until early in 1905, when it was granted organizational independence and formally adopted the Indiahoma Farmers' Union

The Indiahoma Farmers' Union was an organization founded around the idea of advancing cooperative enterprise.

The Socialist Party of America

Far from improving, the conditions faced by Oklahoma's small-holding and tenant farmers remained abysmal into the first years of the 20th Century. Farmers continued to suffer greatly unfavorable terms for credit or rent while receiving extremely low prices for the cotton, corn, and wheat which they produced. Southern agriculture was the hardest hit in the nation, and the regional blight which plagued the cotton economy impacted even the Southwestern state of Oklahoma. By 1910 half the farmers of the South worked on land which they did not own, with between one-quarter and one-half of their annual production lost off the top to rent. The average income of such farmers in Oklahoma was estimated in one contemporary study at just $200 per year.

Organized in August 1901, the Socialist Party of America carried on the legacy of the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party. Although nominally a Marxist party based upon the idea of organization of the working class, in Oklahoma the impoverished and exploited small-holders and tenant farmers were seen as a sort of "substitute proletariat" by Socialist activists. One prominent party organizer, Oscar Ameringer, declared after his extensive travels throughout the state that "Oklahoma farmers' standard of living was so far below the sweatshop workers of the New York east side that comparison should not be thought of." Such farmers were "as wretched a set of slaves as ever walked the face of the earth, anywhere or at any time," Ameringer opined.

Growth

The Socialist Party of Oklahoma took its biggest steps forward in size and influence as the first decade of the 20th Century came to a close, with the decline of the Farmers' Union opened the door for the Socialists organizationally. In 1908 the party for the first time attempted to mobilize tenant farmers through inclusion of "land planks" in the electoral platform.

The Oklahoma effort was aided by Julius Wayland and his widely circulated weekly, The Appeal to Reason, which published a special Oklahoma edition in 1908. The party's effort were rewarded, with Socialist candidates in the poorest cotton-growing areas of the state garnering the party's highest level of voter support. In certain counties the Socialist Presidential ticket of Eugene V. Debs and Ben Hanford drew a quarter of the votes cast. Statewide, the Debs-Hanford ticket won 21,425 votes — just short of 8.5% of the total ballots cast. The final departure of the People's Party from the political scene after the 1908 election further broadened Socialist horizons.

At the time of the 1908 campaign an astonishing 375 locals of the Socialist Party were scattered across the state of Oklahoma, working in support of candidates in 5 Congressional Districts, 12 State Senatorial Districts, and 35 Assembly Districts. The SPO maintained a corps of 15 traveling organizers in the field, with no fewer than 4 of these on tour at any one time. A movement was begun for the establishment of a Socialist daily newspaper in Oklahoma City.

The Socialists further advanced their demand for "constant enlargement of the public domain" on behalf of tenant farmers during the next election cycle. Oklahoma Socialists attempted to push the wage-labor-oriented Socialist Party to pass an agricultural program at its 1910 "National Congress," aided by Midwesterners Algie M. Simons and Kate Richards O'Hare. The agriculturally oriented Oklahoma party's call for the expansion of state ownership of farmland for the benefit of landless tenants, funded by stringent taxes upon land speculators, went unheeded.

In 1911, Oscar Ameringer made a major push into politics running for mayor of Oklahoma City. He gathered twenty-three percent of the vote. In 1912, the Oklahoma Socialist Party voted to abolish the Oklahoma Pioneer as its official newspaper and a year later recalled Ameringer from his seat on the National Executive Committee. In 1931, Ameringer returned to Oklahoma and founded the American Guardian, which remained in circulation until 1942.

Socialist encampments

One particularly effective technique in building the socialist movement in Oklahoma surrounded the use of Socialist encampments, camping excursions in the countryside patterned off Protestant revival meetings and used previously in the state by the populist movement. In his 1940 memoir veteran socialist Oscar Ameringer remembered the Oklahoma encampments at length:

"These encampments were lineal descendants of the religious and Populist camp meetings of former days. They usually lasted a full week. The audience came in covered wagons from as far as 70 miles around. We furnished water, firewood, and toilet facilities. The pilgrims brought their own commissary, cooked, ate, and slept on the ground or in their covered wagons. Besides a large circus tent, we carried cooking and sleeping tents for the crew. Expenses were defrayed from collections taken at meetings and funds raised by chambers of commerce in the nearest trading centers...

"These encampments were attended by an average of 5,000 people, and they meant business. Furthermore, they were welcome because they brought customers together and stimulated business....

Question and answer sessions, educational lectures by prominent orators such as Eugene V. Debs, Walter Thomas Mills, and Kate Richards O'Hare, singing and instrumental music, and discussions around the campfire marked these Socialist encampments. In the process converts to the socialist cause made and the spirit of believers fortified.

The Socialist Party garnered just over one vote in five in Oklahoma in the 1914 elections, the party's peak showing. In the aftermath of the 1914 campaign, one friendly analyst offered reasons for the growth and success of the Socialist Party in the state:

"The first is the intelligence of the Oklahoma farmer, who reads a great deal, and the constant political agitation in Oklahoma, giving him an opportunity to hear the political situation discussed. He has discovered that he is not getting a square deal. Another reason for the gain of the Socialist vote and the loss of the Democratic vote in Oklahoma is the revolt against the corrupt conditions in Oklahoma politics."

While nationally the Democratic Party made inroads among progressive voters in 1916 behind Presidential nominee Woodrow Wilson and his anti-interventionist campaign slogan "He Kept Us Out of War," the Socialist Party retained substantial support in the cotton- and wheat-growing regions of Oklahoma. In the November 1916 elections Socialists maintaining at least a 20% share of the vote in 22 counties, with the percentage in some rural precincts hitting the 50% mark. The Socialist presidential ticket headed by Allan L. Benson gained 15% of the state vote, nearly equalling the 16% cast for Eugene V. Debs by Oklahoma voters in the previous election.

Decline

Threats of violence against Socialists began in Oklahoma in 1916. The drive towards American intervention in Mexico against Pancho Villa inflamed patriotic sentiments throughout the Southwest, causing an anti-Socialist editor to opine of one local Socialist of purportedly pro-Mexican sympathies that "such a man does not deserve the protection of the American government" and hint broadly of a popular desire for a lynching rope. A Socialist newspaper editor was driven from his home after stating a desire that any American who invaded Mexico should be buried there.

The editor of the Marshall County News-Democrat threw more gasoline on the fire, condemning the Socialist opposition as "lying reprobates and degenerate libertines" who should "all be driven from the American continent."

With American entry into World War I, the rhetoric and the stakes were raised yet again, with the Democratic state government of Oklahoma establishing a state-level organization to promote the aims and policies of the national military effort, the Oklahoma Council of Defense. This group of wealthy citizens and community leaders launched a coordinated campaign against the "dangerous" internationalist and pacifist ideas of the Socialist movement. Local councils committed acts of violence against dissidents, including the use of tar and feathers, application of yellow paint, and flogging.

The Green Corn Rebellion

The Socialist Party opposed World War I, and came under fierce attacks for being unpatriotic. Oklahoma suffered from widespread Germanophobia, which saw the cities of Kiel, Bismark, and Korn were renamed Loyal, Wright, and Corn, respectively.

In late 1917, the leadership of the Oklahoma Socialist Party disbanded the state party, in the tumultuous aftermath of the failed Green Corn Rebellion, for which Socialists and Wobblies were blamed. However, this decision was contested by many rank and file as being illegal under party rules.

Reorganization of 1928

Throughout the 1920s the Socialist Party of Oklahoma, formerly one of the strongest state divisions of the SPA, virtually vanished from the political landscape. Only a small handful of at large members remained on the party's membership rolls, with all locals and the state organization discontinued. In February 1928 effort on the part of the SPA's National Office in Chicago began to be exerted to reestablish the Socialist Party of Oklahoma, with the state's at large members reached via mail with a view to the calling of a state conference in Oklahoma City prior to the party's national convention late in the spring.

Around March 1, 1928 a formal call was issued for a reorganizational convention of the Socialist Party of Oklahoma, with a view to nomination of a full party ticket for the November elections in the state. The gathering, held in Musicians Hall in Oklahoma City, was freely delegated and open to "all party members and all those who expect to join before the date of the convention, or even at the beginning of the convention." Socialist Party observers optimistically predicted the rapid growth of the new Socialist Party of Oklahoma as soon as the reorganization had taken place.

The reorganizational convention was attended by 40 delegates from around the state. National Secretary of the Socialist Party William H. Henry was named chairman of the convention and Oklahoma Socialist Party veteran Freda Hogan was elected secretary. The gathering elected a new 7-member State Committee and chose Myrtle Blackwell of Oklahoma City as the temporary State Secretary until such time that a permanent State Secretary could be elected. Two delegates were elected to the forthcoming 1928 National Convention on behalf of the newly reorganized Oklahoma state party.

Reorganization of 2009

A group affiliated with Socialist Party USA created a Greater Oklahoma City chapter of the party on January 31, 2009.