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It well might be asked why Oklahoma, of all places, was more hospitable to socialism than any other state in America? The standard and very conventional review of this book on Amazon explains it as follows: “Jim Bissett chronicles the rise and fall of the Socialist Party of Oklahoma during the first two decades of the twentieth century, when socialism in the United States enjoyed its golden age." These lines echo the words of Bissett’s Preface:
the first two decades of the twentieth century stand out as the golden age of American socialism. These were the years when the American socialist movement could claim as its own such respected members of society as Helen Keller, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, Jane Addams and John Reed. It was a time when one of the country’s most beloved figures, Eugene Debs, was the socialist standard bearer in national elections, and when hundreds of thousands of Americans subscribed to the socialist weekly, The Appeal to Reason.
That weekly is a story in itself. More closely identified with the socialist movement than any other paper, The Appeal to Reason was published in Kansas City MO and in 1913 had “a paid circulation of over 760,000” (Graham 1). Each subscriber would have shared the paper with friends and family, giving it a readership of several times that figure. In short, The Appeal to Reason flooded the southwest and was widely read across rural America. It is on account of this readily available publication that the author’s own great-grandfather Benjamin Pounds, a failed farmer (crippled in one leg) in northwest Lincoln County and never active in politics, called himself a socialist. A better example from Lincoln County would be the community of Clematis south of Davenport (an introduction to which appeared on this same blog about ten days ago), whose rise and fall coincided with that of the socialist party.
Noting that “This book is about the surprising success of the Socialist Party in Oklahoma,” Bissett pauses to credit three other major books in the field. These are James Green's Grass-Roots Socialism, Garin Burbank's When Farmers Voted Red, and John Thompson's Closing the Frontier (Bissett xiii). The present author is also indebted to these scholars, particularly to Green, whose thick opus has dominated his shelves for many years. Both Green and Burbank assume that national socialist organizers schooled in the labor movement brought socialism to Oklahoma farmers on their southwestern organizing tours, Bissett notes, but this view ignores the traditions of agrarian insurgency vital to the story of the Oklahoman socialist movement. “Socialists in the Sooner State drew upon a long and complex tradition of agricultural social movements--a legacy stretching back to populism that was as rich as the labor movement” (xiv).
The labor movement developed in the factories across the cities of the northeast and the old northwest, and their initial impulse was to ignore the plight of the farmer, claiming that by definition he could not be part of the proletariat. Yet, as Bissett, insists:
the strongest state expression of socialism in the United States occurred, not in the urban citadels of the American working class, but in the remote towns and hamlets of rural Oklahoma. . . . Economic reasons are an indisputable factor. . . . the severe agricultural crisis that gripped the South during the early twentieth century provided the context for socialist success . . the twin evils of low crop prices and high credit costs consigned most Oklahoma farmers to a life of poverty and indebtedness, and many responded to this plight by turning to the Socialist Party. (Bissett 3).
In the background, it should be said, most Oklahoma socialists had participated in other social movements prior to joining the Party and came into the organization as experienced activists:
Following the decline of the farmers' Union after 1907, many of its members migrated into the Socialist Party. . . . drawing upon Jefferson's emphasis on the farmer's "natural right" to the land, the Oklahoma Party's analysis of commercial agriculture was far more sophisticated and far more damning than the conventional wisdom emanating from national socialist leaders. (Bissett 4-5).
What made the experience of Oklahoma socialists important was that it combined three significant political and cultural traditions:
(1) the Jeffersonian emphasis on the common man, the dignity of labor, and the importance of the land, brought by the Alliance and the Farmer's Union into the twentieth century; (2) the scathing indictment of capitalism set down by Karl Marx and brought to America by his disciples; and (3) the evangelical Protestant tradition that had been central to the American experience since the Great Revival of the early nineteenth century. (Bissett 7-8)
The Marxist message of class conflict went well with the Jeffersonian promises of farmer democracy to produce an especially explosive mix that became even more persuasive when instilled with the moral authority of Christianity.To broaden its appeal, the Socialist Party borrowed from the ideology both of the American Revolution and of Christianity. By making Marxism speak in American terms, the author argues, Party activists counteracted the prevailing notion that socialism was illegitimate or un-American. Many ministers of the day had farming backgrounds and became socialist organizers, lending their churches and brush arbors to socialist conventions. (Bissett provides a whole chapter called “‘The Real Gospel of Christ’: The Religion of Socialism in Oklahoma” as well as an appendix listing Prominent Oklahoma Socialist Ministers, pp. 193-94.)
All of Bissett’s discussions of these matters should be of interest to most readers of this blog, especially if their ancestors were farmers--which is very likely considering that 90% of Oklahomans were farmers in the period we are examining. Of special interest may be the wealth of statistics Bissett cites, especially those showing the destructive symbiosis of low cotton prices combined with high credit costs as well as the percent of the agricultural population who were no longer land owners (the ideal condition that the Homestead Acts were designed to achieve) but renters or sharecroppers. Bissett lumps these two conditions together as tenancy.
By 1900, per capita income had fallen below pre-Civil War levels in the cotton-producing states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Georgia, and had increased during the same period in the rest of the South at a pace well below the national average. “Farmers in Oklahoma,” Bissett shows, “proved especially vulnerable to these conditions. By 1910 fully half of all farmers in the South worked land they did not own.” Bissett gives census figures in a footnote on p. 271: "According the Census of 1910, 55 percent of farmers in Oklahoma were tenants. Of the remaining 45 percent who owned their farms, only slightly more than half were free of mortgage debt. As a result, only one in four farmers in the state worked land that they owned and that was free of debt."
For the readers of earlier blog entries on this site, the resulting conditions are illustrated by the misery described by Oscar Ameringer when he visited Harrah in 1907. Lest it be assumed that Ameringer encountered only a small and unrepresentative portion of the state's farmers in his travels, it should be noted that in terms of the total rural population, tenants had already reached majority status in Oklahoma by 1910. By 1935 tenants would outnumbers owners by a margin of over two to one (Bissett 8-11).
Sources
Bissett, Jim. Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside 1904-1920. Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1999.
Graham, John. “Yours for the Revolution”: The Appeal to Reason, 1895-1922. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1990.
Pounds, Wayne. “Clematis: The Rise & Fall of the Oklahoma Socialist Party.” Ueno Wayne: From Oklahoma to Tokyo. https://uenowayne.blogspot.com/2019/04/clematis-rise-fall-of-oklahoma.html. Accessed December 2022.
Sources
The first two items listed are readily available at Amazon (new or used) and ABE Books (used).
Bissett, Jim. Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside 1904-1920. Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1999.
Graham, John. “Yours for the Revolution”: The Appeal to Reason, 1895-1922. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1990.
Pounds, Wayne. “Clematis: The Rise & Fall of the Oklahoma Socialist Party.” Ueno Wayne: From Oklahoma to Tokyo. https://uenowayne.blogspot.com/2019/04/clematis-rise-fall-of-oklahoma.html. Accessed December 2022.
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