By Steve Byas

Oklahoma is often referred to as “the reddest state in the nation.” By that, most are referring to the strength of the Republican Party, at least in the last couple of decades. (West Virginia is another candidate for that title).

It was NBC’s Tim Russert, with his repeated usage of the terms as Red for Republican states and Blue for Democratic states, that caused the terms to be universally applied today. Russert probably did not like the association of the Democratic Party with “Red,” the color of international communism.

Whether Oklahoma today is the nation’s “reddest” state in terms of partisan identity is debatable, but in the early history of the state, Oklahoma was the “reddest” state, if by that one means the state where socialism was the strongest. If not Bolshevik Red, it was certainly a dark Pink Socialist.

While in modern Oklahoma, socialism tends to be more popular in urban areas, the strength of the Socialist Party in Oklahoma in the early 20th century was more in the rural areas of the state. By 1914, the Sooner State had more registered Socialist Party members, percentage-wise, than any other state – and more members total than the state of New York! In the governor’s race that year, the Socialist candidate won more than 20 percent of the vote.

Nearly 200 registered Socialists were elected to public office in Oklahoma, including six to the Oklahoma Legislature.

Then came World War I. The Socialist Party opposed the war, in socio-economic terms, declaring it was a “rich man’s war, and a poor man’s fight.” (Not far from the truth). In the summer of 1917, many of Oklahoma’s poor farmers joined an effort to overthrow the U.S. government, in favor of a Socialist regime, and end the war. Their plot involved marching on Washington, D.C., living off the land, eating green corn (The Green Corn Rebellion).

Many of the leaders were arrested, and the effort collapsed. Shortly thereafter, the Bolshevik Revolution broke out in Russia, and an atheistic form of socialism – Soviet communism – took over that country. This association of socialism and communism with atheism did not set well with many of these poor tenant farmers, many of which were devout Christians. (Never mind that Karl Marx was an ardent atheist – it is doubtful many of these Oklahoma socialists ever read Marx).

Nevertheless, many continued the socialist effort in Oklahoma. In 1922, the Farmer-Labor Reconstruction League briefly got control of the Democratic Party and got the Party’s nomination for governor for John Walton, the mayor of Oklahoma City. Walton reigned as a near-dictator briefly, using the National Guard to keep grand juries and even the state legislature from meeting, until he was impeached and removed.

By the mid-1920s, the Socialist movement in Oklahoma had declined, and continued to decline. (Part of this decline was that the Democratic Party increasingly adopted much of the rhetoric and even some of the policies of the Socialist Party).

So, why was the Socialist Party so strong in early Oklahoma history? The eastern part of the state is where the Socialist Party was the strongest. Eastern Oklahoma had largely been “Indian Territory,” although by the time of statehood, a good majority of its residents were non-Indians.

During the years after the Civil War until statehood, non-Native settlers who moved into Indian Territory tended to be desperately poor migrants from the South. In I.T., they could not vote, and their children could not attend the Indian schools. Most importantly, they could not own land. They were tenant farmers. They paid rent, and many lived on the edge, economically.

Private ownership of land usually causes a person to be more conservative, and socialist propaganda tends to not have as much appeal. The Socialist leaders in Oklahoma tended to wed their collectivist philosophy to evangelical Christianity, instead of the social radicalism so prevalent in today’s left-wing circles. (Again, these tenant farmers were probably not well-versed in The Communist Manifesto, and Das Kapital). But as the ugly atheism of communism under the Bolsheviks in Russia became better known, the popularity of socialism declined.

As the years went by, more and more of these tenant farmers and their descendants became land-owners. They got jobs outside of agriculture. In recent years, the cultural radicalism of the Left has pushed these folks further and further away from the radicalism of their ancestors.

Of course, there are other reasons that one could cite for Oklahoma’s drift away from its “red” past to its “red” present. Today, socialism has its most appeal in the urban areas of Oklahoma, and on the college campuses, where Karl Marx is far too often seen as an all right guy.