Oklahoma became a state in 1907 during the Progressive Era. In the 1912 presidential election Oklahoma had the largest Socialist Party vote of any state.
In the first two decades of the twentieth century the Socialist Party of Oklahoma consistently ranked as one of the top three state socialist organizations in America. At the party’s height in the elections of 1914, the Socialist Party candidate for governor, Fred W. Holt, received more than 20 percent of the vote statewide. In Marshall and Roger Mills counties, where the Socialist Party was strongest, Holt captured 41 and 35 percent of the vote, respectively. More than 175 socialists were elected to local and county offices that year, including six to the state legislature.
As these statistics make clear, to a greater extent than anywhere else in the nation, the Socialist Party in Oklahoma played an active, potent role in state and local politics.
Later Oklahoma had the anti-war, anti-draft Green Corn Rebellion. during World War I.
The Green Corn Rebellion in Oklahoma During WWI, by
Nigel Anthony Sellars
Nigel Anthony Sellars, Treasonous Tenant Farmers and Seditious Sharecroppers: The 1917 Green Corn Rebellion Trials.
James H. Fowler, II, “Tar and Feather Patriotism: The Suppression of Dissent in Oklahoma During World War I,” The Chronicles of Oklahoma 56 (Winter 1978–79) pages 409 – 430.
Linda D. Wilson, “Oklahoma Council of Defense,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, www.okhistory.org (accessed March 16, 2018).
Jim Bissett, “World War I,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, www.okhistory.org (accessed March 16, 2018).
Jim Bissett, Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904–1920.
Garin Burbank, When Farmers Voted Red: The Gospel of Socialism in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1910-1924.
William Cunningham (Author), Nigel Anthony Sellars (Introduction), The Green Corn Rebellion.
Davis D. Joyce, An Oklahoma I Had Never Seen Before: Alternative Views of Oklahoma History. (See especially, Marvin E. Kroeker, “”In Death You Shall Not Wear It Either”: The Persecution of Mennonite Pacifists in Oklahoma)
Jeanette Keith, Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War
The Socialist Party in Early Oklahoma
INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD.
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