This is the final prequel to the final part of my three-part series on the need for a humane socialist U.S. agriculture policy, in which I will propose the rudiments of a socialist Farm Bill. (Here are parts 1 and 2 of the series: www.dailykos.com/...; www.dailykos.com/....) I think that before we come up with a socialist Farm Bill for the 21st Century we should learn about the amazing grassroots movement of agrarian socialists in Oklahoma at the beginning of the 20th Century. Let’s go back to the desperate Oklahoma countryside of a hundred years ago to begin to understand the theory and practice we need to employ to address the desperate U.S. countrysides of today. Of course, these are all intersectional problems calling for truly holistic treatment. So that is where I will begin this Oklahoma piece.
As a half-brown male southerner who also happens to be a socialist, I try to be aware, without being maudlin, that I may be walking on holy ground without knowing it. The holiness is usually a mirror image of the denial of justice, so that to sincerely recognize the holiness requires at least an honest attempt to acknowledge the injustice. I wrote a few weeks ago about gender dimensions of injustice all around me in the south. www.dailykos.com/… This week I am going to focus on class. But I would be remiss if I did not first discuss race.
Although I am indeed a socialist and believe in the class struggle and the critical need for class consciousness, the cornerstone story of the European-invaded land we now know as the southern U.S. centers upon racism. There is always an underlying context of racially-based genocide and slavery, with its progeny of discrimination and inequality remaining today. All around me are places where Native Peoples and African Americans suffered horrors that the right is still casually aloof to or actively lying about. I may need to be quiet so that I can hear echoes of their voices, but at least their suffering is acknowledged by the left, who also try to see the continuing unequal suffering by PoC to this day. Of course, even the fascist Donald Trump made a superficial show of having African Americans into the White House on Martin Luther King Day, just days after calling Haiti, El Salvador, and African Countries s***holes.
Only after acknowledging racial context can we in the south begin to accurately assess the story of the fight for democracy by “the working class” as such. “The workers” were and are persons of varying skin tones who, after the land was mostly all stolen from the Native Peoples, and the slaves were on paper “free,” suffered and suffer to this day from the mass political-economic injustice of capitalism. This is the part of the full story of America you almost never hear about these days, and as to which a pathologically insincere Donald Trump may even sincerely be unaware. We know better.
When I go to haggard Alabama towns, or my grandmother’s birthplace in now paved-over West Tampa, Florida, where farmers and cigar workers of varying skin tones, respectively, once organized for political-economic justice, I now increasingly feel kinship and awe at battles fought in solidarity even though they were mostly lost. I now know that there is no holier ground than Oklahoma.
Native Peoples and African Americans are vital to the story of Oklahoma, but their full role is not often told. As to Native Peoples for instance, the beginning point of the saga is not written in books:
Most Oklahomans identify with the Five Civilized Tribes, the Cheyenne, the Comanche, and other contemporary Native people of the state. Representing approximately 8 percent of Oklahoma's population, they are frequently discussed in historic accounts of the settling of Indian Territory. However, other less-well-known Native people inhabited Oklahoma for many thousands of years prior to European arrival on the southern plains in the mid-1500s. The Wichita and the Caddo can be traced back in prehistory at least two thousand years, and the Osage and Apachean-speaking people can perhaps be documented here prior to the arrival of Europeans. Other groups with no historic tribal connections may have lived here or passed through beginning some 30,000 years ago. Prehistoric groups demonstrated remarkable adaptability to diverse settings and changing environmental conditions across Oklahoma. The archaeological record in some 17,500 sites offers evidence for the presence of prehistoric or early historic people over an incredible expanse of time from perhaps 30,000 years ago to as recently as the Dust Bowl era.
www.okhistory.org/...
And as to African Americans for example, Oklahoma experienced some of the worst post-Civil War racial violence:
The most notorious act of racial conflict in Oklahoma history took place in Tulsa in 1921. Significantly, the violence in the state was part of a broader story of national intolerance that followed World War I. Yet the Tulsa riot represented a defining moment in Oklahoma's history, for it forecast the extent to which some white citizens would travel to achieve the ultimate subjugation of blacks. Much like the other riots of the period, the Tulsa disaster developed from a number of immediate and remote causes, among them irresponsible journalism, rumor, racial fears, tensions related to urban migration, and weak law enforcement. Although historians cannot specifically indict the Ku Klux Klan in starting the riot, the organization created a spirit of lawlessness that made it easier for some citizens to engage in mob activity.
A chance encounter by two people who had never met each other led to the Tulsa riot. When a young white woman, Sarah Page, accused Dick Rowland of making advances toward her in a downtown Tulsa elevator, she set the stage for the most disastrous racial episode in Oklahoma. Rowland's flight from the scene and his subsequent arrest by Tulsa authorities confirmed his guilt in the minds of citizens who believed that white womanhood must be protected at all cost. False newspaper reporting of the incident, describing Page as an orphan whose dress had been torn by the black man, inflamed Tulsans and stoked the embers of racial hate. When black men heard of plans to lynch young Rowland, they went to the jail in downtown Tulsa to protect him, but instead they confronted a group of white men determined to drive them back to their section of the city. The whites achieved their objective and then proceeded to burn down a large part of North Tulsa, where the majority of blacks in the city resided. Gov. J. B. A. Robertson called out the National Guard to help police Tulsa, but by that time many homes and businesses, including the ones along Greenwood Avenue (Black Wall Street) had been destroyed by fire, with the loss of dozens of lives. Scholars may never know how many people perished in the tragic events of 1921, for it was difficult to account for those who were burned to death, buried in secret graves, or dumped in the river. Even a special study of the riot eighty years later could not determine the number of persons who lost their lives.
The riot did not alter racial policies in Tulsa or the state of Oklahoma. Tulsa remained unrepentant. Many whites laid blame on the aggressiveness of black agitators for social equality or on militant black groups from outside the state. A grand jury placed responsibility for the conflict squarely upon the shoulders of the black men who went downtown to protect Rowland. At the opening of the twenty-first century, the Tulsa riot continued to engender heated discussion. Oklahoma officially apologized for the tragic event, and in 2001 a Tulsa Race Riot Commission, established by the state legislature, called for reparations for victims of the violence.
www.okhistory.org/...
For a brief time, many rural Oklahomans developed a class consciousness so strong and politically-energized that it even began to transcend racial division. One could speculate that the Tulsa atrocity might not have happened had the flourishing democratic movement of agrarian socialists not been crushed. Extra-legal oppression of the working class was a major tool of the ruling class used against Oklahoma socialists that would have had to be overcome to bring true democracy. Below is my summary of this singularly important movement derived from Dr. Bissett’s book.
The early 20th Century Oklahoma working class movement was to a large extent rooted in the crushed democratic populist movement of the last decades of the previous century. www.dailykos.com/... Out of the cooperative and political vigor of the Farmers Alliance and the People’s Party were thousands of highly trained and class conscious small holder and tenant Oklahoma farmers to whom capitalist injustice remained in full force. They tried in the first decade of the 1900’s to form a new Oklahoma cooperative movement called the Indiahoma Farmers Union. www.okhistory.org/... This movement had huge organizing success, and arguably some economic justice success through cooperative cotton withholding. But it was soon co-opted and sold out by large holders who did not actually farm but rather legally employed and contracted with others to do the work. Needless to say they did not want to challenge existing economic conditions much less structures, and the organization was destroyed from within, losing all credibility with working class actual farmers.
From this failed, sold-out effort, many farmers who were already highly sophisticated in the ways the capitalist world created a hell on earth for small farmers became intense students of socialism. At the same time, the beloved Eugene Debs’ Socialist Party of America was attempting to form a vigorous presence in Oklahoma. It soon became apparent that the party’s top-down and orthodox approach would not work, and it was gradually rejected. The urban-focused “Milwaukee Plan” of Victor Berger was focused on building a dominant central committee and state party newspaper. To the extent it had a rural notion it was that small parcel ownership by working class farmers was completely out of the question.
This triggered an intense discussion that ultimately was resolved by rejection of the Milwaukee Plan in favor of an organically-derived theory and practice approach they called the Texas Plan based on their close affinity with fellow agragrians to the south. The plan was consistent with decades of real life farmer experience going back through the Indiahoma Farmers Union all the way to the Farmers Alliance, revamped on reinterpreted socialist lines. The plan included (a) an amalgamation of the Jeffersonian principal of yeoman democracy with a revision of the Marxist conception of worker control of the means of production to allow small farm ownership and support land reform to break up large farms dependent upon the labor of others; and (b) full grassroots democratic control of all aspects of the movement.
Beyond the plan itself was an acute awareness, prescient of Gramsci, that cultural hegemony could either help or doom the movement. Christians, mostly of decidedly fundamentalist non-mainstream working class denominations, including Primitive Baptist, Pentecostal, and Holiness churches, not only were completely comfortable in the movement but also in many locals led it. Thus, in a way that heartens me as a socialist who happens to be a Christian, they envisioned Jesus as a liberating force for the poor and oppressed. In this way, they were highly radical in program but highly reassuring in language to most of the humble rank-and-file in farming communities.
This is not to say that they were not also students of Marx. Rather, they gave his works the careful attention of those in search of liberation, consistent with their own experiences and beliefs on the ground and in the pews. [Note to comrades: Since I began writing the summary portion of this piece, I have broken my ankle on a backyard zip line which I was trying out prior to the socialists of tomorrow. I am refusing meds to try to finish this piece, which may not meet rigorous ACM standards. Waiting on X-rays. Viva la revolución!] Similarly, they dearly loved Debs. He once spoke to a large gathering of Oklahoma socialists at a Holiness church.
Importantly, from Marx, Debs, and Jesus, but not Jefferson and Jim Crow, they for the most part learned that the racism of the society around them was completely wrong and did not have any place in the movement. There were a few embarrassing outliers, but for the most part, the Oklahoma agrarian socialist movement was a proud example of the way socialism can transform Jeffersonianism to actualize in practice and policy that all are truly created equal.
Circumstances [ouch] will not permit me to detail their successes and the reactionary repression their movement engendered. Their political organizing abilities were unparalleled in U.S. political history. They quickly became a second, sometimes close second, and sometimes even victorious, in many local electoral contests, won 6 state legislative seats, and bested the Republican Party in the governor’s race. This led to innumerable dirty tricks by worried Democratic officials, such as not providing sufficient numbers of ballots to agricultural precincts, marking ballots of known socialists to be discarded, and passing new voter registration requirements to expose socialist party affiliation. (Republican officials were not by the way helpful in standing up for the socialists, needless to say.) At the same time, the state Democratic Party-controlled legislature was passing Jim Crow voter disenfranchisement laws.
In response, the socialists miraculously twice in the same election put on the statewide ballot constitutional fairness in voting provisions, which won clear majorities and in one case the required 2/3rds for passage, only to have the rules changed ex post facto to ensure failure.
Then, when a group of upset desperate farmers in southeastern counties began to use direct action to tear up foreclosure notices, state Democratic officials used that, and socialist opposition to U.S. entry into the racist Wilson’s war to end all wars, as an excuse to round up and incarcerate numerous Oklahoma socialist state and local leaders to make an example of them.
That is all for now. Please read the good professor’s book. Solidarity!