Democrat or Republican, Oklahoma has always been conservative

Because of its deep populist roots, socialist streak and Democratic Party control, Blackburn said, a common assumption is that early Oklahoma was more liberal — to use the word’s current meaning — than it is now.

That isn’t necessarily so.

“We have never been liberal in Oklahoma,” said Blackburn.

And, as the late Danney Goble and other historians and political scientists have pointed out, we have always been Southern, at least politically.

Rise of the populists

When Democrats ruled the South, they ruled Oklahoma. When civil rights and culture wars began flipping party politics in the South 50 years ago, Oklahoma went along.

Oklahoma’s “distrust of concentrated corporate and political power, its steady run-ins with federal authority, even its susceptibility to political corruption — all of these were qualities that the Sooner State shared with states of the Old Confederacy,” Goble wrote in 2007.

Blackburn says the bedrock of Oklahoma politics is a Scotch-Irish culture that first arrived with mixed-blood Indians over the various trails of tears.

“It’s not a majority culture, but it is a dominant culture,” Blackburn said. “Sort of a ‘Lord of the Valley’ mindset. ‘Don’t touch my gun.’ ‘Don’t tell me what I can do with my property.’ ”

But what about all those Populists and Socialists in Oklahoma’s history?

The simple answer is that Populists and Socialists — especially Oklahoma Populists and Socialists — may have been radical, but they weren’t necessarily what we would think of today as liberal.

American political parties at the turn of the 20th century were defined more by economic class, geography and history than by “liberal” and “conservative” ideology, Blackburn said.

The Republicans were the party of capital and, with memories of the Civil War still quite real, the party of the North. Democrats represented labor and the South.

The Populist Party — or, more correctly, People’s Party — arose on the plains in the 1880s and was brought to Oklahoma Territory by settlers from Kansas. The Populists were mostly white farmers who believed themselves victims of corporate monopolies in everything from commodity trading to railroads.

Although a minority party, the Populists were often kingmakers in the Oklahoma Territory legislature. The first Speaker of the territorial House of Representatives was a Populist.

The unusual socialists

By statehood, the Populists had disappeared as an active party, their members absorbed either into a wing of the strengthening Democratic Party or the rising Socialist Party.

But Oklahoma Socialists were not like any others. Oscar Ameringer, a Socialist organizer and congressional candidate, wrote in his autobiography that the national party did not know what to do with them.

Instead of urban industrial workers, most Oklahoma Socialists were small farmers. They may have wanted to nationalize the railroads and tar and feather bankers and landlords, but economic opportunity, not collectivization, was their ultimate goal.

According to University of Oklahoma political science professor Keith Gaddie’s research, “The appeal of socialism arose out of poverty and an environment of distrust of large corporate and economic actors who seemed to exploit that poverty in the eyes of Socialists.”

Instead of rejecting organized religion, state socialists embraced it. Socialism was preached from the pulpit of many a country church; no one could call himself a Christian, it was argued, if he was not a socialist, too.

So Oklahoma Socialists turned out to be budding capitalists and fundamentalist Christians, and they weren’t keen about uniting in common cause with blacks, Jews or immigrants. All five Socialists elected to the Oklahoma Legislature in 1914 were white farmers from the western half of the state.

The Socialist gubernatorial candidate that year, United Mine Workers organizer Fred Holt, got nearly 21 percent of the vote in an election decided by less than 2 percentage points.

That success proved the party’s undoing. Changes to voter registration laws intended to exclude poor whites as well as blacks, combined with a disastrous, half-baked uprising called the Green Corn Rebellion and a rising fear of “Bolshevism,” brought a quick end to the party in Oklahoma.

But the Populists and Socialists left a mark on the new state’s constitution. Long and unwieldy, it protected labor and agriculture through such provisions as an elected corporation commission to regulate railroads and utilities, and an elected labor commissioner to look after the interests of workers. The “long ballot” — a plethora of elected offices that included the likes of assistant mine inspector and state printer — reflected a distrust of government.

Turning into a red state

It could be said that the Republican Party and its allies have spent the last 109 years scrubbing those Populist and Socialist influences from the constitution. From lifting a ban on “foreign” ownership of farmland to right-to-work to control of regulatory agencies, the GOP has, with increasing success, muted the anti-corporate tone of Oklahoma’s founding document.

The GOP did not fully capture state government until recent years, but it became competitive in statewide elections in the 1960s. Oklahoma has had at least one Republican U.S. senator since 1968, and two since 1994.

It became reliably red in presidential elections in 1980, when it went 61 percent for Ronald Reagan.

And, it controls the state Capitol the way Democrats once did.

“We are now in the second phase of the state’s political history,” Blackburn said.

Today, he said, rural populism has been replaced by an urban populism most prominent in the middle and upper middle class suburbs of Tulsa and Oklahoma City.

“The next (general) election will be interesting to me,” he said. “Our populist predisposition swings toward (Donald) Trump. His (rhetoric) will appeal to the populist streak in Oklahoma history.”