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david (praire-type)
@redconversation.bsky.social
product of the union between a horse trader's daughter and a horse assessor’s son. eco-activist. community organizer. direct aid deliverer. living up to my namesake's legacy of great depression-style eco-activism and crime
177 followers310 following1.8k posts

I don't know how to totally explain it yet but it's all throughout the territory, waiting in secret so long that it has likely forgotten what it is, since the first Red Scare.

an digitized pdf archive screenshot showing an article titled "The Socialist Party of Oklahoma", originally published in February 1915. Highlighted in the text is that, at the time, an statement that there were 180,000 mortgaged and tenant farmers at the time. A sentence after that reading "The conditions under which the cotton farmers exist constitution a condition and not a theory." Another sentence is highlighted later in the article. "The system of private ownership of things which the collectivity must use has brought about the same results in Oklahoma as it has in the remainder of the world."
From "The Bolsheviks and War" by Sam Marcy, published 1985.

"one very significant and dramatic struggle, really an armed rebellion, took place in the heart of Oklahoma.

The Green Corn Rebellion of August 1917 was a genuine working class attempt at an anti-war insurrection in what had formerly been called the Indian Territory of Oklahoma. It had in its ranks mostly poor tenant farmers, dispossessed people who had been forced off their land, and former railroad workers who had lost their jobs when the railroad strike led by Debs was broken in the 1890s. Among the participants were many Black people as well as Native people from the Seminole nation.

The rebellion was organized by the Working Class Union, the left wing of the Socialist movement in Oklahoma and Arkansas. It had a strong affinity if not direct ties to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a syndicalist union movement which also opposed the war and was a vigorous part of the socialist movement."
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There's so many people who won't use the word, don't even really know what it really means, but their beliefs and works and the reasons they give for their disaffection with the government and what they say its duties ought be, still describe the regional socialist politics of early Oklahoma.

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david (praire-type)
@redconversation.bsky.social
product of the union between a horse trader's daughter and a horse assessor’s son. eco-activist. community organizer. direct aid deliverer. living up to my namesake's legacy of great depression-style eco-activism and crime
177 followers310 following1.8k posts