Indian Landlords and Socialist Votes

Abstract In the second decade of the twentieth century, Oklahoma hosted the largest state Socialist Party in the United States. The poor white farmers who formed its base hoped that their representatives would release them from local landlords, banks, and creditors. But these tenants and sharecroppers vented their grievances from inside a shattered landscape of recent and ongoing Indigenous dispossession. They could not entomb Native people entirely inside the past, because they confronted a great deal of Indian landownership. Oklahoma Socialists observed how politicians, lawyers, and businessmen grew fat on Indian resources and the deliberate pursuit of injury, fraud, and deception. But they evaded a direct attack on American colonial expansion and instead condemned its capitalist character. Capitalists, they argued, had first conquered the Indians, and now they had created an oppressed agricultural working class. In Oklahoma, radical economic dissent intersected with US imperial policy. Modern leftist politics helped justify and conceal the outcomes of conquest.