Why was Oklahoma, of all places, more hospitable to socialism than any other state in America? In this provocative book, Jim Bissett chronicles the rise and fall of the Socialist Party of Oklahoma during the first two decades of the twentieth century, when socialism in the United States enjoyed its golden age. To explain socialism’s popularity in Oklahoma, Bissett looks back to the state’s strong tradition of agrarian reform. Drawing most of its support from working farmers, the Socialist Party of Oklahoma was rooted in such well-established organizations as the Farmers Alliance and the Indiahoma Farmers’ Union. And to broaden its appeal, the Party borrowed from the ideology both of the American Revolution and of Christianity. By making Marxism speak in American terms, the author argues, Party activists counteracted the prevailing notion that socialism was illegitimate or un-American.

"Reflecting on the seminal work of Seymour Martin Lipset, Agrarian Socialism: The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan - A Study in Political Sociology, academics and political practitioners revisit these questions and consider whether the reputation of the best-known social science text on Saskatchewan still holds. As the political practitioners make clear, the geographic and constitutional boundaries may remain as they were, but the economic and cultural boundaries that once defined provinces have manifestly altered if not disappeared as a result of technological change and global perspective."--BOOK JACKET.

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When Sunflowers Bloomed Red reveals the origins of agrarian radicalism in the late nineteenth-century United States. Great Plains radicals, particularly in Kansas, influenced the ideological principles of the Populist movement, the U.S. labor movement, American socialism, American syndicalism, and American communism into the mid-twentieth century. Known as the American Radical Tradition, members of the Greenback Labor Party and the Knights of Labor joined with Prohibitionists, agrarian Democrats, and progressive Republicans to form the Great Plains Populist Party (later the People’s Party) in the 1890s. The Populists called for the expansion of the money supply through the free coinage of silver, federal ownership of the means of communication and transportation, the elimination of private banks, universal suffrage, and the direct election of U.S. senators. They also were the first political party to advocate for familiar features of modern life, such as the eight-hour workday for agrarian and industrial laborers, a graduated income tax system, and a federal reserve system to manage the nation’s money supply. When the People’s Party lost the hotly contested election of 1896, members of the party dissolved into socialist and other left-wing parties and often joined efforts with the national Progressive movement. When Sunflowers Bloomed Red offers readers entry into the Kansas radical tradition and shows how the Great Plains agrarian movement influenced and transformed politics and culture in the twentieth century and beyond.

"The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation government in Saskatchewan, which was elected in 1944, remains the only government with avowed socialist goals to have come to power in Canada or the United States. In 1949, Seymour Martin Lipset wrote Agrarian Socialism, which has since become a classic, a study of the social background that enabled the movement to succeed in the region that it did. The CCF government, however, remained in power for twenty years. So this new Anchor edition contains not only a new introduction by the author, evaluating his earlier research in terms of later developments, but five new chapters by other sociologists who, taking off from the findings in Agrarian Socialism, studied later developments in Saskatchewan..." -- Back cover.