Why would a frontier state (at that time) give a socialist 16% of the vote? Because Teddy Roosevelt (Bull Moose) couldn't get on the ballot, so most of his supporters voted for Debs as a protest.
Not so; Debs took 8% there in 1908 (when he was polling just under 3% nationally) and Benson took 15% there in 1916. Note that the Socialists were strongest in the likes of Little Dixie rather than in more Republican areas.
The reason for the sharp Socialist decline in Oklahoma after the First World War is because their organisation was cynically destroyed by the state's political establishment during the war (of course this goes for the Socialist Party across the U.S in certain respects; but the repression was worse in Oklahoma than elsewhere).
I see.
Well maybe they did better in Little Dixie because they felt it was better to vote Socialist than Republican (the Yankee Party!!)
Possibly though you see the same sorts of voting trends in the rest of the Great Plains as well, with good areas of strength in both Kansas and Nebraska. Though I do not doubt that, especially for poor sharecroppers throughout the South, they were the logical alternative to the elitist Democrats and the Yankee Southern destroying black loving Republicans.
Mostly in Oklahoma though, and throughout the Great Plains and Texas, Socialist voters came out of the same radical agrarian movements that formed the basis of the People's (Populist) Party in the 1890's and fueled earlier campaigns by William Jennings Bryan.
