Harrison George on the familiar formula by which U.S. fascism feeds and operates, looking at Tulsa, Oklahoma where the klan of the 1920s rose in a state that a decade before had been a hotbed of rural radicalism and agrarian socialism.

‘Dirty Politics and Village Ignorance in Oklahoma Shows Roots of American Fascism’ by Harrison George from The Worker. Vol. 4 No. 293. September 22, 1923.

TULSA, Okla. Out of the witch’s cauldron of political intrigue, religious and racial fanaticism, back-country ignorance and a nation-wide grafting scheme to profit on these dark cross-currents of stupidity and crime, the fact arises that, whether inside or outside the Ku Klux Klan, the humble workers and country folk have been the victims, both of the klan and the dishonest politicians supposed to be “prosecuting” it.

While the Communist workers of this country, organized in the Workers Party, are hounded by William J. Burns and the unspeakable Daugherty of Morse “deal” fame; prosecuted under the “criminal syndicalism” laws of various states, which laws are allegedly aimed at forbidding just such violence, force, beatings and lynchings as are the nightly doings of the KKK, the Klan leaders go boldly about the country gathering in their graft and inciting their countless dupes to vandalage and murder.

With Tulsa under martial law by order of Governor Walton, who, having betrayed and lost the support of the radicals, now evidently seeks to force support out of the Klan as a price for withdrawal from the “occupied zone”–after the manner of imperialist France–and while a local “cyclops” of the Klan who pays himself $5,000 a year walks the streets and “dickers” with the governor’s agents, three laborers whom this “cyclops” incited to kidnap and whip an old German farmer for the awful crime of “tearing up his bible,” are the only ones the powerful arm of the law could find to convict of lawlessness and send to the Oklahoma penitentiary.

Since the open betrayal of the radical farmer-labor forces which elected him, and since the stirring attack on the nest of yellow-socialists and political fakers made by an old time revolutionary socialist, Stanley J. Clark, upon Governor Walton, Oscar Ameringer. Luther Langston, Pat Nagle, Sheldon and other political crooks in control of Oklahoma politics, the governor has felt it supremely necessary to get the support of the KKK. And to have something to trade he clamped down martial law on Tulsa, interfering with the Klan’s evening pastime of flogging men, and women as well, in a large field where hundreds gathered to watch the sport with all the sadistic pleasure of a Spanish bull fight.

But those who are beaten, who were always common folks, poor people,–workers and small farmers without influence, and the bulk of the mob who were also of the type of village ignoramuses, witch-burning puritans and Henry Dubbs among the exploited classes, are both victimized by the KKK, which functions as the Chamber of Commerce on the night shift. Then when the “law” swoops down the poor dupes among the workers are the ones to go to the penitentiary while the Kleagles, Cyclops and so on, continue to live in safety and luxury while trading political favors for official protection…

Oklahoma is outside the currents of communist ideology that are sweeping the more populated and cosmopolitan centers, but the communist can see in the Oklahoma situations all the typical elements which make the soil and feed the roots of the most terrible of menaces to organized labor–Fascism. Unless the sweeping sword of communist propaganda cuts thru the confusion and ignorance of workers and farmers, not only of Oklahoma but of the whole agrarian area of the United States, Fascism may blossom under the wing of the KKK in the period of depression and discontent that seems soon to come.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/theworker/v4n293-sep-22-1923-Worker.pdf