In its early years, Oklahoma was a “Solid South” Democratic state whose founding fathers like "Alfalfa Bill" Murray and Charles N. Haskell had disfranchised most of its black population via literacy tests and grandfather clauses,Ewing, Cortez Arthur Milton; An Introduction to the Government of Oklahoma (1939), p. 72. Published by Americanism Committee, American Legion, Department of Oklahoma the latter of which would be declared unconstitutional in Guinn v. United States.Fairclough, Adam; Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890-2000, p. 82 Partly owing to the absence of the poll taxes found in other Southern states due to the strength of populism amongst the state’s white settlers,Finkelman, Paul; African-Americans and the right to vote (Garland Publishing, 1992), pp. 418, 438 the state became a stronghold of the Socialist Party in the 1910s, especially in the southeast and the northwestern Plains.
