Organized in 1901, the Socialist Party of America claimed,118,000 members by 1912, with its greatest strength west of the Mississippi River, where the socialists' attacks on financial capital appealed to voters who had earlier supported the Populist Party. Oklahoma was the party's greatest stronghold. Eugene Victor Debs, a former railroad worker and union organizer, was the Socialist Party candidate for president in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920. In 1904 he received 400,000 votes, and between 1910 and 1912 hundreds of Socialist Party candi- dates were elected to local and state offices. The Socialist Party platform for 1912, which called for many of the same reforms that Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party championed, included the following statements:

The Socialist Party declares that the capitalist system has outgrown its historical function, and has become utterly incapable of meeting the problems now confronting society. We denounce this outgrown system as incompetent and...