When we think about socialism in the United States, we tend to think of big Northern cities like New York. But in the early 1900s heyday of the Socialist Party of America, many of its most notable figures and strongest bases of support were rooted in the rural Midwest, Far West, and South.

Few states better showcase this agrarian socialism than Texas, where the agricultural worker played a pivotal part in the state Socialist Party, and a German immigrant family by the name of Meitzen — who fled their homeland after the failed 1848 revolution — formed part of the “radical glue,” historian Thomas Alter II writes, “that held the [farmer-labor] coalition together.” Otto Meitzen, his son E. O., and his grandson E. R. — as well as their spouses — forged a multigenerational radicalism in the Lone Star State; E.O.’s political activity stretched from the Greenback and Populist movements of the late 1800s all the way through the height of the Socialist Party in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Along with land reform and labor rights, these Texas Socialists promoted radical positions like women’s suffrage and support for the Mexican Revolution while bumping up against the nascent Jim Crow regime.

Jacobin contributor Yaseen Al-Sheikh sat down with Alter to discuss his recently released book, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas, and the forgotten tales of the Texas Socialist Party, which flourished until state-sponsored suppression came down upon them.