NOW THAT THE Mirror’s Veterans’ Pictorial History book is in production, with Memorial Day the intended publication date, I’m reminded that Gilmer and Upshur County exert a strong hold on their residets — those who have moved away as well as those who remain here.

The book, (still available at the pre-publication price; see ad in this edition), contains hundreds photos of veterans from every armed conflict from the Civil War to the recent operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So many soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines — some of them women — answered their country’s call over this past century and a half. Not all of them heard shots fired in anger but many did. And all gave worthy servuce in myriad ways.

WORLD WAR II marked a turning point in Upshur County demographics. The county was organized in 1848 and there are families here today who can trace their roots back to pre-Civil War times. Many others arrived in the migration from the devastated states of the former Confederacy in the 1870s.

By the time the 20th century dawned this had become a cotton-based economy that is the subject of an interesting recent book by Kyle G. Wilkinson: Yeomen, Sharecroppers and Socialists: Plain Folk Protest in Texas, 1870-1914, published by the Texas A&M University Press.

THE AUTHOR tells how political protest arose in the wake of economic changes. As immigration increased land prices rose and it became harder and harder for tenant farmers to buy their own land.

The yeoman farmers, or “plain folk,” as historians call them, “stubbornly held to a set of values that emphasized family, work, and communnity interdependence,” Wilkinson wrote.

Both tenants and small farm owners spent similar amounts of time behind the plow and women of their families “toiled in meal preparation and homemaking in the most literal and laborious sense, and most spent a good portion of their time and energy int the fields.”

Both groups worried about rain or its lack, temperature, soil, interest rates and cotton market prices, he related.

BUT THE CHANGING economy placed a strain on the ties that bound them. In the years leading up to World War I there was no more open frontier West for the hard-pressed to escape to.

Thus the stage was set for political protest that gave the Socialist Party of America a brief foothold in rural East Texas.

Gilmer Mirror files carry lengthy reports of a Socialist rally at Pritchett in 1916. The speaker was Kate O’Hare, a writer, magazine publisher and speaker who was crossing the Great Plains states and lecturing as far away as Great Britain, Canada, and Mexico, a role in which she was called one of the socialist cause’s most effective proselytizers.

Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate for president that year, got 6 percent of the vote in Northeast Texas as a whole but rose to 20 percent in Morris County.

USING HUNT County as an example in the presidential election of 1912, Wilkinson reported that the rural areas around Greenville gave the Socialist Party 16 percent of the vote, Rains and Van Zandt Counties saw the Socialist Debs reap 30 and 29 percent respectively.

Texas Socialists met in Waco in 1912 and adopted a party platform that called capitalism “incompetent and corrupt” and the source of “unspeakable misery and suffering” to the working class, Wilkinson wrote.

Though the dominance of the Democratic Party at that time was not really threatened, the party fought back.

The Socialists could be depicted as being anti-prohibition, atheistic, in favor of women’s suffrage, and less than dedicated to white supremacy. When it came to cultural issues, the Democrats had a lock.

WORLD WAR I saw many Upshur County men, like other Texans, joining their comrades “over there.” The popular song wondered “how you gonna keep ‘em, down on the farm, after they’ve seen Par-eee?” But the farm was where most Upshur County residents lived and worked through the 1920s. And the year’s economy depended on the cotton crop.

With the 1930s came the great East Texas Oil Boom, followed by World War II, and change accelerated. From the end of the war until today, a stream of migration into the county has sometimes ebbed but mostly flowed.

It’s still possible to tell a newcomer, as one was told on her arrival here a few years ago, “be careful what you say about anybody, because people who have lived here a long time have kinfolks everywhere.”

But even that isn’t as true as it used to be.

And you no longer have Socialists on the ballot — unless, of course, you accept the far right’s definition of Democrats as being Socialists under the skin, or even, worst case scenario, secret Communists.

sgreene@tatertv.com