Chapter 50
Oklahoma has scarcely any history beyond the memory of living man… yet Coronado left his trail across Oklahoma before the Pilgrim Fathers were so much as conceived…. A hundred years ago Oklahoma was turned into a vast concentration camp for Red Indians, because it was such worthless land. Fifty years ago, white people from every state swarmed in to dispossess the banished Indians, because it was such valuable land.
—George Milburn
THE story of Oklahoma is the story of Indians; the state is almost as singular and distinctive as Utah and for much the same reason, that it contains a unique minority. So far in this book we have scarcely mentioned Indians except in passing, because they are outside the main stream of contemporary political considerations. But now—and in the chapter to follow—the Indians, who were after all the original possessors of this large and handsome continent, deserve a friendly word.
The Indians are so extremely numerous and conspicuous in Oklahoma that their importance is, in fact, sometimes exaggerated. For instance the legend is that, to get anywhere at all in the state, you have to have some Indian blood. This isn’t quite true. One commonly hears that every Oklahoma governor has had a touch of Indian, but this isn’t true at all; no governors since statehood have had any Indian blood, though two—among them Alfalfa Bill Murray—married women who were part Indian. Oklahomans with Indian blood have indeed reached important positions in public and private life. Charlie Carter (one-half Choctaw) and W. W. Hastings (one-eighth Cherokee) were members of Congress for many years, and William G. Stigler (half Choctaw) is a valuable member of Congress now. The first American general to be killed after Pearl Harbor, Clarence E. Tinker, was an Osage, and a distinguished former senator, Robert L. Owen (though born in Virginia) is part Cherokee. Will Rogers, as everyone knows, was a Cherokee, and Charlie Curtis, vice president under Hoover, was a Kaw. Curtis, however, was not Oklahoma born. At least 20 per cent of the Oklahoma legislature today is Indian, and in some counties Indians hold at least half the elective offices.
When I arrived in Oklahoma City I wasn’t so naive as to expect to meet feathered chieftains with names like Chief Bacon Rind, muttering war cries and wielding tomahawks, or squaws carrying crimson papooses. But I didn’t quite anticipate what I did find. Perhaps I had been in the South too long. I was thinking in terms of an Indian “problem,” and I had the uncomfortable premonition that I would now have to confront another race almost totally excluded from social affairs, as well as politically downtrodden and economically submerged. Judge R. M. Rainey, one of the leading lawyers of the town, asked me to lunch to meet some Indians. After ten minutes the notion that there could be any discrimination against these Indians was laughable. The guests were all men of distinction who had risen high. Ben Dwight (three-fourths Choctaw), a former principal chief of the Choctaw nation, is ex-Governor Kerr’s principal secretary. Judge Reford Bond (one-eighth Chickasaw) is chairman of the Corporation Commission, state of Oklahoma, which has the important job of regulating all the oil companies, utilities, and the like. Earl Welch (one-sixteenth Chickasaw) is a supreme court justice and a former chief justice. Floyd Maytubby (three-eighths Chickasaw), a prominent insurance man, is governor of the Chickasaw nation.
Someone said at lunch, “My folks started marrying white people, until they damn well married all the Indian blood out!”
Indians vote in Oklahoma. They are citizens with theoretically full and equal rights. If there is any social disparagement, it is of the kind that would equally be exerted against whites on grounds of poverty or uncleanliness. They have been mercilessly exploited in land grabs, as we shall see, but there is no “minority” problem as such. The university has a large percentage of students with Indian blood, and there is no discernible trace of Indian “nationalism,” though most Indians are proud of being Indian.
There are two major classifications of Indians in Oklahoma. First, members of the Five Civilized Tribes—Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Seminole, and Creek. These are descendants of those who first settled “Indian Territory”; by and large they supply the leaders of the community. Second, the “blanket” Indians. These—like the Comanches, Pawnees, Pottawatomies, Apaches, Arapahoes—were nomads, not town dwellers, and they never reached anything like the development of the Five Civilized Tribes. The “blanket” Indians are so-called for the obvious reason that many still wear blankets. Most of what I discuss in this chapter has to do, not with the blanket Indians who are still a definitely inferior class though not officially discriminated against, but with the “civilized.”
The “blanket” Indians live mostly on reservations, and a “reservation” Indian—like those we have briefly alluded to in Florida, Wyoming, and the Dakotas—is simply one who occupies land held in trust for him by the federal government. Such Indians are, as semiwards of the people as a whole, not subject to taxation; this is the chief difference between “reservation” and “nonreservation” Indians in practice. The idea is prevalent that a reservation is a kind of barbed wire enclosure, and that Indians are incarcerated there against their will. This is of course not true. Any Indian on any reservation may move in and out as he chooses; any Indian may, by simply asking to be removed from the rolls, change his status and leave for good. Thousands of Indian boys have done so. They have moved into the towns all over the Wesl and have become drug clerks and mechanics and filling station helpers, indistinguishable from other citizens except for their darker skin. Many volunteered or were drafted and served honorably in World War II. Those Indians who still remain on reservations are, it is important to note, still hedged in and perplexed with some bothersome restrictions. For instance no one may legally sell liquor to an Indian nor can liquor be made on a reservation. Also property rights are restricted.
Approximately a third—128,000 out of 342,000—of all Indians in the United States live in Oklahoma. No fewer than thirty-five tribes are represented, and the gamut runs from men like those I met at lunch, for whom there is no Indian “problem” at all, to lazy old full-bloods (many full-bloods, I heard it said, are not an “extry-industrious people”), to the Osage oil millionaires, to tribesmen in miserable huts who have changed little since their horses were taken from them in the 1870’s, which meant that they could no longer raid.
The Five Civilized Tribes got to Oklahoma in this manner: It is not a story of which Americans should be proud. In fact it is a disgraceful story. The tribes lived originally in southeastern United States—Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama—and the Cherokees in particular, under their great leader Sequoyah, built flourishing communities. They were literate for the most part and Christianized. But greedy whites, in the expanding economy of Andrew Jackson’s day, usurped their land. The whites—assisted by the U. S. Army—simply grabbed it off, The Indians were expropriated and dispossessed without a shadow of legal right. A “treaty” was signed, known as the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, in 1832, whereby those expelled from their homes were in return promised land in what is now Oklahoma for “as long as the grass grows and the water runs.” Four thousand tribesmen out of sixteen thousand died in the Trail of Tears that followed, as the Army forcibly marched them west; even the twentieth century, which has known some ugly forced marches, has produced few episodes worse than this. Eventually the Five Tribes were “settled” in what came to be known as “Indian Territory,” that is, the eastern section of the Oklahoma of today. Here they set about patiently rebuilding their lost towns; the Choctaw “capital” was set up at Tuskahoma, the Chickasaw at Tishimingo, the Cherokee at Tahlequah. About a century after it was founded, Tuskahoma got into the news again. An Oklahoma congressman suggested in 1946 that, of all things, it should be the United Nations capital.
The Five Tribes were allowed to be called “nations,” and they did indeed retain a tribal autonomy, with their own written constitutions and courts of law. The Chickasaws called their chief a “governor,” and the other four had, and have, a “principal chief”; before statehood these were elected by the tribal councils, but now they are appointed by the president of the United States. All Five Tribes reached a fairly high level of development in Oklahoma; Alexis de Tocqueville remarks with wonder that the Cherokees had their own newspaper. They ran their ranches well and brought in white teachers; most of their children could read and write, while grownups in Arkansas, say, next door, hardly knew the English alphabet.
Meantime something known as Oklahoma Territory, in the western part of what is now the state, was similarly organized for the blanket and other tribes. And whereas whites were allowed to enter Indian Territory, but not to settle there, they were forbidden any entrance at all to Oklahoma Territory till 1889. What this meant of course was that whisky traders, gunmen and the like came in illegally and made mincemeat of the Indians; missionaries also entered—legally—and a few stray travelers got in, like Washington Irving. Then Oklahoma as a whole “was turned loose on ’em,” as I heard it put, after the great “run” of 1889. At the firing of a gun at noon on April 22, some twenty thousand white settlers were allowed to rush and stream over the frontier and stake out claims in what had been the Indian land. Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory remained quite different entities until 1907. The Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory had their own tribal government, as noted above; Oklahoma Territory was, on the other hand, organized by Congress in the regular manner. There was a strong movement to make Indian Territory a separate state, with the name Sequoyah, but it withered away, and the two segments coalesced to make the present state of Oklahoma in 1907, when it was admitted to the union.
If you talk to such an enlightened and provocative citizen as John Collier, for more than a decade the U. S. commissioner of Indian Affairs, you will hear details of what happened to the Indians during this time—not merely in Oklahoma, but elsewhere in the West. For instance the Indian population of California fell from roughly 120,000 in 1850 to 20,000 in 1880; a great many died, like the Polynesians, of simple heartbreak. In Oklahoma the territory “reserved” to the Five Tribes was progressively cut down, and the Indians were exploited with mercilessness and savor. This book is not the place to sketch the intricate story of tribal rolls, “severalty,” depredations upon land, cheap trickeries by white real estate men and lawyers. Nothing quite rivals it in American history except perhaps the marauding of the lumber interests in the Northwest—and trees are not, after all, human beings. The Indians were looted, ravished, and left to rot. The Indian Bureau became to all intents and purposes an anti-Indian Bureau. In the beginning the reason for this was mainly military. The Indians were considered to be a pest, and the sooner exterminated the better. This military policy, to destroy the Indian tribes as such, was passed over by the Army to the Department of the Interior, and became rationalized into a long-range attempt to “save” the Indians from their own “dark ways”; hence, anything that broke down Indian culture, that pulverized and atomized the structure of Indian life, was encouraged. Next, there came what Mr. Collier calls a “doctrinal curse,” namely that Indian affairs should be considered not on the national level, but locally, so that every congressman in an Indian area was free to play with what Indian booty he could acquire, if so inclined. The Indian Bureau, in order to get any appropriations at all, had to sell out the Indians. Also, since it was policy to liquidate the Indians, the bureau made no effort to save their agriculture; countless millions of tons of topsoil were washed into rivers like the Rio Grande.
All this changed after 1932. Mr. Ickes became secretary of the interior, John Collier became commissioner of Indian affairs, Mr. Roosevelt encouraged their ideas, the Soil Conservation Service lent a hand, and in 1934 Congress passed a law, the Indian Reorganization Act, that instituted new procedures and a new policy. This included assistance to Indian social and economic progress, protection of Indian culture, and in general an effort to give the Indians a kind of tribal autonomy and self-government.
The chief Indian grievances at present seem to be the following: In the Southwest, where the Indian has overgrazed his land, he may find it impossible to buy more; many Navajos for instance would like to leave their reservations and would be willing to pay taxes as landowners, but are not allowed to do so. Also reservation Indians cannot, by law, go to court to settle claims against the government; a special act of Congress is necessary—and of course practically impossible to put through—before an Indian can sue. Above these are political considerations. Many reservation Indians are dissatisfied with their equivocal status that makes them both “citizens” and wards. In five states at least—Colorado, Washington, Utah, and New Mexico and Arizona as we shall see—Indians are forbidden to vote, though such an interdict is said by most lawyers to be clearly unconstitutional.
I have said that there is no Indian “nationalism.” But a considerable self-consciousness and effervescence has come recently. For instance a Pueblo Council exists in New Mexico in which twenty-two tribes co-operate, and in 1944 a Council of American Indians was organized in Denver, representing a substantial number of tribes all over the country. Another point is that the Indians are no longer dying off. The trend toward extinction has been checked, and as of the moment at least the Indian birthrate—especially among Hopis, Apaches, Navajos, and Pueblos—is three or four times that of the white.
“Columbus, I am Here!”
But to return to Oklahoma and the Five Civilized Tribes. There are about 40,000 Cherokees today, 21,000 Choctaws, 12,000 Creeks, 6,000 Chickasaws, and 3,000 Seminoles. They resemble one another fairly closely, and get on well together. The Cherokees consider themselves the elite of the lot, and the Chickasaws and Choctaws are the richest; something like a billion and a half tons of coal is, for instance, believed to underlie their land and the potential income from this is, in theory, reserved to the tribe as a whole. Choctaws and Chickasaws were once the same tribe, and speak nearly an identical language, but Creek is quite different, and so is Cherokee. Creeks and Cherokees cannot understand Choctaw-Chickasaw. But Creeks and Seminoles can, as a rule, understand one another. There are also some religious differences. Seminoles, having been in Spanish-and French-occupied regions originally, were heavily proselytized by Roman Catholics, as were the Osages, but the others have tended to be Protestant. Most Creeks and Cherokees are Baptists or Methodists, most Chickasaws and Choctaws Presbyterian.
The name “Oklahoma” comes, incidentally, from two Choctaw words, Okla ( = people) and homma ( = red); it was first used in the Choctaw-Chickasaw Treaty of 1866.1 One town in the state has the engaging name of Chickiechockie, after two children of a Choctaw-Chickasaw marriage who were named Chickie and Chockie.
I asked if Indians and Negroes ever married; the subject is complex. Both Choctaws and Chickasaws owned slaves, and even brought some slaves with them on the Trail of Tears; they looked on Negroes—and some still do—almost exactly as a southern planter did. After emancipation the Choctaws “adopted” Negroes as “Choctaw freedmen,” and, in a separate classification, let them share in communal property. But to marry them was punishable by death under tribal law. This was true of the Cherokees also. Creeks, however, did intermarry, as did Seminoles. In this regard Oklahoma strikingly resembles the continent of South America. Just so did various Latin American countries acquire their distinctive characteristics by the degree of intermarriage between white, black, and Indian. The greater the admixture, the lower the standards of civilization is the rule. Look at Honduras, say, compared to Uruguay. In precise microcosm, the same differences exist today in parts of Oklahoma.
The problem of Indian landholding is inordinately technical. What remained of the Indian lands after a generation of looting was allocated to bona fide members of the tribe according to “head rights”; each Indian, regardless of age or sex, was given an “allotment,” depending on tribal membership. To receive an allotment an Indian had to be registered on the tribal rolls which, a kind of census, were finally closed in 1906; since that time, nobody has gotten in. I heard one Indian say, “I have two younger sisters who are not on the rolls,” i.e., who never got their allotment. Plenty of non-Indians around the turn of the century claimed Indian blood in order to get free land, and many whites married squaws to acquire their property.
A special case—very special—is that of the Osages, who are the richest community per capita on earth. These, members of a primitive blanket tribe, got the last and least desirable allotments of rocky non-fertile soil in the north of the state. Then oil, oil in unimaginable quantities, was discovered there. The total value of the Osage leases is estimated today at 280 million dollars. Long before this a perspicacious Indian agent had written subsurface rights into the tribal treaty, reserving all revenue to the tribe itself, en bloc, and so when oil was struck the returns were apportioned in more or less equal shares and practically all Osages got rich—at least on paper. But a great many were bilked and cheated out of what should have been their part of a common return by white lawyers and land agents who took advantage of their lack of education and business experience. They were played one against another, forced into expensive litigation, and hijacked to a turn.
The Indians in Oklahoma do not vote as a unit. But every white politician seeks to cater, naturally, to this considerable wedge of voters. One legend is that all members of the Five Civilized Tribes used to vote Republican, because they still resented having been squeezed out of their southern homes by Andy Jackson. But since the New Deal the Indian vote has been predominantly Democratic as a natural consequence of the Indian Reorganization Act.
I heard two Indian anecodotes in Oklahoma. One recounts that the first Indian GI to land in Italy in 1943 shouted to the beachhead, “Columbus, I am here!” The other records a brief colloquy between a stuffy New England lady and Will Rogers. She asked him if his people had come over on the Mayflower and he replied, “No, ma’am, but we met the boat.”
Facts, Figures, and Impressions
Oklahoma has always been wayward…. The regional tag to fit Oklahoma has not been made. Oklahoma is to sociology what Australia is to zoology. It is the place where the trials and errors of men, instead of nature, have been made only yesterday, and the results are as egregious as a duckbill or kangaroo. Oklahoma is full of manmade contradictions, perversities, and monstrosities.
—George Milburn
Oklahoma looks like a thickly hilted pistol pointing west, and it contains two invisible dividing lines; the first follows the old demarcation between Oklahoma Territory and Indian Territory. What was once the former, the area to the west, is wheat and farming country, rolling plains, with very little industrialization, few Negroes, few towns. What was once Indian Territory, with Tulsa as its focus, is watered, with mountains and streams, cattle, oil (which is also found in the west) and cotton. Oklahoma is thus a state containing one of the most remarkable of all American frontiers, the line where wheat and cotton meet.
Also you can divide Oklahoma north and south; the Rock Island Railroad cuts it in two. The extreme north—including the old Cherokee strip—is Kansan in flavor, and was mostly settled from the north; the south is a cross between deep South and Texas. The north is by and large Republican, the south Democratic. The state that Oklahoma most resembles is of course Texas, if only because it too does everything with color and individuality, but tell an Oklahoman that his state is a “dependency” of Texas and he will bite your eyes out.
Packed with brawn and muscle, Oklahoma is the first state in production of broom corn and grain sorghums, the second in winter wheat, and first or possibly second (depending on where you get your statistics) in zinc. It runs neck and neck with Louisiana for third place in petroleum, and it registers more than 10 per cent of all the Herefords in the country. It is full of pecans, carbon black, glass for milk bottles, and alabaster. It produces notable players of baseball (Carl Hubbell, Pepper Martin), and its basketball team (Oklahoma A & M) was the best in the nation in 1944. Also it produces brains, though—as in the South—most of the bright youngsters are sucked out by better opportunities, better jobs and money, into the East and elsewhere. It has developed some admirable politicians, like Mike Monroney, and a good many writers of talent like Marquis James, Lynn Riggs, George Milburn, and Stanley Vestal. Incidentally Oklahomans are still pretty sensitive about Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, and they are not too impressed by the unprecedented Broadway success Oklahoma!—maybe because, until it becomes a movie, a musical comedy in New York is not very tangible. Finally, in this cultural realm, the state’s university press is, along with Chapel Hill and Yale, one of the most enterprising and distinguished in the country.2
Tall tales come out of Oklahoma just as out of Texas; one favorite describes the “crowbar hole.” This is a hole through the wall that many houses have, designed to check the weather. You shove a crowbar through the hole; if it bends, the wind velocity outside is normal; if the bar breaks off, “it is better to stay in the house.”
Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Oil
Between the two chief cities, Oklahoma City and Tulsa, there are interesting differences, and the two are rivals in the pattern sketched in this book so often—like Minneapolis and St. Paul, San Francisco and Los Angeles, Dallas and Fort Worth. Oklahoma City is bigger (population 204,424 as against Tulsa’s 142,157), more sophisticated, more tranquil—though it has its own type of gustiness. Both cities rise sharp from the tawny plain, with a portcullis of skyscrapers, and seen from the air they are like checkerboards with brilliant alternating squares of green; Tulsa is more dramatic, more pictorial. Oklahoma City is not particularly jealous of Tulsa, regarding it somewhat as a great Dane may regard a noisy poodle, but Tulsa is apt to be jealous of Oklahoma City. Oklahoma City is one of the youngest in the country; it was created in a day—literally—on April 22, 1889, the day of the first great “run”; it has no Indian background. Tulsa, “oil capital of the world” as it calls itself, is a tough, get-rich-quick, heady town about as sensitive as corduroy. It was founded by the Creeks who named it for their former Alabama capital, Tallasi; its great boom began on June 25, 1901, when oil was struck. Yankee oilmen—mostly from Pennsylvania—poured in as the oil poured out. Most oil towns are likely to be reactionary, Houston for example; Tulsa is one of the most reactionary cities in the whole United States.
Also it is one of the most isolationist. In March, 1945, Lord Halifax, then the British ambassador, visited Oklahoma to take part in a coyote hunt. These are some of the words with which the Tulsa Tribune greeted him:
Your advance man, Lord, tells us you will condescend to dine with a selected 200 of us. Nice of you…. You stipulate that you want at least 20 percent to be laboring men. Doggone it, Lord, if you aren’t democratic. Twenty percent democratic.
When a good neighbor borrows a cup of sugar, he returns a cup of sugar. That is a little matter of nice behavior you British do not know. England never returned anything. A gentleman, sir, pays his debts. John Bull is not a gentleman. Can you teach him to be one? Your debt on this World War, sir, is beyond your own arithmetic comprehension … And you never expect to pay a dime of it …
You expect us Americans to go on and pay your bills. It is time your leisure class went to work and paid your honest debts…. We gave you farm implements that we needed for our own soil. You gave those implements to other peoples as your benevolent gift. You sold them and put the cash in your pocket. That, sir, was just plain treachery and DISHONESTY.
Tulsa is a great oil town, but nowhere in the United States, not even Los Angeles, does petroleum make such an impact on the visitor as in Oklahoma City. The derricks rise actually on the governor’s very lawn, and the wells slant under the basement of the capitol itself. The Encyclopaedia Britannica said of Oklahoma City in an edition printed not so long ago that the nearest oil field was thirty miles away; today, the town does its business directly on top of one. This field came in in 1928. It produced mad and fantastic scenes, as black oil gushed down the streets; previously the geologists had pronounced this to be a “red bed” area, in which oil was either absent or very difficult to reach. Another great field just twelve miles outside the city limits was discovered by a freak after the regular oil people had given it up. The steel derricks rise right out of the wheat and alfalfa now.
Oil leases are a tremendous business in Oklahoma. If the geologists think the prospects are good the oil companies will lease land long before any thought of actual drilling. The race for new properties is incessant. Once drilling begins and oil is produced the farmer who sold the lease gets one-eighth the proceeds as a royalty. Oil is, as we well know, fugacious; it is not like a lump of coal that will stay sitting; so if your neighbor drills, you have to drill too, or lose your oil. Except for this, the state would never have started drilling in the governor’s front yard; private owners near by were draining oil away. In an effort to reduce the fantastic evils implicit in this system, Oklahoma limits the production of wells to two hundred barrels each per day. It well remembers the terrible experiences of 1932 when the price of crude dropped to ten cents a barrel.3
Oklahoma City has two more distinctions of which it speaks proudly. It has the largest percentage of American-born white population of any city in the union; the foreign born scarcely exist. The other is that it is the first American city of consequence to ask every citizen, even proud ladies of southern descent, to submit to a test for venereal disease.
A potential danger in Oklahoma is that a prolonged drought might make another Dust Bowl. Wheat is way up, which means that more and more farmers are in 1946 being tempted to repeat the grisly mistake that followed World War I when, like their fellows in Texas, Montana, and elsewhere, they started plowing up range land for crops. Only three Oklahoma counties suffered in the great disaster of 1935, but these three were devastated. On a single day, I heard, fifty million tons of soil were blown away. People sat in Oklahoma City, with the sky invisible for three days in a row, holding dust masks over their faces and wet towels to protect their mouths at night, while the farms blew by.
Once More: Who Runs It?
In God we trusted,
In Kansas we busted;
Now let ’er rip
For the Cherokee strip.
No state has more explosive politics than Oklahoma, and its political behavior can be positively Balkanesque. Knock ’em, sock ’em, rock ’em is the rule. “In most places,” a friend told me, “you clean a dirty blanket with a vacuum cleaner; here we hang it on a line and beat it with a rock.” Not so long ago a celebrated outlaw and train robber, Al Jennings, got more than twenty thousand votes for governor. Out of a total of thirteen governors impeached in all American states since the foundation of the republic, two were Oklahoman, and Oklahoma has been a state for only forty years. Another governor was tried on criminal charges during his term of office, but acquitted. The state runs to the picturesque as well as the outrageous. Alfalfa Bill Murray, who was chairman of the constitutional convention that preceded state-hood in 1907 and governor from 1931 to 1935, had some detonating mannerisms. For instance an unsuspecting visitor to the gubernatorial offices, sitting down in a chair carefully placed three feet from Murray’s desk, might try to hitch himself closer, whereupon he would discover that the chair was nailed to the floor, and Murray would shout, “What the hell do you want?” Often the governor was barefoot, with his socks on the desk. When Murray was sworn in, his father, aged ninety-one, administered the oath. With his huge hawk nose, his neck shriveled into tendons around a protruding Adam’s apple, with dripping white mustaches over a mouth perpetually chewing tobacco, Murray looked—and for that matter still looks, since the old boy is still alive, aged seventy-six—like a cantankerous hick in a burlesque show. In 1932 he bolted the ticket to run for president against FDR. He is a brilliant student of Thucydides, Adam Smith, and Huey Long, and has just published his memoirs in a book 1,683 pages long that costs twenty-one dollars.
In 1942, Senator Josh Lee, a New Deal Democrat, was beaten for re-election. One of the complications attending the campaign was that two other Josh Lees, one a furniture dealer and the other a farmer, ran against him in the primary. We have noted similar tricks in Nevada. But Oklahoma outdoes all other states. One game is to liven up elections by persuading folk whose names are identical with those of celebrities, living or dead, to run. The state has had Daniel Boone, Oliver Cromwell, Mae West, Joe E. Brown, Brigham Young, and William Cullen Bryant on its ballots.4
Speaking generally the following groups all have something to do with running Oklahoma. I have not attempted to enumerate them in order of importance.
First, the Baptist church. A prominent labor man told me that never in his experience has he known a nonpolitical organization to wield such covert political power. Parts of Oklahoma are still deep in the Bible belt. Take the matter of prohibition. It is indeed the strangest of paradoxes that Oklahoma is, with Mississippi and Kansas, one of the three dry states in the union, considering its robust and bawdy character otherwise.
Second, the oil interests. Their influence is, as in Texas, mostly negative; they do not so much do things as keep things from being done. One Oklahoma congressman told me, “They can certainly raise a terrible lot of money to try and beat you.” The oil companies are divided between “majors” and independents, and sometimes they fight civil wars; for instance big-money oil vigorously opposed two recent men known as “oil governors”—Kerr and Marland—because neither would promise subservience to oil though they were oil men themselves. Most of the big companies operating in Oklahoma are absentee owned; this is a familiar pattern. Standard of New Jersey owns the Carter Oil Company and the Carter Pipe Line; Standard of Indiana owns the Stanolind Oil and Gas Company, the Stanolind Pipeline Co., and the Stanolind Crude Oil Purchasing Company; Standard of New York owns the Magnolia Oil Company, and Standard of Ohio, a more recent arrival, owns Sohio. Pure Oil is also important in the state, as are Sun Oil (Pew interests, Pennsylvania), and Gulf (Mellon). The chief independent is Phillips. Some oil companies are, it is interesting to note, retreating out of Oklahoma into Texas, because the Texas laws are more liberal. Also some rich Oklahomans moved south to Dallas, say, to take advantage of the Texas community property law.
Interestingly enough Oklahoma, on achieving statehood, warily sought to avoid dominance by the big corporations. For instance a clause in the actual constitution forbids legislators to ride on free passes. So far as I know this is the only case in the country where such a measure was taken to discourage the railway lobbies.
Third, as in California, the old folks. Oklahoma has a quite liberal Old Age Assistance Law, and some eighty thousand people are on the rolls, getting an average of thirty-four dollars per month each. Of every thousand Oklahomans of sixty-five or older, 496 are eligible to assistance benefits, as against a national ratio of 210. This means, among other things, that the state pays steep taxes, for instance 5½¢ per gallon on gasoline, and 5¢ per package of cigarettes.
Fourth—as in all western states—the education lobby. Oklahoma is very proud of its school record, and it operates more institutions of learning in proportion to population than any other state. Since the state contributes about half the total school budget, every local school district is up to its eyes in politics. The teachers, too, are sophisticated politically and highly vocal.5
Fifth—as in all southern states—the “County Rings.’’ These are built around the seventy-seven county commissioners who have substantial public sums to administer since revenues from automobile licenses and the gasoline tax are divided equally between state and counties.
Other factors in Oklahoma are, on the whole, minor. Take the newspapers. The Chicago Tribune-like papers in Tulsa were venomously anti-Roosevelt but FDR carried the state every time he ran. The Oklahoma City papers are more respectable, and E. K. Gaylord, editor of both the Times and the Daily Oklahoman, is the nearest thing to a boss the city has. Another point is that the small county papers, as apart from big urban organs, have a considerable influence; this is a spreading out of a characteristic very common in the Middle West. What the county press represents is of course the voice of the farmer and, despite petroleum, agriculture is still Oklahoma’s biggest industry.
As to labor, it was very weak until 1944, when the AF of L Teamsters, the Farmers Union, the Railway Brotherhoods, the General Welfare Association (representing the old age pensionnaires) and the CIO worked together—more or less—under a Unity Council. In 1945, after three tries, the CIO won an election at the Douglas plant which was making C-47’s for the army, twelve miles out of Oklahoma City, and the CIO has organized one of the two big packing plants in the city. As to Negroes, the most interesting personality is Roscoe Dungee, editor of the Black Dispatch; he is one of the outstanding Negro journalists in the country. There is no poll tax in the state, but Jim Crowism and segregation are the rule. A Presbyterian preacher in the university town of Norman recently invited Negroes into his church—and the community did not split asunder as predicted.
Oklahoma votes Democratic in a ratio of about three to one, and so the primaries are usually decisive; every governor since statehood has been a Democrat. But twice (Harding, 1920; Hoover, 1928) it voted for a Republican president. To conclude, what really runs Oklahoma is what runs so many other states, the ordinary middle-class voter with all his lamentable defects and limitations on the one side, and on the other his positive qualities like good will and down-to-the-ground common sense.
Bob Kerr and Others
The governor of Oklahoma from 1943 to 1947, Robert S. Kerr, is a large and lively man six feet four in height and weighing about 275 pounds, yet full of agility and bounce. Kerr was the keynoter at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1944; until then he was little known outside Oklahoma. His career is archetypically “American,” in its emphasis on the frontier virtues of diligence and enterprise, its promise of utterly boundless opportunity to the young and bright in heart, and its rewards both in material wealth and a maturing sense of social responsibility.
Kerr is a rich man; he is also, though a politician, an honest liberal. He was president for many years of the Midcontinent Oil and Gas Association, and had never run for office until he became governor. He writes a weekly column—still—for a group of country newspapers and without fail each Sunday morning teaches Sunday school to a large and enthusiastic class. He is a devout Baptist, but his wife—this is a mildly nontypical touch—is a Christian Scientist. Their churches face one another across the street.6
Kerr is the first Oklahoma-born governor. His father was a pioneer farmer who told him as a boy that he could be governor some day, if only he worked hard enough. This, a stock story related of almost all American governors, is in Kerr’s case quite true. Father Kerr became a county clerk, and then went broke. Young Bob decided then and there never to let such a catastrophe happen to him, and he began making money at all sorts of jobs.
Kerr was one of the few governors who did real homework on the questionnaire I sent him; he sent copies to six or seven officials and friends in various fields, and carefully worked over documents they each prepared. What he probably believes in most is the political infallibility of the common man; at the same time he hopes of course that the common man will be sensible enough to vote right, viz., for him.
His style can be somewhat orotund. Here is the peroration of his message to the legislature in 1943:
The signal fires of the Plains Indians and the campfires of our fore-bears have long since ceased to send their flashing messages across the plain or mark the spot of the evening bivouac, but in the hearts of their sons and daughters there burns a brighter glow and a fiercer flame. It is our determination to climb ever upward along the pathway of human progress that leads to the stars…. We shall not now, in the midst of the storm whose thunders roll around this world, be unworthy of their courage…. They had the faith to go up and possess the land. With the mantle of their spirit upon our shoulders, let us march on into a brighter and more glorious dawn!
One of Oklahoma’s senators is a tory Republican, E. H. (Ed) Moore of Tulsa, the other is a tory Democrat, Elmer Thomas. Moore, an extremely wealthy oil man, was once a Democrat himself; in fact he was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1940. Then he flirted with the Willkieites, deserted Willkie because he was too liberal, and joined the Republican party. He is fanatically reactionary. In the New Republic charts issued in September, 1946, he, Hawkes of New Jersey, and Bushfield of South Dakota are the only three senators out of 96 with 100 percent negative voting records. (In the previous chart eight senators, as we noted in connection with Utah above, had this distinction.) Elmer Thomas is not quite so virulent a New Deal hater. On May 6,1946, Drew Pearson charged him—also Bankhead of Alabama—with trading surreptitiously on the cotton market while publicly attacking the OPA price ceilings on cotton.
Politics takes, as we know, some strange twists and turnings in the United States. Consider the case of Jedediah Johnson, Democratic congressman from Oklahoma for twenty years. A persistent thorn in the flesh of the Department of the Interior, he tore away endlessly at Ickes and his appropriations. The Democratic high command offered him a life job as a judge in the customs court in New York. But Johnson himself, it seems, never knew of the offer until his name went to the Senate for confirmation. This was in March, 1945, but he was still sitting in the House in August. Finally he declined the judgeship. He told his constituents that he had given up this splendid offer in order to be able to continue serving them. The judgeship then went to a Negro, Irvin C. Mollison. Anti-Negro folk in Oklahoma decided that if the job was something a colored man could fill it couldn’t be much of a job, and in the Congressional primaries of 1946 Johnson was soundly beaten—of course for other reasons too—and now has no public post at all. The implications of this story are various in the extreme; the United States can be a crazy country, and often is.
Mr. Ickes doughtily paid his respects to Mr. Johnson in several columns in the New York Post in September, 1946, after some mixed sniping:
On one occasion, Congressman Johnson solicited a job in Interior for James V. McClintic of Oklahoma, who had been defeated for, re-election to Congress. Mr. McClintic, upon being interviewed, said that he had been a lawyer but that he did not feel able to work at a law job. He had no civil service status and, in any event, could not qualify for a job higher than that of clerk. So the great “economizer,” Congressman Johnson, obligingly made provision in the Interior budget for a position paying $6,000, and exempt from the classified service. Thus I found myself with an employee on my personal staff of whose services I could really make no use….
When I was Public Works Administrator Congressman Jed Johnson wished upon me his brother, Joshua W. Johnson, as manager of a housing project at Enid, Oklahoma. In October of 1942 he asked me to give a job to another brother, Carroll, and he also sought a place for Eva L. Johnson, the wife of Carroll. The Congressman wrote to the Indian Office about both his brother and sister-in-law, suggesting that they “might possibly be interested in a combination job for a while if you have something that would pay around $3,000 for him and a teaching job or matron of a dormitory for her.”
We were not able to place Brother Carroll or his wife in either agency. We found that his experience had been in grocery stores as an inspector of fruits and vegetables. The influential Jed Johnson had previously gotten him a job to direct landscape work in the Soil Conservation Service, he having passed the civil service test for Rural Letter Carrier in 1941.
This could all be written off as trivial, except that it points a lesson sometimes forgotten or ignored—that a great many Congressmen indeed go in for nepotism, and that a professional political career depends very often on the patronage—jobs—it can bestow.
By all odds the best and most useful man-of-politics Oklahoma has is A. S. Mike Monroney, who in 1946 won the first Collier’s award for distinguished public service in Congress, along with Vandenberg of Michigan. Monroney is an original. In one of his campaigns he sent picket lines to football games, with placards announcing MIKE MONRONEY—UNFAIR TO ORGANIZED POLITICIANS. But I am breaking my rule about keeping Congressmen out of this volume and I must save consideration of Monroney for another place.
Our long march through the United States is nearly done. Let us look now at the two states remaining, the desert states of the great Southwest.
1 Oklahoma Place Names, by Charles N. Gould. University of Oklahoma Press, p. 106.
2 Oklahoma was incidentally the first state to develop aviation among farmers on a serious scale through the Flying Farmers organization, and it is the only one to have a kind of equivalent of the Passion Play at Oberammergau; this is the Good Friday pageant held every year at Lawton.
3 A splendid account of the Oklahoma City field is “Oil in the Back Yard,” by Lillian Fryer Rainey, Atlantic Monthly, April, 1938.879
4 Oklahoma, in the American Guide Series, p. 35.881
5 Oklahoma has had some choice textbook scandals, incidentally. Two officials were recently sent to the penitentiary for accepting bribes of sixty thousand dollars “for influencing textbook adoptions.” Cf. Public Men In and Out 0} Office, ed. by, T. L. Salter, p. 424.
6 In one room of the gubernatorial mansion incidentally a complete collection of the books published by the University of Oklahoma Press is nicely displayed. In another a measuring device is set against the wall, whereby the advancing height of the four strapping Kerr children can be taped.