THE record of the first fifteen years of statehood disappointed those who thought that they were establishing truly democratic government in 1907. In spite of Oklahomans’ persistent idealistic belief in man’s goodness, old injustices remained. From the first, the combination of an unwieldy constitution and an exploitative political system rooted in the frontier ethic of grab-and-run shaped the merry-go-round quality of Sooner party politics and state government.
The basic constitutional provision forbidding the governor and other elected officials from succeeding themselves was designed to prevent the courthouse gangs so familiar in American political history. In practice, it promoted a spoils system. Ambitious men learned to exchange offices and support each other’s campaigns. “Swapping keys,” as the practice was called, gave the state some honest and experienced administrators, but it also left a large number of corrupt or incompetent officials undisturbed.
The number of candidates the system generated thwarted the progressive idea that elected rather than appointed officials best represented the voters’ wishes. Confronted with a bedsheet ballot, most people voted “by guess or by God,” ignorant of the candidates’ abilities. In the 1930s, numerous candidates with famous names compounded the problem of voter recognition. In 1932 a public school teacher from Moore named Will Rogers capitalized on his namesake’s popularity and won election to Congress. Illustrious names appeared regularly on Oklahoma ballots after that. Mae West, a telephone switchboard operator from Oklahoma City, received more than 65,000 votes for Commissioner of Charities and Corrections in 1938. Oliver Cromwell, Daniel Boone, Brigham Young, Joe E. Brown, and Patrick Henry vied for other offices.
The cynical held that anyone who ran for office was probably a scoundrel, anyway; voting him in and then driving him out of office might warn others of like mind. Incessant bickering over patronage within state government and pressures from without prevented many conscientious officials from doing their jobs. Oklahomans were not unique in their disenchantment with politics after World War I, but wide swings of public mood made any real political stability difficult.
Just as national attention focused on the president, so local voters looked to the governor for leadership. After the near-civil war of the Walton episode in the 1920s, Oklahomans were ready for the respite of Martin E. Trapp’s interim administration. Lieutenant governor under three different chief executives, Trapp was the epitome of the professional politician. An able administrator, accustomed to working with a touchy legislature, he provided peaceful leadership. It seemed ironic that more or less by chance the state had acquired an able man as governor during a critical period of transition.
To many, it looked as if the querulous politics of the statehood era were over. And as the 1926 election approached, many Democrats hoped that Trapp could be a candidate, since, technically, he had thus far served only as “acting governor.” Popular with the voters and acceptable to the faction-ridden Democratic party, Trapp probably would have won election. But the state supreme court upheld the constitutional provision of one term per governor, and the prospect of a stable administration faded.
Henry S. Johnston, a frail, bookish, country lawyer succeeded Trapp when the hue and cry of electioneering abated. A prohibitionist, veteran of the constitutional convention, and first president pro tempore of the state senate, Johnston posed as a founding father and an Old Testament prophet. His moralistic speeches were somewhat attractive to an electorate weary of biting personalism.
Soon after his inauguration, however, it became clear that Johnston had as many old-time faults as he had old-time virtues. Intolerant of opponents, he seemed blind to weak friends. He ignored party leaders and legislators in favor of a strange coterie of private advisers. He procrastinated in making decisions and spent hours meditating over Rosicrucian philosophy or consulting with his private astrologer. On one occasion, he told a startled press conference that he chose the specific hour to sign a bill because of favorable zodiac signs. He also offended old-fashioned callers in appointing Mrs. Mayme Hammonds his personal secretary. Her prim screening of Johnston’s visitors offended many sensibilities. Soon there were rumors of another “Mrs. Woodrow Wilson,” then the inevitable charges that the governor was neglecting his duties.
Despite these personal and personnel matters, Johnston might have avoided a break with the legislature had he not tampered with highway department patronage and become embroiled in a controversy over the merits of asphalt versus cement for paving state roads. But Johnston, like Walton, seemed out of touch with political reality, almost bent on destruction. The growing revolt among legislators might have simmered without exploding, except for the 1928 presidential election. President Calvin Coolidge was never popular among Sooners. The Democrats had recaptured the United States Senate seat lost in the Republican landslide of 1920 and were entrenched on the state level. Yet, overnight, the nomination of Al Smith changed everything. Hundreds of state and local Democratic candidates were allied now with a cocky city slicker who was wet—and a Catholic, to boot.
Johnston the procrastinator acted with uncharacteristic decisiveness. He announced that while he personally disliked Smith, as titular head of the Democratic party in Oklahoma, he would actively support the national ticket. As a militant dry, a Protestant, and a Klan sympathizer, Johnston was talking when he should have been meditating.
Smith did not help matters. In Oklahoma City, he bitterly denounced former Senator Robert Owen, leader of the Democratic insurgents who would not support the national ticket. The New Yorker held that Owen, who charged that wicked Tammany Hall was subverting the Democratic party, had avidly sought the Hall’s support in his presidential bid of 1920. Smith blasted the KKK, the Anti-Saloon League, and religious bigotry. When Johnston tried to repair some of the damage, arguing that “prohibition is not an issue in this campaign,” he only inflamed the insurgents further.1
The state GOP barely stirred during the fall campaign, confident that anti-Smith Democrats would push Herbert Hoover over the top. Yet even they underestimated the effects of rum and Romanism on the rebellion. Hoover carried all but eight of Oklahoma’s seventy-seven counties, and those were in the Democratic stronghold of Little Dixie. Many Democrats rationalized their bolt as antiliquor rather than pro-Republican. To everyone’s surprise, Republican candidates were elected to nearly every seat in Oklahoma’s lower house and made substantial inroads into the state senate, while capturing several state offices and three seats in Congress.
Yet, despite Hoover’s decisive victory, to which thousands of rebellious Democrats contributed, the local party leaders blamed Johnston for devastating losses at home. Impeaching him was the first order of business when the legislature convened in 1929. After six weeks of testimony, by turns spectacular and pathetic, the Oklahoma Senate finally convicted him of general incompetence.
The constitutional validity of these grounds for impeachment were debated long after Johnston left office. But many thoughtful Oklahomans were ashamed of the embarrassing national publicity the trial engendered. Johnston seemed as competent when impeached as when elected. William H. Murray typically remained true to his grass-roots populism and offered the hapless Johnston a certain sympathy. “We must remember that the people have a right to elect a fool,” the Sage of Tishomingo noted, “and the best way to cure them of that habit is to let him stay in office.”2
Johnston’s impeachment and the term of his successor, W. J. Holloway, finally signaled the decline of Oklahoma’s fascination with impeachment as a solution to party ills. The KKK was also in decline, and the public served notice that it expected more from the political system than personal feuds. Uncertain economic conditions, sharpened after the stock market crash of 1929, foretold the onset of a new kind of political action. Government must now face a new set of challenges involving public finance and benefits.
Movement toward any new style or purpose in state politics was neither easy nor smooth. As the 1930 elections approached, the effect of the national depression settled on Oklahoma. Farmers who had experienced price slumps, surpluses, and high mortgage rates since the end of World War I now saw natural disaster developing. Drought threatened to destroy not only their shrunken income, but also the soil itself. In the wake of financial collapse after 1929, other sectors of the state economy began to suffer in what seemed a general disaster. Industrial activity slowed, mines closed, oil prices plummeted. Oklahomans continued to believe that hard work and expansion would overcome any temporary handicaps. They were first bewildered, then frightened, as nothing seemed to offset the deepening crisis. Unable to understand what was happening, Sooners, like most other Americans, sought answers in political leadership.
In the spring of 1930, before the GOP was identified with the depression, it seemed that Republicans might consolidate their 1928 gains into a viable state party and elect a governor. After a decade of impeachments, Klan violence, and fratricidal politics, the Democrats were disintegrating. Almost every Democratic leader was tainted with scandal or identified with disorder. The Republican party had always remained associated with respectability and order. Its time now seemed at hand in Oklahoma.
The prospects of Republican resurgence foundered on the unpredicted depression, and the even more unlikely figure that hard times revived, William H. Murray. Alfalfa Bill was the only significant Democrat to escape the frays that divided the party.
A prominent figure since before Oklahoma attained statehood, Murray always desired to govern the state that he had helped to create. Logically, he should have been the first governor, but his loyalty to Charles Haskell caused him to wait. And by the end of the first legislative session in 1908, Oklahoma House Speaker Murray’s highhanded tactics had generated widespread animosity among politicians. He served two terms in Congress, from 1913 to 1917. Then, as Oklahoma matured and her voters grew more sophisticated, Alfalfa Bill became a reminder of a vulgar frontier past. Careless of his appearance, a man who strained coffee through a wad of tobacco and a scraggly mustache and vilified enemies in purple prose, he remained a familiar figure in state affairs. Yet he had never won over “the best people,” even while remaining attractive to voters in the countryside and small towns. Many a denizen of the hitching post and cow lot would vote for Murray, no matter how much the state changed. And Murray’s dogged determination seemed a nice balance of acceptable ambition and genuine concern for the downtrodden. “I have never been over-elated by success,” he claimed, “nor unduly depressed by defeat.”3 But losing a second try for the gubernatorial nomination in 1918 left him exhausted and apparently embittered.
Denied the chance to govern the state he loved so well, Murray became restless. He sensed at some level that the rural values he revered were disappearing. Unable to accept an industrialized world, he decided to start again elsewhere. From 1924 to 1929, Murray tried to establish a Utopian agrarian colony in Bolivia.
While Murray was still in South America, Oklahoma’s rural press began calling for his return. By 1929, the Bolivian colony was clearly a failure. Few families were willing to risk that country’s isolation, chaotic politics, and hardships. The prospect of some new success in Oklahoma beckoned the restless Murray home. The family returned in August 1929, and within a few weeks the Sage of Tishomingo was touring the state. Under the guise of lecturing about Bolivia, Murray was testing the political waters. There were reunions. Veterans of the constitutional convention and the first legislature gathered to praise their old leader. Rural papers reported every step of the tour, but the big city dailies ignored the hubbub. When several metropolitan dailies failed to print Murray’s announcement of candidacy, he warned them that he would be nominated because the country voters were aroused.
When other candidates began to buy expensive radio time, the frugal Murray purchased The Blue Valley Farmer, a former socialist weekly printed at Roff. Published when funds permitted and hand-delivered to the places where Murray was scheduled to speak, the paper became Alfalfa Bill’s official voice and a legend in Oklahoma politics.
Murray’s principal opponent in the Democratic primary was Oklahoma City oil millionaire Frank M. Buttram, who promised an efficient and orderly administration. Buttram’s billboards, radio spots, and newspaper advertisements all told of his Horatio Alger-like rise to fortune and provided perfect foils for Murray’s underdog campaign. In a “cheese and crackers” canvass, allegedly financed with a forty-two-dollar loan from the First National Bank of Tishomingo, Murray concentrated on issues that appealed to financially troubled Sooners.
In a state with dramatic differences between rich and poor, Murray’s rhetoric was designed to stir up class animosity. To farmers without markets and homeowners with unpayable mortgages, Murray decried the state’s tax inequities. He held that Buttram was typical of the rich who paid few taxes while living luxuriously. He promised to lower the rates on farms, ranches, small businesses, and homes. There would be free seed for penniless farmers and a state road-building program to create jobs.
As the campaign gained momentum, first Murray, then even his critics predicted his victory. In the primary, he received twice as many votes as Buttram, carrying fifty-four counties across the state. The largest margins came from rural areas, and the Sage clearly reaped the political benefits of hard times. For once, Murray was in the right place at the right time.
Murray did not receive a majority, however, and faced a runoff with Buttram. More frightened by Murray’s eccentricities than any ideology, E. K. Gaylord, powerful publisher of the Daily Oklahoman and Oklahoma City Times, launched a vigorous personal attack on Alfalfa Bill. Gaylord wrote a series of front-page editorials and printed the special articles on Murray of one Miss Edith Johnson. She claimed that the Sage was incompetent and reprehensible. He never bathed, he lived in a house with a dirt floor and outside plumbing, he sopped his bread with syrup, and he allowed long underwear to show below his trouser cuffs. For once, Murray failed to respond in kind, asking, instead, rather wryly, on what authority the lady knew these things. The numerous Oklahomans who shared that alleged life-style saw a winner in Murray. The newspaper attack backfired, and Murray emerged, stronger than ever, as the underdog arrayed against the rich and smug.
Murray easily won the runoff and in the general election contest displayed the old political skill that had made him influential in the state’s early history. He continued to win support from farmers and other victims of the depression, but shrewdly balanced his appeal for other voters. He continued to spurn socialism, and he softened the radical tone of his earlier days. “I’m not an extremist,” he assured businessmen. “I believe firmly in our capitalistic plan, if capitalism can be forced to restrain its ungodly greed and to serve the needs of humanity.”4
Murray soundly defeated his Republican opponent, and the Democratic slate won, with one exception. But the results were not so sweeping as they seemed. Despite Murray’s margin of victory, many unfriendly or skeptical fellow Democrats went to the legislature. Still, it was a personal triumph. In her hour of greatest need, Oklahoma turned to one of her oldest favorite sons.
Murray soon dispelled any doubts about his administration’s tone. His inaugural address retained the shrewd, though perhaps subconscious, combination of self-interest and concern for the common people, the desire for progress without disturbing old values that informed his entire career. “I shall honestly and honorably represent those who choose to call themselves the ‘better element,’ ” he promised, “but this is one time when Oklahoma Indians, niggers and po’ white folks are going to have a fair-minded Governor too.”5
Emergency relief was the new administration’s most obvious problem. Still the agrarian philosopher, Murray told the inaugural crowd that running the state resembled managing a good farm. Like more orthodox thinkers, he remained a fiscal conservative in matters of spending, though not of taxation. The emerging Keynesian doctrines involving debt and inflation were a book as firmly closed to him as to Herbert Hoover. Murray believed that the state could distribute free seeds and commodities, but must reduce other expenditures wherever possible. When angry politicians kept from the pork barrel talked of impeachment, Murray warned that process would “be like a bunch of jack–rabbits tryin’ to get a wild cat out of a hole.”6
In spite of his insistence on emergency relief measures, Murray believed that charity was basically a private matter. It began at home; and, to prove it, he contributed some six thousand dollars of his own money to feed the hungry. He tapped state employees for relief funds and stopped cities from arresting drifters seeking work. He also allotted half-acre plots between the state capitol and executive mansion for hungry Oklahoma City residents to plant vegetables. But at no time did popular clamor for relief programs overshadow strong public demands for governmental frugality. Oklahomans consistently defeated initiative petitions to increase state funds for relief.
As the depression deepened, Murray joined other governors in seeking federal funds. An ardent states’-rights champion, he saw no conflict of theory so long as he administered federal aid. Murray’s highhanded tactics in distributing these funds ultimately caused the national administrator Harry Hopkins to intervene. Murray dismissed a few incompetent local officials under pressure, but he replaced most with cronies. These tensions and charges that Murray made relief recipients subscribe to The Blue Valley Farmer finally forced Hopkins to make all Federal Emergency Relief Administration workers federal employees. Oklahoma was the only state denied the right to administer federal relief programs, though Murray’s record was probably better than that of Huey Long in Louisiana.
When tough talk, personal charity, and implied threats failed to exorcise the devils of depression, Murray sometimes turned to force. He used the national guard to enforce a moratorium order aimed at stopping bank runs and bank failures. He employed state troops to stabilize the price of oil. The economic collapse of the 1930s and the flood of oil from huge fields in Seminole, Oklahoma City, and east Texas caused the price of Oklahoma crude to drop to fifteen cents a barrel in 1931. State revenues largely derived from a gross production tax on petroleum declined sharply. When Corporation Commission efforts to regulate production failed, three thousand men meeting in Tulsa called for closing all oil fields until prices rose. Murray agreed, and put state troops around 3,106 oil wells, while assessing nonco-operating companies for the cost of guarding the wells. He then appointed a distant cousin, Cicero Murray, “proration umpire” to enforce a production limit when the fields reopened. State troops remained at the wellheads for 618 days to prevent excess pumping. Largely through Murray’s efforts, Texas, Kansas, and New Mexico adopted a uniform allowable policy with Oklahoma. That co-operative action stabilized oil prices, which reached one dollar a barrel at the end of Murray’s term.
Murray then began to use state troops casually to enforce his wishes or court orders. Declaring that no one would be imprisoned for debt, he had guardsmen rescue Colonel “Zach” Miller of the famed 101 Ranch, jailed for failure to pay alimony. Troops collected tickets at University of Oklahoma football games while the athletic department was being investigated. They also enforced segregation laws in Oklahoma City.
Murray’s most spectacular use of troops was in the famous “bridge war” between Texas and Oklahoma. When owners of toll bridges spanning the Red River secured a federal injunction to close three free bridges that the two states had built, Murray decided to take personal charge. Arguing that federal courts favored toll-bridge operators at public expense, he sent the national guard to the scene. Murray held that the Louisiana Purchase Treaty gave Oklahoma title to both banks of the Red River. National magazines carried pictures of the governor clad in a khaki uniform, directing traffic across the bridge between Durant and Denison, Texas, in cool defiance of the federal courts, Texas Rangers, and Governor Ross Sterling of the Lone Star State. A court ruling finally upheld Murray’s views of Oklahoma’s southern boundary, and Murray had the added satisfaction of gloating over Texans. In four years, Murray called the national guard into action twenty-seven times and proclaimed martial law thirty-four times to enforce executive orders. Some Oklahomans naturally criticized such use of executive power, but most voters saw Murray as championing the rights of little people.
By 1932, he was the country’s best-known governor except for New York’s Franklin D. Roosevelt. National magazines vied for the latest “Alfalfa Bill” stories. He addressed the legislature with one leg propped on a desk. He demanded dormitories for lawmakers, to keep them away from the temptations of women, booze, and lobbyists. He attacked the state universities for turning nice boys and girls into “high-toned bums.” And he chained his office chairs to the wall so that no sinister or persuasive caller could edge too close. Most writers saw that Murray’s idiosyncrasies were designed to attract attention and to reinforce his rustic image.
Oklahomans probably applauded anyway. Frustrated and beaten people saw Murray getting the job done, no matter how, and they liked his sound. He said things many others normally were afraid even to think, a refreshing habit in any politician. He was sometimes embarrassing, but he seemed to be a frontiersman gone to ample seed, still an honorable category of human endeavor. Voters who retained any ideals applauded his definition of a public servant as one “too honest to be bought; too wise to be deceived; too brave to be intimidated.”7
Events and his habit of mind inevitably made Murray think of national office. In 1932 he hoped to parlay his activist-underdog role into the Democratic presidential nomination. But his “Bread, Butter, Bacon, and Beans” campaign never had a chance. In the balloting at Chicago, he received a mere twenty-three votes, twenty-two from Oklahoma and one from his brother, a member of the North Dakota delegation. The “Alfalfa Statesman” won some curiosity seekers, but few votes.
After that fiasco, Murray began to encounter resistance to his legislative proposals and dissension within his official family. He soon lapsed into personal invective, as other politicians frustrated his ambitions and programs. Too late, Murray realized the perils of the decentralized government he had helped to construct in 1907. He also replaced many people in state boards and offices with “deserving” relatives and friends. His actions finally alienated the Oklahoma League of Young Democrats so much that they denounced his administration as the “reign of old men” left over from the constitutional convention.8 Out of both disappointment and genuine fear of federal power, Murray also began to attack the New Deal and innovative social legislation. The agrarian radical of the 1890s had become a reactionary of the 1930s.
Whatever his failures or achievements, Murray remained a central figure in Oklahoma life. Opponents saw him as the past they hoped to overcome; supporters viewed him as the past they hoped to restore. But he was a bridge between the old, inherited freedoms and exaggerations and the new restraints necessary in a complex industrial society. Despite the first waves of modernization in the 1920s and the beginnings of a sophisticated oil economy, Oklahoma values remained rural. The great crisis of the 1930s made Murray attractive as a man dedicated to restoring older values in a present that did not seem to work.
Murray continued to typify a great deal of Oklahoma’s tone. Maturing amid the farmers’ revolts of the 1890s, he yet remained a Democrat, spurning third parties and bolters. He was never a dedicated progressive, though he favored some economic and political reforms. Like many others, he balked at the social implications of progressivism. Murray also often sought reforms out of revenge, as in favoring an income tax for the well-to-do, while exempting farm property. He saw no conflict in advocating low tariffs on farm machinery and supplies and high tariffs on farm products. A confirmed agrarian, he spent a lifetime trying to arrest the forces changing America from a nation of small farms to an urban industrialized society.
Murray summed up his administration as “one damn thing after another,” but there were some accomplishments.9 His program of shifting taxes to the rich and assisting the needy was in order. His success at halting the slide of oil prices also helped preserve the basis of the state’s economy for future growth. But by 1934, his public career was clearly over, and he had created no logical successor.
As the 1934 elections approached, Oklahomans generally agreed that temporary relief measures could never halt economic distress, especially as bad weather began to compound the farmers’ troubles. An increasing number of people looked for some kind of government planning to end the depression. “Elect me and bring the New Deal to Oklahoma” was the slogan that put E. W. Marland in the governor’s mansion.
Marland’s career was another Oklahoma fable. A Pennsylvanian, Marland arrived at statehood broke, then amassed a fortune of $85 million in oil by 1920. But in 1930 his petroleum empire collapsed and, like thousands of fellow Sooners, Marland was poor. In prosperity, he was an indulgent and generous philanthropist to his adopted state. When he lost his fortune, Marland turned to politics and saw in the New Deal an outlet for his expansive humanitarianism. After a term in Congress, 1933–1934, he entered the Democratic gubernatorial primary in 1934, along with fifteen other candidates. As a newcomer to politics, he was virtually free of the old controversies. He also appeared to be a pioneer on a grand scale, both in success and adversity. As he told of losing his interests to eastern bankers, he struck a responsive chord in many voters who lost a good deal less, but in the same process.
Marland ultimately won the race and viewed his success in hard times as a compelling mandate. Genuinely devoted to the principles of the New Deal, he clearly intended to carry out a reformist mission. “I am going through with it,” he said firmly, “and those who object must be saved in spite of themselves.”10
Controversy over the New Deal dominated the remainder of the 1930s, as thousands of people eager for relief from their immediate plight balked at any fundamental social reforms. In 1934 many frightened or destitute Oklahomans voted for Marland as they had voted for Roosevelt in 1932. They believed in the New Deal’s general ambition of recovering the economy and preventing future depressions. In practice, however, the national program’s general philosophy clashed directly with Oklahoma’s historical development. Pioneer tradition always allowed for both individual and communal efforts, but individualism was the font of progress. Communal actions were acceptable in emergencies or to help sustain individual achievement through public schools, free textbooks, or public roads. But the New Deal involved regulation and planning of some kind and proposed to curb the exploitative pioneer ethic. It also seemed to threaten states’ rights, skirted the dangerous problem of the Negro, and frightened many with the prospect of good intentions hardened into bureaucracy.
Marland moved against this stubborn attitude and introduced some New Deal concepts into state government. A Planning and Resources Board was set up to inventory the state’s natural resources. The state complied with the Social Security Act; but the legislature stubbornly refused to appropriate funds for welfare and educational projects, nor would it raise taxes on gas and oil to support growing expenses. It grudgingly increased appropriations for roads, partly to increase jobs, but chiefly for patronage purposes.
Eager for federal largess, Oklahoma co-operated with the New Deal’s alphabetical agencies throughout the depression. And although farmers accepted restraints like crop reduction as a desperate remedy for a desperate situation, they did not generally agree with the principles involved. Opening new lands was the goal of most American farmers near a frontier. Mining the soil was synonymous with progress, but retiring good land was disgraceful. And to be paid for not growing products seemed dishonest. “When you come right down to it,” one farmer noted, “it’s not right for a man to be paid for not working.”11Oklahomans who said they wanted larger relief appropriations continued to elect representatives committed to budget balancing and frugality. A frustrated and disappointed Marland presided over a state like most others, still unwilling to abandon old ideals rooted in fear of government for alleged benefits to be derived from governmental action.
By the end of Marland’s term in 1938, the state and nation alike were beginning to react against the New Deal, as the new governor Leon C. (“Red”) Phillips exemplified. An attorney with modest service in the legislature, Phillips was committed to making the state solvent and to adopting modern business practices in state government.
A tall, heavy, red-faced man who kept a black cigar clamped between his teeth, Phillips was a political cartoonist’s delight. Time reported that the new governor was “as typical of Oklahoma as the oil derricks that stood on the Capitol plaza—not pretty, but useful.”12 As a legislator, Phillips had learned the details of state finance. As governor, that knowledge allowed him to intimidate or control any ill-informed department head or politican. He introduced modern controls over expenditures and won public approval for a budget-balancing constitutional amendment. His rigid economies produced a balanced budget in 1941, but mobilization for World War II really pulled the state, and the nation, out of economic crises.
As the European war widened and the presidential election of 1940 approached, a serious rift occurred in the state Democratic party. With the Oklahoma GOP virtually dormant, growing anti-New Deal sentiment naturally erupted in the Democratic party. Governor Phillips disliked the growing federal power and intrusions into state affairs, and he refused to support Franklin Roosevelt’s third-term bid. Determined to control the Oklahoma delegation to the national convention as he had run state government, Phillips threatened Oklahoma National Committeeman Robert S. Kerr: “If you support Roosevelt, I’ll break your back.”13
Kerr, an Oklahoma City oilman who was a major fund-raiser in Phillips’s 1938 campaign, was not intimidated. While canvassing the state prior to the 1940 convention, he found that Roosevelt remained personally popular, whatever the grumblings about the New Deal or state socialism. He decided to seek a delegation pledged to the president’s re-election. A pragmatic appraisal of his own future, rather than any basic enthusiasm for Roosevelt or the New Deal, dictated Kerr’s break with Phillips. When Roosevelt was renominated, Kerr stumped the state for the ticket. His split with Phillips in 1940 laid the ground for his own campaign for the governorship in 1942.
The Oklahoma of 1942 bore little real resemblance, whatever the rhetoric, to the state of a generation earlier. Dugouts, Indian teepees, prairie schooners, and land runs were all memories of a distant past. The boisterous oil boomtowns of the 1920s were now settled communities where men held steady jobs and raised God-fearing families. Munitions factories and military airfields dotted the prairies. Royal Air Force fliers trained near Ponca City for the attack on Berlin. And columns of heavy army vehicles thundered along highways once crowded with Okies in pursuit of the California dream. About half of all Oklahomans still farmed in 1942, but machinery, the radio, electrification, and news of the world all had changed their lives. The exodus to urban centers such as Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Muskogee, Lawton, Enid, and Bartlesville continued and would clearly change the state. The era of clashing titans seemed over, though Oklahomans would always reward the historic virtues. But now voters sought brains and a broad national viewpoint, as well as sentiment and concern for purely local questions.
Entering public life at this crucial moment of transition to regional and national questions, Robert S. Kerr developed a political style that savored of Oklahoma’s past while he worked for her future. The eldest son of a tenant farmer, Kerr began life with all the trappings of an American folk hero. Born in 1896 in a fourteen-foot-square, windowless log cabin in the Chickasaw Nation, he grew up in rural poverty. His parents sacrificed to give their children an education, religious heritage, and a strong sense of civic pride.
As a young boy, Kerr told his father that he wanted three things in life: a family, a million dollars, and the governorship, in that order. He had fulfilled the first two ambitions by the mid-1930s, and he was elected governor in 1942. The tall, impressive millionaire with an attractive family and a ready wit was popular. Oklahomans shared his pride at rising to wealth. He was also a realist with a streak of romance in the soul. “I’m just like you,” he often told crowds, “only I struck oil.” That view appealed to the old ideal that, with hard work and luck, anyone could make it big.
Kerr was also an impressive campaigner, enjoying speech-making, flavoring dull facts with humor. During the 1942 primary, his opponent, Gomer Smith, said that Kerr had a drinking problem and campaigned with a pair of blondes. Teetotaler Kerr responded good-naturedly that he would visit Seminole with the blondes. At the appointed time, he arrived with his wife and his ten-year-old daughter, both suitably blonde.14
Hatless in the blistering summer heat, with the sleeves of his blue shirt rolled up, tugging at red suspenders, Kerr was reminiscent of Alfalfa Bill Murray at his best. Both men were visionaries of sorts, identified with Oklahoma in different ways. Murray, the cantankerous politican who wrote off “the electric-light towns,” remained a classic rustic. But Kerr was a curious combination of tycoon and common man, and he symbolized the state’s future direction. He sensed the need for a new frontier and realized that the old individualism was chaotic and dangerous. Under Kerr’s leadership as governor and then as United States senator for fourteen years, Oklahoma moved from parochial to regional, then to national concerns. Free land was gone, and the possibility of major mineral strikes remote. Kerr wanted to develop a modern frontier based on industry and connections to the national economy.
The Kerr administration of 1943–1947 marked the beginning of a new epoch in Oklahoma history. The lush prosperity of the war years gave Kerr a politician’s dream, the ability to spend lavishly while retiring debts. The governor retained unusually good relationships with legislators. He also knew that any administration friendly to the White House would get roads, dams, military installations, and government contracts. He continued to raise funds for the national party, and in 1944 he keynoted the national convention with a ringing endorsement of the New Deal.
Anticipating the need for diversified industry if the state were to avoid repeating her post-World War I experience, Governor Kerr traveled over 400,000 miles outside Oklahoma extolling Sooner products and blessings. He wrote a comprehensive plan for developing water resources that became the foundation for Oklahoma’s industrial development and continued agricultural prosperity. The idea involved numerous conservation projects, but centered on developing the Arkansas, White, and Red river basins. Once completed, this elaborate project would check soil erosion, trap water for electricity and recreation, and provide an alternative to railroad transportation of heavy goods. The plan was designed to develop the entire state economy; it also combined rural and urban support for Kerr’s political career. Elected to the United States Senate in 1948, Kerr attained an impressive legislative career.
Unlike other Oklahoma leaders, Kerr was neither an eccentric personality nor the champion of a single interest. Though endowed with ample flair, he presided over the end of Wild West politics. He brought a sense of maturity to state government and steadily educated the public in the complexities of modern living. He secured federal largess during the war and prepared the state for postwar development. He consciously helped restore Oklahomans’ sense of pride and place, and he gave them a feeling of involvement in large national affairs.
When World War II ended, Oklahoma’s leaders were anxious to lay a broad basis for future growth. The state had a good climate, abundant fuel, geographic proximity to other growing areas, and a diligent congressional delegation. It ranked eighteenth among the states in war contracts and facilities. Tulsa and Oklahoma City were third and sixth, respectively, among the nation’s cities in terms of expanding job rates. Total income in the state rose some 132 percent as a result of the wartime expansion. Receipts from agriculture surpassed even those of industry because of the voracious demand for food and fiber. Wheat soon surpassed cotton, however, and the war marked the decline of large-scale, competitive cotton culture in Oklahoma.
The war also emphasized the same rural-to-urban shift in population that marked national changes. That meant accelerated demands for housing, schooling, highways, and health care. And while thousands moved from the farm to nearby small towns, or from towns to big cities, many Sooners continued the exodus of the 1930s to other states. Of the approximately one million people who left Oklahoma between 1930 and 1960, a third were productive people in their twenties. Within the state, the proportion of people aged over sixty-five more than doubled, and the age group ranging from forty-five to sixty-four increased some 40 percent during the same period.15 Until the postwar period, the state had relied on welfare checks rather than realism in dealing with the social and economic problems that these unhappy statistics symbolized. Oklahoma was first among the states in the ratio of welfare expenditures to population, chiefly for old age assistance, but ranked almost last in expenditures for education. By the mid-1960s, welfare checks would be the largest form of payroll in many rural counties, especially in the depopulated southeastern quadrant.
For the first time in her turbulent history, Oklahoma was becoming a state of old people. Drastic measures were necessary to provide jobs for displaced farm workers and skilled workers from war industries as the economy shifted to peacetime production. And the youthful population of the state must remain, if Oklahoma were to avoid supporting a stagnant population drawing from a declining economy.
A new kind of economy was clearly the answer, and the wartime experience showed how it could be attained. Like so many other events in the state’s history, the war effectively telescoped several stages of change. Prior to 1940, Oklahomans seemed content to remain in a colonial economic situation, exporting food, fiber, and fuel to be refined, processed, and marketed elsewhere. They lived in response to economic conditions they barely influenced. But the war years dramatically illustrated the state’s potential for a sophisticated economy built on more than one stage of production.
Developing leadership and taking political action were clearly the first steps in realizing these rather vaguely felt ambitions. Building on Kerr’s efforts to attract eastern investment, subsequent chief executives advertised the state’s industrial and recreational potential. Every postwar governor especially emphasized Oklahoma’s fiscal conservatism and solvency in trying to lure industry. Legislatures in the 1950s and 1960s voted increasing sums for highway construction and offered tax incentives to attract new factories. The growing power and longevity of the congressional delegation was highly important in winning major federal facilities, especially in Tulsa and Oklahoma City.
Many of the state’s leaders sought or sensed the social changes that inevitably accompanied such new kinds of economic growth. Learning to live in a complex, interdependent society was not easy. Boosterism and individual achievement characterized the first four decades of statehood. Oklahoma’s history was a series of confrontations that produced change. White faced Indian; cattleman opposed farmer; agriculture competed with oil; Tulsa challenged Oklahoma City; and governors warred against legislatures. Such a series of exaggerated frontier rivalries was colorful, but exhausting. After World War II, men and communities seemed to sense that co-operation was the only way to retain, in peacetime, the expanding prosperity of wartime.
In their first concerted effort at statewide co-operation, business leaders in 1947 financed a fifteen-car train that exhibited Oklahoma products in eastern cities. Some 162 volunteers told potential investors how Oklahoma communities had raised up to $500,000 each to help firms willing to locate in Oklahoma. The response was dramatic. The state’s total industrial development jumped some 36 percent in 1948, compared to a national increase of 10 percent.
In the 1950s and 1960s, other co-operative efforts helped broaden and enrich the state’s economic base. Leaders in business, education, and politics in 1954 formed the Frontiers of Science, to determine how recent technological and scientific developments could be applied in Oklahoma. In the mid-1950s Oklahoma City agreed to co-operate with her rival, Tulsa, in aiding the congressional delegation in securing federal funds for the Arkansas waterway project. Co-operation also increased in politics, as new interest groups such as veterans, teachers, and public employees joined the traditional pressure groups of farmers, welfare recipients, and businessmen to seek more services from government.
A fresh sense of economic progress touched most of Oklahoma in the postwar decades, but fundamental social attitudes predictably resisted change. Of predominantly southern origin and attitudes, most Oklahomans shared the racial prejudices of the day. Although a substantial number of freedmen had lived among the Five Civilized Tribes, and some blacks had succeeded in the early land runs, Indians and whites alike considered blacks inferior. Many frontier towns discouraged black settlers, both out of bigotry and to inhibit the hated Republican party. Reflecting the racial bigotry of the 1890s, the editor of the El Reno Democrat proclaimed: “With a big crop of corn, wheat and cotton and a small crop of niggers, thus diminishing the chances of the GOP, we expect to thrive in this neck of the woods.”16
Formal segregation was not included in the constitution, but the first legislature promptly enacted a set of segregation codes for schools, public facilities, and transportation reminiscent of those of the Deep South. These acts reflected the state’s basic southern heritage and soon filtered into politics. Fearful that Oklahoma would become a Republican state during the progressive era, Democrats quickly disenfranchised blacks. New statutes required a stringent literacy test based on the state’s tortuous constitution. Known as the “grandfather clause” because it exempted the direct descendants of all persons eligible to vote prior to January 1, 1866, the law effectively kept blacks from the polls.
In 1915, the United States Supreme Court invalidated the Oklahoma “grandfather clause” as a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment. But Sooners were neither impressed nor repentant. The editor of the Daily Oklahoman doubtless spoke for most of them: “This is a white man’s state . . . and must forever remain a white man’s state.”17 Like other black Americans, Oklahoma blacks awaited the civil rights legislation of the 1960s to exercise the full rights of citizenship.
The state’s statutes were discriminatory enough by any standard and conformed with social attitudes in general, with those of Little Dixie, in particular. Yet the human relationships involved seemed more open than in the Deep South. The distinguished black novelist Ralph Ellison grew up in Oklahoma City in the 1920s, where his family moved in search of greater opportunities than there were in the older South. He was aware of segregation and discrimination, but he also understood that Oklahoma City was “the capital of the state where Negroes were often charged by exasperated white Texans with not knowing their ‘place!’ ”18 Smaller towns were less tolerant, however. Unwritten “sundown laws,” meaning that no black could stay in town after dark, existed even in the university town of Norman. Formal segregation was especially rigid in the public schools and seemed unsuited to the social changes so clearly transforming the state after 1945. Shortly after World War II, Ada Sipuel, a graduate of Langston University, the state-supported Negro college, sought admission to the University of Oklahoma Law School in Norman. Langston offered only a bachelor’s degree, and blacks desiring professional education had to go out of the state. Like many other southern and western states, Oklahoma gave tuition grants to blacks to attend out-of-state universities. President George Lynn Cross of the University of Oklahoma had to refuse Miss Sipuel admission to the Law School under a 1941 statute that made it a misdemeanor for any university official to admit a Negro to a white school.
With the aid of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Miss Sipuel asked the courts to instruct university officials to admit her, but the judge ruled that they could not be forced to disobey the law. When the state supreme court upheld that ruling, Miss Sipuel’s attorney, Thurgood Marshall, appealed to the United States Supreme Court. The case became nationally famous and developed into a legal landmark.
The high court swiftly reversed the Oklahoma decision and ordered the state to provide a legal education for Miss Sipuel and other blacks. The court did not definitely strike down segregated facilities, however. The situation developed from drama to farce, en route to possible tragedy, as state officials swiftly established a separate law school for blacks. With three rooms in the state capitol, the state’s collection of law books, and a faculty of two former attorneys, the Langston University School of Law was open for business. But its only student refused to attend. Miss Sipuel renewed her fight to cross the barriers of segregation and attend the University of Oklahoma.
While Miss Sipuel awaited the outcome of the legal process, the situation grew more confused and gained in scope. In late January 1948, six more blacks sought admission to the University of Oklahoma Graduate College. University officials denied the applications, as the law required. But Governor Roy Turner instructed the state regents to devise a plan for suitable “separate-but-equal” graduate studies in architecture, engineering, education, social work, and zoology at the Langston campus by that summer.
Although there was some anti-Negro bias at the university campus and among the citizens of Norman, most students and townspeople showed little interest in the question. As the litigation continued and the empty Langston University Law School became more ludicrous, many Oklahomans reflected on the hypocrisy as well as the injustice of the situation. Laurence H. Snyder, dean of the University of Oklahoma Graduate College, accurately expressed the thought that troubled the conscience of many faculty and civic leaders: “If universities, which are supposedly the epitome of culture and learning in our society, cannot practice the principles of democracy and illustrate them by example, where in the world will they be illustrated and practiced?”19
Meanwhile, the so-called “Deans Committee” charged with solving the problem of equal-dual education recommended that qualified applicants be admitted for graduate work to both the University of Oklahoma and to Oklahoma A & M College at Stillwater. Their study showed that creating equal educational facilities for blacks at Langston would require fifty to sixty new departments and a physical plant costing at least twelve million dollars and taking some five years to construct. The report did not recommend integration, but it vividly illustrated the cost of providing the law’s fabled separate-but-equal facilities.
Miss Sipuel’s attorneys followed the path of law and challenged the quality of education at Langston’s fictitious law school. They demonstrated through expert testimony that, despite the spacious physical plant, rich library, and low student-teacher ratio, legal education at the Langston school was not equal to that of the University of Oklahoma. The most remarkable testimony against the Langston experiment came from the University of Oklahoma law faculty. Dean Page Keeton remarked dryly that he favored larger classes than seemed possible at Langston. Law professor Henry H. Foster, Jr., shocked the court when he charged state officials with “cheap political chicanery” and dismissed the putative Langston school as “a fake, fraud and deception.”20 The court finally denied Miss Sipuel’s contentions, but the decision was a gesture, since events were taking Oklahoma colleges beyond segregation.
In June 1948, George McLaurin, one of the six applicants rejected in January, sued in federal court for admission to the University of Oklahoma Graduate College. In late September, without voiding the state’s segregation laws, the court ordered McLaurin admitted. The farce continued. Seated in a separate-but-equal anteroom that Thurgood Marshal] termed a broom closet, McLaurin began graduate work. The university provided separate-but-equal toilet facilities, a separate-but-equal table in the Student Union, and a separate-but-equal study area in the Library.
Oklahoma lawmakers continued to resist, though the trend of federal court decisions was clearly against segregation. Faced with additional requests from black graduate students and with the possibility of finally having to construct a duplicate graduate school, the state legislature capitulated in May 1949. The lawmakers agreed to admit blacks to the Norman campus, but opposed integration. They insisted that instruction to blacks and whites be given at different times, in separate places.
The legislation failed to spell out details, and university officials were left to improvise. They simply roped off sections of existing classrooms for black students. When Miss Sipuel entered the law school at Norman that summer, her seat was identified with a sign “For Colored Only.” John B. Cheadle, professor of law and legal adviser to the regents, likened the absurdity of the 1949 law to a situation saying that “Negroes may not be eaten by lions or tigers which heretofore have eaten only white people.”21
The absurd irony of segregation in places of learning proved impossible to maintain. White students occasionally cut the rope barriers for souvenirs or in protest. They ostentatiously sat at tables with blacks. And the “For Colored Only” signs disappeared after Miss Sipuel’s first day in law school.
Even more important, adverse national publicity hastened the end of segregation. Although the legislature was responsible for the laws, President Cross inevitably became the focus of criticism. Several letters to him from Oklahomans betrayed the old fears of miscegenation. One woman from a rural area assured Cross that segregation gained respect for blacks in white communities. But most letters criticized Oklahomans for being backward. A Californian thought that the desegregation problem reinforced the unfortunate Okie image. And a distressed alumna feared that such publicity would help the Russians demonstrate that there were inequality and hypocrisy in American life.22
In June 1950, the United States Supreme Court invalidated Oklahoma’s evasions, and the McLaurin case entered the train of what became a general assault on segregated schools. In 1954, when the high court struck down the separate-but-equal doctrine, Oklahoma was one of seventeen states still maintaining segregated schools. Governor Raymond Gary assisted in ending segregation, accepted court rulings, and urged voters to abandon dual taxation for dual school systems. The NAACP praised Gary’s realistic stand, a happy contrast to events in neighboring states, especially Arkansas. Gary quietly informed school district officials that failure to obey the law meant loss of state funds. The governor later explained that “no organized opposition ever developed anywhere in Oklahoma, because we didn’t allow it.”23 Newspaper editors and reporters, though often disliking the changes, generally co-operated in urging public acceptance of segregation.
Public school integration without violence testified to the state’s growing modernization. Officials simply pointed to the policy as inevitable, liked or not, as a way of calming public fears. But people rather readily accepted that inevitability. Politicians also shrewdly noted the excessive cost of maintaining dual school systems, always an effective appeal to an electorate that never spent much on education of any kind. But on the whole, the acceptance of the inevitability of desegregation was evidence of how much both the power structure and the people of the state had changed in less than a generation.
As Oklahomans approached their semicentennial celebration in 1957, many still smarted from the criticisms that Governor Johnston Murray had made on leaving office two years earlier. In a Saturday Evening Post article entitled “Oklahoma Is in a Mess,” Alfalfa Bill’s son declared that his native state was “at least a generation behind the times.” Murray blamed his father’s generation for creating an unresponsive political system. He denounced the legislative apportionment that allowed rural politicians to govern an urban state now undergoing industrialization. He believed that too much power resided in the hands of county commissioners, who inevitably retained narrow views. Their vision was especially narrow when it came to building roads that ultimately served the whole state and even extended regionally. The tax system, especially earmarked revenues, was backward and inhibitory. The whole approach fostered haphazard and wasteful government, in which local voters sent representatives to Oklahoma City “with instructions to ‘chop down a Christmas tree and drag it home.’ ” Murray acknowledged some improvements in the state’s economy and clearly saw the social changes that accompanied it. But he noted that Texas attracted forty-four hundred new industries in 1953, while Oklahoma gained five hundred. Nearby Arkansas, Kansas, and Missouri still outstripped Sooners in income, production, and growth. But Murray worried most over the exodus of young people. The state press usually dismissed these emigrants with the rationalization that “we’re losing in quantity, but gaining in quality.” But Murray was impatient with rhetoric of that sort: “No such snobbishness can alter the fact that Oklahoma has diminished for lack of individual opportunity.”24
The metropolitan press generally agreed with Murray’s sharp article, while deploring his airing of dirty linen. Raymond Gary, Murray’s successor, hinted that the former governor was angry because his wife had not succeeded him in office and suggested the slogan “Oklahoma is O.K.,” which ultimately appeared and was retained on the state’s license plates for years. A lively debate followed, and despite much wounded vanity and posturing on both sides, almost 75 percent of the Oklahomans responding to the Post article agreed with Murray.25
Murray’s hotly debated article was shrewdly designed to shock Oklahomans into some kind of action. He maintained that “we get bad government because we hold still to be skinned.” He challenged fellow citizens to “acquire the fiery patriotism which so marvellously serves our neighbor to the South [Texas].” Adverse comparison with the hated Texans usually galvanized even the most complacent or provincial Sooner.
Murray’s views, and perhaps his article, helped spur many changes in Oklahoma during the 1950s and 1960s. Numerous spokesmen worked to restore the Sooner sense of pride and vitality, which two decades of adverse national publicity had worn down. Oklahomans began to seek a new image, based on new frontiers, dealing with science and technology. Slogans advertising the state’s changed life, “From Arrows to Atoms,” or “From Tipis to Towers,” appeared in national publications. Astronauts Thomas P. Stafford and L. Gordon Cooper joined the traditional state heroes Sequoyah, Jim Thorpe, and Will Rogers. Wealthy philanthropists began endowing art museums, symphony orchestras, and private colleges, as their predecessors had done in the 1920s. And slowly the national concept of Oklahoma as the home of refugees in broken-down jalopies covered with mattresses and washtubs began to fade.
In the mid-1960s, Governor Dewey Bartlett sent 58,000 letters to former Sooners telling them of renewed opportunities at home, and some 11,000 responded favorably. Oklahoma leaders wished to avoid the worst aspects of urban congestion through locating plants in smaller towns, as well as in the two large cities, Tulsa and Oklahoma City. The hope was to expand opportunities with a minimum of dislocation and inflation. The state also financed a lavish system of parks and recreational areas, deliberately trying to maintain the best parts of rural life and leisure while the economy changed. In the 1960s, the net outflow of people ceased, then reversed. More new people came with the growing industrial boom, and numerous former Sooners returned. “Every time they have an earthquake or a hippie rebellion in California, another handful of Okies comes back home,” one resident noted wryly.26
Johnston Murray’s agenda of political reforms, legislative reapportionment, a merit system for state employees, tax revision, and modern accounting methods in expenditures were all reflected in his successors’ campaigns and performances. The movement toward modernization affected party politics, as the Republicans became beneficiaries of demands for change. In 1962 they successfully challenged the old, rural-dominated Democratic party and elected Henry Bellmon the first GOP governor since statehood. Dewey Bartlett succeeded him, and both men went on to the United States Senate, before the pendulum swung back to a recovered Democratic party.
But the rise of a viable Republican opposition illustrated how much the state had changed and the scope of fresh demands on government. The era of one-party politics, that so easily degenerated into factionalism and drift, appeared over. The spirit of competition that Sooners praised in economics seemed at hand in politics. Oklahomans tended to vote for Republican presidential candidates, while retaining powerful Democrats like Carl Albert and Tom Steed in Congress.
Fortunately for Oklahoma, changes such as desegregation and urbanization occurred in prosperous times. The Sooner public generally saw social dislocation as part of an actively sought modernization. It thus seemed logical, if not always desired, rather than forced. It was part of long-term beneficent growth, rather than a threat to private beliefs, as it had appeared in the 1920s. Politicians also were fortunate in being able to give rather than deny favors during these expansive times, thus helping to blunt the effects of social change in people’s lives.
As a society, Oklahoma digested these events rather well, whether from desire, indifference, or a sense of the inevitable. Yet the state remains an object of affection for politicians of the right in both parties. That testifies to the tenacity of frontier myths and to a society still rooted in regard for the family, the land, religion, and personal liberty. The state’s conservative electorate likes a government and a society that justifies change in terms of enhancing rather than regulating individual conduct. It will respond to modernization couched in terms of efficiency and economic growth. To date, it has accepted rather well the inevitable human and social changes that follow in the wake of growth and new ideas. That, too, may testify to the frontier ex-pansiveness that made the state what it was and will become.